Russian forces have carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians detained in connection with their attack on Ukraine, summarily executing more than 70 of them, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
It interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the conflict, most of them by Russia. The vast majority of those interviewed said they were tortured and in some cases subjected to sexual violence during detention by Russian forces, the head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine said.
The 36-page report came as Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice, said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, had implicated Vladimir Putin in war crimes by admitting the original invasion had not been justified by any provocative actions by Ukraine.
She added she did not think Putin would dare travel to South Africa for the Brics summit in August if he feared there was a 10% chance that an independent-minded South African judge ordered his arrest. “He is reckless with the Russian state’s resources, but not with his own skin,” she said. The international criminal court (ICC) has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest over his role in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. South Africa was obliged to enforce the warrant, she said.
The UN report will be handed to the Ukrainian prosecutor general and to the ICC as it assembles evidence against individual Russians accused of war crimes during the invasion of Ukraine.
The report covers a 15-month period from the start of the Russian invasion to May 2023. It also documents 75 cases of arbitrary detention by Ukrainian security forces, saying a significant proportion of these also amounted to enforced disappearances. It documented 864 individual cases of arbitrary detention by Russia – 763 men, 94 women and seven boys – many of which also amounted to enforced disappearances.
The head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, said: “Torture was used to force victims to confess to helping Ukrainian armed forces, compel them to cooperate with the occupying authorities or intimidate those with pro-Ukrainian views.” More than half of those detained by Ukrainian forces also reported being tortured or mistreated, usually while being interrogated or immediately after arrest, said Bogner.
Ukraine gave UN investigators “unimpeded confidential access” to detainees at official detention centres, with the exception of a group of 87 Russian sailors, she said.
“The Russian Federation did not grant us such access, despite our requests,” Bogner said. The UN has previously found that Russia summarily executed Ukrainian prisoners, but this is the first time it has said civilians were also executed. It documents 77 cases of civilians being executed, and the report finds others have been kept in deplorable conditions.
While Ukraine has launched criminal investigations against Russian forces over the detention of civilians, resulting in 23 convictions, the UN rights office said it was not aware of any investigations against Ukraine’s own forces for such violations.
Bogner said Ukrainian laws on detention for national security reasons “appear to go beyond what is permissible under international law, even during a public emergency, and have facilitated arbitrary detention”. She said the office had documented 75 cases of arbitrary detention by Ukrainian security forces, “mostly of people suspected of conflict-related offences”.
Van Schaack in a briefing said tens of thousands of individual allegations of war crimes were being examined by trained investigators inside and outside Ukraine.
She said Prigozhin’s remarks challenging the basis of the war last week contradicted the official Russian justification for the war. She said his remarks were likely to be taken into consideration and would probably be quite impactful in any prosecution of Putin over the crime of aggression.
“It is notable he said quite openly that this war is based on false pretences and that Ukraine and Nato had no intention of attacking Russia and this is very much a war of Russia’s own making,” Van Schaack said.
In May the US finally came out in support of a special tribunal to try the crime of aggression, but said it should be a Ukrainian-based court with international support. Ukraine had argued for an international court established by the UN general assembly, something the US opposes on legal and political grounds.
Van Schaack said Putin would be hard to prosecute so long as he remained head of state and within Russia. But “his world is shrinking fast” and many other world leaders who did not think they would appear in court eventually did, she added.
