A citizen is dead. Thirteen military casualties. Five civilians were injured. Attorney General Iryna Venediktova glances at her cell phone. The bold numbers and clear accounts unfolding in her hands are just the beginning. Its staff will record, investigate – and try to bring to justice the Russian war crimes perpetrators. That’s its purpose: to make Vladimir Putin and his forces pay for what they have done. While courts around the world are working to hold Russia accountable, much of the investigation – and most of the prosecution – is likely to be carried out by Ukraine itself. For Venediktova, this is personal. “I am defending the public interest of the Ukrainian people. “And now I see that I can not protect these dead children,” he said. “It’s a pain for me too.”
This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and FRONTLINE that includes the interactive War Crimes Watch Ukraine experience and an upcoming documentary.
The first woman to serve as Ukraine’s attorney general, Venediktova speaks with steely determination and occasional humor, and approaches her work with a relentless work ethic. Venediktova, a 43-year-old former law teacher, moves every few days, with old-fashioned jackets and dresses increasingly being replaced by olives and a bulletproof vest. He eats meals hurriedly in the car or skips them altogether. There are no more office hours. There are only hours of war that start early and end late, as the Associated Press reporters who spent a day with her would learn. Its office has already opened more than 8,000 war-related criminal investigations and has identified more than 500 suspects, including Russian ministers, military commanders and propagandists – even as a series of international war crimes investigations intensify. “The main functions of the law are to protect and compensate. “I hope we can do it, because now are just nice words, not another rule of law,” Venediktova said. “It’s very nice words. I want them to work. “
On Tuesday morning, Venediktova marches in a thick line of refugees waiting in the icy sun to register in a Lviv regional administration building. Her security detail, armed and dressed in black, hovers as she enters the crowd of women and children. Venediktova has placed prosecutors in refugee camps across the country and at border crossings, trying to collect the fragments of the pain of millions of Ukrainians and turn them into facts and figures before they disappear. Benedict sweeps the upper floor, down a narrow corridor into a bare room with two large black desks that he calls “the heart of the war crimes bureau” in Lviv. Its war crimes unit has about 50 dedicated prosecutors, but has redefined all of its staff to focus on this mission. Many do not want to show their face in public. There are serious security issues, both for its people and for the information they collect. Prosecutors here tend to talk about the future with grim pragmatism. It is not just the unpredictability of war. It is a tacit admission that they may not be around tomorrow to complete what they started. Prosecutors are moving daily in the line of refugees in central Lviv, looking for witnesses and victims willing to testify. Some stories are not told. People have come a long way, they are very tired. Or scared. Their babies are upset. They have places to go. Interviews can take hours. Leaning over laptops, prosecutors are waiting for people’s tears to ask how the bombing sounded, what kind of spray ammunition was made during the collision. They ask what uniforms, what insignia the soldiers wore. This is the raw material of accountability, the first link in a chain of responsibility that Venediktova hopes to connect with the Russian leadership. Ala, 34, sits down with prosecutors and explains how she lost her home. She does not want her last name to be made public because her 8-year-old daughter remains trapped in Russian-controlled territory. Ala promises to return with a piece of mortar that destroyed her apartment in Vorzel, a town a few kilometers west of Bucha. She had collected the metal, thick and gray in her hands, as a souvenir of what she had survived. And as evidence. “We need evidence to punish them,” he said. “I’m lucky. I’m still here to talk about what happened to me.”
Shortly before noon, Venediktova leaves the refugee center and climbs into a black SUV heading for the Polish border, about an hour north. A police escort speeds her through a landscape of rugged houses and the winter bones of trees, beyond old cemeteries, rusty cribs, the glittering domes of churches. The only signs of war are provocative billboards proclaiming Ukraine’s victory and death to the enemy, and checkpoints with sandbags and hedgehog roadblocks to stop tanks that have not yet arrived. Venediktova knows these streets well. He leads them endlessly back and forth to meet foreign officials who do not dare to enter a country at war. “I actually live in a car,” he says. “I need help, support, counselors. I need people who understand what will follow. ” Her office works closely with prosecutors from the International Criminal Court and nearly a dozen countries, including Poland, Germany, France and Lithuania, which have launched criminal investigations into atrocities in Ukraine. He has hired senior legal advisors from the United Kingdom and is working with the United States and the European Union to set up mobile research teams with international know-how. Clint Williamson, the former US ambassador to war crimes, is helping oversee the US State Department-sponsored effort. “We have to deal with it,” Williamson said. “There is a need to show that countries are determined to stand up for international humanitarian law and to hold accountable the people who violate it so blatantly.” Part of their mission now is to ensure that the evidence gathered is in line with international standards, so that the testimony of people like Liudmila Verstiouk, a 58-year-old woman who survived the Mariupol siege, will not be thrown out of court. Venediktova meets Verstiuk in a makeshift office at the Krakβwetz crossing on the border with Poland. She arrived from Mariupol with her papers, her phone and the clothes on her back – a velvet dress, black socks, white winter boots. Her apartment was bombed on March 8 and she told prosecutors that when she fled, she left her 86-year-old father behind in the burning building. He has Alzheimer’s and cannot walk. Verstiouk says she spent a week sheltering at the Mariupol Drama Theater. He left the day before the bombs that killed about 300 people there. He was unable to contact anyone inside by telephone. Or her father. “Why did Russia attack me?” she says. “It destroyed my city – why? Why? Who will answer me to this and how will I continue to live? “ During a five-hour interview, prosecutor Stanislav Bronevytskyy takes Verstiouk’s statement. “He can remember every detail, every minute and every second,” he says. He types Verstiouk’s story and uploads it to a central database.
Huge areas of Ukraine have been turned into possible crime scenes. Every day, tragedies multiply, creating an insurmountable pile of facts that must be ascertained and saved. There is too much work even for the more than 8,000 employees who work for Venediktova. Returning from the border in the middle of the afternoon, Venediktova continues her campaign in support, following Zoom calls with Amal Clooney and a team of international donors. When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Venediktova in March 2020, he inherited an office plagued by allegations of corruption and inefficiency, and a legal code that experts said was in need of major reform. She has presented herself as a reformer. Thousands of prosecutors have been fired for failing to meet standards of integrity and professionalism, and so has an office that is not fully staffed to prepare war crimes cases against those it predicts will be 1,000 defendants. Venediktova is building alliances with human rights groups – some of which have a history of rivalry with the Ukrainian authorities – and an often skeptical public. In March, a group of 16 Ukrainian civil society groups formed the 5AM Coalition to document possible war crimes. In addition to analyzing open source material, they manage networks of trained observers who gather data across the country to share with prosecutors. Researchers from around the world, including the Center for Information Resilience, Bellingcat and the International Partnership for Human Rights, are sweeping through the flood of social media posts to verify what happened and who is responsible. Venediktova has also encouraged ordinary citizens to help by collecting information on their smartphones and submitting them electronically to warcrimes.gov.ua. Five weeks after the war, there were more than 6,000 submissions. Artem Donets, a criminal lawyer who joined the Kharkiv Territorial Defense Forces, says he is a member of a Telegram team of 78 lawyers who are all involved in gathering evidence, gathering incidents that prosecutors and police may not have time to reach. . “We are a battalion of law,” he says. The day he spoke to the AP, Donetsk had gone out to record the latest attack on civilian infrastructure in Kharkov. He was found in front of his house. As usual, he took out his cell phone. He took GPS coordinates and trained his camera on an asphalt crater, locating its shape with his finger. “Damage to the facade of the building,” he said in a flat, professional voice. “Destruction of windows, windows, doors”. Donets said he found a rocket from a cluster …
