A video posted to social media appears to show Ukrainian troops shooting a captured Russian soldier near a village west of Kyiv.
In the video posted on Monday, which the New York Times said it had independently verified, a group of Ukrainian soldiers near the village of Dmytrivka walks among at least four stricken Russian combatants, who are tied up and lying on a rural road covered in blood.
“Look — he’s still alive, he’s gasping,” one member of the group says, pointing the camera in the direction of one of the captives, who is gasping for air, his head covered by his jacket and clothes soaked in blood. One of the Ukrainian soldiers fires multiple shots at the wounded man, who then falls silent.
The person filming the scene then pans across the road, where at least three other Russian soldiers are tied up and lying in pools of blood, before approaching a Ukrainian fighter and saying, “Glory to Ukraine.”
The scene appears to have been filmed after a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column of tanks around March 30, as Russian troops partially withdrew from towns to the west of Kyiv.
The captive soldiers lying on the ground are wearing white armbands, commonly worn by Russian troops, while those standing and walking around have the flag patches and blue armbands associated with the Ukrainian army.
In a statement carried by the BBC Russian service, Mikhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said: “Firstly, such incidents must be properly investigated until the motives and circumstances are clarified.”
“Secondly, Russia should end its genocidal anti-Ukrainian propaganda and restore its army’s understanding of the rules and customs of war,” he added.
In Brussels NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said didn’t “know anything about that specific incident” but stressed that all war crimes are “unacceptable” and that such allegations “should be thoroughly looked into.”
Over the weekend, Ukrainian and Western leaders condemned Russian forces for war crimes after authorities, NGOs and journalists reported the discovery of bodies of Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha, about a dozen kilometers from where the video was filmed.
This article has been updated to include comments from Mikhaylo Podolyak and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
