The images of the horror in Mariupol, Bucha or Chernigiv: can Putin be convicted of war crimes?

The war in Ukraine it has left images that have remained etched in the retinas of many, especially those who have experienced the conflict firsthand; of those who have had to flee through streets full of corpses or even have to recover the bodies of their relatives from common pits, among other atrocities. After twelve months of terror, the victims continue to ask for the same thing as when the conflict began: justice.

This is precisely what the mayor of Bucha, a town some 30 kilometers northwest of Kyiv that the Russians held for 29 days, demanded. The withdrawal of Russian forces in April allowed discover dozens of corpses of civilians and places where cases of torture occurred. What’s more, the city remained several days with the corpses of its neighbors in the streets. No one dared to collect the bodies for fear of mines and explosive cables.

According to United Nations reports, at least 54 men, 16 women and three children, although these are the crimes that could be documented and many more could have been perpetrated. The UN data shows that Bucha is the place where the most murders of civilians have been documented in the country, although the total number of deaths confirmed by the United Nations is close to 500, which could mean, according to the high commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, who Russia would have committed war crimes. All this made the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, visit the city last April, which he defined as a “crime scene”, and indeed confirmed that there are indications that these crimes had been committed. crimes.

This fear was also experienced in the north of the country, in chernigiv. In less than a month of conflict, the Russian Army managed to leave the city completely deserted. Its mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, came to warn that his cemetery had reached such a limit that it could not could accept more corpses and, as a consequence, the bodies were kept in morgues and refrigerators longer than normal.

The Ukrainian city of Chernigiv, a “war zone” for Atroshenko himself, was at one time an industrial center where nearly 300,000 people lived. But during the conflict, it became a strategic location for Russian troops in their quest to reach the heart of the country, Kyiv, located some 150 kilometers to the south. But also, Chernigiv became a scene of atrocities indiscriminate. Not even the football stadium, nicknamed Yuri Gagarin during the Soviet era, was spared, in whose central circle there is now a crater and, in its stands, pieces of shrapnel.

The images of Mariupol are other of those that could be considered evidence of possible war crimes perpetrated by the Kremlin. They are not exactly few, since the missiles have fallen on numerous places: in March, for example, the Russian Government bombed a theater where hundreds of refugees were, and although at first there was no talk of fatalities days later it was confirmed that about 300 civilians had lost their lives in the attack, despite the fact that the Ukrainian citizens who took refuge there wrote the word ‘children’ on the outside of the building, to try to stop possible attacks. For Moscow, however, the theater was a clear military objective.

Despite how devastated was, for example, the Mariupol theater, this was not the worst Russian attack. Images taken from a satellite of the technology company Maxar came to show, last April, when the conflict had been going on for a couple of months, a mass grave located in the vicinity of the city where they could be found. between 3,000 and 9,000 corpses.

The truth is that we did not have to wait that long to see the consequences of the conflict: neither had happened nor two weeks after the start of the war when a large part of the population of cities like Kharkiv, Kherson or Zaporizhia fled desperately to leave the horror behind, trying to reach other parts of the European continent, far from the conflict that Russia started in their country. So they were already more than two million people who had become refugees from the warescaping as they could from the points of greatest tension to neighboring countries.

But the reality is that Russia I wasn’t doing anything else I hadn’t done before. The crimes in Ukraine are very similar to those believed to have been committed in the two wars of Chechnya (1994-2000)or even before, during the intervention of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (1979-1989). In Ukraine, the UN documents for now at least 441 civilian murders by the Russian Army (among them 72 women and 28 children), both in improvised places of detention and in the homes of the victims, in front of their portals or at security checkpoints on the ground.

In parallel, another UN Independent Mission report it has described terrible crimes committed by the Russian invaders ranging from sexual violence against children and the elderly to torture of detainees with methods such as beatings, electric shocks and forced nudity. Will Putin sit on the bench for all this? The UN and non-governmental organizations and institutions such as the Council of Europe or the TPI are working against the clock to make it happen, collecting testimonies from victims of these crimes of war.

TPI could not start a trial for crimes of assault, since neither Russia nor Ukraine are signatories to the Rome Statute that created it. However, as the Khan himself recently confirmed, he does have jurisdiction to prosecute acts of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity on Ukrainian territory, since the parties signed a declaration in 2015 accepting the jurisdiction of the TPI in the territory. However, Russia continues to have the power of veto in the UN Security Council, so if it tries to create a special court, Moscow could also stop its creation, as at the time it frustrated the resolution condemning its own invasion of the neighboring country. .