March 25, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-crimes-tracker-b39137c3a96eef06f4ba1793fd694542 LVIV, Ukraine (AP) – For more than a month, Russian forces have repeatedly attacked Ukrainian medical facilities, hitting hospitals, ambulances, doctors, patients and even newborns – with at least 34 attacks documented independently by the Associated Press. With each new attack, the public outcry over war crimes against Russian President Vladimir Putin, his generals and top Kremlin advisers grows louder and louder. To convict, prosecutors must prove that the attacks are not just accidents or collateral damage. The emerging pattern, monitored day by day by the AP, shows evidence of a consistent and ruthless attack on the very political infrastructure designed to save lives and provide safe haven for Ukraine’s most vulnerable. AP reporters in Ukraine saw first-hand the deadly effects of Russian raids on civilian targets: the last moments of children whose tiny bodies were dismembered or their limbs blown up. dozens of corpses, including children, stacked in mass graves. “The pattern of the attacks will help prosecutors understand that these are deliberate attacks,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and a former adviser to the US Department of Defense. “Prosecutors will draw conclusions from how many medical facilities were targeted, how many times individual facilities were repeatedly hit and for how long.” Deliberate attacks on hospitals are likely to be a top priority for war crimes prosecutors. Consequences of the Russian air raid on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. This record of medical facility attacks is part of a broader effort by the AP and the PBS Frontline to track evidence of possible war crimes committed during one of the largest conflicts in Europe since the end of World War II. The War Crimes Watch Ukraine project launched by the AP and Frontline includes details of apparent targeted attacks as well as indiscriminate destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure. The online AP / Frontline database will continue to be updated as long as the conflict lasts. The goal is to provide an independent record of events, in addition to potentially inflated allegations by supporters or misinformation spread by state propaganda.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and Frontline that includes the interactive War Crimes Watch Ukraine experience and an upcoming documentary.

The AP’s own reports include powerful visuals, such as photos and videos, along with testimonies of alleged atrocities. AP reporters outside Ukraine confirmed the details of other attacks by interviewing survivors and independently verifying the authenticity of war zone videos and photos posted online by local officials and residents. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights confirms that at least 1,035 civilians, including 90 children, have been killed in the four weeks since the start of the war. Another 1,650 civilians have been injured. These numbers are certainly counted, as dozens of corpses are now under the rubble of demolished buildings or hastily buried in mass graves or deaths have occurred in areas now under Russian control. However, Russian officials denied that they had hit political targets, scoffing at growing documentation of the atrocities as “Fake News” and claiming without evidence that the dead and wounded civilians photographed were “crisis agents”. Speaking in talks in Turkey about a possible ceasefire, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed concerns about civilian casualties as “passionate cries” from Russia’s enemies and denied that Ukraine was still invading. Military attacks on civilians and their property are generally prohibited under international law governing armed conflict dating back more than a century. Efforts are already under way by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and Ukrainian prosecutors to gather information on future criminal charges. ICC Attorney General Karim AA Khan announced last month that his office had opened an investigation after receiving referrals from 39 nations about possible evidence of war crimes committed in Ukraine. President Joe Biden has said he believes Putin is a war criminal and that the US government has assessed that members of Russia’s armed forces have committed war crimes. Attacks on medical facilities and personnel are considered particularly heinous under international law, which stipulates that they must be protected. However, bombing a hospital is not necessarily a war crime. Prosecutors must prove that the disaster was intentional or reckless. But evidence of such attacks in Ukraine verified by the AP and Frontline is growing and horrific, disproving Russian claims that they were directed, self-inflicted or militarily justified. Russia is bombing “medical facilities deliberately, fighting the sick as if they were military,” said Pavlo Kovtoniuk, a former deputy health minister and adviser to the WHO, which has set up the Ukrainian Health Center, a Kyiv-based think tank. documentation of attacks in hospitals. “The bombing of hospitals is particularly hard because it shows the people that there is no safe place for them on earth,” he said. Among the most well-documented strikes was the March 9th bombing of a children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol. Two AP reporters, the last international media outlets to remain in the city after being surrounded by Russian forces, arrived at the hospital minutes after the blast. They saw a two-story deep crater smoldering in the inner courtyard, surrounded by the twisted and burnt remains of many cars. The force of the explosion tore the facades of three surrounding buildings, blowing up windows and destroying rooms inside. AP reporters took photos and videos of stunned survivors leaving the hospital. A pregnant woman being carried on a stretcher was holding her belly, with blood staining her sweatshirt, her face pale. She later died after an emergency caesarean section at another nearby hospital, according to Dr. Timur Marin, one of the surgeons who tried to save her. The woman’s baby also did not survive. Another pregnant woman, Mariana Vishegirskaya, with her face bloodied, grabbed her belongings in a plastic bag and climbed down a series of stairs covered in debris and left the dilapidated hospital. Vishegirskaya was taken to another nearby hospital, the Mariupol Regional Intensive Care Unit, where she gave birth to a baby girl the next day, whom she named Veronica. “We were lying in the wards when windows, frames, windows and walls were torn down,” she told the AP, lying next to her newborn. Ukrainian authorities say three people were killed in the airstrike, including a child. Another 17 were injured. Kremlin officials acknowledged that Russian planes had hit the hospital, but insisted that all patients and staff had been evacuated before the bombing. The state media claimed without providing any evidence that the hospital was being used as a base for the Azov Order, a small far-right nationalist group often used by Putin as a casus belli to falsely claim that the Ukrainian government was full of Nazis. At a UN Security Council meeting the day after the attack, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia claimed that the injured pregnant women, documented by AP reporters, were “crisis agents”, playing the role of victims in a complex plot to frame Russia. . On Twitter, the Russian embassy in London posted two photos of the AP side by side, one depicting Vishegirskaya and another of a pregnant woman who had died. Each was marked in red as “FAKE”. Twitter removed the tweet for violating its rules against denial of violent events. Vishegirskaya is a blogger in Mariupol who before the war published about skin care, makeup and cosmetics. there is no indication that he was anything but a patient in the hospital. She posted many photos and videos on Instagram that record her pregnancy in recent months. AP reporters also saw no evidence that the facility was used as anything other than a hospital. They did not see any military equipment or vehicles among the burned shipwrecks in the yard. Hospital rooms were filled with beds and medical equipment. Claiming the victims were actors and hospitals were military targets “he is a fool and no court would give him any credibility,” said David Schaefer, who served as US ambassador to Large for war crimes during his government. Clinton. “Imagine them trying to say it in front of an experienced panel of judges as if they could believe it.” Schaefer and Goodman both said that prosecutors in any future trial are likely to argue that multiple strikes against medical facilities are evidence of a deliberate strategy to break the morale of the hostile population. Russian commanders used similar airstrikes during the Syrian war. Physicians for Human Rights, a defense team that monitored attacks on medical workers in Syria, recorded more than 250 attacks on medical facilities and personnel since Russia intervened in the 2015 conflict. Attacks on medical facilities in Ukraine began with at least two attacks on the very first day of the war. On February 24, a local media outlet posted a photo of City Children’s Hospital No. 1 on Twitter. 1 in Donetsk, hit by an artillery shell that destroyed its top floor. The AP found that the photo matched the hospital’s photos before the war. the building is clearly marked as a medical center on the maps of the area. Another photo posted on Twitter shows a large explosion and fire at Central City Hospital in Vuhledar. The AP matched the building in the photo with pre-war images of the hospital in Vuhledar, which is clearly marked as …