Putin will be tried and prosecuted for war crimes, Ukraine’s prosecutor general vows

“I believe that our case will be prepared, and when (the) time comes, when and if Putin will be available, he will be prosecuted and tried by the International Criminal Court or by a special tribunal,” Kostin said in an interview with Euronews on Monday.

“It’s our obligation as prosecutors to document all of the evidence (…) and make a case against Putin. This is our obligation, and we are committed to fulfil it.”

The Ukrainian prosecutor general – who was in Brussels to call on EU justice ministers to back his country’s efforts to deliver justice for the victims of heinous war crimes committed in Ukraine – warned that the security of the civilised world is at stake.

“Justice is always about deterrence,” he explained. “We need to create additional instruments to make aggressors accountable so that others who are thinking about waging aggressive wars will know that the civilised world will stand together in order to prosecute and to punish them.”

Ukraine is currently probing 123,000 war crimes committed since Russia started its full-scale invasion in February 2022, including indiscriminate killings, torture, sexual assault, and the abduction of some 20,000 Ukrainian children, a crime not seen on European soil since the Second World War.

In a deeply symbolic move, Lithuania last Thursday charged three pro-Russian militants with war crimes in the Donetsk region for the murder of Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius in Mariupol in April 2022.

Such commitments by other national jurisdictions are crucial to ensure accountability, according to the prosecutor general. More than 20 countries have opened similar investigations, some based on universal jurisdiction.

The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for President Putin but does not have jurisdiction over Russian crimes of aggression since neither Ukraine nor Russia are parties to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute.

Some 40 countries are in negotiations to set up a special tribunal for the crime of aggression.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian prosecutor is being supported by prosecuting teams from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the US to prepare cases by documenting evidence of atrocities.

They include heinous crimes committed in Bucha, a city in the Kyiv Oblast where hundreds of civilians were massacred in April 2022. Those crimes have become a recurring pattern across occupied Ukraine, according to Kostin.

“Russians proceeded to commit the same crimes (as in Bucha) in the other parts of occupied Ukraine,” he explained.

“Bucha is not about some military unit gone crazy. It’s about policy, it’s about pattern,” he said, adding that a similar number of torture chambers and victims of sexual violence were identified in Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the north-east.

The Ukrainian prosecutor is currently investigating 274 cases of sexual violence reported during the war. The victims of such crimes are receiving specialist medical and psychological support by dedicated teams.

Ukrainian children should be returned “unconditionally”

An estimated 20,000 children have been forcibly taken to Russia since the start of the war, some disappearing from summer camps and others under medical pretexts. Many are being “re-educated” and adopted by Russian parents.

The Kremlin claims these abductions are part of “evacuation measures” to ensure the safety of Ukrainian minors living in frontline areas. 

“They can tell anything they want, but this is a war crime (…) and it’s already the preliminary conclusion of the International Criminal Court,” Kostin said.

By putting Ukrainian children, some too young to understand where they are from, up for adoption, Russia is “erasing their history and identity,” he added.

“I always ask leaders of the world to publicly call for the return of Ukrainian children every day,” he explained, adding that the United Nations could “play a much more active role.”

“Children should be returned unconditionally and as soon as possible to Ukraine, and Russia is ignoring this.”