Ukraine accuses Russian forces of killing, dismembering prisoner-of-war

KYIV – Ukraine’s human rights commissioner urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations to investigate an image widely shared online on Saturday that he said likely showed a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war killed and dismembered by Russian forces.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general said separately that an urgent investigation had been launched into information being spread on social networks about the murder and dismemberment of a Ukrainian POW.

“A photograph, probably of a Ukrainian prisoner whose head and limbs were cut off by the Russians, has appeared online,” Dmytro Lubinets, the country’s leading human rights official, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

“In view of these horrific images, I have urgently appealed to the ICRC and the UN to record yet another human rights violation by the terrorist country,” Lubinets wrote.

Andriy Kostin, the prosecutor general, said an urgent investigation had been launched. “Russia consistently repeats the crimes of the Nazis, defiantly showing utter contempt for all norms of the civilised world,” he wrote on Telegram.

Russia denies torture or other forms of maltreatment of POWs.

A United Nations commission of inquiry on Ukraine said in a report published in March that it had documented credible allegations of executions of at least 32 Ukrainian POWs in 12 separate incidents from December 2023 to February, and that it had independently verified three of the incidents.

The three-member Commission of Inquiry said it had also gathered more evidence that Russia had systematically tortured Ukrainian POWs, documenting rape threats and the use of electric shocks on genitals.

It said the scale of such torture cases may amount to the most serious abuses known as crimes against humanity, describing their occurrence as “widespread and systematic”.