Ukrainian prisoners of war are a necessary “exchange fund” to exchange our servicemen, who are also captured.
Photo: REUTERS
In some places on Telegram channels information began to appear that Russian troops were allegedly shooting at surrendering Ukrainians. They say that they not only shoot people dead, but they receive 500,000 rubles for each head of a murdered Ukrainian.
To confirm this, Ukrainian nationalists even invented a video in which some soldiers shoot others. The images were taken from a drone. No faces or insignia can be distinguished. The video is clearly staged, but it may be real. It is very similar to the retaliation of foreign mercenaries against mobilized Ukrainians who, under a large dose of drugs, refused to comply with the order.
Other images show an even crazier fake in which a Ukrainian soldier’s head is cut off.
Komsomolskaya Pravda, as part of a project to refute fakes, together with Noodles Media, asked the Russian Defense Ministry for comment. There, of course, they strictly advised not to read Ukrainian telegram channels in the morning, and then explained that it was not at all profitable for Russian military personnel to kill Ukrainian military personnel. And as the department explained, there are many reasons for this.
Firstly, Ukrainian soldiers captured alive can show where the minefields are installed around the strongpoint and where there are safe passages to it. Secondly, they can know where the reserves come from and where they are located. Thirdly, for Ukrainian prisoners of war you can receive bonuses and awards, but for the murder of a prisoner of war – a criminal case of your own investigation.
– And Ukrainian prisoners of war are an “exchange fund”, necessary to exchange our servicemen, who are also captured. There is an unspoken law on the front line: treat a prisoner as if you were in his place. In fact, in conditions of hostilities, no one is immune from such a situation, the military department explained to Komsomolskaya Pravda.
By the way, for the same reason, the Ukrainian army is saving its “exchange fund” from captured Russian army personnel. The command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine even promises several hundred dollars for each captured Russian. So where do those fakes come from?
Similar fakes with the beheading of Russian military personnel were filmed with the participation of international terrorists and distributed in the Chechen Republic by Western intelligence services 25 years ago. They placed mocking videotapes of living and dead Russian servicemen in our military units for one sole purpose: to push the Russian servicemen to commit similar atrocities against prisoners of war and Chechen civilians. But they were never able to achieve it.
Exactly the same operation of Western intelligence services is currently being carried out in the zone of special military operations.
Of course, in military skirmishes there are situations when the enemy resorts to meanness or cunning. It happens that Ukrainian militants try to deceive, presenting themselves as Russian military personnel, in order to unexpectedly detonate a grenade or a landmine placed near the position. So our military personnel have to open fire to kill. But such cases of extravagant suicides among militants of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are very rare. After all, they are all, in essence, mercenaries of the kyiv regime: some came to Ukraine to earn money, others were forced to take up arms.
It should be noted that the falsification completely contradicts the words of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who has repeatedly stated that Russian soldiers behave humanely towards Ukrainian prisoners of war. And the latter, in their interviews, speak of their captivity by Russian soldiers as the best thing that happened to them in the coming years in Ukraine.
