A military convoy travelling through Russian-occupied Crimea, 25 February 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE
Kyiv has written to the UN requesting it investigate the alleged execution of nine Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian forces in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said on Sunday.
According to Ukrainian war monitoring project DeepState, Russian troops executed nine Ukrainian soldiers, mostly drone operators, who had surrendered after clashes near the Kursk region village of Zelyony Shlyakh on Thursday.
Citing sources in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) 1st Tank Brigade, DeepState said the Ukrainian soldiers had been retreating and thought they were in “relative rear safety” when they were engaged by Russian forces. They had then been forced to surrender due to limited ammunition supplies, according to DeepState, before being executed by the Russians.
The project also published an image appearing to show nine people lying on the ground in their underwear.
Photo: DeepState
Calling the apparent execution a “blatant violation” of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, Lubinets said he had sent a written request to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross asking both organisations to investigate what he called “another Russian crime”.
“These actions must not go unpunished, and the enemy must be held fully accountable. Russia is a terrorist state that violates all rules and customs of war. The international community must not turn a blind eye to such crimes,” Lubinets said.
The apparent execution is the third such incident reported by Ukrainian sources since the start of the month. On 1 October Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office reported what it called the “largest mass execution” of the war so far near the Donetsk region town of Pokrovsk, where it said that Russian forces had put 16 Ukrainian POWs to death. Just days later, the Azov Brigade reported the shooting of three more Ukrainian POWs in the nearby town of Niu York.
Earlier in October, Yuriy Belousov, head of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office’s War Crimes Investigation Department, said that at least 93 Ukrainian POWs had been summarily executed by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, with 80% of those executions reported in the past year as Russian treatment of Ukrainian POWs had “significantly changed for the worse” since November 2023.
