Revealed in an international summit for war crimes and justice, a recent report accuses Russia of carrying out a heinous campaign of assassination, rape, and torture in Ukraine.
Britain will provide Ukrainian prosecutors with a £2.5 million support package, including the deployment of mobile justice teams and the training of forensic teams, as well as up to 90 judges and UK personnel assisting victims of sexual violence.
According to Western officials, senior military and political figures in Moscow are now being investigated for their roles in the atrocities, as are the soldiers who carried them out on the ground.
Held in The Hague, the Ukraine Accountability Conference was facilitated, as at least 20 people, including children, were killed in a Russian missile strike in Vinnytsia, central Ukraine – an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “an act of open terrorism by a killer state.”
More than 21,900 alleged Russian war crimes are currently being investigated, on top of another 11,000 acts against national security under Ukrainian law, and 800 acts of looting and theft.
To date, over 6,000 civilians, including 348 children, have been killed, while 7,571 have been injured, including 650 children.
According to a senior Western source, international lawyers are also looking into “the crime of aggression and a number of individuals including representatives of the Russian supreme military command and a large number of senior politicians.”
The source added: “Russians do not recognise war crimes in the sense that they see anything they do as being necessary to achieve their objective and if that includes committing a war crime then that is just going to happen.”
Neil Bush, the UK representative to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said the organisation’s second war crimes report charts “a real-life horror story”.
He described the accounts of “torture, execution of civilians, rape of women, rape of children, targeting of civilians, shallow graves, victim activated booby traps, the killing of journalists, targeting of hospitals, schools, the use of cluster ammunition” as “an affront to humanity, it is depravity itself”.