A Russian torture room in the basement of an office building in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, December 10, 2022 (Anna Voitenko/Reuters)

Friday’s Coverage: Sweden Becomes NATO’s 32nd Member

Map: Institute for the Study of War

UPDATE 1556 GMT:

A 16-year-old boy has been killed by Russian shelling near Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region in south-central Ukraine.

A 20-year-old man was injured in the attack on the village in the Chervonohryhorivka area. A house, an outbuilding, a power line, and a gas pipeline were damaged.

Except for killing the teenage boy, the shelling wounded a 20-year-old male resident, who was then hospitalized in severe condition, the regional governor said on Telegram.

UPDATE 0924 GMT:

Two civilians were killed and two others, including a 7-year-old boy, were injured by Russian shelling of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine on Friday.

Four high-rise buildings, 30 private houses, a medical facility, a kindergarten, and port infrastructure were damaged.

UPDATE 0834 GMT:

Visiting Turkey on Friday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia will not be invited to the first Ukraine Peace Summit, to be held in Switzerland in the coming months.

He said a Russian representative could be invited to the next meeting after a road map for peace has been agreed by Ukraine and other countries.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, after talks with Zelenskiy, that Ankara is ready to host a summit between Ukraine and Russia to end Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The two men also discussed developments on the battlefield; shipping security in the Black Sea after the breaking of Russia’s blockade; and defense industry cooperation.

Zelenskiy told journalists:

Today I handed over a list of our Ukrainian citizens, including Crimean Tatars, who are being oppressed by Russia in the occupied territory of Ukraine and are being held in Russian prisons and camps under extremely cruel and inhumane conditions. We must release them all — soldiers and civilians alike, and those who were captured defending their people and are subject to Russian repression simply because of who they are.

ORGINAL ENTRY: The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, says Russia’s armed forces and associated groups are systematically using torture — a “deliberate policy” — in occupied areas of Ukraine.

Edwards, who visited Ukraine in September, cited about 103,000 open cases related to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ukraine prosecutors have registered 90% of these as registered as torture cases, she told the UN Human Rights Council.

Ukrainian civilians and released prisoners of war have detailed the abuses. In January, UN Undersecretary General Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council of “harrowing” interviews with 31 POWs, more than 90% of whom said they had been tortured.

See also Ukraine War, Day 130: Russia’s Torture of Ukrainian POWs

Edwards said on Friday:

These grievous crimes appear to be neither random nor incidental.

In taking each case that I’ve looked at individually, I’m confident in my findings that these allegations are credible, and regrettably that they really point to Russia’s war policy, that there is an intent and purpose to carrying out the torture and that it cannot be described away as aberrant behavior or ad hoc behavior.

The Special Rapporteur has requested visits to Russia, including in November, to check on the conditions in which detainees are being held. Some of the request were not answered; instead, Moscow recenly sent a “note verbale”.

“I have sought on multiple occasions to meet with the Russian authorities here in Geneva, and I will continue to do so so that I can exercise my mandate independently and impartially,” she said.