The United Nations accuses both the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces of a total of 40 summary executions of prisoners of war, in addition to torture and ill-treatment that also reportedly resulted in deaths, according to a report made public yesterday.
According to the head of the UN human rights mission, Matilda Bogner, 25 executions of Russian soldiers by Ukrainian troops have been documented, “often” carried out “immediately after their capture on the battlefield”. For their part, Russian forces killed 15 Ukrainian soldiers “shortly after” their capture. Of these, 11 were executed by the Wagner paramilitary group, said Bogner, whose mission has been working in Ukraine since 2014.
The report is based on interviews with some 400 soldiers, half of them Ukrainians who were released (more precisely, exchanged) and the other half Russians still imprisoned in Ukraine. The investigative team did not have access to areas of the country controlled by Russian forces, where 48 prison camps have been identified.
Another nine cases of dead Ukrainian soldiers were documented, five of them as a result of torture and four due to not receiving medical attention in detention centers.
Russian prisoners reportedly received mock executions, threats of death or sexual violence, and beatings. "Before the interrogation they showed me an ax handle covered in blood," said a prisoner who claimed to have been tortured with electric shocks. The same is true of Ukrainian prisoners, "some of whom have lost their teeth or fingers, or have had their ribs, fingers or nose broken."
We must also remember two videos in which Russian soldiers were apparently shot just at the moment of surrendering and the recent video of a Ukrainian soldier imprisoned in a forest who smoked his last cigarette and was shot.
All the cases cited would constitute war crimes. In this sense, precisely last Thursday an agreement was signed in The Hague between the Ukrainian Attorney General, Andrí Kostin, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), for the establishment of an office of this court in Kyiv.
The agreement comes a week after ICC arrest warrants were issued against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's presidential commissioner for Children's Rights, for the alleged deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia or territories under Russian control, a matter which also mentions the UN human rights report. According to him, some 200 children from the Kharkiv region, when it was partially occupied, have not returned from the summer camp in Russia to which they were sent. Russian authorities acknowledged in October that some 2,500 Ukrainian children were living in some kind of center in Russia, apparently on a temporary basis, but the UN mission notes that it is far from clear under what circumstances they are and how many of them were transferred to Russian territory with their parents.
