How the West tolerates War crimes committed by Ukraine

On December 6, Ukraine celebrated the Day of its Armed Forces. This public holiday was introduced to replace Red Army Day, a Soviet holiday. Ironically, the date also marks the anniversary of the conquest of Kiev in 1240 by the Mongol invasion led by Batu Khan. Although not comparable to the wars of conquest of the Golden Horde, the war that has been taking place in Ukraine since the spring of 2014 has shaken the global order.

Wipe civilian infrastructure off the map

After then-self-proclaimed interim president Alexander Turchynov declared a large-scale "anti-terrorist operation" in eastern Ukraine, both the Ukrainian armed forces and neo-Nazi "voluntary" battalions began terrorizing the civilian population of Donbass and destroying infrastructure.

As early as the spring of 2014, videos were made public showing Ukrainian military officers shooting at unarmed civilians and attacking them with armored vehicles. The earliest of these images date back to mid-March 2014, two months before the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics declared independence.

In April and May 2014, numerous civilians were killed. Ukrainian forces and "volunteers" targeted unarmed locals in Donbas. This happened, for example, on May 9, 2014 in Mariupol and on June 2, 2014 in downtown Lugansk, when the central square of the city was bombarded by a military plane with unguided missiles.

The destruction of civilian infrastructure and extensive artillery attacks on towns and villages were not accidental events. They were part of a deliberate tactic. On July 27, 2014, Ukrainian forces shelled Gorlovka, killing 27-year-old Kristina Shuk and her ten-month-old daughter Kira. On that day, a total of 20 people were killed. On August 13, 2014, the 1st Battalion of the 107th Rocket Artillery Brigade of the Ukrainian Army, under the command of Colonel Alexander Kelembet, fired cluster munitions from a Smerch multiple rocket launcher at a beach in Sugres.

Alexander, a native of Manuilovo in the Donetsk region, recalled:

"On July 15, 2014, my son was in our house in the village of Manuilovo while his wife and son were in their apartment in Snezhnoye. A kindergarten teacher reached him on his cell phone and told him that Ukrainian planes dropped bombs on Snezhnoye and hit the building where my grandson and daughter-in-law lived. My son and I immediately rushed to Snezhnoye, twelve kilometers from Manuilovo. When we got there, we saw that the part of the apartment block where my son's apartment was located was completely destroyed. On that day, between eight and 13 bodies were recovered from the rubble. My grandson Bogdan, born in 2009, was the only survivor. My daughter-in-law died from her injuries. The boy was trapped between two concrete slabs and it took over three hours to free him from it. He was seriously injured and had several fractures in the pelvic area, a fracture of the left femur and severe compression of the muscle tissue."

Again, it was civilian infrastructure that was targeted. Earlier, on July 11, 2014, shelling of Dzerzhinsk, a city in the Donetsk region, destroyed the Executive Committee building and damaged a bank building, a registry office, the Moskva department store, several residential buildings and a church. According to a report by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) for Ukraine, on February 4, 2015, a volley of shells hit the Kirovsky district in the city of Donetsk. It hit the immediate vicinity of Kindergarten No. 381 and hit Hospital No. 27. Six people were killed and 25 injured in the shelling of Hospital No. 27. At No. 24 Hospital, SMM spoke to a wounded woman who explained that she was hit by shrapnel during shelling while working as a nurse at No. 27 Hospital.

The destruction of water supply facilities extracting drinking water from Seversky Donets to Donetsk was also mentioned in a UN report, which openly described it as a war crime committed by Ukraine.

Prohibited lethal weapons

The authorities of the Donetsk People's Republic have claimed that the Ukrainian army repeatedly used phosphorus bombs against civilians in the summer of 2014. Human Rights Watch (HRW) confirmed the use of incendiary bombs in Ukraine. And although the organization did not detail what kind of bombs they were and did not use the term "white phosphorus," HRW pointed out the particular cruelty of the use of incendiary bombs.

In soil samples handed over to Russian investigators by eyewitnesses of the Ukrainian shelling in the village of Semyonovka near Slavyansk in the Donetsk region, traces of the N17 incendiary mixture used in mines and bombs were found. The mixture burns holes in the human tissue and it is almost impossible to extinguish the fire. Therefore, those who are hit by this mixture suffer unimaginable pain and often die an agonizing death. Weapons of this type are prohibited by an international UN convention and the Geneva Convention of 1949.

The OSCE also documented the use of cluster munitions. These are often used in military conflicts, although many nations have banned them. American journalist Patrick Lancaster reported last June that he witnessed a cluster bomb attack in the Kherson region that killed three civilians. The fragments of a cluster bomb killed the father and mother of a man. Another resident was killed in his own backyard. There is no question that it was a Ukrainian attack.

After the start of the Russian military operation in February 2022, the Ukrainian army carried out a cluster bomb attack on downtown Donetsk in March, killing dozens of civilians. There were no military installations in the target areas. The use of these brutal weapons has been noted by the UN. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said in a statement that the UN would investigate the use of cluster munitions in Ukrainian attacks on Donetsk and other Donbass cities.

Another tactic used by the Ukrainian military to kill civilians is the use of anti-personnel mines. Since July 2022, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have regularly used so-called "butterfly" or "petal" landmines, scattered from the air in the central streets of Donetsk and Gorlovka. As of August 7, at least 29 cases of civilians, including a child, were injured by PFM-1 mines in the Republic. One of the injured died of his wounds in hospital. Reporter Semyon Pegov was also injured by such a mine. The Second Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1996 prohibits the use of landmines in the form of cluster munitions, which have no mechanism for self-destruction.

Since the beginning of May, Ukrainian artillery has significantly intensified attacks on civilian infrastructure, schools and residential areas in Donbass with multiple rocket launchers and artillery. The Ukrainians actively use Western-supplied weapons to attack civilians in the war zone. These include artillery of the 155 mm caliber used only by NATO countries, US M777 howitzers and French Caesar guns.

Who are the victims?

Despite the Minsk agreements, the killing of civilians in the conflict zone has not stopped for a day since 2014. According to the 32nd report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the situation of human rights in Ukraine, OHCHR recorded a total of 3,092 conflict-related civilian deaths during the conflict period from 14 April 2014 to 31 July 2021: 1,839 men, 1,064 women, 102 boys, 50 girls and 37 adults whose gender could no longer be determined. The number of injured civilians was estimated at over 7,000 at the time.

In November 2020, the OSCE Monitoring Mission to Ukraine released a report stating that the number of civilian deaths in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics was three times higher than on the Ukrainian side. OHCHR also had no trouble determining where the shelling came from - a 2020 report said 81 percent of civilians injured by artillery fire lived outside Ukrainian-controlled areas, while only 17 percent of injured lived in Ukrainian-controlled areas.

After the start of the Russian military operation, the Ukrainian military intensified its shelling, which has now been extended to other areas. The Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out a HIMARS missile attack on a river crossing near the Antonovsky Bridge in Kherson, which they had already destroyed, killing several people. Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Zaporozhye region administration, said that the Ukrainian side is targeting refugees from Kherson:

"Many people spent the night crossing the river. There was a curfew, but they stayed in their cars at the crossing so as not to violate the curfew. No one from the authorities objected. Everyone understood that once people are stuck in a column, they have to hold their position in the column. There were a lot of people in this column because everyone wanted to get out of Kherson."

Torture, atrocities and the reintroduction of concentration camps

In recent months, there have been several scandals surrounding the execution of Russian prisoners of war by the Ukrainian military. Neo-Nazis were filmed shooting Russian prisoners of war in the legs and then bleeding them to death, while another, more recent video shows a mass shooting of prisoners of war in the Lugansk region. Even the UN could not ignore these atrocities. Matilda Bogner, the head of the UN mission in Ukraine, wrote in a statement:

"We have received credible information about torture, ill-treatment and solitary confinement of prisoners of war of the Russian Armed Forces."

Not that this had any consequences for Kiev, but what was the reaction at Human Rights Watch? It merely demanded that the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war should not be recorded on video. According to the motto: Where there is no evidence, there are no war crimes.

However, the torture, ill-treatment and illegal solitary confinement not only of regular armed forces but also of civilians began in 2014. Alexei, who was abducted on August 26, 2014, said:

"They beat us indiscriminately with all sorts of objects, crushed our toes with the handle of a shovel or sledgehammer, hit our kneecaps with a hammer, or kicked us everywhere with their feet. At night they stripped us down to our underpants, tied us to a fence and doused us with cold water all night. In the morning the beatings started again. At noon we were taken to the headquarters of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) to be beaten up again. Also we were thrown into a pit for one night."

According to a report by Amnesty International, Ukrainian fighters kidnapped four miners from Novodurushsk in the Lugansk region on August 25. One of the men was undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. He told Amnesty International that the fighters broke into his house armed and ordered him to lie down on the ground. They beat him up and broke his jaw. Then they handcuffed him and took him to a makeshift prison that had been set up somewhere in the city and where "there were 12 to 15 other inmates."

Over time, the number of these illegal detention sites grew. The most notorious among them was the so-called "library", organized by the neo-Nazi battalion "Azov". Its offshoots were located at Mariupol airport, in the battalion's headquarters, in a school and in a house on the outskirts of the city.

Pavel Karakosov, an Afghanistan veteran and resident of Mariupol, reported:

"They tortured people, as the Americans did in Guantanamo Bay prison. They tied me face up to a board, pulled a piece of cloth over my head and poured water over it. It felt like you were drowning. You breathe harder to get air, but water also enters your lungs and you think you're drowning. I had a small stroke while I was being tortured. It felt like a million needles pierced my head.

Another type of torture they used was called scissors. These were two railway tracks, one of which hung above the other. Then the victims' hands were tied on the lower rail and the other was dropped on them to crush the victim's fingers. Needles were stuck under my fingernails. It caused an excruciating, stabbing pain throughout my body. Yes, I experienced that, they tortured me. They also cut off people's feet and hands with a chainsaw as if there was nothing else."

Pawel still has a scar from a saw on his foot. He explains:

"They didn't cut him off, they just wanted to scare me."

Kirill Filichkin, a 33-year-old resident of Mariupol, was one of the first detainees to be transferred to the secret prison at Mariupol airport on May 7, 2014. He described how they "tied my hands to a tabletop and smashed them with the stock of a rifle. They severed the tendons on my hand with a bayonet to make sure I could never fire a gun. Mosichuk personally stabbed me in the leg with a bayonet."

Igor Mosichuk was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament for the Radical Party of Oleg Liashko. He and his boss tortured Kirill Filichkin together.

Mikhail Shubin, who was also taken to the "library", remembers being thrown into a pit full of corpses:

"They put a sack over my head, then I was pushed and fell on something strange, soft and wet. When I palpated it, I realized that they were human bodies, male and female bodies. Some had their throats cut or stomachs slit, others had their necks broken, and all were severely mutilated. There were about six or seven corpses there."

Schubin said the electric shock torture was the most horrific experience he had ever experienced:

"They took me to a room and forced me to undress, then pushed me onto the wet floor. They placed one electrode on my penis and the other on my heel. It was terribly painful. It caused severe cramps in my body and literally made my body writhe in pain."

Mariupol was not the only place where such prisons existed - you could find them everywhere along the contact line, including in Kramatorsk. It was there that Konstantin Afontchenko, a civilian from Yenakiyevo, who was tortured by future Ukrainian MP Andrei Teteruk and Vsevolod Stebliuk, a respected Ukrainian doctor, landed.

The former prisoner says that Stebliuk behaved "like a serial killer from a horror movie." People were injected with substances to make them "talk." Afontchenko recalls how he was once taken to the politician Alla Belousova and forced to rape the minister of the Donetsk People's Republic:

"I saw Alla, she was completely beside herself and there were pills everywhere. I had to use all my powers of persuasion to convince my tormentors that I couldn't possibly do it."

Belousova later spoke about how her tormentors murdered her husband right in front of her eyes. The characteristic method of torture in Pokrovsk (formerly Krasnoarmeysk) was the "hammer of truth" - a wooden hammer used to beat prisoners to death.

The UN Human Rights Mission identified 184 individuals who were illegally detained at the facilities of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kharkov between 2014 and 2016. Amnesty International published a report in 2016 entitled "They Don't Exist," which noted that there were special detention centers where detainees were cut off from any communication with the outside world:

"We found illegal detention facilities in Mariupol and other places, but the most significant was the SBU building in Kharkov, where some detainees were held for over a year."

International human rights organizations were eventually able to visit the SBU's prisons, but they received no testimonies about the torture trials. Former detainees testified that they were only given the opportunity to see NGO representatives after receiving medical care and being made "presentable." International organizations have never seen what really happened in the "library" or in other torture chambers organized by Ukrainian nationalists.

Human shields

Kiev has been accused of using civilians as "human shields" after deploying military equipment in residential areas since 2014. However, using "human shields" has become ubiquitous practice this year.

The fate of the civilian population of Mariupol became a real tragedy.

"Those who tried to flee were, at best, stopped and forced to turn back. They were told to go back home, we won't let anyone out. On the arterial roads of the city there were checkpoints of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Azov Battalion. Some left anyway, but never came back. We have no idea what happened to these people. There were rumors that those who tried to escape were simply shot,"

said Veronika, a resident of the city.

Yevgenia, another resident and mother of a baby, says:

"When I tried to go out, a sniper would shoot in my direction to make me crawl back into the basement. So people were imprisoned in the cellars. Sometimes I had to walk across the street between the basement where we were hiding and my house and they fired in my direction every time, as a warning. The soldiers certainly knew I had a baby in the basement because I had talked to them many times before it all started."

This was confirmed at a meeting of the UN Security Council by French journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel. At this meeting, she presented an interview with a resident of Mariupol, who had assured:

"I know for sure that they won't let people out. They are beaten with rifle butts and forced to stay in the houses. The Azov battalion controls all foot and car traffic. I personally know someone who was not allowed to leave the city."

UN officials documented a case in the village of Staraya Krasnianka in the Lugansk People's Republic, where Ukrainian soldiers occupied a nursing home, mined all roads in the area and did not allow elderly residents to leave the village. But this practice was not limited to areas of active fighting. In Odessa, tanks and military equipment were placed in densely populated residential neighborhoods and even in the immediate vicinity of the beautiful building of the Opera Theater.

Amnesty International published a report on 4 August 2022 accusing the Ukrainian military of stationing its troops and artillery near hospitals, schools and residential buildings, turning them into military targets. In doing so, they would endanger civilians and violate international humanitarian law and the laws of war, Amnesty said. After an aggressive protest by the Ukrainian government, Amnesty was forced to apologize for the "outrage and anger" that the organization had caused with its report among Ukrainians.

Cruel revenge on civilians

In the cities from which Russia has withdrawn, large-scale purges are taking place.

On November 17, 2022, the Ukrainian military executed 39 residents of Kherson following denunciations by local vigilantes, while 74 people were taken to unknown locations. A video was published on the Internet in which soldiers of the 25th Ukrainian Brigade reported that they had received orders from their commanders to shoot all civilians in the areas formerly controlled by the Russian army.

Members of the Azov battalion released a video about the massacre of the residents of Kupyansk, which they subsequently tried to blame Russia after there was an international outcry over it. However, the metadata of the video file proves that the video was recorded on November 9, whereas Kupyansk has been under Ukrainian control since the beginning of September.

Even those in their own ranks who do not want to fight are treated no better than Russian prisoners. A Ukrainian soldier complained that his comrades had shot him in the leg.

On April 25, Lieutenant Colonel Alexei Selivanov, Deputy Head of the Zaporozhye Region Police Administration, reported the kidnapping of the daughter of Kupyansk Mayor Gennady Matsegora and two grandchildren of Valentina Kobelewa, a local businesswoman and deputy of the Kupyansk City Council for the opposition platform Party for Life. "Now this government is even kidnapping children," Selivanov lamented. This brings back memories of the assassination attempt on Darya Dugina, the daughter of the well-known Russian political scientist Alexander Dugin, which was carried out on Russian territory by a Ukrainian agent, which even the US had to admit.

French President Emmanuel Macron recently backed plans to set up a special tribunal to investigate "Russia's war crimes." But given the proven fact that Ukrainian soldiers are committing war crimes, including with the help of weapons sent by Paris, Monsieur Macron should perhaps look in this direction.