Horrific video a of Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, standing in a grave he was forced to dig by his Russian captors. He would ve shot moments later.


Horrific video a of Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, standing in a grave he was forced to dig by his Russian captors. He would ve shot moments later. Showing the execution in cold blood of this Ukrainian soldier.

A Moment of Horror, and a New Hero for Ukrainians

Video circulating on social media of a Russian war crime has given the defenders of Ukraine a new icon of defiance.

The image that became a symbol of Ukrainian defiance and Russian war crimes: A video showing the execution in cold blood of this Ukrainian soldier.

On Monday, the grim chronicles of Russia’s war in Ukraine hit a macabre new low when a video appeared on social media depicting the apparent execution in cold blood of a captive Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops. The 12-second clip shows a weary-looking man in camouflage fatigues standing in a shallow trench in a wooded area calmly smoking a cigarette while someone off-camera, speaking Russian, says either “Film him” or “Don’t film him.” Then, just as calmly, the man says “Slava Ukraini!”—“Glory to Ukraine!”—the slogan made famous by the past year’s war. “You bitch!” a man sputters off-camera, and at that very moment there is a burst of automatic gunfire, blowing off the prisoner’s cap and bringing him down a split second later. Then, almost without pause, more bullets rip into the fallen soldier’s body. And a final off-camera comment, just before the video ends: “Sdokhni, suka” (“Croak, bitch”).



The full context of this hideous act is not entirely clear—not that there’s any context that could mitigate it. Was the man being filmed for some other purpose, perhaps to document his surrender, and then killed on the spot for his defiant words? Or was this a deliberately filmed firing-squad execution, with the prisoner smoking a last cigarette according to old military tradition and knowingly speaking his last words? Was he standing in a trench or, as some have speculated, in a grave he’d been ordered to dig?
Whatever the answer to these questions, there is no reason to doubt that the video shows a shocking war crime: the execution, whether planned or carried out on the spur of the moment, of an unarmed and unresisting prisoner of war. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has urged the International Criminal Court to investigate the killing, and Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Andriy Kostin and the Security Service of Ukraine have started an investigation of their own.

WATCH VIDEO FOOTAGE HERE.. HORRIBLE 



The Ukrainian military has identified the victim as Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura, 41, a soldier of 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade who had been fighting in the Donetsk area and had been missing since February 3. While the identification has been confirmed by several of Shadura’s five siblings and other family members, it is not yet final.

FULL VIDEO 



 An alternate identity has been proposed by journalist Yuri Butusov, who says the man in the video may be 42-year-old Oleksandr Matsievsky, a serviceman from the 163rd Battalion of the 119th Territorial Defense Brigade who went missing near Soledar in late December and whose body was retrieved and buried in February. Butusov says that the bullet wounds found on Matsievsky’s body match the areas where the executed soldier was hit; an exhumation for further investigation is likely.
Whether the man in the video turns out to be Shadura or Matsievsky (or even someone else), he is, without a question, Ukraine’s newest iconic hero. His dignified, uncowed, slightly slouching posture, the casual gesture with which he tosses aside the cigarette after taking one last drag, the way in which he speaks his last Slava Ukraini—with no theatrics, as simply as one would say hello or goodbye—is the stuff of myth. Those last words invite the customary response: Heroyam slava, “Glory to the heroes.” Or, as slightly modified by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his somber but stirring short video address: Heroyu slava, “Glory to the hero.”
Not surprisingly, the image of the soldier has already been posterized, online (many times over) and in the real space of war-torn Ukraine: A poster depicting the fallen hero in his final moments, against the backdrop of a Ukrainian flag and the slogan Heroyam slava, was spotted in Odessa the next day:

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