A 14-year-old boy murdered in a summary execution.
Girls as young as 4 years old and women up to 82 years old subjected to sexual violence.
A priest brutally beaten, then stripped naked and forced to parade naked through the streets of his town for an hour.
These were some of the nightmarish finds of a new UN-endorsed report published Thursday that found that Russia has committed war crimes and likely crimes against humanity during its invasion of Ukraine for a year.
The three international experts appointed to act as investigators for the Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russia was guilty of serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
These included indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and targeted attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as well as torture, illegal confinement, summary executions and rape.
“The Commission is concerned by the number, geographical extent and severity of human rights violations and corresponding international crimes that it has documented during its mandate,” the researchers wrote in their report. “These have affected men, women, boys and girls of all backgrounds and ages.”
The report is likely to have little practical effect in Russia, but will increase pressure to hold the country to account. by the International Criminal Court.
At the very least, the report also serves as a historical record of abuses committed by Russia, which did not cooperate with the investigation.
As a man whose father was executed by members of the Russian army in a village in the Kharkiv region told investigators: “They punished innocent people; now the guilty, if they are still alive, must be punished to the full extent.”
