Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine accused each other Friday of bombing a prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine, an attack that reportedly killed dozens of captured Ukrainian prisoners of war after the fall of Mariupol, the city where the troops were held. against a months-long Russian siege.
Both sides said the assault was premeditated to cover up the atrocities.
Russia claimed that the Ukrainian military used US-supplied rocket launchers to attack Olenivka prison, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk People’s Republic. Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war and wounded 75 others.
Moscow opened an investigation into the attack, sending a team from the Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s main criminal investigation agency, to the site. State agency RIA Novosti reported that rocket fragments from the US-supplied high-mobility precision artillery rocket system were found at the site.
The Ukrainian military denied launching any rocket or artillery attack on Olenivka, and accused the Russians of bombing the prison to cover up the alleged torture and execution of Ukrainians there. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the bombing as “a deliberate, cynical and calculated mass killing of Ukrainian prisoners.”
Neither claim could be independently verified.
Video shot by The Associated Press showed charred and twisted bed frames in the wrecked barracks, as well as burned bodies and sheet metal hanging from the destroyed ceiling. The images also included bodies lined up on the ground next to a barbed wire fence and a number of what were said to be metal rocket fragments on a wooden bench.
Denis Pushilin, the leader of the unrecognized Donetsk republic, said the prison held 193 inmates. He did not specify how many were Ukrainian prisoners of war.
The deputy commander of Donetsk separatist forces, Eduard Basurin, suggested that Ukraine decided to attack the prison to prevent the captives from revealing key military information.
Ukraine “knew exactly where they were being held and in what place,” he said. “After the Ukrainian prisoners of war began to talk about the crimes they committed and the orders they received from Kyiv, the political leadership of Ukraine made a decision: strike here.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak called for a “strict investigation” into the attack and urged the United Nations and other international organizations to condemn it. He said the Russians had moved some Ukrainian prisoners to the barracks just days before the strike, suggesting it was planned.
“The purpose: to discredit Ukraine to our partners and disrupt arms supplies,” he tweeted.
Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, said it had intercepted phone calls “in which the occupiers confirm that Russian troops are to blame for this tragedy.”
Intercepted conversations indicate the Russians may have planted explosives in the prison, the agency said in a statement. “Notably, none of the eyewitnesses heard any missiles flying toward the correctional facility. There was no distinctive whistle and the explosions occurred on their own.”
Additionally, online video footage showed that windows remained intact in some rooms at the facility, according to the SBU. This “indicates that the epicenter of the explosion was inside the destroyed building and its walls received the impact of the blast waves, protecting some of the neighboring rooms.”
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, described the attack as a “bloody provocation” aimed at dissuading Ukrainian soldiers from surrendering. It also claimed that US-supplied HIMARS rockets were used and said eight guardsmen were among the wounded.
Ukrainian forces are fighting to keep the territory that remains under their control in Donetsk. Together with neighboring Luhansk province, they form Ukraine’s predominantly Russian-speaking industrial Donbass region.
For several months now, Moscow has focused on trying to seize parts of the Donbas that the separatists do not yet hold.
Keeping prisoners of war in an area with active fighting appeared to defy the Geneva Convention, which requires that prisoners be evacuated as soon as possible after capture to camps away from combat zones.
Ukrainian prisoners of war in Donetsk prison included troops captured during the fall of Mariupol. They spent months locked up with civilians in a giant steel factory in the southern port city. Their resistance during a relentless Russian bombardment became a symbol of Ukrainian defiance against Russian aggression.
More than 2,400 soldiers from the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard and other military units abandoned the fight and surrendered under orders from the Ukrainian army in May.
Dozens of Ukrainian soldiers have been transferred to prisons in Russian-controlled areas. Some have returned to Ukraine as part of prisoner exchanges with Russia, but the families of other POWs have no idea if their loved ones are still alive or will ever return home.
In other Friday news:
— Ukraine’s president visited one of the country’s main Black Sea ports a week after a deal was reached to create safe corridors for grain shipments that have been stuck in the country since the war began. Workers were seen preparing terminals for grain exports, which millions of impoverished people around the world depend on. Zelenskyy said the shipments would begin with the departure of several ships that were already loaded but were unable to leave when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
— Ukraine’s presidential office said at least 13 civilians were killed and another 36 wounded in Russian shelling over the past 24 hours. In the southern city of Mykolaiv, at least four people were killed and seven others were injured when a Russian shelling hit a bus stop. The Russian shelling also hit a facility distributing humanitarian aid where three people were injured, officials said. Ukrainian officials also said at least four civilians were killed and five wounded in the eastern city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.
— An appeals court in Kyiv on Friday reduced the life sentence of a Russian soldier convicted in the first war crimes trial since Russia invaded Ukraine to 15 years. Critics had said the sentence for Vadim Shishimarin, 21, was unduly harsh given that he confessed to the crime and expressed remorse. He pleaded guilty to killing a civilian and was sentenced in May. His defense lawyer argued that Shishimarin shot a Ukrainian on the orders of his superiors.
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