Still more rapes.
Still more torture.
More civilian deaths.
UN investigators drew up a damning new assessment this Friday of the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for 750 days.
The commission of inquiry created 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 sixteen new visits to Ukraine and interviews with 422 women and 394 men to establish the facts published this 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.
“New evidence”
“New evidence” supports investigations into “widespread and systematic” torture used in Ukraine and the Russian Federation against opponents.
Last Friday, Alice Jill Edwards, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, clarified that of the nearly 103,000 cases opened by the Ukrainian prosecutor on war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil, 90% were cases of torture.
In February 2023, a little over a year ago, the latest count from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General reported 66,000 war crimes recorded, not including regions under Russian control.
Last year, after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, torture rooms were discovered in a former regional police headquarters.
Pro-Ukraine civilians were locked up and tortured there for days.
Abuse and sexual assault were allegedly inflicted there.
The new report describes in particular the “horrific treatment” inflicted on Ukrainian prisoners of war in several detention centers in the Russian Federation.
Also read: Two years of war in Ukraine: the new face of the conflict
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”.
Last February, eleven Ukrainian children were able to leave Russia for Ukraine, thanks to the mediation of Qatar, but thousands of families are waiting to be able to reunite with their children.
The International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and Russian Children's Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for "war crimes" due to this transfer policy, described as a war crime by the UN.
The spoliation of cultural property examined for the first time
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, implying that they would be returned at the end of the war.
But a law adopted in March 2023 stipulates that the seized property and archives now belong to Russia.