51st session of the UN Human Rights Council
Interactive dialogue on situation in Ukraine
Intervention by the delegation of Ukraine
Mr. President,
We are meeting at a critical moment for international law and order and for human rights.
The ongoing Russia's aggression against Ukraine accompanied by massive human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity, unseen since the Second World war, is nothing but a deliberate destruction of the UN Charter with human rights at its center.
As the Kremlin's plan to conquer Ukraine continues to fail, and Ukrainian defenders keep liberating our territories, Russia with its nuclear threats puts the world on the edge of unthinkable. Russia's shellings of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's biggest nuclear power station, expose the entire continent to a nuclear danger. Russia's hunger and energy games leave the people around the world in fear and insecurity.
All these actions represent an egregious affront to human rights of every person in every continent and must be strongly rejected.
Acting High Commissioner's update and the Office’s report on the situation in Ukraine clearly testify to the severely destructive impact of Russia's war on the human rights of the Ukrainian people.
Every single day of more than seven months of Russia's unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression brings unspeakable suffering to every Ukrainian household. Innocent people are being killed, their homes, their lives are being destroyed on direct orders from terrorist number one.
Russia's cruelty doesn't know any limits. Residential buildings, bus stops, innocent civilians remain the key targets of Russia's terror machine.
Just few days ago 16 Russian missiles killed 30 and injured more than hundred people in a civilian convoy in Zaporizhzhia. A 3 year old was wondering among the debris desperately trying to find his parents who had been mercilessly killed by Russia.
In the Dnipro region, in a small village the Russian rocket hit the private house leaving a crater dozens of meters wide and deep. A grandmother, mother, twelve-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son were killed, the human remnants were scattered on the roofs of neighbouring houses, while the orphaned elderly dog was looking for his owners on the ruins.
A mass grave with 440 Ukrainian bodies with the signs of torture found in the liberated town of Izum was yet another testimony of numerous war crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia. Nearly one fifth of Ukraine’s territory with thousands of towns and villages remains occupied by Russia: the full scale of violations of human rights in those areas will become clear only after their liberation.
In the temporarily occupied territories, Russian forces are sending Ukrainian citizens to “filtration camps” before forcibly relocating them to Russia in violation of Geneva Conventions. Those people are not refugees, they are forcibly deported people who must be returned home.
The Russian Federation organized illegal mass adoption of the Ukrainian children after they had been forcibly transferred from occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia. We are talking about 200 000 Ukrainian children who have been deprived of their right to have a decent childhood in their homeland.
These are the war crimes and crimes against humanity for which Russia will be held accountable.
This is the reality for millions of Ukrainians who make a plea to the world not to remain silent, not to be neutral, not to be complacent in the face of evil.
Mr. President,
By forcing people to fill out the election ballots at gunpoint in the sham so-called "referenda" in the temporarily occupied parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine Russia has yet again committed a crime against citizen’s right for free and fair elections.
The grotesque attempt to annex parts of Ukraine's territory will not have any legal consequences for Ukraine's sovereign territory or internationally recognized borders of Ukraine. Neither will it change anything for Ukrainian defenders, who will continue to liberate all our territories and our people.
One more atrocious war crime perpetrated by Russia is the illegal conscription of people on the territories it controls into the Russian Armed Forces, forcing them to fight against their own state. In the occupied Crimea, Russia deliberately focuses its mobilization on Crimean Tatars, who received over 80 % of Russian draft notices. It is nothing but the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula of the indigenous people disloyal to Moscow.
Politically motivated persecution of Crimean Tatars in the occupied Crimea is yet another example of Russia’s blazen disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law.
Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the occupying power has issued more than 30 sentences to Crimean political prisoners, the total term of imprisonment of which is already more than 1,100 years.
The recent "draconian" verdict of 17 years in prison to First Deputy Chairman of the Mejlis Nariman Dzhelal for his participation in the Crimean Platform Summit, coupled with 15 and 13 years of imprisonment for Asan and Aziz Akhtemovs expose Moscow's fear of the local resistance to occupation of the peninsula. I reiterate a clear message from ___ participants of the second Crimea Platform Summit: Russia must immediately and unconditionally release all Ukrainian prisoners unjustly detained in Crimea and on the territory of Russia.
Russia breaks every possible rule, violates international legal order and core human rights principles. It does not deserve a seat in any international multilateral institution for its deep contempt for multilateralism.
We will not stop until we liberate all our territories, until we hold Russia accountable for their crimes against the Ukrainian people.
We must do it together, for the sake of world justice and peace.
I thank you.