As international outrage mounted, Ukraine on Saturday called on global organizations including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to quickly investigate an explosion that ripped through a Russian prison camp containing dozens of Ukrainian soldiers, leaving only charred bodies and twisted metal bunk beds. stayed behind. .
The Ukrainians took swift action on Friday to refute the official Russian story that the Ukrainians had used American-made precision weapons to attack the prison and kill their own fighters to deter anyone who would consider surrendering. to the Russian troops.
Ukrainian officials said the idea that they would kill their own soldiers — many of whom fought to defend the Azovstal iron and steel works in the city of Mariupol and are widely regarded as national heroes — was absurd.
“It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his overnight address.
The Red Cross oversaw the surrender of an estimated 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers when they laid down their weapons at the steel mill in May. Many had been taken to the facility where the explosion occurred: Correctional Colony No. 120, a detention camp near the town of Olenivka in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Mr Zelensky said the Red Cross, along with the United Nations, had acted “as guarantees for the life and health of our soldiers” and that they must now take action. “They have to protect the lives of hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” he said.
The Red Cross said: in a statement that it had requested access to the site of the attack and was in contact with the families of soldiers imprisoned there.
“Our priority right now is to ensure that the injured receive life-saving treatment and that the bodies of those who have lost their lives are treated in a dignified manner,” the agency said.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s most senior foreign policy official, said in a statement that Russia’s ongoing “unlawful and unjustified war of aggression” brought “further heinous atrocities” every day.
He said both the attack on the detention camp and a recent graphic video that appeared to show a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian POW were evidence of Russian violations of international law.
“These inhumane, barbaric acts represent grave violations of the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocol, and amount to war crimes,” he said.
Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas said Russia was responsible for the “mass murder” of prisoners in the camp, an act she said was reminiscent of “the darkest chapters of history”.
“There should be no impunity for war crimes, just as there can be no return to relations with war criminals,” she said in a statement.
Critics of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pointed to a statement issued by the Russian Embassy in Great Britain on Twitter as proof of how Moscow views prisoners of war.
“Azov militants deserve execution, but death not by firing squad but by hanging, because they are not real soldiers. They deserve a humiliating death,” the embassy said in a message on Twitter, citing a propaganda video shot in Mariupol.
Twitter has since labeled the statement as violating the platform’s rules on hateful behavior. The outlet wrote that it left the post in place because “it may be in the public interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said that although the killing of the Ukrainian detainees sparked “anger”, the army would continue to follow “the standards of international humanitarian law”.
However, he also called for revenge.
“We will do everything possible – and impossible – to punish those guilty of crimes against our brothers and sisters in arms, as well as civilians,” he said in a statement. “These crimes have no statute of limitations. Beware, enemies, you will have no place to hide on this earth.”