UN To Investigate Possible Russian War Crimes In Ukraine, Human Rights Chief: Scale Of Unlawful Killings

EU officials visit to Bucha, Ukraine. (Wikimedia Commons/KMU.gov.ua/Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine)

JAKARTA - The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution to launch an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops in the Kyiv region and beyond on Thursday, a move Russia said amounted to a political settlement.

In the vote, 33 supported and only two rejected the resolution, ordering the Commission of Inquiry to investigate events in the area around Kyiv and other areas such as Sumy, which is temporarily occupied by Russian troops.

"The areas that have been under Russian occupation in late February and March have experienced the most egregious human rights violations on the European continent in decades," Ukraine's First Deputy Foreign Minister, Emine Dzhaparova, told the Council.

As she spoke via the video link, she held up an image she said was made by an 11-year-old boy who was raped in front of his mother.

"He completely lost the ability to speak afterwards and the only way he communicated was with the black line," he said bitterly.

Reuters was unable to verify Dzaparova's account of what happened to the child. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Russian diplomatic mission did not respond to a request for comment on his account.

Russia, which has denied wrongdoing in what it calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine, left its seat on the Geneva, Switzerland-based Human Rights Council vacant in protest.

"Instead of discussing the real causes that led to the crisis in this country and looking for ways to solve it, the 'collective West' is organizing another political defeat to demonize Russia," Moscow's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Gennady Gatilov, said in an emailed statement earlier this month. voting.

Meanwhile, in a shift from its previous position of abstaining in Ukraine, China voted against Eritrea's joint decision.

"We have noted that in recent years, politicization and confrontation in the (Council) has increased which has greatly affected its credibility, impartiality and solidarity," said Ambassador Chen Xu.

Russia said it went to Ukraine on February 24 to disarm the country, ridding the Kremlin of what the Kremlin calls anti-Russian nationalism fueled by the West.

Adapub, Ukraine and Western countries say Russia is waging a war of unwarranted aggression.

Russia was suspended from a member of the UN Human Rights Council last month over alleged abuses in Ukraine, although Moscow said it had stopped.

At the same session on Thursday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, said there were many examples of possible war crimes since the Russian invasion, saying that so far 1,000 bodies had been found in the Kyiv region.

"The scale of the extrajudicial killings, including indications of brief executions in areas north of Kyiv, is staggering," he said.

Separately, the Kremlin said images of corpses on city streets like Bucha were staged to discredit its troops.

The resolution also asks Bachelet to provide an update at the Council session next June on violations in the Russian-held port city of Mariupol.