Russia accused of 21,920 war crimes . . . and counting
Ukraine’s chief prosecutor smoothes out the document she has on the table before her which lays out the terrible count of Russian war crimes in black and white. “Sorry, that is out of date now,” Iryna Venediktova says, her finger hovering over the figure of 21,620 cases. “Plus 300 from yesterday. Every day there is another number.”
When the Russian invasion began in February and the first 1,000 alleged cases were collated, Venediktova, 43, was shocked by the figure and wondered how her overstretched office would cope. “I thought this number is huge,” she says. “But we understand that the scale is more and more every day. And it will keep growing.”
The investigation into war crimes in Ukraine is the largest in the world today. More than 600 suspects have been identified, from low-ranking soldiers to political leaders, with 80 prosecutions already under way. Six captured Russian soldiers have been convicted in person of the murder of unarmed Ukrainian civilians and another 12 are incarcerated, awaiting trial.
The first case for rape as a weapon of war is scheduled to begin shortly, with an empty dock, because the defendant, Mikhail Romanov, 32, once believed dead, cannot be found, having melted back across the front line into Russian-controlled territory. The likelihood, Venediktova admits, is that the vast majority of perpetrators will not stand trial in person — or at least not in Ukraine — but she refuses to let that grim reality get in the way of justice. “This is an obligation for us,” she says. “We don’t have a choice whether to do it or not. Because it’s a question of justice.”
Rape, torture, murder and kidnap: these are among the litany of crimes levelled against Russian forces during the invasion. The last is the one Venediktova hopes will prove the gravest crime of all. President Zelensky has accused Russia of committing genocide against the Ukrainian people, a crime codified only after the Second World War and defined by five acts intended to destroy in whole or in part, a people. The clearest evidence of such a policy that Venediktova has so far comes from the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russian territory, a crime straight from the Russian history books.
“The Russians have done this to Ukrainians in the Soviet period, and from 2014 they have done it with Crimea,” she says. “They have done this for centuries. It’s very important for me as a prosecutor and a Ukrainian citizen to get a result on this side.”
Sir Howard Morrison QC, a former International Criminal Court (ICC) judge who is Venediktova’s chief British adviser, agrees with the strategy, which is supported by the British Ministry of Justice and Suella Braverman, the attorney general for England and Wales. “To remove substantial numbers of people from their native country, including many thousands of children in order to make them ‘citizens’ of another country, if part of a policy designed to erase Ukrainian identity, then that’s something which is potentially genocidal and actionable under the Genocide Convention,” he said.
Venediktova is determined that Ukraine handle the bulk of the cases itself but she acknowledges that the ICC or a special tribunal under its auspices may prove a better forum for the most politically contentious cases. Karim Khan QC, the ICC chief prosecutor, has visited Ukraine twice and pledged his backing for Kyiv’s investigations, providing investigators and other support and, if deemed appropriate, a venue for international justice. “He has more possibilities to prosecute people who are under functional immunity,” Venediktova says — a reference to President Putin, his ministers and military commanders who have overseen the invasion. “And he understands the cases that are objectively difficult for Ukraine. But they are very important not just for Ukraine but for international justice, and Khan does his job for victims across the whole planet.”
Some of what Venediktova’s office has achieved in barely four months is astonishing. Careful investigative work, including the study of security camera footage, social media, witness testimony and intercepts of Russian military radio communications, has already identified the brigade responsible for the massacres of hundreds of civilians in Bucha and 14 of the individuals responsible.
Venediktova says investigators are well on their way to tracing the chain of command all the way to the top, proving that such atrocities were systematic and not just the work of rogue units. “There are even cases where we don’t have the individual soldiers who killed but we have commanders who gave the order to kill all civilians they saw,” she said. “For what? To terrorise people, to spread panic.”
Questions have been asked about the speed of their investigations. Venediktova dismisses any suggestion they have gone too fast, noting the brazen way many of the crimes were committed. “Imagine it’s an ordinary crime. When the killer runs away you call the police and this person will be stopped within metres. You would start to prosecute straight away,” she says. “Here we have the same situation. We have survivors, we have witnesses, we have evidence.”
Perhaps the most compelling reason not to delay is the message Kyiv hopes to send to Russia that leaders and soldiers alike will face justice for crimes committed in the Ukrainian territory they now occupy. “We know from our information the Russians are committing such atrocities in occupied places like Kherson,” Venediktova says. “We need to do it for the survivors and the victims but also the people in the occupied territories. Now we should do what we can do while we have access to territory and to people.
“I am very surprised when people ask me about fast or not fast. We have six judgments, court judgments, we have more than a hundred suspects, we have 21,000 crimes. The question for us is that it’s too slow.”
