Articles

The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group documented numerous attacks on educational institutions in the Kharkiv Region. Their destruction can significantly affect the development of the region.

The facts are that Russia’s actions in Ukraine are recognized as genocide by many governments, and the ICC recognized Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children as genocide and issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president. What does this mean, and why are these facts important?

After the invasion began, Viktor Marynchak continued to serve in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, although he blessed everyone who decided to leave Kharkiv to evacuate. Military funerals are often held in the church now, forcing Father Viktor to ask himself difficult questions.

August 30 is the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. We talk to Tamila Bespala, the head of the KHPG Kharkiv reception office, about how to correspond with the Russian Federation's Investigative Committee and search for disappeared Ukrainians in Russian telegram channels.

The village Tyshky appeared on the bank of the Kharkiv River in the 1650s. Later it divided in two, called Cherkaski and Ruski Tyshky. Both suffered substantial damage last year.

A resident of the devastated town describes the first weeks of the war.

In 2022, Russia launched its largest disinformation campaign about chemical and biological weapons, with its origins in Soviet newspaper propaganda.

Russians kidnapped the former Ukrainian Navy officer in Henichesk, Kherson Region. They tortured the man and forced him to incriminate himself. Human rights activists are convinced that Kyselov’s case has all the signs of an enforced disappearance.

On 14 September 2023 Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan announced that an ICC field office had opened in Kyiv.

Denys Nozhaiskyi has relatives in Mariupol. He was in Kyiv when the war began, but fate brought him later to Bucha during the days of the heaviest shelling. The man says that now he has only one wish: to go to the war and take revenge on the enemy.

Speech on the International conference in Prague devoted to to Vaclav Gavel Prize on 10 October 2023.

Oskil, a village in the suburbs of Izium, is one of the oldest settlements in the Kharkiv Region. It existed in the early seventeenth century under the name Tsareborysov.

Teacher Alina Veshchuk lived in Horlivka (Donetsk Region) until 2015. Then she fled the occupation to Kramatorsk. In 2022, history repeated itself again... She says that back in 2014 she already understood how the enemy was fighting: “Friends saw “Grad” (multiple rocket launcher) drove into the field, shoot at Toretsk, where the Ukrainian army was, then this “Grad” turned around and shot then back at Horlivka: the enemy wanted people in Horlivka to think that it was Ukrainian army shot back at them”.

Information about extrajudicial executions of Ukrainians by the Russian military and Russian torture chambers in the occupied part of the Kharkiv Region will be sent to The Hague. In the new submissions to the ICC, human rights activists have argued that Russia’s actions constitute crimes against humanity.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) has been documenting the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed by its forces on Ukrainian territory, especially in the Kharkiv Region.

As noted by the Kharkiv Region Prosecutor’s Office, more than twenty of the exhumed bodies suffered broken bones, 15 bore gunshot wounds and at least 15 showed signs of torture.

Continuation of the discussion on the nature of genocide.

To gather information about war crimes committed in the Kyiv Region by the Russian invaders, the Ukrainian police have set up a documentation centre in the town of Bucha and created a Telegram channel to cover the same subject.

How the Russian invaders almost destroyed the UTR-2 telescope outside Hrakove (a village near Kharkiv), the largest of its kind in the world. For almost seven months the observatory was occupied by Russian forces. KHPG monitors visited the site in late autumn 2022.

Under international humanitarian law the International Committee of the Red Cross should play a key role in defending the rights of prisoners of war and captive civilians. The present Russo-Ukrainian war has shown that it is not meeting certain of its obligations. As a result, thousands have suffered.

Maksym Vainer worked in an international team engaged in medical evacuation in the Bakhmut area. They were trying to evacuate a woman wounded after a shelling when a Russian missile hit their car. Maksym received numerous injuries, and his partner, an American medical volunteer, Pete Reed, died.

Olena Hrybanova, a psychiatrist working in Ukraine, identifies three reasons for the systematic sadism of Russian soldiers and explains why their Ukrainian victims often do not receive the treatment they need.

Speech of chairman of the International ‘Memorial’ Society in Oslo on August 31, 2023 at the Nobel Peace Conference: Human Rights Heroes.

On 1 July 2022, Ukraine’s parliament (Verkhovna Rada) created a temporary specialised commission to deal with issues of international humanitarian and criminal law arising from Russia’s war against Ukraine.