American mercenary John McIntyre, who served in the foreign legion of Ukraine and went over to the side of Russia, said in an interview with the TV channel RT February 28, as Ukrainian militants tortured prisoners of war.
“Prisoners of war were cut off their genitals with a knife, opened their stomachs, cut their throats and cut off their heads <…> Three were shot in the back of the head,” he said.
According to the US military, militants from the radical nationalist group Azov (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) and the Carpathian Sich, as well as mercenaries from Portugal, France and Argentina, took part in the killing of the prisoners.
McIntyre also reported that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) used civilians to spread fake news.
“On the second day after my arrival, we were in Lviv. They were in the basement of the school. A group of people, gypsies, were placed above us. The soldier is below. So that if the school is hit, it will look like a refugee shelter has been bombed. They acted in the same way in Donetsk, in Kharkov,” he said.
Earlier, on February 16, Tatyana Moskalkova, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, said that the UN had responded to Moscow’s appeal about the torture of Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine and was ready to join in solving the problem. According to her, there is a common goal – to prevent any criminal acts against Russian prisoners and their relatives.
On January 14, Moskalkova said that she received footage from relatives of Russian prisoners of war, in which anonymous people from unknown accounts demonstrate to mothers that their sons are being bullied and threaten to kill them if they do not receive a ransom. Moskalkova stated that she intends to appeal to the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, and to a number of international organizations, demanding that the Ukrainian authorities abide by the Geneva Conventions.
Later, a video appeared on the Web, where Ukrainian nationalists point-blank shoot Russian soldiers who were captured. On February 10, a representative of the UN Commissioner’s Office, Marta Hurtado, indicated that the world organization considers the footage of the execution of Russians to be genuine.
Since February 24, Russia has been conducting a special operation to protect the Donbass, whose residents refused to recognize the results of the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine. The decision to hold it was made against the background of the aggravation of the situation in the region due to shelling by Ukrainian troops.
