U.N. Investigators Say Russians Tortured Ukrainians to Death
 |
Russian forces in occupied regions of Ukraine tortured people to death, a United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said on Monday, disclosing further evidence that Russia has committed human rights abuses during the war.
The three-person panel, known as a Commission of Inquiry, released a report in March that concluded that many of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, including willful killings, attacks on civilians and forced deportations of children, amounted to war crimes.
The commission has since collected further evidence that Russian forces have made “widespread and systematic” use of torture in occupied regions of Ukraine, the commission’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
The torture has mostly taken place in Russian-controlled detention centers and has been largely aimed at extracting information from people accused of being informants for the Ukrainian Army, Mr. Mose said. He quoted one victim who recounted being given electric shocks for what “felt like an eternity” after every answer “that I didn’t know or didn’t remember something.”
In some cases, Mr. Mose added, “torture was inflicted with such brutality that it caused the death of the victim.”
Russian soldiers in the Kherson region also raped and committed other acts of sexual violence against women ranging from 19 to 83 years old, the commission found.
“Frequently, family members were kept in an adjacent room, thereby forced to hear the violations taking place,” Mr. Mose told the Human Rights Council.
The findings of the commission are based on repeated visits to Ukraine, the most recent of which ended in early September and included stops in Kyiv, the capital, and Uman, a city in central Ukraine where a Russian rocket hit a residential building in April, killing two dozen people.
The commission, which previously identified a “few” cases of violations by Ukrainian forces and urged the Ukrainian authorities to thoroughly investigate, said it had seen “continuous evidence” of Russian war crimes.
The panel is still investigating the scope of Russian abuses — for example, Mr. Mose said, whether torture by Russian forces amounted to a crime against humanity and whether some of the wartime rhetoric from Russian state media constituted incitement to genocide.
All of the commission’s attempts to communicate with Russian authorities remain unanswered, Mr. Mose said.
Comments