Even if the bombs are still falling on Ukraine, justice has begun its work and Russian soldiers have already been tried and sentenced for war crimes. This is an “unprecedented” deployment of international and local criminal justice, while the war is still raging, notes the president of Avocats sans frontières (ASF), Me Pascal Paradise.
Some 20 Russian soldiers have already been found guilty of war crimes by Ukrainian courts.
The first was Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old tank commander.
He was sentenced last May to life in prison for shooting dead an unarmed 62-year-old civilian days after the invasion began. Looking babyish, the soldier said he followed the orders of his superiors, an excuse that is not one in all cases in the eyes of international law. Even war has its laws.
Other soldiers are accused of bombing homes and torturing Ukrainian soldiers — actions that feature on the infamous list of war crimes.
A herculean task
This task of judging all war criminals will be daunting. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, authorities have recorded more than 70,000 war crimes since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, including the bombing and killing of civilians, torture (pulling out fingernails, dumping electric shocks to the genitals, among other atrocities) and repeated rapes.
The count is growing every day as investigators manage to reach areas occupied until recently by Russian forces. These figures are obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, since the sorting has not yet been done and it is possible that multiple people have reported the same alleged crime.
“There is no military justification for such actions. The Russians did these horrible things because they could,” Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichouk told a Council of Europe session last month.
The amount of evidence is equally monumental. Investigators are able to collect direct testimonies on atrocities committed in the days that follow. Citizens, armed with their cellphones, are documenting crimes with precision like never before — not to mention satellites that record troop movements and destruction on the ground.
Despite this workload, Ukraine’s Attorney General Andriy Kostin made the promise on December 24, after seeing images of civilian corpses strewn on the ground in front of shops where people were doing their Christmas shopping: “No crime will go unpunished. »
“It’s unlikely,” says M.e Heaven. We doubt that we can shed light on each case and that justice will be done for each of them. Russian soldiers will lose their lives on the battlefield before being tried, others will be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners and many of the perpetrators of crimes will never be identified, explains the lawyer, whose organization advises in particular, in Ukraine, prosecutors and NGOs to facilitate investigations into crimes of conflict-related sexual violence.
It is expected that the vast majority of these alleged crimes will be tried in local Ukrainian courts, with international courts expected to play a complementary role.
But these have not been idle for all that.
The International Criminal Court has deployed its largest number of investigators and experts in the field. ” Forty-two. Unheard of,” says M.e Heaven.
Several have expressed concern that the Court will be suffocated by the large number of cases that will be submitted to it. This is why it will focus on senior army officers and political leaders, and on the most serious cases, explains the lawyer.
International mechanisms are deployed
Progress has also been made by the International Court of Justice, which quickly opened an investigation into allegations of genocide.
In addition, Ukraine is pushing for the creation of a special tribunal, like those established for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, so that Russia can be tried for the “crime of aggression”, i.e. the act of waging war — because the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction in its case.
It is the mother of all crimes, said Andriy Kostin. Without him, all the others would not have been committed.