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- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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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.