Amnesty International said on Friday that there was strong evidence that Russian troops had committed war crimes, including the execution of civilians in brief, when occupying areas outside the Ukrainian capital in February and March, according to Reuters.
The civilians were also abused, such as “reckless shootings and torture” at the hands of Russian forces during their failed offensive in Kyiv in the early stages of the Kremlin’s February 24 invasion, the group said in a statement.
“These are not isolated incidents. They are largely part of a pattern in which Russian forces have control of a town or a village,” Donatella Rovera, the organisation’s senior adviser, told a news conference in Kyiv.
The information gathered by the group “can be used, we hope, to hold the perpetrators accountable, if not today, some day in the future,” she said.
Ukrainian authorities say they are investigating more than 9,000 possible war crimes by Russian troops. The International Criminal Court also examines alleged war crimes.
The amnesty report is the latest to document alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces when they occupied an area northwest of Kiev, including the city of Butcha, where Ukrainian authorities say more than 400 civilians have been killed. Moscow withdrew its troops in early April.
The report concluded that Russian troops had committed “a number of apparent war crimes” in Bhutan, including “several unlawful killings”, most of which took place near the intersection of Yablunska and Vodoprovidna streets.
Rovera said it had collected bullets and ammunition pierced in a factory in Tula, south of Moscow, for rifles used only by select Russian airborne units, whose presence in the area had been confirmed by Amnesty International.
“We also found and were able to see some military documents showing the presence of these special units in those places where these crimes were committed,” he said.
Amnesty International said it had documented 22 cases of illegal killings by Russian forces, “most of which were apparently summary executions”, in Butsa and nearby areas.
Asked by Reuters ahead of Amnesty International’s report on Russia’s operation in Bhutan, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov said: “The history of the city of Bhutan is fabricated and false.”
Amnesty International also said in a report that Russian airstrikes that hit eight homes on March 1-2 in the city of Borodyanka, killing at least 40 civilians, were “disproportionate and indiscriminate and obvious war crimes”.
“Russian forces can not reliably claim that they did not know that civilians were living in the targeted buildings,” he said.
Source: Capital
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