A damning roster of alleged horrors committed by Vladimir Putin's forces has been compiled in a shocking new report.
Human Rights Watch has documented that Russian soldiers requested civilians to become execution “volunteers”, and there are also numerous cases of civilians being held in “dirty and suffocating conditions” thus developing bedsores.
One woman from the Chernihiv region said she witnessed soldiers suggesting to a 63-year-old man with cancer that he could “hang himself” to alleviate the pain he was experiencing from sitting for days in a school basement.
“The numerous atrocities by Russian forces occupying parts of northeastern Ukraine early in the war are abhorrent, unlawful, and cruel,” said Giorgi Gogia, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Gogia urged that these war crimes should be "promptly and impartially" investigated and appropriately prosecuted.
To chronicle the horrors, the organisation visited 17 villages and small towns in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions where they investigated 22 apparent summary executions, nine other unlawful killings, six possible enforced disappearances, and seven cases of torture.
They encountered 21 civilians who all described unlawful confinement in inhuman and degrading conditions.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of February, his forces have been implicated in numerous atrocities that likely amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In one of the newly documented killings by Human Rights Watch, Anastasia Andriivna said that she was at home when soldiers detained her son after they found his old military coat.
A few weeks later, on March 31, the day after Russian forces withdrew, Andriivna found her son’s body 100 metres from her house after recognising his trainers poking out a barn door.
She said: "He was lying there in a foetal position, with his hands tucked under his head, and his jacket draped over his shoulders. He had been shot in the ear, with blood covering his face.
"His best friend was lying next to him; he had also been shot. His legs were bent in an unnatural position."
The organisation has credible evidence which shows troops forcing civilians, for days or weeks, into dirty and suffocating conditions at sites such as school basements, a room in a window manufacturing plant, and a pit in a boiler room.
In Yahidne, over 350 villagers, including at least 70 children were held in a school basement for 28 days with little air or room to lie down.
One of the women held in the basement and who sat close to the door, which had cracks in it, described seeing an armoured vehicle bringing a man, covered in a blanket, to the schoolyard.
She saw Russian soldiers put him on his knees and question him, and then throw him into the boiler room on the other side of the schoolyard.
The British government says it is considering supporting a special international tribunal to try Putin for the war in Ukraine.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said that ministers were looking at the “most effective way” of holding Russia ’s leaders to account for “appalling war crimes”.
