This is a war between armies of hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side. It's statistically impossible that neither side engaged in killing POWs, the question is who did it more? What is the culture of the army? Is it something done occasionally by individual units, hidden from commanders, or is it just accepted by the entire command structure?

During the battle of Mariupol, after cornering Azov (the hardcore Nazi unit) in the metalworking plant, the Russian forces offered them literally like a dozen chances to surrender.

To the extent that the Russian public was getting seriously angry about it!

The Azov commanders wouldn't give in*!

*They surrendered just days later

And how did the Ukrainians react to this?

Having followed this war closely from the start, the "vibe" I get is that Russia is continuously humanitarian, frequently offers Ukrainians the chance to surrender and treats POWs well on the whole as a matter of military policy, and I feel confident saying the majority of mistreatment of POWs by the Russian side would have been done by Wagner, not the RU Army. Conversely, the Ukrainian army, riddled with rabid fascists and roving paramilitaries barely under the control of the political leadership, has constantly tortured and killed POWs and gloated about it on social media. I realise I should have saved the evidence, but that wasn't exactly the frame of mind I was in while seeing it at the time.

But when the OFFICIAL Twitter account of the National Guard posts shit like this

I think it's safe to say 'humanization of the enemy' is not on the agenda.

[–] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

riddled with rabid fascists and roving paramilitaries barely under the control of the political leadership, has constantly tortured and killed POWs

Civillians too!

remember that so suuuper cool time when Azov took a bunch of human shields prisoner, and then recorded themselves playing the terminator theme song to tweet at arnold swartzenager about how cool his support was

Do you remember that?

also, HORRIFYING that I could only find this video with titles that refer to the ethnic russian civilian meat shields as russian sabateurs

fucking nazis burn all Azov

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 1 year ago

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[–] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net -1 points 1 year ago

Not to mention the Snake Island debacle.

If you don't recall, right at the start of the war, a small Ukrainian National Guard unit was stationed on "Snake Island", a tiny island in the Black Sea. A Russian warship approached the island and told them by radio to surrender. The commander replied "Russian warship, go fuck yourself!". The Russian warship opened fire and blew them all away. For their brave sacrifice, Zelensky posthumously awarded the "thirteen brave soldiers of Snake Island" various medals and honors, and "Russian warship, go fuck yourself! became a shining symbol of Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression, plastered over the west's print and social media for days, until whatever the next thing was replaced it.

How it actually went:

About two weeks later, it turned out they actually had just surrendered and been captured. And there weren't thirteen, there were EIGHTY ONE of them. One of the soldiers told a reporter their commander was "an idiot trying to get us killed" and that Zelensky "didn't even care to know our names".