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Your support makes all the difference.A video posted online and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops outside a village west of the capital, Kyiv.
“He’s still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping,” a man says as a Russian soldier with a jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, is seen still breathing.
A soldier then shoots the man twice. After the man keeps moving, the soldier shoots him again, and he stops.
At least three other apparent Russian soldiers, including one with an obvious head wound who has his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim.
All are wearing camouflage, and three have white armbands commonly worn by Russian troops. Equipment is scattered around them, and there are bloodstains near each man’s head.
The soldiers are lying on the road a few feet from a BMD-2, an infantry fighting vehicle used by Russian airborne units. Some appear to have had their jackets, shoes or helmets removed. Farther up the road, other destroyed vehicles can be seen.
The video was filmed on a road just north of the village of Dmytrivka, around 7 miles southwest of Bucha, where the discovery of hundreds of corpses of people in civilian clothes in recent days has prompted accusations that Russian troops killed civilians as they retreated.
The killings appear to have been the result of a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column that occurred on or around 30 March as Russian troops were withdrawing from small towns west of Kyiv that have been the scene of fierce fighting for weeks.
Ukraine’s defense ministry also tweeted about the destruction of the Russian convoy, calling it “precise work” by Ukrainian forces.
“These are not even humans,” a Ukrainian soldier says in the video as he walks among the wrecked vehicles, adding that two Russian lieutenants had been taken prisoner.
The Ukrainian soldiers are identifiable by their flag patches and blue armbands and repeat, “Glory to Ukraine,” multiple times. Their unit is unclear, but in the video of the killing, one of the men refers to some of them as “Belgravia lads,” likely referring to a housing development called Belgravia located a few hundred yards from the incident.
A Ukrainian news agency that posted a video of the aftermath of the ambush on 30 March described it as the work of the “Georgian Legion,” a paramilitary unit of Georgian volunteers that formed to fight on behalf of Ukraine in 2014.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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