Nine Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered as prisoners were allegedly shot by Russian troops in Kursk Oblast earlier this week, the crowd-sourced monitoring site Deepstate reported on Oct. 13.
The shootings are said to have occurred on Oct. 10, Deepstate reported, citing sources in Ukraine's First Tank Brigade.
"Information about the possible shooting by the Russians of nine Ukrainian prisoners of war in Kursk Oblast is again spreading in social networks," Ukraine's Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said in a statement on Telegram. "Such actions are a gross violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War."
Summary executions by Russians of Ukrainian prisoners of war have sharply risen in the past year.
Kyiv knows of 93 Ukrainian POWs who were summarily executed by Russian soldiers on the battlefield throughout the full-scale war, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General's Office said on national television on Oct. 4. According to the prosecutors, 80% of those were recorded in 2024.
"Since November 2023, the approach of the Russian military toward our prisoners has significantly changed for the worse," Yurii Belousov, the head of the department focused on war-related crimes, said.
Martin Fornusek
