Ukraine has documented evidence related to the execution of 93 Ukrainian prisoners of war, according to a law enforcement official tasked with investigating war crimes related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yuriy Belousov, who heads the Prosecutor-General’s Office’s department in charge of investigating crimes committed in armed conflict, provided the latest figure during a live television appearance on October 4.
“Now we have information about the death of 93 of our soldiers who were executed on the battlefield,” Belousov told Yedyniy Novyny, a broadcast that unites multiple Ukrainian television channels.
Belousov said that about 80% of the executions were recorded this year, but that the number of executions began rising in November “when there were changes for the worse in the attitude of Russian servicemen toward our prisoners of war.”
On October 1, the Prosecutor-General’s Office announced it had opened an investigation into what it described as the “largest mass execution” of Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian troops since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
According to an official statement published on the office’s Telegram channel, Russian forces recently killed 16 Ukrainian “prisoners of war” near the villages of Mykolayivka and Sukhiy Yar in the Pokrovsk district of the Donetsk region.
Videos circulated on various Telegram channels appear to show Ukrainian soldiers, freshly captured by Russian troops, emerging from a forested area.
After the prisoners have lined up, Russian forces appear to open fire. The videos then appear to show Russian soldiers approaching those who were only wounded and shooting them again at close range with machine guns.
The videos have not been independently verified.
Under international humanitarian law, executing soldiers who have surrendered is considered a war crime.
Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said he had contacted both the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross over the deaths, citing violations of the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of prisoners of war.
In March, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine published a report that recorded the execution of at least 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war in 12 separate cases from December 2023 to February 2024.
