After the investigation in Ukraine, the UN Human rights office announced that Russia killed at least 441 civilians at the beginning of the war, Reuters reports.
On December 7, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights informed that the actual number of people killed in Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Buch regions could be even higher than the one mentioned in the report. The report says that Russian soldiers murdered 441 civilians, and the investigation was conducted only for crimes in the time period between the 24th of February and the beginning of April.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense have not yet commented. Moscow regularly denies targeting civilians and says the «special military operation», as Russia calls the war, is designed to disarm Ukraine and drive out dangerous nationalists in power. Ukraine and Western countries call it an illegal seizure of territory.
Throughout the course of the war, until the 4th of December, the UN Human Rights Committee registered 6,702 cases of killing of civilians. The deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime and a very serious violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Most of the remains found showed signs of violent death, the report said. Several settlements have been hit particularly hard, such as Bucha, which is near Kyiv and was under Russian control for most of March. The UN Human Rights Committee has documented 73 murders of civilians in Buch and continues to investigate 105 more cases.
The purpose of the report is to help the victims, document what the Russian army has done, and hold the criminals accountable for the murders committed. Of the murders analyzed in more detail in the report, 57 were executions. The report said the rest of the killings were committed while civilians were on the move: «The majority of victims were killed while going to work, delivering food to others, visiting neighbors or relatives, or while trying to escape the war zone.»
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