UN slams ‘systematic’ Russian torture of Ukraine civilians

GENEVA: Russian authorities have subjected civilian detainees in Ukrainian areas it occupies to “widespread” and “systematic” torture, including sexual violence, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

A UN rights office report concluded that Russia “has subjected Ukrainian civilian detainees to consistent patterns of serious violations” of international law since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“Russia has detained Ukrainian civilians on a massive scale,” Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told reporters in Geneva.

Speaking from Kyiv, she said Ukraine´s top prosecutor had recorded more than 15,000 civilian detentions by Russian authorities, with at least 1,800 people still in custody. “This number should be considered an absolute minimum,” she said, adding that a core finding of the report was the “systematic and widespread torture and ill treatment of (detained) Ukrainian civilians by Russian authorities”.