Ukraina og krigsforbrytelser - 66 000 saker vil bli etterforsket - Stars & Stripes

 

66,000 war crimes have been reported; Ukraine vows to prosecute them all

By 

LIZ SLY

THE WASHINGTON POST • January 29, 2023

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In this Sept. 11, 2022, photo, the war crimes prosecutor for the Kharkiv region watches as police investigators a corpse in a body bag in the liberated village of Zaliznychne. (Heidi Levine/for The Washington Post)

KYIV, Ukraine — The 25 Russians convicted of war crimes in Ukrainian courts include a soldier who forced two Ukrainians at gunpoint to hand over laptops and money, four who beat and tortured Ukrainian soldiers and two who admitted shelling residential buildings in the first weeks of the war.

Over 66,000 additional alleged war crimes have been reported to Ukrainian authorities since the Russian invasion last February, according to Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General. The number is growing by hundreds every day as investigators fan out into areas retaken from the Russians and Ukrainians step up to lodge complaints, ranging from the theft of property to torture, murder, rape, the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the relentless missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure.

It’s a staggering number of cases, one that would overwhelm any judicial system anywhere, legal experts say. But Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin has vowed to investigate all of them and to bring to trial all those in which enough evidence can be gathered. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made justice for the victims of war crimes one of his conditions for eventual peace with Russia. The issue is as important for Ukraine as defeating the Russians militarily if Russia is to be deterred forever from attacking Ukraine, Kostin said.

“We have to win in both battles — in the fight for our territory and in the fight for justice,” he said in an interview.

The battle for justice could prove just as challenging as the fight for land.

The Ukraine war offers an unparalleled opportunity to test the still-evolving international justice system that began to take shape after World War II. The United Nations has found clear evidence that “an array” of war crimes and other violations of human rights and international law have been committed, according to an initial report by the Independent International Commission of Enquiry on Ukraine set up under the auspices of the United Nations earlier this year.

Not only is there an overwhelming number of cases, but abundant evidence, noted a European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. Technology has brought new means of documenting crimes, from the videos posted on social media by Russian and Ukrainian soldiers to satellite footage that reveals patterns of deliberate attacks on civilian targets.

The liberation of territory by Ukrainian troops has enabled investigators to obtain firsthand accounts and forensic evidence within days or weeks of the crimes being committed -— rather than years, as has been the case with most previous attempts to put war criminals on trial. If Ukraine succeeds in retaking more territory, the number of cases could easily double, Ukrainian officials say.

There is extraordinary international interest in the effort to hold the perpetrators to account, surpassed only by the Nazi war crimes trials that followed World War II. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has deployed its biggest team yet to Ukraine. Human rights lawyers and advocacy groups have flooded into the country. The United Nations and European governments have opened investigations. The diplomat said he had counted at least 11 different investigations underway in Ukraine.