The Russians are clearly to blame for most of the devastation of the war in Ukraine, but the grim reality is that because much of the fighting is happening in populated areas, there is potential for both sides to inflict civilian casualties. 

On March 11, two weeks after Russia launched its invasion, Kremlin-backed rebels assaulted a nursing home in the eastern region of Luhansk. Dozens of elderly and disabled patients, many of them bedridden, were trapped inside without water or electricity. The attack set off a fire that spread throughout the facility, suffocating people who couldn’t move. A small number of patients and staff escaped and fled into a nearby forest, getting assistance only after walking for three miles. 

The attack on the nursing home near the village of Stara Krasnyanka stood out for its cruelty, and Ukrainian authorities placed the fault squarely on Russian forces, accusing them of killing more than 50 vulnerable civilians in a brutal and unprovoked attack. At least 22 of the 71 patients survived the assault; the exact number of people killed is not known.

Now, a report from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has found that Ukraine’s armed forces bear a large, and perhaps equal, share of the blame for what happened at Stara Krasnyanka, about 360 miles southeast of Kyiv. A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside the nursing home, effectively making the building a target. The report says the battle there is emblematic of the human rights office’s concerns over the potential use of “human shields” to prevent military operations in certain areas.

The aftermath of the attack on the Stara Krasnyanka home also provides a window into how both Russia and Ukraine move quickly to set the narrative for how events are unfolding on the ground — even when those events may still be shrouded by the fog of war. For Ukraine, maintaining the upper hand in the fight for hearts and minds helps to ensure the continued inflow of billions of dollars in Western military and humanitarian aid.

The first press reports about the Stara Krasnyanka nursing home largely reflected statements issued by Ukrainian officials more than a week after the fighting ended. The governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, declared in a March 20 post to his Telegram account that 56 people had been killed “cynically and deliberately” by “Russian occupiers,” who “shot at close range from a tank.” The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a statement issued the same day that 56 elderly people died due to the “treacherous actions” of the Russian forces and their allies. Neither statement mentioned whether Ukrainian soldiers had entered the home before the fighting began.

The Luhansk regional administration, which Mr. Haidai leads, did not respond to requests for comment. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office told the AP on Friday that its Luhansk division continues to investigate Russia’s “indiscriminate shelling and forced transfer of persons” from the nursing home. About 50 patients were killed in the attack, the office said, fewer than it stated in March. The prosecutor general’s office did not directly respond to the U.N. report, but said it also is looking into whether Ukrainian troops had been in the home.

The human rights commissioner for the Luhansk separatist government, Viktoria Serdyukova, said in a March 23 statement that the Ukrainian troops were responsible for casualties at the nursing home. The residents had been taken hostage by Ukrainian “militants” and many of them were “burned alive” in a fire started by the Ukrainians as they were retreating, she said.

The UN report examined violations of international human rights law that have occurred in Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24. Just two paragraphs of the 38-page report is dedicated to the Stara Krasnyanka attack. Although brief, this section is the most detailed and independent examination of the incident that’s been made public.

The Stara Krasnyanka section is based on eyewitness accounts from staff who survived the attack and information provided by relatives of residents, according to a United Nations official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Among the remaining questions are how many people were killed and who they were.

A correspondent for the state-owned Russia-1 news channel gained access to the war-ravaged home after the battle and posted a video to his Telegram account in April that accused the Ukrainian soldiers of using “helpless old people” as human shields. The correspondent, Nikolai Dolgachev, said the Ukrainian troops set up a “machine gun nest” and an anti-tank weapon in the home. In the video, he stops amid the rubble inside the building to rest his hand on the anti-tank weapon, which he incorrectly called a Tor. The Tor is a Russian-made surface-to-air missile.

A military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ian Williams, reviewed the video and said the weapon is an RK-3 Corsar, a Ukrainian-built portable anti-tank guided missile.

Russia’s frequently indiscriminate shelling of apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and theaters has been the primary cause of the war’s thousands of civilian casualties. Yet Ukraine also must abide by the international rules of the battlefield. A former U.S. Defense Department official who is a veteran of numerous international war crime investigations, David Crane, said the Ukrainian forces may have violated the laws of armed conflict by not evacuating the nursing home’s residents and staff.

“The bottom-line rule is that civilians cannot intentionally be targeted. Period. For whatever reason,” Mr. Crane said. “The Ukrainians placed those people in a situation which was a killing zone. And you can’t do that.”