I actually disagree with this one. Pilots will kill more people through bombing unless killed if allowed to return to their planes later. Unless you can be sure of their capture there's no reason to let them live, from a humanitarian perspective. There was even this case where a pilot from a Russian aircraft killed a civilian on the ground. This rule just never made sense to me - you don't have that with the crew leaving a tank, do you?
The idea is that they have to be given a chance to surrender. If they don't do so, the Geneva Convention (specifically Protocol 1, Article 42) has no issue with you gunning them down. They just have to be given the chance to surrender, which they obviously can't do while parachuting
Video from RIA Novosti released on Tuesday showed the Ukrainians swearing allegiance to Russia, holding rifles and dressed in military fatigues to fight in a battalion named for medieval nobleman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, seen as a national hero in Russia for bringing parts of Ukraine under Moscow’s control in the 15th century.
Both Ukrainian military and human rights officials as well as the Russian defence ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Experts say such actions would be an apparent violation of the Geneva conventions relating to the treatment of PoWs, which forbids them from being exposed to combat or from working in unhealthy or dangerous conditions – coerced or not.
“Russian authorities might claim they are recruiting them on a voluntary basis but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a prisoner of war’s decision could be taken truly voluntarily, given the situation of coercive custody,” said Yulia Gorbunova, senior researcher on Ukraine at Human Rights Watch.
Nick Reynolds, research fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said “the entire scenario is laced with the potential for coercion”.
Reynolds said the fighters were not deployed as part of a conventional Russian military unit but were one of a number of irregular formations that do not adhere to “normal force structure”.
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