Testimony: war in Ukraine | Efforts to Document Crimes of Incredible Cruelty

Feeling the call from the field, Paule Robitaille took up her old journalist’s notebook to document war crimes in Ukraine, a country she often visited while living in Russia. The provincial deputy who has just announced her retirement from politics has taken to the road with the non-governmental organization International Partnership for Human Rights, as part of a ten-day mission. In a series of texts, she gives us her impressions through the precious testimony of victims of the Russian invasion. Good reading.

(Katyuzhanka, Ukraine) I am in the village of Katyuzhanka somewhere an hour northeast of Kyiv with two young criminal lawyers specializing in war crimes. One is of Georgian origin but lives in Brussels. The other, Ukrainian. There is also a Ukrainian psychologist and a Norwegian political scientist versed in human rights. My colleagues belong to the International Partnership for Human Rights, The Norwegian Helsinski Committee and Truth Hound, European and Ukrainian NGOs.

We interview Nina, 40, who lost her husband on February 25, 2022, at the very start of the Russian invasion. She sits in her garden, her 4-year-old boy by her side, recounting with iron strength her husband’s last moments. The questions are specific. The responses are punctuated by long sighs and tears welling up in the eyes. Simon Papuashvili, the Georgian lawyer, conducts the interrogation, impassive. The lady says that a column of Russian tanks was crossing the hamlet and that her husband had just taken the family to safety. He was going to fetch water when on the way he came face to face with the wall of tanks. A shell shot detonated and blew up the vehicle. It made a hell of a racket. Nina’s husband died on the spot.

As if all this were not enough, the Russian army commandeered his house and settled there for weeks. She took refuge with relatives far, far away, only to return after they had left.

We comb through the yard. We discover that the soldiers had transformed the small outbuilding into a traditional Russian sauna. The team gets excited when Nina brings them a t-shirt left behind by the soldiers on which is indicated the unit to which they belonged; they came from Dagestan, a region of the Caucasus. Indeed, the testimonies of the residents overlap, they testify to the presence of Chechens and other ethnic groups in Russian military costumes in the village. They recount the passage of nearly 2,500 tanks during these first days of the occupation. During the siege, 7 residents of this village of 4000 inhabitants were killed by the soldiers, men and women, all driving their cars or harmless passengers, they say.

We’ll spend days combing the terrain, photographing burnt-out cars and weapons, rations and clothing left behind by Russian troops. We will put the evidence in small bags, write down, record. A monk’s work to reconstruct these ordinary tragedies too quickly forgotten, the world turning its attention to the even more terrible horrors of Boutcha, Mariupol, Kharkiv.

There are thousands of us in Ukraine reconstructing as best we can the crimes committed by the Russian army, a thousand sometimes improvised investigators from NGOs from all over the country who scour this gutted country. Add to that war crimes specialists from the governments of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands dispatched to search for possible mass crimes to lend a hand to local and Criminal Court teams. international. Because there is the Attorney General of Ukraine investigating 24/7, trying to come to terms with 10,700 alleged war crimes involving 622 suspects that have been reported to her. And at the rate the fighting is going, when the sirens are still blaring in the capital and elsewhere, the number of these alleged crimes is multiplying every day.

After the unprecedented global economic blockade, Russia will be put in the dock on all fronts.

In all the history of wars, we will never have seen a greater legal construction site. And all this will lead to what? Russia will never play in the film. There will be the trials in Ukraine that Russia will not recognize. Then, those of the International Criminal Court in which it will not participate. Then those that will lead several countries like Canada that she will not respect.

Vladimir Poutine will say that his country is victim of a Occident which refuses to listen to it and which still humiliates it. He will isolate himself more and more in a parallel world and will feed his concrete propaganda to a population that will listen to him. But until when ? Would there one day be the equivalent of the great Nuremberg trials?

In the meantime, I hope that this gigantic and publicized collection of reports will serve to raise awareness in a world that could fall asleep on gas before this war that is getting bogged down. It is a duty of memory which denounces the impunity of Vladimir Putin’s regime. I also want to believe that for Nina and for those millions of Ukrainian civilians who are currently experiencing the abominable, this listening and these efforts made by thousands of people like us to document these crimes of incredible cruelty will serve to heal a little the wounds and to raise the head.