Budanov's trial is “an ideological intervention by Western countries against Russia”

A regional governor who had been a top Russian military commander in the last Chechen war said on Friday one of his former officers charged with murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman is innocent and that there was a Western plot behind the charge. Vladimir Shamanov, former commander of the 58th Army and current governor of Ulyanovsk, expressed the hope that Col. Yuri Budanov would be acquitted of the charge of killing Elza Kungayeva. "I state with a full sense of responsibility that Budanov is not guilty and no one is able to accuse him. I'm saying this not out of a false sense of corporate solidarity, but because there is a hope for an objective trial," Shamanov said in Makhachkala in Dagestan. Budanov's trial is "an ideological intervention by Western countries against Russia," Interfax cites Shamanov as saying. "Col. Budanov is a real officer, he is a commander, he is a Russian asset." Budanov is being tried in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia.