2024-04-26 04:17:57
According to a report presented by three legal experts at the session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, Russia has illegally and systematically detained thousands of Ukrainian citizens since 2014, DPA reported.
The experts said they have “reasonable suspicions” that crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed during that period. Russia seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014 before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In late February, 45 of the 57 OSCE member states commissioned a report on the detention of Ukrainian civilians, taking advantage of OSCE procedures that allow such investigations without the permission of the affected state.
The three experts – Veronika Bilkova from the Czech Republic, Cecilia Hellestveit from Norway and Elina Steinerte from Latvia – could not say exactly how many people were detained in Ukraine during the period under investigation, BTA reported.
But they believe it is thousands of people, and base their estimate on documents and oral testimony from Ukrainian officials, victims and witnesses.
According to this information, the detainees were subjected to sexual violence, hunger and thirst. The experts also mentioned killings of detainees and prisoners, such as in Bucha near Kyiv in 2022. Arbitrary detention of large numbers of Ukrainian civilians appears to be “a defining feature of the Russian Federation’s policy in the temporarily occupied territories,” the report said.
The detainees were accused of supporting the Ukrainian army or rejecting the Russian operation, with the aim of instilling fear and coercing cooperation with the Russian side, the document said.