Amnesty International on Monday accused Russia of war crimes in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv by indiscriminate Russian shelling using widely banned cluster munitions and inherently inaccurate rockets, Amnesty International said Monday.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report published on Monday. “This is true both for the strikes carried out using cluster (munitions) as well as those conducted using other types of unguided rockets and unguided artillery shells.”
Amnesty said that it had uncovered proof of the repeated use of 9N210 and 9N235 cluster bombs and scattered land mines by Russian forces. Such weapons are banned under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which 110 countries have joined.
While neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties to the CCM, they are obliged to respect a ban on inherently indiscriminate weapons that forms part of customary international humanitarian law.
“The continued use of such inaccurate explosive weapons in populated civilian areas, in the knowledge, that they are repeatedly causing large numbers of civilian casualties, may even amount to directing attacks against the civilian population,” the report said.
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