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The Russian military has committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Amnesty International revealed in a report published on Monday.
The Russian offensive in the northeastern city in Ukraine was a “relentless campaign of indiscriminate bombardments” against the second-largest city in the country, the report states.
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The director of the medical department of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration told Amnesty International that 606 civilians have been killed and another 1,248 had been wounded from the start of the war through April 28, the report said, meaning the last six weeks of battle are not included in those tallies.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes. This is true both for the strikes carried out using cluster as well as those conducted using other types of unguided rockets and unguided artillery shells, which are indiscriminate when used in the vicinity of concentrations of civilians,” the report claimed.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office has opened nearly 15,000 cases of alleged war crimes, including the targeting of civilians, the office announced at the beginning of the month. There are another 7,200 cases regarding the crime of aggression, another type of war crime that focuses on the planning and initiation of a large-scale act of aggression using a state military force.
“The continued use of such inaccurate explosive weapons in populated civilian areas, in the knowledge that they are repeatedly causing large numbers of civilian casualties, may even amount to directing attacks against the civilian population,” it added. “Amnesty International researchers documented seven cluster munition strikes in different neighbourhoods all over the city, where they found fins and pellets/fragments of cluster submunitions, as well as fragments of Uragan rockets known to carry such munitions.”
The Convention on Cluster Munitions bars its use as a result of the indiscriminate harm it can cause to civilians. Ukraine, Russia, and the United States are not among the more than 100 nations that signed the pact in 2010.
“Cluster bombs are inherently indiscriminate,” Amnesty’s report added. “Rockets release dozens of submunitions in mid-air, scattering them indiscriminately over a large area measuring hundreds of square metres. In addition, cluster munitions have a high dud rate, with a high percentage failing to explode on impact and thus effectively becoming land mines, which pose a threat to civilians long after deployment.”
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Many Western officials, including President Joe Biden, have accused Russian soldiers of committing war crimes. He has also claimed that in his personal opinion, the situation in Ukraine amounts to genocide, though that has not been determined by experts.
