Russian forces committed horrific war crimes in Ukraine, such as rape and torture, and sometimes even made the families of victims watch, UN investigators find https://www.businessinsider.com/rus...ed-raped-children-un-investigation-2022-9?amp
Russian military commanders ordered soldiers to commit sexual violence in Ukraine, war crimes investigator says https://news.yahoo.com/russian-mili...ed-soldiers-144255788.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall Russian commanders are aware of sexual violence committed by soldiers, says war crimes investigator. In some case they even condoned it or ordered it, lawyer Wayne Jordash told Reuters. The UN has documented dozens of alleged cases of rape by Russian forces in Ukraine. Russian commanders knew about sexual violence committed by their personnel in Ukraine and in some cases condoned or even ordered it, a war crimes investigator has said. Wayne Jordash, a British lawyer who is assisting investigators as they gather evidence of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, told Reuters that some of the sexual violence committed "speaks to planning on a more systematic level." Jordash declined to provide specific names of those he believed to be involved, reported Reuters, and said that the extent of sexual violence was unknown at this stage because of ongoing investigations in parts of northeastern and south Ukraine recently retaken by Ukrainian forces. However, the patterns suggest that sexual violence "may be even more frequent" in territories that were occupied for longer periods, he told Reuters. A UN-mandated investigation published last month claimed that Russian forces had committed widespread sexual violence in Ukraine since the invasion began in February, with victims ranging in age from four to 80 years old. "Sexual violence has affected victims of all ages. Victims, including children, were sometimes forced to witness the crimes," the report said. Reuters said it had interviewed more than 20 people who worked with alleged victims, as well as one victim and the family members of another. According to their accounts there were overlapping similarities, with attacks taking place at gunpoint, with family members forced to watch, and multiple soldiers participating. US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack said this week that the "systemic" nature of Russian atrocities in Ukraine suggested that they were being condoned by senior figures in the Kremlin. Jordash, in an interview with Insider earlier this year, said that evidence was emerging that atrocities by Russian forces in Ukraine constituted genocide. Russia has denied its forces have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. However, organizations including the International Criminal Court are investigating allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
More wholesale kidnapping of children by Putin's Russians. Russians prepare to deport 10,500 Ukrainian children from Luhansk Oblast https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/11/26/7378097/ The Russian invaders have prepared 10,500 Ukrainian children for deportation to Russia from the occupied territory of Luhansk Oblast. Quote: "The Russian occupation administration in the temporarily occupied territory of Luhansk Oblast has reported that in-depth medical check-ups have been conducted for 15,000 children between 2 and 17 years old. Medical workers, brought from Russia, have claimed in their documentation of those examinations that 70% of these children "require special medical assistance". This conclusion is used by the Russians to justify the deportation of children to the territory of the Russian Federation. At first, [the children - ed.] are accommodated in specialised health institutions. Then, their return home is getting delayed for various trumped up reasons in order to encourage their parents to come visit their children. Afterwards, the families are forbidden to return to Ukrainian territory." Details: By way of example, members of the Ukrainian underground resistance have noted that more than 1,500 people from the occupied territory of Kherson Oblast have been relocated to the Feya-3 (Fairy-3) boarding house in the city of Anapa (Krasnodarsk Krai, Russia). Citizens of Ukraine are being persuaded to apply for Russian passports and open accounts in Russian banks, allegedly to receive social welfare benefits. Additionally, the Russians have already brought six mobile medical stations to the temporarily occupied territories of Kherson Oblast. These are special lorries, equipped to function as mobile medical diagnostic facilities. The occupiers are trying to replace Ukrainians with Russians in the occupied territories as fast as possible. The National Resistance Center calls on the residents of the temporarily occupied territories not to allow the Russian doctors to examine Ukrainian children in order to avoid becoming subject to deportation. "Save the children from the Russians’ villainy; if you are able to, leave the region. Let’s home after the liberation!" the National Resistance Center highlighted.
GRAPHIC WARNING - pictures of the hanged civilians; one of them with blood that indicates torture before death.
Time to bring back the Nuremberg tribunal. Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for Putin war crimes tribunal https://thehill.com/policy/internat...e-winner-calls-for-putin-war-crimes-tribunal/ Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Oleksandra Matviichuk called for a special international tribunal to put Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military leaders on trial for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Matviichuk, who has documented around 27,000 war crimes in Ukraine, told Yahoo News that world leaders “cannot wait” to establish such an organization to hold Putin to account. “We don’t need revenge. We need justice,” she said in an interview published Wednesday. “I’ve asked myself, ‘For whom did we document all these crimes? Who will provide justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims?’” Matviichuk, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, is set to be honored in Oslo, Norway, this weekend along with a human rights group in Russia and a jailed activist in Belarus, who all shared the Nobel Peace Prize this year. The Belarusian winner’s wife will receive the award on his behalf. The Center for Civil Liberties, founded in 2007 and based in Kyiv, has worked extensively to document war crimes in Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine, as well as the forced relocation of Ukrainians to Russia. Matviichuk spoke with Yahoo while in Washington, D.C., to receive an honorary award from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University along with other Ukrainian women, including Olena Zelenska. Matviichuk said the International Court of Justice was incapable of holding Putin accountable and called for a special tribunal similar to the Nuremberg trials to put Nazi leaders on trial after World War II. “Putin will stop only when he will be stopped,” she said. “Because if we will not be able to stop Putin in Ukraine, he will go further.” Matviichuk argued the Russian leader “sees civilized dialogue as a sign of weakness.” “It’s a question of how to physically arrest Vladimir Putin,” she said. “But look to history. There are a lot of successful and very convincing examples, when people who see themselves as untouchable suddenly appeared in court.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/13/europe/russian-defector-war-crimes-intl-cmd/index.html ‘There are maniacs who enjoy killing,’ Russian defector says of his former unit accused of war crimes in Bucha By Fred Pleitgen, Claudia Otto and Ivana Kottasová, CNN Updated 4:53 AM EST, Wed December 14, 2022 Nikita Chibrin says he still remembers his fellow Russian soldiers running away after allegedly raping two Ukrainian women during their deployment northwest of Kyiv in March. “I saw them run, then I learned they were rapists. They raped a mother and a daughter,” he said. Their commanders, Chibrin said, shrugged when finding out about the rapes. The alleged rapists were beaten, he says, but never fully punished for their crimes. “They were never jailed. Just fired. Just like that: ‘Go!’ They were simply dismissed from the war. That’s it.” Chibrin is a former soldier from the Russian city of Yakutsk who says he served in the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, the notorious Russian military unit accused of committing war crimes during their offensive in Bucha, Borodianka and other towns and villages north of Kyiv. He deserted from the Russian military in September and fled to Europe via Belarus and Kazakhstan. Troops from Chibrin’s brigade were labeled war criminals by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in April after mass graves containing murdered civilians and dead bodies lying in the streets were discovered following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region. Chibrin’s military documents, seen by CNN, show his commander was Azatbek Omurbekov, the officer in charge of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade. Omurbekov, known as the “Butcher of Bucha” is under sanctions by the European Union and the United Kingdom. The United States have sanctioned the entire brigade. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the mass killings, while reiterating baseless claims that the images of civilian bodies were fake. In a move that sparked outrage across the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the unit an honorary military title and praised it for its “heroism” and “bold actions.” Chibrin said he didn’t see any of the supposed heroism, but many of the crimes. Speaking to CNN in a European country where he has requested asylum, he detailed some of the crimes he says he witnessed and heard accounts of, and said he’d be prepared to testify against his unit at an international criminal court. He maintains he himself didn’t commit any crimes. “I didn’t see murders but I saw rapists running away, being chased (by higher-ranking members of the unit) because they committed rape,” he said. Nikita Chibrin wearing his military uniform. He also said that the unit had a “direct command to murder” anyone sharing information about the unit’s positions, whether military or civilians. “If someone had a phone – we were allowed to shoot them,” he said. He claims there is little doubt some of the men in the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade were capable of killing unarmed civilians. “There are maniacs who enjoy killing a man. Such maniacs turned up there,” he said. Chibrin also described widespread looting, with Russian soldiers taking computers, jewelry and anything they liked. “They didn’t hide this at all. A lot from my unit, when we left Lipovka and Andreevka in the end of March, they took cars, vehicles, they took civilian cars and sold them in Belarus,” he said. “The mentality is, if you steal something, you are good. If nobody catches you, good! If you see something that is expensive and you steal it and don’t get caught, you are good.” As for the unit’s commanders, he said they were well aware of the alleged rapes and murders and of the looting, but took little interest in seeking justice. “They reacted like: ‘Whatever. It happened. So what?’ Actually, there was no reaction,” he said. “Discipline goes [down the drain], there’s no discipline.” CNN has asked the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment on the allegations, but has not received a response. Chibrin has no doubt that Russia will eventually lose its war against Ukraine, but not until many more lives are lost. “Because Russia won’t stop until big blood is spilled, until everyone dies. Soldiers are cannon fodder to them. They don’t respect them,” he said. Having seen the fighting first hand, he said the equipment Russian soldiers have is no match for the weapons to which Ukraine has access. He says that while Ukraine is receiving some of the most advanced weaponry available from its Western allies, the Russian army is relying on Soviet-era equipment used during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “Of course Russia will lose. Because the whole world is supporting Ukraine. To think that they (the Russians) will win is stupid,” he said. “They thought they would occupy Kyiv in three days. What day is it now [of the war]? 260th? They thought they would come to Ukraine and be met with flowers. But they were told to f*** off and thrown Molotov cocktails at.” ‘They lied to us’ Men in his unit were also extremely ill-prepared for combat, according to Chibrin. He said the training his unit received consisted of commanders giving them a weapon, a target and 5,000 bullets. “Keep shooting and then you are free to go. No one was doing anything. There was no actual training. I worked with a computer, at the office, worked as a lawnmower…” he said. The lack of training became obvious once in Ukraine. The same men who were boasting about being “like Rambo” before they were deployed came back broken, he said. “Those who said they’d be shooting Ukrainians easily, when they come back from the front lines … they could not even speak to me. They saw the war, they saw defeat, saw their [fellow] combatants being murdered, saw corpses. They realized – but they couldn’t run away.” He said many of the men were poorly trained and most had no idea where they were headed. “It was a big lie. It was a military training with the Belarusian army. And they lied to us. On February 24 they just said everyone will go to war,” Chibrin said, adding that he initially refused to go. “The first thing I said was, ‘Commander, f*** you, I don’t want to go to the war’ and he said, ‘Hey you, you will have big problems, you will go to jail and your family will have big problems’ … and he attacked me and put me in a special vehicle and closed the door. And I couldn’t open [it] from inside. So, that’s how I went to Ukraine.” Chibrin went on to spend months in Ukraine, on and off. When the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade withdrew at the end of March from the area northwest of Kyiv, following the failed offensive there, he and his unit returned to Belarus. He said he was suffering from a back injury and went to a military hospital in Russia, but was forced to go back to Ukraine in May. This time he was sent to the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine, and then spent time in the forests around Izyum. It was then that he finally found a chance to escape, he said. He noticed that commanders of other units were leaving the area for Russia in a truck and jumped in. “I jump in [the bed of the truck] and I see, wow, other guys, also leaving Ukraine. And they say we don’t want to [fight the] war, we paid the commander money (to drive). And I am waiting and waiting and then we are near to the Russia border and the car is stopped and the guys are jumping off and I am also jumping off. And I go to the Russia border and I say I need the medical help,” he said. Once back in Russia, Chibrin said he spent nearly a month in hospital, most of that being bedridden with terrible back pain. But he said he was unable to get proper treatment. “They said that if I wanted to go to a special sanatorium, I needed to sign a paper that said I’d go back to war,” he said. Refusing to sign, Chibrin said he was getting ready to submit paperwork to get his military contract canceled when the Russian government announced a partial mobilization in September. “And my friends told me I needed to hide. ‘You need to find place and hide, your contract will not be canceled because of the mobilization,” he said. Knowing he needed to get as far as possible from the far east city of Khabarovsk where he was stationed, Chibrin first fled across Russia to St. Petersburg and then took a train to Belarus. Once there he was able to find an intermediary who helped him get to Kazakhstan from where he ultimately traveled to his current location. Now he is determined to speak up about the events he witnessed in Ukraine, even writing an anti-war song. “Hundreds of souls, hundreds of bodies of lost people. Hundreds of mothers without children,” the chorus goes. Eugene Shapovalov and Katharina Krebs contributed reporting.
Just Putin kidnapping more children. Vladimir Putin Accused Of 'Trapping' 5 Thousand Ukrainian Children In Crimean Summer Camps To Use As 'Bargaining Chips' In Ongoing War https://radaronline.com/p/vladimir-...en-crimean-summer-camps-bargaining-chips-war/
Kidnapping and deporting children... nothing more than ethnic cleansing. Mother Russia: Maria Lvova-Belova, the Putin ally deporting Ukrainian children Vladimir Putin’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, claims to be the “saviour” of children caught up in the war in Ukraine. Her compassionate rhetoric conceals a sinister plan to deport Ukrainian children from territories occupied by Russia’s invading forces. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/...a-the-putin-ally-deporting-ukrainian-children