UN inquiry says Russia committed war crimes by attacking Ukraine’s power and heating, and trafficked men from 29 countries into its army

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said on Monday 26 October that Russian authorities committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by attacking civilians and vital energy infrastructure, according to UN News, which reported on the commission’s latest report.

Attacks on power and heating

The three-person panel noted that attacks on power plants have intensified “once again” across Ukraine, where temperatures fell to -21°C last winter. It concluded that Russian commanders who ordered the strikes knew the heating facilities were “indispensable to the civilian population, particularly during the winter”, and found that Russian authorities had made official declarations about further attacks and referred to a plan to carry them out. The investigators concluded that this amounted to the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects.

The report draws on accounts from 255 people who endured the winter in Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Zaporizhzhia and Zhytomyr oblasts, as well as Ukrainian authorities, medical doctors and non-governmental organisations. Older people, it says, were among the worst affected: some cannot use stairs or lifts during air raid alerts and were left in unheated homes without electricity or water.

Strikes on Russian and occupied territory

The commission also examined Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure in Russia and in occupied areas of Ukraine. It said it could not investigate their impact inside Russia because the authorities did not allow access or respond to its requests for information. Recent Ukrainian long-range drone strikes are covered in our reports on the Voronezh drone attack and the Russian missile strike described in Russia fires cluster-warhead ballistic missiles at Kyiv, one hitting the historic Pechersk district near the Lavra, Zelensky says.

Trafficked recruits

The report also cites “compelling evidence” that Russian authorities recruited men trafficked from 29 countries into the armed forces, in violation of international human rights law. According to the commission, the trafficking relied on “deception and coercion”, with agents operating in several countries, and the men were soon forced to sign contracts in Russian with the Ministry of Defence. They were deployed to the front line and given dangerous tasks; many were killed or went missing, while others surrendered or were captured by Ukrainian forces and became prisoners of war. One witness, the wife of a man recruited from the Caribbean, said his passport was taken and he was told to sign a contract written only in Russian.

The commission calls for all the trafficked people to be discharged from the Russian armed forces.

Who is behind the report

The commission was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2022, shortly after Russian troops entered Ukraine. Its members, Erik Møse, Pablo de Greiff and Vrinda Grover, are independent experts who are not UN staff and are not paid for their work. Its mandate covers all alleged violations of human rights and international humanitarian law and related crimes in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.