“Ukraine is a crime scene,” the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, stressed on Wednesday while war crimes prosecutors visited the site of civilian killings in Bucha as tens of thousands of Ukrainians fled the country in advance of a fresh assault to the east.
The Hague-based court, which investigates and prosecutes war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, sent its representatives to the Kyiv suburb now synonymous with scores of atrocities against civilians as the new front of the war shifts eastward.
The United Nations said on Wednesday that more than 40,000 people fled the country in the past 24 hours, bringing to 4.6 million the number of people who have fled since the conflict began.
Kyiv, however, halted humanitarian corridors in several parts of Ukraine on Wednesday, describing them as too dangerous for evacuations.
New allegations of crimes inflicted on locals emerge and new crimes sites are discovered in areas abandoned by Russian forces. Promising to follow the evidence as forensic teams began their work, Khan noted that their presence there is due to reasonable grounds that crimes are being committed that are within the jurisdiction of ICC.
Meanwhile, the report prepared by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the world’s largest security body, points out that Moscow had engaged in clear patterns of international humanitarian law violations in Ukraine.
OSCE’s report covers the period from the beginning of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 through 1 April, before the hundreds of bodies were discovered in Bucha and elsewhere.
It prompted the US President Joe Biden to a dramatic rhetorical escalation in the US view of what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, and level his strongest accusation yet – of genocide – against Putin and his actions in Ukraine.
The US administration, however, still hasn’t made changes in its stand that Moscow’s actions still do not rise up to the level of genocide, describing those actions solely as atrocities and war crimes.
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