Ukrainian servicemen train near the frontlines in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, 15 March 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/YAKIV LIASHENKO
Kyiv has written to the UN requesting it investigate the alleged execution of five Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian forces in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said in a Telegram post on Tuesday.
According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, five Ukrainian soldiers were forced to retreat and take refuge in a private home after Russian forces stormed Ukrainian positions near the Donetsk region village of Petrivka at the start of November. The Russian troops forced the Ukrainians to come out and lie on the ground, after which they shot them, the Prosecutor General’s Office said.
Describing the killing of POWs as a “gross violation of the Geneva Conventions” and a “grave international crime”, the Prosecutor’s Office said it had launched an investigation into a potential war crime with premeditated murder and was working to establish the identities of those responsible.
Lubinets said that he had sent a formal request to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross asking them to “document these Russian crimes”, and urging the international community to act immediately as such actions could not go unpunished.
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, nothing that the Russian treatment of Ukrainian POWs had “significantly changed for the worse” since November 2023.
