The Ukrainian ombudsman rules out that kyiv troops have committed war crimes following the publication of a series of videos that have outraged Moscow and prompted the UN to open an investigation
Facing mounting pressure on Ukraine to clarify whether it executed 10 Russian soldiers on a farm in Luhansk province this month, kyiv authorities once again denied Moscow’s accusations. The ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, argued that the videos that have come to light these days, in which Kremlin troops are seen unarmed and lying face down with their hands on their heads, are actually “excerpts” from a fact different. According to him, he explained, it was about invading soldiers who “pretended that they were surrendering… And they committed a war crime by shooting at the Ukrainian forces.” In any case, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has assured that he will investigate what happened.
In the videos, a part of them recorded by a Ukrainian soldier and others captured by a drone, the moment in which the Russian occupiers surrender without apparently offering resistance to the kyiv troops is captured in the village of Makivka, belonging to the region of Lugansk and recovered in the middle of this month by the troops of Volodímir Zelenski. When they are ordered to lie down on the ground and it is believed that everything is under control, suddenly an eleventh Russian soldier emerges from the latrine and opens fire on the Ukrainians, according to the ‘New York Times’. In other snapshots, the Kremlin troops are later seen dead in the same position on the ground as when they surrendered.
The Ukrainian Army maintains that its troops legitimately defended themselves against enemy fire. Likewise, Lubinets assures that these dead soldiers “cannot be considered as prisoners of war.” “Those who use international protection to kill must be punished,” he says.
The videos were first broadcast on Ukrainian news channels and social media to praise the military prowess of its army and publicize its heroic recovery of territory that had been under Russian control since the beginning of the war. In Moscow, by contrast, the recordings provoked a harsh response.
international inquiry
The Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights has asked the United Nations to create an international commission to investigate the alleged executions of Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine. For their part, the pro-Russian authorities in Donetsk have announced their intention to hand over the images captured of these possible executions to the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Amnesty International for verification.
“It is difficult to comment on the video of the execution of the surrendered soldiers in the Makivka settlement without going beyond the normative vocabulary,” denounced the ombudsman of the Russian administration in Donetsk, Daria Morozova, in comments collected by the Russian agency TASS.
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