Ukraine War: Handing the Donbas to Moscow Will Doom its People to Suffering --

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5853903

Opinion piece by Natalia Morozova, a lawyer for Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre.

Archived version

Remember how everyone recently laughed at the UN for publishing a tearful report saying that no one reads its reports? Well, I can tell you about a fresh report that will sadly be read by even fewer people than any UN document.

Because each of its 224 pages is filled with blood and torture. In every third paragraph, someone is being beaten or electrocuted. And when there’s no beating or torture, there’s a tedious explanation of Russian missile guidance systems and why international law prohibits using such systems at night for strikes on cities — even if the missiles are supposedly high-precision and aimed strictly at military targets.

This report from the Memorial Human Rights Center, titled “Ukraine: War Crimes of the Russian Aggressors,” presents the results of our trip to Ukraine in January 2025.

To give our report even a chance of getting as many views as the UN’s work, I won’t spoil where exactly we were, why we went or what we saw. But I will explain why it’s still worth reading, even if we were slow to publish.

At a time when peace plans, amnesties for war criminals and lifting various sanctions are being discussed, it is crucial to know and remember what Russia is doing in the occupied territories.

For example, Russian soldiers gouged a man’s eye out because they found a blue-and-yellow discount card from the Ukraina supermarket in his wallet. The card, they claimed, indicated sympathy for Nazism.

Other Russians mockingly staged a mass execution of several dozen people the day before withdrawing from Kherson.

Others went a step further by actually executing three brothers simply because the eldest had once served in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (the Ukrainian mission to defend its territorial integrity in 2014-2018). The middle brother miraculously survived after a bullet hit him in the jaw. He crawled out of what was literally a mass grave, made his way back to the village by back roads and told them everything.

Russian soldiers also stole cars and engaged in other forms of looting and torture as brutal as their imagination can concoct. Always with taunts of “fascist” and “Banderite scum,” and the words, “And what made you think you can live better than us?”

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This is the terror Russia establishes in the occupied territories.

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Imagine being forced [as an inmate in a Russian penal colony] to stand motionless from six in the morning until eight in the evening without shifting your weight or leaning on anything. Move, and they beat you. This goes on for months while you develop varicose veins, ulcers or gangrene. This is how they torture people at the notorious Penal Colony No. 10 in Mordovia. In addition, prisoners have dogs set on them, suffer beatings and are forced to memorize “Katyusha” and the Russian national anthem.

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We can now afford to say we warned you.

Although, as the dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin liked to say, we did not “put logic into this system.” Therefore, it is pointless to look for it: a pattern of brutality is unmistakably visible from Chechnya through Georgia and Syria to Ukraine.