In past conflicts, Russia has evaded meaningful accountability for its war crimes. Will the copious amount of video footage taken during the invasion of Ukraine change the equation?
Iryna Havryliuk, in Bucha, told me that she had a case before the I.C.C., and was represented by a lawyer named Achille Campagna. I contacted Campagna, whose office is in San Marino. He told me that when he heard about the crimes in Ukraine he wanted to help; he found a Ukrainian attorney to record Iryna’s account. If the I.C.C. takes up a case in which Iryna is considered a victim, the court could choose to hear her testimony. But Campagna acknowledged that such an outcome is unlikely.
In early June, I travelled with a group of Truth Hounds to Kryvyi Rih, a mining city in central Ukraine that’s close to the front line. Two researchers, Yaroslav and Stanislav , were there to interview people displaced from the east and the south of the country. Truth Hounds has been operating in Ukraine since 2014, documenting war crimes in Crimea and the Donbas. Stanislav, who is thirty-nine, skinny, and tense, has worked as a war-crimes researcher for nearly all of that time.
“Not the road, no,” Apostol said. “They were blocking the view of the hospital’s yard, so that one couldn’t see where they fired from.” A good interviewer also knows how to end a conversation if it gets too hard. “Sometimes you have to be cunning,” Jordash continued. “You can’t interview a woman about being raped when her husband is next door. You might have to concoct a reason for the woman to travel to the next town, to go to the market, and interview her there.” You also have to know how to package the testimony for legal proceedings.
Writing in this magazine almost sixty years ago, Arendt seemed to deride the notion that a war crime should be redressed through compensation to the victim. The Eichmann trial, in her view, devolved into a showcase of grievances. The criminal, she argued, “must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.”
There are pragmatic reasons for this. Prosecutors need to give prisoners of war an incentive to coöperate. And they need to be able to increase the possible punishment proportionately. “When you capture Putin, is he going to get the same sentence as the guy who shot the cyclist?” Jordash said.
Iryna ran to where her house had been. She felt like she was flying, even as she found herself stepping over bodies on Yablunska Street—at least three on the sidewalk, a woman beside a bicycle, plus several in a car that had been shot full of holes. Her house was now a pile of pale rubble, with the burned-out shell of a washing machine on top. Oleg was where the soldiers had left him. The month of March had been cold, so his body was intact.
The women now had to think about how they would live. They had lost their breadwinners. Their houses had been looted and damaged. Ludmila’s was destroyed by fire, apparently as Ukrainian soldiers fought to retake the city; she has furnished a sleeping space in what had been the summer kitchen—she scavenged a door, but she has struggled to scrape together enough money to buy a latch. Abramova is staying with her father. Havryliuk’s home was struck by shelling and is missing all of its windows.
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