It all starts by chance, after a post published on January 6, 2019 on the Facebook profile of that Giuseppe Russo, hitherto unknown for the police. Instead Russo, known as ‘Pino’, 29, for the Messina Prosecutor’s Office, led by Maurizio de Lucia, is a pro-Russia ‘mercenary’ who has been in the Ukrainian territory of Donbass for years. The investigating judge of Messina, in April 2021, ordered the arrest of the young man, later confirmed by the Review Court, in July 2021. The investigation started from the analysis of Russo’s Facebook profile who had posted a photo of him with I am wearing “a combat uniform with military friezes, such as the star on the fur hat, the star with hammer and sickle in the buckle, clearly pro-Russian”, wrote the investigating judge as a precautionary measure. The investigations “confirmed Russo’s operation as a mercenary in the armed conflict in question, as well as the relations between him” and other people who would have hired him. For the judges, “Russo’s actual military activity emerged on several occasions: on April 3, 2019 Russo reported to his sister Giorgia that he was on guard duty, in an area where a curfew was in force, and was paid in rubles », the Review Tribunal later added. Not only. “In a conversation on April 13, Russo’s mother commented with his partner and daughter Giorgia,” how the son was a soldier “,” but not in normal conditions and had begun to have doubts about the appropriateness of continuing in this choice, having now a partner and a small daughter, although she did the ‘job’ he liked, ”says the judge. In the same conversation, the mercenary’s mother “reported that she had gone to Donbass in the past and witnessed a military parade in which she paraded her son.”
“He wanted to get a tattoo with the effigy of his own militia”
On August 16, 2019, “Russo was pleased to report to his family that he had been engaged in a military action, in the course of which, among other things, a Kalashnikov machine gun was used”. On November 16, 2019, conversing with her sister and her boyfriend, the mercenary said he “wanted to get a tattoo with the effigy of his own militia”. Here is the intercepted conversation: “… Half skull … half gas mask … with barbed wire around.” According to the investigating judge of Messina, as stated in the precautionary measure, Russo had posted other photos on his social profile «while he was holding a submachine gun, Kalashnikov type, supplied to the Russian Army, next to an antipersonnel mine. In other images a military base was also taken with the inscription ‘For Putin’ and in Cyrillic ». Furthermore, “from the acquisition of some videos at Rai, on the occasion of an episode of the program”Special Nemo‘aired on June 18, 2018 on the conflict in Ukraine, a man with the features of Russo was filmed ». And that it was him “we had confirmation from a chat on Facebook in which Russo himself reported to a friend that he had been filmed during a television broadcast even though he had refused to give an interview”.
This is how the identification of the mercenary of Messina was born
The inaction of Pino Russo, the 29-year-old Messina ‘mercenary’ with a passion for the Kalashnikov, and who has lived in the Donbass for years, began on April 27, 2021, when the Messina Court issued a precautionary custody order in prison confirmed by the Review Court in July 2021. The young man, who has never returned to Italy, as confirmed by investigative sources at Adnkronos, is still wanted on charges of having violated the international convention against the recruitment, use, financing and education of mercenaries, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 4 December 1989. Giuseppe Russo, called ‘Pino’, remained to fight alongside the pro-Russian militias in the armed conflict in the Ukrainian territory of Donbass, in eastern Ukraine “on remuneration and without being a citizen of that State or permanently resident there”, as the Messina Court writes. The investigations on the mercenary never stopped. The secret services, as well as various prosecutors, are looking for the young Messina in Donbass and other Italian mercenaries who are in that territory. Attention “is maximum,” intelligence sources told Adnkronos. A gun enthusiast, Russo, so much as to say in a chat, without knowing he was being intercepted: «It was nice to shoot yesterday, like crazy … vvrumm vvrumm …». The man, as he himself reveals in a conversation, is framed “in the Russian special infantry”. The fact is “aggravated by transnationality, as it is carried out by an organized criminal group, engaged in criminal activities in more than one state, with disputes in Italy and Ukraine, from close to June 2016 and ascertained until May 2020” .
The Messina Prosecutor’s Office documented that the man fought in Donbass
The investigation conducted by the Carabinieri of the Ros of Messina “started with the inauguration in the city of the Strait, in June 2018, of the ‘Representation Center of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Lugansk in Italy’, chaired by the co-investigator Daniele Macris », Writes the Review Tribunal in the provision held by Adnkronos. The investigations, coordinated by the Messina Prosecutor, Maurizio de Lucia, also made use of the analysis of international financial flows and data provided by Facebook on the basis of a rogatory commission with the United States initiated by the Peloritana prosecutor. It was thus possible to document that Giuseppe Russo operated as a mercenary fighter in the Donbass region, where he had settled since 2016, sharing his military activities with relatives and friends on social networks, some of whom asked him for advice and directions to undertake the same activity. . During the investigation, the investigators also found confirmation of the existence and operation of an organized structure active in the Italy-Ukraine area and dedicated to the recruitment and financing of mercenaries destined to integrate the ranks of pro-Russian separatist militias in the Donbass. The circuit involves subjects from different regions of Italy who have undertaken the activity of “fighters”, lined up alongside the pro-Russian militias and against the regular Ukrainian army in the disputed territories of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and, in this context , particularly alarming were the reports of the Messina suspect with other mercenaries and, in particular, with Andrea Palmeri, from Livorno, known as “the generalissimo”, already the recipient of a European arrest warrant as he was held responsible for the recruitment and recruitment of mercenaries to terrorist and subversive purpose and criminal association.
Traces of the mercenary’s activity on Facebook
“The examination of Russo’s Facebook profile also confirmed the belief that he was a mercenary in Ukraine,” reads the Review. The judges also speak of “multiple images that portrayed Russo in combat uniform, with pro-Russian military friezes, such as the star on the fur hat, the star with hammer and sickle on the buckle, as well as other more dated images that portrayed him, with the same clothing, while carrying a submachine gun (presumably an AK47 rifle, better known as a Kalashnikov) next to an alleged antipersonnel mine and images of what appeared to be a military base with the inscription ‘For Putin’ in Cyrillic “. In the provision, the review judge also spoke of the salary of mercenaries in Donbass. “According to reports from Russo – we read – the higher the remuneration for the service rendered in the fighting lines, the lower if carried out through guard shifts”. According to the defense, the man is permanently “resident in Donbass, from an epoch prior to the outbreak of the conflict” but for the judge this circumstance “is groundless, given that multiple documentary findings lay in the sense of the man’s presence abroad only starting from 2016 “.
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