A Russian man in Germany who supported his country's war in Ukraine has been charged with murder over the fatal stabbing of two wounded Ukrainian soldiers who were recovering from operations, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Prosecutors said the suspect and the two victims knew each other loosely from previous meetings. On the day of the stabbing, the three men were drinking together and argued about the situation in Ukraine, “as a result of which the accused felt that his national pride was hurt,” they said in a statement.
The two Ukrainians, who were 23 and 36 years old were killed on the premises of a shopping centre in the German village of Murnau in Upper Bavaria.
The suspect “decided to kill the two strongly intoxicated Ukrainians in a surprise attack,” prosecutors added, and fetched a knife from his nearby apartment. One of the Ukrainians was killed immediately and the other died later of his injuries.
The 57-year-old suspect, whose name wasn’t released in line with strict German privacy rules, was arrested shortly after the stabbing in the small Bavarian town on April 27.
Prosecutors said that “as a supporter of an exaggerated Russian nationalism, (the suspect) supports unreservedly the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.”
The two Ukrainians had been brought to Germany for treatment after being wounded in the war. They had undergone operations at a hospital in Murnau and were recovering in the town. Both were significantly “physically limited” as a result of the operations, prosecutors said.
Germany has become one of Ukraine's leading supporters in the war since Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022 and is Kyiv's second-biggest weapons supplier after the United States.
More than 1 million Ukrainian refugees came to Germany since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Germany is also home to a significant Russian immigrant community and 2.5 million Russians of German ancestry who mostly moved to the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
A state court in Munich will now have to decide whether and when the case will go to a trial.
