A report compiles the agency’s first verifications of murder, torture and rape and warns that “it will take years to understand the full scale of sexual violence” unleashed in this war
The United Nations has begun to write its own diary of the brutality of the war in Ukraine. Investigators have certified at least 300 summary executions of civilians in the first month of war in areas occupied by the Russian Army. This number does not include the death of citizens due to combat or due to ill-treatment or medical neglect. And what’s worse, the report warns that its data is possibly just the tip of the iceberg of a much more savage and inhumane reality. In fact, in the case of sexual assaults, its chilling account of gang rapes, forced nudity in public and threats of sexual violence by Russian, but also to a lesser extent Ukrainian, military, the UN stresses: “Understanding the full scale of sexual violence in this context could take years.
The war between Ukraine and Russia is also in the numerical field. The figures of victims dance depending on the source. Experts believe that it will be necessary to wait until the end of the conflict to objectively clarify the cost in lives of the invasion and, even so, there will still be a considerable margin of missing persons. Resident testimonies collected in cities such as Bucha or Mariúpol refer to the burial of corpses in mass graves whose location is unknown, the cremation of bodies to make evidence of war crimes disappear, or volatilization in cases such as the latest Russian bombing of a Kremenchuk shopping mall, where dozens of customers appear to have been consumed by fire. That is, sinister factors that feed a margin of uncertainty. The UN recognizes that the data from these first verifications will fall short, but they have the virtue of corroborating that hell exists and that it is currently devouring Eastern Europe. “Civilians continue to bear the burden of hostilities,” said the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, during the presentation of the document, Bogner also warns of the “serious deterioration in the situation of human rights in the country”, where complaints of ill-treatment or arbitrary detention take place.
From the beginning of the occupation on February 24 to May 15, the United Nations has confirmed the existence of 10,000 civilian victims, including 4,731 who were killed. He warns, however, that the teams continue to find evidence of crimes and new graves. The death toll has also accelerated in recent weeks as Russia has stepped up attacks in Donbas. The statistics are, however, below the estimates of the Government of kyiv, whose calculations indicate that only in the martyred Mariúpol at least 5,000 people would have lost their lives.
The “summary executions of civilians” reveal that the beginning of the war was a whirlwind of inhumanity, blood and terror. The report records 300 executions in the first month of the invasion alone. Ukraine sees in this cruelty an intention of the occupying forces to sow panic with the frustrated aim of accelerating the fall of the country. The murders would have taken place in more than thirty settlements in the kyiv, Chernigov, Kharkov and Sumy regions. The investigation continues in all of them and the international agency believes that the number of executions that took place in those weeks will increase significantly.
In his day, the neighbors already offered enlightening accounts of the behavior of some Russian units in their search for “Nazis”, shooting at adults capable of carrying a weapon. A month ago, an investigation by the ‘New York Times’ brought to light a video recorded in the city of Bucha where the execution of eight men blindfolded and with their hands behind their necks can be seen. It happened on March 4. All of them were civilians who lived a few meters from the wall that the riflemen used to shoot them. In Bucha, 50 cases identical to this one have been documented. “The daily killing of civilians, torture, disappearances and other violations must end. If hostilities do not stop, the minimum required is to fully respect Humanitarian Law and commit to protecting all civilian women, men and children and those who are not fighting» explained Matilda Bogner during the presentation of the report.
But the conflict in the former republic shows that there are no possible minimums. The investigations, carried out by an international team in which a group of Spanish forensic experts participate, give rise to knowledge of numerous infractions of the rules of war. These rules “were not respected on numerous occasions by the Russian forces, and to a lesser extent by the Ukrainian ones”, which “has increased the number of civilian victims and the damage to civilian objects”. In other more technical words, the soldiers have skipped basic principles for the protection of the population such as “distinction” and “precaution”, which would have increased the number of citizens killed due to urban clashes and indiscriminate bombing. The most tragic and well-known example is that of the Mariupol theater, where Russian missiles killed between 300 and 600 civilian refugees in their basement.
The United Nations has verified that the two armies have committed violations of Humanitarian Law in the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians. There are complaints of torture, ill-treatment or medical neglect and the agency has confirmed 248 cases of arbitrary arrests of local politicians, activists and journalists that sometimes ended with forced disappearances attributed to Russian troops and separatist groups in Donetsk and Lugansk. A bad ending: the bodies of six of them were found days later. The UN does not save the Ukrainian militias from this type of acts and denounces that they committed a dozen “kidnappings” of citizens suspected of supporting the invading Army.
The notaries of terror do not fare well in the war either. The United Nations counts seventeen journalists and bloggers killed in the first three months of fighting and warns of a “drastic” cutback in the freedoms of information and expression. It concludes with a request for justice for all the victims in what can be presumed as a clear support for the intervention of an international tribunal on war crimes. “Those responsible must be held accountable and the victims and their families must enjoy their rights to remedy and truth,” said the head of the Human Rights Monitoring Mission.
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