Ukrainian war criminals must not escape responsibility
Alexey Blyuminov, political commentator, Kyiv-Lugansk
No matter how the war ends, it is quite obvious that those who started it and are carrying it out must be punished. And this punishment should not be a metaphor or a figure of speech. Not so beloved by our politicians is “political responsibility” in the form of failure to enter the next parliament with the possibility of a well-fed life in a mansion in Koncha-Zaspa with periodic appearances at Shuster’s in the role of a retired “father of the nation.”
We are talking about a war crimes tribunal in Ukraine, similar to the one created for the former Yugoslavia. Already now we need to think about what rules and on what evidence base to judge Ukrainian war criminals
Anticipating possible reproaches of calling for politically motivated repressions, I will immediately note that this is not about judging someone or depriving someone of a position for their views, for example, for dislike of Donbass or adherence to the “ideals of the Maidan.” This is exactly the level of the Maidanists - a “witch hunt” under the banner of lustration and dismissal of judges, officials or police officers for incorrect sentences or actions committed exclusively during the Maidan period. Such a policy could not lead to anything good, and expectedly failed, as the hapless self-appointed “chief lustrator” Yegor Sobolev himself was forced to admit.
This is about something else. Today, every day we receive photos and video evidence of terrible war crimes, eyewitness accounts of extrajudicial politically motivated killings of civilians in the so-called zone. ATO. Every day, the Ukrainian military carries out shelling of peaceful cities, including with the use of prohibited types of weapons, which was recorded by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and foreign media (remember the CNN story about the shelling of rebel positions with ballistic missiles). No one has ever denied this fact, but no one has been properly punished for it.
In Donetsk and Lugansk, absolutely peaceful targets are hit by artillery shelling. For example, local museums, hospitals, maternity hospitals. In Lugansk, for the second time in a month, the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God “Tenderness” was shelled from howitzers; as a result of the shelling, the church’s refectory burned down. Shells fired from Ukrainian positions destroyed a quarter of the Central Market of Lugansk, and shopping pavilions burned to the ground.
According to the press service of the Akhmetov-based Metinvest, the Komsomolets Donbassa mine, the Avdeevsky Coke Plant, and the Enakievo Metallurgical Plant are being shelled. Enterprises are forced to stop operations and evacuate employees. The Gorlovka chemical plant "Stirol" is being shelled from heavy artillery. And this, given the harmful nature of production, is fraught with a full-fledged environmental disaster in the region, a mini-Chernobyl.
It is clear that there is no military necessity in shelling churches, museums and chemical plants. What is this? Either the criminal negligence and lack of professionalism of the Ukrainian artillerymen and those who give them orders, or a deliberate plan to create a full-fledged humanitarian disaster in the zone controlled by the rebels in order to force the militias to leave these cities and not aggravate the suffering of civilians.
There is also a version that Ukrainian politicians are already aware of certain geopolitical agreements at the highest level, the results of which have not yet been made public, and that is why Ukrainian troops have been tasked with destroying as much as possible the infrastructure and industrial potential in Russia’s future zone of responsibility and complicating the humanitarian situation there.
I don’t even want to think about such a version as the ideologically motivated transformation of the industrial Donbass into a bare steppe by Kyiv and Galician dornbassophobes and the trampling of the region into the Stone Age.
However, the recent frequent calls from seemingly sane Ukrainian experts, political scientists and even officials and deputies regarding the deprivation of Donbass citizens of civil and voting rights, assigning them the status of “non-citizens”, similar to the Baltic countries, make us think that the sophistication of the Donbas-phobic fantasies of this public is limitless. So why can’t they dream of a “wild field” in the place of Donbass?
Then they will begin to call for hanging “separatists” in public squares. And society will also remain silent?
Let me remind you that it was precisely under the strongest pressure from the European Union that the authorities of the countries of victorious social apartheid - Estonia and Latvia, who at one time made hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking residents “second-class citizens”, are forced to soften or completely abolish certain provisions of their Nazi legislation. And the Ukrainian Nazis have only now matured to the idea of repeating these experiments at home.
Returning to the idea of a war crimes tribunal in Ukraine, I would like to emphasize that such a tribunal should be international, involving experts and prosecutors from Russia and EU countries. Moreover, certain steps are being taken in terms of collecting facts and evidence about crimes in that Russia. Thus, a “White Book” on Ukraine was created, and investigative authorities opened criminal cases against Ukrainian war criminals, some of whom have already been convicted in absentia by Russian courts.
The collected facts should become sources of evidence for the future tribunal. But even in Ukraine itself, the public creates its own “White Papers”. So, Lugansk residents created a community on the social network Facebook with the same name. And they conduct their own independent count of the civilian victims of the war. Today, almost 190 names have already been included in this list. And this is far from a complete martyrology.
The investigation of war crimes must be as open and transparent as possible, so that no one has the slightest doubt about the verdicts passed. It should be taken into account that war crimes are not only the use of prohibited weapons, shelling and massacres in a war zone, but also already recorded facts of lawlessness, torture, illegal arrests, rape and looting by soldiers and commanders of volunteer battalions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in the areas occupied by them territories).
Well, one last thing. It is the fear of a very real retribution for crimes that explains the stubborn reluctance of the Kiev authorities to recognize the operation it is conducting in the Donbass, in which the regular army, tens of thousands of soldiers, heavy armored vehicles, artillery and attack aircraft are already involved, not as a shameful euphemism “anti-terrorist operation”, but as a war.
After all, waging war imposes on its participants a number of obligations and restrictions enshrined in international conventions. Thus, the Geneva Convention regulates the treatment of prisoners of war, and other international acts regulate the use of various types of weapons. And violation of these conventions is a direct war crime, for which one will have to answer not only before national, but also before international court.
And I am confident that we will live to see that time.
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