Explosion kills dozens of Ukrainian prisoners in Russian prison

ODESA, Ukraine — For the Russians, the Ukrainian fighters held captive in Correctional Colony No. 120 a trophy. For the Ukrainians, they are war heroes.

Why either side would want one of them dead is a mystery, but that is the question hanging over the fighting in Ukraine on Friday after another deadly episode in which both sides accused the other of committing a war crime.

What is known is that an explosion ripped through a detention camp barracks in the Russian-occupied city of Olenivka in southeastern Ukraine early Friday morning, killing at least 50 captured fighters and maiming dozens more, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials. Videos by Russian war bloggers show twisted metal bunk beds and the charred bodies of their former residents.

Russia’s defense ministry said in a daily briefing on Friday that Ukraine had used a US-made advanced missile system to attack the prison, aiming to send a cautionary warning to Ukrainian soldiers considering surrendering to Russian forces.

Ukrainian officials called those accusations absurd, accusing Russia of the massacre covering up the atrocities they committed in prison. “The Russian occupiers are pursuing their criminal goals by accusing Ukraine of committing war crimes while hiding the torture and shooting of prisoners,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in a statement.

It said Ukraine used the new High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, exclusively to attack Russian military targets.

Ukrainian forces have successfully used the missile system supplied by the West to destroy Russian ammunition depots and command centers with high accuracy. The HIMARs have fired hundreds of satellite-guided missiles into Ukraine, and there are no reports of them accidentally hitting civilian targets.

Neither side’s claims about the prison explosion could be independently verified. But Russia has regularly blamed Ukraine for its own attacks on civilian targets — including an April strike that killed 50 people at a Kramatorsk train station — claiming without any evidence that Ukraine is conducting so-called false flag operations to make Russia look bad. to see.

Speaking about Russian claims of a HIMARS attack on the camp, a senior US military official said, “We have not seen any evidence to support these claims.”

The prisoners in the compound in Olenivka were not just soldiers. An estimated 2,500 of them were fighters from the Azovstal iron and steel factory in the city of Mariupol. Their 80-day battle against a vastly superior Russian force from bunkers beneath the mammoth factory has become legendary in Ukraine, with commanders’ faces now appearing on billboards across the country.

Their surrender in mid-May marked the end of one of the most vicious battles of the war and gave Russia a major victory and a bargaining chip. Ukraine and Russia have already negotiated the exchange of 144 of the most seriously injured fighters and talks are underway for a new prisoner swap.

Russian officials have not provided conclusive evidence to substantiate their claims that Ukraine has been jailed. A Kremlin-friendly war blogger posted a video of twisted metal shrapnel that he believes were the remains of a HIMARS missile. No Russian guards were killed or injured in the explosion, according to Russian officials.

The Ukrainian intelligence services quickly weighed in. Domestic intelligence, the SBU, released an audio recording Friday night of what the agency said were two Russian-backed separatist fighters discussing the explosion over the phone. In the call, which could not be independently verified, one person said there was no sound from a missile before the explosion and that Russian troops probably blew up the barracks themselves.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Russia of carrying out a “carefully planned attack” on the detention center, noting that there were no tactical military targets in the city of Olenivka. Russian troops had transferred Ukrainian soldiers to the barracks just days before Friday’s attack, he said.

“The Russians have deliberately, cynically and deliberately mass murdered Ukrainian prisoners,” he said.

In a rare joint statement released Friday night, Ukraine’s intelligence, military and human rights ombudsman called the attack “an organized murder of Ukrainian prisoners” and called on the United Nations and the International Red Cross to travel to Olenivka with Ukrainian officials. check.

Prisoners released from Correctional Colony No. 120 described infernal conditions. Guards provided just enough food for prisoners to survive and beat them regularly.

Vitaliy Sytnikov, a 35-year-old citizen arrested in March when he tried to evacuate other residents from Mariupol, described a disciplinary cell known as “the pit.”

“Almost every day we heard the beatings of prisoners of war there,” said Mr. Sytnikov in a telephone interview, adding that most of the victims of such treatment were soldiers from Azovstal.

Just before the Azovstal soldiers arrived in mid-May, two former prisoners said, the camp was undergoing a major change. The separatist fighters who once stood guard were replaced by soldiers from Russia proper, and the separatist rebel flag was taken down and replaced by the Russian tricolor flag; the changes were a testament to the importance of the new prisoners.

But there was another significant change, according to Dmitriy Bodrov, 32, another civilian from Mariupol detained in the camp. Russian soldiers began to line up near the barracks and fire rockets towards Ukrainian positions, seemingly in an attempt to provoke Ukrainian troops to fire at the detention camp.

“Because of all that artillery, everything around it was on fire,” said Mr. Bodrov.

He said Ukrainian troops had never reached the camp’s territory in the time before his release on July 4.

Mr Bodrov said the industrial zone in the camp, where Friday’s explosion took place, had not previously been used to house prisoners. Gene. Kyrylo Budanov, the commander of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said on Friday that construction of the barracks in that zone had been completed two days earlier and that the detainees had moved there just before the explosion.

Since the Azov fighters were considered valuable prisoners, it was unclear why Russia would want to kill them. In a statement, General Budanov offered a possible explanation, saying the attack appeared to have been carried out by Russian mercenaries acting outside the regular chain of command. The Russian Defense Ministry, he said, seemed surprised and compelled to justify the attack in retrospect.

Late on Friday evening, the Russian government indicated that there was no grief over the loss of the Ukrainian prisoners. In a tantalizing post on Twitter, the Russian embassy in Britain said fighters of the Azov regiment, a unit that makes up a large percentage of Azovstal defenders, “deserve execution, but death not by firing squad but by hanging, because they are not real soldiers to be. They deserve a humiliating death.”

The Kremlin has a history of making up stories to cover up possible war crimes. After a Russian anti-aircraft defense system shot down a passenger plane on Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin came up with a series of exotic and ever-changing statements that never stood up to expert scrutiny. At one point, Russian officials claimed that the plane, a Malaysia Airlines jumbo jet with 298 people on board, was actually filled with corpses before takeoff.

The war in Ukraine itself is based on a Kremlin lie that Russian troops had been sent to liberate the country from a fascist junta that had established itself in Kiev with the help of Western governments.

The attack came this week after videos circulated online showing a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner of war and then shooting him in the head. Ukrainian officials have loudly condemned the violence; the authenticity of the video could not be independently confirmed.

Michael Schwirtz reported from Odessa, Valerie Hopkins from Tivat, Montenegro, and Cora Engelbrecht from London. Eric Schmitt reporting contributed.