“Sickening evil” video footage shows a bound and gagged Ukrainian prisoner of war being castrated by Russian soldiers — before he is shot dead and dragged through the street on a rope.
The barbaric footage — confirmed Friday by a Ukrainian politician and journalist — shows camouflaged soldiers allegedly led by Vitaly Aroshanov kicking the distressed soldier in the head as he lies bound by ropes on the floor.
With his mouth gagged, the tortured prisoner moans in desperation as the troops rip his pants to expose his backside.
As he squirms and moans, they use a box cutter to hack away at his genitalia, eventually cutting it off and throwing it on the ground nearby.
“After the torture, he was shot dead and his body dragged through the streets on a rope,” the war news site Ukraine Watch said Friday of a second part of the video, which it refused to share “for ethical reasons.”
The torture first emerged Thursday on several Russian Telegram channels as a sick warning to Ukrainian mothers not to send their sons to war, the Kyiv Post said. The soldiers speak in Russian and stand near a car with the capital letter Z, the symbol used for the Kremlin’s troops.
Other posts included photos of the body of a Ukrainian soldier with severed hands and his head planted on a fence, the paper said.
Mikhailo Podolyak, a journalist, negotiator and adviser to the Ukrainian president, was among local officials who on Friday confirmed the authenticity of the video, vowing to “identify and get to each” of the invading “executioners.”
He said “the world has to realize” that Russia is “a country of cannibals who enjoy torture and murder.”
Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun was also among those who shared some of the torture video. “Russia has to pay for it. … The world can’t pretend like this isn’t happening,” she wrote.
She later ripped Twitter for taking it down for being “too cruel.”
“But this is what happens. And deleting the video won’t change that. People should know what #Russia is doing!” she seethed.
Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser for the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the “sickening evil committed by the Russian invaders” should be a message for the world to “help Ukraine end it.”
“The barbarity and depravity of the Russian invaders is revolting. Castration, murder, rape, killing children, leveling cities. Unmitigated evil,” he tweeted.
John Spencer, the US Army veteran who chairs the Washington, DC-based Urban Warfare Studies, also implored world leaders to act.
“I just watched the video showing Russian soldiers cutting off the genitalia of Ukrainian POWs. How do you unsee that? WTF are we waiting on to halt this evil?” he wrote.
It is unclear when or where the footage was recorded, but some of the Russian soldiers appeared to be the same as those who appeared in other propaganda videos carried by Kremlin-backed media outlet RT.
