Ukraine identifies 600 Russian war crime suspects: Prosecutor | Russia-Ukraine war News

Kyiv’s top prosecutor says Ukraine has started prosecuting about 80 Russian war crime suspects.

Ukraine has identified more than 600 Russian war crime suspects and has started prosecuting about 80 of them, Kyiv’s top prosecutor said.

The list of suspects includes “top military, politicians and propaganda agents of Russia”, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told a news conference in The Hague on Tuesday as she met her counterparts from other countries.

She added that “200 to 300 new cases of war crimes are added every day”.

Venediktova said Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia had decided to join an international investigation team in Ukraine, which was originally formed by Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland in March to enable the exchange of information and investigation into suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity.

They are working with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which launched its investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine in early March.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan’s office has deployed a team of 42 investigators, forensic experts and support personnel to Ukraine and Khan on Tuesday said the ICC was “working toward opening an office in Kyiv” to support the investigations.

Venediktova said international support was vital to Ukraine’s efforts to investigate all possible war crimes.

“We should collect and protect everything in the right way. It should be acceptable evidence in any court,” the prosecutor said.

Russia has denied targeting civilians or involvement in war crimes while it carries out what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Venediktova said Ukraine has identified several thousand suspected war crimes in the eastern Donbas region where Russian forces are pressing their offensive.

“If we speak about war crimes, it’s about possible transfer of people, we started several cases about possible transfer of children, adult people to different parts of the Russian Federation,” she said.

“Then, of course, we can speak about torturing people, killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure.”

Ukrainian authorities did not have access to Russian-held areas of Donbas, a region in eastern Ukraine, but they were interviewing evacuees and prisoners of war, Venediktova told the news conference at the headquarters of the European Union judicial agency, Eurojust.

At Eurojust, evidence and witness statements are now to be stored in a central database and made available to all members of the group.

In total, Ukraine had identified 15,000 war crime cases across the country since Russia’s invasion on February 24, Venediktova said.