GENEVA — Amid fears of escalating violence in eastern Ukraine, the United Nations called Tuesday for action to counter misinformation and hate speech used as propaganda and urged the authorities in Crimea to account for killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests in the buildup to the March referendum, which led to its annexation by Russia.
“Facts on the ground need to be established to help reduce the risk of radically different narratives being exploited for political ends,” the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said in a statement released with a report on human rights in Ukraine and Crimea, which until last month was an autonomous region of Ukraine.
“People need a reliable point of view to counter what has been widespread misinformation and also speech that aims to incite hatred on national, religious, or racial grounds,” she added.
The UN report came as Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, on a visit to Crimea, said in a post on Facebook that eastern Ukraine was “on the brink of civil war.”
It also coincides with preparations for talks on Ukraine in Geneva on Thursday, when Secretary of State John Kerry is due to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia.
The talks will focus on deescalation of the crisis and will not address Russia’s calls for federalism in Ukraine, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Yuri Klymenko, said Tuesday. Russia is exploiting unrest in eastern Ukraine as a “concocted pretext” to disrupt the meeting, he said, and Ukraine will present “concrete evidence” of the involvement of Russian special forces in the separatist unrest.
The UN report, based on investigations by Assistant Secretary General Ivan Simonovic and UN human rights monitors, pointed to evidence that some participants in deadly clashes in eastern Ukraine had come from Russia.
Tracing the roots of Ukraine’s crisis, the report said excessive use of force by Ukraine’s special police forces, the Berkut, against initially peaceful demonstrators against the government had radicalized protesters and led to the violence that erupted in January.
Investigators found that 121 people were killed in clashes in February, a result of severe beatings or gunshots, and that more than 100 people were still missing, a figure a senior UN official in Geneva said might rise to 140 or 150.
The dead included 101 people killed in protests in Independence Square in Kiev, the capital, and 17 security officers and two members of a pro-Russian organization, Oplot, who were killed during an attack in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Hundreds were hospitalized and some remain in critical condition, the report said.
Investigators said they had received reports of attacks on Ukraine’s Russian minority, but these were “neither widespread nor systematic.” Instead, the report said, “greatly exaggerated stories of harassment of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian nationalist extremists, and misinformed reports of them coming armed to persecute ethnic Russians in Crimea, were systematically used to create a climate of fear and insecurity that reflected on support to integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation.”
They said they heard reports of vote rigging in the March 16 referendum, when residents of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to unite with Russia.