Attacks on civilians in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

[11] On 5 July 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Michelle Bachelet, reported that most civilian casualties documented by her office had been caused by the Russian army's use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas, calling it "indisputable".

HRW called for an International Criminal Court investigation and a United Nations commission of inquiry to decide if a war crime had occurred and to hold to account the people responsible.

[23] Matilda Bogner, Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, stated that the bombing "violated the principles of distinction, of proportionality, the rule on feasible precautions and the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks".

[21] On 16 March 2022, a Russian attack killed 14 civilians who were waiting in a line for bread in the city, The event was reported by Governor of Chernihiv Oblast Vyacheslav Chaus and the United States Embassy in Kyiv.

[25] On 19 August 2023 at about 11:30 Saturday morning seven civilians were killed, dozens hospitalized, and over a 150 injured after Russian Armed Forces launched a 9М727 Iskander cruise missile and hit the Taras Shevchenko Music and Drama Theater at Krasna Square, the city center.

[48] On 14 January 2023 at about 3:30 p.m., a Russian Kh-22 type missile hit a nine-story residential building in Dnipro on the Naberezhna Peremohy St [uk], Sobornyi District in the right-bank part of the city, destroying one entrance and 236 apartments.

[54] Russian missiles struck residential buildings in the southern central city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown, several times.

He stated, "A few days ago, at a UN Security Council meeting, the Russian delegation presented factual information that this maternity hospital had long been taken over by the Azov Battalion and other radicals and that all the women in labour, all the nurses and in general all the staff had been told to leave it.

[128] A fake video clip with a mock BBC logo, attributing blame to the Ukrainian forces, circulated through pro-Russian telegram channels and Russian state television since 10 April.

[141] On 27 June 2023, Russian forces attacked a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk with an Iskander missile, killing 13 people including four children and Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina.

[146] The strike was alleged, including by Donetsk Oblast governor Pavlo Kyrylenko,[147] to have been performed with "Uragan", a self-propelled 220 mm multiple rocket launcher designed in the Soviet Union.

[156] On 27 July 2022, thousands of miniature plastic antipersonnel PFM-1 mines were dispersed over civilian areas of the Russian held city of Donetsk by a BM-27 Uragan multiple rocket launcher.

According to a HRW report published on 4 March, on 28 February, at around 10:00 AM, Russian forces fired cluster munitions with Grad rockets into at least three different residential areas in Kharkiv,[168] killing at least nine civilians and injuring another 37.

[175] On 15 April 2022 in the afternoon hours, during the battle of Kharkiv, the Russian Army fired 9N210/9N235 cluster bombs into the Industrialnyi District, striking a residential area and a playground in the Myru Street.

[179] On 13 June Amnesty International published a report on what it called the "relentless campaign of indiscriminate bombardments against Kharkiv" causing "wholesale destruction" in the city from 24 February until late April.

[174] The human rights organisation's researchers found fragments of seven cluster munition strikes in different neighbourhoods of Kharkiv and gathered evidence of the use of scatterable land mines and Grad rockets.

[188] The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the missile attack on Kharkiv in its briefing, According to their version, "a high-precision ground-based weapon hit a temporary base for foreign mercenaries" and as a result, "more than 90 militants were destroyed".

[203][204] Other than targeting individual civilians, Russian drones using a napalm-like mixture to start fires burning down entire neighbourhoods, and scattering mines powerful enough to destroy a tire or blow a foot off have also been noted.

[213] Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: "The detonation of the munitions for western weaponry in storage led to a fire in a non-functioning shopping centre next to the factory.

[218] Per reports from independent military experts and researchers with Molfar, a global open sourced intelligence community, the factory and mall were too far apart from one another to cause any fires or explosions.

[225][226] On 6 March 2022, from 9:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. local time, the Russian Armed Forces repeatedly shelled an intersection in Irpin that hundreds of civilians were using to escape to Kyiv, whilst a Ukrainian artillery position was located nearby.

[227] The human rights organisation also stated that the Ukrainian forces "have an obligation to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian harm," such as refraining from engaging in combat in populated areas.

[293] On 27 February 2022, Amnesty International said that evidence showed Russian cluster munitions from a 220 mm BM-27 Uragan rocket hit a preschool in Okhtyrka used as a civilian bomb shelter, killing three people including a child.

The energy infrastructure in particular had been badly damaged in Sumy, as part of a broader Russian campaign to degrade Ukraine's power plants and make it more difficult for utilities to provide basic services.

[298] The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission said in a report that large-scale Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure ″have inflicted extensive harm and hardship on the country's civilian population, with potentially devastating consequences as winter approaches″.

[339] The airstrike took place the day after an explosion damaged large parts of the Crimean Bridge, which Russian president Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of carrying out, and called it an "act of terrorism".

[357] Between April and July, Amnesty International researchers found evidence that Ukrainian military objectives had been placed within residential areas in 19 towns and villages in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk and Mykolaiv oblasts.

Amnesty International's Secretary General Agnès Callamard stated that there was "a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated area".

[360][361][362] United Nations war crime investigator Marc Garlasco stated that the Amnesty report got the law wrong, and also that Ukraine was making efforts to protect civilians, including helping them to relocate.

[361] In mid-October 2022, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine released a report which included findings that both Russian and Ukrainian forces had "deployed their military assets and troops in ways that can endanger civilians".