Grisly video footage emerged Wednesday showing Ukrainian forces shooting and killing a wounded Russian soldier on a road west of Kyiv.
The footage, verified by the New York Times, shows two bodies — apparently Russian soldiers — lying on the road in a pool of bright red blood.
The closest soldier, whose jacket is pulled up above his head, can be seen twitching and is heard struggling to breathe.
“He’s still alive,” a man’s voice says. “Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping.”
A man to the right of the camera raises his rifle and fires two shots into the gasping man’s torso.
The wounded Russian gasps again, and is shot a third time in the back before he stops moving.
The camera then pans to the bodies of two other Russian soldiers dead in the road. One, with an obvious head wound, has his hands tied behind his back. The other appears to be wearing the blue striped shirt of Russia’s elite airborne troops.
The Ukrainian unit is not identified in the video, but the scene depicted, and the Ukrainian soldiers seen in the footage, appear identical to those in a video posted March 30.
In that video — which was shared by the Ukrainian news service UNIAN and does not depict the killing of wounded Russians — the unit is identified as the Georgian Legion, a foreign paramilitary unit fighting on the Ukrainian side.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
“The Georgian Legion continues to help Ukrainians in the cleansing of the Kyiv region from the ‘liberators,’” the video’s caption reads.
The Ukrainian government last month said it would launch a probe into unverified videos that purported to show Ukrainian forces shooting captive Russian soldiers in the legs.
The authenticity of that footage has yet to be independently verified.
“We are a European army, and we do not mock our prisoners,” senior presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said at the time. “If this turns out to be real, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior.”
