More civilian deaths, tortured people, sexual violence, which amount to war crimes but also the theft of countless cultural property: UN investigators drew up a new damning assessment on Friday of the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine for more than two years. The commission of inquiry established by the Human Rights Council found “new evidence that the Russian authorities violated international human rights, international humanitarian laws and committed corresponding war crimes”, after 16 new visits to Ukraine and interviews with 422 women and 394 men to establish the facts published Friday.
“The Commission is concerned by the scale, persistence and seriousness of the violations and crimes it investigated as well as their impact on victims and affected communities,” insists the new report, which complements previous investigations of the Commission published last year. It “confirms its previous conclusions, according to which the multiplicity of these attacks (in Ukraine, editor’s note) testifies to the disdain on the part of the Russian armed forces for the damage that can be caused to civilians”, underline the investigators.
Systematic torture
“New evidence reinforces the Commission’s previous findings that torture used by Russian authorities in Ukraine and the Russian Federation is widespread and systematic,” they add. The new report describes in particular the “horrific treatment” inflicted on Ukrainian prisoners of war in several detention centers in the Russian Federation.
It also documents “rape and other sexual violence inflicted on women in circumstances that amount to torture” and the investigation made it possible “to find additional evidence of the illegal transfer of children in areas under Russian control”. For the first time, investigators also looked into the fate of cultural objects and archives in the occupied territories. They specifically investigated the city of Kherson.
“Russian authorities transferred cultural objects from the Kherson Regional Art Museum and provincial archives” to Crimea, annexed in 2014 by Moscow. “According to estimates by the staff of the two institutions, more than 10,000 objects from the Museum and 70% of the documents from the main building of the State Archives have been removed,” the report highlights. Local authorities cited the need to protect these objects from destruction.
For investigators, the authorities committed a war crime by seizing Ukrainian property, in particular through a law adopted in March 2023 which stipulates that these seized property and archives now belong to Russia.