A school damaged by a rocket attack in a residential area of Kharkiv (Ukraine) June 2, 2022. IVAN ALVARADO / REUTERS
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in Kharkiv by indiscriminate Russian cluster munition shelling, Amnesty International denounced in a report published on Monday 13 June. Researchers at the human rights organization examined 41 attacks that killed at least 62 people and injured at least 196. There were indiscriminate effects.
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“The people of Kharkiv have faced a relentless barrage of indiscriminate attacks in recent months,” said Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International. People have been killed in their homes and on the streets, in playgrounds and cemeteries while queuing for humanitarian aid or shopping for food and medicine.” She denounced the “repeated and shocking” use of cluster munitions, the “total disregard for civilian life “ show.
The report, titled Anyone Can Die at Any Time: Indiscriminate Attacks by Russian Forces in Kharkiv, recalls that Russia is not a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions or the Convention on Landmines. However, he points out that “international humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate attacks and the use of weapons, which by their very nature strike indiscriminately”.
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Strike against a playground
The bombing of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city with a population of 1.5 million, began on February 24, the first day of the Russian offensive. Residential areas in the north and east of the city were hardest hit. On March 24, cluster munitions killed at least six people and wounded 15 others in a parking lot near the Akademika-Pavlova metro station, where hundreds of people were queuing for humanitarian aid.
A supermarket destroyed by a Russian strike on June 8, 2022 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. IVAN ALVARADO / REUTERS
In another neighborhood, Oksana Litvynyenko was walking in a playground with her husband Ivan and their 4-year-old daughter when several cluster munitions exploded next to her. Fragments pierced his back, chest, abdomen, lungs and spine. “When my daughter saw her mother lying on the ground in a pool of blood, she said to me, ‘Let’s go home: Mom is dead and the people are dead.’ She was in shock and so was I. I still don’t know if my wife will recover, said Ivan Litvynyenko. Doctors can’t say if she’ll be able to talk or walk again. Our world has been turned upside down. The attack happened in the afternoon when many other families were at the playground with their children, Amnesty International said. On site, researchers found distinctive fins, metal pellets and other fragments of the 9N210/9N235 cluster munition.
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