Russia Claims Ukraine Killed Its Own POWs—Here’s Why Few Believe It

Aerospace & Defense Russia Claims Ukraine Killed Its Own POWs—Here’s Why Few Believe It Sebastien Roblin Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I cover international security, conflict, history and aviation. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jul 31, 2022, 10:21pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – In this photo taken from video a view of destroyed barrack at a prison . . .

[+] in Olenivka, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces, eastern Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine accused each other Friday of shelling a prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine, an attack that reportedly killed dozens of Ukrainian military prisoners who were captured after the fall of a southern port city of Mariupol in May. (AP Photo) Copyright 2022 The Associated Press.

All rights reserved. In 2014, the town of Olenivka in Eastern Ukraine fell under control of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), a separatist group now controlled by Moscow. That August, the Volnovakha Correctional Colony No.

120 in the town of roughly 4,500 persons became a prison camp for Ukrainians soldiers and political prisoners captured by DPR militants and the Russian military. Eight years later in July 2022, a group of between 193 and 211 Ukrainian soldiers were regrouped into a new barracks in the Volnovakha complex. All were members of the far-right Azov unit which had surrendered on May 16 under a guarantee of protection from the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after resisting beseiging Russian forces for three months in the city of Mariupol.

Just few days later in the evening of July 28, a blast consumed their new dormitory in flames, killing at least 53 of the interred POWs and injuring at least 75 and up to 130 more. Gruesome video footage released by Russia and other news agencies show numerous scorched bodies, some reduced to carbonized ashes while sleeping in their beds. MORE FOR YOU American Airlines Pilots Say Operations Managers Must Go After Summer Breakdowns The U.

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No other buildings were damaged (as can be seen in satellite photos) and no guards were killed. In this satellite photo provided by Maxar Technologies, a view of the Olenivka detention center, in . .

. [+] Eastern Donetsk province, after an attack on the prison reportedly killed Ukrainian soldiers captured in May after the fall of Mariupol, a Black Sea port city where troops and the Azov Regiment of the national guard famously held out against a months-long Russian siege. Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian POWs and wounded another 75.

(Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies via AP) Maxar Technologies The ICRC subsequently requested access to the surviving Ukrainian POWs, the safety of which it had guaranteed, but were refused it . Moscow claimed the Olenivka prison had been struck by a missile fired by a HIMARS rocket artillery system given to Ukraine by the U. S.

The HIMARS’s GPS-guided M31 rockets have proven effective in destroying Russian ammo depots and surface-to-air missile batteries, as well as holing bridges Russian logistics depend upon. Russian troops displayed fragments allegedly from the HIMARS strike, though without evidence that they were recovered at the site of the attack. Investigators put fragments on display of what they say were rickets fired from U.

S. -supplied HIMARS . .

. [+] systems near a destroyed barrack at a prison in Olenivka, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces, eastern Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022. Moscow opened a probe into the attack, sending a team to the site from Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s main criminal investigation agency.

The state RIA Novosti agency reported that fragments of U. S. -supplied precision High Mobility Artillery Rocket System rockets were found at the site.

(AP Photo) Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Russian sources claimed Ukraine attacked to prevent the POWs from ‘exposing’ their supposed crimes, or to discourage Ukrainian troops from surrendering.

Ukraine denied it had carried out a strike and Ukrainian intelligence specifically claimed that the Russian private mercenary company Wagner Group set out on its own initiative to cover up the torture of Azov prisoners by killing them in such a manner to discredit the Ukrainian military and deflate Ukrainian morale after the successes of its HIMARS artillery. In effect, besides the supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine, most observers find it far more likely that forces allied with Moscow carried out the deadly attack. Here’s why.

The prison’s use to house Ukrainian POWs was known since 2014. Unlike conventional rocket artillery which often scatters unguided projectiles hundreds of meters from the designated target, the M31 rockets used by Ukrainian HIMARS systems are designed to land within a few meters of a pre-specified GPS coordinate—a capability affirmed by holes that have precisely been punched through targeted bridges. So the attack couldn’t be a case of a random shot landing far off target.

An M31 was only likely to strike the dormitory in Olenivka if Ukrainian planners deliberately intended it to. EASTERN UKRAINE , UKRAINE – JULY 1: Kuzia, the commander of the unit, shows the rockets on HIMARS . .

. [+] vehicle in Eastern Ukraine on July 1, 2022. (Photo by Anastasia Vlasova for The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post via Getty Images To be sure, it’s not unheard of in war for POWs to inadvertently fall victim to friendly bombardments.

But Ukrainian personnel would have been well aware of the prison’s location and function. The DPR also prior released propaganda videos highlighting the internment of Azov fighters in the facility. Ukraine’s military would have had to deliberately seek to kill its own prisoners in the one specific building the Azov prisoners had been moved into.

Ukraine probably wouldn’t have used a HIMARS to hit a target in Olenivka. Olenivka is about 9 miles away from the frontline—a short enough distance that regular Ukrainian shorter-range artillery could attack it without expending expensive HIMARS missiles capable of hitting targets over 43 miles away. Expatriating the Azov POWs would have been a big political win for Kyiv.

There has been immense political pressure on Kyiv to somehow secure the release of forces captured by Russia in Mariupol, who came to be seen as icons of Ukrainian resistance for their three-month stand in Mariupol while starving and under constant bombardment. Demonstration at the Main Square in support of Azovstal 4308 regiment defenders that are currently . .

. [+] in Russian captivity. Krakow, Poland on July 3rd, 2022.

The Azov Regiment was among the Ukrainian units that defended the steelworks in the city of Mariupol for nearly three months before surrendering in May under relentless Russian attacks from the ground, sea and air. (Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images) NurPhoto via Getty Images The notion Russia’s supporters propose that there was some cynical political incentive for Ukraine to kill its own POWs is absurd when the return of these prisoners alive would have been an important boost to morale and a big political win for Ukrainian leaders. Even pro-Russian militants appear to believe the POWs were deliberately killed by Russian forces.

A purportedly intercepted phone call released by Ukraine’s intelligence service appears to show that a DPR fighter stationed near Olenivka doesn’t believe the official line that Ukraine attacked the facility. The caller claim that Russian Grad rocket artillery trucks were positioned “100 meters from the fence” of the prison facility and launched several volleys towards Ukrainian positions. He insists, however, that during the rocket barrage, three explosions detonated inside the dormitory even though no sound or other evidence of incoming fire was discernible.

He believes instead that explosives planted inside the prison by Russian personnel were remotely detonated, using the racket of the rocket salvo and the possibility of counter-battery fire as a cover. The damage to the facility doesn’t resemble a HIMARS attack. Photos from inside the Olenivka complex show rows of scorched bunk beds that, though warped by heat, have mostly remained upright.

And the building’s exterior remains essentially intact. In this photo taken from video a view of a destroyed barrack at a prison in Olenivka, in an area . .

. [+] controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces, eastern Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine accused each other Friday of shelling a prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine, an attack that reportedly killed dozens of Ukrainian military prisoners who were captured after the fall of a southern port city of Mariupol in May.

(AP Photo) Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Thomas Theiner, a former solder in the Italian Army with expertise on artillery, notes in a Twitter thread that the dormitory doesn’t exhibit the kind of extensive kinetic impact damage typical of a building hit by an M31 rocket, which would likely have left a notable crater and knocked everything down around it.

Theiner points out that Russia, however, makes relatively extensive use of incendiary and/or fuel-air explosive type weapons like the portable RPO-A and RPO-Z “Shmel” ‘flame-thrower’ rockets that do cause combustion and are designed to efficiently kill people in buildings. However, both Ukraine’s intelligence service and the DPR fighters in the intercepted phone call above suggest another method—explosives planted inside the building prior to the explosion. Questionable messaging from Russian embassy The day after the attack, Russia’s UK embassy shared a quote from alleged pro-Russian civilians in Mariupol advocating for the “humiliating death” of the Azov prisoners of war, in contravention of the Geneva convention: The post has come under scrutiny for violating Twitter’s rules against advocating violence, but Twitter explained it would keep the post up out of public interest.

Who has a track record of deception? Strictly speaking, one side can easily dismiss evidence produced by the other as doctored. Furthermore, one should generally treat the claims of warring parties with skepticism, especially claims of enemy losses. However, that doesn’t mean all claims are equally plausible, nor that all parties should be treated as equally credible.

Russia’s narrative claims Ukrainian officials diabolically used an expensive guided long-range missile to kill their own celebrated war heroes in service of some hypothetical coverup, despite Kyiv having orchestrated several prisoner swaps for other well-known prisoners and having pressed hard to secure the exchange of Azov fighters. Alternatively, one could believe that Moscow is deliberately lying about the actions of its own forces. Consider that.

. . Moscow spent October 2021 through February 23, 2022 repeatedly insisting that it was definitely not going to invade Ukraine .

It invaded Feb. 24. A few days prior, it released a video supposedly showing a Ukrainian attack on a Russian border outpost that was immediately exposed as a clumsy fake In 2014, when “little green men” seized the Crimean Peninsula on behalf of Russia, Putin strenuously insisted he had nothing to do with them.

A year later he openly bragged about the success of his cloak-and-dagger operation. Russia’s defense ministry claims to have destroyed over 260 Ukrainian warplanes by July 2022, several times the total number in Ukrainian service prior to the war. Russian citizens can potentially be imprisoned for up to 15 years Russia for calling the war in Ukraine a ‘war’ despite the casualty rate putting this conflict on track to be one of the deadliest wars in recent history.

The massacre at Olenivka coincides horribly with the release of an atrocious video on Telegram depicting a Russian soldier mutilating the genitals of a Ukrainian POW while two other soldiers watch. In a separate video, the soldier is then killed with a shot to the head. A Russian military vehicle with the pro-Ukraine invasion ‘Z’ emblem can be seen in the background.

It should go without saying that prisoners of war are entitled to humane treatment regardless of which side they are on as defined in the Geneva Convention. (Yes, that includes Russian POWs, several of whom were apparently maimed or killed in Ukrainian captivity based on videos in March and April). If POWs are allegedly culpable of war crimes, than they are entitled a fair, non-kangaroo court trial with due process to ascertain guilt or innocence.

Incidents such as that at Olenivka should receive the scrutiny of an independent investigation to determine exactly who was responsible for the killing of more than fifty sleeping men. Follow me on Twitter . Sebastien Roblin Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.