Ukraine: Soldier shows 'mass grave' with burned Russian equipment

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Russian soldiers stand accused of using mass rape as a weapon of war. Legal experts from the Hague have been on the ground in Ukraine to collect evidence of alleged sexual crimes by Russian forces. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied committing war crimes and rejected allegations of sexual violence by the Russian military but investigators in Ukraine report that the number of alleged war crimes is running into the tens of thousands.

The Deputy head of Ukraine’s war crime unit for sexual violence, Anna Sosnovska told TimesRadio: “Everywhere where Russian soldiers were based they committed war crimes, they committed sexual violence and they tortured, they murdered.

“This is the main line I think, like a method of conducting war against Ukraine as a nationality.”

 Julian Elderfield, an International legal adviser at Global Rights Compliance, has been working with Ukrainian prosecutors in the newly liberated city of Kherson to help uncover the crimes in more depth.

He explained: “So we’ve been down here for three days now supporting the Office of the Prosecutor General in their local investigations here in Kherson.

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“The team is a conflict-related sexual violence specific team and they’ve been coming down here, they are coming down here to extract and target conflict-related sexual violence.”

He added: “It is a two-pronged process. There is a need to collect evidence as soon as the crimes occur.

“But as the conditions improve, that also becomes more amenable for victims of sexual violence to come forward.”

Serhii Doroshyn the Deputy head of the national police’s investigation department in Crimea claims officers have “personally interrogated approximately 70 people.”

Ukraine: Russian Wagner base hit by missile strike in Svatove

He said: “It is inhumane treatment. Law and customs of war are not observed at all.

“None of the Conventions is observed either.”

Russian drone attacks near the Black Sea port of Odesa over the weekend destroyed several energy facilities and left all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations without power.

Meanwhile Ukrainian officials said Monday the country’s forces hit a hotel in the Luhansk region that served as a headquarters of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military contractor and mercenary group that has played a prominent role in eastern Ukraine.

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The region’s Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said hundreds of Russians were killed in the strike on Kadiivka on Sunday. Moscow-backed local officials in Luhansk confirmed that a Ukrainian strike destroyed a hotel building in Kadiivka but claimed it was unused.

The Ukrainian mayor of the southeastern town of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, reported that Ukraine also attacked a hotel that reportedly housed analysts from Russia’s top security agency, the FSB.

Moscow did not comment on that claim, and none of the reports could be independently confirmed.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Monday that two civilians were killed and 10 were wounded in Russia’s shelling of the town of Hirnyk in the Donetsk region.

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