Murder In The Grass

The battle had been hard fought. The enemy kept pushing the four men back, further and further. Finding a house that had been largely destroyed in an earlier skirmish, the four took shelter, hoping that the Russians would go around the house and not notice them. They were tired, hungry, and running low on ammo. They needed help but didn’t have a working radio among them. There was a drone outside; they had seen it in the air but didn’t know if the video feed was enough to reveal their location.

The Russians caught up with them. They fought with everything they had, but it wasn’t enough. Together, they decided it was better to surrender than get shot. They signaled to the Russian soldiers. The first of them came out with his hands up, showing they were unarmed. They looked up and saw a second drone in the sky; this one was Russian. This was good. The soldiers would have to behave as if someone was watching.

The men were told to lie face-down in the grass. They were expecting to be searched, then marched away. Instead, the Russians raised their guns and shot them in the back with such ferociousness that one man’s head was blown off.

The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has documented 91 extrajudicial killings of Ukrainian POWs since August 2024. During the same period, it found a single case of Ukrainian soldiers killing a Russian POW.

Danielle Bell, head of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said the increase in POW killings by Russian forces hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Russia enacted laws shielding soldiers from prosecution, she said, and officials have called for the killing or torture of Ukrainian POWs and endorsed reported extrajudicial killings. Multiple videos of POW killings have appeared online, some posted by Russian soldiers themselves, she noted, suggesting an environment of broad impunity.

“Calls on social media by public officials, amnesty laws, dehumanizing language within the context of impunity for these acts — it’s contributing to an environment that allows such acts or these crimes to take place,” she said.

The Associated Press was able to get copies of the video from both drones. The Ukrainian drone shows exactly what we’ve described above. The video from the Russian drone, however, was edited to stop right after the men lay down in the grass.

On March 13, the day European officials said the incident in Piatykhatky took place, U.S. representatives landed in Russia for ceasefire talks with President Vladimir Putin.

President Donald Trump, who has signaled that a prospective deal could see Ukraine surrender some territory and echoed Moscow’s talking points, called for a quick peace deal. His administration has pulled back support for Ukraine, including war crimes investigations, and is rebuilding relations with Putin — the very man many victims and prosecutors want to see in court.

“Whatever a peace agreement would be, Ukraine is not ready to forgive everything which happened in our territory,” Yurii Bielousov, head of the war crimes department for Ukraine’s prosecutor general, told AP. “In which form there will be accountability, that we don’t know at the moment.”

Of course, Russia denies everything and says they have proof of Ukrainian extrajudicial murders as well. However, the UN has not seen any data that would support Russia’s claim.

In the effort to end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine, tensions have mounted, and Russia has launched particularly large offensives in an effort to try and claim control over as much Ukrainian land as possible. Russian President Putin has often made remarks that the land which Russian troops have taken would be divided up. In one remark, Putin seemed to infer that the US would participate somehow in that division of Ukranian land.

At the same time, Chinese soldiers have been caught participating in the war against Ukraine. President Zelenskyy said that “There are 155 people with surnames, with passport data – 155 Chinese citizens who are fighting against Ukrainians on the territory of Ukraine,” according to remarks reported by Interfax.

Zelenskyy said on X that “Ukraine believes that such blatant involvement of Chinese citizens in hostilities on the territory of Ukraine during the war of aggression is a deliberate step towards the expansion of the war and is yet another indication that Moscow simply needs to drag out the fighting.”

Responding to Zelenskyy’s accusation earlier this morning, a Chinese government spokesman said they “advise relevant parties to correctly and soberly understand China’s role and not to make irresponsible remarks. China is neither the creator nor a party to the Ukrainian crisis. We are a staunch supporter and active promoter of the peaceful resolution of the crisis.”

Like so many times before, this is a case of whether one wants to believe the Chinese rhetoric or the mounds of data, from videos, passports, cellphone images, and witness interviews, that contradict all of those statements.

War is never sane. War is never ‘fair.’ Our attempts to homogenize a war that is not directly in front of our faces on a daily basis demonstrates how little we care about justice for anyone other than ourselves. This is not an area where the US needs to step in and “make a deal.” Russia started this damn thing. Only by forcing them to give back all captured territories, including Crimea, and making severe concessions to their war-making capabilities can there ever be any kind of peace in this region and justice for those who have been killed.

Unfortunately, we keep sending a game show host in to do the negotiations. Perhaps all the other clowns were too busy with other circuses.