The clip showed Russian soldiers emerging from a building with their hands above their heads and later they were forced to lie facedown. One of the men wearing all black, however, seems to turn his gun on what appears to be a Ukrainian unit of soldiers wearing yellow armbands as he emerges from the half-destroyed outhouse.
The footage suggests that all the Russians were killed in the violence that followed.
A Guardian report cited, the incident was said to have taken place in the grounds of a house near the village of Makiivka in the eastern Luhansk region of Ukraine, which is part of a wider area known as the Donbas.
Neither the location nor the identity of those featuring in the video could be immediately independently verified.
A spokesperson for Russia’s ministry of defence said, “This brutal murder of Russian servicemen is neither the first nor the only war crime. This is common practice in the Armed Forces of Ukraine that is actively supported by the Kyiv regime and blatantly ignored by its western patrons."
Meanwhile, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has said that both Russia and Ukraine have tortured prisoners of war during the conflict in Ukraine. It said there were instances of mistreatment including beatings, the use of electric shocks and forced nudity.
The OHCHR’s Ukraine-based monitoring team’s findings were based on interviews with more than 100 prisoners of war (POWs) on each side of the war, which will soon drag into its ninth month.
(With inputs from agencies)
