A military court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Friday charged Anton Sopov, 21, and Stanslav Rau, 28, with murder, and sentenced them bot to life in prison for their killing of a sleeping family in Ukraine, according to the local newspaper Kommersant.

The men entered the home of the Kapkanets family in Volnovakha, a city in eastern Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region. According to Kommersant newspaper, the men used shooting rifles with silencers to not wake the family.  Among the victims were 53-year-old Eduard Kapkanets and his wife, 51-year-old Tatyana Kapkanets, as well as their son Aleksandr, his wife Ekaterina and their children, and Ekaterina’s young brother, Dmitry. 

The motivation for the crime has been conflictingly reported, as the Moscow Times noted. Kommersant reports that the murder was either motivated by the family refusing to give the Russian soldiers free moonshine, or by a member of the family insulting the Russian soldiers. Russian news agency Tass reports that the motive for the crime was some sort of unspecified domestic conflict. Lastly, Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinetz, reports that the two soldiers killed the family because they “refused to give their home to the Chechen occupiers.”

As the Moscow Times has also noted, it is unclear whether the defendants admitted their guilt or not. Kommersant reports that the defendants did not plead guilty, and plan to appeal the decision. TASS, on the other hand, reports that an agency source told them that the defendants “partially admitted their guilt, but did not admit that they did it in a socially dangerous way and out of hatred based on their nationality”.

Regardless of the motivation or possible appeal, ombudsman Lubinetz maintains: “Russia violates the rights of Ukrainians…every day, in particular by committing murders. Violations of the rights of Ukrainian citizens will stop only when the Russian army completely leaves the territory of Ukraine!”