President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials have demanded that Russia be held responsible and its soldiers punished over a video that purportedly shows a Ukrainian prisoner of war being beheaded.
The gruesome clip, which began circulating in pro-Russian Telegram groups over the past few days, shows what appears to be a Russian soldier pinning down a Ukrainian soldier before decapitating him with a knife.
According to a translation by the Moscow Times, a soldier wearing a yellow armband, symbolizing his allegiance to Ukraine, could be heard screaming, "It hurts," while another voice was heard saying in Russian: "Break his spine. Haven't you cut heads off before? Finish the job." All
The video is believed to have been filmed last summer.
"There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill," Zelensky said in a video message on Tuesday night. "There will be legal responsibility for everything. The defeat of terror is necessary."
Just hours after the clip went viral on Tuesday, Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba called for the removal of Russia from the United Nations and compared the video to the brutality of the Islamic State.
"It's absurd that Russia, which is worse than ISIS, is presiding over the [U.N. Security Council]," Kuleba said in a post to Twitter. "Russian terrorists must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN and be held accountable for their crimes."
In response to the accusations of beheading, the Kremlin stated that the authenticity of the footage would need to be checked. “We live in a world of fakes,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday. However, he added that the footage was “awful.”
Meanwhile, a second video of two beheaded Ukrainian soldiers beside a damaged military vehicle appeared on social media this week. "They killed them," a voice behind the camera said. "Someone came up to them. They came up to them and cut their heads off."
Neither video has been independently verified by Yahoo News, however, Ukrainian officials have opened up an investigation into both clips and are treating them as authentic.
It comes less than one month after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine. It was the first time the ICC has ever issued a warrant for a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.