War Crimes in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Yesterday, U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emanuel Macron pledged to hold Russia accountable for “widely documented atrocities and war crimes” in Ukraine, the two leaders said in a statement issued after their White House meeting. (Reuters)

Also this week, the European Union’s top official on Wednesday proposed the creation of a United Nations-backed court to investigate and prosecute possible Russian crimes in the war in Ukraine, reflecting growing calls in Kyiv and the West for holding Moscow accountable for atrocities committed since its invasion. (New York Times)

Reporters looking for expert insight on ongoing issues with war crimes and the Ukraine invasion, please see comments from Syracuse University scholar-in-residence and former war crimes prosecutor David Crane.

• “The criminal acts by the Russian Federation upon a fellow member state of the United Nations demand accountability, particularly for the crime of aggression. This aggression is a direct affront to the international community and the United Nations. The rule of law has been ignored by the Russian Federation, a permanent member of the UN Security Council. This cannot stand. The world’s tyrants and dictators watch like crocodiles as to what the international community does about Putin’s aggression. If we do nothing it will be a signal to them that they can act in other parts of the world. We are at a historic and seminal moment in international history, what we decide to do about Russian aggression will set the geo-political tone for the rest of the 21st Century,” said Crane.

Crane recently co-authored a white paper, “Russian War Crimes Against Ukraine. The Breach of International Humanitarian Law by the Russian Federation [PDF],” written with Syracuse University College of Law students that offers in-depth accounting and accusations of crimes committed by the Russian Federation and President Vladimir Putin during the invasion of Ukraine.

Crane is the co-founder of Impunity Watch, an online student-run law review and public service blog and the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP), an internationally-recognized effort among students, activists, journalists and non-governmental organizations to document war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Syrian Civil War.

In 2014, Crane co-authored the “Caesar Report” that detailed the systematic killing of thousands of people in Syria and testified about the report at the UN Security Council. Crane also has testified to the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations on the Syria crisis and related human security and humanitarian issues. In 2016, Crane helped to draft a UN resolution “to establish a special team to ‘collect, consolidate, preserve and analyze evidence’ as well as to prepare cases on war crimes and human rights abuses committed during the conflict in Syria.” Subsequently, he assisted the UN in setting up the independent justice mechanism mandated by the resolution.

When he was chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Crane was the first American to be a chief prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal since 1945 when Justice Robert Jackson and Telford Taylor were prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.