Faced with the horror of the atrocities committed in Boutcha, Europe plunges back into the worst moments of its history and international condemnation is unanimous: the head of American diplomacy, Anthony Blinken, speaks of “punch in the stomach“. The Secretary General of the United Nations calls for the opening of an independent investigation and the words “war crimes” resound in echo from one chancellery to another, from Berlin to London: Emmanuel Macron evokes “unsustainable images“. “There are very clear indications of war crimes“to Boutcha and he is”roughly established that it is the Russian army” who was present there, said the head of state on Monday April 4 on France Inter.
.@EmmanuelMacron “The scenes seen in Boutcha are unbearable. It is clear that there are very clear indications of war crimes. International justice must pass, those who were at the origin of these crimes will have to answer for them. ” #le79Inter #Elysee2022 pic.twitter.com/CJLTEMozFt
– France Inter (@franceinter) April 4, 2022
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez talks about a possible “genocide” and calls for the appearance of the culprits before the International Criminal Court.
Moscow, for its part, convenes the UN Security Council to discuss what it describes as “Provocation” and of “staging” from the Ukrainians. “We categorically deny all accusations“, indicates the spokesman of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, assuring that the experts of the Russian Ministry of Defense have discovered signs of “video fakes” and “fakes” in the images presented by the Ukrainian authorities.
In Boutcha, the total number of dead is still uncertain. According to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, the lifeless bodies of 410 civilians were found in the territories of the Kyiv region recently recaptured from Russian troops, who withdrew there to redeploy towards the East and the South . AFP saw the bodies of at least 22 people in civilian clothes on the streets on Saturday, killed by “a bullet in the neck” in the words of the mayor, who also affirmed on Saturday that “280 people“had been buried”in mass graves“.
Across Ukraine, around 40 NGOs have already begun the work of gathering evidence and documenting on the ground. In Boutcha, as elsewhere, you have to check everything, cross-check everything. Like at a crime scene, identifying names, collecting testimonies from survivors… Steps that take a lot of time. The motto of the investigators? “Never assume anything, believe anything, check everything” – the methodology is well established. The difference with other conflicts is that the war in Ukraine is very well documented by the photos and videos circulating on social networks: this can speed things up.
Then comes the time for the trials. Either before the International Criminal Court, which opened an investigation on March 3. With a limit: Russia having withdrawn in 2016, the Court will not be able to prosecute Russian individuals on Russian soil, it will only be able to do so if they are arrested in a country which recognizes its jurisdiction.
President Zelensky has just addressed the nation and pleads for a no-fly zone. After the use of Russian cluster munitions on residential buildings in Kharkiv, he demands at the ICC that Russia be tried for war crimes. https://t.co/5BCEkN4e81 pic.twitter.com/JQMYBFZzJi
— Philippe Berry (@ptiberry) February 28, 2022
Either before a special tribunal, as was created for the former Yugoslavia (The ICTY sentenced four Serbian officials for numerous counts of crimes against humanity committed during the siege, including terrorism. or Rwanda ( which ceased operations in 2015. Ukraine and some jurists are calling for it.
Or before national courts. In the name of universal jurisdiction, any country can indeed open a war crime investigation. This is how France, Sweden, Belgium or Canada condemned those responsible for the Rwandan genocide. This is also how the court in Koblenz, Germany, recently sentenced a former Syrian colonel from the Damascus regime to life imprisonment.
All these steps take time, often ten years. The most difficult thing is to establish the whole chain of responsibility, from the officers on the ground to those who gave the order to massacre the civilians.
In the shorter term, what can be the response of Westerners after the stunning effect? Sometimes, in the course of a war, there is one massacre too many, one that changes the course of history. One thinks of the two bombings of the Sarajevo market, in 1994 and 1995, during the siege of the city by the Serbian forces. It was this event that prompted NATO to launch an intense bombing campaign. It lasted three weeks and led to the Dayton Accords ending the war in Bosnia.
The Butcha massacre could be one of these. Except that nobody is ready for a direct military confrontation with Russia, which is a nuclear power. It is not on the military ground that Westerners will bend Vladimir Putin.
Their main weapon is economic leverage. The Europeans undertake to take new sanctions. There have already been several since the start of the war on February 24, against companies, banks, senior politicians, oligarchs. They never made the Kremlin bend. But the Europeans could finally decide to deprive the country of an essential financial resource by banning imports of Russian gas.
[ RUSSIE | UKRAINE ]
The German Minister of Defense believes that the European Union must think about banning the import of Russian gas after the “crimes” of Boutcha. (Reuters) pic.twitter.com/zCBCI2I3ln
— (Little) Think Tank (@L_ThinkTank) April 4, 2022
The United States banned the import of Russian oil and gas shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, but not the European Union which was sourcing about 40% from Russia in 2021. For now , only the Baltic countries took the plunge on Saturday 2 April, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda calling on the rest of the European Union to follow them. All three countries are now served by gas reserves stored underground in Latvia.
Berlin, very dependent on Russia for energy and so far very reluctant to imagine an embargo, is now ready to discuss it. It is a real inflection. In the short term, there is no other way to condemn Boutcha’s atrocities. Especially since even if the Russians withdraw from the kyiv region, they are redeploying in the East to ensure territorial continuity between Donbass, the besieged port of Mariupol and Crimea: the fighting and atrocities will continue.