Russian atrocities against civilians detailed

KYIV, Ukraine — The United Nations has detailed extrajudicial killings by the Russian army during the first month of the war that it described as likely war crimes, releasing a report Wednesday that offered a harrowing, fine-grained examination of the risks to civilians in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

A report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights documented 441 killings of civilians in areas along the Russian attack route toward the capital, Kyiv, on both the west and east banks of the Dnieper River. Of these, 28 were children, the report said. It said the total number of killings in the area was “likely considerably higher.”

The report, whose aim was to document war crimes and assist future prosecutions, arose from one of several international investigations into the macabre scenes discovered in the wake of the Russian army’s retreat from Kyiv. Ukrainian prosecutors are also collecting evidence.

“There are strong indications that the summary executions documented in the report constitute the war crime of willful killing,” the U.N. human rights commissioner, Volker Türk, said in a statement.

Ukrainian authorities discovered more than 1,000 bodies after the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv. The U.N. investigators focused on proven cases of summary execution or targeting of individual civilians by Russian soldiers, excluding victims of artillery shelling. The report focused narrowly on killings in towns and villages north of Kyiv occupied from Feb. 24 to April 6.

War crimes prosecutions are likely years away, and Russia has rejected cooperation, the U.N. report noted, adding that Russia had shown “no indications” it would investigate or prosecute its soldiers for war crimes.

Of the 100 cases studied, 57 were summary executions. In others, civilians were shot from a distance as they drove in cars, rode bicycles or walked, sometimes while trying to flee the combat zone, the report said.

“In most cases, victims of killings in places of detention were found with their hands cuffed or bound by duct tape, and with injuries suggesting torture or other ill-treatment before being killed,” the report said. One body had signs consistent with sexual violence, it said.