MOSCOW, April 17. /TASS/. The Ukrainian government is committing premeditated murder of the population and filming these events and there is a lot of evidence to corroborate these facts, Maksim Grigoryev, the chairman of the International Public Tribunal for the Military Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists and their Accomplices, said on Monday.
The tribunal was established at a conference of the Russian Civic Chamber on March 1 last year. It includes civil society representatives, such as lawyers, journalists and members of non-profit groups, from more than 26 countries.
"Over the past year, we have dozens of testimonies about how the Ukrainian authorities deliberately kill people in order to organize staged filming. We have exact places, where, when and how. That is, they gather people, for example, to distribute food, water; strike; and three or four minutes after that, Western journalists arrive, who are well aware of what is happening," said Grigoryev, who also is a member of the Civic Chamber, speaking at a conference entitled Ukraine Between Russia and the West.
He called Ukraine's actions "direct war crimes, crimes against humanity." Grigoriev said that representatives of the tribunal recorded violations of the Geneva conventions, international humanitarian law, shelling of hospitals, civilians, and mass mining of districts and cities.
"We are seeing the deliberate murder of people in the territories that are under the control of Ukraine. We have hundreds of people, testimonies from witnesses, [they] without hiding their first, last and middle names, or any details, tell us how Ukrainian troops shot at them, their children, women, old people, how they were shelled, how they were captured, how they were tortured," Grigoriev said.
Earlier, he said that representatives of the tribunal interviewed more than 500 victims and witnesses of Ukrainian crimes, recorded shelling and killings of civilians with the use of small arms, indiscriminate mining of civilian areas, the use of human shields, and hostage-taking.