A video posted online on Monday and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian soldiers outside a town west of kyiv.
“He is still alive. Record these rascals. Look, he’s still alive. He is gasping,” a man says as a Russian soldier is seen with his jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, still breathing. A soldier then shoots the man twice. After the man continues to move, the soldier shoots him once more and stops.
At least three other apparent Russian soldiers, including one with an obvious head injury who has his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim. All are dressed in camouflage, and three have the white bands on their arms that Russian troops usually wear. There is equipment scattered around them and bloodstains near each other’s heads.
The soldiers are lying on the road just meters from a BMD-2, an infantry fighting vehicle used by Russian airborne units. Some seem to have their jackets, shoes or helmets removed. Further up the road, other destroyed vehicles can be seen.
The video It was recorded on a road north of the town of Dmytrivka, some 11km southwest of Bucha, where the discovery of hundreds of bodies in civilian clothes has in recent days sparked accusations that Russian troops killed civilians as they retreated. .
The killings appear to have been the result of a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian column that occurred around March 30, as Russian troops were withdrawing from small towns west of kyiv that have been the scene of heavy fighting for weeks. On April 2, freelance journalist Oz Katerji posted on Twitter videos and pictures of the destroyed column and wrote that the soldiers told him that the Russians had been ambushed 48 hours earlier.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also tweeted on the destruction of the Russian convoy, calling it “precise work” by the Ukrainian forces. “These are not even human,” a Ukrainian soldier says in the video as he walks among the wrecked vehicles, adding that two Russian lieutenants had been taken prisoner.
Ukrainian soldiers are identifiable by their flag patches and blue armbands, and they repeat “glory to Ukraine” several times. Their unit is unclear, but in the video of the massacre, one of the men refers to some of them as “Belgravia boys”, probably referring to a housing estate called Belgravia located a few hundred meters from the incident.
A Ukrainian news agency posted a video of the followingmath of the March 30 ambush described it as the work of the “Georgian Legion,” a paramilitary unit of Georgian volunteers that was formed to fight on behalf of Ukraine in 2014.
Evan Hill is a journalist with the Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics techniques. @evanchill
