The New York Times has confirmed that videos circulating online of more than ten Russian Prisoners of War (PoW) getting executed by Ukrainians were filmed in the village of Makeevka at the time of its recapture by the Ukrainian forces.
"By comparing the videos to satellite imagery, The Times confirmed that the videos had been filmed at a farmhouse in the village. Some of the videos are part of a series of four drone videos circulated on Nov. 12 by a pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel reporting the recapture of Makeevka. The Times verified that the other aerial videos had also recently been filmed in the village," the newspaper said on Sunday.
It was emphasized in the report that in the videos the Russian soldiers can be seen lying dead, positioned as they were when they surrendered. "It looks like most of them were shot in the head," Dr. Rohini Haar, medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights, told the newspaper, adding "There are pools of blood. That indicates that they were just left there dead. There appears to have been no effort to pick them up or help them."
War crimes prosecution expert at Utrecht University Iva Vukusic told the paper that it was difficult to determine whether a war crime had or had not been committed by Ukraine, based on the video evidence. Meanwhile, Dr. Haar said that when they surrendered, the Russian soldiers had been lying down, apparently unarmed.
"They’re considered hors de combat, or noncombatants — effectively prisoners of war," the medical adviser stressed. The report says the videos of the execution "offer a rare look into one gruesome moment among many in the war, but do not show how or why the Russian soldiers were killed."
On Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Ukrainian military had deliberately killed more than ten captured Russian servicemen, shooting them in the head at point blank — a crime no one can present as a "tragic exception."
The Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal investigation on Friday into the execution of Russian POWs by the Ukrainian military. The committee said that Russian military investigators were also taking measures to identify individuals who captured the footage of the execution.
UN Spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Friday that the United Nations was calling for a full investigation of all reported human rights violations in the context of more than 10 brutally executed Russian PoWs by the Ukrainian side.
Russia has sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the issue of inhumane treatment of Russian PoWs by Ukraine and asked the top official to circulate it as an official document of the UN Security Council and General Assembly.
No comments:
Post a Comment