UN: Ukrainian Forces Took Over Nursing Home And Used Residents As Human Shields, Claimed 'Atrocities' When Russia Attacked

Investigation finds Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside a nursing home, "effectively making the building a target," and separatist fighters gave assistance to patients and staff who fled the home. Somebody at AP might get fired for writing this. https://t.co/yKwRGbMUl0

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) July 9, 2022

This is actually the West's Ukraine strategy: maximize the number of civilians killed to create moral outrage in the public to support increased Western involvement while frustrating every attempt to end the war peacefully.

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) July 9, 2022

Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russian forces assaulted a nursing home in the eastern region of Luhansk. Dozens of elderly and disabled patients, many of them bedridden, were trapped inside without water or electricity.

The March 11 assault set off a fire that spread throughout the facility, suffocating people who couldn't move. A small number of patients and staff escaped and fled into a nearby forest, finally getting assistance after walking for 5 kilometers (3 miles).

In a war awash in atrocities, the attack on the nursing home near the village of Stara Krasnyanka stood out for its cruelty. And Ukrainian authorities placed the fault squarely on Russian forces, accusing them of killing more than 50 vulnerable civilians in a brutal and unprovoked attack.

But a new U.N. report has found that Ukraine's armed forces bear a large, and perhaps equal, share of the blame for what happened in Stara Krasnyanka, which is about 580 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of Kyiv. A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside the nursing home, effectively making the building a target.

At least 22 of the 71 patients survived the assault, but the exact number of people killed remains unknown, according to the United Nations.

The report by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights doesn’t conclude the Ukrainian soldiers or the Russian troops committed a war crime. But it said the battle at the Stara Krasnyanka nursing home is emblematic of the human rights office’s concerns over the potential use of "human shields" to prevent military operations in certain areas.