Ukraine lodges war crimes probe after Russians shoot unarmed Ukrainian POWs in the back

The Donetsk Regional Prosecutor has initiated criminal proceedings after the latest report posted on Telegram asserting that Russian soldiers killed three Ukrainian defenders who had clearly surrendered.  The men were therefore prisoners of war, making such a killing, if confirmed, a war crime.

The prosecutor’s statement on 3 September followed a report from a lieutenant of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, who cited, but did not post, drone footage from 2 September.  This, he said, showed how, on three Ukrainian soldiers in Donetsk oblast (in the Toretsk direction) had come out of a basement, with their hands in the air.  The enemy came up and forced the men to lie, faces to the ground, and had then shot each in the back.   Such moments, the lieutenant wrote, make it clear to him, that “however hard, there is no other alternative but to fight to the end for our [land]”

The criminal investigation initiated is under Article 438 § 2 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code (war crime linked with homicide), with the efforts to verify the information and establish the full circumstances to be carried out by Ukraine’s Military Intelligence and Security Service. 

Any deliberate execution of prisoners of war is, indeed, a grave violation of international law.  The Fourth Geneva Convention, for example, clearly prohibits any killing or violence towards “persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause… “ (Article 3).

This does need to be stressed, although there seem strong grounds for believing that Russia’s ill-treatment of prisoners of war, including such cold-blooded executions, is, at very least condoned by the Russian military command, if not state policy.

There is considerable witness testimony and other evidence to back the suspicion that the explosion that killed over 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war at the Olenivka camp in occupied Donetsk oblast on 29 July 2022 was planned.  The fatal explosion came just a day after Russian propaganda channels showed a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner of war [POW]. 

Worth noting that Russia’s UK Embassy posted a tweet on 29 July, demanding “a humiliating death” for Ukrainian defenders from the Azov Regiment, very many of whom were at Olenivka.  The tweet, which pre-Musk Twitter decided it was in the public interest to keep accessible, despite its “hateful content”, also demonstrated another Russian method used widely ever since, namely efforts to blame Ukrainian soldiers for Russian war crimes.  There is considerable proof that Russia has used duress and / or threats against civilians taken by force to Russia from Mariupol and has held Ukrainian prisoners of war incommunicado and applied torture to force them into ‘confessing’ to non-existent war crimes.

In August 2022, video footage was posted of what appeared to be the impaled head and hands of a Ukrainian prisoner of war in the Russian-devastated city of Popasna (Luhansk oblast).  It was posted shortly after drone footage appeared of Ukrainian soldiers being led away by the Russians, with their hands on their heads.

In April 2023, two separate videos were posted which appeared to show Russians beheading Ukrainian soldiers.  One, posted on 8 April on a pro-Russian social media platform, showed the beheaded bodies of two Ukrainian soldiers.  The other was posted on 11 April but may have been taken earlier.  On it a Russian can be seen beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war. 

While these were not the only such crimes earlier, the scale of executions and other atrocities increased sharply in late 2023.  In its monitoring report for the period from December 2023 to March 2024, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that its monitors had “recorded 12 cases of executions of at least 32 captured Ukrainian POWs. OHCHR has verified three of these incidents in which Russian servicemen executed seven Ukrainian servicemen hors de combat.” “In eight of the reported cases, videos published on social media showed what appears to be Russian servicemen killing Ukrainian POWs who had laid down their weapons and using other captured Ukrainian POWs as human shields”. 

In August 2024, two videos were posted of Ukrainian prisoners of war having been killed and their bodies dismembered.  The second, on 16 August, was posted by the so-called Rusich ‘sabotage-assault reconnaissance group’ or task force, a neo-Nazi unit originally formed by notorious sadist Alexei Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky.  It showed a masked man pointing to a severed head on a pole which he claimed to be the head of a Ukrainian defender.

Two months earlier, on 17 June, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin reported that drone footage had located a Ukrainian Armed Forces armed vehicle, with the decapitated head of a Ukrainian soldier on it.  Kostin added that they had received information, he said, that the commanders of one Russian military unit in the Volnovakha raion had issued an order to not take any prisoners of war, but to kill them with savagery.

As noted by Oleksandr Pavlichenko, Executive Director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, the Soviet Union’s so-called ‘peacekeepers’ in Afghanistan resorted to horrific torture.  Russia continued such practice during both wars in Chechnya and is continuing it again in its war against Ukraine.