In March this year, a Ukrainian court convicted 15 Russian soldiers of war crimes committed exactly two years earlier, in March 2022. Back then soldiers forced the entire village of Yahidne in Chernihiv region, north Ukraine, to move to a school basement and to spend 27 days there. 17 out 368 civilians didn’t survive due to the harsh conditions.
But these 15 perpetrators, whose personalities were identified and whose crimes were proved in court, are unlikely to serve their sentences of 12 years in a Ukrainian prison as they are back in Russia. So does this conviction in absentia make any sense?
Ukrainian prosecutors claim it does. Since the beginning of the full-scale war the Prosecutor’s Office documented more than 124,000 war crimes committed by Russians against Ukrainian civilian people and infrastructure. While the recent report published by the UN Commission stresses that the scale and the gravity of violations against civilians proves it has a systematic and widespread character.
In a piece translated by n-ost this week, journalist Maia Orel talks to Ukrainian prosecutors, judges and lawyers to understand the legal basis of the war crimes trials and the ethical and technical challenges they face. Describing the urgent need for justice, a judge from Chernihiv, Vladyslav Kukhta, claims:
“The full-scale hostilities in Ukraine have been going on for two years already, and there’s no knowing how much longer they are going to last. What happens to the recollections of those survivors if we postpone the trial until the end of the war? Besides, not every one of those victims will live to see the war end. We either come hot on the heels and hold those trials in absentia, or we may never have the chance to hold them in praesenti.”
The article was originally published by Hromadske, a Ukrainian online-media strong in reporting from the frontline and on touchy topics around the war.
Translated by Tetiana Evloeva. |