Russian prosecutors announced Thursday that they have begun an investigation into a viral video showing a Russian-speaking man in uniform beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war with a knife. This footage caused shock and outrage in Ukraine and the West, it is reported. AFP.

“In order to establish the authenticity of this content and the relevant (judicial) conclusions (the video) has been sent to investigative bodies for examination,” the prosecutor’s office said in a message on the Telegram channel.

This decision is a preliminary step that may or may not lead to criminal proceedings.

However, the prosecutor’s statement is unusual, as Russia usually immediately, systematically and en masse denies allegations of war crimes against its troops in Ukraine, such as the extrajudicial executions in Buch.

On Wednesday, after Kyiv accused the Russian military of the beheading, Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov called the images “horrific” but said their “authenticity” had yet to be established.

Russian prosecutors said in a statement that the footage appeared to have been filmed “in the summer”, suggesting the scene could have taken place in 2022.

Kat, member of Wagner? Prigozhin’s reaction

The one minute and forty second video has been circulating since Tuesday. In it, a man in camouflage, with his face masked, slits the throat of another man in uniform, who is writhing on the ground and screaming “it hurts.”

After a few seconds, the screams subside and a man behind the camera can be heard urging the executioner in Russian to “cut off the head” of the victim. The executioner finishes chopping him with a knife and shows the severed head to the camera.

The torturers also showed their victim a military vest with a Ukrainian trident.

The head of the “Wagner” PMC, Yevhen Prigozhin, on Thursday rejected the accusations made the day before by the public organization and a defector from his group, according to which the executioners of the Ukrainian military were members of “Wagner”.

“Vagner’s former fighter Andriy Medvedev, who fled to Norway, recognized the voices of his comrades in the video,” said Volodymyr Osechikin, the founder of the Gulagu.net organization, in his Telegram channel, where he published a fragment of his recording. intervention for the Khodorkovsky Live program.

According to this human rights activist, who lives in exile, the former mercenary “unequivocally recognizes his colleagues there, Wagner’s fighters, by their characteristic nicknames, by the way they speak, by what they say on the radio” during the beheading. Ukrainian soldier.

“This is all nonsense, it is not true,” Prigozhin said in an audio commentary published by his press service on Telegram.

“We are fighting an enemy that has no soul”

A Ukrainian commander spoken to by AFP near the eastern town of Bakhmut on Thursday said he had watched the video and believed it would help his men understand what would happen to them if they were captured by the Russians.

“This is not a civilized war. We are fighting an enemy that has no soul,” said a soldier with the call sign “Yelezyak” from a basement near the front line.

“We are ready to kill without hesitation. This is our task. But we can’t do that,” he said. “If we do what they do, we’ll become monsters like them,” he added.