Russia committed heinous human rights abuses in Ukraine, using rape and torture to terrorise the population before and after Vladimir Putin's troops launched their full-scale invasion in February 2022, Europe's top rights court has ruled.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) yesterday found Russia guilty of committing various atrocities in Ukraine following the outbreak of war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
Reading the decisions in a packed courtroom in Strasbourg, Court President Mattias Guyomar said Russian forces breached international humanitarian law in Ukraine by carrying out attacks that 'killed and wounded thousands of civilians and created fear and terror'.
'The prevalence of sexual violence and rape by Russian soldiers in occupied territory is especially abhorrent,' the ruling said.
'The evidence shows the extreme violence of the circumstances in which women were raped or sexually assaulted and the intent to terrorise, humiliate and debase them... the raping of women and girls has also been described as a means for the aggressor to symbolically and physically humiliate the defeated men.
