War crimes in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

[11] On 17 March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova over allegations of involvement in the war crime of child abductions during the invasion of Ukraine.

[34] On 7 June, Human Rights Watch specialist Tanya Lokshina emphasized this, reiterating that forcible involuntary deportation was itself a war crime, and called for Russia to stop this practice.

The OHCHR informed the Human Rights Council that arbitrary detention of civilians, including 21 journalists and civil society activists, had become "widespread" in territory controlled by Russian forces and affiliated armed groups.

[41] On 25 February, Amnesty International said Russian forces had "shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely-populated areas".

[5] A 3 March statement from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it recorded at least 1006 civilian casualties in the first week of the invasion, but believed the real figures were "considerably higher.

In November 2024, Amnesty International reported that 2024 had seen a significant increase in civilian casualties, particularly highlighting attacks, including war crimes, resulting in children killed and injured in Russian airstrikes.

While some casualties were caused by artillery fire[87] and lack of healthcare,[88] most showed signs of violent death and 30 of torture and summary execution, including ropes around their necks, bound hands, broken limbs and genital amputation.

[3] CCTV video also from 28 February shows that two civilians (a 72-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman) were killed when their car was blown apart by shots from a Russian BMP armoured infantry fighting vehicle at the intersection of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street and Okruzhna Road, near the hospital in Makariv.

[109][110] On 30 September, a convoy of six civilian cars and a van on the outskirts of the village of Kurylivka (at that time in the so-called "gray zone" between Kupiansk and Svatove) was discovered by Ukrainian forces, with around 24 people killed, including a pregnant woman and 13 children.

[120] The couple fled from their damaged car after the attack, Bohomaz had been badly injured in the head, Russian troops later found him, and, incorrectly assuming he was dead, dropped him in a ditch, he woke up 30 hours later, with several injuries and shrapnels lodged in his body.

[138] The World Health Organization has warned of a potential humanitarian crisis, saying that "lack of access to fuel or electricity due to damaged infrastructure could become a matter of life or death if people are unable to heat their homes.

[140] In his comprehensive analysis,[142] Charles J. Dunlap jr., executive director of Duke Law School's Centre on Law, Ethics and National Security and former deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force, pointed to the view that "[e]lectric power stations are generally recognized to be of sufficient importance to a State's capacity to meet its wartime needs of communication, transport, and industry so as usually to qualify as military objectives during armed conflicts",[143] furthermore that they have been a favourite target for almost a century, and that Ukraine did resort to similar tactics in 2015.

[145] According to the United Nations intentional attacks against building dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals not being used as military infrastructure is a War Crime.

[176] On 22 July Human Rights Watch published a report documenting 42 cases of torture, unlawful detention and enforced disappearance of civilians in the Russian-occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

According to the witnesses, at least eight civilians were held in a basement of a train station, where they were tortured, starved, subject to mock executions, forced to sit in their own excrement, electrocuted, stripped, and threatened with rape and genital mutilation.

In the town of Balakliia, which the Russians occupied for six months, forensics specialists, human rights activists, criminal law experts, and Ukrainian investigators found extensive evidence of war crimes and torture.

[202][203][168] According to the OHCHR what happened in the school of Yahidne suggests that the Russian armed forces were using civilians to render their base immune from military attacks while also subjecting them to inhuman and degrading treatment.[14]: para.

96-102 [213] In late March, Ukraine's Prosecutor General opened an investigation into a case of a Russian soldier who was accused of killing an unarmed civilian and then repeatedly raping the dead man's wife.

[236] There were reports of bazaars set up by Russian forces in Belarus to trade in looted goods, such items as "washing machines and dishwashers, refrigerators, jewelry, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, dishes, carpets, works of art, children's toys, cosmetics".

[41] At an Arria-formula meeting of the UN Security Council, US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice Beth Van Schaack said that US authorities have evidence that surrendering Ukrainian soldiers were executed by the Russian army in Donetsk.

[248] Following a trial by the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People's Republic, three foreign-born members of the Ukrainian armed forces, Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner, and Brahim Saadoun were declared mercenaries and sentenced to execution by firing squad.

[264] On 22 July 2022, Human Rights Watch documented the torture of three Ukrainian prisoners of war, members of the Territorial Defense Forces, and the death of two of them in the occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

[269] Bellingcat identified the soldiers involved, including the main perpetrator (an inhabitant of Tuva), who wore a distinctive wide brimmed black hat, as members of the Akhmat unit, a Chechen Kadyrovite paramilitary formation fighting for the Russians in the war in Ukraine.

[271] One video purportedly filmed by Wagner Group mercenaries showed the bodies of two Ukrainian soldiers next to a destroyed military vehicle, their heads and hands missing, with a voice commenting in Russian in the background.

[303] One of several efforts to document Russian war crimes concerns its repeated bombardment of markets and bread lines, destruction of basic infrastructure and attacks on exports and supply convoys, in a country where deliberate starvation of Ukrainians by Soviets the Holodomor still looms large in public memory.

[305] The Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba stated on 25 February that Russia was committing war crimes, and that the ministry and the Prosecutor General of Ukraine were collecting evidence on events including attacks on kindergartens and orphanages, which would be "immediately transfer[red]" to the ICC.

[322] Several states, including Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden, announced in March and April 2022 that they would conduct investigations of war crimes in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine under the universal jurisdiction principle of international humanitarian law.

[326] The establishment of a special tribunal within the framework of the United Nations could be hampered by Russia's position as a permanent member of the Security Council and by the difficulty of gathering the necessary two-thirds majority in the General Assembly.

[326] In mid-June, according to the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, an alleged GRU officer, who was a student of prominent genocide professor Eugene Finkel, attempted to gain entry into the Netherlands under an assumed identity.

[158] According to the report, had the Russian army refrained from indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the number of civilians casualties would have remained much lower and fewer houses, hospitals, schools and cultural properties would have been damaged or destroyed.