DONETSK, March 4. /TASS/. The number of exposed crimes committed by the Ukrainian armed forces in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) has grown manifold as they are bombarding residential buildings upon their retreat from liberated territories, Head of the DPR mission to the Joint Ceasefire Control and Coordination Center Ruslan Yakubov told TASS on Friday.
"We are working on the liberated territories in the same way as we do on the republic’s territory. We are registering, documenting, generalizing and transmitting data on crimes against the civilian population for opening criminal cases against the Ukrainian regime to the DPR Prosecutor General’s Office, which is also transferring materials to the Investigative Committee of Russia. The sole thing that has changed is that the amount of work has grown manifold as there are a lot of war crimes," he said.
This can be attributed to the fact that the retreating Ukrainian troops are delivering mortar and artillery strikes against liberated communities, Yakubov said. "Unfortunately, they have adopted this practice. Novoignatovka has suffered the most of all the communities where we have already conducted our operations. By retreating, the Nazis tried to fulfil their pledge: ‘either Ukrainian or deserted’ and shelled the community from Grad multiple rocket launchers," the DPR mission head said.
"In one of the houses, a shell hit the basement where people were staying who did not live to their liberation: it was impossible to survive. We retrieved the bodies of a mother and her daughter and transferred them to the relatives for a funeral. A large number of residential buildings have been either destroyed or damaged," Yakubov said.
The number of exposed crimes committed by the Ukrainian army will grow as checks are commenced in all the other communities that are being liberated, the DPR mission head said. He added that data was incoming that the Ukrainian Azov and Aidar nationalist battalions were using civilians as a human shield.
"We are trying to create and provide humanitarian corridors in Mariupol but Nazis from the Azov nationalist forces who have entrenched there are prohibiting civilians to leave. There are living proofs filmed by Azov battalion nationalists themselves when they are stationing themselves in schools and deploying combat hardware on the territory of kindergartens, which is prohibited by international conventions and all human laws. They ignore all these rules and are acting inhumanly, endangering human lives," Yakubov said.