The U.K. on Monday sanctioned more senior officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including financiers and commanders, in its latest set of asset freezes and visa bans. 

The government said it was slapping sanctions on five board directors of a foundation which manages the IRGC’s domestic investments, as well as two provincial commanders of the state security service. 

It follows a flurry of other sanctions against Iranian officials by London, the European Union and the United States in recent months over Tehran’s bloody crackdown on protesters. 

“Today we are taking action on the senior leaders within the IRGC who are responsible for funneling money into the regime’s brutal repression,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. 

“Together with our partners around the world, we will continue to stand with the Iranian people as they call for fundamental change in Iran.” 

The U.K. has imposed dozens of asset freezes and U.K. travel bans since the start of the year on Iranian individuals and organizations, including leading IRGC commanders and Tehran’s prosecutor general. 

The last set of sanctions in January followed Iran announcing that it had executed British-Iranian dual citizen Alireza Akbari for spying for the U.K., prompting widespread Western outrage. 

Demonstrations have swept Iran since the September 16 death in custody of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, 22, after her arrest for allegedly failing to adhere to the Islamic republic’s strict dress rules. 

Iran has since arrested thousands of people in the wave of protests, according to the United Nations and rights groups.  
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Russia plans to hold an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council in early April on what it said is “the real situation” of Ukrainian children taken to Russia, an issue that has gained the spotlight following the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes related to their abduction. 

Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told a news conference Monday that Russia planned the council meeting long before Friday’s announcement by the ICC. Russia holds the rotating presidency of the council in April. 

The court said it was seeking Putin’s arrest because he “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of (children) and that of unlawful transfer of (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” 

The announcement of the warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, was welcomed by Ukraine as a first step toward accountability by Russia for crimes following its February 2022 invasion. It was dismissed by Moscow, which is not one of the 123 countries that are parties to the court, calling the action “legally void” and “outrageous.” 

The announcement followed a report Thursday by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine that said there was evidence of the illegal transfer of hundreds of Ukrainian children to Russia. 

The commission said both parents and children faced many obstacles in establishing contact, with the burden falling primarily on the children, with young children likely unable to make any contact. It concluded that the forced deportations “violate international humanitarian law, and amount to a war crime.” 

The Ukrainian government claims 16,221 children have been taken to Russia since the war began. 

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was quoted by the Courthouse News Service as telling Russia on Monday at a conference in London of justice ministers from more than 30 countries: “Return the children, repatriate the children.” 

Russia’s Nebenzia called the issue of the children “totally overblown” and said Moscow wants to explain at the Security Council meeting, around April 6, that they were taken to Russia “simply because we wanted to spare them of the danger that military activities may bring.” 

Nebenzia was asked whether Russia planned on returning the children. “When conditions are safe, of course. Why not?” the Russian envoy replied. 
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An art exhibit in Warsaw, Poland, brings together the works of Ukrainian artists who aim to document the brutality of Russian aggression. The exhibition is entitled “Ukraine. Under a Different Sky.” For VOA, Lesia Bakalets reports on the display at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Elizabeth Cherneff narrates. Camera – Daniil Batushchak.
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Russia’s armed forces have committed “numerous war crimes and other atrocities” since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, said a U.S. Department of State report that documents human rights practices around the world.

“There were credible reports of summary execution, torture, rape, indiscriminate attacks, and attacks deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure by Russia’s forces in Ukraine, all of which constitute war crimes,” the State Department said in its 2022 annual human rights report, released Monday.

The annual report also underscored cases of forced deportation of civilians and children from Ukraine to Russia.

The report comes after the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Russian children’s rights official for their roles in alleged war crimes relating to the illegal transfers and deportations of children from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.

Moscow said the arrest warrants are outrageous and has dismissed the prospect of Putin going to trial. Russia does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction.

U.S. President Joe Biden and senior officials from his administration have accused Russia of committing war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine. In February, the State Department determined that members of the Russian forces and other Russian officials had committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.  

The report also highlighted concerns about continuing human rights abuses in Iran, China, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma,) Afghanistan, South Sudan, Syria and other authoritarian nations.

On Iran, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this year’s report documents in detail “the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown and its continued denial of the Iranian people’s universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedoms of expression and religion or belief.”

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the so-called “morality police” last September for an alleged dress code violation triggered peaceful protests across Iran.

While the Iranian government launched an investigation after the death of Amini, it focused on the acts of the protesters whom the government called “rioters” with no indication it would investigate the conduct of security forces, said the State Department report.

On the People’s Republic of China, Blinken said, “Genocide and crimes against humanity” continued to occur against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in China’s Xinjiang province.

These crimes include the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, coerced abortions, rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, and persecution including forced labor and draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement, according to the human rights report.

On Myanmar, the report said the military regime continues to use violence to brutalize civilians and consolidate its control, killing more than 2,900 people and detaining more than 17,000 since a military coup in February 2021.  

The new report documents the status of respect for human rights and worker rights in 198 countries and territories.  The State Department has issued its annual Country Report on Human Rights Practices for more than 40 years.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping begins a three-day visit to Moscow Monday seen as a rare show of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, increasingly isolated over his war on Ukraine. The visit also comes at a time when Russia and China are eager to cooperate as each of them faces its own challenges with the West. Marcus Harton narrates this report from the VOA Moscow Bureau.
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European Union foreign and defense ministers are meeting Monday in Brussels as they work to finalize a multi-prong plan to supply Ukraine with ammunition and replenish their own ammunition stocks. 

The $2 billion proposal also includes working to increase the EU’s production of ammunition in order to better secure long-term supplies. 

Ukrainian officials have stressed the need for more ammunition aid from Western partners as Ukraine battles against a full-scale Russian invasion that began more than a year ago. 

EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell has encouraged members to approve the plan, saying Ukraine needs deliveries of more artillery ammunition to happen faster. 

Putin in Ukraine 

The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Russian-occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol late Saturday after a stopover in the Crimean Peninsula to mark the ninth anniversary of Moscow’s illegal annexation of the territory in 2014.     

Video showed Putin chatting with residents after earlier visiting an art school and a children’s center in Crimea.     

The visits came after the International Criminal Court Friday issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges for Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian children during its 13-month invasion. Putin has not commented on the charges and the Kremlin has called the allegations “legally null and void.”       

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded Russia’s withdrawal from Crimea and all areas it has occupied in the eastern regions of Ukraine, but the ground war in Ukraine’s eastern regions has to a large degree stalemated, with neither side gaining much territory.  

Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Sunday that the warrant represented a turning point in the conflict, and that Russia would be held responsible “for every strike on Ukraine, for every destroyed life, for every deported Ukrainian child… And, of course, for every manifestation of destabilization of the world caused by Russian aggression.”    

Putin’s visit to war-torn Ukraine was his first since the February 2022 invasion. Numerous Western leaders supporting Ukraine, including U.S. President Joe Biden, have visited Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital that Putin tried — and failed — to capture in the earliest weeks of the war.     

Mariupol was one of the centers of fighting in the first months of the war, although when Russia took full control last May, only about 100,000 residents remained of the city’s prewar population of 450,000.      

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. 
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