"Finish Them Off Immediately": Russkies Executed Wounded Ukrainian POWs

Near Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia region, Russian soldiers shot dead on orders two wounded, unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war, while the Ukrainian army listened in on the radio as it happened. Maksym Kravchuk, spokesperson for the Southern Defense Forces, told Ukrainska Pravda on Saturday that the intercepted Russian radio communication clearly contained the order: the wounded Ukrainians were to be "finished off immediately." The conversation also revealed that the order was in fact carried out. According to the Ukrainian side, the incident took place a few days before the announcement, but the exact date and location have not yet been made public.

Kyiv says the killings were carried out by soldiers of Russia's 38th Separate Mechanized Rifle Brigade, which is fighting in this sector of the front. Kravchuk believes that such orders do not stem from the arbitrary decisions of individual soldiers, but are issued on the initiative of the brigade commander, Colonel Valeriy Kazak. The Ukrainian army has handed over the intercepted recordings and other evidence to investigative authorities so that those responsible can be identified by name.

Killing wounded soldiers who have surrendered is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, and this is not the first such case near Huliaipole. Last November, the battlefield monitoring group DeepState reported that Russian soldiers had shot dead five captured Ukrainian soldiers near the village of Zelenyi Hai, a report later confirmed by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office. Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said in August this year that at least 345 Ukrainian soldiers who had already laid down their arms have been executed by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale invasion. The Huliaipole case is therefore not an exception but another link in a long chain, in which the order, it seems, comes not from the trenches but from far higher up.

Ugar