U.S. Says 'Fully Committed' To Ensuring Accountability For Russian War Crimes In Ukraine

The United States is fully committed to ensuring accountability for atrocities committed in Ukraine, a senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday, adding that abuses are taking place at a scale that suggests leaders in the highest levels of the Kremlin know about and support them.

"There are legal doctrines that are available to hold Putin responsible," U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack told TURAN's Washington correspondent during a special briefing organized by the State Department's Brussels Media Hub.

Van Schaack represents the U.S. to global bodies investigating war crimes and other atrocities, and called the current situation a “new Nuremberg moment”, a reference to the war crimes trials held in the German city at the end of WWII.

In terms of Putin, she said, "we know that there are doctrines that enable criminal responsibility to go all the way up the chain of command."

She went on to explain, "This is the doctrine of superior responsibility, which states that if a superior has subordinates who are committing abuses and the superior knows that they’re committing abuses, knows that they are intending to or about to or they have committed abuses, that superior is under a legal duty to take the necessary steps to either prevent those abuses from happening or to open an appropriate investigation and prosecution after the fact."

According to Van Schaack, it’s "particularly relevant" when seeing abuses across all areas where Russia’s forces are deployed. "These are not the acts of individual units necessarily.... It’s hard to argue that any of the events that we’re seeing on the ground in Ukraine are the result of decisions being made at very low levels," she said.

Van Schaack also signaled strong U.S. support for the various efforts currently underway to document war crimes and to eventually present formal charges at the International Criminal Court or other suitable venues.

"We have a long history of supporting international courts, and we see the ICC as playing a really important role here. The bulk of the work, of course, is going to be done in domestic Ukrainian courts by the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the project that I’m funding through Georgetown University is geared towards supporting him and his efforts, but at the same time there will be a role for the ICC as well," she said.

Ukraine, for example, has no crimes against humanity statute, and so if those charges are to be brought, they will have to be brought either in the ICC or in a foreign court that has jurisdiction over particular defendants.

Likewise, this doctrine of superior responsibility is not fully embedded in Ukrainian law, and so it will be much easier for the ICC to work up the chain of command, particularly if it’s lacking direct evidence of involvement by a superior, Van Schaack said.

"The prosecutor of the ICC was here in Washington last week, and then Congress sent a bipartisan delegation to The Hague the week before, and my understanding from both of those interactions is that the ICC prosecutor is working very closely with the Ukrainian Prosecutor General to coordinate which cases should be brought before which forum," she added.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.