November 21, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

There is “mounting evidence” of “systemic war crimes" being committed in "every region where Russia's forces have been deployed” in Ukraine, a top US State Department official said Monday.

“This includes deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks against the civilian population and elements of the civilian infrastructure,” abuses of civilians and prisoners of war and “efforts to cover up these crimes,” reports of executions, torture, and sexual violence, US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack told reporters on a call. 

Russia has been accused of deliberately targeting Ukraine’s civilian power grid in an effort to leave the civilian population without electricity and heat — an act that would amount to a war crime.

Van Schaack said it is difficult to determine particular individual strikes would be war crimes, noting that “each individual strike has to be evaluated as against whether there were military objectives in the vicinity, or whether these were purely civilian objects,” but said “there is a consistent pattern of attacks on civilians elements.”

Van Schaack also highlighted Russia’s “construction of a vast transnational infrastructure of filtration operations, to which thousands of Ukrainian citizens have now been subjected,” which is a violation of international law.

The United States is supporting the International Criminal Court, the Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General — which “has already identified thousands of incidents that may constitute war crimes” — the UN Commission of Inquiry, a European joint investigative team, Van Schaack said.

Around one out of five people in Ukraine have trouble getting access to medicine, Dr. Jarno Habicht, the World Health Organization's representative in Ukraine, said on Monday.   

The problem is worse in Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia, with one in three people there not able to get the medicine they need, Habicht told a news briefing Monday in Kyiv.  

This winter season and particularly snow which has already been witnessed in parts of Ukraine will pose a "formidable challenge" to the health system, he added.    

Continuous attacks to the health infrastructure in Ukraine have also impacted availability to health services, such as medicine, Covid-19 vaccines, and machinery in hospital intensive care units, the WHO official said.     

The agency has so far verified some 703 attacks on health care facilities in Ukraine since the war began in February, according to WHO's latest data.

Iran and Russia have reached an agreement to begin the production of attack drones in Russia, according to a new intelligence assessment from a country that closely monitors Iran’s weapons program. 

Iran is beginning to transfer blueprints and components for the drones to Russia after the initial agreement was struck earlier this month, said a source familiar with the assessment.

US officials have said that Russia has received hundreds of drones from Tehran which have had a deadly effect in Ukraine.   

Earlier this month, the Iranian government acknowledged for the first time that it had sent a limited number of drones to Russia in the months before the start of its invasion of Ukraine.

“Some Western countries have accused Iran of helping the war in Ukraine by providing drones… we did provide a limited number of drones to Russia in the months before the start of the war in Ukraine,” Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian told reporters in Tehran. 

The goal is for Russia to produce thousands of new attack drones using Iranian components and blueprints, the source explained. If the two countries move ahead full-steam with their plan the expectation is that production could begin in a few months and its possible that the drones could be used by Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine next year, the source said.

It would be a move that would further cement the partnership between Tehran and Moscow and likely provoke significant anger from Ukraine and its western allies including the US. 

The Washington Post first reported the agreement.

More background: The efforts come after CNN and other outlets reported that Iran was preparing to send weapons, including surface-to-surface short range ballistic missiles and more attack drones to Russia before the end of the year. 

The source familiar with the assessment said those reports caused concern in Iran, which appears to have prompted the regime to rethink its approach with the plan for Russia to manufacture the drones rather than Iran directly transfer them. 

The production process for the attack drones is not complicated when compared to the production of other weapons, the source explained.

CNN has asked the Russian embassy in Washington and the Iran mission at the United Nations for comment. 

When asked for comment on the assessment, White House national security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “Iran and Russia can lie to the world, but they can’t hide the facts: Tehran is helping kill Ukrainian civilians through the provision of weapons and assisting Russia in its operations. It’s another sign of how isolated both Iran and Russia are.” 

Why this agreement matters: Drones have played a significant role in the conflict since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, but their use has increased since the summer, when the United States and Kyiv say Moscow acquired drones from Iran. In recent weeks these Iranian drones have been used to target critical energy infrastructure in Ukraine.

The Iranian drones are known as a “loitering munition” because they are capable of circling for some time in an area identified as a potential target and only striking once an enemy asset is identified.

They are small, portable and can be easily launched, but their main advantage is that they are hard to detect and can be fired from a distance.

The office of the prosecutor in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region released a statement on Monday giving more details about what it said were four “torture chambers” discovered in the regional capital after it was liberated from Russian occupation earlier this month. 

Ukrainian war crimes investigators have previously said they found 11 detention centers in the Kherson region and evidence of “torture” used in four of them.

Today’s statement said the four locations were in the city, “in the seized buildings of the Kherson temporary detention center, the pre-trial detention center and in one of the district police departments.”

CNN cannot independently verify the claims.

Russia has previously denied allegations of war crimes and claimed its forces do not target civilians, despite extensive evidence gathered by international human rights experts, criminal investigators and international media in multiple locations. 

Last week, Alexander Malkevich, a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, an advisory body largely packed with pro-government loyalists, said that Kyiv was planning to accuse the Russian military of crimes in Kherson, in an interview on Russian state-owned Sputnik radio.

CNN’s Yulia Kesaieva and Katharina Krebs contributed reporting to this post.

The Zaporizhzhia power plant is “at risk of a nuclear accident,” according to the head of Russia's nuclear energy agency Rosatom.

“This will be a precedent that will forever change the course of history. Therefore, everything must be done so that no one has in their minds to encroach on the safety of the nuclear power plant," he added. 

There has been frequent shelling in and around the plant and more powerful explosions were heard there over the weekend, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Sunday.

Today an IAEA team of experts will conduct an assessment of the shelling impact on the site. The nuclear facility is in Ukraine but occupied by Russian forces.  

Restoring power to recently liberated Kherson city is the "number one task," according to a Ukrainian official, while Norway has agreed to provide $200 million in funding to help Ukraine buy natural gas this winter.

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Russia will do “everything possible” to search for those responsible for allegedly executing a number of Russian soldiers, adding that they must be “punished,” Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov told journalists Monday.

Peskov said Russia will use the full extent of “the framework of international mechanisms to draw attention to this crime and call to law and order those who may be involved in it.”

“Of course, Russia will search for those who committed this crime. They must be found and punished,” he added.

The precise details of what happened remain unclear.

The video -- which has been geolocated by CNN -- was filmed on the outskirts of the village of Makiivka, which lies in the eastern Luhansk region, about 25 miles (roughly 40 kilometers) northeast of the city of Lyman.

On Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of war crimes after a video emerged on social media which Moscow says shows Russian soldiers killed after surrendering to Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, commented on the incident on Sunday, claiming the Russians staged a surrender and opened fire first, adding that “returning fire is not a war crime.”

The city of Kherson is still without electricity, an official in the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Ukrainian television on Monday.

“There is no electricity in Kherson city. We are working on it,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said. “This is the number one task for sure.”

Ukrainian forces swept into the city and Russian troops retreated to the east on November 11 following a months-long Russian occupation.

Tymoshenko said the government had established a network of tents and buildings that had generators — so-called "invincibility points" — where people could access hot water and heat up food. Some 1,600 people accessed these facilities on Sunday, the State Emergency Service said on Telegram.

On Sunday, the Kherson city council also published a list of four water distribution points where residents could get water this week. 

Norway has signed an agreement to provide funding of almost $200 million to help Ukraine purchase natural gas this winter, the Norwegian government said in a statement on Monday.

The 2 billion Norwegian kroner (around $195 million) in funding will be “channeled” through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

It is part of a 10 billion Norwegian kroner (approximately $976 million) package that the Norwegian government has allocated to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, the statement said.

“Ukraine has specifically asked Norway for support for the procurement of natural gas this winter. The timing is critical, and we are very pleased that the EBRD is to be our partner in carrying out gas purchases," Norwegian Minister of Finance Trygve Slagsvold Vedum said in the statement.

"It is important to channel the support through an established, internationally recognized organization, which will ensure effective and transparent use of the funding,”

The Ukrainian state-owned energy company Naftogaz will be the “formal recipient of the gas” in Ukraine, whilst payments will be made directly to European gas suppliers “that have received prior approval,” the statement added.