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Tag: War crimes
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“Could humans really do this?”: Stories of civilians killed in Bucha, Ukraine | 60 Minutes
“Could humans really do this?”: Stories of civilians killed in Bucha, Ukraine | 60 Minutes – CBS News
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10/16/2022: The Lost Souls of Bucha, The Power of Grimsby, Coach Prime
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10/16/2022: The Lost Souls of Bucha, The Power of Grimsby, Coach Prime – CBS News
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Putin says he doesn’t regret attacking civilians in Ukraine
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Putin says he doesn’t regret attacking civilians in Ukraine – CBS News
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Russia escalates attacks after Crimea bridge blast
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Russia escalates strikes on Ukrainian civilian areas
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‘War crime:’ Industrial-scale destruction of Ukraine culture
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KYIV, Ukraine — The exquisite golden tiara, inlaid with precious stones by master craftsmen some 1,500 years ago, was one of the world’s most valuable artifacts from the blood-letting rule of Attila the Hun, who rampaged with horseback warriors deep into Europe in the 5th century.
The Hun diadem is now vanished from the museum in Ukraine that housed it — perhaps, historians fear, forever. Russian troops carted away the priceless crown and a hoard of other treasures after capturing the Ukrainian city of Melitopol in February, museum authorities say.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its eighth month, is being accompanied by the destruction and pillaging of historical sites and treasures on an industrial scale, Ukrainian authorities say.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Ukraine’s culture minister alleged that Russian soldiers helped themselves to artifacts in almost 40 Ukrainian museums. The looting and destruction of cultural sites has caused losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros (dollars), the minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, added.
“The attitude of Russians toward Ukrainian culture heritage is a war crime,” he said.
For the moment, Ukraine’s government and its Western backers supplying weapons are mostly focused on defeating Russia on the battlefield. But if and when peace returns, the preservation of Ukrainian collections of art, history and culture also will be vital, so survivors of the war can begin the next fight: rebuilding their lives.
“These are museums, historical buildings, churches. Everything that was built and created by generations of Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in September when she visited a Ukrainian museum in New York. “This is a war against our identity.”
Workers at the Museum of Local History in Melitopol first tried hiding the Hun diadem and hundreds of other treasures when Russian troops stormed the southern city. But after weeks of repeated searches, Russian soldiers finally discovered the building’s secret basement where staff had squirrelled away the museum’s most precious objects — including the Hun diadem, according to a museum worker.
The worker, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, fearing Russian punishment for even discussing the events, said the Ukrainians don’t know where Russian troops took the haul, which included the tiara and some 1,700 other artifacts.
Dug up from a burial chamber in 1948, the crown is one of just a few Hun crowns worldwide. The museum worker said other treasures that disappeared with Russian soldiers include 198 pieces of 2,400-year-old gold from the era of the Scythians, nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine and founded an empire in Crimea.
“These are ancient finds. These are works of art. They are priceless,” said Oleksandr Symonenko, chief researcher at Ukraine’s Institute of Archaeology. “If culture disappears, it is an irreparable disaster.”
Russia’s Culture Ministry did not respond to questions about the Melitopol collection.
Russian forces also looted museums as they laid waste to the Black Sea port of Mariupol, according to Ukrainian officials who were driven from that the southern city, which was relentlessly pounded by Russian bombardment. It fell under Moscow’s complete control only in May when Ukrainian defenders who clung to the city’s steelworks finally surrendered.
Mariupol’s exiled city council said Russian forces pilfered more than 2,000 items from the city’s museums. Among the most precious items were ancient religious icons, a unique handwritten Torah scroll, a 200-year-old bible and more than 200 medals, the council said.
Also looted were art works by painters Arkhip Kuindzhi, who was born in Mariupol, and Crimea-born Ivan Aivazovsky, both famed for their seascapes, the exiled councillors said. They said Russian troops carted off their stolen bounty to the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The invasion has also wrought extensive damage and destruction to Ukraine’s cultural patrimony. The U.N.’s cultural agency is keeping a tally of sites being struck by missiles, bombs and shelling. With the war now in its eighth month, the agency says it has verified damage to 199 sites in 12 regions.
They include 84 churches and other religious sites, 37 buildings of historic importance, 37 buildings for cultural activities, 18 monuments, 13 museums and 10 libraries, UNESCO says.
Ukrainian government tallies are even higher, with authorities saying their count of destroyed and damaged religious buildings alone is up to at least 270.
While invasion forces hunted for treasures to steal, Ukrainian museum workers did what they could to keep them out of Russian hands. Tens of thousands of items have been evacuated away from the front lines and combat-struck regions.
In Kyiv, the director of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine lived in the building, guarding its artifacts, during the invasion’s first weeks when Russian forces sought, unsuccessfully, to encircle the capital.
“We were afraid of the Russian occupiers, because they destroy everything that can be identified as Ukrainian,” recalled the director, Natalia Panchenko.
Fearing Russian troops would storm the city, she sought to confuse them by taking down the plaque on the museum’s entrance. She also dismantled exhibits, carefully packing away artifacts into boxes for evacuation.
One day, she hopes, they’ll go back into their rightful place. For now, the museum is just showing copies.
“These things were fragile, they survived hundreds of years,” she said. “We couldn’t stand the thought they could be lost.”
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AP journalist John Leicester in Paris contributed. Efrem Lykatsky contributed from Kyiv.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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Ukrainian authorities take stock of ruins in liberated Lyman
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LYMAN, Ukraine — Ukrainian authorities are just beginning to sift through the wreckage of the devastated city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine as they assess the humanitarian toll, and possibility of war crimes, from a months-long Russian occupation.
Few of the buildings in the city in the Donetsk region — an area which Moscow illegally claimed as Russian territory last week following a staged “referendum” — have survived without damage, and most houses are without basic utilities.
Walls around the town bear graffitied reminders of the four-month occupation by Russian troops, with words like “Russia,” “USSR” and “Russian World” scrawled on surfaces that are riddled by bullets.
Mark Tkachenko, communications inspector for the Kramatorsk district police of the Donetsk region, said Friday that authorities are still searching for the bodies of civilians amid the destruction, and trying to determine causes of death.
“They will look at when people died and how they died. If it was in the period when the city was occupied and they have injuries from Kalashnikov rifles, then of course, it’s a war crime,” Tkachenko told The Associated Press.
While it is still unclear how many died in the city since it was overrun by Russian forces in May, he said, Lyman today has become a “humanitarian crisis” which could still hold further grim discoveries.
“Some people died in their houses, some people died in the streets, and the bodies are now being sent to experts for examination,” he said. “For now we are looking for grave sites, and there are probably mass graves.”
The road approaching Lyman, which Russians used as a strategic logistics and transport hub during its occupation, is littered with miles of desolation left behind from intense fighting as Ukrainian troops pressed to retake it late last week.
The forests surrounding the city were decimated by the fighting, and the burned out and twisted wreckage of dozens of vehicles lined the road which was pockmarked by craters from falling rockets.
Tetyana Ignatchenko, spokeswoman for the Donetsk regional administration, said the city’s civilian infrastructure had been “completely destroyed,” and that an effort was ongoing to clear it of the bodies of Russian soldiers abandoned during their army’s retreat.
“Police and criminologists are working, looking for Russian bodies and collecting them in the streets and forests. There are very many of them because the occupiers didn’t bring them with them,” Ignatchenko said.
As they left Lyman, Russian soldiers placed mines on the bodies of some of their fallen comrades, set to explode when Ukrainian authorities attempted to clear them, said Tkachenko of the Kramatorsk district police. Some had exploded, but caused no injuries.
As Ukrainian authorities entered the city, they found that many civilian residents had been killed by shelling while others, mostly older people, had died during the Russian occupation because of a lack of food and medicine, Tkachenko said.
Looting of civilian homes by Russian soldiers, he said, was widespread.
Anatolii, 71, a Lyman resident who lined up in the city’s central square Friday to receive humanitarian aid, said Russian soldiers generally left people his age alone, but that he had heard rumors of prolonged detentions of civilians and that his daughter’s home had been robbed.
“I was looking after my daughter’s house when they came over and opened the house with a crowbar and stole everything that they needed and escaped,” he said. “What could I say, and to whom? Could I fight with them? No.”
The liberation of Lyman came as the latest in a series of gains by Ukrainian forces as part of successful counteroffensive operations in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson regions.
Even as Ukraine has recovered thousands of square miles of territory in the last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to illegally annex the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Western leaders decried the move as illegitimate and a reckless escalation of the war, which began on Feb. 24.
As Ukrainian forces moved back into liberated cities and towns, they discovered some instances of mass graves and torture sites, such as those recently observed by AP journalists in recaptured settlements in the Kharkiv region.
In one liberated city, Izium, an AP investigation uncovered 10 separate torture sites.
Ukrainian media earlier reported the discovery of a mass grave in Lyman, but authorities on site wouldn’t confirm or deny its existence and wouldn’t elaborate further, saying only that investigations were ongoing.
But Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko on Friday said that two burial sites had been found in Lyman, including around 200 individual civilian graves and a mass grave with an undetermined number of bodies.
On Friday, Tetyana, who didn’t want to give her last name, wheeled a hand cart full of squashes toward her house on the outskirts of Lyman on a street where most houses bore damage from the fighting.
Her home had been heavily damaged in a Russian attack, she said, pointing at what used to be a window in her kitchen from when a rocket came through the wall.
“I was at home and fell into the bathroom, and my daughter was in the hallway. How we weren’t killed, I don’t know,” she said. “The storage shed is destroyed, the roof was destroyed, but now we’ve repaired it. Here you see the doors are also damaged.”
Tetyana pointed to a pair of green trousers she was wearing, and several camouflage coats hanging on hooks outside her house. She’d found the Russian uniforms, she said, “laying around. All my stuff was destroyed so I have nothing to wear.”
Daria Yevheniivna, 15, said that while she had spent most of the occupation at home in hiding, she now feels a new sense of hope that her city can be salvaged.
“Everything got better,” she said. “It became very calm. I don’t hear shooting anymore, and I can sleep in the house, not in the cellar. People became more kind.”
Anatolii, who also didn’t give his last name, complained as he spoke on the central square that some of his neighbors only watched Russian television, which he said had “messed with their heads.” He has tried to influence them, he said, but without success.
“There are some people who were waiting for the Russians, but I am Ukrainian, and we don’t like them,” he said.
“War is war. This is a real war,” he said. “Russians shout that it’s a special operation, but it’s only a special operation for them. For us, it’s a real war.”
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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Putin celebrates annexation of Ukrainian territory as Russian forces retreat from frontline
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Putin illegally annexes 4 regions in Ukraine
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Occupied Ukraine holds Kremlin-staged vote on joining Russia
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Kremlin-orchestrated referendum got underway Friday in occupied regions of Ukraine that sought to make them part of Russia, with some officials carrying ballots to apartment blocks accompanied by gun-toting police. Kyiv and the West condemned it as a rigged election whose result was preordained by Moscow.
Meanwhile, in a grim reminder of the brutality of the 7-month-old invasion, U.N. experts and Ukrainian officials pointed to new evidence of Russian war crimes. Kharkiv region officials said a mass burial site in the eastern city of Izium held hundreds of bodies, including at least 30 displaying signs of torture.
The referendums in the Luhansk, Kherson and partly Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions were widely seen as a prelude to Moscow annexing the regions. The voting, which was overseen by authorities installed by Russia, is scheduled to run through Tuesday and is almost certain to go the Kremlin’s way.
Authorities in the Kherson region said residents of a small Moscow-controlled area of the neighboring Mykolaiv province also will be able to vote, and that small area was “incorporated” into Kherson until all of Mykolaiv is taken over by Russian forces.
Ukraine and the West said the vote was an illegitimate attempt by Moscow to slice away a large part of the country, stretching from the Russian border to the Crimean Peninsula. A similar referendum took place in Crimea in 2014 before Moscow annexed it, a move that most of the world considered illegal.
Citing safety reasons, election officials carried ballots to homes and set up mobile polling stations for the four-day voting period. Russian state TV showed one such election team accompanied by a masked police officer carrying an assault rifle.
Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia region, told The Associated Press that Russians and residents of Crimea were brought into his city to urge people to vote.
“The Russians see an overwhelming reluctance and fear to attend the referendum and are forced to bring people… to create an image and an illusion of the vote,” he said. “Groups of collaborators and Russians along with armed soldiers are doing a door-to-door poll, but few people open the doors to them.”
Voting also occurred in Russia, where refugees and other residents from those regions cast ballots.
Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-backed separatist leader in the Donetsk region, called the referendum “a historical milestone.”
Lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, said in an online statement to the regions: “If you decide to become part of the Russian Federation, we will support you.”
Thousands attended pro-Kremlin rallies across Russia in support the referendums, news agencies reported. “Long live the one, great, united Russian people!” one speaker told the large crowd at a central Moscow rally and concert titled, “We Don’t Abandon Our Own.”
Luhansk Gov. Serhii Haidai accused officials of taking down the names of people who voted against joining Russia. In online posts, Haidai also alleged that Russian officials threatened to kick down the doors of anyone who didn’t want to vote.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Ukrainians in occupied regions to undermine the referendums and to share information about the people conducting “this farce.” He also urged Ukrainians to avoid being called up in the Russian mobilization announced Wednesday.
“But if you do end up in the Russian army, then sabotage any enemy activity, interfere with any Russian operations, give us all important information about the occupiers. … And at the first opportunity, switch to our positions,” he said in his nightly address.
President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilization of reservists could add about 300,000 troops, his defense minister said. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed as false media reports of plans to muster up to 1.2 million troops.
Across the vast country, men hugged their weeping family members before departing as part of the call-up, which has raised fears that a wider draft might follow. Anti-war activists planned more protests Saturday.
Other Russian men tried desperately to leave the country, buying up scarce plane tickets and creating traffic jams hours or even days long at some borders. The lines of cars were so long at the border with Kazakhstan that some people abandoned their vehicles and walked — just as some Ukrainians did after Russia invaded their country Feb. 24.
Russian authorities sought to calm public fears over the call-up. Lawmakers introduced a bill Friday to suspend or reduce loan payments for those called to duty, and media emphasized that they would be paid the same as professional soldiers and that their civilian jobs would be held for them.
The Defense Ministry said many of those working in high tech, communications or finance will be exempt, the Tass news agency reported.
Amid the mobilization and referendums, the horrors of the conflict persisted.
Kharkiv regional Gov. Oleh Synyehubov and regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko said at least 30 of the 436 bodies exhumed so far in Izium bore signs of torture. Among them were the bodies of 21 Ukrainian soldiers, some found with their hands bound behind their backs, they said.
Russian forces occupied Izium for six months before being pushed out by a Ukrainian counteroffensive this month. The exhumations, which began a week ago, are nearing an end, as investigators work on identifying victims and how they died. A mobile DNA lab was parked at the edge of the burial site.
“Each body has its own story,” Synyehubov said.
Experts commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council also presented evidence of potential war crimes, including beatings, electric shocks and forced nudity in Russian detention facilities, and expressed grave concerns about extrajudicial killings the team was working to document in Kharkiv and the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy.
With world opinion pushing Moscow deeper into isolation over the war, Russia lashed out against the West. Its U.S. ambassador, Anataly Antonov, said at a Moscow conference Friday about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that Washington is trying to bring Russia “to its knees” and divide it into “several fiefdoms” while stripping it of its nuclear weapons and its permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council.
In new reports of fighting, Ukraine’s presidential office said 10 civilians were killed and 39 others wounded by Russian shelling in nine regions. Battles continued in the southern Kherson province during the vote, it said, while Ukrainian forces meted out 280 attacks on Russian command posts, munitions depots and weapons.
Heavy fighting also continued in the Donetsk area, where Russian attacks targeted Toretsk, Sloviansk and several smaller towns. Russian shelling in Nikopol and Marhanets on the western bank of the Dnieper River killed two people and wounded nine.
In other developments, Kyiv expelled Iran’s ambassador and reduced staff at the Iranian Embassy in response to Tehran’s “supply of weapons to Russia for war on Ukrainian territory,” said Oleh Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. Ukraine reported shooting down an Iranian-made Mohajer-6 drone that can be used for surveillance or to carry precision-guided weapons, adding that it destroyed four other Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones.
Earlier Friday, Ukrainian officials said Russia had attacked the port city of Odesa with Iranian-made drones, killing one person.
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Associated Press writer Lori Hinnant in Izium contributed.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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Until Everyone Is Free: My Jewish, Anti-Zionist and Antiracist Journey Toward Collective Liberation
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I grew up half Jewish and half Italian-Catholic. I made jokes about how these different identities left me mostly confused. Had Jesus risen again or not? I thought I had to choose one side rather than celebrating all the parts within myself, so I almost erased my Jewish half. I learned how to make risotto, but not matzah ball soup.
Christianity is the dominant culture in the United States and obscures the other religions. People would always say Merry Christmas to me, assuming everyone celebrated it, assuming it was the only holiday. I unconsciously accepted that and embraced my Catholic heritage more. I learned gospel hymns, but never learned the Hebrew blessings sung on Shabbat.
In addition to being stifled by Christianity’s dominant force, I also grew up internalizing sexism, striving to be like the men I deemed superior, by playing jazz and chess, composing music, reading philosophy, being stoic, and working hard.
Weighed down by sexism from without and within, I was unaware of the ways I was also part of oppressive systems. In undergraduate jazz school I was so anxious about playing equally to men that I didn’t wake up to systemic racism. I took a jazz history class, where I learned about the racism Black musicians endured, but that felt like history, miles away. I couldn’t see my white privilege because I only noticed how inferior I felt to my male classmates.
It wasn’t until I was 30 that I realized I had spent most of my life trying to prove I was as good as men, and this had distracted me from other issues. It wasn’t until I was 32, when I made a joke about Jewish people, that my Jewish friend let me know what I said was antisemitic.
“But I’m Jewish!” I said, stunned.
It turns out antisemitism is everywhere.
Even inside me.
In my thirties, when I finally uncovered the side of me that was Jewish and uprooted my internalized antisemitism, I found the joy of being Jewish: dressing up for glittery Purim events in Brooklyn; going to a feminist, antiracist synagogue; and connecting to a community of inspiring Jewish activists. The more I learned about Jewish traditions, the more I realized there was so much of Judaism already flowing through me without me even knowing: my connection to the moon, my eco-spirituality, my humor, my animated hand gestures.
As I became in touch with the Jewish part of me that was lost and erased, I also learned about the Israeli government’s erasure and deliberate killing of a large amount of Palestinian people. US media and Zionist culture declare that Israel and Palestine are in conflict, it’s complicated, and there are two sides. But 5,590 Palestinians were killed from 2008-2020 compared to 251 Israelis killed. Human Rights Watch has declared Israel to be guilty of apartheid and human rights crimes. Israel has the largest army in the Middle East, funded by the US government’s aid of 3.8 billion dollars a year. Hamas, meanwhile, has rocks and rockets that are easily intercepted by Israel’s military system. Israel is the one with the power, and their government uses it to oppress and kill the Palestinian people.
My Grandma had always talked about her love of Israel, and I absorbed that without any questions for too long. The truth of Israel’s aggression was hidden in plain sight.
Just as I first had to embrace Judaism within myself, and then awoke more to the antisemitism around me, so I learned about Zionism and Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. The uncovering never ends, just like my battle with sexism delayed my awakening to racism. Different oppressions conceal other oppressions. Until they don’t anymore. Until we wake up from our individual struggles and realize how the system wants to keep people separated.
The veil that kept me isolated in my own struggle of sexism and antisemitism also became the path toward connection. Once we know there is a veil, we can then see through it, leading us to pursue solidarity with other causes. We can see how all the struggles overlap — that the Black Lives Matter movement is part of Palestinian liberation, part of queer and trans liberation, part of reproductive rights and feminism — that the intersection of all these injustices is where our community power lies.
When white supremacists stormed the capital on January 6th, some wore shirts that said “6MWE.” My stomach churned when I saw on Facebook what that meant: “6 Million Wasn’t Enough.”
I texted a friend: They’re talking about the Holocaust. They’re talking about me.
Some people hate me, which is sickening, and I am not going to hate or oppress anyone else. I know that it is, in the words of Jewish organization If Not Now, a “false choice between Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety.” The intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust has created an extreme militant Israeli government unable to see they are now harming others. Israel’s government is stuck in a pattern they feel is defensive but is actually violently aggressive. This round of Israeli bombing in May killed at least 256 Palestinians in Gaza, including 67 children, displaced tens of thousands, destroyed hospitals, schools, sewage systems, clean drinking water supplies, and the only COVID testing site. In contrast, thirteen Israelis were killed. That’s not Israel acting in defense — that is aggressive and violent, a series of human rights violations. When you bombard an area densely populated with civilians who are unable to escape, that’s a deliberate and horrific mass killing. That’s a war crime.
The more I dig into the rich and beautiful culture of Judaism, I learn that there is a long history of anti-Zionism within Judaism. The Judaism that I know and love wants basic human rights for all people. If Not Now states, “Palestinian liberation and dismantling antisemitism are intertwined … We will not be pitted against each other … We won’t be distracted from our fight for freedom and safety for all people.” No one is free until everyone is free, and that includes Palestinians oppressed under apartheid; Black, brown, and Indigenous people brutalized and killed by the police in the US; transgender people who are horrifically murdered; Jews experiencing hate crimes; and people in other countries fighting totalitarian and fascist governments. Our liberation is bound up in each other’s.
Still, some people try to link any opposition to Israel’s government as being antisemitic. As Palestinian-American writer and policy analyst Yousef Munayyer writes, “When people turn humanizing Palestinians into antisemitism, they not only enable the continued dehumanization of Palestinians but they also cheapen antisemitism by cynically weaponizing it.”
I, an American Jew, stand with Jews all around the world in protest of Israel’s government, because I know injustice, war crimes, human rights violations, and apartheid when I see them. I will fight for the rights of marginalized people until everyone is free.
[Feature image: Close-up of barbed wire with the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem visible in the distance under a blue sky. Source: @RJA1988 for Pixabay.]
Mare Berger is a singer-songwriter, pianist, teacher, writer, improviser, gardener, and activist living in Brooklyn, NY. In April 2020 Mare released an album “The Moon is Always Full” featuring their original lyrics, songs and orchestration. You can buy Mare’s album here. Follow Mare @maremoonsong. Listen to music and read more of their writings at marielberger.com.
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Biden to allow US to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court | CNN Politics
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CNN
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President Joe Biden has decided to allow the US to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, two US officials and a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
The decision comes after months of internal debate and marks a historic shift, as it would be the first time the US has agreed to share evidence with the court as part of a criminal probe into a country that is not a member of the ICC. Neither the US nor Russia are members of the court.
“It could be deeply consequential,” one of the sources said, adding that the US government now has “a clear green light” to share information and evidence with the ICC.
What information the US shares will ultimately depend on what the ICC prosecutor requests for the investigations, the source explained.
A National Security Council spokesperson would not comment directly on the decision, but said in a statement that Biden “has been clear: there needs to be accountability for the perpetrators and enablers of war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.”
“We have been clear that we support a range of international mechanisms to identify and hold accountable those responsible, including through the Office of the Ukraine Prosecutor General, the Joint Investigative Team through Eurojust, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, the Expert Missions established under the OSCE’s ‘Moscow Mechanism,’ and the International Criminal Court among others,” the spokesperson added.
The New York Times first reported on Biden’s order.
Over the course of the war, Biden administration officials have obtained evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, through intelligence gathering mechanisms among other channels, officials told CNN. But the administration debated for months internally over whether to share that evidence with the court, as officials grappled with the possibility that doing so could set a precedent that could one day be used against the United States, officials explained.
The Pentagon was the most concerned about cooperating with the court, officials said, and worried that doing so might set a precedent for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes carried out by Americans in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin raised his concerns with the president earlier this year, but told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month that the Defense Department would cooperate with whatever policy decision was made by the president.
The NSC spokesperson noted that the US has already “deployed teams of international investigators and prosecutors to assist Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General in documenting, preserving, and preparing war crimes cases for prosecution, and the Department of Justice has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate with Ukraine on investigations and prosecutions of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
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