RUSSIA  –  A group of international human rights lawyers has accused Russia of intentionally starving the civilians of Mariupol as a method of warfare during its 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city in early 2022.

A 76-page dossier published by the Starvation Mobile Justice Team of the human rights organization Global Rights Compliance looks in detail at the siege, which it described as “hell on earth” for the port city’s residents, through the lens of the war crime of starvation as a calculated strategy.

It found that Russian forces “systematically attacked objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” while at the same time cutting off evacuation routes and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid. Ukrainian civilians were cut off from water, electricity and gas and forced to drink from puddles, radiators and melted snow.

The findings didn’t come as a surprise to Nikolai Osychenko, who described living through the siege as a “Stone Age” experience. “The Russians bombed the substation that supplied electricity to Mariupol on March 2 and we lost electricity, and at the same time, we also lost the water supply and heating,” he told CNN, adding that the city started running out of food almost immediately, because without electricity, much of it has gone bad. “We all realized that flour is the best thing to have. If you have water and flour, you can cook something. But without water, you can’t do anything,” he said.

The Mariupol resident spent two weeks living in one apartment with nine other people, rationing food and scraping together any water they could find. They would spend two days melting buckets of snow with their hand, only to get a few inches of dirty water. Osychenko told CNN that at one point, he drank the water from his radiators, boiling it 20 times over to purify it. Deliberately causing starvation and deprivation constitutes a war crime under international law. The group is in the process of submitting their latest report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of a larger dossier on Russia’s use of starvation.

According to their website, the organization is funded by the governments of the EU Commission, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. (CNN)…[+]