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These sorts of international agreements seem to be in a different class from basic rules-of-warfare/human-rights conventions, and anyhow once you go there (as the subthread below yours aptly demonstrates) you just get stuck in a very deep hole of both sides having equal and opposite stories of treaty violations by the other, and why their own violations as alleged by the other side don't actually count. Meanwhile, even in WWII, at least on the Western front both sides (and especially the morally and militarily victorious one!) upheld a pretense of respecting the rights of PoWs, and neither the Ameribrits nor the Soviets followed a principle of "our goal should be to maximise the number of dead Germans". Are you saying they should have?
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence. It stands to reason that they are certainly not killing and torturing as many PoWs as they could. The person quoted by OP seems to suggest that Ukrainians should kill and torture as many Russian PoWs as they could. If they did this, why would Russians not do the same to their Ukrainian PoWs? I can see why the intermediate state where Ukrainians go wild but Russians haven't yet would appeal to him, but at the inevitable new equilibrium where both of them do it, would his side actually be better off than before?
"Here are excerpts from three letters found on dead Germans:
Manager Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Schirach: "The French were taken from us to the factory. I chose six Russians from the Minsk district. They are much tougher than the French. Only one of them died, the rest continue to work in the fields and on the farm. Keeping them costs nothing and we should not suffer from the fact that these beasts, whose children may be killing our soldiers, are eating German bread. Yesterday I subjected to light execution two Russian beasts who secretly devoured the skimmed milk intended for the sows..."
Mateas Zimlich writes to his brother, Fr. Heinrich Zimlich: "There is a camp for Russians in Leiden, you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk to them with a good lash ..."
A certain Otto Essmann writes to Lieutenant Helmut Weigand: "We have captive Russians here. These types are devouring earthworms on the airfield pad, they are throwing themselves at the garbage bucket. I've seen them eating grass. And to think they're people..."
Slave owners, they want to turn our people into slaves. They take the Russians to their place, mock them, starve them to insanity, to the point where, dying, people eat grass and worms, and the shitty German with a rotten cigar in his teeth philosophizes, "Are these people...?"
We know everything. We remember everything. We have understood: the Germans are not people. From now on the word "German" is the worst curse for us. From now on the word "German" discharges the gun. We shall not speak. We shall not be indignant. We shall kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is wasted. If you think your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you don't kill a German, the German will kill you. He will take those dear to you and will torture them in his damned Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull on your station, if you are waiting for a battle, kill the German before the battle. If you let a German live, a German will hang a Russian man and disgrace a Russian woman. If you have killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count the versts. Count one thing: the Germans you have killed. Kill the German! - That's what the old mother is asking. Kill the German! - That's the child's plea. Kill the German! - It's the land itself that cries out. Don't miss. Don't skip. Kill!"
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Note that Ukraine allowed contact of independent organisation with PoW held by them, Russia failed to do so.
See also how people released by Russia looks like.
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I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3543197-inside-russias-war-camps-ukrainian-pows-detail-torture-abuse/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/russia-ukraine-war-un-report-details-accounts-of-rape-torture-and-executions.html
I find it hard to imagine that this wouldn't be carried by our media with much greater continuing intensity if the evidence situation were actually good enough. More importantly, though, it seems that there are some obvious test cases where PoWs like the top brass of Azov or the handful of international volunteers that were captured came back in one piece as part of a prisoner swap, where disposing of those people would have been a natural choice that would have been very advantageous to Russia if optics of PoW treatment were not a concern (as the Azov leaders and those who would see themselves in their position are valuable to Ukraine by virtue of ideology, combat experience and motivation, and conversely anything from just not releasing them to the full ISIS treatment would have improved Russian morale).
Did you miss what happened at Elenovka? Or do you find Russian version plausible, that it was a Ukrainian strike on their own people because "they started to talk about crimes of Zelensky"? By the way, UN had to disband the group tasked with investigating what happened there because Russia denied the investigators access.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/un-disbands-fact-finding-mission-into-olenivka-prison-attack-in-ukraine/2780833
Just curious, you’re so passionate about the war that you set up a Google ping for themotte when anything critical of Ukraine pops up. (Nothing wrong with that, why not give your POV.) You mentioned last time you are living in Ukraine. Have you considered fighting in the war? I know Ukraine is drafting every young man they can find; I think their recent bill allows recruiters to enter homes to find young men. Or do you have a desk job with the Ukrainian military that permits you to engage in forums from time to time?
Uncharitable, antagonistic, and snide.
Believe it or not, we are actually capable of reading between lines, and just because you write a post in a conversational, friendly tone doesn't mean we can't tell what you're actually saying. No, you are not "Just curious." Don't do this.
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It's false. I read this forum sometimes, but I don't find American culture war that interesting so I rarely post.
I did. But I have a dependant, and some of my relatives including my father are fighting, so if something happens to us, no one would be able to take care of my underage sister. Plus I don't have military experience, my father has. Also I have relatively lucrative job in IT, and I donate most of my salary to AFU. Make of that what you will.
It's false as well.
And that is comical. Interesting that people who laugh at conspiracies involving "Russian bots" fall to the same temptation of accusing anyone of being a "glowie", or an "Ukrobot".
To be fair, the people who are referred to as "Ukrobots" do exist. I doubt they'd consider obscure heretic forums to be worth astroturfing, though, as opposed to Russian Telegram channels.
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I thought that both the version of the Russian narrative you quote and the Ukrainian version about them shelling themselves was nonsense (Ukraine was pushing the "Russians shelling themselves" thing about every single shelling that may have looked bad in the eyes of anyone on their side at the time, including anti-personnel mines fired into the urban areas of Donetsk and the near-daily shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP). Surely they would have had better ways to dispose of them if they were interested in this, especially since this sort of shelling presumably only actually killed some hard-to-control small subset of the PoWs on site.
The more plausible explanation was that the Ukrainians shelled it by accident, based on false intel, or because the Russians could have also garrisoned military and equipment at the PoW camp (as they were doing in the NPP) and they were indifferent (as in the NPP) or unaware of the presence of the PoWs. Even in these scenarios, the Russians could have any number of reasons for refusing to admit the UN group, ranging from concerns that the report would find against them regardless of facts (see also the irregularities around their investigation of the Syria chemical weapons incident; it seems quite likely that for a lot of the UN bureaucracy, the US and allies have their thumbs firmly on the scale), via concerns that the group might pass intel to Ukrainians (the Russians repeatedly accused OSCE monitors of doing this since the conflict started, and my impression is that well-connected people on their side do in fact believe this), to the circumstance that they might find even an accurate finding that they were garrisoning valid military targets in a PoW camp to be embarrassing (in fact I'd assume there are some agreements against this as well?).
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Though the same group proves that PoWs were treated awfully by Russia.
So apparently really bad treatment is happening, though without routine murder of surrendering Ukrainians. Always nice to be passing some standards.
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The claimed goal was German surrender. Which is more than the US demands from Russia today, namely, retreat to 2022-01 or 2013 borders. The Russian people also aren't burned alive by tens of thousands, with the alternative being putting themselves at the mercy of a regime as bloodthirsty as Stalins.
I don't think you would prefer this being the goal, and those being the methods.
You're making a series of statements that I think are all correct, but I don't understand what this has to do with the question at hand of whether it is actually advantageous for Ukrainians or their Finnish allies to call for reducing their side's adherence to norms and conventions such as that you should not execute prisoners of war (or, basically equivalently, reducing their efforts to enforce their side's continued adherence; non-adherence can be expected to follow naturally if adherence is not enforced).
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