KYIV – When Ukrainian National Guardsman Vitaliy Markiv was given a 24-year prison sentence by a court in northern Italy on July 12, 2019, for his role in the deaths of an Italian photojournalist and his Russian interpreter, and wounding a French journalist, his mother said it was the “most painful moment of her life.”
Oksana Maksymchuk told RFE/RL in June that she was convinced he would be acquitted “because there wasn’t any proof” of his guilt and that the verdict came “as a shock to us… we had always remained optimistic.”