Russian Digest 4/5
Russian Digest 4/5
Top daily stories I'm keeping an eye on
Almost five thousand Russian war crimes are being investigated in Ukraine - Irina Venedíktova
About this, today during a press briefing in the dismissed city of Bucha, said Attorney General Irina Venediktova.
The head of Офіс Генерального прокурора noted that the investigation of war crimes is now the number one task for the entire law system of Ukraine.
She reported that thousands of such crimes have been registered today. Nearly five thousand qualified - war crimes. Almost two thousand are relevant to war crimes. All criminal proceedings are different in their scope and number of episodes.
"We must understand that even in such a cruel situation war crimes are the first link of gradacíí ції. Next go crimes against humanity, genocide. We are investigating all these crimes to bring to justice all who started this war to destroy Ukrainians," said Irina Venediktova. via Facebook
As many as 200 people are missing and presumed dead under the rubble of this small town that has been devastated by Russian airstrikes, the acting mayor said Tuesday.
Borodyanka is a one-street town, just northwest of Kyiv, the capital. A quiet, modest place, as one resident described it.
But it lies on a key access road leading to the capital, and it was among the first communities to be hit by Russia’s aerial bombardment in Ukraine’s six-week-old war, Ukrainian officials said.
The town was visited by New York Times journalists on Tuesday after Russian forces withdrew. The scars left behind are shocking. Great gashes have been sliced through multistory complexes along the main street. Four apartment buildings collapsed in the airstrikes, and the layers of apartments crushed like a concertina to ground level. via NYT
The Russian military in Mali is involved in the mass executions of civilians. This is reported by Human Rights Watch, citing 27 sources, including witnesses from Mura, traders, public figures, diplomats, and security analysts.
According to human rights activists, at the end of March 2022, the Malian army and foreign soldiers associated with it executed about 300 people. Some of those killed were suspected of belonging to Islamist militants.
Several unnamed Human Rights Watch sources identified the foreign soldiers as Russians. According to the organization, Russian security forces executed in small groups several hundred people who were detained on March 27 in Mura during the armed conflict. via HRW
Longtime Putin Adviser Says Russian Leader Is Obsessed With Ukraine And Has 'Stepped Into A Trap' via RFERL
The Russian military shelled Nikolaev with cluster bombs, Mayor of Nikolaev Alexander Senkevich reported on his Telegram channel.
«Cluster shells again. Stay away from windows. I will give you all the information later,» the mayor said.
Conflict Intelligence Team investigators confirmed to The Insider the character of the damage suggested the use of cluster munitions.
«The pictures show a mark left by an exploded cluster sub-munition on a hard surface (asphalt in this case): a round-shaped central part with a fan of shrapnel,» the CIT said.
Senkevich said today that Russian troops launched several rocket attacks on the city. Over the course of the day, shelling was heard throughout the Mykolaiv region, particularly in the regional capital and Ochakov.
The Ukrainian authorities said earlier Russia had used prohibited cluster munitions to shell a populated area in the Kryvyi Rih district of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
On March 31, UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said during a meeting in Geneva that the organization's investigators were looking into 24 cases of Russia's possible use of cluster munitions, which resulted in the mass destruction of civilian facilities and a large number of civilian casualties.
According to Bachelet, the indiscriminate attacks prohibited by international humanitarian law and carried out by Russia in Ukraine «may amount to war crimes.»
«The massive destruction of civilian facilities and a large number of civilian casualties strongly suggest that the fundamental principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution have not been sufficiently respected,» Bachelet said.
Russia continues its military invasion of Ukraine, launched on orders from Vladimir Putin on February 24. Russian authorities call it a «special military operation» to protect people «from genocide.» All these days, Russia has been shelling not only military facilities but also residential areas in Ukraine, including cluster bombs, which pose a particular danger to civilians. At the same time, the Russian side continues to claim it is destroying only military infrastructure. via The Insider