Russians accused of beheading Ukrainian soldiers (original) (raw)

Russian soldiers appear to have pinned a Ukrainian prisoner of war to the ground and used a knife to behead him in gruesome footage circulating online.

Volodymyr Zelensky described the killers as “beasts” and demanded world leaders punish Moscow.

"This is not an accident. This is not an episode... this was the case in Bucha. Thousands of times. Everyone must react. Every leader,” the Ukrainian president said on Wednesday in a video address.

“There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill.”

The video appears to show a Ukrainian soldier struggling on the floor as a Russian soldier cuts off his head.

The attackers hold up the Ukrainian’s tactical vest, displaying the patch worn by members of Kyiv’s armed forces, to identify their victim to the camera.

“Get working, brothers,” a voice can be heard saying in Russian. “Break his spine, f---, have you never cut off a head?”

At the end of the clip there are cheers as the Ukrainian’s decapitated head is held aloft towards the camera.

The perpetrator and other men visible in the clip have white bands on their legs, which Russian soldiers are known to wear as a means of identification.

It is likely the footage was shot in summer 2022 given the amount of green foliage around the murder scene.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday described the videos as horrible but suggested the executions could have been staged.

‘More videos will pop up’

But a Russian neo-Nazi paramilitary unit, the Rusich Group, reacted to the footage with a smiley face emoji, adding: “You will be surprised how many of these videos will gradually pop up.”

Another clip being circulated appeared to show the corpses of two Ukrainian soldiers lying on the ground next to a destroyed military vehicle.

“Got f----- by a mine,” a Russian voice can be heard describing the incident.

“They killed them. Someone came up to them. They came up to them and cut their heads off,” the voice added.

Ukraine's military intelligence agency described the videos as an act of Russia’s deliberate psychological warfare against Ukraine.

Senior officials in Kyiv said the footage demonstrated the need for more donations of weaponry to tackle a “new Isis” in Europe.

“One day they will behead victims not only in Bakhmut but in London and New York,” Serhi Leshchenko, a governmental adviser, said.

In a recent battlefield assessment, the US-based Institute for the Study of War wrote that Russian troops continue to “commit war crimes by beheading Ukrainian servicemen in Bakhmut”, citing a third social media post purportedly showing the remains of a head belonging to a Ukrainian serviceman on a spike.

Russian social media channels suggested the two videos were also shot close to the besieged salt-mining city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Wagner has been leading Moscow's efforts to capture it.

A former Wagner fighter who fled Russia and applied for political asylum in Norway in late 2022 has identified the men who executed the soldier in the video as Wagner fighters.

Andrei Medvedev told the NGO that helped him to escape that the aliases and code words heard in the video are distinctive of the group’s mercenaries: “It’s a typical Wagner feature. 100 per cent.”

The footage is the latest in a string of brutal executions carried out by Moscow’s invasion forces, including the castration and execution of one Ukrainian and another unarmed soldier shot in cold blood shortly after proclaiming “Glory to Ukraine”.

Executing deserters

But fighters from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group have a particular history of executing members of opposition forces, as well as their own troops.

In the Syrian war, members of the Kremlin-linked private military firm were filmed beating a prisoner with a sledgehammer before beheading him and amputating his arms with a sapper’s trowel.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, several videos have emerged online of what purportedly showed Wagner troops executing deserters with a sledgehammer – a signature of their brutality.

The UK Government on Wednesday announced a fresh wave of sanctions targeting “financial fixers” who have helped Roman Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea FC, and other oligarchs to hide their assets.

Cypriot Demetris Ioannides was hit by the measures for his alleged part in efforts to help Mr Abramovich stash more than £760 million in assets before he was sanctioned.

James Cleverly, Foreign Secretary, said: “We are closing the net on the Russian elite and those who try to help them hide their money for war.

“There’s no place to hide. We will keep cutting them off from assets they thought were successfully hidden.”