GENEVA (AP) – The fighting in eastern Ukraine has killed nearly 300 people in the last month despite a cease-fire and has violated people’s rights so much it could amount to war crimes, U.N. rights investigators said Thursday.
A new report from the U.N. team in Ukraine said at least 4,317 people have been killed in the conflict that began in mid-April and the number of people internally displaced by the violence has risen sharply in the last two months to nearly 466,830 in all.
The report also cited allegations of serious human rights abuses by armed groups including torture, detention, executions, forced labor and sexual violence that “are of a systematic nature and may amount to crimes against humanity.”
The report said the standoff between Kiev’s government troops and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine “is becoming increasingly entrenched, with the total breakdown of law and order and the emergence of parallel governance systems” in Donetsk, the largest city under separatist control, and in rebel-controlled areas in the neighboring Luhansk region.
“All parties need to make a far more wholehearted effort to resolve this protracted crisis peacefully,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein said in a statement.