Russia has illegally and systematically detained thousands of Ukrainian civilians since 2014, according to a report presented by three legal experts to a session in Vienna of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The three said they had "reasonable grounds" for believing that crimes against humanity and war crimes had been committed over the period. Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At the end of February, 45 of the 57 OSCE member states commissioned a report on the detention of Ukrainian civilians, making use of OSCE procedures that allow such investigations without the permission of the country affected.
The three experts - Veronika Bilkova from the Czech Republic, Cecilie Hellestveit from Norway and Elina Steinerte from Latvia - were unable to say precisely how many people had been detained in Ukraine over the period.
But the number was in the thousands, they said based on documents and oral evidence from Ukrainian officials, victims and witnesses.
According to this information, detainees had been subjected to sexual violence, hunger and thirst. The experts also referred to the killing of detainees and prisoners, as for example in Bucha near Kiev in 2022.
The arbitrary detention of a large number of Ukrainian civilians appeared to be a "defining feature of the Russian Federation's policy in the temporarily occupied territory," the report said.
Detainees had been accused of supporting the Ukrainian army or rejecting the Russian operation, with the aim of sowing fear and forcing cooperation with the Russian side, it said.