Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has condemned the killing of dozens of prisoners of war in a camp in the Donetsk region, blaming Russia for it. “This is further confirmation that Russia is a terrorist state,” Zelenskyy said on Friday evening, according to a message on his Telegram news service channel.
It was a “deliberate war crime” for which there would be “retaliation,” he later said in his video message that evening.
“There is sufficient evidence that this was a planned crime.” More than 50 Ukrainian defense lawyers were cynically murdered.
Russia, in turn, blamed Ukraine for the attack. According to this, the building with the prisoners is said to have been fired at with a US-supplied Himar multiple rocket launcher.
Selenskyj, on the other hand, spoke of a “terrorist attack carried out by Russian inhuman monsters in Olenivka”. “The United Nations (UN) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which are supposed to guarantee the life and health of our prisoners of war, must react immediately,” the head of state demanded.
He reiterated calls for Russia to be classified as a “terrorist state”. The country is now the “biggest source of terrorism” in the world.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the UN helped extract defenders from the Azov steelworks in Mariupol in the spring. They were then taken prisoner by pro-Russian separatists.
The UN should not only condemn the shelling of the prison camp, but also investigate the terrible crime on the spot. The ICRC must take care of the situation of the other prisoners. There were many injured. Russia says it has thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Media showed images of a burned-out dormitory with corpses. Many bodies covered with tarpaulins also lay in front of the building, which showed bullet holes.
The Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov compared the act in Olenivka to the massacre by Soviet soldiers in Katyn, who shot thousands of Polish prisoners there in World War II in 1940 and buried them in mass graves.
