As Ukraine's parliament approved a statement calling Russia as an aggressor state on Jan. 27, lawmakers also started gathering support to appeal to the International Criminal Court to punish Kremlin-backed terror against Ukrainians.
“There are enough reasons to address a prosecutor of International Criminal Court in Hague in order to start investigations over war crimes – and it’s the next step that parliament should make, even without waiting for ratification of the Rome Statute,” Hryhoriy Nemyria, chairman of parliament’s Human Rights Committee and a Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker, told journalists after the session.
“And we have addressed them earlier regarding crimes committed during the EuroMaidan,” Nemyria said.
A separate push is also on for Ukraine to ratify the Rome Statute that brought the International Criminal Court into being. The International Criminal Court is part of the Hague Tribunal, a reference to various international courts located in The Hague, Netherlands.
Recent video material appeared on Kremlin-backed separatist websites showed ample evidence of war crimes — piles of bodies of Ukrainian troops, torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war and public humiliation of captives in the village of Krasny Partizan.
Volodymyr Parasyuk, a EuroMaidan Revolution activist and member of parliament, has no doubt the videos are real.
“Regarding the authenticity, this is true because I was in the situation like that myself. While they are showing how they are interrogating our servicemen on the camera, when the camera is off they are brutally beating them,” Parasyuk told the Kyiv Post while commenting on the videos. “This is horrible and we should do everything possible to set our servicemen free.”
The experts of fact-checking website Stopfake.org that was launched in March 2014 also believe the videos “has no signs of fake.”
In the meantime, at least nine Ukrainian servicemen were killed and some 30 wounded in the war zone on Jan. 26, adding to a death toll in the 11-month-old war that has exceeded 10,000 victims on both sides — half of them civilians in the Donbas region of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Pavlo Kyshkar, a Donbas Battalion member and Samopomich Party lawmaker, says the military officials and lawmakers planned to meet Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Jan. 27 to discuss evidence of war crimes.
Kyshkar says that Ukraine’s government has convincing evidence proving Russia’s involvement in the war in the east.
“Time to call a spade a spade. Ukraine Rada names DNR/LNR for what they are- terrorist organizations. EU has to follow suit,” Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius posted to his Twitter on Jan. 27 after Ukraine’s parliament voted to classify the self-proclaimed people’s republics in Donetsk and Luhansk as terrorist organizations.
Some 270 lawmakers, a decisive majority, backed the decision.
Iryna Herashchenko, the presidential envoy for eastern Ukraine also addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to recognize self-proclaimed republics as terrorist organizations, and the Russian Federation – as a country that supports terrorism.
However, Timothy Ash, who heads the emerging market research or Standard Bank in London, believes that declaring the self-proclaimed republics as terrorist organizations will complicate the situation.
“There would be pressure for the West to follow suit, which could then leave Russian banks and entities vulnerable for further sanctions,” Ash says, adding the case would likely be a topic for conversation at the EU foreign ministers meeting on Jan 29.
“The West is still reluctant to go down this route as it still wants to keep Russia in the loop over counter terrorism operations,” according to Ash.
Ilkka Kanerva, president of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, recently called on Russia to close its international border with Ukraine to help counter the increase in violence in the east of Ukraine.
“Russian leaders have spoken of their support for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. In keeping with that pledge, I call on Russia to close the border to halt the flow of any weapons or fighters … which may be entering eastern Ukraine. The advanced weaponry that is being employed by the illegal separatists in Ukraine is not appearing out of thin air,” Kanerva said.
Kyiv Post staff writers Oksana Grytsenko and Anastasia Forina contributed to this report. Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
