War in Ukraine: Video of alleged Ukrainian pow beheading surfaces online
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00:00 Reporting from Kharkiv today in Eastern Ukraine, here's our correspondent there, Gulliver-Cragg.
00:05 Well, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, was practically demanding an international
00:10 reaction in a video he released saying this is the true face of Russia calling on world
00:15 leaders to speak out. Those reactions have started to come in with the United Nations
00:20 condemning the video, the European Union saying that war criminals must be held to account.
00:26 Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Dmitry Kuleba, the foreign minister, said that this video showed
00:30 that the Russians were worse than ISIS and reiterated his call for Russia to be removed
00:36 from its position on the U.N. Security Council, particularly at the moment when Russia is
00:40 chairing the U.N. Security Council, something that the Ukrainian authorities have been decrying
00:46 as absurd for weeks now.
00:48 In Russia, the reaction was quite interesting in a way, because Russians, their spokespeople
00:53 usually come out decrying these kinds of things where Russian forces are accused of war crimes
00:58 as fake right away. Instead, this time, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said this is awful,
01:04 we must investigate the authenticity of this video, we live in a world of fakes.
01:08 So, suggesting that it might be faked, but not coming right out and saying that it's
01:12 fake, perhaps that's because on Russian social media, where this video, which I think it's
01:17 worth stressing is not new, it looks like it was filmed in summer, judging by the foliage,
01:21 was published on some private telegram channels at first, and then leaked to public ones.
01:26 And on some of those Russian social media, you have also got Russians saying that this
01:30 is awful, you know, and condemning this video.
01:33 Meanwhile, as you might imagine, Ukrainian social media is absolutely up in arms with
01:37 people voicing their disgust, and also noting, perhaps in support of the idea that this video
01:43 is probably authentic, that there have already been reports of decapitations carried out
01:48 by Russian and Russian-backed forces in Ukraine, even going right back to 2014.
01:53 That was Gulliver Crag for us in eastern Ukraine, in Kharkiv.