Written by Farangis Najibullah and Steve Gutterman based on reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered were “shot dead on the spot.” Others were killed despite being unarmed or injured, according to witness accounts. And prominent Russians have publicly called for the execution of captured military personnel.
Those are some of the details described by a UN mission in a statement on an “alarming rise” in reported executions of Ukrainian soldiers in Russian custody in the last six months or so.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has recorded 79 such executions in 24 separate incidents since the end of August 2024, it said on February 3. It said it had also documented the execution of a wounded Russian soldier by Ukrainian troops in 2024.
The mission’s conclusion was based on its assessment and verification of multiple videos and photos published by Ukrainian and Russian sources depicting the killings or dead bodies, as well as on interviews with witnesses.
“Many Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered or were in physical custody of the Russian armed forces were shot dead on the spot,” the statement said. “Witness accounts also described the killings of unarmed and injured Ukrainian soldiers.”
Legal protections for Russian soldiers and an atmosphere of impunity may have contributed to the “sharp rise” in reported executions, mission chief Danielle Bell suggested.
“These incidents did not occur in a vacuum. Public figures in the Russian Federation have explicitly called for inhumane treatment, and even execution, of captured Ukrainian military personnel,” Bell said. “Combined with broad amnesty laws, such statements have the potential to incite or encourage unlawful behavior.”
“All allegations of execution of captured Ukrainian military personnel and public statements calling for, or condoning, such actions must be investigated,” she said.
The UN mission did not give past numbers for comparison, but Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, recently told RFE/RL that the Russian military executed 177 Ukrainian prisoners of war from the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 through mid-December 2024 -- and that 109 of the executions took place in 2024.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the 79 recent cases documented by the UN mission “could be one of the largest campaigns of intentional murder [of prisoners or war] in modern history.”
“The world must not only condemn, but also take urgent action. We need new and effective international legal tools, and concrete steps to hold the perpetrators accountable,” he said in a social media post.
Lubinets said he hoped the UN mission’s statement “will serve as important evidence of the crimes committed by the Russian Federation and contribute to holding the aggressor country accountable.”
Ukrainian authorities have conducted several probes into reports of executions. On January 23, the Prosecutor-General’s Office opened a criminal case against Russia on suspicion of war crimes after a video emerged purportedly showing Russian troops executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war in the eastern Donetsk region.
“During an attack on the positions of Ukrainian troops in Donetsk, the invaders captured six servicemen of the Defense Forces of Ukraine and subsequently shot them dead," the Prosecutor-General’s Office said.
Maksym Butkevych, a prominent journalist and human rights activist who was released in a prisoner swap last October after two years in Russian captivity, told RFE/RL that executions of soldiers who have surrendered “are war crimes and can also be qualified, particularly in certain cases, as crimes against humanity.”
“The fact that these executions…are quite often documented, filmed on video, and then distributed by the murderers themselves is a demonstration of complete disregard for the laws and customs of the conduct of war, international humanitarian law, and the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” Butkevych said. “It is a demonstration of impunity.”
Videos of purported executions of captive soldiers serve as a way for Russia to inflict pain on Ukrainian civilians because those who watch them “are subjected to serious emotional violence,” Anastasia Obertas, whose husband was held prisoner by Russia for 810 days, told RFE/RL.
“In addition, this is one of the ways of Russian commanders to control their subordinates…since collective responsibility for terrible crimes keeps them together and forces them to continue to carry out criminal orders,” especially when there is documentary evidence on film, said Obertas, who has done volunteer work with families of prisoners of war since 2014.
She said she believes that Russia has little interest in taking many lower-ranking Ukrainian soldiers captive and that Russian troops do not have much motivation to “drag more prisoners with them,” adding that “this is not a priority task for them…. They would rather save their skins.”
Russian authorities have not commented on the latest accusations. Russia denies its soldiers have committed atrocities in Ukraine, despite substantial and mounting evidence.