Status: 05/31/2022 5:58 p.m
According to Attorney General Venediktova, the Ukrainian judiciary has received around 15,000 cases of suspected war crimes nationwide. Two other Russian soldiers have recently been sentenced for such crimes.
Ukraine is investigating several thousand alleged war crimes in the contested Donbass region in the east of the country. “We have opened a few thousand investigations into what we are seeing in Donbass,” said Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova in The Hague, where she met with counterparts from other countries.
According to her, Ukraine has been assuming that there have been 15,000 suspected war crimes nationwide since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression at the end of February.
Ukraine is investigating 15,000 war crimes cases by Russia
Sabine Krebs, WDR, daily news at 5:00 p.m., May 31, 2022
Venediktova counted among the possible war crimes in the Donbass above all “relocations of people” to the territory of the Russian Federation, which also affected children. It is “also about torture, the killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure,” added the Attorney General at the press conference at the headquarters of the EU judicial authority Eurojust.
No investigations possible in Donbass
Ukrainian authorities have so far had no access to Russian-controlled areas in the Donbass. However, refugees and prisoners of war would be interviewed.
A total of 600 suspects would be accused of the crime of “aggression”, said the prosecutor general, referring to the whole of Ukraine. Among them are “high-ranking military officials, politicians and propaganda agents of the Russian Federation,” Venediktova said. Almost 80 people are suspected of having committed war crimes directly on Ukrainian soil.
International team determined
Venediktova was in The Hague for a meeting of the international team of investigators into alleged Russian war crimes (JIT). The team has since been joined by the judicial authorities of Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia. It was founded in March by Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine with the support of Eurojust. In April, the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court joined the JIT.
The evidence collected should then lead to trials – in Ukraine or other European countries. The International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, could conduct trials against high-ranking suspects such as officers and politicians. The court steps in when an affected country is unable or unwilling to do so itself. However, it has no police power to arrest suspects.
Two other Russian soldiers convicted
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, two captured Russian soldiers have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for war crimes. A court in the Poltava region imposed eleven years and six months in prison, as reported by the online portal Ukrajinska Pravda. The two soldiers from the northern Russian region of Murmansk had confessed to having shot at civilian buildings in the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine. According to the report, they regretted their actions in court.
Accordingly, both soldiers testified that they had first been assigned to a maneuver in the Kursk area. Then they were transferred to the Russian region of Belgorod and suddenly found themselves at war in February.