World

The video posted last year on Chinese social media showed more than 100 Japanese children, supposedly at an elementary school in Shanghai, gathered in their schoolyard. Chinese subtitles quoted two students leading the group as screaming: “Shanghai is ours. Soon the whole China will be ours, too.”

The messages were alarming and infuriating in China, which Japan invaded during World War II. Except that the scene actually took place at an elementary school in Japan. And the students were not stoking hatred of China; they were swearing an oath to play fair at what looked like a sporting event.

The video wasn’t taken down until after it had been viewed more than 10 million times.

Xenophobic online content like the schoolyard video is the subject of debate in China right now. Last week, a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese mother and her son in eastern China. Two weeks earlier, four visiting instructors from a college in Iowa were stabbed in northeastern China. Some Chinese are questioning the role that online speech plays in inciting real-world violence.

China has the world’s most sophisticated system to censor the internet when it wants to. The government sets strict rules about what can and cannot be said about politics, economics, society and the country’s leadership. Internet companies deploy an army of censors. Private citizens censor themselves, knowing that what they post can get their social media accounts deleted or, worse, land them in jail.

Yet the Chinese internet is laden with hate speech toward Japanese, Americans, Jews and Africans, as well as Chinese who are critical of the government. False information about Japan and the United States regularly tops lists of popular searches and receives a ton of reposts and likes.

What is happening online is influenced by the rising nationalism that has been promoted in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has adopted a China-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality. One of China’s responses to worsening tensions with its rivals was “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term used to describe an ultranationalistic and often hostile approach to geopolitics.

Of course, online hate speech and disinformation are not unique to China. But the Chinese government runs a well-oiled public opinion machine that tolerates and even encourages this kind of message when it’s directed at certain countries and their people. The authorities silence voices that try to correct the falsehoods or reason with their purveyors. The internet companies cash in on the online traffic that the chauvinistic content draws. And social media influencers, those at the grass roots and some of the most high-profile intellectuals and writers of the Xi era, get traffic and income.

In February 2023, the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, was covered extensively by Chinese state media. Influencers spun many conspiracy theories. One called the incident the equivalent of Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear accident, and said it had left most of Ohio unlivable. The theory claimed that the U.S. government and the mainstream media were trying to cover it up, similar to what happened with Chernobyl.

Duan Lian, an online misinformation consultant who has 1.7 million followers on the social media platform Weibo, posted an article about the East Palestine tragedy that tried to separate facts from fallacies. He urged the public not to fall for misinformation. The article was reposted more than 1,000 times — and then it was deleted. His Weibo account was suspended for about three months, with Weibo citing violations of online regulations.

“The space for free speech has narrowed,” he told me in an interview.

Mr. Duan has been active on Weibo since 2010 and is known for his insightful work combating misinformation.

“In the past, if CCTV made a significant error in its reporting, you could mock it, right?” he said, referring to China Central Television, the state broadcaster. “But now, even if they blatantly lie, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Liu Su, a science blogger in Shanghai, was censored for trying to set the record straight on a coordinated government campaign targeting Japan.

In 2023, China spread disinformation about the safety of the Japanese government’s decision to release treated radioactive water from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean. There were fear and outrage about what’s known in China as “nuclear-contaminated wastewater.”

After Mr. Liu wrote several articles challenging what was being said, someone reported him to the internet regulator in Shanghai. Mr. Liu deleted the article, posted an apology and promised to stay away from commenting on current affairs. Then his public WeChat social media account was suspended for six months.

Mr. Liu is one of a number of Chinese intellectuals who have voiced their concerns about the online condemnation of foreigners. In another article on WeChat this year, he criticized the trend of praising traditional Chinese medicine while belittling Western medicine. He was reported again.

“If the backbone of a society is completely submerged by the tide of nationalism, the future fate of the country is predictable,” he wrote.

China’s foreign ministry spokespeople said the recent attacks on foreigners were isolated crimes. The local authorities haven’t shared much information. But on social media, many comments praised the attacks and the perpetrators.

Another force for spreading online hate is a popular genre of short dramas on Chinese video platforms such as Douyin. In the videos, influencers stage scenes in which Chinese are humiliated by Japanese and then beat them up using martial arts moves. Or sometimes, a whole scene is just about insulting and beating Japanese people.

Anti-America sentiment is popular, too.

“I’ve been concerned for my two-plus years here about the very aggressive Chinese government efforts to denigrate America, to tell a distorted story about American society, American history, American policy,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, told The Wall Street Journal in an article last week. “It happens every day on all the networks available to the government here, and there’s a high degree of anti-Americanism online.”

It is telling to look at the times when Chinese censors act swiftly and effectively to remove something they don’t like.

In 2021, after the tennis player Peng Shuai accused a former senior national leader of sexual assault on her Weibo account, it took censors 20 minutes to delete the post and nearly all other posts about it. This is what’s known as a blanket ban.

A year earlier, to stop the Chinese public from talking about Mr. Xi, a social media platform censored 564 names that users had come up with to refer to him, including “a guy in Beijing,” “a big deal” and “the last emperor.” In 2016, a regulator gave a video platform a database of more than 35,000 terms about Mr. Xi that it wanted policed.

On Friday, Chinese people learned that a 52-year-old woman named Hu Youping, who had tried to stop the attack on the Japanese mother and son in eastern China, had died from her injuries. Many people mourned her on social media. Some said they wondered if the crime, targeting Japanese people, had anything to do with China’s nationalistic online environment.

In a rare move, China’s biggest internet platforms issued notices over the weekend that they were cracking down on hate speech that targeted Japanese and incited extreme nationalism. The questions are: How long will this continue? How much can it change an ecosystem that has been breeding hatred? And what will happen when it’s politically convenient for the government to use Japan and the United States as the boogeymen again? The notices themselves got many nasty comments.

“In this grand drama that plays out every day, some are directors, some are actors, some set the stage while the others are the audience,” wrote Peng Yuanwen, a former journalist. He called the attacker in last week’s incident a victim of nationalistic brainwashing. “He has become too deeply immersed in the play, finding it difficult to extricate himself,” Mr. Peng said.

As Hurricane Beryl headed toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands early Wednesday as a powerful Category 4 storm, a clearer picture emerged of the devastation it had caused on two small islands in Grenada, with that country’s leader calling the destruction “unimaginable” and “total.”

“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” Grenada’s prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, said at a briefing after visiting the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, which were ravaged by Beryl on Monday.

Officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on the islands, where between 9,000 and 10,000 people live, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility, the Princess Royal Hospital, and its airport and marinas. As of Tuesday night, there was no electricity on either island, and communications were down. Crops had been ravaged, and fallen trees and utility poles littered the streets.

The natural environment also took a beating. “There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou, the mangroves are totally destroyed,” Mr. Mitchell said.

But the death toll appeared to be low. Officials have reported three deaths from the storm in Grenada, two of them in Carriacou. Another was reported in the Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro said on Tuesday that three deaths had been reported in that country’s north.

Beryl, which peaked as a Category 5 storm on Tuesday morning, is still expected to be a major hurricane when it reaches Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday, either hitting them directly or coming close. Prime Minister Andrew Holness addressed the Jamaican public on Tuesday night, imposing a 12-hour curfew to start at 6 a.m. An evacuation order was issued for low-lying areas.

In the Caymans, a hardware store packed with shoppers was rationing sandbags, and residents with plenty of hurricane experience were bracing for Beryl.

“We get waves and wind, and we make the best of it, but this — this is going to be on a whole other level,” said Luigi Moxam, the owner of Cayman Cabana, a waterfront restaurant in George Town, the Caymans’ capital. He said he had spent Tuesday morning “peeling away the restaurant to skeletal form.”

Mr. Mitchell said that many people on Grenada’s main island had lost their homes, but that the destruction was far worse on Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Officials were still trying to assess the extent of the damage on the two islands, particularly to the power grid and water supply.

Grenada, like other Caribbean nations, gets most of its drinking water from rainwater harvesting, involving drains on roofs that lead to storage vessels. Terrence Smith, the head of the country’s water agency, said the storm damage was not expected to immediately cause a life-threatening shortage on Carriacou and Petite Martinique.

“We believe that is very unlikely,” Mr. Smith said on Tuesday. “If it is correct that most houses have lost their roofs, then they can’t harvest rainwater anymore. But many of these households have weeks of storage.”

Still, a recent dry spell has led many households on the islands to depend on desalination plants for water, and Mr. Smith said the plants on Carriacou and Petite Martinique were “probably negatively impacted by the hurricane.” That system had been under strain well before the hurricane arrived.

Beryl has set records as the first Category 4 hurricane, and then the first Category 5 storm, to form in the Atlantic Ocean so early in the season. A recent study found that with ocean temperatures rising, hurricanes in the Atlantic have become likelier to grow from a weak storm into a major one of Category 3 or higher within just 24 hours.

Mr. Mitchell called Beryl a direct result of global warming, saying that Grenada and countries like it were on the frontline of the climate crisis. “We are no longer prepared to accept that it’s OK for us to constantly suffer significant, clearly demonstrated loss and damage arising from climatic events and be expected to rebuild year after year while the countries that are responsible for creating this situation — and exacerbating this situation — sit idly by,” he said.

Jovan Johnson contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica, and Daphne Ewing-Chow from Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.

Protesters returned to the streets of Kenya on Thursday, some of them demanding the resignation of President William Ruto, despite his announcement a day earlier that he was abandoning a tax bill that drew large-scale demonstrations in which nearly two dozen people were killed.

The crowds in Nairobi, the capital, were much smaller than those on Tuesday, when tens of thousands of protesters flooded into the city center as lawmakers debated and then passed the contentious legislation. That demonstration turned violent as people stormed the building and set parts of it ablaze, and rights groups say that at least 23 people were killed and more than 300 others injured as the police used tear gas and bullets against them.

On Thursday, a heavy police and military presence was visible across the capital, with officers in cars and trucks and on horseback guarding the roads leading to Parliament, the president’s official residence and several downtown streets. Much of the central business district remained closed as police officers chased and tear-gassed smaller crowds waving white roses. Protests continued until evening in some neighborhoods in Nairobi.

Some activists and opposition political leaders had urged demonstrators not to march toward the president’s official residence in Nairobi on Thursday for fear of more bloodshed. But others said the killings, shootings and abductions in recent days — which activists said were some of the bloodiest in Kenya’s recent history — would not deter them from pushing Mr. Ruto to resign.

“We will be in these streets until Ruto goes,” said John Kimani, 25, who was protesting in Nairobi. “No one can tell us otherwise.”

In Eldoret town, Mr. Ruto’s stronghold, dozens of young men carrying wooden batons, bows and arrows demonstrated in support of the president. One carried a placard that read, “Warning: Protest at your risk.”

Until Mr. Ruto’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not sign the finance bill, the president had defended the measure as necessary for raising revenue and staving off debt default for a country whose government owes billions of dollars to its creditors.

As demonstrators gathered on Tuesday for what they called “Occupy Parliament” and some breached the legislative building, Mr. Ruto called their activities “treasonous” and said he would deploy the military to support the police in quelling the protests.

On Thursday, Kenya’s High Court ruled that the deployment of the military was necessary to assist the police but called for the government to provide the terms and duration of the engagement within two days.

“The president has not respected the general will of the people,” said Jimmy Magero, a protester in Kisumu, an opposition bastion along Lake Victoria. “He cannot rule over us by force if we say enough is enough.”

The youth-led protests in Kenya began last week, with opponents arguing that the bill would drastically escalate the cost of living. Even when Mr. Ruto’s governing coalition removed some of the proposed new taxes, many activists and Parliament’s opposition lawmakers rejected the bill.

The government’s spokesman, Isaac Mwaura, called on Kenyans to stop marching in the streets on Thursday. “Let’s not aid those who don’t wish our country well by staging protests to destabilize us,” he said in a statement. “Kenya is the only country that we have.”

But many were not deterred.

In Kisumu, dozens of protesters tried to reach the president’s residence but were rebuffed by the police. Most shops in central Kisumu were closed as traffic ground to a halt and the police put up barricades to prevent demonstrators from gaining access to some main streets.

Similar protests broke out in the port city of Mombasa, where demonstrators chanted, “Ruto must go.” Protesters also blocked the Migori-Kisii highway in the country’s west, burning tires and throwing stones at the police.

About 50 young Kenyans had been abducted by Wednesday, according to the Law Society of Kenya. By Thursday, some of those abducted had been released by law enforcement officials, but several others have gone missing, said the Law Society president, Faith Odhiambo.

The country’s deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua, has blamed the spiral of violence on the National Intelligence Service. He said on Wednesday evening that the agency did not properly brief the president on the anger on the streets, and called on its director, Noordin Haji, to resign.

Detractors have also pointed out that Mr. Ruto was a deputy president in the previous government, which saddled Kenya with so much debt.

Altogether, Kenya owes some $39 billion to foreign and commercial lenders. Protesters have specifically directed their ire at the International Monetary Fund, which has lent more than $3 billion to the East African nation and has, in turn, recommended that the government raise taxes and cut spending.

Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, echoed similar sentiments on Wednesday, saying the I.M.F.’s recommended “austerity conditions have contributed to the economic hardships facing Kenyan citizens.”

With protesters promising to continue flooding the streets, analysts say that Mr. Ruto faces an emboldened public that is determined to see more tangible changes.

“The finance bill was the final straw,” said Kathleen Klaus, an associate professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has studied political violence in Kenya. The legislation, she added, “has provided a clear event and a set of demands around which to organize peaceful resistance.”

Odera Wycliffe contributed reporting from Kisumu, Kenya; Mohamed Ahmed from Mombasa, Kenya; and Jimmy Gitaka from Eldoret, Kenya.

“I’ve never been called timid in my life,” Angela Rayner, a Labour lawmaker, told an audience of British voters during a televised debate last month while laying out her policy priorities.

The deputy leader of the Labour Party, Ms. Rayner, 44, is set to become one of the most powerful women in British politics as her party forms a new government on Friday, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule.

A straight-talking lawmaker with a warm, direct manner and an at times brutal honesty, Ms. Rayner is considered one of Labour’s most powerful electoral assets in reaching ordinary voters.

Political analysts say she appeals to parts of the public that the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, might otherwise struggle to connect with.

“She can speak to a broad swath of voters, including working-class voters who might not connect to the Starmer project,” said Dr. Lise Butler, a lecturer in Modern History at City, University of London. “I do think that her gender is important. She is appealing. She is clear spoken, and sometimes very frankly spoken.”

Ms. Rayner was named deputy prime minister and the secretary of state for improving housing and communities on Friday, both major roles in the new administration.

In the early hours of Friday morning, after she won her seat in Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester, she paid tribute to “the working class people who are the bedrock of this country” in her victory speech. “There is no greater honor than to serve you,” she said.

While the top political roles in Britain have traditionally been dominated by the country’s elites, with many in power hailing from the same private schools and universities, Ms. Rayner has taken a less traditional route to the top.

She left school at 16 when she was pregnant and later cared for older people and then became a union representative at her workplace.

It was through the trade union movement that she came to politics, rising first through the ranks of the union, before being elected as her constituency’s first female member of Parliament.

She served in prominent political positions under Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, and is often associated with the more left-leaning wing of the party. In 2020, she was elected as the Labour Party’s deputy leader, and despite some initial tensions with Mr. Starmer, she has thrived in his revamped and more center-left Labour Party.

“She’s very carefully bridged different parts of the party,” said Ms. Butler. “She’s a rare example, I think, of someone who has been able to gain a profile within both the Corbyn leadership and the Starmer leadership.”

But political adversaries and the tabloid press have regularly taken aim at her, something Sarah Childs, a professor of politics and gender at the University of Edinburgh, said is certainly linked to her ascendant political career.

“The fact that she is unapologetic, that she can at times be quite strident, she doesn’t necessarily behave always how some people might want women in public life to behave,” Ms. Childs said. And that “creates a context where critics who want to will take that particular way of behaving and problematize it.”

In 2022, a British tabloid printed a report based on an unnamed Conservative lawmaker’s claim that Ms. Rayner had tried to distract Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Parliament by rearranging her legs, comparing her to Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct.” The article was met with widespread outrage from other lawmakers in parliament, with one saying: “The story is that there is misogyny alive and well and stalking the corridors of the House of Commons.”

Ms. Rayner’s strong northern accent, a clear marker of her upbringing in Stockport, has been mocked by some anti-Labour critics on social media, but it is a point of pride for her.

“I speak like people do where I grew up,” Ms. Rayner wrote on the social media platform X last year. “I want people from backgrounds like mine who’ve been told to ‘know your place’ to know that public life is their place too.”

Hours after a battle in eastern Ukraine in August, a wounded and unarmed Russian soldier crawled through a nearly destroyed trench, seeking help from his captors, a unit of international volunteers led by an American.

Caspar Grosse, a German medic in that unit, said he saw the soldier plead for medical attention in a mix of broken English and Russian. It was dusk. A team member looked for bandages.

That is when, Mr. Grosse said, a fellow soldier hobbled over and fired his weapon into the Russian soldier’s torso. He slumped, still breathing. Another soldier fired — “just shot him in the head,” Mr. Grosse recalled in an interview.

Mr. Grosse said he was so upset by the episode that he confronted his commander. He said he spoke to The New York Times after what he regarded as unwarranted killings continued. It is highly unusual for a soldier to speak publicly about battlefield conduct, particularly involving men whom he still considers friends.

But he said he was too troubled to keep silent.

The shooting of the unarmed, wounded Russian soldier is one of several killings that have unsettled the Chosen Company, one of the best-known units of international troops fighting on behalf of Ukraine.

Mr. Grosse’s witness recollection is the only available evidence of the trench killing. But his accounts of other episodes are bolstered by his contemporaneous notes, video footage and text messages exchanged by members of the unit and reviewed by The Times.

In a second episode, a Chosen member lobbed a grenade at and killed a surrendering Russian soldier who had his hands raised, video footage reviewed by The Times shows. The Ukrainian military released video of the episode to showcase its battlefield prowess, but it edited out the surrender.

In a third episode, Chosen members boasted in a group chat about killing Russian prisoners of war during a mission in October, text messages show. A soldier who was briefly in command that day alluded to the killings using a slang word for shooting. He said he would take responsibility.

“If anything comes out about alleged POW blamming, I ordered it,” wrote the soldier, who uses the call sign Andok. He added an image of a Croatian war criminal who died in 2017 after drinking poison during a tribunal at The Hague.

“At the Hague ‘I regret nothing!’” he wrote. It was one of several text messages reviewed by The Times that make reference, directly or obliquely, to killing prisoners. Andok said in an interview that he had been joking.

Mr. Grosse was not on that mission but said that, afterward, a fellow soldier recounted killing a prisoner. Mr. Grosse documented it in his journal.

The Times is identifying frontline soldiers by their call signs in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol. They have not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Killing prisoners of war is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Once soldiers clearly indicate an intention to surrender, they cannot be attacked and must be safely taken into custody. The Ukrainian government has repeatedly pointed at Russian troops killing unarmed and surrendering soldiers as proof of Moscow’s lawlessness.

A Greek soldier known as Zeus was at the center of all three episodes — tossing the grenade and, Mr. Grosse says, firing at the wounded Russian in the trench and bragging about another kill. He did not respond to messages seeking comment left on his phone and through Facebook.

Ryan O’Leary, the de facto commander of Chosen Company and a former U.S. Army National Guardsman from Iowa, said that Zeus did not want to speak.

In an interview, Mr. O’Leary denied that members had committed war crimes. He said that his fighters had killed wounded Russians, but only those who could have fought back.

Mr. O’Leary said that the trench episode that Mr. Grosse recounted never happened, and that he was not on that mission. He also dismissed the significance of the text messages. “That’s predominantly blowing off steam,” he said.

He said the grenade episode was not “black and white,” because the Russian soldier and another nearby might have posed a threat. The video leaves unanswered questions about what Chosen members saw or considered threats before the attempted surrender.

But in the United States military, a video showing the killing of a surrendering soldier, regardless of the circumstances, would prompt an immediate investigation, said Rachel E. VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and a former U.S. Air Force lawyer.

“Failure to investigate is more troubling than the incident itself,” Ms. VanLandingham said. “Lack of accountability starts with lack of investigation.”

The Ukrainian military has the authority to investigate accusations of war crimes and has opened investigations into claims of abuses committed by Russian forces. In response to a list of questions, the military stopped short of promising an investigation. It said “the issue raised will be thoroughly examined and verified.”

The American volunteers are fighting without the backing of the United States government, which does not want to be drawn into direct combat with Russia. But the U.S. Justice Department also can investigate because Mr. O’Leary and other Chosen members are American.

Soon after The Times began asking questions, Mr. O’Leary vowed to find out who was speaking to journalists.

“Some stuff the reporter brought up was only known by a few people,” he wrote in a group chat. “But we will cast a wide net regardless to snare the rabbit.”

Chosen Company

The very existence of the Chosen Company is a peculiar feature of Ukraine’s war effort. Desperate for personnel, the military opened its ranks to thousands of international volunteers after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Fighters with varying degrees of experience and professionalism, some of whom would not have been allowed near a battlefield in an American-led war, were welcomed and armed.

Mr. O’Leary wanted Chosen to be a home for professional, disciplined fighters. The unit — a mix that included deserters, thrill seekers and aging soldiers — became a hub for volunteers seeking combat.

Mr. Grosse, a former German soldier, came to Ukraine seeking purpose and adventure. He fought alongside other foreign fighters early in the war. Then, he found his way to Chosen.

The company, of about 60 people from about a dozen countries, fell under the command of Ukraine’s 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade. Ukrainian officers were technically in charge but, as in most foreign units, they largely performed administrative functions.

Chosen often acted as shock troops, teams that could lead assaults and clear Russian positions despite heavy fire and, sometimes, heavy casualties.

Internally, the company had its own reputation. Benjamin Reed, a former Chosen member from Massachusetts, said in an interview that he “heard, to such a large degree, innumerable conversations, about the executions of P.O.W.s on various operations.”

Mr. Reed said that even the unit’s recruiter told him that it “was OK to kill P.O.W.s if they didn’t surrender in the strictest Geneva Convention standards.”

The Grenade Episode

On Aug. 23, 2023, just over a dozen soldiers from Chosen joined a small Ukrainian force on a mission that became known as Operation Shovel.

The goal was to drive Russian forces out of trenches south of the eastern Ukrainian town of Pervomaiske.

Chosen stormed the trenches in vehicles and then on foot, surprising the Russian soldiers and pinching them on either side.

The fighting was mostly over in less than a half-hour. Everyone in Chosen survived, though some were wounded. Most of the Russian forces died, but a few fled, taking cover in nearby craters that had been left by explosions.

The episode took place after the trench was declared clear. But artillery fire and drone attacks remained a threat. And the battlefield was dynamic: About 10 minutes earlier, an unarmed Russian soldier had frantically darted into Chosen’s trench, then hurried away before being shot and killed.

Mr. O’Leary showed The Times two videos that he said proved that what followed was murky, not a “dirty kill.” The videos, which he said were unedited, were taken from a drone and a soldier’s helmet camera.

In the helmet camera video, sporadic small-arms fire is audible in the distance, but no hostile fire comes from the craters. The two Chosen soldiers seen on video were somewhat exposed and scanning the area, indicators that they were not under fire.

Mr. O’Leary, who was nearby in the trench, called out to Zeus and another soldier: “Three Russians in front.”

One of those three was dead. Two others were in a nearby crater. One, dressed in olive-colored battle dress, seems to try to get the attention of Chosen troops. He puts his hands to his mouth, apparently calling out. He fires his weapon directly in the air, then puts it down and approaches the edge of the crater with his hands up, an internationally accepted sign of surrender.

Beside him is another Russian soldier, who appears wounded and barely moves. He does not try to surrender.

How much the Chosen team knew about these men is unclear, and potentially significant to the question of whether the killing that came after was justified.

Mr. Grosse, the medic, said he heard a Ukrainian drone team report on the radio that a Russian soldier was trying to surrender.

Mr. O’Leary initially denied that his radio was working properly. When asked, if so, how he knew that three Russians were in or near the craters, he acknowledged that some transmissions had gotten through.

The surrendering Russian soldier has his hands raised for several seconds, as seen from the drone footage, when a grenade lands nearby, killing him.

Zeus, who threw the grenade, was not wearing a body camera. Footage from the nearby helmet camera does not show the Russian soldier, indicating that Zeus may not have seen him.

But after the explosion, Zeus indicates that he had seen him. “I think I killed a guy with a grenade in his hands,” he said, laughing. There is no indication in the drone video that the Russian had a grenade.

Mr. O’Leary said that since he could not see into the crater, he had no idea if the Russian soldier or his comrades could fight back if Chosen tried to capture him.

The Ukrainian military later released an edited video that shows only two seconds of the fatal encounter. It shows that the Russian has no weapon, but the moment that he raises his hands is not included.

And the editing made it appear that the killing occurred in the heat of combat, rather than when the battle was all but over. A spokesman for the 59th Brigade would not discuss the video.

Mr. O’Leary denied that Mr. Grosse was on the mission.

But in interviews, Mr. Grosse recounted details that other Chosen members corroborated. And, using the publicly released video, The Times geolocated the battle and placed it exactly where Mr. Grosse said it had occurred. He is not sure whether he is in the military logs for the battle, but those are notoriously unreliable, according to other foreign fighters not involved with Chosen.

Ms. VanLandingham, the former Air Force lawyer, said that details about what the soldiers could see would typically surface in an investigation.

The Ukrainian military justice system, though, is widely regarded as outdated and ill equipped for such situations.

“Reports of human rights violations within the military have become a toxic issue for the Ukrainian government and highlighted the issue,” the Wilson Center, a Washington-based research organization, wrote in February.

A Fatal Shooting

As Operation Shovel winded down that same day, Chosen secured the trench line and waited for reinforcements.

Around dusk, Mr. Grosse said, a badly injured Russian soldier, who had been presumed dead, began crawling through the trench, calling for help.

A Chosen soldier from the United States, known as Cossack, knew some Russian and tried to speak to him, Mr. Grosse said. When Cossack said that he was American, the injured man began saying “help” and “surrender” in English, Mr. Grosse said.

Cossack called out for first-aid equipment. “I think he wanted to help him,” Mr. Grosse said.

It was then, Mr. Grosse said, that Zeus arrived and shot the Russian soldier in the chest. “He was breathing and wiggling around,” Mr. Grosse said.

Mr. Grosse said Cossack then shot the Russian soldier in the head with a Kalashnikov rifle in what Mr. Grosse assumes was a mercy kill.

Cossack did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

Roughly an hour later, Chosen soldiers returned to their base, where they watched a medley of videos from the operation.

There, Mr. Grosse said he first saw the grenade attack. He had been elsewhere in the trench and had not witnessed it.

Mr. Grosse, who said he was already disturbed from the shooting, said that he complained to Mr. O’Leary in front of others.

“I specifically said that, because I’m the medic, I want prisoners to be in my care and nobody gets to shoot them,” Mr. Grosse said. “‘They have to arrive in my care healthy, or at least in the way you found them.’ And everybody was like, ‘OK fine.’”

Mr. O’Leary confirmed receiving a complaint after Shovel about the unit’s tactics in general. And he said that Mr. Grosse did complain about conduct on other missions — conduct that he said was lawful. But he denied that Mr. Grosse had raised concerns after Shovel.

Afterward, Mr. Grosse said, Zeus bragged “a thousand times” about killing the surrendering Russian.

Word spread within Chosen about the video’s contents.

When Mr. Reed joined a few months later, he said he was told — not by Mr. Grosse — that there was a reason the Shovel video had not been not released in full: “because it would look very bad on us,” Mr. Reed said.

He said soldiers told him they had killed “some Russian asking to be spared.”

Text Messages and a Journal Entry

Nearly two months later, in mid-October, about a dozen Chosen members were again called to an area around Pervomaiske, this time to halt a Russian advance.

Afterward, a group chat lit up with discussion alluding to the shooting of Russian prisoners.

Andok, who briefly took charge that day, said his team had been exhausted and low on ammunition. They had no reinforcements and nobody to carry the wounded, he wrote.

“And then someone’s like ‘We got these captures,’” Andok wrote. “Me: Why the fuck aren’t they sleeping, sort em out.”

He added: “If indeed that’s what actually happened.”

One soldier posted an image from the World War II movie “Inglourious Basterds” showing a German prisoner about to be killed.

Discussion focused on Zeus. But Andok said that he, not Zeus, was responsible. “He was just doing his job,” Andok wrote. He then posted the photograph of the Croatian war criminal.

Andok now says he sent the messages in jest and did not order any shooting. But the messages suggest that others took the matter seriously.

One soldier asked if video of the shooting existed. “Because if not, it’s sound,” he wrote. “Unless someone grasses on him,” he added, using the British slang term for reporting someone to the authorities.

“No go pro footage, didn’t happen,” another soldier wrote.

Mr. Grosse was not on that October mission. But he said Zeus later bragged directly to him about the killing.

Mr. Grosse keeps journals, though not always chronologically. His thoughts and poems spread across Moleskine or off-brand notebooks, whatever is nearby when the mood strikes.

He showed The Times a copy of an entry that he said he wrote immediately after his conversation with Zeus.

“Today a good friend willingly executed a bound prisoner,” the entry begins. “As the prisoner was sitting in a trench blendage with his jacket draped over his shoulders, Zeus came up behind him and shot him into the back of the head multiple times. Going to bed.”

(The entry misspells the word “blindage,” a protective structure in a trench.)

Though the entry is undated, Mr. Grosse said it was written in October. That aligns with an early conversation he had at the time with a Times reporter, when he spoke about being troubled by battlefield incidents.

‘We Are Brothers’

In an interview, Mr. Reed, the former Chosen member from Massachusetts, said his time with the unit was marked by disagreements, all unrelated to accusations of battlefield wrongdoing.

He recounted harassment and death threats. He threatened to disclose Chosen’s location publicly, jeopardizing its security. In anger, he said, he posted embarrassing photographs of a Chosen member in a pro-Russian channel on the messaging platform Telegram.

He says he left Chosen in November. Mr. O’Leary says he was kicked out.

In January, Mr. Reed posted a video on TikTok criticizing his former comrades. “Those guys are kill-crazy cowboys, nothing more,” he says.

Unlike Mr. Reed, Mr. Grosse said he left last fall on good terms, but disenchanted. “You couldn’t rely on the guy next to you,” he said.

In April, word spread inside Chosen that The Times was asking about the deaths of Russian prisoners and surrendering soldiers.

One Chosen member questioned in the group chat why anyone was “snitching on bros’.”

Mr. O’Leary wrote that the accusations were baseless. He said that anyone who had spoken to reporters faced years in prison for releasing confidential information.

“I’d prefer to stop any investigation before it starts and simply say it was a misunderstanding,” he wrote. “End of day, we are brothers.”

Niki Kitsantonis and Dave Philipps contributed reporting.