IS beheads alleged Russian spy in gruesome video

The Islamic State militant group has released a video showing the beheading of what it described as a Russian intelligence officer captured in Syria, the US-based SITE monitoring website reported on Tuesday.

The gruesome 12-minute video - released on the day Russia celebrates the anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany with military parades - contained a message in Russian to President Vladimir Putin under the title "complete bankruptcy".

It showed a man dressed in black kneeling in a desert scene and urging other Russian agents to surrender.

"This idiot believed the promises of his state not to abandon him if he was captured," a narrator said, before a bearded militant beheaded the Russian man using a knife.

The man killed in the video is thought to be Evgeny Petrenko, who was kidnapped by IS earlier and featured in a video message in September.

The footage included clips of several other Russian prisoners being beheaded and shot in past videos.

It also showed scenes of what it described as the aftermath of Russian bombing raids in Syria.

Russian forces are backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his war against rebels and militants seeking to oust him.

The Russian defense ministry says about 30 Russian servicemen have been killed since the start of the Kremlin's operation there in September 2015.

IS has lost swathes of the territory it seized in a lightning advance in 2014, with militants being driven out of Iraq's Mosul and surrounded in their de-facto capital of Raqqa.