Dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were feared dead on Friday as Moscow and Kyiv accused each other of carrying out a missile strike on a prison in Russian-controlled territory.
Russia said Ukraine used a U.S.-supplied rocket system to hit a detention facility near the eastern front lines, killing at least 40 soldiers including some who had been captured after the fall of Mariupol in late May. Kyiv vehemently denied any such strike and said Moscow was to blame, accusing the Kremlin of deliberately shelling the prison to falsely accuse Ukraine of war crimes and cover up its own.
NBC News has not been able to independently verify the claims from either side.
Moscow-backed separatists in the Donetsk region said a Ukrainian attack on the prison in the town of Olenivka killed 53 prisoners of war and wounded 75 others. Russia’s defense ministry said earlier that 40 had been killed, with 75 injured and eight staff members at the facility also wounded.
193 people were present in the building, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said in a statement.
The victims included Ukrainian troops who had mounted a final defense at Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel plant, the ministry said, accusing Kyiv of carrying out the strike to deter its troops from laying down their weapons in the future.
“Last night, the Kyiv regime purposefully committed a bloody provocation,” a statement on the defense ministry’s official Telegram channel read on Friday. The missile was launched from the American HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, the ministry said.
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Ukraine’s military denied the accusation, saying the strike had been launched by Russian forces with the intention of framing Ukraine for war crimes and to “hide the torture of prisoners and executions” at the detention site.
“The Russian enemy continues its propaganda methods of conducting an information war in order to accuse the Armed Forces of Ukraine of shelling civilian infrastructure and the population, thus hiding its own insidious actions,” a statement from Ukraine’s armed forces read on Friday.
“Such statements about the alleged shelling of civilian infrastructure and the population by the Armed Forces of Ukraine are outright lies and provocation,” it continued.
“The Kremlin puppets decided to commit another war crime,” said Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was seemingly referring to the Moscow-backed separatist forces in Donetsk. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that “Russia has committed another petrifying war crime by shelling a correctional facility in the occupied Olenivka where it held Ukrainian POWs.”
“I call on all partners to strongly condemn this brutal violation of international humanitarian law and recognize Russia a terrorist state,” he added.
NBC News has not verified the claims. Russia has consistently denied targeting civilians or civilian areas throughout the war.
Daryna Mayer contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
