“We must not accept to trivialize this tragedy”, says the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Andriy Kostin. That day, February 10, his services were investigating a bombardment in the northeast of the country. Russia had just fired 36 missiles at the city of Kharkiv. Prosecutor Kostin is a calm man, he chooses his words. The long and insistent ringing of an alarm siren does not stop him: he provides facts, figures. Since the start of the Russian aggression, Ukraine has been investigating all attacks against civilians. This war is the most documented in the history of armed conflict.
kyiv wants culprits, names, precise identities. We have to go back up the chains of command, from Vladimir Putin to the servers of this or that battery, continues the prosecutor. In twelve months, tens of thousands of soldiers died. The war devastated the east of the country. Each advance of the Russian army leaves uninhabitable cities, charred ruins of buildings 80% destroyed. Putin’s soldiers, when they advance, rule over ghost towns.
But Ukraine keeps the accounts, registers, classifies and intends one day to prosecute those responsible, to the top of the Russian state. Putin in the dock? Some see it as an illusory approach which can only delay a possible negotiation. To promise the equivalent of the Nuremberg tribunal to one’s enemy is not to incite him to dialogue.
That’s not the main thing. Kiev’s approach gives the measure of the trauma suffered by the Ukrainians – the shock of a country attacked by the big neighbor that it did not threaten; the martyrdom suffered by the occupied populations; daily life to the rhythm of the bombardments. The Ukrainian stubbornness to investigate each attack against civilians is first and foremost a desire to testify.
Rapes and forced adoptions
Day and night, Ukrainian investigators are on the ground. Stories, exhibits, ballistic analyses, examinations of missile debris, the whole is patiently collected, studied, classified. In devastated landscapes such as Europe has not known since the Second World War, the horror is documented, the terror is archived.
Lists of civilians killed (more than 9,000, including 461 children), tortured, kidnapped children (16,000, it is said in Kiev; 6,000, according to other sources) are kept for the purpose of adoption forced in Russia, rapes, but also the list of indiscriminate bombings – to date, 31,000 war crimes, says Oleksandra Matviichuk, the president of the Center for Civil Liberties, Nobel Peace Prize 2022.
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