“The importance of documenting and highlighting the severity and routine nature of Russia’s attacks on a daily basis is just so critical, and [showing] how vulnerable Ukraine is without support,” Catriona Murdoch, who leads the Starvation Mobile Justice Team at Global Rights Compliance told HuffPost. Catriona Murdoch commented on documenting war crimes in the context of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine for HuffPost article “Western Compassion Fatigue Is Hitting Ukraine As War Drags On”
Against the backdrop of the war, many human rights organizations on the ground in Ukraine have been documenting and investigating Russia’s conduct.
Catriona Murdoch, who leads the Starvation Mobile Justice Team at Global Rights Compliance, an international human rights law firm and foundation, said her team is working on discerning whether starvation is being used as a method of warfare in Ukraine, by looking at the way in which hostilities are conducted.
She says her team has noticed a three-pronged approach: It begins with the siege of an area, followed by attacks on critical infrastructure in an effort to demoralize civilians. The last step involves attacks on agriculture, aimed at destroying Ukrainians’ livelihoods — but also able to impact other food-insecure countries.
Russia and its affiliates have continuously and deliberately engaged in the extraction of grain in the Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia provinces, according to a report by GRC published in November. Russian-backed actors have “seized the means of grain storage and export in Ukraine to such an extent that they fundamentally control the grain trade in the areas they operate,” the report said.
Meanwhile, Moscow in July withdrew from the U.N.-brokered Black Sea initiative, — a deal it had struck with Turkey and Ukraine that allowed Ukrainian grain to leave the country, in an effort to address fears of global food insecurity fueled by the war.
“In both seizing the grain and profiting from its export, one of Russia’s goals appears to have been to fund its own war effort, even in part, through purposefully denying food to civilian populations,” the report found.
Murdoch said recording these types of actions is one of the ways to keep the world’s attention on the war.
“I think that the importance of documenting and highlighting the severity and routine nature of these attacks on a daily basis is just so critical, and [showing] how vulnerable Ukraine is without support,” Murdoch told HuffPost.
To read the full version, please, follow the link here.