A video posted on social media on Monday and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops near a village west of Kiev, Ukraine.
“He’s still alive. Film these thugs. Look, he’s still alive. He’s panting,” says a man as a Russian soldier with a jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, is seen still breathing. Then a soldier shoots him twice. After the man keeps moving, the soldier shoots again, and then he stops. The Times did not publish the video because it is visually shocking.
At least three other soldiers who appear to be Russians, including one with a clear head wound and his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim. All are wearing camouflage uniforms and three of them have white armbands commonly worn by Moscow troops.
There’s equipment scattered around them and bloodstains near each man’s head. Soldiers are lying on the road a few meters from a BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicle, used by Russian airborne units. Some appear to have been stripped of their jackets, shoes or helmets. Further down the road, other wrecked vehicles are seen.
The video was taken on a road north of the village of Dmitrivka, about 11 kilometers southwest of Butcha, where the discovery of dozens of corpses of people in civilian clothes in recent days has sparked accusations that Russian troops killed civilians as they retreated.
The murders shown in the video now analyzed by the New York Times appear to have been the result of a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column that took place around March 30, as Moscow’s military was withdrawing from small towns west of Kiev, which were targets of fighting. fierce for weeks.
Oz Katerji, an independent journalist, posted on Twitter last day 2 videos and photos of the destroyed column and wrote that soldiers told him the Russians had been ambushed 48 hours earlier.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry also tweeted about the destruction of the Russian convoy, calling it “precise work” by Ukrainian forces.
“Those aren’t even human,” says a Ukrainian soldier in the video as he walks among the wrecked vehicles, adding that two Russian lieutenants have been taken prisoner. Kiev’s soldiers are identifiable by their blue flag emblems and armbands — they still repeat “Glory to Ukraine” over and over again.
Their unit is unclear, but in the video of the murder one of the men refers to some of them as “Boys from Belgravia”, likely referring to a housing project of the same name located a few hundred meters from the incident.
A Ukrainian news outlet that posted a video of the aftermath of the March 30 ambush described it as the work of the Georgian Legion, a paramilitary unit of Georgian volunteers that formed to fight on behalf of Ukraine in 2014.
