kyiv – A video circulating online shows the alleged beheading of a Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops, prompting widespread international stupor yesterday.
In the images, which have been circulating on the internet since Tuesday and last one minute and 40 seconds, a man in camouflage clothing and his face covered is seen inflicting neck injuries on another, dressed in uniform, lying on the ground and screaming. “this hurts!”.
After a few seconds, the screams stop and a man behind the camera is heard in Russian inciting the executioner to “cut off his head”. He finishes the decapitation with a knife and at the end, shows his head to the camera. “You have to put it in a bag and send it to the commander,” says a voice, in Russian.
The camera also focuses on the victim’s vest, which bears the trident of the Ukrainian shield, and a skull. The Wagner mercenary group would be behind the fact, international media maintain.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of war crimes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today criticized Russian “beasts” and stressed that these things have already happened in other Russian cities.
“How easily these beasts kill! This video of the execution of a Ukrainian prisoner of war, the world must see. This is a video of Russia as it is,” Zelensky said in a message posted on Instagram.
“This is not an accident. This had happened before. So it was in Bucha. Thousands of times,” she added, alluding to the kyiv suburb that became a symbol of atrocities attributed to the Russian military. “Prison sentences for the murderers, court to the State of evil,” he said.
For his part, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, stressed that the video is a “horrible extract of the Russian military beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war” and considered that Russia was “worse than the Islamic State”, a jihadist organization. that he used to film the executions of his hostages, usually by beheading.
“Russian terrorists must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN and held accountable for their crimes,” he declared on Twitter.
Russia, meanwhile, asked to verify the authenticity of the images that were disseminated in the last hours due to the amount of false news that usually circulates on the networks. “Of course these are horrible images,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov told reporters. But, “in the world of ‘fakes’ (falsehoods) in which we live, the authenticity of this video must be verified,” he said.
The European Union (EU) also warned that the veracity of the video has yet to be confirmed, although it stressed that, if it is authentic, “all perpetrators and accomplices of war crimes must be held accountable.”
The EU “has no information on the veracity of this video” but “if confirmed, it is yet another brutal reminder of the inhumane nature of Russian aggression,” said the spokeswoman for the head of European diplomacy, Nabila Massrali.
For its part, the UN Human Rights Mission in Ukraine said it was “appalled” by the images showing “a brutal execution of a man who appears to be a Ukrainian prisoner of war” and mentioned a second recording in which he sees “mutilated bodies, apparently of Ukrainian prisoners of war.”
Source: Ambito
