Ihor Kotelyanets
Anastasia Bagalika
How thoroughly have Russian war crimes been investigated?
To commemorate the second anniversary of the liberation of the northern regions, Hromadske Radio interviews Roman Avramenko, the executive director of Truth Hounds.
Guests1
Sumy region/Illustrative photo
Completeness of the Situation Today
Roman Avramenko: The main picture of what happened during the occupation of the three northern regions is known to law enforcement agencies, human rights organizations, and organizations providing humanitarian aid. Recently, during a mission to the Sumy region to collect additional data on one of the incidents, our colleagues discovered additional circumstances about the abductees and victims of inhuman treatment. Neither we, nor our human rights colleagues, nor law enforcement agencies knew about these people before.
In general, all the crimes are well-documented. The investigation is now ongoing and requires additional investigative actions, including additional contact with witnesses or the identification of additional witnesses, so that the suspects themselves, their identities, and the degree of their guilt can be established.
Therefore, I ask for understanding and patience from people living in the de-occupied territories. If you think that you have already told everything and have to tell it all again, in fact, your participation is critically important at this stage. Because, in addition to finding out what happened, it is also necessary to establish who did it.
Sometimes, the huge number of crimes that were discovered on the same day after the de-occupation of the three regions becomes an obstacle to the full identification of all the circumstances and facts. Despite the fact that Ukraine has a fairly large staff of investigators and operatives, they simply could not physically interview everyone and identify all the incidents. Of course, human rights defenders come to their aid by sending their field teams to identify these facts and coordinating with them.
However, such cases still occur. Moreover, if we talk about the approach taken by our law enforcement officers, each of them usually acts narrowly within the framework of the criminal proceedings for which they are responsible. They ask very thoroughly, but narrowly, about the particular incident that is in the proceedings of this specialist, leaving out a wider range.
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Why the Russians Created Torture Chambers in Some Places and Did Not Even Contact with the Locals in Others
Roman Avramenko: Their behavior was driven by logistics and the challenges posed by the counter-actions of the Ukrainian troops. I myself was in the south of the Chernihiv region in early April. This is exactly the case when the Russians were simply trying to use the roads to bring as many troops as possible to capture Kyiv as quickly as possible. They did not pay attention to the settlements that were on both sides of the road.
That is, they secured a direct route for themselves, set up checkpoints, and intimidated the local population by shooting at houses and windows. As soon as any of the locals approached the window, they forbade them to go outside and killed people who appeared on the street despite this ban. And all their logic was subordinated to securing the routes of advance.
When the Ukrainian troops fought back, blew up bridges, or somehow affected the columns with fire, they changed their routes and the settlements were affected.
Sometimes, the Russians would burn down streets with incendiary ammunition to make it easier for them to pass through the remains of the village. And, relatively speaking, there was less chance that they would be ambushed. And where they stopped, where Ukrainian troops stopped them and resisted, where they could not advance and began to suffer significant painful losses, their behavior often changed, and they took out their anger on the civilian population, including committing sexualized crimes in order to further oppress and show their superiority over the people who were held hostage. The closer to the frontline, the more frequent cases of inhumane treatment and violence against civilians are.
Usually, when the Russians gathered and left the territory, they took with them some of the people who were under their control in cellars, basements, and other institutions. It is not yet known what principle they used to select people.
People were taken to the territory of the Russian Federation, and they often ended up in penitentiary institutions. Some absurd charges were brought against them, and they ended up in the legal field of the Russian Federation. Others may remain in the status of persons subjected to enforced disappearance, who are simply in the same detention centers or in Russian zones.
What Is the Number of Abducted People
Roman Avramenko: There are no statistics. If we estimate that from each settlement controlled by the Russians, they took up to ten people, then at least a hundred civilians must have been taken by the occupiers for one reason or another when they left Ukraine.
Orders or Independent Decisions
Roman Avramenko: It is absolutely certain that there were some kinds of orders. I myself interviewed a young man who survived this captivity. He said that before the Russians began to pack up and leave, a commander came and said that he had been ordered to shoot half of the prisoners, release half, and take one or two people with him. He was among those who were released. He testified that four people were indeed taken from the basement and shot. The rest were taken with them.
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The Process of the Group’s Work
Roman Avramenko: We resumed our documentation activities quite quickly, as we have been doing this since 2014. In March, we did it exclusively remotely. We joined the field component on 2 April. Our colleagues were in Gostomel, Kyiv region. The next day we went to the Makariv district of Kyiv region. Two days later, we went to the south of Chernihiv region. Since then, there have been quite a few field missions.
If we count all the days, our documenters spent about a month in each region, visiting many settlements.
In the Kyiv region, we saw how much effort the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office and investigators put into documenting the area around Kyiv. So we focused our efforts on more remote locations: Motyzhyn, Borodyanka, Makariv. Places where the world’s attention was not focused.
Usually, the team arrives, enters a local shop, starts asking the shop assistant, finds the first witness or victim, and from there the tangle of all the events that took place spins. By this time, we already had our monitoring results because starting from 24 February, all regions of Ukraine were distributed among our colleagues who were monitoring any source of information about the events. Therefore, it was much easier to recreate the sequence of events from the very first minutes of the occupation to the moment when people went out and realized that their territories had been liberated.
On Universal Jurisdiction
Roman Avramenko: Universal jurisdiction is a concept that describes the ability of investigative bodies of other countries to investigate international crimes that have no connection to the country in question.
For example, consider the Netherlands. The Netherlands can initiate proceedings against a non-Dutch national who has committed a crime against a non-Dutch national on non-Dutch soil.
However, international crimes are labeled as such because they are so severe, have no statute of limitations, and transcend jurisdictional boundaries, allowing them to be investigated in countries other than where they were committed. Perpetrators of these crimes can be prosecuted in these countries.
Universal jurisdiction is evolving rapidly. It has existed for many years and is often directly codified into criminal laws. For instance, Argentina possesses what is known as perfect universal jurisdiction. It can prosecute any war criminals for crimes committed anywhere against anyone. This concept is currently evolving further. Last March, the United States announced the adoption of relevant amendments to the Criminal Code, enabling the prosecution of war criminals and has already issued four indictments of Russian military personnel. However, this was due to suspicions of crimes committed against a US citizen.
Other countries are also actively advancing this concept. Many European countries, for instance, have initiated what are termed structural investigations. These entail comprehensive criminal inquiries into all events. At the request of specific groups, such as ours, these investigations can be focused on individual episodes and incidents to identify suspects.
This is particularly crucial if the suspect has been observed in a country where they can be apprehended. Investigators and human rights activists should pay close attention to such developments.
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The occupation of the northern regions lasted from 24 February 2022 to early April 2022. Russian troops entered the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions from multiple directions, resulting in a significant portion of the northern regions being occupied.
At the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion, attempts were made to seize Kyiv. Troops bypassed certain settlements as they advanced toward the capital, while simultaneously establishing torture chambers and sites of mass detention in others. Many abductees are still unaccounted for. For instance, as of last year, 317 people were reported missing in the Kyiv region.
On 2 April, the Ukrainian Armed Forces completely liberated the Kyiv region, followed by the liberation of the Chernihiv region on 6 April and the Sumy region on 8 April.
In times of war, the program «Free our relatives» tells the stories of people, cities, villages, and entire regions that have been captured by Russian invaders. We discuss the war crimes committed by the Kremlin and its troops against the Ukrainian people.
The program is hosted by Igor Kotelianets and Anastasia Bagalika.
This publication is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the framework of the Human Rights in Action Program implemented by Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. Opinions, conclusions and recommendations presented in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID, the United States Government. The contents are the responsibility of the authors.
USAID is the world’s premier international development agency and a catalytic actor driving development results. USAID’s work demonstrates American generosity, and promotes a path to recipient self-reliance and resilience, and advances U.S. national security and economic prosperity. USAID has partnered with Ukraine since 1992, providing more than $9 billion in assistance. USAID’s current strategic priorities include strengthening democracy and good governance, promoting economic development and energy security, improving health care systems, and mitigating the effects of the conflict in the east.
For additional information about USAID in Ukraine, please call USAID’s Development Outreach and Communications Office at: +38 (044) 521-5753. You may also visit our website: http://www.usaid.gov/ukraine or our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/USAIDUkraine.
