Russians savagely execute unarmed Ukrainian prisoner of war

A new video posted on Telegram appears to show a Ukrainian prisoner of war having been killed with a sword after his capture. If the video footage, posted on 17 September, is fully verified, the crime would be all the more horrific as the Ukrainian soldier was unarmed and, judging by the scotch tape visible on one of his hands, probably bound. 

The Russians, as noted by Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, are clearly trying to demoralize Ukrainians with all of these demonstrative executions of prisoners of war, who are protected under international law.  While possible that the new video was a stunt, the amount of blood near the body would suggest that the sword, with the words ‘For Kursk’ written on it, was the cause of death.

In reporting that a criminal investigation had been initiated under Article 438 § 2 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code (war crime linked with homicide), both the Prosecutor General and the Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office stated that the killing was believed to have taken place in Novohrodivka (Pokrovsk raion, Donetsk oblast).  The investigators are trying to establish the identity of the Russians’ victim and when the killing took place. 

The BBC Ukrainian Service reports that its BBC Verify team have confirmed that the footage is from Novohrodivka and relatively recent. Although Russia claimed it had taken Novohrodivka on 9 September, monitoring by the Institute for the Study of War suggests that full control was only established on or around 15 September.

This is the latest of many such executions of unarmed Ukrainian defenders, with the same Donetsk Regional Prosecutor involved in investigating the apparent killing of three Ukrainian prisoners of war on 2 September.  A source within Ukraine’s Armed Forces had then reported that three Ukrainian soldiers in Donetsk oblast (in the Toretsk direction) had come out of a basement, with their hands in the air.  They had been forced by the Russians to lie down, with each then shot in the back.

On 6 September, CNN reported that a “horrific video appears to show execution of Ukrainian soldiers by Russian troops”, with the killing said to have taken place in late August near Pokrovsk.  Ukraine’s Military Intelligence had provided CNN with a list of “15 cases since November, most supported by drone video or audio intercepts, in which they say surrendering Ukrainian troops were killed by the Russians on the front lines, rather than being taken prisoner.”

In speaking about the believed execution in Novohrodivka, Denys Lysenko, Head of the Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office department investigating such war crimes, noted that such crimes are of a systemic nature. As of September 2024. 36 criminal investigations have been launched, with the circumstances being investigated of the believed execution of 64 Ukrainian defenders.   Four Russians have already been identified as suspected of involvement with two having received sentences.  Unfortunately, such sentences were almost certainly passed in absentia.

Such a systemic nature was confirmed to CNN by a UN investigative source.  In speaking of executions of Ukrainian POW, the person said: “There are many. There is a pattern. It suggests complacency, if not orders to give no quarter “;i.e show no mercy]”,

CNN were also given audio transcripts of the intercepts, reported here earlier, in which a Russian commander, known as ‘Turk’, had ordered a subordinate to kill Ukrainian POWs.

As already reported, 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]. 

Then 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”. 

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.  It was then that Kostin mentioned intercepted conversations in which 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.

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.

International law, for example, Article 3 of Fourth Geneva Convention, 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… “

Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,  Russian invaders had begun torturing and killing Ukrainian civilians, with the bodies of many victims found lying on the streets, in basements or mass graves after the Russians were forced to retreat from Kyiv oblast.  Many of the victims then, and those discovered later in other liberated cities, had their hands tied behind their backs when shot and / or showed signs of torture.