Russian war crimes
[15] In 2017 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has reported that Russia used cluster and incendiary weapons in Syria, constituting the war crime of indiscriminate attacks in a civilian populated area.
[20] By 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued 115 verdicts (including the virdict in the Baysayeva v. Russia case) in which it found the Russian government guilty of perpetrating enforced disappearances, murder, torture, and failing to properly investigate these crimes in Chechnya.
[27][28] As a result, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-11/3 officially suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council membership due to war crimes in Ukraine.
According to Human Rights Watch, the campaign was "unparalleled in the area since World War II for its scope and destructiveness, followed by months of indiscriminate and targeted fire against civilians".
The Russian Air Force perpetrated repeated rocket attacks on a large convoy of refugees trying to enter Ingushetia through a supposed "safe exit" during the Baku–Rostov highway bombing.
[143] HRW and Amnesty International accused Russia of using imprecise cluster munitions in civilian areas, including near hospitals and schools, which constitute unlawful attacks with weapons that indiscriminately kill and maim.
[9] Numerous war crimes were recorded, including murder or willful killings, torture, persecution, deportation or forced transfer, looting, rape against Ukrainian women, terror, enforced disappearance, attacks on civilians, unlawful airstrikes or attacks against civilian objects, wanton destruction not justified by military necessity including that of protected objects such as hospitals and cultural property, arbitrary detention, forceful conscription of nationals of the hostile party to take part in the operations of war directed against their own country, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of POWs.
[147] "Russian forces’ widespread and repeated targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure appears primarily designed to instill terror among the population in violation of the laws of war".
[158][159] On 3 March, 47 civilians were killed in Chernihiv, most of whom were standing in line at a food store, waiting for bread, when a Russian air strike with eight unguided aerial bombs hit them.
[162] Following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the E-40 highway around the Kyiv area, BBC News discovered 13 dead bodies left lying on the road, only two wearing Ukrainian military uniforms.
[163] After the Russian forces left the area of Bucha after a month of occupation, on 1–3 April photos and videos emerged showing hundreds of killed people lying on the streets or in mass graves.
A Ukrainian official said that Russia is using mobile crematoriums to dispose of bodies in Mariupol in an attempt to cover up evidence of war crimes and hide the number of people that have died.
[173] On 15 June 2022, OHCHR expressed concerns over reports that Ukrainian children were forcibly deported to Russia, where they were being sent for rushed adoption, stating that these "do not appear to include steps for family reunification or respect the best interests of the child".
[180] This assertion was corroborated by a report by New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights which inferred that Russia breached two articles of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
[206] Amnesty International rejected Kremlin's claims that the Ukrainian air defence accidentally bombed the children's hospital, adding it "seeks to deflect from Russia’s responsibility for killing civilians and destroying medical facilities".
[208] In August 2024, UN official Danielle Bell claimed that 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war had suffered from Russian tortures (e.g. beating, using electric shock or were strip naked).
It has concluded that Russian authorities have committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law and violations of international human rights law, in addition to a wide range of war crimes, including the war crime of excessive incidental death, injury, or damage; wilful killings; torture; inhuman treatment; unlawful confinement; rape; as well as unlawful transfers and deportations.
[242][243] On 6 March 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Council published a public report confirming that the Atarib market bombing was perpetrated by the Russian military.
[244][245] On 2 February 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a report on the battle of Aleppo, confirming that Russia used cluster and incendiary weapons.
[16] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that Russian air strikes and artillery shells have killed 18,000 people, including nearly 8,000 civilians, in Syria by 1 October 2018.
[246] On 27 October 2021, the UN experts of the Human Rights Council warned that Russia's paramilitary Wagner Group "violently harassed and intimidated civilians, including peacekeepers, journalists, aid workers and minorities in the Central African Republic".
[247][248] Examples of crimes believed to have been committed by Wagner Group members in the Central African Republic include the Aïgbado massacre,[249] killing of 12 unarmed men near Bossangoa on 21 July 2021, and beating and holding suspected rebels in inhuman conditions in an open hole at a national army base in Alindao between June and August 2021.
According to the NGO, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, as many as 456 civilians died in nine incidents involving Malian forces and Wagner fighters, between January and mid-April 2022.
[257] On 24 May 2018, after extensive comparative research, the Dutch investigation concluded that the Buk that shot down the 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 came from the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk.
[265] On 9 November 2021, Ukraine authorities arrested Denis Kulikovsky, a senior warden of the Izoliatsiia detention center in Donetsk People's Republic, where prisoners were tortured.
[272] On 29 September 2022 Russian Lieutenant Serhiy Steiner was sentenced in absentia to 9 years in prison by a Ukrainian court for looting and destruction of civilian property in the village of Lukyanivka.
[281] On 19 January 2023, the European Parliament also adopted a resolution recommending the establishment of an international tribunal to prosecute Putin and Belarus' leader Alexander Lukashenko for war crimes.
By 2009, the ECHR issued 115 verdicts (including in Baysayeva v. Russia case) finding the Russian government guilty of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture, and for failing to properly investigate these crimes in Chechnya.
[21] On 21 January 2021, the ECHR also separately found Russia guilty of murder, torture, looting and destruction of homes in Georgia, as well as preventing the return of 20,000 displaced Georgians to their territory.
[291][292] On 25 June 2024, the ICC indicted former Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu and Head of General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Valery Gerasimov for the same three counts.
