Russia Accuses Ukraine of Executing POWs as War’s Center Shifts East

The lack of Western reporters on the ground in eastern Ukraine makes it difficult to corroborate many accounts of war crimes allegedly committed by both sides.

AP/Bernat Armangue, file
Ukrainian defense forces members stand next to a sign reading Kherson Region on the outskirts of Kherson, November 14, 2022. AP/Bernat Armangue, file

In unsettling signs that the brief lull in fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces following the liberation of Kherson is over, Russia has accused Ukrainian soldiers of executing at least 10 prisoners of war in the eastern Donbas even as the week ended with renewed Russian attacks in the embattled region. 

Russian officials denounced videos that appeared on social media that purportedly show Ukrainian troops executing its soldiers. Russia said the videos were recorded in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, which is almost entirely under Russian control.

“We demand international organizations to condemn this egregious crime, to conduct a thorough investigation of it,” the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said. A ministry statement read in part, “No one will be able to paint the deliberate and methodical murder of more than 10 restrained Russian soldiers … who were shot in the head, as a ‘tragic exception.’”

Russia’s human rights council said it had sent the videos to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and other international organizations.

Earlier this week, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, said the mission had investigated torture of prisoners on both sides of the conflict.

“We have received credible allegations of summary executions of persons hors de combat and several cases of torture and ill-treatment, reportedly committed by members of the Ukrainian armed forces,” Ms. Bogner said.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the footage was seemingly taken by a Ukrainian soldier. It shows what appears to be a group of Russian soldiers emerging from an outbuilding in the grounds of a house with their hands above their heads before they are told to lie facedown. The video suggests that as many as 12 Russians were killed in the ensuing violence. 

Ukraine’s ministry of defense did not respond to a request by a Guardian journalist for comment.

The lack of Western reporters on the ground in eastern Ukraine makes it difficult to corroborate many accounts of war crimes allegedly committed by both sides. Yet there is clear escalation in violence in the east. The Telegraph reported on Friday that the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaiday, said there were “intense clashes” in and around a number of towns that have swung between Russian and Ukrainian hands.

“The Russians are constantly attacking, trying to recapture the territory of the village that has been completely destroyed,” Mr. Gaiday said, adding that the Ukrainian military has so far managed to push back the Russian troops.

In the meantime,  the chief of Ukraine’s electricity grid warned of hours-long power outages Friday as Russia zeroed in on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with heavy artillery and missile attacks that have interrupted supplies to as much as 40 percent of the country’s people at the onset of winter.

The capital, Kyiv, is already facing a “huge deficit in electricity,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko told the Associated Press. Some 1.5 million to 2 million people — about half of the city’s population — are periodically plunged into darkness as authorities switch electricity from one district to another. “It’s a critical situation,” he said.

Mr. Klitschko added that President Putin’s military planners apparently are hoping “to bring us, everyone, to depression,” to make people feel unsafe and “to think about, ‘Maybe we give up.’” It won’t work, he said. “It’s wrong, it’s [a] wrong vision of Putin,” Mr. Klitschko said. “After every rocket attack, I talk to the people, to simple civilians. They [are] not depressed. They were angry, angry and ready to stay and defend our houses, our families and our future.”

Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy and power facilities have fueled fears of what the dead of winter will bring. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had again been targeted Thursday, two days after Russia unleashed a nationwide barrage of more than 100 missiles and drones that knocked out power to 10 million people.

In the past 24 hours, Russian forces unleashed the breadth of their arsenal to attack Ukraine’s southeast, employing drones, rockets, heavy artillery, and warplanes that killed at least six civilians and wounded six others, the president’s office said.

In the Zaporizhzhia region, part of which remains under Russian control, artillery pounded 10 towns and villages. The death toll from a Russian rocket attack on a residential building in the city of Vilniansk on Thursday climbed to 10 people, including three children.

In Nikopol, situated across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, 40 Russian missiles damaged several high-rise buildings, homes, and a power line.

In the wake of its humiliating retreat from the southern city of Kherson, Moscow intensified its assault on the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia’s defense ministry said Friday its forces took control of the village of Opytne and repelled a Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim the settlements of Solodke, Volodymyrivka, and Pavlivka.

The city of Bakhmut, a key target of Moscow’s attempt to seize the entire region of Donetsk, remains the scene of heavy fighting, the regional governor said. The Russian defense ministry also said Ukrainian troops were pushed back from Yahidne in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv province, and Kuzemivka in the neighboring Luhansk province.

Donetsk and Luhansk were among the four Ukrainian provinces illegally annexed by Moscow in September, together with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

At the same time, Moscow is fortifying its defenses in the southern region to thwart further Ukrainian advances. Russian troops have built new trench systems near the border of Crimea, as well as near the Siversky-Donets River between Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, according to a British Ministry of Defense report.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian and international investigators were forging ahead on uncovering suspected war crimes committed by Russian forces during the near seven-month occupation of the Kharkiv region. Ukraine’s National Police said Friday that its officers had initiated more than 3,000 criminal proceedings against Russian troops.


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