(Kyiv) 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 left more than 50 dead.
Posted at 9:53 a.m.
“Read this when they tell you that Russia should not be isolated. 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 on Friday evening in English from the Russian Embassy in the UK which was marked as having “broken Twitter’s rules on hateful conduct”, but remains available as “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.
PHOTO DAVID GOLDMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Irina Pidluzhna, the mother of a soldier from the Azov regiment captured by the Russian army is comforted by Bogdan Sirchenko.
“Russia is a terrorist state. In the XXIe 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 Friday bombardment of a prison in Olenivka, in the Donetsk region, in the occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.
Initially, it was Moscow that implicated Kyiv, the Russian investigation committee having 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 system Himars”.
The Azov regiment had distinguished itself in the defense of Mariupol, strategic to the southeast. After long weeks of siege and resistance at the Azovstal steelworks, some 2,500 Ukrainian fighters surrendered to the Russian army in May.