An American mercenary, alongside other mercenaries, slit the heels of a Russian prisoner of war and forced him to swim across a river and used him for target practice. As we read in a report by Lindsey Snell:

“Benjamin Velcro” is former US serviceman and volunteer with the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the official unit of foreign volunteers under the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In early August, Russian media widely shared voice recordings in which Velcro recounted the torture and murder of a Russian prisoner of war.

“I don’t know where the fuck he was from, somewhere in Central Asia or Central Russia. He was about 18. We were told to take no prisoners. Because we had been told we were just mercenaries and we’d be executed by Russia. So we don’t give a fuck, man. We slit his fucking achilles and made him swim across the Severodonetsk River, to see if he could swim across the river without achilles tendons. He drowned…or he was shot, I don’t know. We were all kinda taking practice shots at him.”

According to Velcro, the horrific war crime he detailed didn’t actually happen. “I had just come back from the front. I was drunk. And I just decided to troll this Russian guy I met in Thailand years ago by telling him this story. Next thing I knew, that shit just blew up on Russian media.”