Behind the glass, they don’t look like the idea one might have of a monster. Mikhaïl, Ruslan, Maksym, Valentin: four men between 40 and 60 years old, their hair shaved, short. Three of them have children, one is a widower, the last single. An ordinary man’s life that ends in the dock. Reason: war crime. On December 23, in a court in northeastern Ukraine, these four Russian soldiers were convicted of torturing civilians in a village they occupied, some of them more than 6,000 kilometers from their birthplace. , in the Russian Far East.
A few months earlier, the four servicemen had abducted three Ukrainian veterans and thrown them into a pit three meters deep, originally dug for recalcitrant Russian soldiers, in the middle of an airy center. The three civilians will suffer an ordeal of several days in this makeshift prison, almost without water or food, abused by their jailers, who will finally release them, before being captured during the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region.
For these four torturers, the court will be lenient: eleven years in prison, out of a maximum of fifteen. A reduced sentence for having expressed remorse and cooperated in the investigation, according to the verdict consulted by L’Express. However, other civilians, whose bodies were found in the same grave handcuffed to each other, riddled with bullets and stab wounds, are still under investigation. While fighting rages in the east of the country, the Ukrainian authorities are fighting day after day so that war crimes, from perpetrators to sponsors, can one day be judged.
99% of war crimes tried in Ukraine
Since the start of the invasion, only 30 individuals have been convicted, half in absentia. The first trial, that of Vadim Chichimarine, a soldier sentenced to life for having executed an old man on his bicycle, took place barely three months after the crime. “The legal mechanisms in place are based on Ukrainian legislation, it’s not perfect, but at least it works,” said Olexandre Pavlichenko, director of the Ukrainian Union for Human Rights in Helsinki. Some activists have indeed denounced too rapid procedures.
It must be said that with nearly 77,000 open cases for war crimes, the Ukrainians must move quickly. “Not a legal system in the world was ready for such an influx,” said prosecutor Yuri Belousov, in charge of war crimes at the office of the general prosecutor. Murder, torture, deportation, rape, destruction of civilian infrastructure… Of the 27 possible war crimes described in international law, all are found in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. While a few cases committed by the Ukrainian army have been identified and are being dealt with by military justice, the overwhelming majority come from Russian forces. “International justice will only be able to deal with a few dozen cases, 99% of crimes will be tried in our courts,” adds Yuri Belousov.
From April 2022, with the discovery of mass graves in the north of Kiev, particularly in Boutcha, many institutions mobilized to collect evidence: the police, the security service (SBU), the prosecution, defenders of human rights and sometimes even foreign investigators – French gendarmes who came on the spot were able to submit advisory reports. At the moment, 305 soldiers are officially suspected of war crimes.
Crimes and punishments
Several investigations have also been opened by foreign countries, and some cases have been brought before the European Court of Human Rights – of which Russia was a member until September 2022 – by victims supported by NGOs. Ukrainians also rely on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try high-ranking dignitaries who enjoy immunity. In 2014, the Court had been seized, but it waited until March 2, 2022 to open an investigation.
Bodies wait to be examined by forensic doctors and investigators at the cemetery in Boutcha, Ukraine, on April 6, 2022.
© / afp.com/RONALDO SCHEMIDT
The invasion and the mass crimes changed everything. For the first time, the ICC is targeting the leader of a member country of the United Nations Security Council, with the issuance on March 17 of an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for the rights of the child, Maria Lvova-Belova. The defendants served the evidence of their crimes on a platter, Moscow claiming the evacuation of Ukrainian children, officially for their own safety. On television, the commissioner even revealed, in February, before an approving president, that she had herself adopted a 15-year-old child from Mariupol. “Now I know what it’s like to be the mother of a child from Donbass. It’s difficult, but we love each other,” she said with a smile. kyiv accuses the Russians of abducting 16,226 children, who are sometimes given Russian passports and placed in foster care.
When the mandate was announced, Maria Lvova-Belova quipped in the Russian media: “It’s nice that the international community has valued our work to help the children of our country”. On social media, ex-president Dmitry Medvedev compared the document to toilet paper. He also threatened the judges by advising them to “watch the sky”, in reference to Russian airstrikes. Apart from the deportations, however, it will be difficult for the ICC to quickly prove the responsibility of the top of the state in the crimes committed on the ground. “We have to find what connects them directly. However, the chain of command is obscure in Russia”, analyzes Mathilde Philip-Gay, jurist, author of Can we judge Putin? (Albin Michel, publication scheduled for May 3).
special court
The other limit of the ICC is that it cannot judge the crime of aggression. Since the beginning of last year, on the idea of the jurist Philippe Sands (see page 24), the Ukrainians are calling for the establishment of a special tribunal to bring to justice the highest officials of the invasion, like the one in Nuremberg which tried the Nazi dignitaries in 1945-1946. “When we talk about war crimes, there are specific victims and their families. But for the crime of aggression, the victim is the whole nation, every Ukrainian, says Anton Korynevych, the special ambassador to of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. It is important for them to feel that justice is done.”
kyiv succeeded in convincing the United States and France to support the tribunal. It remains to agree on its form: a special international tribunal based on a multilateral treaty or a hybrid jurisdiction, under Ukrainian law? The United States, cautious about questions of international justice after the war in Iraq, favor this second option, where the funding would be foreign, like some of the judges, as well as France. This court should in any case be held in The Hague, confirms Anton Korynevych, for whom all the options are on the table, with a preference for the most international form possible: “This court should not be only a response of a state victim of aggression, this concerns the entire international community.”
Whether through this special tribunal or the ICC, the chances of arresting the Russian dignitaries remain slim, however, or could take years. Without its own police, not recognized by Russia, the ICC depends on the goodwill of States to carry out its mandates. But many take refuge behind the immunity of incumbent heads of state. Yuri Belousov wants to be optimistic, while his office has already identified 647 people suspected of the crime of aggression: “The Nazis lived all their lives in hiding and were arrested ten, thirty, sometimes fifty years after their crimes”, explains the magistrate Ukrainian. “After a certain time, [les criminels russes] will think that we have forgotten them, but we will wait for them at the turn. One day or another, we will be able to catch them all.”