One
report, released on Tuesday, accused Russia of detaining more
than 800 civilians, some of them children, and of executing 77
civilians since the conflict began in February of last year.
In another report, commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres for the U.N. Security Council and published
last week, Russia stands accused of having killed 136 children
in 2022.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a regular briefing that
Moscow "firmly rejects" such accusations.
"Our military, repeatedly risking their own lives, took measures
to save children, to take them out from under shelling, which,
by the way, was carried out by the armed forces of Ukraine
against civilian infrastructure," he said.
Russia regularly rejects accusations of human rights abuses in
Ukraine and also denies deliberately targeting civilians in what
it calls a "special military operation".
Tuesday's 36-page U.N. report, based on 70 visits to detention
centres and more than 1,000 interviews, also said that Ukraine
had violated international law by arbitrarily detaining
civilians, but on a considerably smaller scale.
In last week's report, compiled by Virginia Gamba, Guterres'
special representative for children and armed conflict, the U.N.
also verified that Russian armed forces and affiliated groups
had maimed 518 children and carried out 480 attacks on schools
and hospitals during 2022.
Russian armed forces also used 91 children as human shields,
according to the report.
The International Criminal Court in March issued an arrest
warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow's
envoy for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them
of the war crime of illegally deporting children from Ukraine.
Moscow said the warrants were legally void as Russia was not a
member of the ICC.
Russia has not concealed a programme under which it has brought
thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, but presents it as a
humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned
in the war zone.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by
Andrew Osborn)
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