UN says Russia consolidates control of occupied Ukraine with “climate of fear”
PHOTO CAPTION: Illustrative photo — A resident casts her vote in Avdiivka, Donetsk Region, Russian-controlled Ukraine, March 16, 2024. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
By Max Hunder
KYIV (Reuters) - 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 U.N. reporting mission in Ukraine told Reuters.
Speaking before the release of a comprehensive UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) report on the territories Russia occupied in its full-scale invasion since 2022, the mission's head, Danielle Bell, said Russia's breaches of rights there were used to terrify local residents into co-operating.
"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.
In Moscow, Russian authorities did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the main points of the U.N. report.
Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities or deliberately attacked civilians during the invasion, which it says is 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 2022 invasion led to Moscow's capture of further swathes of land in Ukraine's east and south.
It currently controls more than 17% of Ukraine's territory, where several million people remain.
The U.N. 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.
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 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.
Bell gave the example of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where she said workers were forced to continue to work even if they did not want to.
"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."
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.
Bell said residents in occupied areas were encouraged to spy on each other, and online services had been created for this.
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 each other", she said.
(Reporting by Max Hunder, Editing by William Maclean)
