Biden administration officials have said in recent days that the United States is helping to gather evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, without troops in the warring nation.
The State Department first announced on March 23 that it had seen “numerous credible reports of indiscriminate attacks and attacks deliberately targeting civilians, as well as other atrocities,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement at the time.
Over the weekend, Russian forces’ apparent actions in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, prompted new calls of war crimes with hundreds of bodies having been found buried in a mass grave and others found with their wrists bound behind them and other signs of torture.
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The reports, which prompted President Joe Biden to call for a war crimes trial against Russian President Vladimir Putin, spurred various administration officials to denounce the actions.
“I am certain that the apparent atrocities that we are seeing in Bucha will be a topic of discussion with the secretary and his NATO foreign minister counterparts,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said during Monday’s briefing. “These images that we’ve seen over the past 24 hours, they are searing. They are painful. They are equally a reminder of why we must continue to support our Ukrainian partners and why we must continue to hold to account those who are ultimately responsible for these apparent atrocities, these war crimes, these heinous acts.”
Price explained that the U.S. is supporting a multinational team of international prosecutors in the region at the request of the prosecutor general of Ukraine who created a war crimes unit and is putting together criminal cases. The U.S. sent experts to support the unit from the region but not from within Ukraine. Price could not answer how many U.S. citizens are over there working to help, saying he doesn’t “have a precise number.”
Additionally, there are no plans for U.S. troops to go into Ukraine to document war crimes, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said during Monday’s briefing.
“I don’t have anything more in terms of context or color to add in terms of our contribution to a larger interagency and, frankly, international effort to make sure that these war crimes are documented,” he added. “The DOD will participate as we can, but I’m not going to get into specific details of what that’s going to look like.”
Prior to the reporting of the massacre in Bucha, Russian forces’ brutality was apparently on display in Mariupol, a key southern port city along the Sea of Azov. They shelled a local maternity hospital, they bombed a Mariupol theater that had been serving as a shelter, even though they had spelled out the word “children” in Russian in the front and back of the facility, and they bombed a school that was housing hundreds of people.
Allen Weiner, a Stanford University senior law lecturer and the head of its program in international conflict and negotiation, told the Washington Examiner that “there are a number of countries that would presumably have the legal capacity to conduct investigations, possible prosecutions in their domestic courts as well,” in addition to the investigation by the International Criminal Court and the one being conducted by the Ukrainian government.
There are risks involved in the documentation of war crimes, Weiner noted, saying, “It’s always best to get to a crime scene when the crime scene is fresh,” but investigators “have to be very careful about subjecting their own personnel to risks, so there’s going to be a trade-off there.”
Some evidence might still be helpful even if investigators can’t get to an area immediately, he said, mentioning “if people were killed with their hands tied behind their backs” or “if you see whether people were shot at closer range or not,” or in “some kind of point-blank fashion.”
There have been reports that people killed in Bucha had their hands tied behind their backs when they were killed.
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Weiner said that “it seems quite imaginable” that the ICC would “be able to issue indictments with respect to the kinds of indiscriminate attacks against urban settings,” though he’s not certain whom the court would charge for the crimes, and it depends on whom they can prove gave the order to commit such acts.
Since neither Russia nor Ukraine is a part of the ICC, the institution only has jurisdiction over the conduct of war on Ukrainian soil. It doesn’t have the ability to charge Russia with the crime of aggression, even though “that’s the one that it would be easiest to imagine that Vladimir Putin is responsible for because we know that he’s the one who made the decision to order the invasion of Ukraine,” Weiner said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Monday that the situation in Bucha may not be the worst of the atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, while Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told Ukrainian media, “In terms of human casualties, the worst situation is in Borodyanka. There’s a lot to process.”
