The image of a soldier pierced by a sword shook Ukraine. It happened last September in Kursk, the Russian province that Ukrainian troops have invaded by order of the president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The soldier was lying on the ground, with signs on his wrists of having been tied and with a kind of medieval sword stuck in his body. It is one of 104 cases reported by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office so far this war of prisoners of war executed by Russian forces. 80% of these have occurred in 2024.
The Ukrainian Ombudsman, Dmitro Lubinets, has repeatedly appealed to the United Nations to take action on the matter due to the accumulation of visual evidence of these war crimes. The cases have skyrocketed since August, coinciding with the operation in the Russian Kursk region: in the last two months 40 executions have been confirmed.
Morning Express has been able to collect visual evidence of 38 of these events. On October 1, images of the shooting of 16 Ukrainian soldiers, the largest volume known so far, in Donetsk province, appeared on social media. The last one happened on October 18 on the Pokrovsk front, also in Donetsk: a video shows two soldiers who, after surrendering, are murdered at point-blank range.
The Attorney General’s Office has indicated that the upward trend in these crimes began in November 2023 and that, since then, it has only gotten worse. Last February began with visual evidence of the murder of six surrendered soldiers in Avdiivka. Five of the bodies were repatriated to their families in an exchange of dead last week, according to the media. Slidstvo. Lubinets insists that this is the tip of the iceberg because these are only crimes that can be confirmed by visual documents.
On October 1, the United Nations Human Rights Office published a report on prisoners of war in this conflict. The document states that “Russian authorities have extensively and systematically subjected Ukrainian prisoners to torture, ill-treatment and inhumane conditions.” In the case of Russian prisoners, the UN office reports that half of the prisoners suffered mistreatment at the time of their arrest and during their transfer to prison.
The Institute for the Study of War, a reference analysis center for the invasion in the United States, stated in a report dated October 21 that the increase in executions by Russian troops shows a “systematic” procedure: “The “The apparent perpetration of war crimes throughout the war theater suggests that Russian forces continue to operate with a low level of discipline, and that their commanders do nothing to prevent it or perhaps encourage it.”
Russian propaganda justifies the shooting of prisoners
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda shows his citizens a clean war, a special military operation in which images of blood and mutilations are censored from the Russian viewer. However, Russian Telegram channels, like the Ukrainian ones, are lavish in videos of the barbarity of the front. Some even publicize obvious war crimes.
These recordings usually go viral first among the military’s WhatsApp and Telegram contacts, often due to their crudeness. For example, the execution of a Ukrainian sniper after being caught in an unknown location. Both these soldiers and drone operators are among the most hated enemies on the front for their way of waging war. In the video, the Russians reduce the soldier to the mud and cut his throat amid screams of agony.
In general, Russian pro-war channels tend to openly show less explicit war images, such as the destruction of enemy armor or bombing, but sometimes they leak hints of war crimes. The channel of the Rusich reconnaissance group, a unit of the former Wagner Group, whose leader is an openly proclaimed neo-Nazi—its symbols are the kolovratan eight-armed swastika, and the Black Sun of the Schutzstaffel, known as SS—, showed on October 20 a chemical attack against a Ukrainian trench: “We fuck the crests—the Russian insult against the Ukrainians—with chloropicrin.” . This agent – considered asphyxiating by causing irritation to the lungs, eyes and skin, as well as vomiting, nausea or diarrhea – is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Other channels of correspondents and war analysts have recognized and applauded the executions of Ukrainian soldiers. These profiles have between hundreds of thousands and a million followers, have met with Putin on occasion to inform him about the situation on the front and are closely monitored by the Kremlin, especially after the crisis opened by the criticism of Wagner and some of his followers to the Russian high command in 2023. Other channels are directly funded by Moscow to wage its propaganda war inside and outside Russia. His comments on war crimes could not have gone unnoticed by the Russian authorities.
“These shootings are by no means uncommon on both sides of the front,” remarked one of the Z channels Russians, Rybar, to his more than 1.3 million followers. “Prisoners often become an annoying burden: it is not always possible to put a guard on them when you are launching an assault,” he tried to justify despite the fact that the images shared by the channel itself reflect the cold-blooded execution of the Ukrainian military, with the bodies in rows, hands over their heads and almost naked after leaving their uniforms in a separate pile.
“Fighting from the offices and demanding humanity is fine until you are on the front lines and find yourself in an ‘you or them’ situation. Only when there is an opportunity do they take prisoners,” says Rybar, although he exempts Russia from the obligation to comply with international law: “When it comes to our former territories and the invasion of the Russian border, all humanitarian nonsense can be put aside. ”. Furthermore, the channel uses the excuse that the Kremlin declared the Ukrainian troops “terrorists” and, therefore, they can be killed without prior trial, despite the fact that the death penalty is prohibited in Russia.
According to US intelligence, Rybar receives financing from the state corporation Rostec. The US Treasury Department has offered up to $10 million for any information about the people behind the channel, which it accuses of interfering in the US elections in November. A Russian independent media,Agentsvo,has revealed this week that one of her collaborators, Tatiana Kosterova, is a military police officer, has worked in the occupied territories under the guise of a correspondent for the state news agency Ria Fan, was awarded by Putin and her husband is a member of the GRU, the army intelligence services.
“As for the shooting of a squad of the Crests in the Kursk region: it is good, but it is not enough,” the pro-war channel stated on October 13 Starshe Eddywhich has 624,000 followers. “During the Great Patriotic War – the Soviet front in World War II – there were entire formations of the German army that were not taken prisoner,” added the channel’s author after declaring that the Ukrainian troops that entered Russian territory “shot at the civilians.” Moscow has not presented evidence of the latter.
Another channel from a military man with more than 16,000 subscribers, National guard, He stressed that drone controllers should be shot “even if they surrender.” “The war has also changed here. In the past, snipers and pilots were not spared, and now unmanned aerial vehicle operators are joining in.”