Video of the alleged beheading of a Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops last week caused outrage in the international community and even led Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov to describe the footage as “terrible.” The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it would open an investigation to clarify the facts, an unprecedented move by Moscow, according to a recent United Nations report on crimes against prisoners of war in Ukraine. What is not unusual, this report, human rights organizations and testimonies consulted by EL PAÍS agree, are the abuses against soldiers taken prisoner on both sides.
The scale of Russia’s crimes against the civilian population in Ukraine is unmatched by other violations of human rights in war. “Russia’s 13-month war against Ukraine has involved serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that are shockingly routine,” Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on March 31. “We have documented more than 8,400 civilian deaths and more than 14,000 injuries, the vast majority of the victims being the result of Russian weaponry targeting civilian residential areas. Summary executions and deliberate attacks against the civilian population have been reported in the Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine,” recalled Türk.
More unnoticed are war crimes against soldiers who have surrendered at the front. In this matter, the violations of international law, and especially of the Geneva Convention that regulates the treatment of prisoners, are systematic in the two Armies, according to a report released at the end of March by the UN Mission for the Monitoring of Human Rights in Ukraine (HRMMU). The document provides conclusions from 13 months of investigations and the results are devastating for both sides.
The discovery of the video of the beheading coincided with another recording in which the mutilated corpses of alleged Ukrainian soldiers appeared. “Unfortunately, these are not isolated cases,” according to a statement from the HRMMU. In March, video of a surrendering Ukrainian soldier being machine-gunned by Russian troops sparked outrage in Ukraine and across Europe. In February, another recording of an alleged shooting to the head of three Russian servicemen by Ukrainian fighters was released.
The HRMMU report confirms the authenticity of several of these audiovisual products that appear on social networks, shared by the soldiers who record them as a kind of macabre trophy and in an attempt to intimidate the enemy, as denounced on Wednesday by Dariia Zarivna, adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, referring to Russian actions. However, both the HRMMU and the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) have warned that this psychological weapon is also used on the Ukrainian side. In its report on the first year of the invasion, HRW emphasized the use by the two armies of public taunting of prisoners of war, something that contravenes the Geneva Convention.
The UN report provides several examples of this. On the Russian side, an extreme case of humiliation reported by the HRMMU is that of two Ukrainian prisoners who were filmed as they were forced to drag themselves half a kilometer with their broken leg. On the Ukrainian side, HRW notes that multiple cases have been identified of Russian prisoners under pressure and in deplorable conditions who are filmed with mobile phones to expose them publicly. Last Saturday, the video of three Russian soldiers who had surrendered in a forest, in deplorable physical conditions due to the harshness of the combat, appeared on Telegram channels and was broadcast by the Ukrainian media, while the Ukrainian unit that had captured them laughed. of your state.
HRW highlighted in his memory a confirmed case of ridicule and torture filmed last March in Mala Rohan, a town in Kharkiv province where three Russian soldiers -captured after the town was liberated by Ukrainian forces- were shot in the legs. EL PAÍS visited Mala Rohan in July and collected the testimony of two women who denounced that other Ukrainians had been raped by the occupying troops. Neighbors interviewed suggested that the Ukrainian military acted with a spirit of revenge. The UN report includes several examples of torture against Russian prisoners in retaliation for crimes committed against the civilian population. In June, a Ukrainian officer stabbed three surrendered Russian soldiers in Sloviansk; another, he suffocated until he lost consciousness and the next day his arm was cut.
Torture is common, although much more widespread on the Russian side. The HRMMU concludes that more than 90% of imprisoned Ukrainian soldiers suffer torture, compared to 49% of Russian prisoners. A fighter from the Ukrainian International Legion explained last week to this newspaper that Ukrainian soldiers are terrified of being captured. An official from the Ukrainian intelligence services admitted last February to EL PAÍS that on the front in the eastern province of Donetsk neither of the two contenders “prioritizes” taking soldiers prisoner, only officers because they have more information.
In both armies the most common form of torture is beatings, although the Russians use other forms of mistreatment more extensively, such as electrocuting interrogees or sexual abuse. The HRMMU reports that both sides have used the old TA-57 military telephones to give inmates electric shocks. On the Ukrainian side no sexual assaults have been identified, while on the Russian side there is even evidence of the castration of a soldier.
Active collaboration of Ukraine
The UN Mission stresses that the Ukrainian authorities “actively” collaborate to facilitate their work, unlike the Russian side, which has restricted the access of international observers to their detention centers. The Red Cross has also denounced the difficulties they have in visiting Ukrainian prisoners of war: Moscow has only given occasional access to the Red Cross in Donetsk and since December, 10 months after the start of the invasion.
The UN ensures that the living conditions of Russian prisoners are better and that the Ukrainian authorities allow contact with their families, unlike those detained on the Russian side. In addition, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has opened five investigations to clarify the summary execution of 22 Russian prisoners, something that the Russian justice had not done until the case of the beheading made public last week. The HRMMU does regret that the progress of the Ukrainian prosecution has been non-existent.
The event that best demonstrates the lack of Russian collaboration was the death last July of at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war interned in an abandoned building in Olenivka, a Russian-occupied Donetsk municipality. A Ukrainian bombardment ended their lives. A few weeks after the incident, the UN and Turkey announced that there was an agreement with the Russian and Ukrainian presidencies to clarify the facts. Finally, the Russian side backed out of the pact. The HRMMU report suggests that the Russian military most likely installed Grad missile batteries in the vicinity of the prison colony so that Ukrainian artillery would bombard the site, unknowingly killing dozens of their compatriots.
