The UN has made investigating human rights abuses in the war a priority, and in May its top human rights body ordered a team of experts to begin working in the country. Since then, UN investigators have risked their lives to collect evidence of crimes committed against civilians, including in areas still threatened by enemy forces or mined. The panel of three independent experts presented its first oral briefing to the UN human rights council on Friday after starting initial investigations into the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, adding that it would expand its investigations. Speaking a day before the seven-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, Erik Mose, head of the investigative team, told the council that, based on the evidence gathered by the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, it “concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine”. The team of researchers visited 27 cities and settlements, as well as graves and detention and torture centers. interviewed more than 150 victims and witnesses. and met with advocacy groups and government officials. Mose said the team was particularly struck by the high number of executions in the areas we visited and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind the back, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”. It added that it is investigating such deaths in 16 cities and towns and has received credible allegations of many more cases that it will seek to document. Investigators had also received “consistent reports of ill-treatment and torture carried out during unlawful detention”, the council was told. In the settlements of Bucha, Hostomel and Borodyanka, which were occupied for about a month by Russian troops, Ukrainian investigators found dozens of mass graves where the bodies of civilians, tortured and murdered, had been buried. Since the Russians withdrew from the area, a group of young volunteers has worked tirelessly to exhume the bodies and send them to forensics who are collecting evidence of crimes committed by Russian troops. Some of the victims had told investigators they were taken to Russia and held for weeks in prisons. Others had “disappeared” after such transfers. “Interlocutors described beatings, electric shocks and forced nudity, as well as other types of violations in such detention facilities,” Mose said. Mose said the team had also “handled two incidents of ill-treatment of Russian Federation soldiers by Ukrainian forces”, adding that “although they are few in number, such cases continue to be the subject of our attention”. He said investigators had also documented cases of sexual and gender-based violence, in some cases proving that Russian soldiers were the perpetrators. “There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes,” he said. “In the cases we investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gender-based violence ranged from four to 82 years old.” The commission had documented a wide range of crimes against children, Mose added, including children who were “raped, tortured and illegally confined”. In late April, coroners told the Guardian they found evidence that some of the women were raped before being killed by Russian forces. “We already have a few cases that suggest these women were raped before being shot to death,” Vladyslav Perovskyi, a Ukrainian medical examiner who has performed dozens of autopsies on people from Bucha, Irpin and Borodyanka, told the Guardian. At least two men on a list of accused Russian war criminals released by Ukrainian prosecutors are accused of sexual assault and rape. Mose, in his report to the council, also pointed to the “use of explosive weapons by the Russian Federation with wide-area effects in populated areas”, which he said was “a source of enormous damage and suffering to civilians”. The UN stressed that some attacks investigated by the group “were carried out indiscriminately between civilians and combatants”, including attacks with cluster munitions, banned by most of the world under a 2008 treaty. Since the beginning of Moscow’s invasion, Russian troops have been accused of using various illegal weapons that have killed hundreds of civilians in the Ukrainian region of Kiev, including highly powerful unguided bombs in residential areas, which have destroyed at least eight civilian buildings. According to evidence, cluster munitions were fired in areas where there were no military personnel and military infrastructure. The commission’s work could eventually feed into the work of international criminal tribunals that could indict Ukraine for war crimes, although it remains uncertain whether Russia or other alleged perpetrators will ever face justice. In a separate development, Ukrainian officials said on Friday that some 436 bodies had been exhumed from a burial ground in the recently recaptured city of Izium and that at least 30 of them showed signs of torture. Mose said, “This is of course a new incident, but we definitely plan to look into the Izium incident as well.”
