New Delhi: Ukraine compared Russia to Islamic State after a video, purportedly showing Russian soldiers filming themselves while beheading a Ukrainian captive, surfaced online, news agency Reuters reported. The video, whose authenticity could not be verified by Reuters, shows a man in uniform beheading another person who wears the yellow arm band used by Ukrainian soldiers.
Condemning the act of the Russian troops, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a video message said, “There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill. There will be legal responsibility for everything. The defeat of terror is necessary.”
Taking to Twitter, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba said, “A horrific video of Russian troops decapitating a Ukrainian prisoner of war is circulating online. It’s absurd that Russia, which is worse than ISIS, is presiding over the UNSC.” He was referring to the UN Security Council, where Russia took up the rotating presidency this month.
“Russian terrorists must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN and be held accountable for their crimes,” the Ukrainian minister added.
Meanwhile, Kremlin described the video as “awful” but said its authenticity needs to be checked.
“First of all, in the world of fakes that we live in, we need to check the veracity of this footage. Then it could be a pretext to check whether or not this is true, whether it happened, and if it did, where and by whom,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said at a press briefing in Moscow.
Ukraine’s domestic security agency said it has launched an investigation into a suspected war crime over the video. “Yesterday, a video appeared on the Internet showing how the Russian occupiers are showing their beastly nature – cruelly torturing a Ukrainian prisoner and cutting off his head,” the SBU agency wrote on Telegram.
It is to be noted that militants from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were notorious for releasing videos of beheadings of captives when they controlled swathes of those countries from 2014-2017.