The report says it found “credible evidence” suggesting that violations “of even the most basic human rights (right to life, prohibition of torture and other inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment) were being committed, mainly in areas under effective control of Russia or companies under overall control of Russia.”
In a statement to the OSCE on Wednesday, US Ambassador Michael Carpenter said that “the report as a whole documents the catalog of inhumanity perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine.”
“The report impressively documents the sheer scale of the Russian government’s atrocities,” Carpenter said.
The 110-page report includes accounts of targeted killings, torture, rape and enforced disappearances.
The OSCE fact-finding mission “received several reports, sometimes accompanied by photographic evidence, alleging that Russian troops used the Red Cross emblem to identify non-medical military vehicles, Ukrainian flags, army or police uniforms or vehicles, white flags, civilian clothing and OSCE symbols to facilitate their military operations,” it said.
It includes reports of a Ukrainian interpreter being “held in captivity for nine days” by Russian forces. Left in a freezing basement, he was repeatedly beaten with an iron bar and rifle butts, tortured with electricity, deprived of food for 48 hours, and subjected to a mock execution.
It includes the account of a woman who was repeatedly raped “in the presence of her young child” by a “drunk Russian soldier” who killed her husband.
“There are allegations of rapes, including gang rapes, committed by Russian soldiers in many other regions of Ukraine,” the report said.
She cites the Ukrainian Parliament’s Human Rights Ombudsperson, who said that “500,000 civilians were deported from Ukraine to Russia” and “that they were all forcibly displaced, first taken to some filtration camps in Russia near the Ukrainian border, and so on some.” of them were then taken to the island of Sakhalin, but left there at liberty.”
For many of the incidents, the report says they constitute war crimes but does not fully explain them as such. Regarding the attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital, however, it says: “This attack is therefore a clear violation of (international humanitarian law) and those responsible committed a war crime.”
“While it may be that one hospital was used by the defender for military purposes or accidentally destroyed, it is unlikely that this would be the case if 50 hospitals were destroyed,” the report said.
It points to a “particularly insidious form of attack,” known as “double tap attacks,” allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Kharkiv in early March. A Russian cruise missile hit the Kharkiv regional administration – and a second hit hit the building after rescuers arrived a few minutes later.
“Inconceivable”
The report was the result of a three-week fact-finding mission by the three OSCE experts and covers the period from the start of the war on February 24 to April 1. This mission was launched after 45 countries triggered the OSCE Moscow Mechanism, which is used to investigate allegations of human rights abuses.
The report notes that the experts faced a number of limitations – time and resource constraints, lack of access to Ukraine – allowing “a detailed assessment of most allegations of violations of international humanitarian law and the identification of war crimes and crimes against the Humanity required in relation to specific incidents has not been possible.”
“However, it is inconceivable that so many civilians would have been killed and injured and so many civilian objects, including houses, hospitals, cultural assets, schools, multi-storey residential buildings, administrative buildings, penitentiaries, police stations, water stations and power supply systems, would have been damaged or destroyed if Russia respected its (international humanitarian law) obligations of discrimination, proportionality and precautionary measures in conducting hostilities in Ukraine,” it said.
The report did not cover the period in which developments such as the Bucha atrocities came to light, which “require serious national and international investigations on the spot with forensic experts”. It stated that “such killings, if confirmed, would constitute a egregious violation of (international humanitarian law) and war crimes”.
The report said that “violations occurred on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.”
“However, the violations committed by the Russian Federation are far greater in nature and scope,” she adds. Most of the violations reported by Ukraine relate to the treatment of Russian soldiers.
The report also notes that Russia, which is a member of the OSCE, did not provide the fact-finding mission with any additional information, but “referred the mission to the official statements and briefings of the Government of the Russian Federation, which made it impossible for the mission to to take into account the Russian position on all relevant incidents, unless they are based on official open sources and websites.
“The Permanent Representation of the Russian Federation informed the Mission upon request that it considered the Moscow Mechanism largely outdated and redundant,” the report reads.
“More detailed investigations are needed”
The OSCE report hailed the work of other organizations – the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – to investigate crimes committed in Ukraine.
“Further investigations are necessary, particularly with regard to determining individual criminal responsibility for war crimes,” it said.
Carpenter, the US ambassador to the OSCE, told reporters that “the information and evidence gathered by the fact-finding mission will be shared with other jurisdictions such as the ICC and the ICJ. They can also be shared with national courts that may declare jurisdiction.”
Carpenter did not rule out the possibility that the Moscow Mechanism could be triggered to investigate further reports of atrocities committed in Ukraine.
This story has been updated to include additional details.