KYIV, Ukraine — A video circulating on Russian-language Telegram channels that emerged this week appeared to show the beheading of a restrained prisoner wearing symbols associated with the Ukrainian military. The video prompted horrified responses, including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The gruesome scene captured in the 1 minute, 40-second video, which could not be independently verified by The Washington Post, shows a masked Russian speaking-soldier crouched over a man dressed in green fatigues wearing a yellow arm band worn by Ukrainian forces.
The man screams in pain as the masked soldier uses a knife to saw at the man’s neck, eventually decapitating the prisoner. A green passport-shaped document marked with the Ukrainian trident is seen next to the headless man.
The date and location of the video is unknown. However, it occurred in a leafy green setting, suggesting the incident occurred sometime last year before cold weather set in.
“There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill,” Zelensky said in a video statement posted on the Telegram messaging platform. “This is a video of Russia as it is, what kind of creatures they are,” he said.
Promising that all who committed crimes in Ukraine would face justice and that such actions had occurred “a thousand times,” Zelensky added that this incident was “not an episode and “not an accident.”
“We are not going to forget anything. Neither are we going to forgive the murderers,” he said. “There will be legal responsibility for everything.”
The video was being shared on far-right and neo-Nazi-affiliated Russian Telegram channels that frequently post videos of captured Ukrainian soldiers and corpses of Ukrainian fighters.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the footage as “horrible” but said it must be verified.
“In the fake world in which we live, it is necessary to check the authenticity of this footage,” Peskov said.
The video surfaced days after a pro-military Russian Telegram channel posted an image of what appeared to be a human head on a stick, claiming it was the skull of a Ukrainian soldier in Bakhmut.
The founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, on Wednesday said there was no evidence of Wagner involvement in the beheading depicted in the video, answering a media question in comments posted on Telegram by his media service.
“I watched this video,” Prigozhin said. “It’s bad when people’s heads are cut off, but I haven’t found anywhere that this is happening near Bakhmut and that Wagner PMC fighters are participating in the execution.”
Russian military bloggers rushed to claim that the decapitation video was either staged or carried out by Ukrainians to make Russia look bad.
One popular pro-war Telegram channel, Two Majors, called it “an externally controlled operation.”
“The publication of a summer video with a severed head has only one goal — to dehumanize all Russian soldiers,” it said.
But a channel associated with the Wagner mercenary group, Grey Zone, did not question the video’s authenticity, called it unsurprising and predicted similar incidents in the future from both sides.
The unverified clip is one of a series of extremely gruesome videos that have surfaced showing apparent war crimes, including one that open-source investigative group Bellingcat verified, which showed a Russian serviceman wearing a distinctive hat, removing the testicles of a Ukrainian soldier while he was alive.
Another video in March of last year that appear to show Russian prisoners of war shot in the legs by their Ukrainian captors near Kharkiv. Ukrainian authorities said at the time they were investigating the incident.
Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia, and Bennett from Washington.