Ukraine on Saturday denounced Russian calls to “hang” or inflict another “humiliating death” on fighters from the Ukrainian Azov regiment the day after a strike on a prison where some of them were being held that killed more than 50 dead.
“There is no difference between Russian diplomats calling for the execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian troops doing so at Olenivka. They are all complicit in these war crimes and must be held accountable,” Ukrainian foreign affairs spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said on Twitter.
He was reacting to a tweet posted Friday evening in English from the Russian Embassy in the UK which was masked as having “breached the rules on hateful conduct”, but remains available as being “of interest to the public”.
“Azov fighters deserve to be executed, but not by firing squad, by hanging. They are not real soldiers. They deserve a humiliating death,” the tweet read.
“Russia is a terrorist state. In the 21st century, only savages and terrorists can say at the diplomatic level that people deserve to be executed by hanging”, for his part reacted on Telegram Andrii Iermak, the chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Ukrainian president on Friday evening described as a “deliberate Russian war crime” the bombing of a prison in Olenivka, in the Donetsk region, in the occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.
Initially, it was Moscow that accused the Ukrainian forces of having “fired on the prison where the members of the Azov regiment are being held, using American projectiles from the Himars system” (multiple rocket launchers).
The Azov regiment distinguished itself in the defense of Mariupol, a strategic port in southeastern Ukraine. After long weeks of siege and resistance on the Azovstal steel site, some 2,500 Ukrainian fighters, including members of Azov, surrendered in May to the Russian army.
“We consider the Olenivka attack an act of public execution committed by Russia with complete impunity,” Acting Commander of the Azov Regiment Mykyta Nadtotchy said in a video address.
Those responsible for this act will be “found wherever they are” and Ukraine as a state “will ensure that they are punished justly”, he added.
Ukrainian human rights official Dmytro Loubinets announced on Saturday that he had asked the Red Cross, which had supervised the withdrawal of the defenders from Azovstal, to have access to Olenivka. According to him, the ICRC has “for the moment” not obtained authorization from the Russians.
“Currently, we can only analyze the video we have. First, this barracks was built separately — for us, this is an indicator that this was a premeditated Russian military operation. According to the preliminary data, we assume that the explosion occurred indoors,” he told national television.
According to him, this version is confirmed by the fact that “the nearby barracks were not damaged, even the windows were not broken. Likewise, “by a miracle”, the Russian soldiers were not injured”.
British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons called for “an investigation” into what happened in Olenivka.
“This appears to be part of an increasingly disturbing pattern of the worst kinds of human rights violations, and possibly war crimes, committed with impunity in occupied eastern Ukraine,” she said. wrote in a tweet.