A gravedigger pauses while preparing the ground for a funeral at a cemetery on April 20, 2022, in Irpin, Ukraine. The first several rows contain the bodies of people killed during the Russian occupation of the area.
Yet the evidence attesting to Russia atrocities in Ukraine also obscures an essential fact: It represents a small fraction measured against the likely scale of atrocities carried out by President Vladimir Putin’s forces.We know that because we know this: Notwithstanding the lurid accounts detailing systematic torture, rape, execution and other forms of abuse deployed by Moscow’s troops, independent investigators are denied access to territory seized by Russian forces.
Yet even from a limited sampling, and in the dry lexicon of U.N. commission reports, the abominations perpetrated by Russian security services and soldiers are plain., released Oct. 20, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, established by the U.N. Human Rights Council, recounted what it called evidence of war crimes. It includes details of electric shocks routinely used to torture detained Ukrainian civilians, a form of torture that Russian forces term “a call to Putin.
Many of the atrocities are acts of terrorism. They occur amid the quotidian backdrop of Russian air and artillery strikes against Ukrainian apartment buildings, cafes and other civilian targets — attacks with no military rationale.