Kremlin refuses to say if beheading video of Syrian prisoner will be investigated

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has refused for the second day in a row to confirm that an investigation is taking place into footage that shows the beheading of a Syrian prisoner by what appear to be Russian mercenaries.

The victim was murdered in 2017, but a complete video of the increasingly savage torture appeared only last week. The footage shows men in camouflage breaking the victim’s legs with a sledgehammer, then crushing his chest, before beheading him and cutting off his lower arms with a military entrenching tool.

The men hang the victim’s decapitated corpse by the legs, and set his body on fire.

The Kremlin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, described the footage as “truly shocking”, but he would not be drawn on whether the four Russian-speaking soldiers in the video were members of a private military group controlled by a close ally of President Putin. Nor would he commit to an investigation.

“We have no information and no relationship to these people,” he told journalists during his daily briefing on Friday. There would be “no answer” to the question of whether the president felt that a government probe was warranted.

A fragment of the video first appeared two years ago, but it was only with the publication of a complete video last week that the scale of the torture became clear. It is understood that the victim, identified as Syrian national Mohammed Taha Ismail al-Abdullah, had deserted from a unit loyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The video was likely filmed at an oil field west of Palmyra.

Russian media say they have identified the soldiers in the footage using facial recognition software. Two of the men, identified as Vladislav A and Stanislav V, are known to have been employed in Wagner units in Syria.

The Independent understands that Vladislav A, a joint Moldovan-Russian citizen, was killed in early 2018. The fate of Stanislav V is uncertain.

Wagner is a military contractor associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin, who goes by the moniker of “Putin’s chef” on account of his close relationship with the president and the multiple state-catering contracts awarded to his companies.

Fighting abroad in mercenary formations is formally illegal under Russian law. That has not hindered Wagner’s aggressive expansion – in the shadows of the Russian army – across Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa.