The Case for Nuremberg II: The Haunting Truths of Ukraine's Invasion

After studying the United Nations website document on war crimes, I’m left wondering if the Russian invaders used this document as a manual. After interviewing more than 100 individuals in seven Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages, and after studying the UN’s lists of war crimes, I’m unable to find a war crime that Russia hasn’t committed. 

Let’s look at a selection of these crimes through the eyes of four members of the Ukrainian police. These members of law enforcement use their forensic skills to collect evidence of war crimes. Some of what they’re documenting may be used at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. 

From the point of view of Investigator Vadim Subotin of the Bucha District near Kyiv, the war crimes began on February 22, 2022. It’s a war crime to attack or bombard cities, towns, or villages. 

 “The Russian air force started pounding targets all over the city,” he remembers. “In one case people were lined up outside a supermarket, but the rockets were indiscriminate and ended up hitting random people in the line. I saw people whose nervous systems were so overwhelmed by sheer terror that they fell to the ground with epileptic seizures. That day, in an area of one square kilometer, I assisted six people with seizures, sticking a spoon in their mouths so they wouldn’t choke on their own tongues.” 

Bucha was liberated after 33 days. Policeman Anatoly Kotyash, Chief Investigator of the Buchansky District, together with his colleagues documented the deaths of the 1,189 people killed  during the occupation. The willful killing of non-combatants is a war crime.

Although many of the bodies were in mass graves, not all were. For Kotyash a memory that haunts him is exhuming the bodies of a couple buried in their own backyard. After the exhumation and collection of evidence, he walked through their house. On the walls were photographs showing pictures of their children and happy events in their family life. 

Just before they were killed, the husband had been in the kitchen, working on a car battery. These sights brought home to Kotyash that the couple had been real people living a normal life, and then for no reason, their lives were ended. The wrongness and the injustice of each death is something he can’t shake off.

When asked if the people who willfully killed civilians will be brought to justice, he explains that while that would be a desired outcome, it’s probably not the likely one. “We know the names of many of the perpetrators, but by now they may be dead or wounded. Still, we know who their commanders were, and the war crimes we are documenting will matter for bringing the higher ups to justice.” 

As part of his job as Chief of Explosive Services, as Mykola Murai, deals with a different kind of war crime. “After the liberation of Kherson,” he says, “the Invaders mined the government buildings, knowing our authorities would want to restore government services as soon as possible.”

The Invaders booby-trapped the buildings in ways designed to cause maximum harm. As an example, they removed tiles in buildings and put massive amounts of explosives beneath where the tiles had been. They’d then replace the tiles, re-caulk the area around the tiles, and then skillfully camouflage the fresh caulking. When a person stepped on what looked like any other tile, the explosion would be large enough to kill several people. Murai lost four of his most experienced sappers because of these booby traps.

Elena Kosenko, Head of Juvenile Prevention, has the task of documenting the war crime of rape. However, there’s so much stigma attached to rape that women desperately resist disclosing what happened to them. To document this crime, Kosenko needed to persuade the women to talk about what they were most anxious to conceal. Kosenko has empathy and compassion and learned stories of whole villages where all the women and children were raped.

The individual stories she heard were beyond horrifying. One mother was repeatedly raped, and then her four-year-old daughter was forced to perform fellatio on one of the invading soldiers. 

Alexander Malysh, Chief Criminalist, Kyiv Region Police is documenting torture. “Our task is to document everything that happened to the dead person. We can identify from the posture of the dead person unnatural positions indicating pain. We document cases where teeth have been bashed in or gunshots to the kneecaps, or clearly visible damage to the structure of the skull.”

Sometimes it was impossible for him to document the cause of death. “We discovered bodies that had been completely burned. Possibly the individuals had been so severely tortured that the perpetrators wanted to obliterate the evidence.”

The interview ends as Malyish says, sounding unconcerned, “They just announced an air raid in Kyiv. It is recommended that we go to the shelter.” 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is approaching World War II levels of crimes against humanity. As Justice Robert H. Jackson said in his opening statement at the Nuremberg Trial, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” 

There must be consequences for Russia’s war crimes. Let’s demand Nuremberg Trial II.