Category Archives: War crimes

Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike

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Author who had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion was hospitalised with skull fractures after Tuesday’s missile strike

An award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN has said.

Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens.

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Ukraine and Myanmar make 2022 most violent year in a decade for medical staff

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Report demands accountability for war crimes and singles out Russia for ‘mind-boggling’ targeting of hospitals in Ukraine

Russian attacks on medical facilities in Ukraine made 2022 the most violent year in a decade for hospitals and health workers operating in conflict zones, according to a new report by a coalition of humanitarian organisations.

With 750 reported attacks in 2022, Russia set a 10-year record, according to the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, which includes Human Rights Watch and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health.

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Australian government considers compensation for Afghanistan war crime victims

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Human rights and legal groups have stepped up their calls for a compensation plan in the wake of the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation ruling

The Australian government is looking for “a way forward” to compensate families of victims of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, the defence minister has told legal advocates.

But officials continue to warn about the complexity of the compensation issue, one of the key outstanding recommendations from the landmark Brereton inquiry into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces soldiers.

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Rwandan ex-police chief arrested in South Africa over 1994 genocide

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Fulgence Kayishema, 62, charged with playing leading role in church killing of more than 2,000 people

One of the world’s most wanted genocide suspects, a Rwandan former police chief, Fulgence Kayishema, has been arrested in South Africa and charged with playing a leading role in the murder of more than 2,000 people in a church in April 1994.

Kayishema has spent more than two decades as a fugitive and was living under a false name at the time of his arrest on Wednesday afternoon in Paarl, 35 miles (60km) north-east of Cape Town. He was detained by the South African police and members of a tracking team from the Rwandan war crimes tribunal based in Arusha, Tanzania.

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Murder, alcohol and prostitutes: Wagner convicts pardoned by Putin return to terrorise home towns

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Violent criminals who served with the notorious Russian militia in Ukraine are terrorising the communities they return to

He strode up and down the central street of Tskhinvali on Monday, like he did most days, occasionally stopping to chat with passersby.

Locals knew the man, Soslan Valiyev, 38, as an idiosyncratic but popular fixture in Tskhinvali, the tiny capital of the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia in Georgia.

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ICC to plead for extra money to pursue Russian war crimes in Ukraine

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International court’s prosecutor to make case at conference in London after Putin warrant issued

Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the international criminal court, will plead on Monday for extra cash to pursue Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including the potential prosecution of Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of children from Ukraine to Russia.

Khan made his dramatic move against the Russian president last week ahead of a conference in London co-hosted by the UK and the Dutch government aimed at raising cash to fund the ICC’s war crimes investigatory work inside Ukraine. The ICC’s budget has not been increased even though it has 40 investigators working inside Ukraine.

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‘It’s justified’: Joe Biden welcomes ICC arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin

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US president says Russian leader has clearly committed war crimes and move makes ‘a very strong point’

Joe Biden has welcomed the international criminal court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes in Ukraine.

The US president said Vladimir Putin had clearly committed war crimes and that the arrest warrant for the Russian leader made a “very strong point”.

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Putin’s alleged war crimes: who are the Ukrainian children being taken by Russia?

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What we know about the children behind the indictment of Vladimir Putin and his children’s commissioner for abduction

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

The international criminal court in The Hague has indicted the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

This means there is now an international arrest warrant out for Putin, a reflection of the speed with which the international legal community has pursued allegations of war crimes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Zelenskiy vows to ‘find the murderers’ of PoW allegedly shot dead by Russians

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Ukrainian president’s comments come after video appears to show killing of unarmed combatant

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to “find the murderers” of an unarmed Ukrainian prisoner of war apparently shot dead by Russian troops as the Ukrainian military named the man it said was in the footage that spread rapidly across social media on Monday.

In the graphic 12-second clip that first circulated on Telegram and was widely shared on Twitter, a detained combatant, named by the Ukrainian military as Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura, is seen standing in a shallow trench smoking a cigarette. The soldier, in uniform with a Ukrainian flag insignia on his arm, says “Glory to Ukraine” and is then apparently shot with automatic weapons.

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Ukraine urges ICC to investigate video appearing to show Russians killing PoW

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Graphic clip shows detained combatant standing in a shallow trench before being apparently shot

Ukraine has urged the international criminal court to investigate footage circulating on social media that appeared to show Russian fighters killing a Ukrainian prisoner of war.

In the graphic clip that first circulated on Telegram, a detained combatant is seen standing in a shallow trench and smoking a cigarette. The soldier says “Glory to Ukraine” and is then apparently shot with automatic weapons.

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Campaigners seek to overturn Liz Truss’s resumption of Saudi arms sales

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Lawyers will argue the then trade secretary ignored Saudi air force’s bombing of civilians in Yemen

Anti-arms trade campaigners will seek to overturn a decision made by Liz Truss to resume UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, arguing she ignored a pattern of bombing civilians by the country’s air force in Yemen.

A judicial review brought by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) starts in the high court on Tuesday, the latest step in a long-running battle over the legality of a lucrative trade worth more than £23bn since the war in Yemen began.

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Ukraine war pushes civilian casualties from explosive weapons to four-year high

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Reported casualties in Ukraine were eight times more than Afghanistan – and real figure likely to be much higher

Civilian casualties from the use of explosive weapons soared by 83% last year because of the war in Ukraine, according to a monitoring organisation that counts the number of deaths caused by conflict and war.

Action on Armed Violence (AOVA) said the total number reported killed and injured in 2022 was 20,776, the highest level since 2018, with 10,381 casualties in Ukraine alone, based on reports from English language media.

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Russia must face tribunal for ‘crime of aggression’ in Ukraine, say cross-party leaders

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Pressure grows on Putin as politicians and lawyers point to principles that led to Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals

Demands for a special tribunal to investigate Russia for a “crime of aggression” against Ukraine have been backed by senior UK politicians from across the political divide in a move to show Vladimir Putin and his generals that they will be held to account.

In a joint statement shared with the Observer, figures including the Labour leader Keir Starmer, the former Nato secretary general George Robertson, the former foreign secretary David Owen, and former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith say the tribunal should be set up to look into the “manifestly illegal war” on the same principles that guided the allies when they met in 1941 to lay the groundwork for the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders.

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Starvation being used as a weapon of war in South Sudan, report reveals

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International community urged to intervene as hundreds of thousands forced into refugee camps as homes and crops destroyed and aid workers attacked

Starvation is being used as a weapon of war by South Sudan government forces against their own citizens, an investigation has found.

Deliberate starvation tactics used by government forces and allied militia, and by opposition forces, are driving civilians out of their homes, exacerbating Africa’s largest refugee crisis, according to the report published on Thursday.

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Russia says Ukrainian soldiers executed prisoners of war in Donbas region

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A video has circulated on social media reportedly showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting at least 10 Russians

The Kremlin has accused Ukrainian soldiers of executing more than 10 Russian prisoners of war following the circulation of a video on social media purporting to be from the frontline.

The footage appears to show a group of Russian soldiers emerging from an outbuilding in the grounds of a house with their hands above their heads before they are told to lie facedown.

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Alleged Russian ‘torture room’ uncovered in liberated Kherson

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Ukrainian investigators claim Russian forces took over juvenile detention centre, beating and killing people inside

Ukrainian investigators have uncovered a claimed “torture room“ in Kherson city where dozens of men were allegedly detained, electrocuted, beaten and some of them killed.

Police said Russian soldiers took over the juvenile detention centre
in around mid-March and turned it into a prison for men who refused to collaborate with them or who were accused of partisan activity.

Three neighbours and two local shopkeepers said they started hearing screams about six weeks after they saw Russian soldiers take over the building. The witnesses said they started seeing people being taken in with bags on their heads, and some bodies being removed.

Mykola Ivanovych, whose balcony overlooks the back yard of the
detention centre, said he saw two bodies thrown into the garages behind the centre. The Guardian was with press and prosecutors when they first entered the site, and the bodies had been removed.

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Perpetrator of Syria’s Tadamon massacre still working on military base

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Maj Amjad Yousef, identified on videos as killer of dozens of people, accused of directing more mass killings

The Syrian intelligence officer at the centre of one of the most shocking acts of the civil war – the Tadamon massacre – is still working on a military base outside Damascus and has since been accused by colleagues of directing up to a dozen more mass killings.

Amjad Yousef, a major in one of Syria’s most feared intelligence units, is operating from the Kafr Sousa base, where he has been for most of the past six months since the Guardian revealed his role in shooting dead dozens of people across a death pit in Tadamon, a suburb of the Syrian capital in 2013.

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Red Cross frustrated by lack of access to PoWs in Russian-occupied Donetsk

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ICRC responds to criticism from Zelenskiy, saying it is being refused entry to Olenivka prison

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has gone public with its frustration at being refused entry to a notorious Russian prisoner of war camp after scathing criticism from Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In his daily evening address, Ukraine’s president accused the ICRC of a lack of leadership, suggesting that officials were picking up their salaries without doing their jobs.

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Tigray rebels tortured and killed civilians in renewed fighting, survivors claim

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Witnesses claim the attacks in Amhara region last month were carried out on those the TPLF suspected of supporting Ethiopian federal forces

Tigrayan rebel forces have killed dozens of civilians during their latest occupation of a town in the Amhara region, survivors claim, after fighting resumed last month in the northern area of Ethiopia.

The alleged killings took place in the town of Kobo, located along the highway to the capital, Addis Ababa. Between 13-15 September, Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters shot dead unarmed civilians they suspected of supporting federal forces and local militias, survivors have told the Guardian.

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Former Liberian rebel charged with war crimes awaits Paris trial

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Kunti Kamara charged with torture, cannibalism and complicity in crimes against humanity during civil war between 1989 and 1996

A former Liberian rebel commander will go on trial in Paris on Monday charged with acts of barbarity including torture, cannibalism, forced labour and complicity in crimes against humanity during the country’s first civil war more than 25 years ago.

It is the first trial in France of a non-Rwandan suspect accused of wartime atrocities since the special crimes against humanity tribunal was set up in Paris in 2012.

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