The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine welcomes the publication by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) of the “Report on violations and abuses of international humanitarian and human rights law, war crimes and crimes against humanity, related to the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Ukrainian civilians by the Russian Federation”.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba previously called on the OSCE to take politically relevant actions to solve the problem of the Ukrainian civilian hostages. The Minister welcomed the Report, stated that the conclusions of the Mission are shocking, and should be an alarm signal for the world community regarding Russia's deprivation of liberty of civilian hostages and the importance of their immediate release.

It is important to emphasize that Report made by the independent Mission of experts of the OSCE Human Dimension Moscow Mechanism is the first particular and comprehensive international report dedicated to the problem of Russia's deprivation of liberty of the Ukrainian civilian hostages.

It should also be noted that the Russian Federation refused to cooperate with the mission of independent experts.

The Mission established that the practice of arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Ukrainian civilians by the Russian Federation has occurred on a massive scale and has signs of a systematic, consistent, deliberate pattern of conduct targeting specifically Ukrainian civilians. The Mission concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both the war crime of “unlawful confinement” and the crime against humanity consisting of “imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law” have been committed.

The Mission also concluded that the deprivation of liberty of the Ukrainian civilians caused other serious violations of International humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL).

The Report concluded that Ukrainian civilians arbitrary detained by Russia “have died due to the injuries suffered as a result of torture and other cruel, inhuman degrading treatment or punishment, sexual violence and other forms of serious mistreatment. The Ukrainian civilians detained by the Russian Federation have endured harsh conditions of detention and have been denied contact with the outside world, turning their deprivation of liberty into incommunicado detention and enforced disappearances”. The Report has also recorded cases of “extrajudicial killings of arbitrarily detained Ukrainian civilians”. It is mentioned that the “detained civilians have been denied fundamental fair trial guarantees in criminal prosecutions”.

The Mission concluded that “extrajudicial killings of arbitrarily detained Ukrainian civilians by Russian representatives without proper investigation of allegations of such murders, may also amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Report defines that the practice of arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Ukrainian civilians has started in the occupied Crimea in 2014, quickly spread out to the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and has been further applied by the aggressor-state on all the temporarily occupied territories since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The experts note that the Russian Federation's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine has resulted in thousands of cases of arbitrary deprivation of liberty of the Ukrainian civilians and in a large number of missing Ukrainians whose whereabouts are currently either unknown or not officially confirmed.

The document emphasizes that the Russian authorities regularly fail to fulfill a number of obligations regarding civilian detainees arising from Third Geneva Convention (III), Geneva Convention IV (GCIV) and Additional Protocol I. In addition, the Russian Federation did not recognize the special status of three staff members of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) detaining them without any reason for almost two years and putting them on trial.

It is crucially important that the conclusions of the Report can be used within the framework of national and international mechanisms for bringing to justice the war criminals of the aggressor state, as well as may contribute to the achievement of the goals of President Zelenskyy's Peace Formula in terms of the release of captured and deported persons and the restoration of justice.

Ukraine calls on international community to further actively use and spread the Mission’s conclusions as well as to consolidate efforts to ensure the immediate and unconditional release of all Ukrainian civilians, arbitrary detained by Russia.

All instigators, organizers and perpetrators of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity must and will be brought to justice.