The Ugliness behind the Ugliness

“And even before seeing the images from Bucha, President Zelenskyy, along with others in the region, were reporting that children were being abducted – and we heard him that today. Also abducted are mayors, and doctors, religious leaders, journalists, and all who dare defy Russia’s aggression. Some of them, according to credible reports – including by the Mariupol City Council – have been taken to so-called ‘filtration camps,’ where Russian forces are reportedly making tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens relocate to Russia… Reports indicate that Russian Federal Security agents are confiscating passports and IDs, taking away cellphones, and separating families from one another. I do not need to spell out what these so-called ‘filtration camps’ are reminiscent of. It’s chilling and we cannot look away.” 

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, speaking to the Security Council on April 5th.

 

We’re watching sanctions rising, the UN has suspended Russia from its Human Rights Council, German intercepts have conclusively proven that Russian soldiers knowingly interrogated, tortured and then executed civilians, we’ve watched that Bucha footage of civilian bodies strewn everywhere (including raped women and young children), we have oceans of photos and videos showing massive, targeted destruction of garden variety apartment buildings, we’ve witnessed a huge death toll after a single bombing of a railroad station filled with civilians trying to leave Ukraine for safety (lots of dead children too) and we have clear evidence that these horrific actions are pervasive and continuing. 

Indeed, Russian soldiers have rounded up civilians captured in eastern Ukraine, most notably the port city of Mariupol, which refused to surrender, sending them to those “filtration camps” inside Russia “for their own protection.” The truth lies elsewhere as our UN Ambassador spoke in the above quote. It seems obvious that Russia has no intention of letting these people return to their homeland. In what appears to be a conscious effort to depopulate Ukraine of Ukrainians, particularly in the eastern most provinces, one has to view this atrocity as Putin’s manipulative effort “just in case” there is a peace settlement that might require a referendum. 

“The filtration camps, described as large plots of military tents with rows of men in uniforms, are where deported Ukrainians are photographed, fingerprinted, forced to turn over their cellphones, passwords and identity documents, and then questioned by officers for hours before being sent to Russia. A satellite image captured by the U.S.-based Maxar Technologies last week offered the first glimpse of one camp in the Russian-controlled village of Bezimenne, giving a peek into how Russians are processing Ukrainians and attempting to strip them of their identities. Ukrainian officials say more than 40,000 people have been forced into Russia against their will since last month.” Marquise Francis writing for the April 7th Yahoo News. The above satellite image shows that “filtration” complex of 30 large, fenced in tents in Bezimenne, a reality replicated in other border areas as well.

The Guardian UK (April 4th) spoke to women able to message the outside world before their communication was cut off: “‘On 15 March, Russian troops stormed into our bomb shelter and ordered all the women and children to get out. It was not a choice,’ said one woman who had been hiding with her family in a suburb of Mariupol since early March. ‘People need to know the truth, that Ukrainians are being moved to Russia, the country that is occupying us.’…

“The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has denied these accusations, claiming ‘such reports are lies’. Russian officials have previously said 420,000 people have been voluntarily evacuated to Russia ‘from dangerous regions of Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics’.

“The women requested anonymity because they were concerned about the safety of their relatives who are still in the heavily shelled city. Their accounts, along with similar stories published by the Washington Post and the BBC and reports from human rights groups, contradict Russian claims that Ukrainians are not being forcibly moved to Russia.”

No one has any real doubt that war crimes have been committed at level we have not witnessed since the Nazi death camps of World War II. We know investigators have already begun gathering the requisite evidence. But Oliver Knox, in the April 8th Washington Post (The Daily 202), asks a most obvious question: Why is it so hard to prosecute war crimes? His answer (in part): “Laptops and phones, eyewitness accounts, Russian soldiers’ confessions and their “pocket trash”: These are some of the things investigators hunting in Ukraine for evidence of war crimes by Moscow’s forces are looking for to prove cases that may take years to try.

“‘There’s things they need to do: To take the pictures, collect articles, including the so-called ‘pocket trash,’ any phones that have been left behind,’ interrogate prisoners, and talk to eyewitnesses, Stephen Rapp, a former State Department ambassador at large for war crimes, told The Daily 202… Laptops and phones are treasure troves of data: Metadata helping to pinpoint their owners’ movements, as well as messages home or official directives, photos, videos, personal notes. But pocket trash? What’s pocket trash?

“As Russian soldiers pressed toward Kyiv, they may have picked up Ukrainian supplies, or mementos, or kept notes of their movements or written orders from commanders, that could help place them at the site of atrocities, Rapp explained. (I get it. I just found a restaurant matchbook in a blazer. An investigator could use it to show I was there.)…

“The question at the center of the investigation is whether prosecutors can prove who did it, and how high up the chain of command they can go. Intent and authorship matter more than tragic tales of those who have suffered and died at the hands of invading Russian forces.” You have to get credible evidence, one military level clearly linked to the one above it with tangible and substantial proof, and so on, until you reach the top… unless those at the top admit their complicity. Don’t hold your breath. For more clarity on what constitutes a war crime under international law, please visit my March 10th International Law and Putin’s War blog. But neither Russia nor the United States has formally accepted the jurisdiction of the UN’s International Court of Justice, which prosecutes war crimes. 

Writing for the George Washington School of Law (The United States and the International Court of Justice: Coping with Antinomies in THE UNITED STATES AND INTERNATIONAL COURTS AND TRIBUNALS (Cesare Romano, ed., 2008), Sean Murphy tells us: “Since 1946, the United States has had an uneasy relationship with the International Court of Justice (ICJ or World Court or Court). On the one hand, the United States embraces the rule of law within its own society and, in principle, within the international system of states. The United States has been and remains an active participant in cases before the Court, appearing before it several times, more than any other state, even in recent years. On the other hand, the United States has never been willing to submit itself to the plenary authority of the Court, and has typically reacted negatively to decisions by the Court that are adverse to U.S. interests.” Thus, to so prosecute Vladimir Putin, this cannot be done in absentia; he must be physically arrested and brought before the court.

That those committing major crimes may escape without prosecution cannot be anything new to most Americans, watching two parallel and unequal systems of justice work in our own country: one for the rich and politically connected and the other for the rest of us. That Putin’s crimes are heinous does not change the basic unfairness of our legal system or that of the International Court of Justice.

I’m Peter Dekom, and either we, as residents of an eroding democratic society, fight for a system of equal justice for all… or simply learn to live in a rising autocracy and keep our mouths shut.