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Evidence shows Russian troops committed war crimes near Kyiv: Amnesty Int'l

06.05.2022 14:30
Evidence shows that Russian forces committed multiple war crimes, including extrajudicial executions of civilians, when they occupied areas northwest of Ukraine's capital earlier this year, Amnesty International said on Friday.
Protesters at an anti-war rally in Berlin, Germany, on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.
Protesters at an anti-war rally in Berlin, Germany, on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.Photo: EPA/FILIP SINGER

Ukrainian civilians also suffered abuses such as "reckless shootings and torture" at the hands of Russian forces during their failed onslaught on Kyiv in February and March, the rights group said in a report, as cited by the Reuters news agency.

"These are not isolated incidents," Donatella Rovera, Amnesty's senior crisis response adviser, told a news conference in Kyiv, according to Reuters.

"These are very much part of a pattern wherever Russian forces were in control of a town or a village," she was quoted as saying.

She added that information collected by the group could help hold the perpetrators to account, "if not today," then "one day in the future," Reuters reported.

Canadian lawmakers last month voted unanimously to label Moscow's assault on Ukraine as "genocide," saying there was "ample evidence of systemic and massive war crimes against humanity" committed by Russian forces.

The top war crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has said that Ukraine has become "a crime scene" amid Russia's brutal invasion of the country.

Polish President Andrzej Duda said on a visit to Kyiv in mid-April with his Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian counterparts that “those responsible for crimes against the Ukrainian people must be punished by international tribunals.”

He appealed for “sanctions that will exclude Russia” from the international community.

Poland’s upper-house Speaker, Tomasz Grodzki, said after returning from Kyiv two days later that "the Russian devastation of Ukraine" and atrocities committed there were "much more terrible" than he and others could have imagined before visiting the war-torn country.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in early April that Russian war crimes in Ukraine were “the darkest chapter in the history of 21st-century Europe” and urged an international inquiry into the atrocities.

(gs)

Source: PAP, Reuters