[Witness spoke in Ukrainian, interpreted as follows:]
Greetings to the esteemed members of Parliament. I would also like to thank you on behalf of all of the residents of Chernihiv.
On my own behalf, I would like to thank the Government of Canada, the Prime Minister and the people of Canada for the powerful support you're lending us. We can really feel it. We're very grateful for this. We're grateful to those Canadians who were one of the first to come to our aid. We're also grateful to the members of the Ukrainian World Congress, which is based in Canada.
With regard to war crimes that Russia committed in Chernihiv, here's what I have to say. From the very first days of the war.... You'll know that the active phase of the war started in 2014. Then, in 2022, it started on February 24, and on February 27, the first Iskander missiles hit the building of our city council in the very centre of Chernihiv, next to the central square.
These are very powerful missiles, and they were obviously directed by the Russian officers at the downtown of a city that's 1,300 years old. Clearly, they were aiming at the city council, but I think they were also aiming at the civilian population. The city was surrounded for a month and a half. The city was shelled with all kinds of weapons. The shelling was indiscriminate. It was chaotic. Various calibres of weapons, artillery, tanks and missiles were used. Aviation bombing was deployed. Three hundred and fourteen civilians died, 16 of them children under 16 years of age.
Russians were consciously committing these crimes. They knew they were not shooting at any military units or infrastructure. They were shooting at the infrastructure of the city, the civilian infrastructure, and in particular the water pumping stations, the electricity stations, the auto parks belonging to the city, public transit and parks. Nine thousand, six hundred and fifty-two apartments have been destroyed completely, and 1,500 private houses have been destroyed as well. This shows that the entire city was under fire.
Putin himself called the city the cradle of orthodoxy. It was in the city of Chernihiv that the Kievan Rus started, so it was not just the city they were destroying. It was the entire historical city that contains many cultural sites. This is a city of ancient history.
Luckily, the Russians were unable to enter the administrative territory of the city thanks to the armed forces of Ukraine and thanks to the thousands of residents of the region who took up arms and who repeated the feats of their ancestors, who have never given up and have never surrendered in their history.
There are egregious cases of war crimes that I could cite. There's a pilot by the name of Krasnoyartsev who was killed, but he also testified. He dropped six bombs of TNT, 500 kilograms each. At the epicentre of these explosions, about 10 kilometres from there, there are no military infrastructure sites. During these bombing attacks, 49 civilians died. They were just in their own apartments. They had no weapons in their hands. These were mostly women, children and elderly people. They died without ever trying to resist the Russian army.
There's another egregious case. A mortar shelling was done on a lineup of people who were trying to buy bread. Several people died in that attack. I also know of a case where mortar shelling led to the dismemberment of an IT programmer. He lost his limbs as he was going to work. Many other people, innocent people, have lost their lives.