Alleged War Crimes Committed by Russian Forces in Ukraine

A street in Bucha covered with destroyed armored fighting vehicles. Photo: Lee Durant/ BBC

In the beginning of this week, Bucha, a small Ukrainian city near Kyiv, became the most talked about battlefield in the current Russo-Ukrainian War. On Monday the New York Times published an article with multiple satellite images of unidentified bodies strewn on the streets of Bucha. Many of them had their arms tied behind their backs, and were assumed to be killed between March 9 and March 11, when the Russian military was still occupying the city. 

The Russian withdrawal from the city on March 30 also led to a discovery of a mass grave comprising 20 bodies of Ukrainian men. As the BBC reports, some of the bodies were in black bags with their arms tied and mouths covered; some faced the ground and others were on their backs. Currently, only a few people have been identified. 

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the UN Security Council for the first time since the war broke out, denouncing Russian forces for their war crimes and demanding that they end immediately with a tribunal of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Additionally, he asked that a global conference be held in order to restructure the system of global security and establish specific rules on sovereignty and integrity of the UN member states. 

In his video appeal to the UN, Zelenskyy called the murders a genocide of Ukrainian people. He claimed to have seen more than just one mass grave in Bucha and described the various methods by which Ukrainian people were killed, as well as tortured by Putin’s army. As discovered bodies continue to be examined by local authorities, it is clear that some were shot in their hands, backs and heads, and had their throats slashed and limbs cut off. The Russian army also killed civilians in their apartments, cars and on the streets by driving over them with tanks, according to Zelenskyy. His graphic description was a strong call for officials’ attention and action to end the violence, by punishing Putin in a court trial and with more intense sanctions. 

A satellite image showing dispersed bodies along one of the streets of Bucha. Photo: BBC

Zelenskyy also mentioned multiple rapings of Ukrainian women performed by Russian forces, often in front of their children. Human Rights Watch reported that a woman reached out to them to talk about her traumatic experience of being raped by a Russian soldier in a school in the Kharkiv region, where she and her family and many others were sheltering. She received medical attention and her injuries were photographed. While her case has strong evidence, it is very important to remember that many of these situations remain unreported or unpublished in the media; however, it does not change the fact that wartime rape goes against international humanitarian law, and is considered a war crime. 

Not surprisingly, these extensive allegations have not gone unheard by the Kremlin authorities. While they have not directly addressed accusations of sexual assault and rape, they refused to take responsibility for Bucha killings, declaring them a hoax. Simultaneously, they called for an emergency UN Security Council to discuss such “provocation of Ukrainian radicals.” Nonetheless, as German intelligence claimed on April 7 to have intercepted the radio communications of Russian soldiers’ describing the brutal killings of Ukrainians, the evidence for the committing of war crimes only increases.