Last fall Monday morning, Ukrainian drone pilots were watching what became a familiar scene for live drone feeds. Russian soldiers pointed their guns at two seemingly surrendered Ukrainians. Video was then shown, with the Russians shooting them into the blank.
The video was provided by a pilot who said he witnessed the killing on feed and was verified by the New York Times and the Information Resilience Center, a nonprofit organization. It appeared to indicate a Ukrainian prisoner executed near the village of Novoibanovka in the Kursk region of Russia.
“There were no polite words spoken between us. We were full of anger and a fierce desire for revenge,” said the 26-year-old pilot, who was served as the 15th mobile border guard and was asked to be identified by a “one two” call sign according to military protocols.
As the US accepts the point of Russia’s story to promote a ceasefire in Ukraine, many Ukrainians wonder whether Russian war crime allegations can simply be forgotten. President Trump has shown he wants to reestablish relations with Russia and end the war. Or at least, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The US recently reported that it had withdrawn from a multinational group created to investigate allegations of war crimes against senior Russian leaders and allies, and that it had withdrawn from its alliances responsible for Ukraine’s full-scale invasion in 2023. The Biden administration joined the group in 2023.
Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes, but Russia faces far more allegations not only from Ukraine, but also from human rights groups and the United Nations. In recent months, Ukrainian and international human rights officials have accused the Russian troops of executing Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered instead of taking prisoners of war, as required under the Geneva Convention Treaty, which outlines how the state should treat enemy forces and civilians during armed conflicts.
A recent UN report denounced the “surprising spikes” in the execution of Ukrainian prisoners in Russia. In December, the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Office announced that 177 Ukrainian prisoners had been executed on the battlefield since the start of the war. Of those, 109 were killed in 2024 alone. Since then, the Russians have killed at least 25 Ukrainian soldiers. This is according to Artem Starosiek, who runs Morpher, a Ukrainian consultancy that supports war efforts and analyzes videos to come up with its tally. The Times were unable to independently confirm the count.
“This could be one of the biggest campaigns of intentional prisoner murder in modern history,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha said in February.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied Russia committing war crimes in Ukraine, but the Russian Ministry of Defense did not reply to requests for comment on Ukraine’s allegations.
Five Ukrainian drone pilots said in an interview that they had seen the drone video showing fellow soldiers surrender. On Telegram, such videos have become commonplace. While Russian officials have denied committing war crimes in Ukraine, some Russian soldiers appear very indifferent to the potential impact of posting their own video of killing unarmed Ukrainians.
In past conflicts, war crimes were usually invisible, but only revealed later through investigations. But drones mean that these executions can be tracked in real time. The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office showed as many as 16 men who were shot dead in line on September 30 after surrendering near the eastern Ukraine town of Pokrovsk. The nine Ukrainian drone operators were forced to strip their underwear towards the ground in Kursk before being shot on October 10th. The footage was very clear.
Some perpetrators have been widely distributed on social media and will film the video itself, as posted in January, which appears to show the execution of six Ukrainian soldiers near Donetsk, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said.
“It’s mine,” one Russian said on the video.
“Photo on camera,” another added.
The video ended with the seventh Ukrainian on the ground. His fate is unknown.
The location of the video could not be independently verified, but the man killed in the video was wearing a yellow armband, as is known by the Ukrainian army. One soldier involved was identified by an open source researcher and later by the Financial Times by a Russian named Olegyakofrev.
Since the end of August, Ukraine’s UN Human Rights Surveillance Mission has documented 29 encounters in which Russian soldiers killed at least 91 helpless Ukrainian soldiers. Human Light Monitor analyzed videos and photos issued by sources from Ukrainian and Russian, a Russian source showing corpses and corpses, interviewed witnesses and confirmed that reported executions were carried out near Russian attackers, said mission head Daniel Bell.
“That’s scary,” Bell said in an interview. “And these are just cases we rated as reliable and reliable.”
For the same six months, the UN recorded the execution of one of the Russian soldiers neutralised by Ukrainian forces, Bell said.
She did not speculate on why the number of murders increased. However, in August, Ukrainian soldiers could invade Kursk, causing retaliation. Some military analysts said that Russians could threaten the joining of potential Ukrainian recruits into the army, and attempt to make Russian soldiers think twice before surrendering.
Even after the Ukrainian forces ordered them to kill them, they were captured in questioning that they were ordered to kill them, according to an edited video of the interrogation released by Ukrainian special forces.
The Ukrainians apparently began running “after hearing orders on the radio and then starting a fire,” one person said in the video. He added: “And the fire opened to them.”
A photo of several Ukrainian prisoners circulating with their hands wrapped around their backs as Russian forces tried to reclaim Kursk in mid-March. Another video that could not be independently verified shows that the same prisoner is dead, three of whom are bleeding from the back of their heads. Those filming used the slur to refer to them when counting the camera’s corpses.
Analysts said the orders are likely to come from above. Former President Dmitri Medvedev, deputy chief of the Russian Security Council, said Ukrainian soldiers have no right to life or mercy after posting a video of the Ukrainian Azov brigade shooting and death of a soldier who looked like a wounded Russian soldier on social media in July. “Run, run, run,” Medvedev wrote in Telegram.
In October, the Washington-based War Institute said, “It is likely that Russian commanders have largely tolerated, encouraged or directly ordered the execution of Ukrainian prisoners.”
When drone pilots saw Russians pointing weapons on video at Ukrainians, the pilots said they were often quiet when they saw their companions being shot. Then they vowed.
One commander said that one scene still bothers him. A Russian soldier shot four Ukrainian soldiers lying towards the trench near Chashiv Yah, and he was unable to stop it. “Without hesitation, he executed them all,” said the commander who uses the call sign “Madara” on Japanese manga heroes.
In another video, Russians surrounded four injured Ukrainians, ousting them from shelter into the garden and confiscated their weapons. The Russians then took three soldiers into the street and shot them, the military intelligence officer of the 110th Brigade with a call sign for “grandfather.” This was one of three executions of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region that he saw in video feeds from drones in command posts over the past year.
“The worst part was helplessness. We couldn’t do anything to help the man,” my grandfather said.
After seeing Ukrainian soldiers killed on the morning of November 11th, one and two commanders said they wanted retaliation from the drone pilot. The pilots of three units met on a video call. The Ukrainian drone tracked down five Russians. They shot the Ukrainians, and three stood up and fed them live moving bait into the forest. Ten other drones followed, surrounding five Russians. And one two said, the drone pilot fired his weapon and killed it.
Marc Santora, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Liubov Sholudko contributed to reports from Kyiv and Alina Lobzina in London.
