UN expert: Russian forces use torture as 'deliberate policy' in occupied Ukraine

On a Friday in early March, a United Nations investigator delivered a stark assessment: Russian forces in occupied Ukraine are torturing people as a matter of deliberate state policy. Alice Jill Edwards, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, had traveled to Ukraine the previous September to examine the evidence. What she found was systematic. Ukrainian prosecutors told her they were managing roughly 103,000 open cases tied to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nine out of every ten of those cases—roughly 92,700—were registered specifically as torture allegations.

The scale of the accusation is difficult to absorb. It is not a claim of isolated incidents or the actions of rogue units. It is the conclusion of a UN expert that torture has become embedded in how Russian forces operate in the territories they control. Edwards did not specify which Russian units or commanders were responsible, nor did she detail the methods involved, but the sheer volume of cases—nearly 103,000—suggests a pattern that reaches across multiple occupied regions and spans the entire duration of the war.

While Edwards was releasing her findings, the violence continued. In Sumy, a city in northern Ukraine, a Russian missile strike killed two people and wounded 26 others on Friday. The attack damaged a school, the central city hospital, the regional emergency medical care center, and the water utility. In the Kharkiv region, Russian shelling killed three civilians—a 64-year-old woman, a 58-year-old man, and a 40-year-old woman. About 18 settlements in the region came under artillery and mortar fire. Across the border in Russia's Belgorod region, Ukrainian drone attacks killed two people and seriously wounded a third.

Meanwhile, diplomatic channels were opening. President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey announced his country's willingness to host a summit between Ukraine and Russia aimed at ending the war. The announcement came after talks in Istanbul between Erdogan and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine's president. They discussed the war itself, security in the Black Sea, and defense industry cooperation. Zelenskiy made clear that Russia would not be invited to the first peace summit, which is planned for Switzerland in the coming months. However, he suggested that a Russian representative could attend subsequent meetings once a roadmap for peace had been negotiated with Ukrainian allies.

The diplomatic overtures existed alongside urgent warnings about Ukraine's military needs. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, told Western allies that the current pace of military aid delivery was insufficient. "The strategy of dripping aid to Ukraine drop by drop doesn't work any more," he said during a visit to Lithuania. He warned that without faster transfers of weapons and ammunition, the war risked expanding beyond Ukraine's borders. A Czech-led initiative to purchase ammunition for Ukraine had already raised enough money to buy 300,000 artillery shells—the first batch of a larger procurement effort.

On the nuclear front, conditions at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, Europe's largest nuclear facility and now under Russian control, were deteriorating. Ukraine's energy minister said the situation was worsening daily, citing problems with staffing and maintenance. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors had just passed a resolution condemning Russia's occupation of the site and expressing grave concern about its operational status. Ukraine pledged to continue pressing Russia at the UN nuclear watchdog to withdraw from the facility.

Defense efforts continued. Ukrainian air defenders shot down 33 of 37 Russian Shahed drones launched overnight into Friday. Britain's defense secretary, Grant Shapps, visited Kyiv to underscore his country's commitment, saying simply: "Let's make sure Ukraine wins this war." A Chinese delegation, meanwhile, met with Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskiy's office, in what appeared to be a signal of Beijing's engagement with the conflict.

Smaller stories carried their own weight. Serbia revoked an expulsion order against Elena Koposova, a Russian woman who had signed an open letter opposing the invasion. She had lived in Serbia with her family since 2019. And Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader, disclosed that she had not heard from her jailed husband in a year—a silence she described as a form of torture in itself.