A UN rights chief on Thursday asserted that the extent of the growing deaths and destruction in Ukraine’s port city of Mariupol is a serious pointer to international law violations, while also the warning that the horrors would mark future generations.
While speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday, Michelle Bachelet painted an ugly scenario of one of the bloodiest chapters so far in Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
‘Between February and the end of April, Mariupol was likely the deadliest place in Ukraine,’ she said, in an update on the situation in the strategic port city, now held by Moscow.
‘The intensity and extent of hostilities, destruction and death and injury strongly suggest that serious violations of international humanitarian law and gross violations of international human rights law have occurred,’ she added.
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Russia declared victory in May in its months-long operation to capture Mariupol, after Ukraine ordered the last of its troops holed up in the city’s steelworks to lay down their arms.
The three months of battles sent hundreds of thousands of people running for their lives and caused untold suffering and death.
Bachelet said that her staff had verified 1,348 civilian deaths in the city, including 70 children.
‘These deaths were caused by air strikes, tank and artillery shelling and small arms and light weapons during street fighting,’ she said.
She went on to acknowledge that ‘the actual death toll of hostilities on civilians is likely thousands higher.’
The rights office assessed that up to 90 percent of residential buildings in Mariupol had been damaged or destroyed and an estimated 350,000 people were forced to leave the city.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that Moscow’s offensive on Mariupol has drawn multiple accusations of war crimes, including over attacks on a maternity ward and a theatre, where hundreds of mainly women and children were sheltering.
