Less than a week after the devastating attack on a prisoner of war camp in eastern Ukraine, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced an investigation. The United Nations had received a request from both Russia and Ukraine, Guterres said in New York. He was “not authorized to take up criminal investigations”, but could initiate an investigative mission. The preparations for this were underway.
Dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in an attack on the prison camp in Olenivka in eastern Ukraine about a week ago. The site is near the city of Donetsk in territory controlled by Russian soldiers and pro-Russian fighters. According to Russian sources, a rocket landed in the prison barracks last Friday night. The Russian Defense Ministry later released the names of 50 prisoners killed and more than 70 injured.
Moscow and Kyiv blame each other for the attack. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that it was “absolutely proven” that Ukraine had killed its own soldiers there who had been taken prisoner. “There is evidence of that and nothing can be hidden here.”
However, international research weighs primarily on the Russian side. For example, the US Institute for War Studies (ISW) recently wrote: “The ISW assumes that Russian troops were responsible for the killing of 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war.”
Doubts about the Russian version are fueled by the fact that there are no witnesses to the approach of the alleged Ukrainian missile. In addition, apparently only prisoners and no Russian or pro-Russian guards were hit. Satellite images also show relatively little damage to the building complex – which, according to the US experts, could indicate that an incendiary material or explosives might have been detonated inside a barracks.
