Category Archives: War crimes

Russian soldier pleads guilty in first Ukraine war crimes trial since invasion

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Tank commander Vadim Shysimarin, 21, admits shooting dead a 62-year-old civilian who was on a bicycle

A Russian tank commander has pleaded guilty to shooting dead 62-year-old man as he rode his bicycle down a village road, in Ukraine’s first trial for war crimes committed during the Russian invasion.

Vadim Shysimarin, 21, sat emotionless as prosecutors detailed charges that he had fired his AK-47 at the unarmed cyclist from the window of a car in the north-eastern Sumy region in late February.

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Zimbabwe denies harbouring deceased Rwandan genocide fugitive

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DNA shows body exhumed in the country was Protais Mpiranya, Rwanda’s most wanted fugitive

Zimbabwe has denied harbouring the Rwandan genocide fugitive Protais Mpiranya after it emerged that he died in 2006 and was buried in the country after living there for four years.

The 20-year manhunt for one of the world’s most brutal killers came to a decisive end in an overgrown cemetery outside Harare, but Zimbabwean authorities say they did not conceal his whereabouts.

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Twenty-year search for Rwanda genocide suspect ends in Zimbabwe grave

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Exclusive: inside the manhunt for Protais Mpiranya, accused of Rwandan mass killings and the world’s most wanted war crimes fugitive

The 20-year manhunt for one of the world’s most brutal killers has come to a decisive end in an overgrown cemetery outside Harare.

The body of Protais Mpiranya, the former commander of the Rwandan presidential guard indicted for genocide, lay buried under a stone slab bearing a false name, which UN investigators tracked down and identified with the help of a critical lead found on a confiscated computer: the hand-drawn design for Mpiranya’s tombstone.

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UN secretary general describes war in Ukraine as ‘absurdity’ in 21st century

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António Guterres visits Borodianka outside Kyiv where Russian forces are accused of massacring civilians

The UN secretary general has described the war in Ukraine as “an absurdity” in the 21st century on a visit to the scene of civilian killings outside Kyiv, as Russia warned the west that increasing arms supplies to Ukraine would endanger European security.

António Guterres was touring Borodianka on Thursday, where Russian forces are accused of massacring civilians before their withdrawal, on his first visit to Ukraine since the start of the invasion on 24 February, before talks with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

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Massacre in Tadamon: how two academics hunted down a Syrian war criminal

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After a rookie militiaman secretly watched a video of 41 people being brutally killed, he knew he had to get the horrific images to the outside world

• Warning: this report contains images readers may find upsetting

On a spring morning three years ago, a new recruit to a loyalist Syrian militia was handed a laptop belonging to one of Bashar al-Assad’s most feared security wings. He opened the screen and curiously clicked on a video file, a brave move given the consequences if anyone had caught him prying.

The footage was unsteady at first, before it closed in on a freshly dug pit in the ground between the bullet-pocked shells of two buildings. An intelligence officer he knew was knelt near the hole’s edge in military fatigues and a fishing hat, brandishing an assault rifle and barking orders.

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Crimes against history: mapping the destruction of Ukraine’s culture

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US-based lab documents destruction of churches and theatres

Satellite scrutiny of Ukraine is not just focused on military hardware. Thousands of miles away from the fighting, an international group of archaeologists, historians and technicians are quietly coordinating another high-stakes monitoring effort: the tracking of the mounting losses to Ukraine’s cultural landscape.

Now an impact summary, released this month from their lab at a museum in the US state of Virginia, has revealed the bleak truth.

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With bloodied gloves, forensic teams uncover gruesome secrets of Bucha in Ukraine

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While investigators uncover the remains of civilians, heartbroken families wait nearby to reclaim their loved ones

Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.

In a deep mass grave, a forearm and hand, the fingertips turning black, lay under a foot at a sickening angle; another man’s arm looked like it was clawing its way out of the disturbed soil in an attempt to escape his fate.

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Video appears to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoner of war

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The BBC has confirmed the location west of Kyiv and found satellite images showing bodies on the ground

Soldiers fighting for Ukraine appear to shoot a Russian prisoner of war outside a village west of Kyiv in a video posted online.

The footage was originally shared on social media app Telegram. The New York Times said it had verified the video and the BBC said it had confirmed the location north of the town of Dmytrivka and found satellite images showing bodies on the ground.

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Tigray has been the scene of ‘ethnic cleansing’, say human rights groups

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Human Rights Watch-Amnesty report accuses Ethiopian paramilitaries of war crimes and crimes against humanity

Ethiopian paramilitaries have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes using threats, killings and sexual violence, according to a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The rights groups accuse officials and paramilitaries from the neighbouring Amhara region of war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia.

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Sanctions on Russia must stay till all troops leave Ukraine, says Liz Truss

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Foreign secretary in discussions with Ukrainian foreign minister about intensifying sanctions after atrocities in Bucha

The West must not lift sanctions against Russia until all its troops have left Ukraine and Vladimir Putin is unable to mount such an offensive again, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said.

She was speaking alongside the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in Warsaw, where the two discussed how to step up sanctions against Russia to the maximum in the wake of the alleged war crimes revealed in Bucha.

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Biden calls for Putin to face war crimes trial over civilian killings in Ukraine

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Western leaders prepare fresh round of sanctions against Moscow amid outrage over reports of killings in town of Bucha, near Kyiv

Joe Biden has called for Vladimir Putin to be tried for war crimes as western leaders prepared a fresh round of economic sanctions against Moscow amid mounting global outrage over claims of civilian killings by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

The US president was responding to harrowing images broadcast around the world after the discovery over the weekend of a mass grave and bodies in civilian clothes, some with their hands bound, in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.

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‘It is a war crime’: two young boys among neighbours shot dead during attempted evacuation

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Civilians fleeing in cars mown down in the town of Bucha, north-west of Kyiv, where 20 bodies were found on the streets

Halyna Tovkach, 55, is searching for the body of her husband, Oleg, 62. His death, she says, is part of a war crime in which Russian soldiers also killed two young boys and their mother.

The incident is said to have happened at 7.15 on the morning of 5 March in Bucha, a town north-west of Kyiv, when two families who were neighbours on Ivana Rudenka street tried to escape their hell.

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Russia may be committing war crimes in Ukraine, UN human rights chief says

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Michelle Bachelet said the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure indicates the rules of war have ‘not been sufficiently adhered to’

Ukrainian cities have been pounded by airstrikes and heavy shelling in Russia’s five-week-old invasion, killing civilians and destroying hospitals in acts that may amount to war crimes, the top United Nations human rights official has said.

Michelle Bachelet, addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, called on Russia to withdraw its troops.

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UN official concerned over videos showing apparent abuse of PoWs in Ukraine

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One video shows a man with a blue armband shooting three prisoners in the leg in Malaya Rohan’

A senior UN official has said they have seen videos purporting to show the abuse of prisoners of war on both sides in Ukraine, as Russia raised the mistreatment of its soldiers at the first day of the latest peace talks.

Matilda Bogner, head of the UN’s human rights office in Ukraine, said a number of videos of the abuse of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners were being examined, adding that “on the face of it, it does raise serious concerns”.

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ICC launches war crimes investigation over Russian invasion of Ukraine

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International criminal court inquiry has been expedited by unprecedented number of countries backing move

A war crimes investigation has been launched into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine after an unprecedented number of countries backed the move and Boris Johnson called the military intervention “abhorrent”.

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the international criminal court (ICC), said he would begin work “as rapidly as possible” to look for possible crimes against humanity or genocide committed in Ukraine.

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Russian blasts hit civilian areas: the videos analysed as war crime evidence

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Video shows Russian strikes hitting residential buildings in Ukraine, adding to mounting evidence of war crimes to be investigated by The Hague.

Footage of an attack on a car park in Kharkiv, described by a Bellingcat researcher as a cluster bomb strike, appears to show a residential park nearby, and similar bombs exploded along a road.

Intentionally targeting civilians or civilian buildings is considered a war crime under international humanitarian law. Russia routinely denies it engages in illegal attacks. Cluster munitions, which indiscriminately scatter small bombs over a wide area, are banned by more than 100 states. But neither Russia nor Ukraine (nor the US) have signed up to a treaty first introduced in 2008 that bans them

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Researchers gather evidence of possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine

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‘Open-source intelligence community’ is already collecting and studying video and photo evidence

Six days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, there is mounting evidence that its military is committing war crimes with deadly attacks on civilians and the use of cluster munitions.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat, said there was evidence of Russia causing “civilian harm”, including through the use of “cluster bombs in civilian areas”, from credible video and stills of the conflict.

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Analysis: what weapons is Russia deploying in Ukraine invasion?

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Fears that use of indiscriminate armaments could amount to war crimes

Footage captured by a CNN crew of the deployment of a T0S-1 heavy flame thrower system which was filmed being transported towards the Ukrainian border on Saturday has focused increased attention on what weapons Russia is beginning to deploy and how indiscriminate they are.

The TOS-1, nicknamed the “Buratino” – the Russian version of Pinocchio – for its big nose, is one of the most feared weapons systems in Russia’s conventional armoury, a multiple launch rocket system mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank capable of firing thermobaric rockets which use oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion.

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Human rights lawyers attempt to bring Syria war crimes cases to ICC

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Attempt to target Iranian and Syrian officials includes evidence from civilians forced to flee to Jordan

A groundbreaking attempt to make Iranian and Syrian military officials answerable for war crimes they may have committed in Syria is being launched, as part of an effort to have the cases brought before the international criminal court.

The request includes evidence of Syrian victims forced to flee into Jordan due to attacks and intimidation by the Syrian government and Iran-backed militia groups. It is being brought by the US-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in conjunction with Haydee Dijkstal, a UK barrister.

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Ukraine crisis has financial markets spooked, but not yet despondent | Larry Elliott

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Shares dipped and oil prices crept closer to the $100 mark due to fears of invasion and resulting economic sanctions

The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine has left financial markets jittery but not yet panicky. Unsurprisingly, shares took a tumble on the world’s bourses and there was a brief rise in oil prices to just over $96 a barrel.

Investors were taking few chances and sought out traditional safe havens such as the US dollar, but there was little sense that world war three was about to break out. If anything, financial markets seem to be underestimating the risks.

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