The United States government believes so. In his statement Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States undertook a “careful analysis of the law and available facts” to determine that Russian officials and military forces had committed crimes against humanity. He pointed to “execution-style killings of Ukrainian men, women, and children; torture of civilians in detention through beatings, electrocution, and mock executions; rape” and the deportation of “hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families.” He added: “These acts are not random or spontaneous; they are part of the Kremlin’s widespread and systematic attack against Ukraine’s civilian population.” The designation is not one the United States makes lightly, the statement said, and it reflects the “staggering extent of human suffering” that Russia has inflicted on Ukrainians. Atrocities allegedly carried out by Russian forces against civilians in Ukraine have been widely documented throughout the war, with images of toddlers’ lifeless bodies after Russian missile attacks and the harrowing accounts of rape survivors stirring anguish and outrage across the world. In her speech at the Munich Security Conference, Harris referred specifically to an airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol in March and to atrocities in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian occupying forces left hundreds of bodies — some mutilated or sexually abused — in their wake. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European lawmakers have previously accused Russia of crimes against humanity. And the International Criminal Court opened an investigation in March into alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide committed in Ukraine from late 2013 onward.