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14 NEWS maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 1 MARCH 2023 RUSSIA'S full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered "the most massive violations of hu- man rights" in the world today, the head of the United Na- tions said Monday, as the war pushed into its second year with no end in sight and tens of thousands dead. The Russian invasion "has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement," U.N. Secretary-General Antó- nio Guterres said in a speech to the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council in Geneva. Guterres said the Office of the High Commissioner for Hu- man Rights has documented dozens of cases of conflict-re- lated sexual violence against men, women and girls, and se- rious violations of internation- al humanitarian and human rights law against prisoners of war. Hundreds of cases of en- forced disappearances and ar- bitrary detentions of civilians were also documented, he said. After failing to capture Kyiv in the opening weeks of the in- vasion on Feb. 24 last year and suffering a series of humiliating setbacks during the fall, Russia has stabilized the front and is concentrating its efforts on cap- turing four provinces that Mos- cow illegally annexed in Sep- tember — Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine, meanwhile, hopes to use battle tanks and other new weapons pledged by the West to launch new counteroffen- sives and reclaim more of the occupied territory. Guterres said "attacks on ci- vilians and civilian infrastruc- ture have caused many casual- ties and terrible suffering." The intense fighting for ter- ritory in eastern Ukraine was in sharp focus Sunday at a Ukrainian field hospital treat- ing wounded from the intense battle for the city of Bakhmut. A constant flow of battered and exhausted soldiers came in on stretchers from the devastated city. Anatoliy, the chief of the medical service, said his team treats dozens of soldiers every day and barely has time to eat. "My medics work practically nonstop. Before the full-scale invasion we had 50-60 wound- ed in a nine-month rotation, and now sometimes we have more (than that) in one day," he told The Associated Press. He gave only one name for se- curity reasons. During his remarks, the U.N. chief also decried how the Uni- versal Declaration of Human Rights, now 75 years old, has been "too often misused and abused." "It is exploited for political gain and it is ignored, often, by the very same people," Gu- terres said. "Some govern- ments chip away at it. Others use a wrecking ball." "This is a moment to stand on the right side of history," Guterres told the council, the U.N.'s top human rights body. Russia withdrew from its seat last year amid a surge in inter- national pressure over the war in Ukraine. Guterres' speech came as the Ukrainian military said that Russia launched attacks with exploding drones on several re- gions of the country from late Sunday until Monday morning, killing two people. Dozens of high-level envoys at the Geneva meeting — many from Western countries — lashed out at Russia over its conduct of the war. At the simultaneous Confer- ence on Disarmament, another U.N.-backed body, delegates criticized Putin's decision to suspend Russia's participation in the New START agreement with the United States, the last nuclear arms control agree- ment between Moscow and Washington. Russia was not represented at the council, and its top envoy to the session wasn't expected to speak until Thursday. Russian officials have shown little sign they may be recon- sidering their attack on their neighbor, however. Kremlin spokesman Dmit- ry Peskov said Monday: "We aren't seeing any conditions for a peaceful settlement now." Dmitry Medvedev, the dep- uty head of Russia's Securi- ty Council that is chaired by President Vladimir Putin, went a step further, once again rais- ing the spectre of nuclear war and a nightmare outcome to Europe's biggest and deadliest conflict since World War II. He chided the U.S. and its al- lies for providing Ukraine with military and other support to help push back the Kremlin's forces. Their longer-term aim, he claimed, is to break up Rus- sia. Putin has also framed the war in those terms, saying it's an existential risk to Russia. In the Sunday-Monday at- tacks, Ukraine's General Staff said Kyiv's forces shot down 11 out of 14 Iranian-made Shahed drones. Ukraine's presidential office said Monday that at least two civilians were killed and nine others wounded by Russian attacks over the previous 24 hours. Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said the Rus- sian offensive aimed at secur- ing control of eastern Ukraine has effectively become bogged down while losing "huge num- bers of weapons and ammuni- tion." Zhdanov said the Ukrainian military, in turn, is building up forces for a future counterof- fensive in the south while pum- melling Russian positions and depots there. In other developments, the Russian military claimed its forces struck an electronic in- telligence centre near Brovary, just east of Kyiv. Russia's Defense Ministry also said that Russian forc- es struck a special operations centre of the Ukrainian armed forces near the western city of Khmelnytskyi. The ministry didn't say when the strikes were launched, and its claim couldn't be inde- pendently verified. United Nations chief decries "massive" human rights violations in Ukraine UN Secretary-General António Guterres