UN-appointed investigators are looking into whether Russia’s attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine amount to war crimes, one of the inspection team said on Friday.
Russia has been pounding Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure since early October, causing blackouts and leaving millions without heating as temperatures plummet, Reuters reported.
Russia says the assaults do not target civilians and are meant to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight and push it to negotiate – though Kyiv says such attacks are a war crime.
“Part of the analysis that we are engaged in at present … is whether the attacks constitute war crimes,” Pablo de Greiff told a news conference, speaking from Kyiv.
If they do, the team would work out what it “can do in order to make a contribution to the accountability for such crimes,” he added.
The three-member commission of inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council in March has already concluded that Russia committed war crimes in areas it occupied in Ukraine.
Moscow regularly dismisses such accusations as a smear campaign.
When Alina Trebushnikova woke up on Thursday morning, the light was on and she knew the day had already got off to a bad start.
The electricity in her neighbourhood of Novomoskovsk had returned in the middle of the night and that meant it would not be on for much longer. As a result, the little house would be colder and darker for much of the day.
It gets dark by 4pm in Ukraine now and temperatures hover just below zero after nightfall. Next week a deep frost is expected and the days will grow even shorter, as Ukrainians approach their hardest winter since the second world war.
Alina’s husband, Oleksii, was away at his construction job and would only return long after dark. Their two boys, nine-year-old Ilia and Yakov, three years younger, were at the home of Alina’s parents, who have a wood stove, independent of the vagaries of the grid.
Alina is 31 and has lived in Novomoskovsk since she was seven, when her parents moved out of a block of flats in nearby Dnipro to live closer to the earth, as they put it. She now spends most of her days alone with Polina, born three months ago, while making food for the family, juggling with limited light, heat and ingredients.
Ukrainian embassy in Madrid receives 'bloody package'
Spanish police have cordoned off the area surrounding the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid after it received a “bloody package” similar to the ones sent to other embassies abroad, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said.
This comes after a spate of six letter bombs targeted high-profile targets in Spain related to the war in Ukraine, including the United States’ embassy, prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the defence minister, an arms manufacturer, an airbase and a European satellite centre.
On Friday, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said several of the country’s embassies abroad have received “bloody packages” containing animal eyes.