According to prosecutors, Ukrainian investigators visited four buildings, including pre-war remand centers, where during the capture of the city, the occupiers illegally detained people and brutally tortured them.
Pieces of rubber batons, a wooden stick, a device used by the occupiers to shock civilians, an incandescent lamp and bullets […] were seized, added the same source ten days after the recapture of Kherson by the Ukrainian army following a counter-offensive which lasted two months.
Since the liberation of Kherson on November 11, kyiv has repeatedly denounced Russian war crimes and atrocities in the region. Moscow has not reacted to these accusations so far.
In this context, in Washington, the United States Goodwill Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice, Beth Van Schaack, told reporters that there was strong evidence of Russian abuses in Ukraine.
There is growing evidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by systematic war crimes committed in all regions where Russian forces were deployed, she said.
She referred to deliberate, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populations, abuses of detention of civilians and prisoners of war, forced expulsion or filtering of Ukrainian citizens – including children – to Russia as well as murders and sexual violence tantamount to executions.
Concerns about the Zaporizhia power plant
In addition, following the firing of undetermined origin which fell on Sunday inside the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, French Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted on Monday, during a telephone call, on the ‘absolute necessity to preserve the safety and security of the site.
Mr Macron expressed his deep concern about the new shootings against the Ukrainian power plant, which Moscow and kyiv accuse each other of having bombed.
He had already discussed it on Sunday with the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, who had denounced absolutely deliberate and targeted strikes.
In kyiv, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe, Hans Kluge, has warned that winter will threaten the lives of millions of Ukrainians after the series of devastating Russian strikes on energy infrastructure from the country.
« This winter will endanger the lives of millions of people in Ukraine. To put it simply, this winter will be about survival. »
The damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure is already having devastating effects on the health system and on the health of the population, he added.
A fake surrender?
In Moscow, the Kremlin has promised to punish those responsible for the death of a group of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, denounced by Moscow as a war crime, while kyiv claims that these soldiers were killed after a false surrender.
On the basis of videos posted on social networks, Russia claims that the Ukrainian army executed more than ten of its soldiers who had laid down their arms.
On the first video, a dozen soldiers presumed to be Russian come out one after the other from a shelter, hands in the air, and lie face down on the ground under the injunction of apparently Ukrainian soldiers who hold them at gunpoint.
The video abruptly ends when a last silhouette emerges from the shelter and seems to open fire. Another video filmed by a drone shows the same place with a dozen bodies of soldiers lying in pools of blood.
Ukrainian human rights official Dmytro Lubynets said on Sunday that the videos actually showed a feigned surrender and that the Russian soldiers had, under international law, committed a war crime by opening fire on the forces. Ukrainian armies after pretending to surrender.
The Russian soldiers killed in this incident cannot therefore be considered prisoners of war, he argued.