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Special Report: Russian War Crimes From Budapest to Bucha

Findings on Russian war crimes, from Soviet tanks in Hungary in 1956 to Ukraine, where UN monitors have verified 17,257 civilian deaths since 2022.

ByPeter
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KYIV — For eight decades, Soviet and then Russian forces have been accused of killing, torturing and sexually abusing civilians in wars from Central Europe to the Caucasus, Syria and Ukraine. This special report on Russian war crimes, including those of the Soviet era, traces that record from the end of World War II to October 2026. It draws only on findings by courts, United Nations bodies, international organizations and established human rights groups, and it focuses on Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians and on sexual violence by Russian forces.

Moscow has rejected most of these findings. Its responses are reported below as claims.

The Soviet record: Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan

Hungary, 1956. A UN General Assembly special committee concluded in June 1957 that the Hungarian revolt was “a spontaneous national uprising,” not a plot by Western powers. It found that the government installed in November depended for its authority on Soviet occupation forces and violated Hungarians’ basic rights, according to a U.S. State Department summary of the report. The committee could not determine whether Hungary’s government had invited Soviet troops.

Czechoslovakia, 1968. The Warsaw Pact invasion led by Soviet troops killed 108 Czechoslovak citizens by the end of that year and seriously injured about 500, according to Prague’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Its case files include unarmed people shot near the Czechoslovak Radio building in Prague and soldiers firing into crowds in Slovak towns such as Detva and Poprad. Military vehicles caused many of the other deaths.

Afghanistan, 1979–1989. Helsinki Watch, a forerunner of Human Rights Watch, reported in December 1984 that Soviet forces had “taken the lead in air and ground attacks on Afghan villages, looting, terrorizing, and randomly killing Afghan civilians.” The authors, writing in The New York Review of Books, described a strategy to terrorize the countryside so that villagers would stop supporting the resistance or flee. They also cited reports that Soviet personnel took part directly in interrogation and torture by the Afghan secret police.

Chechnya: Grozny, Samashki and Aldi

Russian troops entered Chechnya in December 1994. Within days of a government pledge to use force “with due consideration of the principle of humanity,” Russian forces began bombing Grozny in a campaign that Human Rights Watch called “unparalleled in the area since World War II for its scope and destructiveness.” In April 1995, Interior Ministry troops killed 103 civilians in the village of Samashki, most of the men among them summarily executed during house-to-house searches, according to the Russian rights group Memorial, as cited in Human Rights Watch’s 1996 world report.

During the second war, Human Rights Watch documented the summary execution of at least 60 civilians by Russian riot police and contract soldiers in Aldi and Chernorechie, suburbs of Grozny, on February 5, 2000. It called the killings a war crime. Russia’s Defense Ministry dismissed the findings as “a concoction not supported by fact,” and no one had been charged when the full report appeared that June.

In February 2005, the European Court of Human Rights issued its first Chechnya judgments. In three rulings, it found that Russia had violated civilians’ right to life, including by failing to investigate their deaths.

Georgia, MH17 and Syria

Georgia, 2008. In January 2021, the European Court’s Grand Chamber ruled in Georgia v. Russia (II) that Russia was responsible for an “administrative practice” of killing civilians and torching and looting homes in ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia and the adjacent buffer zone after the ceasefire. In June 2022, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for three South Ossetian officials, including a Russian national who served as the region’s de facto interior minister. They are accused of war crimes that include the torture and hostage-taking of ethnic Georgian civilians.

Eastern Ukraine, 2014. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board. In November 2022, the District Court of The Hague found that a Buk missile had been fired from separatist-held farmland and that the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic” had taken direction from Russia since mid-May 2014. It sentenced two Russians and a Ukrainian to life in prison in absentia. In May 2025, the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization found Russia responsible for the downing, the first ruling of its kind in the agency’s history.

Syria, from 2015. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found that a Russian fixed-wing aircraft using unguided weapons struck a crowded market in Atarib, in Aleppo governorate, on November 13, 2017, killing at least 84 people. It found no evidence that civilians were deliberately targeted. It said, however, that using unguided bombs in a densely populated area “may amount to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks” (UN report A/HRC/37/72).

Ukraine since 2022: attacks on civilians

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, UN monitors, courts and rights groups have documented these attacks, among many others:

  • Bucha and the north. The UN human rights office documented the violent deaths of 441 civilians in parts of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions in the invasion’s first six weeks, 73 of them in Bucha. It said summary executions there “may constitute the war crime of willful killing” (OHCHR).
  • Mariupol. An OSCE expert mission under the Moscow Mechanism concluded that a deliberate Russian attack destroyed the city’s maternity and children’s hospital on March 9, 2022, and that those responsible “have committed a war crime” (OSCE). A week later, bombs hit the Mariupol Drama Theatre, where hundreds of civilians were sheltering and where the word “children” had been painted in Russian outside. Amnesty International concluded that Russian aircraft almost certainly carried out the strike, called it “a clear war crime” and said at least a dozen people were killed, likely many more (Amnesty).
  • Kramatorsk. A Tochka-U ballistic missile carrying a cluster warhead burst over the city’s crowded train station on April 8, 2022, killing at least 58 civilians who were waiting to evacuate. Human Rights Watch called it an apparent war crime and found that Russian forces had Tochka launchers within range. Russia denied carrying out the attack (HRW).
  • Kremenchuk. A Russian missile struck a busy shopping center on June 27, 2022, killing at least 18 people, according to local authorities. Human Rights Watch called the Russian Defense Ministry’s claims that the mall was closed and that the fire had spread from a struck arms depot “demonstrably false” (HRW).
  • Dnipro. A Kh-22 missile hit a high-rise apartment building on January 14, 2023, killing 46 people, including six children, according to Ukrainian officials cited by the Kyiv Independent.
  • Okhmatdyt. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) found a “high likelihood” that Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, in Kyiv, took a direct hit from a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile on July 8, 2024, rather than debris from an interception (Kyiv Independent).
  • The power grid. ICC judges issued warrants in March 2024 for two Russian commanders, Sergei Kobylash and Viktor Sokolov, over a campaign of missile strikes on power plants and substations from October 2022 to March 2023. They found reasonable grounds to believe that the campaign amounted to the crime against humanity of inhumane acts (ICC). In June 2024, the court issued warrants on the same charges, for the same period, against former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.
  • Drones over the Dnipro. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded in October 2025 that Russian short-range drone attacks on civilians along more than 300 kilometers of the Dnipro River’s right bank, across the Kherson, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, amount to the crimes against humanity of murder and forcible transfer of population. It had first reached the murder finding for Kherson in May 2025.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the Bucha scenes a “fake attack” staged after Russian troops withdrew, and he said accusations over the Mariupol hospital rested on “fake materials” (TASS).

The toll. HRMMU has verified at least 17,257 civilians killed and 53,693 injured from the start of the full-scale invasion through August 2026. It says the real figures are likely considerably higher. It also found that civilian casualties from January to August 2026 were 55% higher than in the same period of 2025. Separately, Ukraine’s National Police had opened 226,766 war crimes proceedings as of October 2, the Kyiv Post reported.

Ukraine’s children and the Putin warrant

On March 17, 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights. Judges found reasonable grounds to believe that each bears responsibility for the war crimes of unlawful deportation and unlawful transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

In March 2026, the UN commission said it had verified the deportation or transfer of 1,205 children from five Ukrainian regions. It concluded that Russian authorities had committed crimes against humanity, including the enforced disappearance of those children, most of whom had not returned. Russian authorities have called the removals evacuations, a description the commission rejected because the relocations were not temporary.

Sexual violence: from Berlin to occupied Ukraine

The historical record. Historians have documented mass rape by Red Army soldiers as they advanced into Germany in 1945, though estimates vary widely. A 2021 review by the German Bundestag’s research service notes that Helke Sander and Barbara Johr estimated that about 110,000 women were raped in Berlin. It adds that Gerhard Reichling’s estimate of 1.9 million victims of Red Army soldiers has been repeated by the British historian Antony Beevor and other authors. The historian Miriam Gebhardt reached a lower total of about 860,000 victims of all occupying armies from 1944 to 1955 (Bundestag research service). In Chechnya, Human Rights Watch collected credible second-hand accounts of rape by Russian soldiers during the Aldi sweep.

Ukraine. In a thematic report published in September 2026, the UN human rights office said it had documented 1,004 cases of conflict-related sexual violence between February 2022 and July 2026. It attributed 89% of them to Russian authorities, including the armed forces, the Federal Penitentiary Service and the FSB security service. The office found that Russian personnel subjected Ukrainian prisoners of war and detained civilians, both men and women, to sexual violence on a widespread basis and used it as a method of torture. In occupied areas, mainly women and girls were raped, usually in residential settings. The report said Russia had taken no “discernible steps” to prevent, investigate or prosecute these crimes. It attributed the remaining cases to Ukrainian authorities; nearly half of those involved only threats of sexual violence against detainees. The office said it was not aware of any such case moving beyond the investigative stage.

The UN commission of inquiry, after investigating 238 incidents, concluded in June 2026 that Russian authorities had committed the war crimes of sexual violence, including rape, which often amounted to torture. The crimes took place in nine occupied regions of Ukraine and 11 regions of Russia, and the victims ranged in age from 4 to 84 (UN commission fact sheet).

In May 2026, the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence listed Russia’s armed and security forces for the first time, a year after warning that they could be added. The report verified 310 cases against prisoners of war and civilian detainees. Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, called the findings “unsubstantiated lies,” the Associated Press reported.

In June 2026, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said investigators had recorded 401 cases of sexual violence against civilians. Prosecutors had served notices of suspicion on 116 Russian servicemen, and Ukrainian courts had issued 19 verdicts against 26 people, all with prison sentences. Kravchenko said most perpetrators are hiding in Russia (UNN).

What it means

Analysis: These findings come from different wars, institutions and legal standards, from a Cold War UN committee on Hungary to crimes-against-humanity conclusions this year. Yet several patterns recur across them: heavy or unguided weapons used on populated areas, summary executions during sweep operations, abuse and sexual violence in detention, and the removal of civilians. Official Russian responses have also followed a consistent line of denial or claims of staging.

The open question is enforcement. The ICC’s warrants depend on states making arrests, and many Ukrainian verdicts are handed down against defendants who remain in Russia. For now, documentation remains the main form of accountability available to most victims.

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