The International Court of Justice in the Hague on March 7 started its second day of hearings of a Ukrainian lawsuit that accuses Russia of violating international law by annexing the Crimean peninsula in early 2014 and triggering the war in the Donbas.
Ukraine’s lawsuit asks the UN court to order Russia to stop aiding its proxy forces in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas region and end the persecution of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars living in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
During the first day of hearings, the Ukrainian court delegation, headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Olena Zerkal, said that Kremlin-backed forces have carried out terrorist acts in the Donbas. In its 45-page indictment, Ukraine cited as examples the bombardment of residential areas in Donbas towns and cities, as well as the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014, which claimed the lives of 298 passengers and crew.
But on day two of the hearings the Russian delegation brushed off Ukraine’s claims, and accused Ukraine of taking the case to court under false pretenses.
The Russian delegation, led by Roman Kolodkin, the head of the legal department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with Ilya Rogachev, the director-general of the Department for New Challenges and Threats, and Grigory Lukiantsev, the deputy head of the Department for Human Rights, denied that Russia was supplying separatists in Ukraine’s east with any military equipment or weaponry.
Russia has made these denials since it started its military aggression against Ukraine and in the Donbas in early 2014. However, an overwhelming amount of evidence uncovered since then shows these denials then, as now, to be false. Russian weapons now known to have been supplied to Russia’s proxy forces in the Donbas include T-72B3 tanks, a recent modification of the Soviet-era tank that was never in service in Ukraine, but is used by the Russian armed forces. Russian regular troops, including ones from the Russian Far East, are also known to have fought in Ukraine.
Rogachev argued that the rebels had found the weaponry in Donbas mines which was left from the Soviet army. Part of the equipment was left behind by retreating Ukrainian soldiers, he said.
“Ukraine’s own evidence, which shows that it is at least equally engaged in indiscriminate shelling, places a very important question mark next to the characterization that Ukraine alone places on these acts as acts of terrorism,” added one of Russia’s lawyers, Samuel Wordsworth of the Essex Court Chambers, citing the figures from the OSCE and the UN reports on the situation in Donbas.
Kolodkin told the 16 judges hearing the case that it was the 2013 “coup in Kyiv” that had triggered the bloody events in Donbas, and all the problems were caused by “the politicians in Kyiv.” He added that the main objective of the new Ukrainian government was to cancel the status of Russian as an official language.
Lukiantsev said no acts of political and cultural suppression against the ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars living in Crimea have been recorded since 2014. Instead, he said, Crimean Tatars who moved to mainland Ukraine have been facing difficulties in finding work or getting education.
“Ukraine has been discriminating against Tatars for decades,” Lukiantsev said in his presentation. “Russia is making significant efforts to support Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian community and promote their culture in Crimea, despite financial difficulties. Such efforts have never been carried out in this territory.”
Commenting on the decision of Russia’s Supreme Court in 2016 to declare the Mejlis, an elected representative body of the Crimean Tatars , an extremist organization, Lukiantsev said that it had never represented the whole of the Crimean Tatar community. He argued that Russia had banned the Mejlis’s activities in occupied Crimea because it relied on “violent methods to achieve their goals” and it had nothing to do with the nationality of its members.
According to Human Rights Watch, several members of the Mejlis have been victims of threats, attacks, and have had their homes searched. Some are currently facing criminal charges for extremism, separatism, and other trumped-up charges.
Over the three years of the Russian occupation of Crimea, at least 17 people have gone missing, 12 have been killed and 39 have become political prisoners, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, said in February.
In the meantime, the Russian delegation claims that the UN court should reject Ukraine’s case, since Crimea’s annexation is a matter beyond the court’s jurisdiction.
