Relatives and friends of Ukrainian POWs are calling for Russia to be classified as a terrorist state after several prisoners were killed near Donetsk.
Image: Reuters
Who castrated and then killed a man in Ukrainian military clothes? Two research teams have now identified a possible perpetrator. He is said to belong to a battalion of volunteers.
EIn late July, pro-Russian Telegram channels circulated video footage purporting to show a man in a Ukrainian military uniform being castrated and then shot in the head. The identity of the victim remains unclear, so for many Ukrainian relatives of prisoners in Russian violence the horror at the pictures is likely to be mixed with the fear that their husband, son or father might have been hit. The combatant, who wields the knife against the victim in surgical gloves, wears a dark, wide-brimmed hat with a shell border and a black bracelet on his left wrist. Journalists from the research network “Bellingcat” and his exiled Russian partner “The Insider” now want to have identified the “cowboy sadist”.
Images of a man wearing such a hat were included in footage pro-Kremlin media celebrating the Chechen battalion “Akhmat”’s involvement in the capture of the Azot plant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk at the end of June. Like many things in Chechnya, it is named after the father of Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruler of the North Caucasus republic. A white car with the “Z”, the symbol of the conquerors, can also be found in the torture and murder recordings as well as in those from Severodonetsk. With the help of facial recognition software and entries in social media, the researchers want to have unmasked the alleged perpetrator. “Bellingcat” refrained from naming in the absence of sufficiently clear shots of the perpetrator’s face in the torture and murder pictures. In contrast, “The Insider” named Otschur-Suge M., born in 1993, from the southern Siberian republic of Tuva on the border with Mongolia, as the perpetrator.