On a Monday morning last fall, Ukrainian drone pilots watched what had become a familiar scene unfold on a drone’s live feed: Russian soldiers pointed their guns at two Ukrainians, who seemingly surrendered. Then, the footage showed, the Russians shot them point blank.
The video, provided by a pilot who said he had witnessed the killing on the feed, was verified by The New York Times and the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit organization. It appeared to show the Ukrainian prisoners executed near the village of Novoivanovka in the Kursk region of Russia.
“There were no polite words spoken among us — we were filled with rage and an intense desire for revenge,” said the pilot, 26, who served with the 15th Mobile Border Guard and asked to be identified by his call sign of “One Two” in accordance with military protocol.
As the United States embraces Russian talking points in its push for a cease-fire in Ukraine, many Ukrainians wonder whether allegations of Russian war crimes will simply be forgotten. President Trump has indicated that he would like to re-establish ties with Russia and end the war — or at least, wind down the U.S. commitment to Ukraine made under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The U.S. informed European officials recently that it is withdrawing from a multinational group created to investigate allegations of war crimes against senior Russian leaders and allies responsible for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Biden administration joined the group in 2023. The U.S. State Department has also ended funding for the tracking of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.
While both sides have been accused of committing war crimes, Russia has faced far more allegations, not only from Ukraine but also human-rights groups and the United Nations. In recent months, Ukrainian and international human-rights officials have accused Russian troops of executing Ukrainian soldiers who have surrendered instead of taking them as prisoners of war, as required under the Geneva Conventions treaties that outline how nations should treat enemy forces and civilians during armed conflict.
A recent U.N. report decried an “alarming spike” in Russian executions of Ukrainian prisoners. In December, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman office announced that 177 Ukrainian prisoners of war had been executed on the battlefield since the beginning of the war; of those, 109 were killed in 2024 alone. Russians have killed at least 25 additional Ukrainian soldiers since then, according to Artem Starosiek, who runs Molfar, a Ukrainian consultancy that supports the war effort and analyzed videos to come up with that tally. The Times could not independently verify that count.
“This could be one of the largest campaigns of intentional P.O.W. murder in modern history,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said in February.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not reply to a request for comment on the Ukrainian allegations, although the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russia commits war crimes in Ukraine.
Five Ukrainian drone pilots said in interviews that they had watched as drone videos showed their fellow soldiers surrendering, only to be killed. On Telegram, such videos have become commonplace. Although Russian officials have denied committing war crimes in Ukraine, some Russian soldiers appear so unconcerned about potential repercussions that they have posted their own videos of killing unarmed Ukrainians.
In past conflicts, war crimes usually happened out of sight, only to be revealed later through investigations. But drones mean that these executions can be tracked in real time: Grainy footage showed as many as 16 men, lined up and shot dead Sept. 30, after surrendering near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office. Nine Ukrainian drone operators were forced to strip to their underwear and lie face down on the ground in Kursk before being shot Oct. 10 — the footage was so clear, a mother of one man later recognized him.
Some perpetrators film the videos themselves — like one posted in January that circulated widely on social media and appeared to show the executions of six Ukrainian soldiers near Donetsk, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said.
“One’s mine,” one Russian said on the video.
“Film me on camera, damn it,” another added.
The video ended with a seventh Ukrainian on the ground, his fate unclear.
Although the video’s location couldn’t be independently verified, the men killed in the video wore yellow armbands, like Ukrainian forces are known to. One soldier involved was identified by open source researchers, and later The Financial Times, as a Russian named Oleg Yakovlev.
Since the end of August, the U.N. human-rights monitoring mission in Ukraine has documented 29 encounters in which Russian soldiers killed at least 91 incapacitated Ukrainian soldiers, including the episode witnessed by One Two. Human-rights monitors analyzed videos and photos published by Ukrainian and Russian sources showing executions and dead bodies, interviewed witnesses and verified that the reported executions took place near Russian offensives, said Danielle Bell, the head of the mission.
“It’s horrible,” Ms. Bell said in an interview. “And these are just the cases that we have assessed as being credible and reliable.”
During those same six months, the United Nations documented one execution of an incapacitated Russian soldier by Ukrainian troops, Ms. Bell said.
She would not speculate on why the number of killings has increased. But in August, Ukrainian soldiers invaded Kursk, potentially sparking retaliation. Some military analysts said the Russians could be trying to intimidate potential Ukrainian recruits from joining the army and make Russian soldiers think twice before surrendering — because the Ukrainians might want revenge.
Russian soldiers captured after executing Ukrainian troops said in interrogations that they were ordered to kill them — even after telling commanders that the Ukrainians had surrendered and tossed their weapons on the ground, according to an edited video of the interrogations released recently by the Ukrainian Special Forces.
The Ukrainians apparently began to run “after hearing the command over the radio to open fire,” one captured Russian said in the video. He added: “And fire was opened on them.”
In mid-March, as Russian forces sought to retake Kursk, a photo circulated of several Ukrainian prisoners of war with their hands behind their backs. Another video, which could not be independently verified, showed the same prisoners, now dead, with three of them bleeding from the backs of their heads. The person filming used slurs to refer to them as he counted the corpses for the camera.
The orders are likely to come from the top, analysts said. The deputy head of Russia’s Security Council — Dmitri Medvedev, the former president — said that Ukrainian soldiers had no right to life or mercy after Ukraine’s Azov Brigade posted a video of a soldier shooting what appeared to be an injured Russian soldier on social media in July. “Execute, execute and execute,” Mr. Medvedev wrote on Telegram.
In October, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said: “Russian commanders are likely writ large condoning, encouraging, or directly ordering the execution of Ukrainian P.O.W.s.”
When drone pilots have seen the Russians pointing their weapons at the Ukrainians on video, the pilots said, they often went quiet watching their comrades get shot. Then they swore.
One commander said one scene still haunted him: A Russian soldier shot four Ukrainian soldiers lying face down in a trench near Chasiv Yar, and he could do nothing to stop it. “Without hesitation, he executed them all,” said the commander, who uses the call sign “Madara,” for a Japanese manga hero.
In another video, Russians surrounded four injured Ukrainians, forced them out of their shelter into a yard and confiscated their weapons. The Russians then took three of the soldiers to the street and shot them, said one military intelligence officer from the 110th Brigade with the call sign of “Grandfather.” It was one of three executions of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region he had watched on video feeds from drones at a command post over the past year.
“The worst part was the helplessness — we couldn’t do anything to help our men,” Grandfather said.
After seeing the Ukrainian soldiers killed on the morning of Nov. 11, One Two said commanders wanted the drone pilots to retaliate. The pilots of three units met on a video call. One Ukrainian drone tracked five Russians — the two who shot the Ukrainians, and the three who stood by — and gave a live feed of their movements into the forest. Ten other drones followed, surrounding the five Russians. And then, One Two said, the drone pilots fired their weapons and killed them.
Marc Santora, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Alina Lobzina from London.
