Colonel Joby Rimmer, senior military adviser at the United Kingdom delegation to the OSCE, on Wednesday condemned Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians and said Russia must show the evidence behind claims it presents as fact.
Speaking in Vienna to the Forum for Security Co-operation, Rimmer said a Russian drone struck a crowded platform at Dnipro’s main railway station on Oct. 29 as a commuter train prepared to depart, killing at least 14 people. He said Russian strikes the same day killed two children in Chernihiv and at least three people in Kremenchuk. He said the United Kingdom condemns those attacks.
Rimmer also said the United Kingdom unequivocally condemns what he called Russia’s double-tap strike on Nov. 2 against civilians gathering for humanitarian aid in Komyshuvakha. He said the strike killed at least 33 people, including police officers and rescue workers. “Once again, it is Ukrainian civilians who are paying the price for Russia’s strike campaign,” he said.
He said Russia brings presentations to the forum each week and offers them as fact, but that the material often does not support the claims. On Sept. 23, he said, Russia told the forum that experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross had verified the complete absence of military targets at the Wildberries warehouses in the Leningrad region. He said a Russian Foreign Ministry official made that claim and Russian state media reported it, and that the United Kingdom is not aware of any statement from the Red Cross confirming it.
“A Russian official’s account of what the ICRC concluded is not a finding of the ICRC,” Rimmer said. He asked the Russian delegation to provide the organization’s own confirmation of the conclusion attributed to it.
He said the same pattern appeared on Oct. 7, when Russia cited its own Foreign Intelligence Service to support claims about European Union policy on recruitment. He said the European Union had explicitly denied that policy one month earlier and rejected it, and that Russia repeated the claim anyway. When one part of the Russian government is cited as the source for a claim made by another, he said, the claim has not been corroborated, only repeated.
On Sept. 30, he said, the Russian delegation used images of mines, munitions and launchers to support allegations that they had been used against civilians. He said Russia supplied no incident-specific dates, recovery locations, provenance, chain of custody or independently verifiable information connecting any depicted item to a particular attack. He cited a holding of the International Court of Justice that claims against a state involving charges of exceptional gravity must be proved by evidence that is fully conclusive.
He said last week’s presentation was titled “the escalation of the terrorist war by the Armed Forces of Ukraine” and contained 12 slides of photographs of damaged homes, shops, a church and a substation. Every caption blamed Ukraine, he said, but no slide explained how that culpability was established. Most of the images were credited to the archive of Mr. Miroshnik, whom he described as the same Russian government official behind the unsupported Red Cross claim.
Many of the photographs were undated, he said, and those that were dated went back as far as April. He said not a single photograph was from October, and that some slides gave no location, no source and no date at all.
Rimmer said claims of this kind will not weaken international support for Ukraine. He said the United Kingdom on Oct. 28 announced over £10 billion of additional economic and military support for Ukraine, its largest package to date. He said the package includes £500 million for Ukraine’s air defenses this winter, on top of a commitment of £3 billion a year for as long as it takes, and that the United Kingdom has now committed £35 billion to Ukraine, including £16.5 billion in military support.
He welcomed the United States’ approval on Oct. 30 of the potential sale of 500 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine, which he said is funded entirely by Ukraine’s partners and allies. He said that when delivered, they will save Ukrainian civilian lives. He said Russia’s attacks and unsupported narratives are not persuading Ukraine’s partners to step back, and that the United Kingdom will continue to stand with Ukraine and to ask Russia to show the forum the evidence behind its claims.