Russia is ordering its troops to kill Ukrainian prisoners of war – why?

Russian commanders are ordering their forces to kill surrendering Ukrainian soldiers in a plan to “terrify” droves of Russian troops into not giving themselves up.

Many newly conscripted and poorly trained Russian soldiers realise their lives are being squandered in human-wave attacks, according to Ukrainian officials.

Petro Yatsenko, a spokesperson for Kyiv’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, says orders to kill Ukrainians who could be taken prisoner come from the “highest level” – the Kremlin. The instructions are designed to “terrify” their own soldiers, he adds.  

The department has representatives from various Ukrainian ministries, with the country’s military intelligence agency playing a key role.

Yatsenko says: “The logic is very straightforward: the killing of defenceless [Ukrainian] military personnel is intended to prevent Russians from themselves surrendering to the Ukrainian army on the basis that if [Russians] are doing this to them, the Ukrainians will do the same to you if you give up. Therefore, don’t surrender to them, rather kill yourself.

“That’s an extremely cruel tactic but we, unfortunately, are dealing with a country, Russia, which traditionally has not abided by any democratic values and for which human life has no worth.”

There has been evidence of the Russian “take no prisoners” policy in multiple places along the front lines but most prominently in the northern battlefields of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, where Russia shares a long border and where it launched a powerful attack, with its troops pouring in on 10 May.

A senior Ukrainian army source with knowledge of the situation on the Kharkiv front lines, but who was not speaking officially, told The Independent that during the assaults up to 90 per cent of Ukrainians who fell into enemy hands were executed. He said they included those too badly wounded to flee, soldiers knocked unconscious by explosions and those trying to surrender because their position was hopeless. 

A principal goal of the assault was for Russian artillery to get within range of the region’s capital, Kharkiv City, already under daily rocket, drone and glide bomb attacks to force its population to flee. Vladimir Putin’s declared ambition is to create a 10-mile deep uninhabitable “grey zone” on the Ukrainian side of the two countries’ frontier.

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The Russian intrusion initially claimed a string of villages and captured some 50 square miles of territory. However, Ukrainian counterattacks stemmed the Russian assault and have kept its artillery out of range of Kharkiv City.

For weeks there has been a bloody stalemate with only slight shifts of territory amidst street fighting focused on the largest town in the area, Vovchansk, as well as smaller settlements such as Starytsya, Hlyboke and Lyptsi.  

This week, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War reported, “Ukrainian forces counterattacked and recently regained some tactical positions” in Vovchansk and Starytsya.

Ukrainian troops fighting in northern Kharkiv told The Independent last month that the Russians were hurling novice troops into the front lines as cannon fodder to force Ukrainians to reveal their positions when they repelled them. They said they were mowing down the Russians in great numbers.

Yatsenko says he cannot “confirm for the moment” the scale of killings of Ukrainian prisoners as “we don’t have the objective statistics because it’s happening in the current battlefields and we can only confirm all these instances after the de-occupation of these territories... with the work of criminal investigators.”

But he says the new troops realise their commanders consider them “expendable material” and that has led to a severe “loss of motivation”, swelling the number of Russian soldiers surrendering to Ukrainian forces.

Instructions intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence, debriefings of Russian prisoners of war and other sources showed that another reason Russian commanders are ordering their men not to take captives is because dealing with prisoners slows down assaults.

Yatsenko said the orders to kill unarmed or surrendering Ukrainian soldiers in the Kharkiv region come against a background of such atrocities since the start of the Russian invasion in 2014 when Putin’s forces annexed Crimea and occupied parts of eastern Ukraine in what is known as the Donbas region.  

Many of those incidents have been recorded in dozens of videos posted on social media by the Russians themselves.

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Videos of Ukrainians who have surrendered being lined up or forced to kneel before being executed have appeared online, while others show prisoners being tortured. One video that became popular in Russia not just among soldiers but in the wider population, showed a Ukrainian soldier being splayed face down on a table and being castrated as he screams before being killed. 

Another video taken by and posted by a Russian soldier shows a prisoner being shot to death after he utters the patriotic slogan “Slava Ukraine – Glory to Ukraine.”

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified some of the incidents and said its investigations and interviews with scores of former Ukrainian PoWs “disclosed that they had been subjected to sexual violence during their internment, including attempted rape, threats of rape and castration, beatings or the administration of electric shocks to genitals, and repeated forced nudity”. 

Last week, Russians left the severed head of a Ukrainian soldier near Volnovakha in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, is investigating it as a war crime and says Ukrainian intelligence revealed that Russian battalion and company-level commanders had ordered subordinates to behead Ukrainian prisoners in order to cause terror.

The Institute for the Study of War says: “Kostin’s report is consistent with a larger observed trend of prolific Russian abuses against Ukrainian POWs that is apparently enabled, if not explicitly endorsed, by individual Russian commanders and upheld by Russian field commanders.”

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Russia is desperate to expand or at least consolidate its gains in northern Kharkiv before the flow of US-supplied weapons and ammunition, held up for six months by political wrangles in the US Congress, resumes.

The lack of US-supplied ammunition, particularly for Ukrainian artillery and rocket systems, severely hampered Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities and gave Russia a window of opportunity to make significant gains. 

But that window is already closing and Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov,  has predicted American supplies will return to previous levels next month. 

Yatsenko contrasted the treatment of PoWs by Ukraine and Russia. He says while Ukraine allows free access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the Russian prisoners held by Ukraine, Moscow severely restricts access to Ukrainian prisoners.

He says Ukrainian PoWs said they had rarely seen ICRC representatives while in captivity. “And when they are released you can see that the Russian prisoners  look in good health and well-fed but our people look like photographs of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.”

He said that at least 170 Ukrainians known to have been taken to Russian PoW camps died in captivity and the true number of slain prisoners is likely much higher.

On 25 June, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for former Russian defence minister and current security council secretary Sergei Shoigu and chief of the Russian general staff Valery Gerasimov for “the war crime of directing attacks at civilian objects” in Ukraine.

The European Court of Human Rights also announced decisions regarding Russia’s long-term perpetration of war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine.