Lies can't conceal the war crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine

Rescuers work next to a residential building damaged by shelling, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in Kyiv, Ukraine, in this handout picture released March 14, 2022. [Courtesy Reuters]

I once again encountered Russian propaganda and fake news, which were highlighted in the article by Russian Ambassador to Kenya Dmitry Maksimychev 'This is what the West really wants from Africa' which was published early last month in a local newspaper.

What struck me about this article is that it was completely based on lies; it was unsupported by any evidence or facts.

According to the Russian side, the international sanctions against Russia as the response to the war of aggression against Ukraine "cripple their own countries more than they do Russia, that their people have to choose between eating and heating, etc".

It seems that the author, while talking about supposed global problems in the countries of the free world, closes his eyes to the dire situation in his own country.

A large number of people in Russia live in terrible conditions in poor abandoned cities without cooking gas, roads, access to medicines or even basic sanitary facilities. And these are not empty words. All these facts can be easily found even on Russian websites and media.

The Russian ambassador also claims that Western countries, which the Kremlin calls a "collective West", breached the "rules-based order" and the principles of international law.

How dare he say that, when Russia itself has gravely violated the UN charter by launching an unprovoked and unjustified full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

An unambiguous evidence of Russia's disregard for international norms and rules is the number of UN resolutions, supported by a majority of UN member states, which condemn the Kremlin for invading Ukraine.

So, all these words are nothing more than yet another attempt to hide the Kremlin's crimes against humanity and war crimes, which Putin's killers are still committing in my country.

I consider it my moral obligation to share with readers the blatant facts of Russian crimes in Ukraine.

After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, almost 70,000 crimes committed by Moscow and its soldiers against Ukraine and innocent civilians have been recorded and documented by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. This has been done in cooperation with special international investigative groups of 21 countries and the International Criminal Court.

According to Unicef, more than 470,000 people in Ukraine find themselves in poverty for the first time. Most of them are children.

Eight million Ukrainian citizens have moved abroad to escape mortal danger; seven million Ukrainians have become internally displaced persons. In total, 21.3 million people, almost half of our population, have been affected by the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

In the cities and villages that still remain under Moscow's temporary occupation, the Russian armed forces commit murders, rapes and kidnappings and other deliberate actions aimed at torturing the civilian population by depriving them of even basic needs.

Mass burial sites have been found in several parts of Ukraine previously occupied by Russian troops. In April 2022, more than 400 bodies of civilians were found in Bucha. In September 2022, 450 bodies - mostly of civilians - were found in mass graves in Izium.

In March 2022, Russian forces carried out an air strike on a theatre in Mariupol which was being used as a refuge for children, marked with the clear sign "children" which was easily seen from the air. Three hundred people were killed in this attack.

The Russian occupation regime organises forced mass deportation of Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied territories and sends them to remote regions of the Russian federation, impose Russian citizenship under a simplified procedure against their will and allows adoption in order to destroy the gene pool of Ukrainian people.

That is why the ICC on March 17, 2023 issued an arrest warrant for war crimes in Ukraine for the Russian President. The court at The Hague accused the Russian president of bearing criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Another shocking, inhuman, beastly act of Russians, which is evidence of the genocide of the Ukrainian people, was the decapitation of a Ukrainian soldier by Kremlin slayers, posted in extremely violent video on pro-Russian social media on April 11.