UN investigators accused Russia of committing war crimes on a “massive scale” in Ukraine, listing bombings, executions, torture and sexual violence, but said it was too soon to prove crimes against humanity. Speaking before the United Nations Human Rights Council, the head of a high-level investigative team listed numerous serious violations committed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seven months ago. Erik Mose, chairman of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) set up by the council in March, said the team had seen evidence of numerous executions and the rape and torture of children. “Based on the evidence gathered by the commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine,” he said. The categorical nature of that statement was unusual for UN investigators, but the team of three independent experts said the evidence they had found was clear. In the few months they have been on the job, they said they had initially concentrated on crimes committed in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions in late February and March. They had visited 27 towns, interviewed more than 150 victims and witnesses, and had “inspected sites of destruction, graves, places of detention and torture, as well as weapon remnants”. “We have been on the ground… and concluded that what we saw amounted to, according to our evidence, war crimes,” Mose told journalists. The team said they had found two cases where Ukrainian soldiers had abused Russian soldiers, but far more and diverse cases of war crimes by the Russian side. “There is a world of difference between massive scale war crimes on the one hand and on the other hand two cases that we are aware of,” commission member Pablo de Greiff told AFP.