Claim: In October 2023, Vladimir Putin said, "There is no way to help the Palestinians except by fighting those behind their conflict, and we are fighting them in Ukraine."
Rating: Correct Attribution
As of 31 October 2022, OHCHR – through the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine
(HRMMU) – had documented summary executions and attacks on individual civilians in 102 villages and towns of the three regions between 24 February and 6 April 2022. The acts in question were committed by Russian armed forces in control of these areas and led to the deaths of 441 civilians (341 men, 72 women, 20 boys and 8 girls). One hundred of those killings are analysed in this report and its Annex, as illustrative examples of the suffering borne by civilians in these areas.
Information available to OHCHR indicates that the total number of summary executions and lethal attacks directed against individual civilians by Russian armed forces in the three regions during the reporting period is likely considerably higher.
True. The speaker of Canada's House of Commons, Anthony Rota, issued a public apology, claiming he was unaware of the full extent of Hunka's wartime affiliations when he made the acknowledgment.
KYIV (7 December 2022) – In the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian armed forces summarily executed or carried out attacks on individuals leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner said today. A UN Human Rights report based on the work of the Mission details how Russian troops killed civilians in Ukrainian towns and villages across the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine from 24 February until 6 April 2022.
Bogner said the summary executions examined in the report may constitute a war crime. “There are strong indications that the summary executions documented in this report may constitute the war crime of willful killing,” she said.
Dating at least to 2008 or 2009, increasingly hostile language laid the groundwork for rejecting Ukraine’s existence as a state, a national group, and a culture.
What follows is a compilation of publicly available statements (readers are invited to submit by email any that we may have missed).
Experts such as Francine Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg,” have pointed to such language as evidence of genocidal intent toward the Ukrainian people. Whether and how the concept of “genocide” applies to Russia’s campaign against Ukraine is the subject of debate, notwithstanding the reference in Article II of the Genocide Convention to “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.”
BBC News debunks several disinformation narratives making the rounds on Twitter - amplified in particular by paid "blue check" accounts:
- Weapons for Ukraine not used in French riots
- No evidence of 'baby factories' in Ukraine
- Kramatorsk missile not Ukrainian
- Zelensky has not cancelled elections
UNESCO list of damaged cultural sites in Ukraine - 260 as of 19 June. (Note that this list includes only those sites that have been verified by UNESCO - a complete list would be far longer.)