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Probe launched into artillery attack on civil objects in Donbass

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation discovered another fact of a Ukrainian military forces’ artillery attack on a settlement of the self-appointed Donetsk People’s Republic leaving a civilian injured.

On December 13, 2018, while executing admittedly offensive orders of higher officials from the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard of Ukraine performed a targeted artillery attack with high-casualty heavy weapons on civilian infrastructure objects located on Dunaevskogo Street of Petrovsky District of Donetsk. That resulted in a civilian born in 1991 suffering injuries.

The Ukrainian military officers violated the Protocol on Cease-Fire in Southeast of Ukraine and related Memorandum, as well as provisions of the Convention on Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and related Additional Protocol II. The motive of their actions was to kill, out of political and ideological hatred, an infinite range of civilians living in the South-Eastern Ukraine for they denied to recognise the legitimacy of the acting authorities and intended to create their own administrative and territorial entities in Ukraine.

The Main Investigations Directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal inquiry into the offence under Part 1 Article 356 of the Criminal Code of Russia (cruel treatment of civilians; use in a military conflict of means and methods of warfare, banned by an international treaty of the Russian Federation).

Investigative activities and criminal intelligence and surveillance operations are being carried out in order to identify all the persons involved in the crime.

 

Official spokesperson for the Investigative Committee of Russia S. Petrenko