Following the alleged shooting of nine Ukrainian POWs in the Kursk region, several major pro-war Russian Telegram channels have published posts praising Russian troops for executions.
Some of the posts compared the incident to the treatment of German soldiers during World War II, who the Red Army did not take prisoner.
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Russian troops have allegedly shot nine Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) in Russia’s Kursk region after they surrendered. Open-source intelligence DeepState, citing its own sources from Ukraine’s 1st Tank Brigade, reported the incident on Sunday in a Telegram announcement.
The report said the incident took place on Thursday, Oct. 10, when nine Ukrainian troops, some of them working as drone operators, came into contact with Russian troops after “thinking that they were in the relative rear,” who then surrendered and were subsequently shot.
DeepState added a photo containing a map that indicates the location of the incident, as well as a top-down photo, presumably taken by a drone, of men lying nearly naked on the ground only in underwear.
DeepState added that “additional details of the circumstances are being clarified.”
Yuri Podolyaka, who has 3.1 million subscribers, was the first to react to reports of the execution of nine Ukrainian soldiers. His post came shortly after DeepState reported on the killing.
Podolyaka claimed that Ukrainian drone operators “failed to escape” and were subsequently “surrounded and destroyed.” He dismissed the outrage over the execution, suggesting that capturing the prisoners was impractical for the Russian forces in that situation.
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December, 20, 2024
Podolyaka further argued that drone operators are treated similarly to snipers, who, according to him, “are simply not captured.” He urged support for the Russian fighters, claiming that taking prisoners would have jeopardized their mission.
The channel “Older than Edda” (627,000 subscribers) expressed approval of the shootings, stating, “good, but not enough.”
This message was shared by “Two Majors” (1.1 million subscribers), which accused the Ukrainian soldiers of committing atrocities in the region and questioned “whether they deserved to be taken prisoner.”
The “Rybar” channel (1.3 million subscribers) claimed that such executions are “common on both sides during combat.”
Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, citing the DeepState report, called the alleged act “a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.”
“These actions must not go unpunished, and the enemy must bear full responsibility. Russia is a terrorist country that violates all the rules and customs of war. The international community should not turn a blind eye to such crimes!” Lubinets said in his Telegram announcement.
Killing POWs constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
It’s also unclear if the POWs were stripped of their clothes before or after the alleged shooting. While some militaries, such as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), have in the past stripped the clothes of surrendered combatants due to what it claimed to be concerns over hidden weapons and explosives, the act is also considered by human rights observers to be a move to humiliate adversaries.
While combatants are required to relinquish their equipment and weapons upon surrendering, stripping – especially in cases with underwear remaining as the only garment – is not a standard procedure during conflicts, with “humiliating and degrading treatment” also being considered a war crime.
There have been numerous recorded cases of Russian troops executing unarmed Ukrainian POWs.
On Oct. 6, the 12th Special Purpose Brigade released a video depicting a group of Russian soldiers executing three unarmed Ukrainian POWs in the village of Niu York in the Donetsk region.
In July, another video circulating on social media allegedly showed Russian troops shooting a group of Ukrainian POWs near the village of Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia sector.
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