‘Sham’: Wong slams Russia’s jailing of Australian 33-year-old

Canberra is ‘appalled’ by what it is calling the ‘sham trial’ of Australian Oscar Jenkins, who has been sentenced to 13 years in a Russian penal colony after being caught fighting for Ukraine.

Oscar Jenkins in a picture released by the Lugansk People’s Republic Prosecutor’s Office.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong says she is “appalled” by the sentencing of Australian Oscar Jenkins to 13 years in a Russian penal colony after he was captured fighting for Ukraine.

The 33-year-old from Melbourne was found guilty of being a “mercenary”, Russian-installed prosecutors said on Friday night.

“The Australian government is appalled at the sham trial and 13-year sentence given to Australian man Oscar Jenkins,” Senator Wong said.

“As a full serving member of the regular Armed Forces of Ukraine, Mr Jenkins is a prisoner of war.”

Russia’s prosecution service in the eastern Ukrainian region of Lugansk said in a statement that Mr Jenkins would serve his sentence “in a strict regime penal colony”.

Ms Wong said Russia was “obligated to treat him in accordance with international humanitarian law, including humane treatment”.

The government is “working with Ukraine and … the Red Cross” to advocate for Mr Jenkins’ welfare and release, Senator Wong said.

Mr Jenkins was captured near Makiivka, a village on the Zherebets River in Luhansk, while fighting with the 402nd Rifle Battalion in Ukraine’s 66th Mechanised Brigade.

According to the indictment, he arrived in Ukraine in February last year and received a “monthly reward” of between $11,400 and $15,000.

He was earlier reported to have been fighting with the International Legion of Defence of Ukraine, a coalition comprised of former soldiers and foreign volunteers.

Russia and its eastern Ukrainian proxies consider foreigners travelling to fight in Ukraine as “mercenaries”.

This enables them to prosecute them under its criminal code, rather than treating them as captured prisoners of war with protections and rights under the Geneva Convention.

The Australian government had repeatedly called on Russia to release Mr Jenkins, a former biology teacher at Melbourne Grammar School.

Russia-installed prosecutors said Mr Jenkins “took part in combat operations against Russian military personnel between March and December 2024”.

They posted a video showing him standing in a court room behind a glass cage, his hands behind his back and his expression despondent.

Russian forces captured Mr Jenkins in December 2024.

In that same month, he appeared in a video shared by a Russian military blogger showing him being roughly interrogated and slapped in the face.

He was then believed to have been killed in captivity, until Russia confirmed he was alive.

A later video showed him undergoing a medical examination, with his captors heard joking in the background that his blood pressure showed “he wasn’t dead”.

According to Mr Jenkins’ LinkedIn profile, from 2015 he worked as a language teacher in China before becoming a ­lecturer at the Tianjin Modern Vocational Technology College.

With AFP