Kyiv knows of 124 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) who were executed by Russian forces on the battlefield throughout the full-scale war, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General's Office said on Nov. 6.
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.
Kamila Hrabchuk
(Updated: )
