Russian Murder of Ukrainian Civilians is Deliberate

In addition to deliberate russian acts of torture of Ukrainians in the past 17 months, United Nations investigators also found that at least 77 unarmed Ukrainian civilians were summarily executed – deliberately killed – by the invading cutthroats.

The figure is, unfortunately, likely to be much higher, because of areas still under occupation, and because the russians also carried out on-the-spot summary executions, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

Russian forces carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians who were detained in connection with the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, summarily executing dozens of them, the United Nations human rights office reported last week. The UN interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the war.

The vast majority of those interviewed said they were tortured and in some cases subjected to sexual violence during detention by russian terrorists, the head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine said. It added that Russian armed forces, law enforcement and penitentiary authorities have used torture and ill-treatment of civilian detainees on a massive scale.

“Torture was used to force victims to confess to helping Ukrainian armed forces, compel them to cooperate with the occupying authorities or intimidate those with pro-Ukrainian views,” said Matilda Bogner.

Sexual violence especially against civilians has been denounced and forbidden by international law.

The figure was reported on June 27, 2023, in the latest report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), titled “Detention of civilians in the context of the Russian armed attack, 24 February 2022 – 23 May 2023.” Since this report concentrates on all aspects of civilian detention, the authors do not go into detail and simply express grave concern over the summary executions of some hostages. 

UN monitors documented the summary execution of 72 men and 5 women whom the russians had arbitrarily detained in Ukraine and are aware of another man who died in russian custody as the result of torture or inhumane conditions. The real number of extrajudicial executions carried out by russia since it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is undoubtedly much higher as the fate of many victims of enforced disappearances remains unknown, and the above figure does not include those whom the russians executed on the spot. News accounts of russian terrorists executing entire families – in some cases grandparents, parents and children – in their automobiles have been reported since the start of the invasion.

An earlier report from December 2022, however, gave more detail about Russia’s summary executions in those parts of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions that had been occupied russia. By the end of October 2022, OHCHR had recorded the summary execution or fatal attacks on 441 civilians (341 men; 72 women; 20 boys and 8 girls). Fifty-seven of the 100 killings which the report concentrated on were assessed as summary executions (48 men; 7 women and 2 boys). Thirty victims had been killed in places of detention, with the other 27 summarily executed on the spot. The authors warned that in these three regions only, the total number of summary executions and lethal attacks against civilians by the russian military “is likely considerably higher.” This is without taking into account other parts of Ukraine already liberated from the invading forces, as well as those still under occupation. 

In February of this year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres asserted that russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered “the most massive violations of human rights” in the world today.

The State Department Human Rights Country Report for Ukraine (and an array of other governments, international organizations and NGOs) lists mass and unlawful killings, including summary executions, forced disappearances, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, interrogations with no due process, arbitrary detention, and sexual violence, among other violations. Large numbers of political prisoners and detainees languish in appalling detention centers. There are severe restrictions on political rights and civil liberties, such as freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, religion, movement and, of course, the denial of the right of citizens to vote in free and fair elections, the report concluded.

Most of these rampant human rights abuses and democracy violations have been inflicted on Ukrainian citizens by the russian occupiers since 2014, when moscow seized Crimea and then Donetsk and Luhansk immediately upon the end of 2014 Winter Olympics. However, in the ensuing months the crimes have greatly expanded, intensified and acquired new shocking features and even more terrifying practices since February 2022.

Crimes against humanity, war crimes and atrocities that occurred in places like Bucha, Irpin, Izyum, Mariupol, Kherson and elsewhere shocked the civilized world. In addition, the indiscriminate, relentless drone and missile attacks against innocent civilians and the forcible transfer of Ukrainians including the abduction of Ukrainian children to russia, and the notorious filtration system that dehumanizes by security screenings of Ukrainians who are violently interrogated and detained in concentration camps.

The latest iteration of russia’s war against Ukrainians who are subjected to arbitrary killings, torture, rape, starvation, forcible transfers, and other abuses is part of a centralized plan to break the will of Ukrainian citizens and have them submit to russia’s authority.

In a recent speech to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna, U.S. Ambassador Michael Carpenter asserted: “Ukraine’s civilians in Russia-occupied territories have been unjustly detained under the flimsiest of justifications – if any at all – and under appalling conditions. These detained civilians have been sent to penal colonies or detention facilities in occupied territories or deep within Russia, many without charge, leaving their families no ability to track their whereabouts or to appeal their detention.”

Undeniably, this litany of crimes against humanity is aimed at creating a climate of fear and complete subjugation is part and parcel of russian fuhrer vladimir putin’s genocidal attempt to erase the Ukrainian nation, starting with the most vulnerable – the children of Ukraine.

In the words of Ambassador Carpenter, who was reacting to a recent OSCE report exposing russia’s war crimes against Ukraine’s children: “It is heart wrenching to think of Ukrainian children being stolen from their families and uprooted from their homes, and then subjected to systematic efforts to erase their Ukrainian identity and replace it with a Russian one. … As the report makes clear, ‘Not only has the Russian Federation manifestly violated the best interests of these children repeatedly, it has also denied their right to identity, their right to family, … as well as their right to thought, conscience and religion, right to health, and right to liberty and security.”

These children have been forced to sing the Russian national anthem and, at least in one instance, threatened to have their “lips sewn shut” if they uttered support for Ukraine. Or, as the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHRPG) put it: “In January, young people in the devastated city of Mariupol were forced to dance and entertain the invading forces – they were made ‘to thank the killers of their parents, relatives and their childhood [friends], to thank them and entertain them with shows. Parents were warned that anyone who was against, or who filmed it, faced [being imprisoned in] basements for the dissatisfied.’”

• Democratic and Republic incumbents and candidates to public office should reconsider their anti-Ukrainian positions in view of this survey.

Solid majorities of Americans support providing weaponry to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia and believe that such aid demonstrates to China and other U.S. rivals a will to protect U.S. interests and allies, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.

The two-day poll that was concluded on Tuesday charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the shipments compared with 46% in a May poll.

Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 56% of Republicans and 57% of independents favor supplying U.S. weapons to Ukraine, according to the latest poll.

The survey was conducted just days after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private Wagner mercenary company, launched and then called off a mutiny over what he charged was the Russian defense ministry's mishandling of the war in Ukraine.

The findings appeared to provide firmer backing for President Joe Biden’s policy of doing “whatever it takes” to assist Ukraine in recapturing territory that Russia seized in an initial assault in 2014 and its full-scale invasion 16 months ago.

“This definitely reinforces Biden's decision to be all-in on this,” said William Taylor, a former US ambassador to Ukraine now with the US Institute of Peace. “The Republican leadership of the House and Senate will also take heart from this.”

In other findings, the survey said large majorities of Americans - 67% and 73% - are more likely to support a candidate in next year’s US presidential election who will continue military aid to Ukraine and one who backs the NATO alliance.

• Time to pick up the pace of free world’s military aid to Ukraine.

In an interview with The Washington Post, of June 30, 2023, commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces Gen. Valery Zaluzhny offered emphatic ideas of what must be done to ensure Ukraine’s victory over russian invaders. The Post wrote: “So it ‘pisses me off,’ Zaluzhny said, when he hears that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive in the country’s east and south has started slower than expected — an opinion publicly expressed by Western officials and military analysts and also by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, though Zaluzhny was not referring to Zelenskyy. His troops have gained some ground — even if it’s just 500 meters — every day, he said.

‘This is not a show,’ Zaluzhny said Wednesday in his office at Ukraine’s General Staff headquarters. ‘It’s not a show the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter is given by blood.’

‘Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all,’ he added. ‘But they are being carried out. Yes, maybe not as fast as the participants in the show, the observers, would like, but that is their problem.’”

• Earlier I wrote about 11 slices of death at the Kramatorsk pizzeria due to a russian missile strike. The toll has risen to 12. Rescuers retrieved another person’s body from the rubble at the site of moscow’s June 27 crime against humanity, when russian terrorists fired two soviet-era S-300 missiles at the eastern Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk. The number includes three children, two born in 2008 and one in 2011. Another 60 people were injured, including a child. The search and rescue operation is completed, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Viktoriya Amelina, a Ukrainian writer and member of the PEN Club, who was having dinner with Colombian journalists, became the 13th fatal victim, succumbing to her head wounds in the hospital.