UN says Russia consolidates control of occupied Ukraine with ‘climate of fear’
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A man standing in front of a campaign poster for Russian President Vladimir Putin, in downtown Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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KYIV – Russia is illegally consolidating its control over occupied Ukrainian territory by creating a “climate of fear” with practices such as arbitrary detention, killings and torture, the head of a United Nations reporting mission in Ukraine told Reuters.
Speaking before the release of a comprehensive UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine report on the territories Russia occupied in its full-scale invasion since 2022, the mission’s head, Ms Danielle Bell, said Russia’s breaches of rights there were used to terrify local residents into cooperating.
“These combined actions of censorship, surveillance, political oppression, repression of free speech, movement restrictions... created a climate of fear in which the Russian Federation could systematically dismantle the Ukrainian systems of government and administration,” she said in an interview.
The Russian diplomatic mission in Geneva did not respond to questions on the report’s main accusations.
Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council after the report’s publication, Russian senior diplomat Igor Sergeev accused UN human rights bodies of double standards and of turning a blind eye to violations committed by Kyiv.
Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities or deliberately attacked civilians during the invasion, which it terms a “special military operation”.
Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014, and its proxy separatist groups occupied two regional capitals in east Ukraine in the same year.
The invasion in 2022 led to Moscow’s capture of further swathes of land in Ukraine’s east and south.
It currently controls more than 17 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, where several million people remain.
The UN monitors did not have access to occupied territory, but instead based their findings on more than 2,300 interviews with people who were living in occupied territories, had left occupied territory or lived in liberated areas.
Ms Bell said there had been an initial phase of rights violations, including killings, torture and arbitrary detention of those perceived to be linked to Ukrainian security forces or those believed to be supporting Ukraine. That was followed by campaigns against freedoms of movement, assembly and expression, she said.
These were followed by a push to change all major state institutions into Russian ones, something Ms Bell said violated international humanitarian law.
That effort saw schools forced to switch to the Russian language and curriculum, and the justice system jailing people in Russian prisons.
Civil servants had been forced to comply with these new systems, she said.
Ms Bell gave the example of Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,
“When they resisted, they faced threats, intimidation harassment, threats against their families, and some even faced arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and in some cases... death.”
Ms Bell said Russia aggressively pushed people to take Russian citizenship: People could obtain services such as healthcare, social security or rented housing only with a Russian passport.
She added that residents in occupied areas were encouraged to spy on one another, and online services had been created for this.
Ms Bell also said Russia had sought to cut communication links between Ukrainians in occupied areas and those in territories controlled by Kyiv.
Combined with families not being allowed to travel back and forth to see loved ones, this kept relatives cut off from one another, she added. REUTERS
