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US has evidence that Russian troops in the Donbas are executing Ukrainians even as they surrender, official says
Russian forces have refocused their efforts in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
news.yahoo.com
4.28.22
The US has evidence that Russian troops in eastern Ukraine have executed people who are trying to surrender, a top US official told the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday. "We now have credible information that a Russian military unit operating in the vicinity of Donetsk executed Ukrainians who were attempting to surrender, rather than take them into custody," Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice, said in the meeting. "If true, this would be in violation of a core principle of the law of war: the prohibition against the summary execution of civilians and of combatants who are hors de combat by virtue of surrender, injury, or other forms of incapacitation." Hors de combat is a French term used in international law to refer to someone in war who has clearly expressed an intention to surrender or who is injured and incapable of defending themselves.
Van Schaack continued: "These ... reports suggest that atrocities are not the result of rogue units or individuals; they rather reveal a deeply disturbing pattern of systematic abuse across all areas where Russia's forces are engaged." In the besieged port city of Mariupol, at least 21,000 civilians have been killed by Russian forces, local Ukrainian officials said earlier this month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of committing "genocide" and called Russian soldiers "murderers, looters, butchers."
For Russian soldiers, war is carte blanche permission to murder, rape, and pillage.
No need to wonder why the Ukrainian troops holed up in the Azovstahl steel plant in Mariupol refuse to surrender.