Human Rights

Human rights investigators and journalists have long reported on rebel fighters disposition towards arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearances, and even execution. Igor Girkin, also known as Igor Strelkov the former military leader of the DNR, a Russian citizen from Moscow, even resurrected a Stalinist era law to legitimize the extrajudicial execution of alleged looters.

“In one of the most high-profile incidents to date, a document surfaced in May purportedly showed one of the separatists’ main leaders, Igor Strelkov, had ordered the executions of two DNR militants on charges of looting. The document apparently showed Strelkov, a Russian citizen also known as Igor Girkin, had based the ruling on a 1941 Stalin-era law introducing capital punishment for theft of property. A month later, in June, separatist leader Igor “The Imp” Bezler published a video showing two blindfolded Ukrainian army officers apparently being shot to death by a firing squad as a warning to Ukraine government forces. He later dismissed the video as fake.”

Trying to prove their conservative, religious credentials, the rebel republics have also banned public drinking, swearing, and other displays of social disorder. According to some reports, those who break these bans may be forced to join labor brigades or work on the front lines.

The Guardian correspondent in Moscow

Insurgent forces are detaining civilians on allegations of violating public order and then subjecting them to forced labor. Rebels appear to be using public order infractions as a pretext to obtain unpaid labor.

Certain groups have come under particular scrutiny by rebel authorities. The Russian Orthodox Church is the official religion of the self-declared rebel ‘republics’, and all other denominations are prohibited. Members of other religious groups have allegedly been targeted for discrimination and even violence.

Vice News investigates a story about executed civilians in the city of Slovyansk, Donetsk oblast. Among the killed were petty thieves and four members of a local Protestant church.

Public dissent from officially sanctioned ideology is almost certainly dangerous in the two separatist republics. Local pro-Ukrainian activists, in the past, have been detained and subject to beating and torture. In August, a pro-Ukrainian activist from Yasynovata, Iryna Dovgan, was publicly humiliated and beaten, allegedly for assisting Ukrainian troops. Other activists have reported enduring arbitrary detainment and torture for expressing anti-separatist and pro-Ukrainian views.

“Somebody even said to me: ‘you should have suffered more.’”

“Since the separatists took total control here, human rights and Ukrainian activists say, an untold number of loyalists have been extorted, abducted, tortured and, allegedly, executed… …He pauses, as tears well in between manic laughs. “They don’t just beat you,” he hissed through a tormented smile. “They torture you.”He was held for two weeks, he said. His face was so beaten that he’s now missing teeth. He was suspended upside down by a rope, he said.”

The LGBT community has also come under attack, with the Luhansk People’s Republic threatening lengthy prison terms for homosexuality. Rebel leaders have referred to homosexuality as a perversion and a result of Western influence.

“Failing to decide such key questions, the council opted for a law everyone in the smoking room seemed to agree on: punishment of homosexuals. They voted to imprison people convicted of being gay for two years and six months. And they voted the death penalty, no question about that, for the rape of a minor whether of the same or opposite sex. The law did not stipulate execution for homosexuals, as some media reported. But the question of how it will be interpreted, like so much else in Luhansk, remains an open question.”

Since the declaration of the September cease fire, LNR and DNR have only extended their policy of extrajudicial justice wrapped in the slogan of people’s justice. DNR rebels publicly convicted a man for rape after a hasty “people’s trial,” and members of the audience later voted with a show of hands for the man to be executed by firing squad.