The comprehensive Moscow Mechanism report details violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia and its armed forces during the ongoing war against Ukraine.

As this report on victims of Russia’s brutalities was being presented at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE’s) Permanent Council, Russian missiles struck the town of Vinnytsia and killed at least 20 people, including three children.

First and foremost, I want to stress that the OSCE concluded that patterns of violent acts by Russian forces in Ukraine unquestionably, without any shadow of a doubt, meet the qualification of crimes against humanity.

The report of more than 100 pages provided strong evidence of the numerous atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine:

 “The Mission found clear patterns of international humanitarian law (IHL) violations by the Russian forces on many of the issues investigated. It is not conceivable that so many civilians would have been killed and injured and so many civilian objects, including houses, hospitals, cultural property, schools, multistorey residential buildings, administrative buildings, penitentiary institutions, police stations, water stations and electricity systems would have been damaged or destroyed if Russia had respected its IHL obligations in terms of distinction, proportionality and precautions in conducting hostilities in Ukraine. The conduct of the siege of Mariupol is an extreme example.”

For me, this report is a horror story I cannot believe is happening in real life. And I am not alone here. The US ambassador to the OSCE, Michael Carpenter, in his response to the report, stated: “Taken as a whole, the report documents the catalogue of inhumanity perpetrated by Russia’s forces in Ukraine. This includes evidence of direct targeting of civilians, attacks on medical facilities, rape, executions, looting, and forced deportation of civilians to Russia.” 

Carpenter also talked about the forcible transfers of civilians, the mass kidnapping of children and filtration camps:

“The report underscores that mass forcible transfers of civilians from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power are prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the practice is considered a war crime. Yet despite this clear prohibition, the report notes that more than 1.3 million Ukrainian civilians are reported to have been deported against their will to Russia, including more than 200,000 children. 

“The report cites the Mariupol mayor’s description of how these deportations are carried out: ‘At night, a man with a gun entered the shelter, claiming it was an evacuation. People who had been in the shelter for about 20 days were let out, put in cars, and driven somewhere, only to realise they had been taken somewhere out of Ukraine. They were then loaded on to trains and transported to the Russian Federation’s hinterland.’

“The report provides evidence that tens of thousands of civilians are being detained at ‘filtration centres’ and then transported to detention places in Russia or the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Many of them are then held incommunicado, have no contact with their families, and are subject to various forms of mistreatment. The mission notes that these centres, such as the Bezimenne centre in the Donetsk region, serve to ‘filter, on unclear grounds, individuals seeking to leave besieged cities or other dangerous areas’ and that the filtration process involves ‘harsh interrogation and humiliating body inspection’. Those who pass through the filtration are ‘often transferred, with their consent or without it, to Russian territory’. 

“The experts note that they have ‘no doubts that such practices violate international human rights law and may amount to a crime against humanity or a war crime’. The mission in fact documents ‘a relatively consistent pattern of behaviour on the side of the Russian Federation, when the military occupation of a certain area is followed by abductions, interrogations, mistreatment and sometimes killings of important public figures, such as mayors or local journalists’.

“Russia is not only waging war on its neighbour but reportedly forcing some Ukrainian citizens to fight against their own country. The mission reported conscription was imposed on all local men between the age of 18 and 65 in areas under Russian control in the Donbas as well as of the oblasts of Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumy. Residents report that men with no military experience are regularly ‘plucked from the streets and immediately sent to the front’. The mission also reported the use of non-combatants, including children, as human shields, contrary to international humanitarian law. For example, Russia’s soldiers reportedly used over 300 Ukrainian civilians as human shields and held them captive for 25 days in March in the basement of Yahidne School, where a major Russian military camp was located. 

“Children have of course been killed as well, as we have documented in this council previously. Per the report, ‘in Bucha alone, 31 children under the age of 18 were killed and 19 wounded, according to local authorities’. The report cites the region’s chief prosecutor saying that ‘all children were killed or injured deliberately, since Russia’s soldiers deliberately shot at evacuating cars that had the signs CHILDREN and white fabric tied to them, and they deliberately shot at the homes of civilians’. 

“Some children witnessed executions of their parents, relatives and friends, with impacts that will last for generations. And on top of this, the mission relayed reports that ‘approximately 2,000 children from various orphanages and children’s institutions’ have been ‘purportedly transferred to Russia, even though they have living relatives and were in the institutions only for medical care’.”

During the hearing on the report, the deputy head of the UK delegation, Deirdre Brown, highlighted some of the most horrific parts of the report:

“The report is a real-life horror story. Due to the actions of the Russian government — a government of an OSCE participating state — this horror is an everyday reality for the people across Ukraine.”

Reports of torture. The execution of civilians. Unlawful detentions. Enforced disappearances. Targeting civilians on their streets, in their cars, on their bicycles, on their balconies and in their homes. Victim-activated booby traps. The rape of women. The rape of children. Violence towards men. The killing of journalists. The targeting of hospitals, of schools. The use of cluster munitions. Shallow graves. The threat of cholera. This is an affront to humanity. It is depravity itself.

I recall with shock, alarm and dismay some of the accounts documented from Bucha in this report. I simply cannot imagine what it is like to have lived through the reality on the ground, including:

• In Vorzel, west of Bucha, where a woman and her 14-year-old child were killed after smoke grenades were thrown into the basement in which they were hiding;
• The summer camp in Bucha, repurposed for torture. With bullet holes in the walls, instruments of torture and the corpses of five men — burnt, bruised, and lacerated;
• In Zabuchchya, a village in the Bucha district, where 18 bodies of murdered men, women and children were discovered, some with their ears cut off, some with their teeth pulled out; and
• Kyiv’s regional police force reported that 900 civilian bodies were discovered after the Russian withdrawal, 350 of them in Bucha. According to police reports, nearly 95% were “simply executed”.

The report states that photographic and video evidence appears to show “that Russian forces carried out targeted, organised killings of civilians in Bucha” who were “frequently found shot dead, hands tied behind their backs. 

“A series of torture chambers separated by concrete walls were discovered in a summer camp in Bucha.  At the front, there was a room that appeared to be used for executions, with bullet holes in the walls. The following room contained two chairs, an empty jug, and a wooden plank. The Russians had brought in two metal bedsprings and leaned them against the wall in another. The tableaus suggested to Ukrainian investigators that prisoners were tortured here: tied to the bedsprings and interrogated; strapped to the plank and waterboarded. 

“In that chamber, five dead men dressed in civilian clothes were discovered. They were covered with burns, bruises, and lacerations. Also, in Zabuchchya, a village in the Bucha district, 18 mutilated bodies of murdered men, women, and children were discovered in a basement: some had their ears cut off, while others had their teeth pulled out.”

I do understand that parts of this report are unbearable to read, but I think we all need to understand what Ukrainian children, women and men went through before they were killed. I’m not mentioning the parts of the report on Russia stealing grain, bombing farms and silos and mining the fields and burning the harvest to starve the world because I have a few blogs already dedicated to this problem.

I will remind everyone of the quote made by the head of Russia’s state TV, one of the most powerful people in Russia, who is in charge of Putin’s propaganda machine. This was a public quote by Margarita Simonyan during a conference last month, addressed to all of us and you, the people of Africa, where Ukraine ships most of its crops: “All of our hopes are for famine. I mean, when famine really starts, they’ll have a chance to rethink everything and lift the sanctions and will become our friends because they’ll understand that it’s impossible not to be our friends.”

I urge everyone to read the Moscow Mechanism report on violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia and its armed forces during the ongoing war against Ukraine. And stand with Ukraine. DM

Monitoring the human dimension 

(Source: https://www.osce.org/)

“The OSCE has established a number of tools to monitor the implementation of commitments that participating states have undertaken in the field of human rights and democracy (the human dimension). One of these tools, the so-called Human Dimension Mechanism, can be invoked on an ad hoc basis by any individual participating state or group of states.

“It is composed of two instruments: the Vienna Mechanism (established in the Vienna Concluding Document of 1989) and the Moscow Mechanism (established at the last meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension in Moscow in 1991), the latter partly constituting a further elaboration of the Vienna Mechanism.

“The Vienna Mechanism allows participating states, through an established set of procedures, to raise questions relating to the human dimension situation in other OSCE states.

“The Moscow Mechanism builds on this and provides for the additional possibility for participating states to establish ad hoc missions of independent experts to assist in the resolution of a specific human dimension problem — either on their own territory or in other OSCE participating states.

“The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is designated to provide support for the implementation of the Moscow Mechanism, and it maintains a list of experts appointed by some of the participating States who are available to carry out such investigations.

“To date, the Moscow Mechanism has been used 11 times.” DM