Moscow's Military Targeting of Civilian Infrastructure in Ukraine

"Each such Russian strike undermines trust in everything being done through diplomacy to end this war, and again and again proves that only strong pressure on Russia and clear security guarantees for Ukraine are the real key to stopping the killings." 

"[Ukraine is making] many changes [in the way it fights Russia's aerial attacks, particularly in short-range air defences; key issues include training and replenishing new troops]."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 

A child's toy among the wreckage of a house in the north-eastern Ukrainian town of Bohodukhiv after a Russian drone strike    Kharkiv regional military administration

 

"We lost what is most precious — our future."

"There are no words to console the family; there is no prayer that could heal the heart of a mother who has lost her children."

Bohodukhiv mayor Volodymyr Bielyi   

A father and his three young children were killed when a Russian drone smashed into a home in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine's north-east. The mother of the children survived the blast that killed her husband and children. The mother, pregnant, was wounded, but survived the attack. The brick house was set on fire, the family trapped under the resulting rubble.

 

Two-year-old twin boys and their one-year-old sister died alongside their 34-year-old father. Rescue workers managed to extract their mother still alive. Information whether the unborn child also came through the ordeal was not given. A Geran-2, a Russian-produced version of an Iranian Shahed drone had struck the house in Bohodukhiv.

 

Aftermath of a Russian drone strike on a civilian household in Bohodukhiv, Kharkiv region, February 11, 2026. (Source: Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office)

 

The little family of five with another child on its way, was made up of twin brothers Ivan and Vladyslav, sister Myroslava and father Hyrhorii, and mother Olha. Olha escaped with slight burns and other minor injuries, treated in hospital and later released. She was 35 weeks into her pregnancy. The family had recently been evacuated from another town in the region. "It was their first night at the new place", observed Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration. 

 

Three days of mourning for the family was declared by the town's mayor, with national flags to be lowered and organized public events to be cancelled. "We will endure. We will remember. We will never forgive this horror on our land", stated Bohodukhiv's Mayor Volodymyr Bielyi. With a prewar population of 15,000, the town is located 22 kilometres from the Russian border.

 

Moscow always assures its detractors that the Russian military attacks only military infrastructure, never does it target civilian structures. According to public records, however, there is no Ukrainian military infrastructure in proximity to the house that was destroyed and those within it, on Tuesday. 

 

In 2025 alone, after three years of unrelenting bombardment of Ukraine's cities, 2,514 civilians were killed and 12,142 wounded, representing the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022, through the intensified Russian aerial barrages, according to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. The 2025 death toll was 31 percent higher than that of 2024, the year before. Ukrainians continue to endure constant aerial attacks by Russia. 

  

The family's house was completely destroyed in the Russian attack   Ukraine's DSNS emergencies service/Kharkiv region

 

The October 7 Rape War

"We are indeed facing a whole new battlefield which we did not anticipate. A whole new war, which is the war over the narrative, over the truth, over the justice, the acknowledgement."

"Hamas had engaged in the most horrendous crimes and brutal and inhumane acts on October 7. One can both acknowledge that Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war, and at the same time question the ongoing war in Gaza. but this is a very complex truth to hold on to. It's nuanced, and I'm afraid that this is where much of the media, international human rights organizations and women's groups have failed."

"[The Minerva Center for Human Rights said there is] clear and convincing evidence that hostages in Gaza were subject to sexual assaults that were probably still ongoing."

Israeli legal scholar Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former UN official

People protest outside the offices of the United Nations Women in New York City on Nov. 27, 2023 to bring attention to the Israeli women who were raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

 

Dr. Halperin-addari is involved in spearheading documentation of the sexual violence Hamas terrorists committed during their invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Her purpose is to finally achieve international recognition for the  horrors that Israeli women and among them some men as well, suffered, in the face of perplexing apathy and indifference from a number of world bodies.

 

Dr. Halprin-Kaddari is the lead researcher for the Dinah 7/10 Project, co-author of its white paper submitted to the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Torture. She is in the process of cataloguing evidence while proposing new legal frameworks for prosecuting such crimes. Her dozen  years as a member of he UN's Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has more than adequately prepared her for the task at  hand.

Finding bodies showing signs of sexual violence were reported by first responders, Israeli soldiers and medical teams. Survivors and witnesses of the attacks also provided accounts of sexual violence. Some victims were found bound, unclothed, and exhibiting injuries consistent with sexual assault, such as genital injuries, nails pounded into female organs and bleeding. Women required surgery and plasma transfusions for extensive internal rape damage.

At the Shura IDF base, the identification site for victims' bodies, forensic examinations revealed signs of sexual assault followed by execution. Site photographs revealed women's bodies naked from the waist down, or with underwear ripped aside, legs splayed, signs of trauma to genitals and legs. Bodies were bound to structures such as poles and trees. Bodies with broken pelvises from viciously violent assaults. 

The Office  of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict concluded in a UN report that evidence was "clear and convincing of sexual violence, characterizing its scope and actions as "cruel and inhumane". Findings, Dr. Halperin-Kaddari states, meeting criteria of the Rome Statute: When rape is committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack, a crime against humanity is constituted."

 

The expectation is that international bodies such as the United Nations will acknowledge this.

 

"Our major  undertaking now is to complete a research report that both accumulates all the pieces of information which we gathered and we grouped together, cataloguing them according to their evidentiary value, according to the proximity of the source of information."

"So eyewitnesses, earwitnesses, footage by first responders and testimonies of first responders."

"It's the attack against the sexual organs. It's mutilation of he sexual organs of the procreative capacity of the nation that is being attacked. So the bodies, mostly of women, but also of men, are actually used as tools."

"They are attacked directly in their procreation capacities in order to destroy that nation."

Dr. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari