Thousands of credible reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine now constitute a mountain of evidence compiled by international organizations, European authorities and Ukrainian prosecutors. Collectively, it provides documentation of a pattern of war crimes — systematic, ongoing and sanctioned by superiors — that is among the defining characteristics of Moscow’s invasion. No stable peace is likely without accountability for these outrages.
The scale of Russian criminality in Ukraine is breathtaking. It ranges from the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure — including facilities in the country’s power grid starting last fall and, mounting evidence suggests, southern Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam in early June — to methodical violence against Ukrainian noncombatants. Both are banned by international law.
In all, said Beth Van Schaack, the State Department’s ambassador at large for global criminal justice, investigators are examining tens of thousands of allegations of individual war crimes. A new U.N. report found that Russian forces summarily executed 77 Ukrainian civilians, including five women, who were among hundreds it said have been arbitrarily detained. Ukrainian security forces have also arbitrarily detained some civilians, the report said — but in much smaller numbers with no executions.
In the vast majority of cases involving the civilians in Russian custody, the detainees were subjected to torture and other ill treatment, including sexual violence, the report said.
Those victims do not include thousands of other Ukrainian civilians killed or assaulted by Russian troops in areas under Russian control. In the town of Bucha, near Kyiv, authorities found the bodies of more than 450 Ukrainian civilians after Moscow’s forces withdrew more than a year ago; most had been shot, tortured or bludgeoned to death, officials said.
In mid-June, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, the Australian lawyer and scholar Alice Jill Edwards, wrote that the scale of reports of torture and abuse by the Russian military constitutes an apparent state-endorsed pattern — “a level of coordination, planning and organization, as well as the direct authorization, deliberate policy or official tolerance from superior authorities.” Both Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war were victimized, subjected to electric shocks, beatings, hooding, mock executions and other death threats, according to the reports Ms. Edwards cited.
A separate report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, commissioned last fall by the United Nations, was equally harrowing. In addition to summary executions and torture, it detailed instances of alleged rape and other sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians in regions they invaded and occupied last year.
The victims included small children, adults and the very elderly, and accounts of their suffering make for horrific reading. In March 2022, just weeks after Moscow’s troops invaded, two Russian soldiers entered a home near Kyiv, “raped a 22-year-old woman several times, committed acts of sexual violence on her husband and forced the couple to have sexual intercourse in their presence,” according to the report. “Then one of the soldiers forced their 4-year-old daughter to perform oral sex on him, which is rape.”
To date, only a handful of Russian soldiers have faced justice for their crimes. One, Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old sergeant, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Ukrainian court a year ago after he admitted shooting to death an unarmed 62-year-old man in the invasion’s early days. He did so, he said believably, on the order of his superior officer.
Investigators from the FBI and European agencies and prosecutors’ offices, in addition to the United Nations and other international bodies, are interviewing Ukrainian victims and witnesses. They are compiling dossiers that might be used at some point to bring perpetrators to justice, including at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. That would provide a measure of accountability, but it is far from sufficient.
A warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin has been issued by the International Criminal Court, on charges of issuing orders for the abduction of hundreds of Ukrainian children who have been brought to Russia, a war crime. That marks the first time an arrest warrant has been issued for the head of state of one of the United Nations’ five permanent Security Council members.
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End of carousel- Lawyers plead guilty in racketeering case in Fulton County, Ga.
- The Biden administration announces more than $100 million to improve maternal health.
- Wisconsin Republicans back off impeachment threat against justice.
- Bahrain’s hunger strike ends, for now, after concessions to prisoners.
- A Saudi court sentences a retired teacher to death based on tweets.
Attorneys for Donald Trump have pleaded guilty in the racketeering case led by Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Even those lawyers related to the deals focused on equipment-tampering in rural Coffee County are relevant to the former president — they help to establish the “criminal enterprise” of which prosecutors hope to prove Mr. Trump was the head. The news is a sign that the courts might be the place where 2020 election lies finally crash upon the rocks of reality. The Editorial Board wrote about the wide range of the indictment in August.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced more than $103 million in funding to address the maternal health crisis. The money will boost access to mental health services, help states train more maternal health providers and bolster nurse midwifery programs. These initiatives are an encouraging step toward tackling major gaps in maternal health and well-being. In August, the Editorial Board wrote about how the United States can address its maternal mortality crisis.
Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) announced Tuesday that Republicans would allow the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to draw legislative maps, a dramatic reversal after years of opposing such an approach to redistricting. A new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court is expected to throw out the current maps, which make Wisconsin the most gerrymandered state in America. Mr. Vos has been threatening to impeach Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose election this spring flipped control of the court, in a bid to keep those maps. This led to understandable outcry. Now it seems Mr. Vos is backing off his impeachment threat and his efforts to keep the state gerrymandered. Read our editorial on the Protasiewicz election here.
Prisoners are eating again in Bahrain after the government agreed to let them spend more hours outside and expanded their access to visitors, a welcome development ahead of the crown prince’s visit to Washington this week. Activists say the monthlong hunger strike will resume on Sept. 30 if these promises aren’t kept. Read our editorial calling for the compassionate release of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a political prisoner since 2011 who participated in the strike.
A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, has been sentenced to death by the country’s Specialized Criminal Court solely based on his tweets, retweets and YouTube activity, according to Human Rights Watch. The court’s verdict, July 10, was based on two accounts on X, formerly Twitter, which had only a handful of followers. The posts criticized the royal family. The sentence is the latest example of dictatorships imposing harsh sentences on people who use social media for free expression, highlighted in our February editorial.
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In fact, Mr. Putin and a coterie of his top advisers have committed a broader offense by unleashing the war in the first place — the crime from which all the subsequent atrocities arose. They should face prosecution for waging a crime of aggression — the very charge used against Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials after World War II. True accountability would not be achieved by prosecuting individual Russian soldiers or officers while leaving the Kremlin’s cabal untouched.
European governments and, more recently, the Biden administration have backed that approach, although it remains to be decided what sort of tribunal could turn the plan into action. It is incumbent on them that they agree on a mechanism to try Mr. Putin and his henchmen, in absentia if necessary.
It is true they are unlikely to be hauled into court anytime soon. Yet the prospect of doing so looks less remote today than it did before the recent mutiny by the mercenary Wagner Group, which briefly appeared to threaten Mr. Putin’s hold on power. Other strongmen and dictators responsible for atrocities also looked untouchable until they wound up in the dock. It is time to hold the Russian leader accountable for his ultimate crime — launching an illegal war that has devastated so many towns and villages and ruined so many lives.