Definition of mercenarism according to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation

Mercenary is a crime that implies the responsibility of a hired person for participation in wars and other armed conflicts on the territory of a non-civilian state, which does not pursue any other goals other than obtaining benefits for himself personally, as well as the responsibility of other persons who contribute to an increase in the number of mercenaries by the methods indicated in the disposition of the article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

In the commentary to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in Article 359 and in the note to the same article in the code itself, the concept of a mercenary, used in Russian legislation, is enshrined. This concept is fully consistent with international law and repeats the definition given in Article 47 of the 1st Additional Protocol of 1977 to the Geneva Convention.

International law does not prohibit a person from being a mercenary, but indicates that if captured, they are subject to criminal law in almost all civilized countries and do not have the status of “prisoner of war.”

Based on international documents, soldiers of the Foreign Legion of the French army, as well as the Nepalese Gurkhas of the British armed forces, are not considered mercenaries, as they are considered part of the armies of non-belligerent states.

The corpus delicti according to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation

The crime of mercenaryism according to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation establishes criminal liability both for organizational actions and for direct active participation, namely:

recruitment - inciting a person to become a mercenary, or providing assistance in the implementation of a previously made similar decision. The crime is completed from the moment the person’s consent is obtained or actions are taken to implement the decision he has made;
any material support for mercenaries , incl. and financing - payment of wages to hired military personnel, both in cash and non-cash form, provision of food, shelter, weapons, medicines, etc.;
training - providing information about the methods and methods of warfare, military operations, etc., the formation of certain skills for the successful completion of military tasks assigned to him;
involvement of hired persons in wars and armed conflicts;
directly for the actions and behavior of the mercenary himself during the war or conflict.

The actions of a hired military person are considered a completed crime under Article 359 of the Criminal Code of mercenarism from the moment they begin.

This crime is always committed only with direct intent, i.e. the person knows that he is committing a crime, seeks to commit it, and also certainly knows about the consequences of such actions.

According to the article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, only individuals starting from the age of 16 can be held accountable for mercenarism. Under Part 2 of this article, responsibility is borne by a special subject of the crime - an official.

The article provides for both the basic composition, which provides for punishment under Part 1 of Article 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and the qualified one - the commission of a crime (one or more alternative actions, enshrined in the disposition in Part 1 by an official who, in his criminal activities, takes advantage of a special position or commits a crime in relation to a person who has not reached the age of majority.

Part 3 of this article establishes the responsibility of the mercenary himself for his direct participation in wars and armed conflicts. In this case, the corpus delicti is formed from the moment the first active actions of a mercenary participating in an armed conflict (war) begin.

A 27-year-old guy went to fight in Donbass on the side of the DPR to Motorola after unsuccessful attempts to find a good job in Krasnoyarsk. The mother considers her son a hero and collects money at the market to bring her son’s coffin home. The author found living volunteers fighting in Ukraine and found out how they got into the bloody hell and whether they receive money.

To deliver the body of 27-year-old Oleg to Nazarovo, the Kotov family needed 100 thousand rubles. For several days, relatives borrowed money from friends, knocked on the doors of the military registration and enlistment office, and the boy’s mother asked random passers-by for money at the local market - death overtook the guy 3,600 km from home. The family expected to receive the boy's body on Thursday, but due to bad weather the flight was canceled.

The funeral for the family was the guy’s status on VKontakte. Going to his page, my sister read a short and impersonal: “On January 16, 2015, the Donetsk airport died heroically in the siege.” “At first they thought it was some kind of stupid joke, a scam. They rushed to call his Ukrainian number, his friends answered: “He was killed, a cleanup was in progress,” recalls Oleg’s sister Svetlana Demchenko.

Now acquaintance with Kotov’s page makes me want to turn off the Internet altogether for a while - supporters and opponents of the idea of Novorossiya have turned the dead man’s account into a place for a heated showdown, and swearing is heard in skirmishes. Comrades in the DPR promise to take revenge, opponents of military actions (mostly with anonymous pages or from Ukraine) hint at mercenaries and ask the question “what was he doing there?” As the author managed to find out,

In the DPR army, the guy fought in the “Sparta” detachment, led by a man with the call sign “Motorola”.

The latter gained fame in the Russian media by marrying a local militia member in front of television cameras while wearing combat gear. Since then, the man has been willing to give interviews, guide journalists around combat positions, and the fighters themselves film all the fighting on camera.

In one of the videos, strong men cross machine guns like Dumas’s musketeers, and then shout “For battle!” they start shooting from some ruins. In the photographs, members of the squad show a bullet-riddled Ukrainian flag, take group photos, call themselves “Family” in the comments and call their opponents “cyborgs”; some pictures are accompanied by music in the driving rhythms of punk rock.

Of all the “Spartans” with whom the author managed to contact, only Novosibirsk resident Dmitry agreed to talk about Oleg Kotov. “Gold was an experienced man. I learned a lot from him. It's not easy to get to Motorola. He won’t hire ordinary people who don’t know how to do anything. The detachment is always in the most advanced positions,” says the man, suggesting that we address him by his call sign, “Frol.”

The mother of a guy who found himself in the thick of a violent confrontation speaks of her son as a person “with the fragile, vulnerable soul of a little kitten.” Before Donbass, his life did not even contain a hint of military inclinations. He did not serve in the army due to flat feet; he recently lived in Krasnoyarsk, where he had a lot of not the most prestigious professions: from a sausage warehouse storekeeper and a mechanic to a shift worker. “They didn’t pay much, it was enough to pay the rent, and there was little left for living. I think I was a fickle person: either I didn’t like the team, or the work wasn’t interesting. It was as if he was looking for his purpose,” says Oleg’s friend Danil Kostyuchenkov.

At the beginning of autumn, Kotov confessed to his mother over the phone: they didn’t pay him at work, and he was leaving on a “watch for Abakan”; he wouldn’t be in touch for a while. In the end, her friends told her the truth.

The woman’s first thought was: “I was stuck with work, I didn’t make money here, I went on a contract,” but the son constantly denied this in infrequent conversations. “Mom, I haven’t washed my hands for a week, I can’t get out of the trenches for days, but that’s not the main thing, what’s happening here is terrible,” -

he told her. Now the woman explains her son’s action with lofty motives and quotes one of the conversations from memory:

- Oleg, you are like puppets - the governments don’t get along with each other, and you are sent to the slaughterhouse. Why do Ukrainians come here and don’t want to defend their land? - Mom, you don’t understand anything. There are old people and children here. I don't want war to come to us.

Only once during a conversation with the author does the woman break out: everything could have turned out differently if not for the “situation in Russia.” The guy couldn’t find himself in it, he really didn’t want to go to Nazarovo, where it’s difficult to find a job, but in the DPR he found the meaning of life “and would suffer if he returned,” “the guys there give their lives.”

How Kotov crossed the border and ended up in Motorola’s detachment, none of his relatives really knows. Danil Kostyuchenkov talks about some acquaintances who shared the phone number of guides from Rostov with Kotov. Judging by the VKontakte groups, today sending volunteers is a long-established technology. One of the administrators of the “Reports from Novorossiya” group, back in early autumn, for example, offered to contact him upon arrival in Rostov, promising to provide guides to the Donetsk region. In the group “People's Militia of Donbass,” the combatants have already admitted that when crossing the border, Russian border guards “don’t ask questions.” Those who wanted to become volunteers were actively interested in the question of whether there would be problems at the border if there were loan debts.

Official statistics are silent about how many Krasnoyarsk residents went to fight in Ukraine - the country's top officials have repeatedly stated that the Russian Armed Forces are not participating in the conflict. According to calculations by the Ukrainian website “Peacemaker” and a resource called lostivan, at various times about two dozen Krasnoyarsk residents fought in the southeast.

Each name there is accompanied by a link to an account on social networks. The overwhelming majority are young people 20–27 years old, but there are also men over 40. Volunteer pages are full of red and blue flags of the unrecognized Novorossiya, men pose draped in machine gun belts and weapons, other photos show steppe views with ruined houses and equipment mangled in the fire .

57-year-old Zelenogorsk sports teacher Vladimir Nizhnik laughs at the fact that Ukrainian websites call him a terrorist and a mercenary.

In early August, along with humanitarian aid from Russia, he arrived in southeastern Ukraine and fought there for 4 months in the detachment of a commander known as Babai. The man calls himself the ataman of the Zelenogorsk village: “I decided to go, looking at everything that was happening there. My son is studying to become an officer, you need to be an example for him. When we entered the village of Olkhovka for cleansing, people prayed for us, they met us on their knees.”

Cossack does not hide the fact that it is volunteers from Russia who make up the backbone of the army of Novorossiya, since “we are more experienced.” According to the man, for 4 months of service he received $500 as compensation for travel expenses. Now the man is recovering his health in Zelenogorsk and preparing for a new trip.

All the volunteers with whom the author was able to communicate, when asked about the motives for the trip, talked about “Slavic unity, helping the Russians and duty.” 26-year-old glass cutter Vadim Ikonnikov left his wife with 2 children and went to fight in Donbass, having seen on Russian TV how the Ukrainian army allegedly fired at a school. “I arrived in Rostov. There are agitators like dirt. Signed up with the militia. It was scary to end up not in the militia, but on the other side, but I decided. They told me to go to Russian Donetsk. From there by bus across the border. Exercises,” says the guy. According to the guy, he did not receive the money - his mother sent it to him, making a transfer to the card of a Rostov policeman. Now the young man is in Krasnoyarsk. In the near future, Ikonnikov is preparing to go to Donbass again, collecting humanitarian aid and looking for those who will provide a truck to deliver it to Ukraine. Another militia member, the head of a Krasnoyarsk cable television company, told the author “that there is no money, although it is needed.” His VKontakte page is filled with requests to help the militias with money.

Arguments about the free service of Russian citizens in the army of Novorossiya are refuted by the head of the Sverdlovsk veterans, Vladimir Efimov, who himself sent volunteers to the Ukrainian southeast. In a conversation with journalists from the E1 portal, he said at the end of December: ordinary personnel receive 60–90 thousand rubles, senior personnel - from 120 thousand rubles. per month. A colleague of the deceased Krasnoyarsk resident Dmitry “Frol” claims that there were no salaries in their detachment, but admits that in another Novorossiya detachment “Oplot” money is paid, although the amounts are unknown to him.

Krasnoyarsk lawyer Anton Kolosov notes that any citizen of Russia can face prosecution under the article “Mercenarism” if it turns out that he receives money for his activities: “Any material interest that is derived from participation in hostilities can be qualified as mercenarism.

Therefore, if a person goes to fight, he must do it selflessly.” According to the lawyer, signs of mercenarism can be seen even in receiving compensation after injuries and reimbursement of travel expenses to the site of hostilities.

The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation provides for up to 7 years of imprisonment for mercenary activities, but Anton Kolosov calls the article “non-working” and provides data from reviews of judicial practice: out of almost 3 million criminal cases initiated in the country per year, under Art. 359 accounts for 3–4.

The Kotov family expects to receive the body of a relative on Friday. Colleagues offered to bury him near Donetsk, but relatives decided to deliver the remains to Nazarovo. Galina Kotova admits: of the 100 thousand spent, most of it was taken by relatives, 20 thousand were donated by Krasnoyarsk residents, and 8 thousand were given to her at the market. “I decided to go out to people with trouble. Grandmothers gave 2-3 rubles, someone said: why did he go there,” the woman recalls. On January 21, the administration of the Nazarovsky district promised to give the family 50 thousand.

Anton Ponarin Source >>

Penalties

Article 359 for mercenarism prescribes punishment exclusively in the form of imprisonment. The minimum sentence for the first part is four years, the maximum is 8 years. As an additional type of punishment, restriction of freedom for up to two years can be used.

Food for thought

Mercenary activity is a crime against peace and security, as is ecocide, an environmental crime. Despite calls from the public and the UN to take care of the planet, certain groups of people use the Earth's resources for their own purposes.

An official who commits actions that fall under the crime of mercenaryism is punished by imprisonment for a minimum of seven years and a maximum of fifteen years. In this case, an additional type of punishment may be a fine (up to 500,000 rubles or in the amount of three years’ salary or other income for the same period) or restriction of freedom for a period of 1 to 2 years.

The mercenary himself for participation in wars and armed conflicts is also punishable by imprisonment for a minimum of three years, and a maximum of seven years. Additionally, restriction of freedom of up to 1 year may be applied.

The concept of restriction of freedom implies the imposition by the court of certain restrictions for the period specified in the sentence after serving the main type of punishment (prohibition on leaving the house at a certain time, visiting gambling establishments, drinking establishments, etc.).

Under this article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a person who is recruited to carry out certain actions aimed at overthrowing the current government, undermining territorial integrity, the constitutional foundations of the activities and functioning of the state can be held accountable. Such principles are pursued by the Syrian terrorist organization Islamic State, which is banned almost all over the world.

Differentiation of definitions

It is necessary to distinguish mercenaries from employees of non-belligerent countries sent on business trips to perform official tasks determined by bilateral agreements. These may be advisers, instructors, consultants, and other entities who provide the necessary assistance during the training of military personnel and training them in military affairs. In accordance with the Federal Law “On Military Duty,” for example, foreigners also perform service under a contract. These subjects are given the status established by Federal Law No. 76.

Arbitrage practice

Judicial practice on this crime is not widespread. Currently, on the territory of the Russian Federation, courts pass sentences on those who participated as mercenaries in the armed conflict in Ukraine as part of criminal groups, the most widespread and popular among which is Azov.

Around mid-2015, several sentences were handed down against mercenaries who took part in hostilities in the Syrian Arab Republic in 2013. At least five such sentences were handed down in the court of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

More information can be obtained by asking questions in the comments to the article.

International law

The key provisions relating to this issue are defined in the Declaration of International Legal Principles relating to Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States. According to the document, each power is obliged to refrain from creating or encouraging the organization of armed bands or irregular forces to invade other territories. Thus, a foreign legion consisting of recruited citizens would be considered a violation of the Declaration adopted in accordance with the UN Charter. It is worth noting that Russia does not participate in the 1989 Convention. Note to Art. 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is formulated on the basis of the provisions of the Additional Protocol of 1977.

Mercenary from the point of view of the law

By providing for punishment for mercenary activities, the legislation gives a precise description of the mercenary.

This is someone who agrees to participate in armed competition and is in no way connected with a given state:

is not its citizen;
does not live in the territory of the state as a permanent resident;
is not in military service in a country participating in the conflict;
The main motivation for action is to obtain significant, usually financial, benefits for oneself personally.

The qualities listed above that characterize a person as a mercenary are indicated in the protocols of the convention signed in Geneva on August 12, 1949. The main theme of which was the protection of those who suffered from hostilities.

The same criteria are used in the legislation of the Russian Federation when assessing a person’s actions as mercenary.

Unlike a combatant who acts within the bounds of the law, a mercenary:

wears a special uniform;
has a special insignia;
carries a weapon openly;
has an official leader;
complies with the laws of war.

A mercenary is equated to a war criminal by the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Accordingly, if it is proven that a person is a mercenary, he will be punished.

Composition specifics

Mercenary activity is condemned not only as an ordinary crime, but also as an ideological one. This phenomenon gives rise to individuals in society who are capable of mass murder, terrorism, and other crimes if they expect to receive large profits for these acts. At the same time, they are not at all interested in the moral side of the issue.

The main point that is important when characterizing an activity as mercenary is the presence of significant material rewards to encourage those who entered into hostilities.

Material rewards include:

cash;
an account opened in a bank;
just a promise of similar reward.

Financial support, recruitment, training, acquisition of weapons and other actions necessary for hiring and maintaining a mercenary are also criminally punishable.

According to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, mercenarism can be presented in any form: