The atrocity is sure to escalate an already brutal conflict.
David Axe
Forbes
October 13, 2024
After a strong Ukrainian force with around a dozen battalions invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast on Aug. 6, quickly seizing 400 square miles of the oblast, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin reportedly gave his troops until Oct. 1 to eject the Ukrainian invaders.
The Russians missed the deadline, but not for a lack of trying. And not for a lack of brutality. A recent Russian counterattack on the western edge of the Ukrainian salient, seemingly led by the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, didn’t get very far—but it got far enough to overtake a team of Ukrainian drone operators near a Ukrainian-occupied Russian fortification outside the village of Leonidovo.
The area is garrisoned by the Ukrainian army’s 33rd Assault Battalion and 41st Mechanized Brigade.
Shortly after capturing the nine Ukrainians, the Russians reportedly stripped them down to their underwear, forced them to lie face-down on the ground—and then shot them in their heads, killing all nine. Imagery from an overhead drone, obtained by Ukrainian analysis group Deep State and posted online on Sunday, seems to confirm the mass execution. “Such actions are a gross violation of the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners of war!” Deep State noted.
It’s not an isolated incident. On Oct. 7, Ukrainian human rights commissioner Dmytro Lyubinets announced that Ukrainian authorities were investigating the recent execution of three Ukrainian prisoners of war in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. According to Yuri Bilousov, Ukraine’s national war crimes investigator, Russian forces had murdered at least 93 Ukrainian POWs on the battlefield before the two most recent incidents.
The Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. reported observing “a wider trend of Russian abuses against Ukrainian POWs across various sectors of the front that appeared to be enabled, if not explicitly endorsed, by individual Russian commanders and unpunished by Russian field commanders.”
Leaving aside the obvious moral failings of Russian commanders who order or overlook the murder of Ukrainian prisoners, the executions are sure to backfire on the Russians. Throughout history, the execution of surrendering soldiers by one side in a conflict has motivated the other side to execute prisoners in retaliation. In just one of countless examples from the final years of World War II, German soldiers advancing near Bastogne, Belgium during the 1944 Battle of the
Bulge overran a field hospital belonging to the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. The Germans killed many of the wounded Americans they found there—by slashing the helpless men’s throats as they lay on their cots.
Learning of the atrocity, the U.S. Army’s 327th Glider Infantry Regiment located the German unit responsible and counterattacked. “They took no prisoners,” Justin Harris wrote in a 2009 thesis. In executing Ukrainian prisoners, Russian troops only intensify the horror of an already horrific war—and all but guarantee the atrocities they inflict will ultimately be inflicted on them, too.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.