Russia is using armed Russian soldiers, threats of deportation and pressure on employers before claiming from 1 January 2024 that it is Ukrainians, nor the aggressor state, that are ‘foreign nationals’ on Ukrainian territory

Our struggle is being waged for human rights, for those democratic values that are lacking in the Russian Federation and which the enemy is trying to destroy in us - Maksym Butkevych

Russia’s attempts to outlaw Ukrainian history, literature on occupied territory is further evidence of its genocidal aim to destroy all that represents Ukraine and Ukrainian identity

The arguments can certainly not be dismissed, however such rulings make it impossible for Ukraine to bring neo-Nazi mercenaries like Yan Petrovsky to justice for their direct role in Russia’s full-scale war of aggression

These trials are particularly dangerous as Russia is openly using torture and unrecognized courts to deny Ukrainian defenders their rights as prisoners of war

Both Ukrainian human rights groups and UN monitors have found that Russia is torturing around 90% of all Ukrainians held prisoner

54-year-old Oleksandr Zarivny was held for almost ten months before his family even learned of his whereabouts.

"A crime was indeed committed in Kherson, but not by me, a citizen of Ukraine who was defending his country, but by the Russian soldiers who abducted and tortured me" - Pavlo Zaporozhets

Although it took the Russians a week to admit Ruslan Rusnak's death, it is likely that he died, as the result of torture, within hours of being seized and 'interrogated'

The invaders have destroyed more monuments to the victims of Holodomor, with this part of Russia’s aggressive attempts to eradicate all that is Ukrainian on parts of Ukraine presently under its occupation

The ‘irrefutable proof’ against the young woman includes a ‘confession’ almost certainly extracted through torture, her Ukrainian POW stepfather and the fact that she has the same surname as one of the Kremlin’s main political prisoners

It is hard to imagine anything more lawless than invading a country and torturing Ukrainian civilians into ‘admitting’ to acts of ‘international terrorism’

Russia is continuing to abduct and brainwash Ukrainian children despite the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Putin and his ‘children’s ombudsperson’ Maria Lvova-Belova over these likely war crimes

Russia’s aggressive measures to foist its citizenship in occupied Ukraine, to indoctrinate children and eliminate Ukrainian language and identity are only equalled by deliberate attempts to create "an information black hole" in occupied parts of Ukraine

Vladyslav Kryvyy is one of a huge number of Ukrainian civilian hostages almost certainly tortured into providing ‘confessions’ clearly and boringly drafted by Russia’s FSB

While Russia is clearly planning a second winter of attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure, its treatment of Ukrainians currently under its occupation is no less brutal

Volodymyr Vakulenko was killed because he openly opposed Russia’s occupation of his native Kharkiv oblast and helped the Ukrainian defenders. He is one of many Ukrainian writers and artists remembered in PEN Ukraine’s #EmptyChairWeek

Russia has blocked investigation of the explosion at Olenivka that killed over 50 Ukrainian POWs. Its mass ‘trials’ of Ukrainian POWs are, however, also in flagrant violation of international law and have perpetrators who should be held to answer

Russia is not content with having destroyed most of Mariupol’s infrastructure, and having killed vast numbers of civilians, but is now seeking to deprive residents of those homes it did not earlier destroy

Ukrainian defender of Mariupol, Anton Cherednyk was clearly tortured into providing an insane ‘confession’ that fits Moscow’s propaganda narrative, but not the facts