The question remains if this is an isolated case, this remains to be seen. There are indices that's NOT isolated.
And every time coming from 'both sides'. That's really ridiculous, because it were civilians that were shot down, tortured, raped.
The Ukrainian government deliberately blurred all lines between civilians and soldiers, between combatants and non-combatants. Like you saw the videos some here posted with pride, which showed a mixed sex group driving by in a car and trying to burn Russians alive with a Molotov cocktail they threw at them. Or people in civilian clothes getting guns and tried to fire at Russians from a civilian building, without any sign of being part of the military or at least combatants.
Then we saw in the last weeks how Russian POW being tortured, mutilated, even killed and there are reports of ethnic Russian civilian victims, killed by the Ukrainian forces in the Eastern Ukraine (some reports not independently verified, coming only from Russian witnesses).
A war crime is a war crime, whether its a soldier or a civlian. Or do you think that helpless young men, just because they are POW, can be treated worse than animals? Tortured, mutilated and killed at will? If the Ukrainians do so, they just prepare the ground for hateful crimes they can the Russians accuse of later - like this one probably, if we know the background. That's the dirty partisan style: First mistreating, torturing, mutilating and killing the enemy soldiers, then using the retaliation, which will often hit innocent civilians, unfortunately, to induce even more hate and violence. That's why partisan style warfare is particularly ugly and gruesome, with this deliberate blurring of combatants vs. non-combatants and the gruesome treatment of POW.
In this case it looks like they tried to round the males up, and then we don't know what happened. Some said they tried to flee or resisted and attack the Russians, when they should have been transported away. Others might say they would have been shot anyway, because the frustrated Russians, which surely saw the images of their mutilated comrades too, got frustrated and wanted retaliation. We don't know what exactly happened there, at this point.
It looks to me, like a general war crime, committed by either frustrated and angry, or simply overstrained young soldiers, against at least mostly innocent civilian men. This would constitute a war crime, but surely no genocide.
It won't be the only such incident, it won't be the last, but as long as its not systematic and widespread, its definitely no genocide. If the Russians would have wanted to commmit a genocide, with orders from above, there would have been much more victims, many more reports and these being widespread in Northern Ukraine in particular. Which is the only region it would make any sense anyway, because the other regions the fighting takes place are mostly Russian and Russian mixed anyway.
The fighting soldiers however, to make that clear once more, are overwhelmingly West Ukrainians, especially from the nationalist faction, and foreign mercenaries, rather than local populations which need "to be broken" like you claimed last time for Mariupol, which is beyond ridiculous. Because these were at the start about 10.000 or whatever Ukrainian soldiers, many from nationalist militias, mostly from the West, which defended the area of Mariupol against first the local/Russian uprising, then now against the invading Russians. But its not exactly "a local resistance" by any stretch.
That would be like saying that the allies had to break the "local resistance in Normandy"... Local in the sense of military personnel being in that spot, but not from the local population (largely).
