The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine welcomes the publication of the UN Secretary-General's report “Situation of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol” for the period from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2024. This report has been prepared in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 78/221.

It is the UN Secretary-General’s first annual report detailing gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed by the Russian occupying authorities throughout all Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories, including the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Kherson regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

The report documents numerous cases of torture, conflict-related sexual violence, unlawful arrests, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and restrictions on freedom of religion, expression, and peaceful assembly, perpetrated the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and other bodies of the Russian occupying authorities.

The Secretary-General calls on the Russian Federation to comply with its international legal obligations under the Charter of the United Nations, international humanitarian law and international human rights law in all areas of Ukraine. In particular, the Russian occupying authorities must respect the absolute prohibition of enforced disappearances, the use of torture and other forms of cruel treatment. They must ensure independent, impartial and prompt investigations into all such cases.

Furthermore, the Secretary-General calls on Russia to immediately cease the forcible transfer and deportation of protected persons from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, to provide full information on the deported Ukrainian children, to refrain from any action that would alter their status and to cooperate with the UN on this matter.

Ukraine reaffirms its willingness to continue cooperating with the UN and its human rights mechanisms to ensure the protection of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories, to return illegally deported children, to release illegally detained civilians and POWs, to investigate cases of conflict-related sexual violence and to provide justice to the victims.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine emphasizes the importance of the UN Secretary-General’s report as yet another critical documentary confirmation of the widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed by Russia as an occupying power in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine since 2014.

We call on the international community to step up the pressure on the Russian Federation to immediately cease its armed aggression, to withdraw from all Ukrainian territory and to hold those responsible for war crimes to account.