Zelenskyy administration advisor says there are 'hardly any' war crimes Russia hasn't committed in Ukraine

• A Ukrainian official said new evidence of Russian war crimes was being discovered every day.
• "There is hardly any war crime that was not committed" by Russian forces, Yuriy Sak said on Monday.

An advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's administration said there were "hardly any" war crimes that Russia hadn't committed during its two-month invasion of the Eastern European country.

Yuriy Sak, an advisor to Ukraine's defense minister, told CBS News on Monday that evidence of Russian war crimes was being discovered every day.

"Evidence is being very carefully collected for the future trial — tribunals — because there is hardly any war crime that was not committed by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine today," Sak said. "And, unfortunately, this is still ongoing, and we will still see more of such evidence as we liberate our cities."

Western states, Ukrainian officials, and international organizations have accused Russian forces of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during their war against Ukraine, and local outlets have reported accusations of troops of looting homes, as well as raping, torturing, and indiscriminately executing people.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court on Monday signed an agreement to participate on a team with Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland to investigate war-crime allegations against Russian troops.

Sak said the "most difficult situation" was in the southern port city of Mariupol, where a small Ukrainian resistance and civilians are holed up at a steel plant and surrounded by Russian forces — who claim to be in control of the city.

Russian forces laid siege to Mariupol for weeks and launched a devastating bombing campaign, targeting civilian areas including an art school, a maternity hospital, and a theater serving as a shelter for civilians.

Officials have said that at least 21,000 civilians died during Russia's offensive on the city, which it sought to capture to establish a land bridge from Russian-controlled Crimea to Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Ukraine has accused Russian forces of committing war crimes in Mariupol and using mobile crematoriums to burn civilians' corpses to hide evidence.

"From what we understand from the witnesses who managed to escape to safety from Mariupol, the situation there is worse than it was in Bucha — in those cities which are nearby Kyiv," Sak said, referring to the discovery of mass civilian killings in Kyiv suburbs earlier this month.

He added that the number of casualties in Mariupol was "staggering, and we will document every single war crime committed on our land."