Separately, large numbers of children were moved from areas occupied by Russian forces to so-called vacation camps in Crimea and inside Russia with parental consent, they noted, but Russia required parents to travel in person to collect them and many had been unable to do so, raising fears of permanent separation.
Ukraine has reported the transfer of 16,221 children to Russia, but the commission said it had not been able to verify the number. The commissioners said Russia’s transfer of children and other civilians from Ukraine to Russia may amount to a war crime, observing that none of the cases they investigated were justified under international law. The commission said it documented sexual violence against “women, men and girls aged from 4 to 82.” Russian troops who conducted house-to-house searches as they took control of areas also raped women at gunpoint, with “extreme brutality” and torture, the panel reported. In other cases, the torture of prisoners was followed by their execution.
Some victims, they said, had witnessed fellow detainees being tortured to death. Other methods of torture, the panel said, included rape, as well as hanging detainees from the ceiling with their hands tied, strangling them with cables and suffocating them with plastic bags or gas masks. Their findings and a list of individuals linked to abuses will provide additional ammunition to intensive Ukrainian and international investigations aimed at holding Russia to account for its actions after invading Ukraine just over a year ago.Īmong the abuses the report enumerated was the use of torture, which the commission said was “prevalent” against certain categories of people, particularly serving or former members of Ukraine’s armed forces, as well as local officials, employees of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and civilians with pro-Ukraine views.Ī common Russian torture technique, known as a “call to Putin” or “call to Lenin,” used military phones connected to electrical cables to deliver shocks to feet, fingers and genitals. The commissioners said their attempts to establish “meaningful communication” with the Russian authorities had no success, although they noted that a Russian government department had referred some material to them. The report drew on findings made during eight trips to Ukraine, visits to 56 towns and communities and interviews with 595 people, as well as on satellite data. The 18-page report echoed many of the findings in the panel’s preliminary assessment last September, but was able to go into greater detail on patterns of abuse. The move, if it happens, would be the first delivery of fighter jets by a NATO country to Ukraine, but would still fall short of meeting Ukrainian requests for more advanced F-16 fighter jets from the United States.īut on Wednesday, a three-person commission of inquiry created by the United Nations Human Rights Council last year said in a report that Russian missile attacks on energy infrastructure since October - leaving millions of people without power, heat or water - could also amount to crimes against humanity.Īnd Russian forces’ use of torture against civilians and prisoners of war in occupied areas may also amount to crimes against humanity, on the ground that their use was systematic, occurred in several different regions of Ukraine in sites intended for that purpose and showed a degree of planning, the panel said. Ukrainian military officials on Thursday expressed confidence in their ability to hold onto Bakhmut, even as military analysts and Western officials warned that the battle was unsustainable. Poland on Thursday said it had detained nine foreigners accused of spying for Russia and preparing operations to disrupt the flow of Western arms into neighboring Ukraine. Ukraine’s military reported unusual Russian naval activity in the Black Sea on Thursday, saying more ships were deployed in its waters in a scattered formation that suggested they were searching for the wreckage of the U.S. The fallout from a collision between a Russian warplane and an American spy drone continued, as the Pentagon’s European Command on Thursday released the first declassified video images of the events leading up to the episode, which has threatened to escalate tensions between the United States and Russia amid the war in Ukraine. Poland’s announcement “doesn’t change our calculus, with respect to F-16s,” Mr. Kirby, said that the United States still had no plans to send American-made warplanes to Ukraine.
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