'The intentional killing of civilians is a war crime,' Amnesty says.
Amnesty International said its crisis response investigators interviewed more than 20 people from villages and towns near Kyiv, many of whom claimed to have witnessed or have had direct knowledge of Russian soldiers committing horrific acts of violence against unarmed civilians across the region.
The International Criminal Court, a United Nations Human Rights Council commission of inquiry and Ukraine's prosecutor general have all opened investigations into possible war crimes by Russian forces. But the interviews conducted by Amnesty International and published Thursday provide a harrowing window into these kinds of attacks with grisly detail.
An unnamed 46-year-old woman told Amnesty International that Russian troops entered her village of Bohdanivka, southeast of Kyiv, on March 7 or 8. On the night of March 9, the woman said she heard gunshots through the downstairs windows of her home, where she lived with her husband, 10-year-old daughter and 81-year-old mother-in-law. She told Amnesty International that she and her husband shouted that they were civilians and that they were unarmed.
Another woman, from an unidentified village east of Kyiv, told Amnesty International that two Russian soldiers entered her house on March 9, killed her husband and then repeatedly raped her at gunpoint while her young son hid nearby in the boiler room, according to the report. The unnamed woman managed to escape from the village with her son and they fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
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