The Ukrainian non-governmental organization (NGO) Center for Civil Liberties (CGS), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, recently documented 31 cases of torture carried out by the Russian Kherson army, bringing the national total to 300.
“So far, we have documented 300 cases of torture throughout the country and 31 in the Kherson region,” the executive director of the CGS, Oleksandra Romantsova, told the EFE agency on Tuesday.
Romantsova hopes that the 300 documented tortures carried out since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 will reach the International Criminal Court (ICC) “within a few years.”
“We need personal information from the perpetrators of the crimes, since the accusation must be personal,” he says about the documentation process -not the criminal investigation- that the CGS has already begun.
“All torture cases will go to the ICC, I hope all of them,” said the activist, from Nicolaev, the town near Kherson, recently liberated by the Ukrainian army.
CGS is also aware of another 10,000 Ukrainian children separated from their families and “forcibly displaced”, a number provided to the humanitarian organization by the Ombudsman.
“We know the names,” Romantsova said of these children, although she acknowledged that she still doesn’t know how many children lost their parents during the wars and occupation, as there are no official statistics.
As for sexual abuse, there is a telephone line throughout the country and 30 cases have been reported, while the Attorney General’s Office has opened an investigation into nine of them.
“Nobody talks about these crimes. We will know when the war ends and people feel safer,” said the Ukrainian activist.
Regarding the total number of missing persons, the CGS considers that the official figure is 50,000 cases, a status that, according to him, must be qualified, since he knows that many are in Russia.
In total, the CGS database today gives a total of 26,000 war crimes, which makes its executive director speak of “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.
According to Romantsova, these are systematic war crimes that “are happening everywhere and follow the same pattern.”
The attorney general considers that these war crimes already amount to 50,000, without counting the Kherson statistics, something that leads Romantsova to forecast a much higher number.
“When the new data comes out, I don’t expect less than 200,000 cases [de crimes de guerra] altogether,” he says.
Source: TSF
