Russia not allowing UN monitors to visit Ukrainian POWs, hiding war crimes – chief of monitoring mission

Matilda Bogner, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said this on Friday, Ukrinform reports, citing The New York Times.

According to her, prisoners arriving at some detention sites faced a "welcome process" in which they were forced to run the gantlet between two lines of guards who beat them severely as they passed.

The torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, if proved, "could rise to being war crimes," she said, speaking by video link from Odesa.

Bogner also expressed concerns over a sharp deterioration of conditions in Crimea, where she reported tighter restrictions on freedom of expression and rising cases of torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.

U.N. monitors had documented the prosecution of more than 80 people in the Russian-held Crimean peninsula for "public actions directed at discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation," Bogner said. The authorities there, she said, had imposed sanctions on teachers who did not endorse the war, arrested and prosecuted human rights activists and intimidated lawyers.

Bogner added at some Russian detention sites, conditions pose a dire threat to prisoners' health, saying that there were reports of inadequate food, water or sanitation. She cited in particular a penal colony at Olenivka, in Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, where she said there had been reports of prisoners grappling with infectious diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis A.

At the same time, Bogner noted, the Ukrainian authorities had allowed U.N. monitors full access to detention centers across the country, where they visited 160 prisoners of war.