Atrocities raise pressure on US to hold Putin accountable

Dead bodies lining the streets. Hundreds of people buried in mass graves. Women reporting brutal sexual violence and rape.

These are among the atrocities Ukrainian officials say Russian troops are committing in the country, increasing pressure on the United States and its allies to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable.

“These are war crimes and will be recognized by the world as genocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday while surveying the carnage in the city of Bucha, outside Kyiv.  

“We know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women and murdered children,” he said.

President Biden on Monday said Putin should face trial for war crimes, though the White House did not go so far as Zelensky in labeling the killings as “genocide.”

“This guy is brutal and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone has seen it,” Biden told reporters, referring to Putin. 

Experts and advocates say the president’s remarks are an important signal to the global community, but that the talk must be followed by concrete action to carry out international justice.

“I want to emphasize that those general messages are positive, like we’ve had from the president in the last few hours, that’s important,” said Stephen Rapp, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice during the Obama administration and is an adviser to groups documenting war crimes in Ukraine.

“At the moment, the U.S. is working closely with the Ukrainian prosecutor general. It’s important that that office be a center of coordination.”

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, to which the U.S. and other governments provide technical and financial support, is an essential front in the legal route to prosecute war crimes.

The office should have the capacity to carry out a trial in Kyiv against alleged Russian perpetrators it captures in combat, or to build a case that leads up the Russian chain of command, Rapp said.  

However, the main venue to hold Putin accountable will likely be the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. 

Ukrainian officials, journalists and human rights groups released reports Sunday from the cities on the road leading out of Kyiv, detailing the alleged atrocities. 

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and who has been visiting the liberated towns, said he saw up to 50 dead bodies out in the open and described them as civilians, including at least one child and naked women, some of whom were partially burned. 

“It was absolutely horrific,” he told The Hill by phone.

​​The New York Times reported that Ukrainian officials in Bucha dug a mass grave by a church to bury the scores of people killed amid the Russian occupation. The graves were so haphazard that hands and feet still poked through the loose soil, and bodies wrapped in black garbage bags piled in a corner. 

The private company Maxar Technologies released satellite imagery it said showed the 45-foot long trench of a mass grave. Reuters journalists on the ground also said that the grave had hands and feet poking through the clay heaped on top. 

Anatoly Fedoruk, the Mayor of Bucha, told CNN that among the dead in the city were the elderly, teenagers and children. 

“We all were witnesses to the horrific events and horrific crimes that the Russians committed here,” he said. 

The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said in a release that officials found a torture chamber in the basement of what it described as a children’s sanatorium in Bucha, were the bodies of five men with their hands tied behind their backs were discovered.

Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, said that in the near term it is crucial for the dead bodies to be protected so that experts can examine them as possible evidence of war crimes. 

“Where there are bodies lying on the ground or in a mass grave, it’s a crime scene, and those crime scenes need to be protected,” she said.

The scale of the horror raised even more concern over what is happening in the southern-city of Mariupol, which has been under Russian siege for more than a month. 

The U.S. and other international actors have earlier said attacks on hospitals, schools and shelters by Russian forces in the city strongly suggest war crimes have been committed.

“I can tell you without an exaggeration, but with great sorrow, that the situation in Mariupol is much worse, compared to what we’ve seen in Bucha and other cities and towns and villages nearby Kyiv,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Monday.

The foreign ministers of the Group of Seven countries and NATO are expected to meet in Brussels later this week, as officials across the world call for a harsher wave of sanctions against Russia and accelerated efforts to kick Russia off of international committees like the U.N. Human Rights Council. 

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that the U.S. would levy new penalties on Russia this week, though he declined to preview specifics.

Rapp, who is also a senior fellow with the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, called global support for Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, and an investigation by the ICC, as two crucial developments in holding Russia and Putin accountable.

Whether Putin could be arrested is another story, but Rapp pointed to examples of other foreign leaders being indicted and arrested on allegations of war crimes within a few years, through a combination of domestic political opposition and international pressure.

The former president of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, was arrested within three years of an indictment of war crimes, and the former president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, was also arrested within a few years after an arrest warrant was issued for genocide in Sierra Leone. 

But Rapp raised concern about the ICC’s resources and called for the U.S. to offer support.

“He [the prosecutor] has 77 investigators for the whole world and about 15 different country situations, and so the United States needs to strongly support the prosecutors efforts to build, very soon, cases that can result in warrants of arrest for people in the Russian command structure that are responsible for the war crimes being committed,” Rapp said. 

Sunderland warned that trials at the ICC can take several years — a trial stemming from atrocities in Darfur from the earlier 2000s is only beginning this year — meaning Russia is unlikely to face consequences in the near term from any international war crimes probe.

But Sunderland urged resolve in pursuing accountability, noting, “There is no statute of limitations for these crimes.”

Sullivan also indicated Monday that there are alternative venues besides the ICC through which the global community could punish Russia for committing war crimes in Ukraine. 

“We have to consult with our allies and partners on what makes most sense as a mechanism moving forward,” Sullivan said.

Russia has dismissed the accusations of atrocities and its military’s assault on Ukraine shows no signs of abating, with Moscow refocusing troops on the east of the country. 

The Senate last month passed a resolution, authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), that  included support for the ICC to investigate alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine to hold Putin accountable. 

In the House, the foreign affairs committee is pushing through a bill to exercise oversight of the Biden administration’s actions to support efforts to document war crimes, aiming to bring it to the floor by the end of the week. The bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chair and ranking member of the committee. 

But Michael Sawkiw, executive vice president of political advocacy for the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, called for the U.S. to designate Russia a State Sponsor of Terrorism, a designation that would effectively make Russia an international pariah, blocking nearly all foreign assistance and military exports to the designated country. 

“The president has called Putin a war criminal before, he’s called him a butcher, he’s called him a liar, he’s called him a killer and that’s exactly what it is,” Sawkiw said.

“Now it’s the opportunity to put actions to those words, to make deeds out of words … There’s no other designation that Russia should have right now, other than that.”