Ukraine’s human rights commissioner urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations to investigate a photo widely shared online on Saturday which he said possibly showed a Ukrainian prisoner of war being killed and dismembered by Russian forces.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said separately that an urgent investigation had been launched into information being spread on social networks about the murder and mutilation of a Ukrainian prisoner of war.
“A photo has surfaced online, possibly of a Ukrainian prisoner whose head and limbs were chopped off by the Russians,” the country’s top human rights official Dmytro Lubinets said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
“Seeing these horrific images, I urgently appeal to the ICRC and the UN to document yet another human rights violation committed by a terrorist country,” Lubinets wrote.
Prosecutor General Andrey Kostin said an urgent investigation had been launched. “Russia constantly repeats the crimes of the Nazis, showing blatant contempt for all norms of the civilized world,” he wrote on Telegram.
Russia denies torturing or otherwise mistreating prisoners of war.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said in a report published in March that it had documented credible allegations of executions of at least 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war in 12 separate incidents from December 2023 to February, and that it had also independently verified three incidents.
The three-member investigation commission said it had found further evidence that Russia had systematically tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war, with threats of rape and reports of electric shocks to the genitals.
It said the level of such torture cases could amount to the most serious abuses known as crimes against humanity, and described the incidents as “widespread and systematic”.