A British man who fought in Ukraine has been jailed for 13 years for being a paid mercenary, Russian prosecutors say.
Hayden Davies, 30, was tried by a court in Russian-occupied Donetsk on Thursday, Russia’s Prosecutor General said, and sentenced to 13 years in a maximum security prison camp.
Russian prosecutors released a video of Mr Davies dressed in a black coat and with a shaven head, being questioned behind bars.
When asked if he pleaded guilty to the charge against him, Mr Davies said “yeah” and nodded his head.
It was not clear if Mr Davies was speaking under duress.
He said in the video that he had travelled to Ukraine to join the International Legion which paid him $400-500 a month.
Mr Davies is reported to have served in the British army and was born in Southampton.
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The International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine is a unit of the Ukrainian military made up of foreign volunteers.
The unit is believed to include potentially thousands of Britons, who signed up to join the fight to Moscow’s forces from Ukraine after Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a full scale invasion in February 2022.
The British Foreign Office has not commented on the sentence yet, but the government has previously said Mr Davies was a prisoner of war entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions.
In the past it has condemned Russia’s exploitation of prisoners of war “for political and propaganda purposes”.
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Russian prosecutors said on Thursday that Mr Davies had arrived in western Ukraine in August 2024, signed a contract to fight for the International Legion, undergone military training, before fighting against the Russian army in Donetsk.
Mr Davies was captured in winter 2024 carrying a US-made assault rifle and ammunition, prosecutors said.
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A Russian court sentenced another British man, James Scott Rhys Anderson, to 19 years in prison in March after finding him guilty of fighting for Ukraine in the Kursk region of western Russia.
