Ukraine has called for an international response after a video circulated on social media apparently showing Russian soldiers filming themselves beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war with a knife.
What does the video show?
The video appears to show a man in green fatigues wearing a yellow armband, typically donned by Ukrainian fighters. He is heard screeching before another man in camouflage uses a knife to decapitate him.
A third man holds up a flak jacket apparently belonging to the man being beheaded. It is unclear when or where the video was shot.
What has Ukraine said?
Ukraine’s state security service has launched an investigation into the video. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenksyy has said Russian forces would be held responsible for such acts, and labelled Putin’s soldiers “beasts”.
“How easily these beasts kill. We are not going to forget anything. Neither are we going to forgive the murderers,” Zelenskyy said. “There will be legal responsibility for everything. The defeat of terror is necessary.”
Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that he will request that the UN Human Rights Committee investigate the video, and has also written letters to various human rights bodies.
He wrote that “a public execution of a captive is yet another indication of a breach of Geneva Convention norms, international humanitarian law, a breach of the fundamental right to life”.
Ukrainian foreign minister Dmitro Kuleba compared Russia to Islamic State.
“It’s absurd that Russia, which is worse than ISIS, is presiding over the UNSC,” he said, referring to the UN Security Council, where Russia took up the rotating presidency this month.
“Russian terrorists must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN and be held accountable for their crimes.”
Militants from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were notorious for releasing videos of beheadings of captives.
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it was appalled by what it called “particularly gruesome” videos posted on social media.
What has Russia said?
The Kremlin described the video as “awful” but said its authenticity needed to be checked. Moscow has denied in the past that its troops carry out atrocities during the conflict.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “First of all, in the world of fakes that we live in, we need to check the veracity of this footage.”
“Then it could be a pretext to check whether or not this is true, whether it happened, and if it did, where and by whom,” Peskov said.
Posters in some pro-Kremlin Russian Telegram channels, while not confirming the authenticity of the video, did not dispute it. Some sought to justify it by saying that Russian troops have become hardened by combat.
What about other war crimes?
Since Russia’s forces invaded Ukraine more than a year ago, they have committed widespread abuses and alleged war crimes, according to the United Nations and rights groups.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
More than 74,500 atrocities have been reported in Ukraine since Russia invaded, according to the prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv.
Ukrainian and Western authorities say there is evidence of murders and executions, shelling of civilian infrastructure, forced deportations, child abductions, torture, sexual violence and illegal detention.
The bombings of the theatre and maternity hospital in Mariupol appear to fall under the definition of war crimes. Images of hundreds of civilians lying dead in the streets and in mass graves in Bucha after Russian forces withdrew have horrified the world.
The Kremlin denies it has committed war crimes or that it has targeted civilians.
With reporting from AP and Reuters.