A new 155-page report on war crimes in eastern
Ukraine has singled out top separatist leaders for perpetrating torture and
murder, all in a bid to hold them accountable before the International Criminal
Court in The Hague
The report, an initiative by Polish member of parliament Małgorzata Gosiewska, relied on a team
of Ukrainian volunteers and Polish policemen to conduct exhaustive interviews
with war crime victims and representatives of various non-governmental
organizations working in the war-torn east.
In addition to naming alleged
perpetrators of war crimes – including Donetsk separatist leader Alexander
Zakharchenko, Arseniy Pavlov a.k.a. Motorola, and Mikhail Tolstykh a.k.a. Givi
– the report also pinpoints locations where victims say they were tortured or
witnessed executions and torture.
The report is limited to events
that took place in 2014, before a newly reached ceasefire led to a major
decline in fighting in September 2015. It also focuses exclusively on crimes
committed by Russian-backed separatist forces in occupied territories.
Yet at a time when many fear the
war in Ukraine has been forgotten and some of the perpetrators of war crimes
mentioned in the report are walking freely around Moscow, the report’s authors
hope this newly compiled evidence will lead to criminal charges brought in the
International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The stories told by victims in the
report are hard to stomach. Some victims testified that they were forced to
watch while other prisoners were tortured. The torture included amputating
fingers and gouging out eyeballs, according to the report. In
some cities, detainees were forced to bury the bodies of both fellow prisoners
and executed separatists.
The report also alleged that
interrogations were conducted by members of Russia’s Federal Security Service
and Main Intelligence Directorate.
One victim, whose identity was kept
anonymous, said GRU officers had “pierced” and “slashed”
his knees with knives so that he couldn’t fight back or struggle. He also said
they poured salt into all of his open wounds.
Staged executions were also used as a form of
psychological pressure, as were real executions. One prisoner testified that
authorities in Donetsk had chained a man to a car and left him there for five
days without food or water. Other prisoners were forced to watch as he slowly
withered away from dehydration and starvation, and told they would suffer the
same fate if they tried to help him, the report said.
In Slovyansk, victims spoke of midnight
executions ordered by impromptu tribunals.
Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, a Russian
citizen who at one point was the leader of the armed gangs who seized control
of Slovyansk, was accused of taking part in such executions.
A copy of scanned documents that the report
identified as official documents of one such “tribunal” in occupied Donetsk
cited a law active in 1941, under the Soviet Union, as the basis for its
decision to execute three men for robbery.
Several Ukrainian soldiers interviewed for the
report said they were transported from Donetsk to Russian territory after being
captured. There, they were allegedly interrogated by members of Russia’s FSB
and the Investigative Committee, according to the report.
During the interrogations, the detainees were
forced to speak to Russian journalists and give statements under duress.
The report categorically disputes the notion
that the conflict in eastern Ukraine was a civil war, pointing the finger
directly at Russia for the crimes perpetrated on Ukrainian territory by
separatist leaders.
Although Ukraine is not a signatory of the Rome
Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin lodged a declaration with the
international body in early September to allow the court jurisdiction over
crimes committed on Ukrainian territory since February 2014. The declaration
will allow the court in The Hague to investigate war crimes in Ukraine.
