UN human rights council to meet, will extend war crimes investigation
The UN human rights council is set to meet today in a united call to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extend its investigation into war crimes in the conflict.
Days after the United Nations general assembly in New York voted overwhelmingly to demand Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine, the war is expected to dominate the opening of the top UN rights body’s main annual session in Geneva.
We’re looking for this session to show, as the UN general assembly showed … that the world stands side-by-side with Ukraine,” British ambassador Simon Manley said at an event Friday marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The meeting, which is due to last a record six weeks, will be the first presided over by new UN rights chief Volker Turk, who kicks the session off early Monday.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will also address the council on the first day, while nearly 150 ministers and heads of state and government will speak, virtually or in person, during the four-day high-level segment.
Among them will be the top diplomats of the US, China, Ukraine and Iran.
Moscow will send deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov to address the council in person on Thursday.
One key resolution will be on extending a high-level investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The so-called Commission of Inquiry, which has already determined that Russia is committing war crimes on a “massive scale” in Ukraine, is due to present a comprehensive report to the council in late March.
The commission must “continue its important work, which is of paramount importance for the principles of accountability and justice”, Yevheniia Filipenko, permanent representative of Ukraine to the United Nations office in Geneva, told reporters on Friday.
Key events
Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war.
BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs).
“One of the nine Awacs of the Russian aerospace forces worth $330m (was destroyed),” said a statement attributed to BYPOL.
“These were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusians. (They have attained) ‘Victory’ and are now safely outside the country. Everyone has escaped,” said one statement attributed to Aliaksandr Azarau.
The plane “definitely won’t fly anywhere”, the group added.
According to some reports, the aircraft was hit by munitions dropped by two drones. A second munition reportedly hit close to the cockpit. “The front and middle section of the aircraft were damaged, as well as avionics and a radar antenna,” said a report attributed to BYPOL.
The damage to the aircraft has not been independently confirmed, although both Russian and Belarusian military bloggers have reported explosions on Sunday at the airfield. One also confirmed “damage to a Russian military transport plane”.
China has derided US sanctions on Chinese companies, as part of its targeting of the Russian private mercenary Wagner group and its affiliates, describing them as “illegal” and accusing the US of “outright bullying and double standards”.
The sanctions “have no basis in international law or authorisation from the Security Council, and are typical illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction”, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing.
The measures were “seriously harming China’s interests” and China “strongly rejects and deplores that and has lodged solemn complaints with the US side”, Mao said. She added:
While the US has intensified its efforts to send weapons to one of the parties to the conflict, resulting in an endless war, it has frequently spread false information about China’s supply of weapons to Russia, taking the opportunity to sanction Chinese companies for no reason.
This is outright bullying and double standards.
The US has sanctioned the Chinese company Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute, also known as Spacety China, for providing satellite imagery of Ukraine to support the Wagner group’s combat operations for Russia. A Luxembourg-based subsidiary of Spacety China was also targeted.
Summary of the day so far …
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Air raid alerts sounded across Ukraine’s Kyiv region late on Sunday night as Kyiv’s regional military administration confirmed the country’s air defences were at work. The nearby northern city of Chernihiv also reported shooting down Iranian-made Shahed drones, according to its regional governor, Vyacheslav Chaus.
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Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to city’s mayor.
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Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian plane at an airstrip near the capital, Minsk, on Sunday. “Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk,” tweeted Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.” The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe.
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Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Monday that talks with Sweden and Finland regarding their Nato membership bids would resume on 9 March, after a delay in January in the wake of a Qur’an-burning protest. The meeting will take place in Brussels and will include discussion on the implementation of the memorandum signed between the countries. It later emerged that the Qur’an-burning incident in Stockholm was funded by a far-right journalist with links to Kremlin-backed media.
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Respect for human rights has gone into reverse, the United Nations chief warned Monday, calling for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing. Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, António Guterres said the declaration was “under assault from all sides”. He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today. “It has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement,” he said.
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The UK’s ministry of defence has claimed that “Russia will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring” in and around Mariupol, a location “at least 80km away from the frontline … [which] it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities.”
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The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”.
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China has always maintained communication with all sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including Kyiv, a foreign ministry spokesperson told a regular news briefing on Monday.
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Russia’s former president said in remarks published on Monday that the continued arms supply to Kyiv risks a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev’s apocalyptic rhetoric has been seen as an attempt to deter the US-led Nato military alliance and Kyiv’s western allies from getting even more involved in the war.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be with you for the next few hours.
Jennifer Rankin
A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, arguing that it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, also said a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers could save people’s lives by deterring Russian forces from committing further crimes.
Starting legal proceedings could have “a cooling effect” on the brutality of human rights violations that Russian troops were committing daily in Ukraine, she told the Guardian in an interview.
Some troops, perhaps not all, would realise that Putin’s authoritarian regime had an end date, Matviichuk said, if they knew they would be held to account. The possibility of justice would help them realise “I will not be able to hide under abstract Putin and maybe I will have to be responsible for every thing which I commit by my own hands,” she said.
Read more of Jennifer Rankin’s interview and report here: Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate calls for special tribunal to try Putin
Here is a recent view of the military cemetery in Dnipro that has just been sent to us over the news wires.
The Kremlin said on Monday it was worried about the state of affairs in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region, where it said Ukraine and other European countries were stirring up the situation.
Moscow last week told the west that it would view any actions that threatened Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria as an attack on Russia itself, a warning that came amid increased concerns in Moldova, a small ex-Soviet republic located between Romania and Ukraine, of a possible Russian threat.
Moldova’s pro-European president, Maia Sandu, this month accused Moscow of plotting a coup, something Russia denied.
“Naturally, the situation in Transnistria is the subject of our closest attention and a reason for our concern,” Reuters reports Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the media. “The situation is unsettled, it is being provoked, provoked from outside.
“But we know that our opponents in the Ukrainian regime, the Kyiv regime, as well as those in European countries, are capable of various types of provocation.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed Moscow’s assertion that Ukraine wants to take over the region, while Moldova said there was no truth to the allegations.
Vadim Krasnoselsky, the self-styled president of Transnistria, had earlier described the situation in the region as tense, but urged people to remain calm and said that citizens would be informed immediately should any threat of danger arise.
Respect for human rights has gone into reverse, the United Nations chief warned on Monday, calling for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing.
Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, AFP reports António Guterres as saying the declaration was “under assault from all sides.”
“Some governments chip away at it. Others use a wrecking ball,” he told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s main annual session, describing the disregard and disdain seen for human rights around the world as “a wake-up call”.
He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today.
“It has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement,” he said.
AFP reports that a second person has died as a result of Russian drone attacks overnight.
It quotes Oleksandr Symchyshyn, mayor of Khmelnytskyi, saying “Unfortunately, we have another hospital death. Doctors failed to save the life of another hero, a rescuer”. Earlier, the mayor and Ukraine’s ministry of defence reported that someone from the emergency services had been killed. Ukraine claims to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed by Russian forces.
Nine were downed over the capital, Kyiv, the head of the city’s military administration said, and there were no reported casualties or damage to infrastructure.
The official, Sergiy Popko, said Russian forces were trying “to exhaust our air defences”, and said the attack had come in two separate waves.
Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the news wires from Ukraine.
Ramon Antonio Vargas has spoken to Randi Thompson, president of Los Angeles-based nonprofit Kidsave, who is calling on Americans to aid efforts to place Ukrainian children orphaned by the Russian invasion in new families within their country.
Read more here: Ukrainian children orphaned by war ‘need a tremendous amount of help’
Just to add to that report from the Ukraine ministry of defence that an emergency service worker was killed in Khmelnytskyi overnight, AFP is reporting that the mayor of Khmelnytskyi, Oleksandr Symchyshyn, has said: “For now, we know of one dead and four injured” after the drone attack on the city.
