L’Ukraine has denounced Russian calls to “hang” or inflict another “humiliating death” on fighters from the Ukrainian Azov regiment. Words that come the day after a strike against a prison where some of them were detained and which killed more than 50 people. “Read this, when they tell you that Russia should not be isolated. There is no difference between Russian diplomats calling for the execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian troops doing so at Olenivka. They are all complicit in these war crimes and must be held accountable,” Ukrainian diplomatic spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said on Twitter on Saturday July 30.
The diplomat was reacting to the tweet from the Russian Embassy in the UK, posted the previous evening in English and marked as having “broken Twitter’s rules on hateful conduct”. However, the message remains available as being “of interest to the public”. “Azov fighters deserve to be executed, but not by firing squad, by hanging. They are not real soldiers. They deserve a humiliating death,” the tweet read.
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“Russia is a terrorist state. In the XXIe century, only savages and terrorists can say at the diplomatic level that people deserve to be executed by hanging”, for his part reacted on Telegram Andrii Iermak, the chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president on Friday evening described as a “deliberate Russian war crime” the Friday bombardment of a prison in Olenivka, in the Donetsk region, in the occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.
Mariupol defended by the Azov regiment
Initially, Moscow had implicated kyiv, the Russian investigation committee having accused the Ukrainian forces of having “fired on the prison where the members of the Azov regiment are detained, using American projectiles of the Himars system” (launches -multiple rockets). The Azov regiment distinguished itself in the defense of Mariupol, a strategic port in southeastern Ukraine. After long weeks of siege and resistance at the Azovstal steelworks, some 2,500 Ukrainian fighters surrendered to the Russian army in May.
Ukrainian human rights official Dmytro Lubinetsk for his part announced on Saturday that he had asked the Red Cross, which had supervised the withdrawal of the defenders from Azovstal, to have access to Olenivka. According to him, the ICRC has “for the moment” not obtained authorization from the Russians. “Currently, we can only analyze the video we have. First, this barracks was built separately – for us, this is an indicator that this was a premeditated Russian military operation. According to the preliminary data, we assume that the explosion occurred indoors,” he told national television.
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An investigation in Olenivka
According to him, this version is confirmed by the fact that “the nearby barracks were not damaged, even the windows were not broken. Likewise, “by a miracle” the Russian soldiers were not injured,” he continued. The British Ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, for her part called for “an investigation” into what happened in Olenivka. “This appears to be part of an increasingly disturbing pattern of the worst kinds of human rights violations, and possibly war crimes, committed with impunity in occupied eastern Ukraine,” she said. wrote in a tweet.