War crimes evidence is a priority

Tuesday’s horrifying witness account of how hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in the targeted Russian bombardment of a Mariupol refuge underlines the need for the urgent deployment of independent investigators to gather evidence for war crimes trials. “Soul-less” Vladimir Putin may be, according to Joe Biden; but even the Russian tyrant must be disturbed when he learns, as Jacquelin Magnay wrote, of the terrible fate of pregnant women, babies in arms, grandmothers and others among the 1200 people huddled in a theatre where they thought they would be safe.

Each day of Mr Putin’s unprovoked war brings new detail of similar, unconscionable atrocities committed by Russian soldiers and their commanders as they seek to fulfil the marauding tyrant’s merciless determination to see Ukraine reduced to the devastation he wreaked previously on Grozny in Chechnya and Aleppo in Syria. A month of barbaric warfare, of crowded apartment blocks bombed to smithereens, of starved cities and towns denied even water, and of shameful atrocities including the rape of women and young girls have turned Ukraine into a vast crime scene.

Adding to the inhumane spectre of widespread, deliberately targeted devastation on Tuesday was a report by The Times that showed even supposed humanitarian assistance is being used to commit abuses. Russian attackers have been offering ostensible rescue corridors to people they have been bombing. But they are no such thing. Typically, according to The Times, women and children are prodded out of their bomb shelters, carted off to the self-declared Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, then transported across the border into western Russia. In shades of Nazi Germany, 15,000 civilians have been removed from Mariupol alone and deported into Russia, which will allow them to return only with Russian identity documents – the Kremlin’s tactic being to boost the number of Russians inside Ukraine. Russia denies this is ethnic cleansing or forced deportation. But the Kremlin’s use of the sinister term “filtration points” to describe the process that is, in effect, deporting thousands of Ukrainians to Russia is strikingly similar to processing points established by Mr Putin in Chechnya during his 1999 bombardment of Grozny.

The need is clearly for teams of independent war crimes investigators to be on the ground gathering evidence. The Balkan wars of the 1990s showed the crucial importance of getting as much detail as soon as possible about war crimes so the identity of perpetrators and the chain of command that led to their atrocities can be fully investigated. Intelligence estimates so far of the devastation caused by Mr Putin’s invasion could hardly be more shocking – 4500 residential buildings, including major apartment blocks, destroyed together with at least 100 factories and business centres, 400 universities, schools and other places of learning, and 150 hospitals and clinics.

Adding to that, upwards of 10 million people (a quarter of Ukraine’s entire population) have been forced to flee their homes. A month into the war and with the Russian despot still waging all-out war, nearly four million Ukrainians have fled across their country’s borders, one of the largest migrations in modern history. The numbers reflect the terrible war crimes that are being committed. They demand early investigation and the gathering of evidence for future trials. Mr Putin and his cronies must not be allowed to evade being brought to book.