U.S. Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack, commenting on Russian allegations that Ukrainian soldiers may have shot surrendering Russian soldiers, said there has been a marked difference between the ways Moscow and Kyiv have responded to such charges.
Beth Van Schaack
“We’re obviously tracking that quite closely,” Van Schaack said during a telephone meeting with journalists on November 21. “It’s really important to emphasize that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, both the aggressor state and the defender state, and this in equal measure.
“Likewise, we’re seeing a really vast difference when it comes to the reaction to such allegations,” she added. “Russia inevitably responds with propaganda, denial, mis- and disinformation, whereas the Ukrainian authorities have generally acknowledged abuses and have denounced them and pledged to investigate them.”
She called on Ukraine to continue to comply with its international obligations, adding, however, that the scale and number of war crimes accusations against Russian forces in Ukraine was “enormous compared to the allegations against Ukrainian forces.”
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Van Schaack said there is “mounting evidence that [Russian] aggression has been accompanied by systemic war crimes committed in every region where Russia’s forces have been deployed."
She noted “deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks against the civilian population and elements of the civilian infrastructure,” as well as “custodial abuses of civilians and POWs and also efforts to cover up those crimes.”
The Russian Embassy issued a statement claiming that “the United States enables permissiveness and impunity for neo-Nazis in Ukraine by covering up the frenzy of Ukrainian bandits,” Russia’s state news agency TASS reported on November 22.
The Russian State Duma the same day adopted a statement urging foreign legislatures to “unequivocally condemn the Kyiv regimes’ crimes.”
On November 18, Russia accused Ukraine of war crimes, citing video fragments that seem to show Ukrainian forces killing Russian soldiers who were lying on the ground and surrendering.
Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets has said the Russian soldiers were only pretending to surrender and that their comrades opened fire on the Ukrainians first.
Lubinets pledged to conduct an investigation into the incident, which occurred sometime around November 12 in the Luhansk region village of Makiyivka.