Ukraine’s Azov Regiment posts video showing shooting of Russian soldier, sparking fury and an investigation in Moscow

On Monday, the Ukrainian military’s Azov Regiment published first-person footage of one of its soldiers killing a Russian soldier after finding him in a mostly-abandoned bunker. The video left Russian politicians and military leaders furious, with one top commander calling the shooting a violation of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, though it’s not clear from the clip that the soldier in question had surrendered. Here’s what we know.

On July 15, the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov Regiment posted a video on social media that shows its fighters storming Russian positions and shooting a Russian soldier at close range. “New video shows the clearing of Russian positions and the destruction of enemy infantry,” the unit wrote on Telegram. It didn’t indicate when or where the footage was taken, though the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState, which works closely with the country’s Defense Ministry, reported that it was filmed in the Serebryansky Forest in the country’s Luhansk region.

The clip shows an Azov soldier walking through a trench until he comes across a soldier, who is presumably Russian, in a dugout and begins shooting at him. The Russian soldier says: “One of your own, damn it!” The Azov fighter continues to shoot and says: “One of our own, my ass. Get down, bitch!”

The footage is part of a longer video posted on the Azov Regiment’s YouTube channel titled “Azov storms and clears out enemy positions: First-person view of the destruction of occupiers.” The video also includes other combat scenes.

Numerous Russian soldiers and politicians responded to the video with outrage. Major General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Chechen Akhmat Battalion special forces unit and the deputy head of the Russian Armed Forces’ Main Military-Political Directorate, said that the Russian soldier’s killing constitutes a “violation of the Geneva Conventions [on Prisoners of War].” Why Alaudinov believes the soldier in the video was a prisoner of war is unclear.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev commented on the video on Telegram, writing: “There can be no mercy here. […] Just kill!”

He then called for there to be no displays of compassion and for Russian soldiers to “execute, execute, and execute.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, wrote: “Fascists are fascists. We should treat them that way and we should destroy them. And that’s what the heroes on the front line are doing.”

The Russian Investigation Committee said it plans to investigate the shooting, writing in a press release:

On the Internet, militants from the nationalist Azov regiment, which is banned in Russia, have published a video of the shooting of a Russian serviceman. The Russian Investigative Committee will determine all of the circumstances of the incident and identify the individuals involved in this crime.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been multiple reports of prisoners of war being killed. The most recent of these allegations came from the Ukrainian authorities less than one week ago, when a video surfaced online that appeared to show the killing of two Ukrainian soldiers who Russian forces had been taken prisoner in the village of Robotyne in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

Analysis from Meduza’s explainers team

This video appears to show Ukrainian soldiers taking over a small Russian military outpost that’s been destroyed by artillery fire. Most of the Russian soldiers who were posted in the trenches appear to have fled before the assault. This “clearing” operation differs little from the many others that have been carried out by both armies: the attacking side, with support from a reconnaissance drone, circles its enemy’s fortifications and throws grenades into their bunkers.

In one of these bunkers, a Ukrainian soldier found a Russian soldier who appeared disoriented. The Russian soldier likely didn’t understand that the person in front of him was from the Ukrainian army and, as a result, he didn’t make any visible attempt to surrender; however, he also didn’t offer any armed resistance. He only tried to convince the Ukrainian soldier that he was from his same side, but then he was killed.

In addition to the numerous clear-cut cases in this war in which soldiers have been killed after surrendering, reports have surfaced regularly of ambiguous situations (like this one) in which the killed soldier’s prisoner of war status is unclear. In 2022, for example, two Ukrainian soldiers were killed several dozen kilometers from the Serebryansky Forest during a Russian counterattack. Judging from GoPro footage, the soldiers did not realize they were facing an enemy fighter, and instead of surrendering their weapons, they tried to convince the Russian soldier that they were on the same side.

The Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War does not outline a procedure for surrendering properly; it only addresses situations in which combatants have already been captured by the enemy. This has led to conflicting interpretations of these kinds of incidents by both parties to the conflict.