Soldiers drank whisky and ate sweets after killing two unarmed Ukrainian civilians
RUSSIAN soldiers have been caught on CCTV shooting dead two unarmed Ukrainian civilians, more evidence of the brutal way that the Russian army treated people in areas it occupied.
In the security camera footage, now broadcast by the BBC and CNN, five Russian soldiers drive up to a large bicycle shop on a motorway leading into Kyiv at the start of the war.
The duo have graffitied their stolen white van with the V insignia of the invading Russian army and sprayed “Russian Tank Special Forces” on the vehicle’s side.
They are armed with rifles and start to smash in the shop windows before the two Ukrainian men arrive.
These are Leonid Plyats, 65, and the unnamed owner of the shop.
In the footage, Plyats and his boss at first seem to defuse the situation.
They strike up a conversation with the Russian soldiers and share cigarettes. In the CCTV, the Russian soldiers frisk the two Ukrainian men to make sure that they are unarmed.
Then the Russian soldiers turn and walk away, before Plyats and his boss also turn and walk away.
At that moment two of the Russian soldiers exchange words, turn around and run back towards the gate. They lift their rifles to their shoulders, take aim and fire.
Both Ukrainian men tumble to the floor. The boss of the business is dead but Plyats, after the Russian soldiers break into the shop to start their looting and drinking spree, gets up and staggers back to his cabin, where he dies.
After the Russian army retreated from Kyiv’s suburbs at the end of March, Ukrainian soldiers found the bodies of hundreds of civilians. Hundreds of women, and children, have also accused Russian soldiers of rape. Looting and the destruction of private property were rampant.
Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, has said that 10,700 crimes have been recorded and the first prosecution of a captured Russian soldier accused of murdering a Ukrainian civilian has been launched.
But it is likely the murderers of Plyat and his boss will never be caught as they will already have escaped back to Russia.
Perhaps just as shocking as the murder of the two unarmed Ukrainian men was the way the Russian soldiers acted afterwards.
Video footage showed the duo wandering around the offices of the bicycle shop, helping themselves to sweets, and swigging from whisky bottles.