KYIV — The 25 Russians convicted so far of war crimes in Ukrainian courts include a soldier who forced two Ukrainians at gunpoint to hand over laptops and money, four who beat and tortured Ukrainian soldiers and two who admitted shelling residential buildings in the first weeks of the war.
Over 66,000 additional alleged war crimes have been reported to Ukrainian authorities since the Russian invasion last February, according to Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General. The number is growing by hundreds every day as investigators fan out into areas retaken from the Russians and Ukrainians step up to lodge complaints, ranging from the theft of property to torture, murder, rape, the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the relentless missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure.
It’s a staggering number of cases, one that would overwhelm any judicial system anywhere, legal experts say. But Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin has vowed to investigate all of them and to bring to trial all those in which enough evidence can be gathered. President Volodymyr Zelensky has made justice for the victims of war crimes one of his conditions for eventual peace with Russia. The issue is as important for Ukraine as defeating the Russians militarily if Russia is to be deterred forever from attacking Ukraine, Kostin said.
“We have to win in both battles — in the fight for our territory and in the fight for justice,” he said in an interview.
The battle for justice could prove just as challenging as the fight for land.
The Ukraine war offers an unparalleled opportunity to test the still-evolving international justice system that began to take shape after World War II. The United Nations has found clear evidence that “an array” of war crimes and other violations of human rights and international law have been committed, according to an initial report by the Independent International Commission of Enquiry on Ukraine set up under the auspices of the United Nations earlier this year.
Not only is there an overwhelming number of cases, but abundant evidence, noted a European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. Technology has brought new means of documenting crimes, from the videos posted on social media by Russian and Ukrainian soldiers to satellite footage that reveals patterns of deliberate attacks on civilian targets.