Video shows Russian forces executing unarmed, wounded Ukrainian soldier, Kyiv says

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include additional details about the reported execution.
A video circulating online shows the latest instance of Russian forces executing a Ukrainian soldier, Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said on Nov. 9.
“The occupiers have no limit to cynicism and cruelty,” he said in a post on Telegram.
“The Russians shot an apparently wounded, unarmed Ukrainian soldier. They captured it on a video that is spreading online.”
The video appears to show an unarmed Ukrainian soldiers being executed at close range with an automatic weapons while lying on the ground, the Prosecutor General’s Office said. The soldier was captured immediately prior to his execution.
The Prosecutor General’s Office sad it was opening an investigation into the suspected war crime under the country’s criminal code.
Lubinets said he would be writing a letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the U.N.
“This is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law, laws and customs of war,” he added.
Lubinets did not specify when or where the video was taken.
Earlier this week, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office said Kyiv knows of 124 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) who were executed by Russian forces on the battlefield throughout the full-scale war.
Reports of murders, torture, and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war are received regularly by Ukrainian authorities and have spiked in recent months. Most cases were recorded in embattled Donetsk Oblast.
Speaking on national television, Denys Lysenko, the head of the department focused on war-related crimes, said that 49 criminal investigations were underway regarding the execution of Ukrainian POWs.
The most recent cases include the killing of six captured Ukrainian soldiers near Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast, prosecutors reported on Nov. 5.
“We are now analyzing all these cases, looking for patterns… We are considering all these cases comprehensively and the involvement of a particular armed unit is, of course, analyzed in each case,” Lysenko said.
According to him, prosecutors are building cases against representatives of the Russian military leadership who may be involved in organizing such executions or in failing to take measures to prevent them.
Former Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin called the killing of Ukrainian servicemen in captivity a “deliberate policy” of Russia.
Some 80% of the cases of executions of Ukrainian POWs were recorded in 2024, but the trend began to appear in November 2023, when “there were changes in the attitude of Russian military personnel towards our prisoners of war for the worse,” said Yurii Belousov, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office.