I will start with the point that we gathered testimony from people from Bucha, Gostomel, Motyshyn, Makariv, and other cities and settlements in the Kyiv region, even before this area was liberated, because there were some lucky people who escaped from isolated towns. I just want to remind you that the Russians deliberately isolated these villages' support to provide people the possibility to relocate in order to stop local resistance.
We knew about disappearances, of course, about killings, about rapes and sexual violence before, but when I saw this photo and picture, and when our colleagues came to these released towns, frankly speaking, I was in shock. Even me, who has been documenting war crimes for eight years already...I didn't expect such a picture. It had a systematic and large-scale character. This was for sure war crimes, and even, I must admit, crimes against humanity, because all of the settlements were under Russian controls.
I will tell you one story which we documented before the liberation of this town. It is a story of woman whose husband and small son rode by bicycle to the centre of occupied Bucha in order to find humanitarian assistance and medicines. They were stopped by Russian soldiers. They immediately stopped and they raised their hands up. They said that “We are civilians”, and it was very obvious that they were civilians. But Russian soldiers started shooting on them. They killed the father in the eyes of the son, and they severely injured the son. The son luckily survived. We spoke with this woman who lost her husband and likely saved her son.
Even a war has rules and has to be conducted according to international humanitarian law. International humanitarian law obliged this side to provide a clear distinction between military and civilians, but Russia used war crimes as a method of warfare. Russia deliberately targeted civilians. That's why we have enormous losses. That's why me, as a human rights defender, now thinks not only of how to provide proper investigation and collecting all of this evidence for the future justice, because future justice is always postponed in time.... But for me, the main question is, what I can do as a human being in order to stop these war crimes, to prevent new victims of war crimes to emerge. This is a much more challenging task.
Thank you.