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Ukraine’s human rights commissioner has urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations to investigate an image widely shared online on Saturday (August 3) that he said likely showed a Ukrainian prisoner of war killed and dismembered by Russian forces.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general separately said an urgent investigation had been launched into information circulating on social networks about the killing and dismemberment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
“The photos that appeared online could be of a Ukrainian prisoner whose head and limbs were chopped off by the Russians,” Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s top human rights official, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
“In light of these horrific images, I urgently call on the ICRC and the United Nations to document yet another human rights violation by this terror state,” Rubinetz wrote.
Prosecutor General Andrei Kostin said an urgent investigation had been launched. “Russia is repeating the crimes of the Nazis and blatantly defying all norms of the civilized world,” he wrote on Telegram.
Russia denies torturing or otherwise mistreating prisoners of war.
In a report released in March, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said it had documented credible allegations that at least 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war were executed in 12 separate incidents between December and February 2023, and had independently verified three of the incidents.
The three-member investigative committee said it had also gathered more evidence of systematic Russian torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war, including threats of rape and the use of electric shocks to the genitals.
The report said the scale of such torture cases could amount to the most serious violations, crimes against humanity, and called the incidents “widespread and systematic.”
Read more by Euractiv
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