Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday condemned a video circulating online that the country’s security services said showed a Ukrainian being decapitated by “Russian occupiers.”
“There is something that no one the world can ignore,” Zelenskyy said in Ukrainian in a video posted to his Telegram channel.
“We are not going to forget anything,” he added. “There will be legal responsibility for everything.”
The footage viewed by NBC News features a man repeatedly saying “it hurts” as another man wielding a small knife appears to saw into the man’s neck.
Another man then says to the one with the knife in Russian: “What, have you never chopped off a head before? Do it, do it, do it.”
Once the decapitated is finished, the knife-wielding man shows the dead man’s head to the the camera.
What appears to be a Ukrainian identification document can be seen on the ground by the victim’s body while one attacker holds up a bulletproof vest with patches of the Ukrainian coat of arms and a skull.
NBC News was not able to independently verify the identity of the people in the video, its location or the date it was filmed.
Zelenskyy has described the victim as a “Ukrainian captive.”
The Security Service of Ukraine said the video showed “Russian occupiers … severely torturing a Ukrainian prisoner and cutting off his head.” NBC News has not been able to verify this allegation.
The Ukrainian government said it had started a war crime investigation after the video appeared on the internet on Tuesday.
When asked about the video on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called it “horrifying.”
“In the world of fakes in which we live now, it is necessary to verify the authenticity of this video,” he added.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russia based Wagner mercenary group, which has a large presence in Ukraine, said in a statement on his Telegram channel that he had seen the video but had not found that any of his…
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