A 14-year-old boy killed in a summary execution.
Girls as young as 4 and women as old as 82 are victims of sexual violence.
A priest brutally beaten, then stripped and forced to parade naked through the streets of his village for an hour.
These are among the nightmarish discoveries of a new Report supported by the UN published on Thursday which revealed that Russia had committed war crimes and likely crimes against humanity during its year-long invasion of Ukraine.
The three international experts appointed to serve as investigators for the Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry into Ukraine have concluded that Russia is guilty of serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. ‘male.
These included indiscriminate shelling of areas inhabited by civilians and targeted attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as well as torture, kidnapping, summary executions and rape.
“The Commission is concerned about the number, geographic distribution and gravity of human rights violations and corresponding international crimes that it has documented during its mandate,” the investigators wrote in their report. “These touched men, women, boys and girls from all walks of life and of all ages.”
The report is likely to have little practical effect on Russia, but it will increase pressure for the country to be held accountable by the International Criminal Court.
At the very least, the report also functions as a historical record of abuses by Russia, which failed to cooperate with the investigation.
As a man whose father was executed by members of the Russian army in a village in the Kharkiv region told investigators: “They punished innocent people; now those who are guilty, if still alive, must be punished to the fullest extent possible.