His comments on Monday came as the war pushed further into its second year with no end in sight and tens of thousands dead.
After failing to capture Kyiv in the opening weeks of the invasion on February 24 last year and suffering a series of humiliating setbacks during the fall, Russia has stabilised the front and is concentrating its efforts on capturing four provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September — Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia.
Ukraine, meanwhile, hopes to use battle tanks and other new weapons pledged by the West to launch new counteroffensives and reclaim more of the occupied territory.
Guterres said “attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure have caused many casualties and terrible suffering”.
The intense fighting for territory in eastern Ukraine was in sharp focus on Sunday at a Ukrainian field hospital treating wounded from the intense battle for the city of Bakhmut, which is devastated. A constant flow of battered and exhausted soldiers came in on stretchers.
Anatoliy, the chief of the medical service, said his team treats dozens of soldiers every day and barely has time to eat.
“My medics work practically non-stop. Before the full-scale invasion we had 50-60 wounded in a nine-month rotation, and now sometimes we have more (than that) in one day,” he told The Associated Press, providing only one name for security reasons.
Guterres’ remarks came as the Ukrainian military said Russia launched attacks with exploding drones on several regions of the country from late Sunday until Monday morning, killing two people.
Meanwhile, Belarusian opposition activists claimed a military air base outside Belarus’s capital that hosts Russian warplanes came under attack Sunday by Belarusian guerrillas.
BYPOL, an online messaging app channel run by the activists, and several other online resources operated by the Belarusian opposition, said an A-50 early warning and control aircraft was seriously damaged in the attack at the Machulishchy base near Minsk.
The activists provided no evidence to support the claims, which couldn’t be independently verified. Belarusian and Russian officials made no comment, but Belarusia’s President Alexander Lukashenko urged top military and security officials on Monday to tighten discipline.
Russia used the territory of its ally Belarus to invade Ukraine a year ago. Belarus continues to host Russian troops, warplanes and other weapons.
Guterres, in his Geneva speech, cited cases of sexual violence, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and violations of the rights of prisoners of war documented by the UN human rights office.
He decried how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, now 75 years old, has been “too often misused and abused”.
“It is exploited for political gain and it is ignored, often, by the very same people,” Guterres said.
“Some governments chip away at it. Others use a wrecking ball.”
“This is a moment to stand on the right side of history,” he told the council, the UN’s top human rights body.
Russia withdrew from its seat last year amid a surge in international pressure over the war in Ukraine.
Dozens of high-level envoys at the Geneva meeting — many from Western countries — lashed out at Russia over its conduct of the war.
At the simultaneous Conference on Disarmament, another UN-backed body, delegates criticised Putin’s decision to suspend Russia’s participation in the New START agreement with the United States, the last nuclear arms control agreement between Moscow and Washington.
The images that defined Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during its first year
Russia was not represented at the council, and its top envoy to the session wasn’t expected to speak until Thursday.
Russian officials have shown little sign they may be reconsidering their attack on their neighbour, however.
“We aren’t seeing any conditions for a peaceful settlement now,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council that is chaired by President Vladimir Putin, went a step further, once again raising the spectre of nuclear war and a nightmare outcome to Europe’s biggest and deadliest conflict since World War II.
He chided the US and its allies for providing Ukraine with military and other support to help push back the Kremlin’s forces. Their longer-term aim, he claimed, is to break up Russia.
World marks one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Putin has also framed the war in those terms, saying it’s an existential risk to Russia.
In the Sunday-Monday attacks, Ukraine’s General Staff said Kyiv’s forces shot down 11 out of 14 Iranian-made Shahed drones.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday that at least two civilians were killed and nine others wounded by Russian attacks over the previous 24 hours.
