Moscow admits to attacking infrastructure but denies that it targets civilians, saying it aims to undermine Ukraine’s fighting ability and push it to negotiate. Kyiv says such attacks are war crimes.
“These attacks have left millions of people trapped in extreme hardship and appalling living conditions,” Volker Turk said in a statement. “As a whole, it poses serious problems under international humanitarian law, which requires a concrete and direct military advantage for each object to be attacked.”
In the same statement, he said that a preliminary analysis of UN videos that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers executing Russian prisoners of war indicated that they were “highly likely to be authentic”.