Videos released last week of Ukrainian soldiers allegedly torturing Russian prisoners of war has invited widespread criticism of Ukraine’s leadership. The footage and its contents could not be independently verified by News18.
A Russian investigative committee will now launch a probe to see if excesses were committed to Russian POWs, news agency RT said in a report. The video was originally shared by Maria Dubovikova, an independent journalist.
The video shows Russian soldiers lying on the ground, some bleeding profusely and amid all the commotion a Ukrainian soldier allegedly shoots a Russian soldier on his leg and proceeds to beat all of the wounded Russian soldiers.
Dubovikova shared two videos. The first one is a longer version of more than 2 minutes where bleeding Russian soldiers are seen being beaten up and interrogated. The second video which is only 13 seconds-long shows newly arrived POWs being shot directly on their legs at point blank range.
“Ukrainian soldiers shoot Russian prisoners of war in the legs and afterwards give them a severe beating,” she said in a tweet. “It might give the impression that the Russian military were captured after having been wounded. But that’s not the case. At the end of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting all the newly arrived prisoners through their legs,” she tweeted while sharing the second-clip.
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1508002623252750341?s=20&t=EIBePy1ZSimNzKWdDEoK9Q
The tweeted videos have so far garnered over a million views.
Independent journalist and founder of Bellingcat, Eliott Higgins, whom pro-Russian observers claim to have taken Ukraine’s side, also said that the allegations levelled against Ukrainian service members must be investigated. “A very serious incident that will require further investigation, maybe the videos in this thread can be geolocated?” he said in a tweet.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1508189157675388938?s=20&t=EIBePy1ZSimNzKWdDEoK9Q
However, it should be mentioned that adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky Oleksiy Arestovich asked Ukrainian soldiers to adhere to Geneva convention which says that all prisoners of war should be treated humanely. It also bars ‘passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court’.
Earlier, pro-Russian accounts also tweeted videos of Russophone people being mistreated in Ukraine’s east and south by members of the Azov Battalion, which is considered by many as a neo-Nazi outfit.
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