Australian man Oscar Jenkins will stand trial on mercenary charges in Russian-occupied Lugansk, the eastern region’s Moscow-installed authorities said on Friday, but the prime minister has insisted he has not been abandoned.
“The Prosecutor’s Office of the Lugansk People’s Republic approved the indictment in the criminal case against 33-year-old citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia Oscar Charles Augustus Jenkins,” the authorities said in a statement.
He is the latest foreign soldier fighting for Ukraine to appear before the court.

Asked whether Australia had abandoned Jenkins amid the developments, Anthony Albanese said on Saturday “we certainly have not”.

“[Australia will] continue to make representations to the reprehensible regime of Vladimir Putin on behalf of Mr Jenkins,” he said, in what is the latest of many calls to release the former biology teacher.
“We will stand up and use whatever avenues we have at our disposal to continue to make those representations.”
As part of that, Albanese again confirmed Australia is “prepared to consider being part of a coalition of the willing” peacekeeping effort in Ukraine.

The investigators allege Jenkins came to Ukraine in February 2024 from Melbourne and then fought against the Russian army between March and December 2024, for which he was paid around $7,000-9,000 a month.

After his capture in combat, Jenkins first appeared in a video shared by a Russian military blogger in December 2024, in which he was filmed being roughly interrogated under duress and slapped in the face.
He was then believed to have been killed in captivity, until Russia confirmed he was alive and later posted a video of the frail Australian’s medical examination, with the captors heard joking in the background that his blood pressure showed “he wasn’t dead”.

“We’ve made it clear to Russia that Mr Jenkins is a prisoner of war and that there are obligations that kick in in accordance with international humanitarian law and they must be observed,” Albanese told ABC Radio Sydney after the examination video was released.

Russia and its eastern Ukraine proxies typically consider foreigners travelling to fight in Ukraine as “mercenaries”.
This enables them to prosecute fighters under its criminal code, rather than treating them as captured prisoners of war with protections and rights under the Geneva Convention.
Most recently, British man James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, was charged with terrorism after he was caught in the Kursk region fighting on Ukraine’s side.
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