Dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed this Friday in an attack on a prison held by the Russian occupation authorities in eastern Ukraine. Both Moscow and kyiv are accused of having carried out the bombing of these facilities. The images of the Reuters agency show charred bodies in the bunks in which they slept or lined up outside the facilities.
Ukraine has denied targeting civilian infrastructure or prisoners of war. President Volodomir Zelenski has assured that the bombing is a “deliberate Russian war crime”. “I received today [viernes] the information about the attack of the occupants in Olenivka, in the Donetsk region. It is a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war. More than 50 dead”, he has affirmed in his daily intervention.
Sources from the Russian Defense Ministry have accused the kyiv authorities of carrying out the attack with a US-made Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) missile, according to the Reuters agency, citing to Russian media. The same source added that 40 prisoners had died and another 75 had been injured in the prison in the town of Olenivka, in the Donetsk region, at the hands of Russian troops and separatists aligned with the Kremlin. According to this version, eight of the facility’s guards were also injured. Those responsible for the pro-Russian separatist authority in eastern Ukraine raise the death toll to between 47 and 53, reports Agence France Presse. They all belonged to the Azov Battalion, a body that operates under the National Guard. Russian television has shown images of what appeared to be destroyed barracks and twisted metal beds.
The Ukrainian Army accused, for its part, the Russian troops of bombing the detention center to hide the conditions in which they hold the inmates. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitro Kuleba, called for an investigation to be opened into what he considers a “war crime”. The Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office announced an investigation after “the occupying state” attacked a detention center.
Russia has committed another petrifying war crime by shelling a correctional facility in the occupied Olenivka where it held Ukrainian POWs. I call on all partners to strongly condemn this brutal violation of international humanitarian law and recognize Russia a terrorist state.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) July 29, 2022
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The attack takes place while both parties to the conflict are waiting for, after the agreement signed in Istanbul under the auspices of the UN, ships with the tens of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain blocked by the war.
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