A UN monitoring body reported on Thursday that Russia’s ongoing air strike campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure could potentially breach international humanitarian law.
This comes as Ukrainians brace for what is expected to be the harshest winter since the onset of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine focused its report on nine waves of strikes occurring between March and August 2024.
The report indicates “reasonable grounds to believe that multiple aspects of the military campaign, aimed at damaging or destroying civilian infrastructure for the production, thermal conversion, and transmission of electricity in Ukraine, violated fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”
Throughout the war, Russia has launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Ukrainian facilities involved in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity.
Each wave of strikes has left Ukrainian cities without power for hours each day, extending over weeks.
Kyiv has labelled the targeting of its power system a war crime, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for four Russian officials and military personnel accused of bombing civilian energy infrastructure.
Moscow contends that the energy infrastructure constitutes legitimate military targets and has dismissed the charges against its officials as irrelevant.
President Vladimir Putin has issued a decree to increase the total number of personnel in the armed forces to over 2.3 million, including 1.5 million active military personnel.
The new decree will come into effect on 1 December 2024, marking a significant expansion of Russia’s military capabilities amid ongoing global tensions.
This move is part of an amendment to a previous decree that set the Russian armed forces’ size at just over 2.2 million personnel, with 1.32 million active-duty soldiers.
