“Five Ukrainian soldiers retreated and hid in a house, which was then surrounded by the enemy,” said the Donetsk prosecutor’s office.
This Tuesday, November 27, Ukraine accused Russian forces of having shot and killed five Ukrainian soldiers who had gone to the Donetsk region, on the Eastern Front, the umpteenth incident of this kind in recent months denounced by kyiv.
The events occurred on November 13 in the village of Petrivka, near Pokrovsk, a town of importance for the logistics of the Ukrainian army, the Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office said in a press release.
“Five Ukrainian soldiers retreated and hid in a house, which was then surrounded by the enemy,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Russia has not responded to these accusations
Russian soldiers “took them prisoner and forced them, without weapons, to come out of the shelter and lie on the ground” before executing them “with automatic weapons”, he continued.
Ukrainian authorities have opened an investigation for “war crimes” and “premeditated murder”, the general prosecutor’s office said. Russia did not immediately respond to these accusations.
Ukraine has information on at least 102 prisoners of war executed by the Russian army since the start of the invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Loubinets said at the end of October, according to whom the real number of these crimes is “much more important”.
“Numerous violations of international humanitarian law”
An official from the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office, Yuriï Beloussov, declared in early October that the number of executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war had started to increase at the end of 2023 and that the overwhelming majority of these crimes took place this year.
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of killing prisoners of war since the Russian invasion began.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights claims to have “documented numerous violations of international humanitarian law against prisoners of war, including cases of summary executions of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war” .
