Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin accused the Russian military of executing at least 61 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) since the start of its full-scale invasion of the country, independent Ukrainian news website Liga.net reported on Tuesday.
Kostin said that Ukrainian POWs in Russia were routinely tortured and that over 500 Armed Forces of Ukraine troops had testified that they had been subjected to physical violence while in Russian captivity, mostly via electric shocks.
Kostin said that 27 criminal cases had been opened in Ukraine into the execution of Ukrainian POWs, adding that two such cases had so far gone to trial, and one conviction had already been secured.
On Tuesday, the I Want To Live hotline, which was set up in September 2022 to provide Russian soldiers with a safe way to surrender to the Ukrainian authorities, published shocking photographs of Roman Horilyk, a recently returned Ukrainian POW, in which he is clearly emaciated.
Photo: I Want To Live
Horilyk, who was held in Russia for over two years, was taken prisoner at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine in March 2022 along with another 168 national guardsmen. While Horilyk returned to Ukraine on 31 May as part of a prisoner exchange, some 89 of Horilyk’s fellow POWs remain in Russian captivity, according to I Want To Live.
“The condition Roman and the other Ukrainian prisoners are in is horrific and raises associations with the darkest pages in human history — the Nazi concentration camps,” the organisation said, adding that Horilyk and his fellow prisoners of war had also been denied access to Red Cross staff during their captivity.
