PACE recognizes that Russia started war against Ukraine in 2014

The relevant resution, entitled ‘Conflict-related sexual vience’, was endorsed during the PACE’s Winter Session 2023 in Strasbourg on Tuesday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

“Since February 2014, the Russian Federation has waged a war of aggression against Ukraine, which it relaunched on 24 February 2022 with a massive invasion of Ukraine,” the document reads.

Additionally, the resution noted that Russian armed aggression “led to mass conflict-related sexual vience committed by the Russian Federation’s armed forces and by affiliated armed groups against the civilian pulation of Ukraine and Ukrainian prisoners of war”.

According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, over 11 months since the Russian invasion started, 155 cases of conflict-related sexual vience have been recorded in Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Mykaiv regions.

“The officially stated number of cases does not reflect the scale of crimes of the Russian Federation, which are much larger,” the document added.

The PACE congratulated Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Pand, Romania, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland for having initiated universal jurisdiction investigations of war crimes in the context of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, or for having declared their intention to do so.

The resution also urged Member States to provide concrete expert and technical support, with the Assembly and the Council of Eure, for the setting up of a special (ad hoc) international tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine “as conflict-related sexual vience is a result of this crime of aggression”.

The voting was 122 in favor and four abstentions.

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