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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Russian troops ‘systematically raped’ 25 women, girls as young as 14 in a Bucha basement, Ukraine says
Peter Weber, Senior editor – April 12, 2022
After five weeks of Russian occupation, the Kyiv suburb of “Bucha is a landscape of horrors,” The New York Times reports in a graphic photo essay compiled over more than a week spent with officials, coroners, and scores of witnesses in the recently liberated city. “The evidence suggests the Russians killed recklessly and sometimes sadistically, in part out of revenge.”
Ukrainian officials said that as of Sunday, they had discovered the bodies of more than 360 civilians in Bucha and its immediate surroundings, including more than 250 killed by bullets or shrapnel and now being investigated as war crimes, Bucha chief regional prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko tells the Times. Along with the executions and random murder are horrific cases of torture and sexual violence.
One man who fled his home with his wife when a Russian armored vehicle rammed their fence, said when they finally returned home after the Russians left, they found it “ransacked, filled with rubbish and beer bottles,” the Times reports. “Then, in a cellar under the garden shed, his nephew discovered the body of a woman” wearing “a fur coat and nothing else.” Police said she had been shot in the head, and they found condom wrappers, a used condom, and other signs she was kept as a sex slave before being executed, the Times reports.
Ukraine’s ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, said she has recorded many horrific cases of sexual violence by Russian troops in Bucha and other places, speculating that the rapes were partly revenge for stiff Ukrainian resistance but also a Russian weapon of war.
In one case, “about 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant,” Denisova told BBC News. “Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.” The BBC also spoke with one woman who recounted being raped.
UPDATE 2-Russia says ammunition blast badly damages major ship in Black Sea fleet – Interfax
April 13, 2022
Cruiser Moskva sails into the harbour of Sevastopol
April 14 (Reuters) – The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, was badly damaged when ammunition on board blew up, Interfax news agency quoted the defence ministry as saying on Thursday.
Interfax said the crew had been evacuated. It blamed the blast on a fire and said the cause was being investigated.
A Ukrainian official earlier said the Moskva had been hit by two missiles but did not give any evidence.
The 12,500 tonne ship has a crew of around 500. Russian news agencies said the Moskva was armed with 16 anti-ship “Vulkan” cruise missiles, which have a range of at least 700 km (440 miles).
“As the result of a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser, ammunition detonated. The ship was seriously damaged,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. “The crew was completely evacuated.”
Interfax did not give more details.
Maksym Marchenko, governor of the region around the Black Sea port of Odesa, earlier said in an online post that two anti-ship missiles had hit the cruiser, but did not provide evidence.
Last month Ukraine said it had destroyed a large Russian landing support ship, the Orsk, on the smaller Sea of Azov to the northeast of the Black Sea. Moscow has not commented on what had happened to the ship. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Stephen Coates and Neil Fullick)
Russia says blast cripples Black Sea flagship, Ukraine claims missile strike
Pavel Polityuk and Oleksandr Kozhukhar – April 13, 2022
FILE PHOTO: Cruiser Moskva sails into the harbour of Sevastopol
KYIV/LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -Russia said on Thursday the flagship of its Black Sea fleet was seriously damaged and its crew evacuated following an explosion that a Ukrainian official said was the result of a missile strike.
Russia’s defence ministry said a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser caused ammunition to blow up, Interfax news agency reported.
It did not say what caused the fire but Maksym Marchenko, the Ukrainian governor of the region around the Black Sea port of Odesa, said the Moskva had been hit by two Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles.
“Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage,” he said in an online post.
Ukraine’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment and Reuters was unable to verify either side’s claims.
The Moskva is the second major ship known to have suffered serious damage since the start of the war. Last month Ukraine said it had destroyed a landing support ship, the Orsk, on the smaller Sea of Azov.
Russia’s navy has launched cruise missiles into Ukraine and its activities in the Black Sea are crucial to supporting land operations in the south of the country, where it is battling to seize full control of the port of Mariupol.
Russian news agencies said the Moskva, commissioned in 1983, was armed with 16 anti-ship Vulkan cruise missiles with a range of at least 700 km (440 miles).
Russia said 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had surrendered in Mariupol and that the city was fully under its control. Ukraine’s defence ministry spokesman said he had no information about a surrender.
Capturing the Azovstal industrial district where the marines have been holed up would give Russia control of Ukraine’s main Sea of Azov port, reinforce a southern land corridor and expand its occupation of the country’s east.
“Russian forces are increasing their activities on the southern and eastern fronts, attempting to avenge their defeats,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Wednesday night video address.
Reuters journalists accompanying Russian-backed separatists saw flames billowing from the Azovstal area on Tuesday, a day after Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade said its troops had run out of ammunition.
The United States said on Wednesday it would send an extra $800 million worth of military hardware to Ukraine including artillery, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. France and Germany also pledged more.
Senior U.S. officials are weighing whether to send a top cabinet member such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Austin Lloyd to Kyiv in a show of solidarity, a source familiar with the situation said.
Russia will view U.S. and NATO vehicles transporting weapons on Ukrainian territory as legitimate military targets, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the TASS news agency.
It will impose tit-for-tat sanctions on 398 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 87 Canadian senators, Interfax cited the foreign ministry as saying, after Washington targeted 328 members of Russia’s lower house of parliament.
Britain announced new financial measures on separatists, and Australia imposed targeted financial sanctions on 14 Russian state-owned enterprises on Thursday.
Fiji said it was investigating the arrival of the superyacht Amadea, owned by Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, who has been sanctioned by the United States, Britain and the European Union.
‘LIBERATE US FROM WHAT?’
Ukraine says tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed in Mariupol and accuses Russia of blocking aid convoys to civilians marooned there.
Its mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said Russia had brought in mobile crematoria “to get rid of evidence of war crimes” – a statement that was not possible to verify.
Moscow has blamed Ukraine for civilian deaths and accused Kyiv of denigrating Russian armed forces.
In the village of Lubianka northwest of Kyiv, from where Russian forces had tried and failed to subdue the capital before being driven away, a message to Ukrainians had been written on the wall of a house that had been occupied by Russian troops.
“We did not want this … forgive us,” it said.
The Kremlin says it launched a “special military operation” to demilitarise and “liberate” Ukraine from nationalist extremists, a message villagers said had been repeated to them by the Russian troops.
“To liberate us from what? We’re peaceful … We’re Ukrainians,” Lubianka resident Viktor Shaposhnikov said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on a visit to Kyiv with his Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian counterparts that those who had committed and ordered crimes must be brought to justice.
Germany’s president did not join them as he had planned. Zelenskiy denied a newspaper report he had rejected the visit due to Steinmeier’s recent good relations with Moscow.
BIDEN’S GENOCIDE COMMENTS
The Kremlin denounced President Joe Biden’s description of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine as amounting to genocide, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying this was unacceptable coming from the leader of a country he said had committed crimes of its own.
An initial report by a mission of experts set up by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe documents a “catalogue of inhumanity” by Russian troops in Ukraine, according to the U.S. ambassador to the OSCE.
“This includes evidence of direct targeting of civilians, attacks on medical facilities, rape, executions, looting and forced deportation of civilians to Russia,” Michael Carpenter said.
Russia has denied targeting civilians.
The Kyiv district police chief said 720 bodies had been found in the region around the capital from where Russian forces had retreated, with more than 200 people missing.
(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper in Kyiv, Max Hunder in London, David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Reuters bureaus; Writing by Costas Pitas and Stephen Coates; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Michael Perry)
Zelensky: Russian forces left ‘hundreds of thousands’ of mines, unexploded shells in northern Ukraine
Catherine Garcia, Night editor – April 11, 2022
Ukrainian soldiers walk down a street damaged by Russian shelling in Kharkiv Oblast. Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
In northern Ukraine, Russian forces have dropped and left behind “hundreds of thousands of dangerous objects,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday night, including mines and unexploded shells.
“At least several thousand such items are disposed of daily,” Zelensky said. “The occupiers left mines everywhere. In the houses they seized. Just on the streets, in the fields. They mined people’s property, mined cars, doors. They consciously did everything to make the return to these areas after de-occupation as dangerous as possible.”
In Kharkiv, authorities are asking people to stay away from some neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, where there are mines strewn across streets. Lt. Col. Nikolay Ovcharuk, head of the state emergency service’s de-mining unit, said the plastic devices are PTM-1M mines, which were used by Soviet troops in Afghanistan and are detonated by timers.
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of dropping “parachute bombs” over Kharkiv, and a resident who gave his name as Sergey told The Guardian that at about 1 a.m. Monday morning, “we heard some strange sounds, something whistled and then it all dropped.”
Zelensky said he believes Ukraine is now “one of the most contaminated by mines in the world,” and considers this a war crime. Russian forces, he added, “did everything to kill or maim as many of our people as possible, even when they were forced to withdraw from our land. Without the appropriate orders, they would not have done it.”
Will the US run out of Javelin anti-tank missiles to give Ukraine before Russia runs out of tanks?
Mark F. Cancian, Center for Strategic and International Studies
April 13, 2022
US Army soldiers fire a Javelin anti-tank weapon at a training area in Hawaii on July 28, 2016.Spc. Patrick Kirby/US Army Will the US run out of Javelin anti-tank missiles to give Ukraine before Russia runs out of tanks?
The US has supplied Ukraine with thousands of Javelin anti-tank missiles.
But it’s nearing a point where it must reduce transfers to maintain a stockpile for US forces.
Will Ukraine inflict enough Russian losses to cause stalemate before it runs out of Javelins?
The United States has supplied Ukraine with thousands of Javelins, the anti-tank missiles that have become the iconic weapon of the war, but the US inventory is dwindling.
The United States has probably given about one-third of its stock to Ukraine. Thus, the United States is approaching the point where it must reduce transfers to maintain sufficient stockpiles for its own war plans. Production of new missiles is slow, and it will take years to replenish stocks.
The Russians have numerous armored vehicles, but their supply of trained crews and level of morale are declining. Will Ukrainian anti-tank weapons inflict enough Russian combat losses to produce a battlefield stalemate before Ukraine runs out of its most effective anti-tank weapons?
Javelins ― the iconic weapon
Ukrainian troops fire a Javelin anti-tank missile during drills in Ukraine, February 2022.Ukrainian military/Handout via REUTERS
It is the most sophisticated, capable, and expensive weapon out of the wide range of anti-tank munitions that NATO and other countries are providing to Ukraine. The United States says it has provided 7,000 to Ukraine.
Infantry anti-tank weapons have allowed Ukrainian forces, which are mostly light infantry, to defeat Russian mechanized forces despite their much greater firepower.
It is important to note that Javelins are the most capable and best known of the anti-tank weapon systems but not the most numerous. That distinction goes to the NLAW, an anti-tank system with guidance but not as sophisticated as a Javelin’s and lesser range.
The United States has not published figures about its Javelin inventory, so this must be deduced. According to the Army budget books, total production has been 37,739 since production began in 1994.
A remotely operated Javelin mounted on a Stryker armored vehicle at a US training area in Germany, December 19, 2018.US Army/Markus Rauchenberger
Every year, US forces use some missiles for training and testing. Thus, there may be 20,000 to 25,000 remaining in the stockpiles. These 7,000 systems represent about one-third of the US total inventory.
That fraction doesn’t sound like much; after all, two-thirds of the inventory remains. However, military planners are likely getting nervous. The United States maintains stocks for a variety of possible global conflicts that may occur against North Korea, Iran, or Russia itself.
At some point, those stocks will get low enough that military planners will question whether the war plans can be executed. The United States is likely approaching that point.
The obvious answer is to build more missiles (and launch units, the control box that goes on the missile). The United States has been buying Javelins at the rate of about 1,000 a year. The maximum production rate is 6,480 a year, though it would likely take a year or more to reach that level. The delivery time is 32 months; that is, once an order is placed, it will take 32 months before a missile is delivered.
This means that it will take about three or four years to replace the missiles that have been delivered so far. If the United States delivers more missiles to Ukraine, this time to replace extends.
It’s not just Javelins
US Army soldiers fire a Stinger anti-aircraft missile during a live-fire exercise, June 13, 2019.US Army/Sgt. Thomas Mort
The United States is providing a wide variety of other systems, such as small arms, tracking radars, and armored trucks (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle). However, the numbers being provided are relatively small compared to likely inventories.
For example, the United States has sent the Ukrainians 50 million rounds of ammunition. That sounds like a lot, but total US ammunition production for military and civilian purposes is 8.7 billion per year. Deliveries to Ukraine comprise less than 1% of that.
One system for which inventories and replenishment rates are limited is the Stinger anti-aircraft missile. According to the White House fact sheet, the United States has provided 2,000 Stingers to Ukrainian. The United States has not purchased any since 2003. At that time, the total production was stated as 11,600 missiles (from the FY 2000 budget documents).
With testing and training losses of 1% a year, the remaining inventory would be about 8,000. So, the United States has sent about a quarter of its inventory to Ukraine.
In 2003, the last time the United States procured Stingers, production rates were stated as 275 with standard shifts (called “1-8-5”) and 720 at maximum production rate. Production lead time was 24 months. That means it will take at least five years to replace the inventory drawdown (two years for lead time and three years for production).
What the Russians may run out of are trained crews and morale if the Ukrainians chew up enough armor. The Russians have lost about 40,000 troops, a quarter of their initial combat force, with especially high casualties in their elite units. Reinforcements and replacements can restore some of the numbers, but skills are deteriorating and morale, never high, seems to be declining.
So it is a race. Will Russian combat losses produce a battlefield stalemate before Ukraine runs out of its most effective anti-tank weapons?
Ukraine War Pushes Germans to Change. They Are Wavering.
Katrin Bennhold and Steven Erlanger – April 13, 2022
The facility where the Nord Stream 2 pipeline arrives outside Lubmin, Germany after crossing the Baltic Sea, April 1, 2021. (Lena Mucha/The New York Times)
BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100 billion euro ($108 billion) plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.
It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.
But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.
Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”
The changes Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military — some 70 billion euros ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s 41 billion euros ($44 billion).
They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.
Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mindset change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”
But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading. It is being dragged.”
Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.
That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.
“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”
Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now but had not changed their views.
“You can feel this,” she said. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”
Since Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the parliament Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.
German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the 100 billion euro ($108 billion) special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.
As the CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, Martin Brudermüller, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”
It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, business as usual has largely meant “change through trade” — the conviction that economic interdependency would alter authoritarian governments like Russia and China for the better and help keep the peace. Prosperity and democracy, the thinking went, go hand in hand.
The link to Russia is particularly complicated by a long and complex history of hot and cold war, including guilt over the millions of Russians killed by the Nazis. This reinforced the belief that the security architecture of Europe had to include Russia and take account of Russian interests.
It was a model that paid off nicely for Germany, too.
“We export to China and import cheap gas from Russia; that’s been the recipe for the German export success,” said Ralph Bollmann, a biographer of Angela Merkel, a former German chancellor who is now seen as having protected Germans from a rivalrous world but not preparing them for it.
Few in Germany, including its intelligence services, predicted that Putin would invade a sovereign European country. But the war has set off a cycle of soul-searching, even among prominent politicians like Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and now federal president.
A senior member of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, he was a prominent supporter of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, now halted, that bypassed Ukraine and that the United States opposed.
“We were clinging to the idea of building bridges to Russia that our partners warned us about,” Steinmeier said, after Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador, accused him of enabling Putin. “We failed to build a common Europe,” Steinmeier said. “We failed to incorporate Russia in our security architecture.” He added: “I was wrong.”
In the immediate aftermath of Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, the details of which he had shared with only a handful of people, the resolve to act decisively seemed palpable.
The three diverse parties in his coalition swung behind it, and partisan divisions with the conservative opposition were briefly forgotten, too. Public opinion mirrored the shift, rewarding the new chancellor with better popularity ratings.
But in a short time, the breadth of the change Scholz announced seems to have intimidated even his own three-party coalition. “The government has made some courageous decisions, but it can seem afraid of its own courage,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
There is skepticism that the political establishment is ready to break fundamentally from Moscow, or that German voters will happily pay so much more for energy and food for the foreseeable future.
“German pacifism runs very deep,” said John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who has lived in the country on and off since the 1960s. “German illusions may have shattered, but not its traumas about Russia and the war.”
That “neurotic relationship with Russia may be on pause for the moment, but it will return in full force as soon as the shooting stops,” he said.
Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson in parliament for the Social Democrats, said that Germany’s soft stance toward Russia “reflects German society, and what will remain is this idea that Russia is there and part of Europe, and we will have to deal with that.”
The war has produced “dashed hopes” of a peaceful united Europe, shared by his generation of 1989, he said. But he noted that with this war, “there can be no return to business as usual. No one really wants to go back to the old times of engagement with Russia.”
Still, he said, “We shouldn’t overdo it. The balance will shift to more deterrence and less dialogue. But we must keep some dialogue.”
Puglierin has little patience for such arguments. “People need to let these old ideas go and adapt to reality as it is, and not as they want it to be,” she said. “Russia has shown that it does not want a stable relationship on this existing security order, which is now an empty shell.”
A prominent conservative lawmaker, Norbert Röttgen, argued that Germany must make a complete and immediate break with Russia. “War has come back to Europe, one that will affect the political and security order of the continent,” he said.
Germany must also draw on the lessons of its dependency on Russia for its future relationship with the more powerful authoritarian realm of China, on which key sectors of Germany’s export-driven model rely, Röttgen said.
“The real Zeitenwende,” Puglierin said, “will come when we remake our model for a future of competition with both Russia and China and realize that every dependency can be used against us.”
U.S. and Ukrainian Groups Pierce Putin’s Propaganda Bubble
Julian E. Barnes and Edward Wong – April 13, 2022
The Echo of Moscow studio, just before the media outlet was shut down, in Moscow, March 3, 2022. (Nanna Heitmann/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Using a mix of high-tech and Cold War tactics, Ukrainian activists and Western institutions have begun to pierce the propaganda bubble in Russia, circulating information about the Ukraine war among Russian citizens to sow doubt about the Kremlin’s accounts.
The efforts come at a particularly urgent moment: Moscow appears to be preparing for a new assault in eastern Ukraine that could prove devastatingly bloody to both sides, while mounting reports of atrocities make plain the brutality of the Kremlin’s tactics.
As Russia presents a sanitized version of the war, Ukrainian activists have been sending messages highlighting government corruption and incompetence in an effort to undermine faith in the Kremlin.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded but independent news organization founded decades ago, is trying to push its broadcasts deeper into Russia. Its Russian-language articles are published on copies of its websites called “mirrors,” which Russian censors seek out in a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Audience numbers have surged during the war despite the censorship.
U.S. organizations are also promoting the use of software that allows Russian citizens to leap over the nascent firewall erected by the Kremlin to control internet access.
The efforts face high barriers as the Kremlin tightens controls on journalists and the internet, passing laws that have forced the closure of independent media outlets, like the Echo of Moscow. President Vladimir Putin is doing all he can to keep Russians in the dark about Europe’s largest land war since 1945, with casualties going largely unreported in Russian news media.
The Russian government has focused in particular on restricting reports of war casualties. In its most recent official announcement, in late March, Russia reported 1,351 military deaths, while the latest U.S. intelligence estimate, which was shared with Congress in recent days, put the number at 4,000 to 5,000.
But cracks in Moscow’s facade are starting to show. On Thursday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson acknowledged that Russia had suffered “significant losses.”
After the war started in February, Putin began erecting an internet firewall similar to China’s to block some Russian and Western news sites and social media networks. Russians can still visit Google and YouTube, but many Western sources of news are labeled “foreign agents.”
An authoritarian government does not have to maintain a perfect firewall to keep its public in a propaganda bubble. Many Russians get their news from state-controlled television and radio. And some Russian analysts argue that most citizens support the government for reasons beyond their news diet and want to believe the Kremlin’s lines.
American intelligence officials say that is why pushing information into Russia, and reaching the broadest population, is so difficult.
Nevertheless, American and European officials say that the attempt by outsiders to get facts about the war to Russians is important.
For now, Putin and the invasion remain popular in Russia, according to polls, though analysts caution that such measures of Russian attitudes are unreliable, mainly because many people fear making anti-war statements. The police have arrested thousands of protesters, and many people self-censor their remarks on Ukraine.
There are early signs that the efforts to break down the wall of propaganda may be working, said a senior Western intelligence official, who like other security officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified or sensitive government assessments.
And a U.S. data analytics company, FilterLabs.AI, which has been tracking Russian sentiment on internet message boards and other online forums, says it has measured growing anxiety among Russians about the draft and war casualties. Putin recently signed a decree ordering up about 134,500 conscripts, though the Defense Ministry said they would not go to Ukraine.
“We could be at a turning point in Russian sentiment toward the initial invasion of Ukraine, when Russia attempted to take over the whole country,” said Jonathan Teubner, CEO of FilterLabs.
Planting the Seeds of Doubt
The email to the 18-year-old Russian was, in some ways, subtle. It did not directly mention the invasion of Ukraine or allegations of war crimes against Russian soldiers.
Instead, it talked about the mistreatment of Russian soldiers by their own military and suggested the Russian government was lying to conscripts and, crucially, providing inadequate food and equipment to the country’s soldiers.
Over the last two weeks, a group of Ukrainian activists, government officials and think tanks, called the Information Strategies Council of Ukraine, has sent emails and social media messages to 15 million Russian men of draft age, between 18 and 27. It aimed other posts at older Russians, using historical references to prod them to discuss government-sanctioned news reports.
“The fundamental problem is that when you want to tackle the propaganda, you cannot just say what you are getting on TV is not true; it doesn’t work like that,” said Sophia Hnizdovska, an executive at the council. “We are trying to slowly, through our narratives, make people question the official sources.”
The most successful posts by the Ukrainian activists have built on this theme, focusing on the incompetence and corruption of Russian military leaders, members of the group say.
One image circulated by the group portrayed senior Russian military leaders, including Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, with his head filled with question marks and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the senior military leader, with his head filled with an image of a superyacht.
Russians tend to dismiss messages highlighting Russian war crimes as American propaganda, according to activists, and pictures of Russian casualties run the risk of inciting anger at Ukraine, rather than the Kremlin.
Teubner’s company is trying to measure the Ukrainians’ success — and in recent days has tracked what appears to be growing negative sentiment across Russia toward a draft. If the Ukrainians can sow enough doubt about the truthfulness of the Russian government, Hnizdovska said, more Russians will seek out information from Western-supported Russian-language news media.
Radio Waves and Real News
During the Cold War, the U.S. government, and the CIA specifically, helped found and fund independent media organizations with the mission to penetrate the Iron Curtain with fact-based news.
With the invasion of Ukraine, the organizations are once again operating with a sense of urgency as they push to get accurate information inside an authoritarian state.
The news organizations are using both old-school and 21st-century tactics, creating radio programs and complex digital information campaigns.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the main private, independent news organization in the region with U.S. government financing, is producing journalism on the war from reporters on the front lines in Ukraine and working quietly in Russia.
Commonly known as RFE/RL, the group has a Russian-language news site and a 24-hour Russian-language television network, Current Time, as well as websites aimed at regional audiences in a wide range of languages, including Tatar, Chechen and Belarusian.
Like some other news organizations and U.S.-based social media companies, its websites were blocked in Russia starting in late February. And it suspended its main operations in Russia last month.
RFE/RL opened offices in Lithuania and Latvia as new bases for its reporting on Russia. The group also has a medium-wave radio transmitter in Lithuania to send broadcasts into Russia that can be picked up on an AM frequency. Officials said they hoped to expand the signal’s strength.
The group uses Telegram, a chat app, to disseminate some of its reporting and to send out the web addresses of its new “mirror” sites.
A Washington-based sister organization that also gets funding from the U.S. government, the Open Technology Fund, sets up the mirror sites and constantly creates new ones to stay a step ahead of Russian government censors.
“In the context of new censorship, the mirror program has grown rapidly, and Russian censors are proving to be a very active adversary,” said Nat Kretchun, the organization’s senior vice president for programs. “Our partners are setting up a more automated system where once the Russian censors block them, new sites are set up.”
The technology group arranges for some of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s sites to be hosted by Tor, a digital communications network that helps shield ordinary internet users from surveillance. And it gives financing to companies and groups developing virtual private network apps, software known as VPNs, that help citizens get around internet firewalls. Owners of smart TVs in Russia can also download an app for Current Time.
And Current Time is among the RFE/RL networks and programs with channels on YouTube, which, unlike Facebook and Instagram, has not been blocked by Russian censors. RFE/RL said the number of video views on its YouTube channels more than tripled in the first three weeks of the war, to 237.6 million, from the three weeks prior.
“We’re seeing higher audience numbers for Russians inside the country and also for Russians outside,” said Jamie Fly, president and CEO of RFE/RL. “The challenge is: Can we maintain that over time? Will interest fade?”
In mid-March, Russian news outlets began running stories saying that Russian casualties in Ukraine were low, in contrast to much higher Western estimates. Those reports, according to an analysis by FilterLabs, came just as concern about the country’s war dead was starting to rise on local internet message boards — and as soldiers’ coffins began returning home.
Stories about Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and Russian prisoners of war are among the most popular across RFE/RL platforms, said Patrick Boehler, the head of digital strategy for the news organization. The news agency’s reporters in Ukraine who learn the identities of Russians killed or taken prisoner pass that information to colleagues in Russia, who then try to find and interview the families.
The software developed by FilterLabs began tracking changes in public sentiment and shifts in how Russian news outlets talk about wartime casualties. Some skeptics question this kind of artificial-intelligence-driven sentiment analysis, and FilterLabs acknowledges that the technology has limits.
But the group says the broad trends it identifies are reliable and show that concern about the draft is increasing, as discussions on message boards appear to indicate that Russians are growing more worried that their children will be conscripted into the military to fight in Ukraine, Teubner said.
“The overall sentiment when talking about the draft is trending very negatively in the popular forums,” he said. “This shows us what is likely one of the greatest vulnerabilities for those trying to maintain support for the war over the long term.”
Randy Smith: Is it time for the U.S. and NATO to intervene in Ukraine?
Randy Smith – April 13, 2022
I don’t know how many isolationists or Putin fans live out here in the Valley, but I was looking at the recent satellite images of that eight-mile long Russian military convoy traveling in eastern Ukraine and thought, what’s wrong with this picture?
What’s wrong is all we’re doing is watching it. That’s it. Same for the Ukrainian military. All they can do is watch it, too. But if we can detect it, why isn’t immediate action being taken to destroy it?
It’s almost a foregone tragic conclusion that the Russian soldiers and equipment in that convoy will be used in yet more brutal atrocities against innocent Ukrainian civilians, women and children included. Russia is repositioning and beginning a major offensive in eastern Ukraine that will probably finish off the city of Kharkiv as it did the city of Mariupol.
So why hasn’t that Russian military convoy already been obliterated instead of just photographed? Oh, wait, we — the West — opted to not send those MIG fighter jets, and to not arm Ukraine with the right weapons it needed soon enough. Military aid is rolling now, but so too are the Russian convoys.
As the next Russian offensive gets underway, NATO countries are giving Ukraine more of what it needs militarily, but the skies over Ukraine remain largely unprotected, and it’s almost a guarantee we’ll see more war crimes and atrocities, especially now that Putin has tapped Dvornikov, the “Butcher of Syria,” to take over in Ukraine.
The Bucha massacre. The missile strike on the Kramatorsk train station. The leveling of Mariupol. The UNHCR estimate that one quarter of the entire population of Ukraine has either fled Ukraine or been displaced. None of these events has yet moved the dial of the U.S. and NATO past sanctions and weapons assistance.
Why is this?
Some consider that it would be tantamount to WWIII or that it might provoke Putin to unleash nuclear weapons. Is it really WWIII if we remove one country’s forces from a country it illegally invaded? And quite frankly, Putin is no dummy, he knows who is supplying all the military assistance to Ukraine, so in essence a version of WWIII is already in progress. At the least, it’s a proxy war between western democratic versus authoritarian ideologies.
As for the potential for nuclear conflict if NATO intervenes, some of our most respected retired generals and admirals doubt Putin would resort to all-out nuclear war. Douglas London, ex-CIA station chief agrees: “But he’s not the suicidal type either if escalating pressure is brought to bear.”
Roman Popadiuk, the first U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, feels in interviewer John Harwood’s words that “…the allied response remains too constrained by fear of nuclear escalation.”
Sen. Durbin offered a cogent perspective on Meet The Press: “Listen, if the end game is that Vladimir Putin scours the earth in Ukraine and kills half the people and displaces the other half, and then he leaves, and we suggest that’s a victory for the West, we stood up for Ukraine, that’s not an ending I want to sign up for. We have to be ready to stop this man because I can tell you he won’t stop at Ukraine.”
Putin is already well along to scouring the earth and killing off the Ukranian people. It would be naive to think that sanctions and military aid alone will quickly end things, and speed is what matters now. Otherwise, growing consensus signals that the war will drag on for a long time, meaning more horrible deaths and more Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble.
When is enough enough? How much brutality and human suffering are we willing to watch others endure? What is your threshold for the number of Buchas, Kramatorsks, and Mariupols?
In the final analysis it’s simple: Putin is a bully. Bullies don’t stop bullying until someone stops them. Bullies will back down in the face of overwhelming force. The West — the U.S. and its NATO allies — are easily capable of providing overwhelming force in Ukraine to push Putin’s forces back to the 53rd parallel.
Is it time for NATO, as a whole or as a coalition of the willing, to end the heartbreaking suffering in Ukraine?
— Randy Smith is a local guest columnist for the News Leader.
The United States and its allies can tip the balance between a costly success and a calamity
By Eliot A. Cohen – April 12, 2022
Diego Herrera / Xinhua / Eyevine / Redux
The relatively brief but bloody war in Ukraine is entering its fourth phase. In the first, Russia tried to depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and sweep the country into its embrace in a three-day campaign; in the second, it attempted to conquer Ukraine—or at least its eastern half, including the capital, Kyiv—with armored assaults; in the third, defeated in the north, Russia withdrew its battered forces, massing instead in the southeastern and southern areas for the conquest of those parts of Ukraine. Now the fourth, and possibly decisive, phase is about to begin.
For those of us born after World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Upon its outcome rests the future of European stability and prosperity. If Ukraine succeeds in preserving its freedom and territorial integrity, a diminished Russia will be contained; if it fails, the chances of war between NATO and Russia go up, as does the prospect of Russian intervention in other areas on its western and southern peripheries. A Russian win would encourage a China coolly observing and assessing Western mettle and military capacity; a Russian defeat would induce a salutary caution in Beijing. Russia’s sheer brutality and utterly unwarranted aggression, compounded by lies at once sinister and ludicrous, have endangered what remains of the global order and the norms of interstate conduct. If such behavior leads to humiliation on the battlefield and economic chaos at home, those norms may be rebuilt to some degree; if Vladimir Putin’s government gets away with it, restoring them will take a generation or longer.
There will be time enough for recriminations. Germany long claimed that it was extending the hand of reconciliation to Russia when in fact it chose to pursue a policy based on greed and naivete. It was not alone in delusion and hypocrisy. For more than a decade, American leadership proved inept, complete with red lines that melted and indifference to the rending of nations in Europe and the leveling of cities and gassing of civilians in Syria. Smug asides about leading from behind seem particularly reprehensible now, as we see what a world without American leadership looks like.
In the years to come, culpable politicians will attempt to excuse these follies and historians will acidly dissect them. What matters now is that we judge the present moment correctly. And here, again, the West faces potential failure. Those who talk of a stalemate on the battlefield, perhaps lasting years, are likely making as big of an error as when they dismissed the possibility of effective Ukrainian resistance two months ago. Decisive action is urgently required to tip the balance between a costly success and a calamity.
In most intense conflicts of this kind, armies engage in a kind of competitive collapse, victory going to the side that can hold out longer. The Ukrainians have kept their own losses and exhaustion well-guarded secrets, as they should, but outgunned as they are, and seeing their civilians slaughtered and tortured, they have to feel the strain. As fighting shifts to open areas where guerrilla tactics and handheld anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles will no longer be as effective, they face daunting, if not impossible, odds. They are as motivated as soldiers can be, and creative tacticians too. But they are not supermen, and they desperately need all that the arsenals of the West can provide them.
The Russian military—revealed as inept at tactics, unimaginative in operational design, obtuse in strategy, and incompetent at basic logistics and maintenance—can do only two things well: vomit out massive amounts of firepower and brutalize civilians. It has been bloodied very badly indeed. If, as seems plausible, it has taken losses (killed, wounded, missing, and imprisoned) of a quarter or more of the forces it committed to this war, it may teeter on the verge of collapse. We can see the indicators in reports from the battlefield: equipment abandoned, officers killed by their own men, desperate attempts to dragoon young men into military service, and blocking units to shoot deserters. The Russian military has not established, let alone maintained, control of the air. Russia threw three-quarters of its ground-combat forces into Ukraine, where they were driven from one theater and severely handled in the others, and now has no real reserves on which to draw.
Why, then, the impending escalation of the war in the east and the south? What explains the desperate throw of the dice by the Russian high command? One may assume that neither Putin, nor his senior advisers, nor even senior subordinate commanders have an accurate picture of the situation on the ground. They know that they have been humiliated, but they do not have a feel of the battlefield. As stewards of a military that cannot adequately care for its wounded and that abandons its dead, they don’t care about the human price they are paying. In a system built on lies and corruption, they receive or pass on falsely optimistic information. Having sought to upend the notion of truth in the West, they now fall victim to their own pervasive untruths.
And so Putin will order offensives that, if confronted by a well-resourced Ukrainian foe, can effectively destroy his own army. The challenge for the West is to ensure that this is its fate.
The Europeans have been, unsurprisingly, far from uniform in their reactions: Within Germany, the foreign minister from the Green Party is staunch; the chancellor is erratic; some members of his own party are timid. Britain is splendidly assertive. Poland and the Baltic states are positively heroic, while Hungary, Austria, and a few others are ambivalent or worse.
The United States is doing many of the right things. It has provided a lot of portable missiles, as well as drones and nonlethal gear. It has facilitated the transfer of heavier equipment, such as Slovak S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which it backfilled with Patriot systems. President Joe Biden and some of his key aides have said the right things about Ukraine’s right to freely exist within its rightful borders. But in other respects, America has failed.
In Washington, the metronome of war ticks too slowly. The administration has not taken advantage of the near-unanimous support for Ukraine in Congress—a marvel of bipartisanship in this contentious period of American politics—to press for much larger sums (in the tens of billions of dollars) for the Ukrainian military. It has moved slowly to procure for Ukraine the heavier kinds of weapons that it knows are needed. Its attention wanders to a domestic agenda that was in trouble before the war, and that pales in significance now. It does not seem to have senior leaders inclined to bulldoze bureaucratic obstacles and cut red tape. It feels like business as usual in the Pentagon. Some Russian banks have been sanctioned, but not others. And multinational corporations have not yet been confronted with a simple ultimatum: You can do business in the United States or in Russia, but not in both.
The United States has failed to take many of the symbolic actions that matter in wartime. If British Prime Minister Boris Johnson can visit Kyiv (as did Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and heads of government and senior officials from other nations), so can Secretary of State Antony Blinken or Vice President Kamala Harris. If other countries can reopen embassies in Ukraine, so can the United States, which never should have closed its own. Instead of treating Zelensky’s pleas to Congress as a singular event, the U.S. should find ways, on a daily basis, to celebrate his courage and that of his people, and to continually remind the American people what is at stake here. Part of wartime leadership is theater, and the administration should embrace it. The moment requires a bit of Shakespeare’s Henry V, but what has been on display has been too much of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The United States has been unwilling to take some steps because of its own self-deterring beliefs about Russian behavior. It should accept that the Ukrainians are now the world’s experts in fighting Russians—not us. They have proved by their skill and success that they can handle much more than we give them credit for. So rather than questioning whether they need fixed-wing aircraft or can use Western military hardware, the U.S. should err on the side of generosity. And if American expertise is needed, it can be provided without the U.S. entering the war directly. Before Pearl Harbor, the American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, was sent to China to fly P-40 fighters against the Japanese air force there. The group did so with the support of the U.S. government. Something similar can be done in Ukraine, if only there is the will to do it.
If the Soviet Union could deploy thousands of advisers to North Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam War without triggering a nuclear conflict, the U.S. can deploy advisers to western Ukraine, or at least to Poland, to train Ukrainian soldiers. Instead, we ship Ukrainian troops to Biloxi, Mississippi, to learn how to operate the Switchblade drone, where their congratulations come from the secretary of defense on a Zoom call from his Pentagon desk. It would be better if he were draping his arm about their shoulders in some muddy field a lot closer to their homeland.
The war may get worse. If the Russians use chemical weapons, the United States should rethink its unwillingness to introduce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The Obama administration, many of whose veterans serve in this White House, failed wretchedly when it declared a red line over the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then walked away from it. Ukrainians and Syrians alike have paid cruelly for that pusillanimity. But that does not make it wise or moral to fail to act here in the name of cowardly consistency. The use of chemical weapons opens up the path to the massacre of civilians on a scale that is indeed genocidal. If it happens, the free world must stop it.
Upon what the United States and its allies do in the next few weeks hangs more than the American people realize. The evidence suggests that Russia’s armies can, if met by a well-equipped Ukrainian force, be thoroughly wrecked and defeated. While Russia itself will likely remain a paranoid and isolated dictatorship after this war, it can be defanged, even as its own folly reduces it to the ranks of a third-rate power. But war is war, and the future is always uncertain. All that is clear right now is that a failure to adequately support Ukraine will have terrible consequences, and not just for that heroic and suffering nation.
Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.
Why prosecuting Russian war crimes in Ukraine could be complicated
Joseph Gedeon – April 13, 2022
Peter Dejong, File/AP Photo
The Russian military, in retreat after defeat in the cities around Ukraine’s capital, left behind such horror that war crimes investigators are likely to be kept busy for months, if not years.
Bodies were strewn across the northern countryside, including Bucha, where city officials said at least 400 civilians were killed, with more than 260 buried in mass graves. Dozens were found on the streets outside their homes, their hands bound, with some shot in the head. In Mariupol, Russian forces allegedly fired indiscriminately and used bombs to level an art school where some 400 civilians were sheltering. WHO has verified 64 attacks on health facilities.
War is cruel, but international humanitarian law experts say the atrocities emerging from Ukraine are not how modern conflict is supposed to look. The International Criminal Court prosecutor has already started an investigation and the French Interior Ministry of Justice has sent doctors and more than a dozen crime scene investigators to Ukraine to collect evidence for possible war crimes charges.
Now, the United States, Ukraine and the United Kingdom are investigating reports of alleged chemical attacks in Mariupol, bolstering evidence of possible war crimes if confirmed.
“What is happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone sees it,” President Joe Biden said last week amid the Bucha revelations. “It is a war crime.”
But war crimes cases are notoriously difficult to prove and prosecute. Even with the right evidence and eyewitness accounts, the murder of civilians by Russian forces may not present a clear cut case. The international legal basis for prosecution is not universally accepted, and context, intent and often geopolitics matter. War crimes have often been too slippery to stick, with obvious offenders sometimes escaping conviction. And because of these complications, the accused can wait decades to face any form of justice. Here’s a look at the challenges facing prosecutors in search of justice in Ukraine.
What exactly are war crimes?
To understand what makes a war crime, it’s important to know the laws of war. Those rules, collectively known as international humanitarian law, stem from international treaties that have aimed to find the balance between military necessity and the protection of human life.
Our general understanding of what makes a war crime is essentially whether there have been “grave” breaches of the Geneva Conventions, which were established in the aftermath of World War II to ensure that civilians caught in the midst of war and combatants who could no longer fight were protected. A grave breach would include wilful killing, serious injury and torture, as well as legal and humanitarian failings, such as depriving a prisoner of war to a fair trial, excessive demolition to populated urban centers and taking hostages.
And while a war crime is an egregious violation that goes against the agreed upon principles of warfare, experts note the legal definition has been elusive in prosecution. While targeting civilians in a conflict zone would constitute a war crime, civilians dying as part of an armed conflict may fall short of that bar.
Legal scholars note proportionality also falls into war crimes consideration: that while civilian casualties can and do happen in conflict, there is an obligation by combatants to ensure the toll is not excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated.
“Very often, militaries will make arguments that they were primarily going against military targets, that they didn’t expect that the incidental loss of civilian life would be so high, there was an intelligence error or technical mistake, or that there was information on combatants and fighters being present,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, a Harvard law professor and co-founder of the Global Legal Action Network. “This information is not necessarily easy to disprove and has led to significant difficulties in bringing such cases [to the courts].”
A case that’s been elevated could land at the ICC, which examines allegations in three core areas: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. What separates a war crime from these other gross violations is that the offense has to have happened during an armed conflict — not its causes or post-war fallout — and that the acts in question are directly correlated to the war.
So is it context that makes something a war crime?
You’re getting warmer. Let’s say a fighter pilot is flying a mission over Ukraine. If they are shot out of the sky and killed in combat, then it is an unfortunate but legal consequence of war. But if that pilot survives the crash and is killed while surrendering as they leave the disabled aircraft, that could be considered a war crime.
“There’s a whole concept of whether persons or individuals are actively participating in hostilities, which is used to determine whether they may be lawfully targeted in certain conflicts. In international armed conflict, fighters cannot be prosecuted for participating in hostilities, that’s called ‘combatants’ privilege,’” said Susana SáCouto, director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University Washington College of Law. “But if you target either a civilian, a POW or a wounded soldier then that is considered a war crime.”
Still, what makes a violation a war crime in one international treaty or convention may not make it a war crime in another.
Take a look at the hallmark for humanitarian treatment in conflict that is often cited in war crime charges. Since being drafted and updated in 1949, the Geneva Conventions have been ratified by 196 states, including all member states of the United Nations — but it doesn’t have a specified definition of war crimes. Instead, it focuses on protecting people who are no longer in conflict.
On the other hand, the Rome Statute — the defining treaty for the ICC’s prosecution — does include war crimes in its charter but only counts 139 signatories, with 123 ratified states. The U.S. has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute, along with Russia and Ukraine.
But the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction in non-member states so long as those parties consent or are referred to the court by the U.N. Security Council. Since Russia has veto power at the Security Council it will be completely unlikely that an investigation will be approved through those chambers. Therefore the road to war crimes prosecutions in The Hague, the Dutch city where the ICC is headquartered, is rooted in Ukraine offering the ICC jurisdiction on its land.
What complicates achieving a guilty war crimes verdict further is that some countries, which in this case would include Russia, may choose not to abide by the ICC’s treaty. The United States, which is not a ratified member of the ICC, has chosen to use its own rulebook to combat claims of war crimes by its citizens.
“The U.S. military does not charge its own service members with war crimes, instead the U.S. military finds an article of Uniform Code of Military Justice,” said Chris Jenks, a former army officer and now law professor at Southern Methodist University. “So it further confuses it from the American perspective when the U.S. does not apply the term war crimes internally, but externally.”
Could what’s happening in Ukraine be considered a war crime?
After receiving 39 referrals from member states by March 2, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was authorized to open an investigation into the situation in Ukraine. Since then, the number of referrals has risen to 41 states.
While the ultimate decision falls on a judicial body, there are apparent war crimes and clear violations of international humanitarian law occurring in the war in Ukraine, according to Amnesty International.
“Many Ukrainian civilians are losing their lives from strikes that are emanating from the Russian military, from very conventional weapons that are simply used in an unacceptable way,” said Daniel Balson, advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International USA. “There’s no way to conduct non-precision guided munition strikes in heavily urbanized areas. We’re talking about weapons that have a wide blast radius, that are fundamentally indiscriminate that they cannot be steered to a particular target and they’re being used in areas that are very built up and very populated; this in and of itself is a human rights violation.”
Balson also points to the recent discovery of civilian deaths in Bucha and the use of Russian cluster bombs that the organization has documented striking near a hospital in Ukraine.
While neither Ukraine nor Russia are signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty meant to prohibit all use, transfer, production and stockpiling of cluster bombs, Balson notes that since there are 110 countries that have signed onto the agreement it is now considered part of customary international law.
What does punishing a war criminal actually look like?
Legal scholars say that we should expect a number of different entities — including the ICC, special tribunals, courts in the United States and other international and state bodies — to investigate war crime allegations in Ukraine. Eventually, there might be trials in Ukrainian courts, with the most grave cases prosecuted at the ICC.
But don’t expect the convictions from the ICC to come anytime soon. Consider the example of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, a former senior militia commander in Darfur, who has been accused of war crimes in Sudan between August 2003 and April 2004. Nearly two decades after the atrocities in Darfur left 300,000 people dead and displaced millions, his war crimes trial only began in The Hague last week.
The delay is rooted in the ICC’s judicial structure, which only allows for a trial if an individual is physically present in the courtroom. The likelihood that Moscow will refuse to extradite Russian troops or generals accused of crimes in Ukraine means that these cases may take decades to prosecute. But when an individual in ICC custody is found guilty, lengthy sentences usually follow.
Bosco Ntaganda, former chief of staff of a Congolese armed militia group, had his 30-year sentence confirmed in 2021 after he was found guilty of 13 counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity that occurred between 2002 to 2003.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was the last to face war crimes charges for atrocities committed in Europe, as he presided over the Bosnian War, the Croatian War of Independence and the Kosovo War in which at least 130,000 people were slaughtered in the 1990s. After five years of trials that began in 2001, Milošević was found dead in his cell of an apparent heart attack. No posthumous verdict was issued.
Are there possible war crimes happening in other parts of the world right now?
Yes. The ICC alone has 17 investigations ongoing across the world, the majority on war crime charges. It has eight defendants in ICC custody on war crimes charges, with five trials ongoing. There are 11 defendants still at-large or in pretrial.
