Nathan News

KOROPY, Ukraine – Four men pulled long strips of fabric to lift a coffin from a gaping hole in the backyard of a small house. They opened the lid to reveal the moldy corpse of Oleksiy Ketler, who had been killed instantly by shrapnel when a mortar fell on the road in Koropy, a village outside Khavkiv in the northeastern Ukraine in March.

Mr Ketler, a father of two young children, would have celebrated his 33rd birthday on June 25, had he not left his home at the wrong time. Today, his body has become another exhibit in Ukraine’s vast effort to gather evidence to prosecute Russia and its military for war crimes in the brutal killings of Ukrainian civilians.

Experts say the process is moving with extraordinary speed and could become the biggest effort in history to hold war criminals to account. But he faces a series of daunting challenges.

On the one hand, the investigations are being carried out even as war rages in the east. As investigators examined Mr Ketler’s body, bangs from incoming and outgoing shelling thundered nearby. Ukrainian helicopters, most likely bringing new troops to the front line, flew low.

Moreover, although investigators inside and outside Ukraine are all collecting evidence, there is little coordination. And despite the influx of experts, “there really aren’t enough people” to investigate, charge and try the cases, said Andrey Kravchenko, the region’s deputy prosecutor, who was sitting in his office in the center -city of Kharkiv as the sound of outgoing shelling seemed to ring out. to get closer.

A building prosecutors used as an office was hit by missiles in what Mr. Kravchenko believed was an intentional attack, and now his team is changing headquarters often.

The demand for accountability is strong.

Ukraine’s justice system is now almost entirely devoted to war crimes investigations, with most of its 8,300 prosecutors spread across the country collecting evidence, said Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine’s chief war crimes prosecutor.

Ukrainian courts have already handed down six convictions against Russian soldiers. Ukraine’s chief prosecutor said last week that nearly 20,000 other cases – involving charges of torture, rape, execution-style murders and deportation of what Mr Belousov said could be tens of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia – were under investigation.

At the same time, hundreds of international experts, investigators and prosecutors descended on Ukraine from an alphabet soup of international agencies.

At the start of the war, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, arrived in Ukraine with several dozen investigators. But the court, which is based in the Netherlands, tries a limited number of cases and generally only seeks to prosecute the top echelon of political and military leaders.

It is also slow: investigators working on the 2008 Russo-Georgian war did not apply for an arrest warrant until this year.

There are also a number of other initiatives. Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer, is part of a team advising the Ukrainian government on bringing international legal action against Russia. The United Nations has set up a commission to investigate human rights abuses in Ukraine – with three human rights experts – but cannot establish a formal tribunal because Russia has a right of veto in the UN Security Council.

Investigators in Poland are collecting testimonies from refugees who fled there to supply Ukrainian prosecutors. France has sent mobile DNA analysis teams to integrate with Ukrainian authorities to collect evidence. Non-governmental organizations based in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, are traveling to the territories recently occupied by Russian soldiers to collect testimonies.

The involvement of multiple countries and organizations does not necessarily lead to a more productive investigation, said Wayne Jordash, a British criminal lawyer who lives in Ukraine. Mr Jordash, who is part of an international task force supporting Ukrainian prosecutors, criticized some of the efforts to help Ukraine on the judicial front, describing it as “smoke and mirrors”, with no results or results. clear priorities.

International Criminal Court investigators were just getting started, he noted, and experts from other countries also cycled in for several weeks.

“You can’t just parachute into an investigation for two weeks and expect it to be meaningful,” Mr Jordash said.

Iva Vukusic, a specialist in post-conflict justice at the University of Utrecht, said: “Resources are pouring in, but maybe we will see that they have not been spent in the right way”, per example, by duplicating investigative efforts. rather than providing psychosocial support to victims.

Ms. Vukusic underlined the magnitude of the effort. Across the country, she said, “there are thousands of potential suspects and thousands of potential trials.” All material must be properly collected and analyzed, she said.

“If you have 100,000 items — videos, statements, documents — if you don’t know what you’re sitting on, that limits the use of the material,” Ms Vukusic said.

She also warned that the leadership of the International Criminal Court could face criticism for collaborating too closely with Ukrainian authorities because, she said, Ukraine was also “a player in this war”.

She worried that Ukrainian officials were setting very high expectations for justice and possibly wasting scarce resources on trials in absentia.

“No big deal is going to be over in two or five years because of the scale of the violence and the fact that it has been going on for so long,” she said.

Mr. Belousov, the Ukrainian war crimes prosecutor, admitted this. “We are playing a long game,” he said. Even if the attacker is tried and sentenced in absentia, Belousov said: “We understand that in a year, or two, three or five, these guys won’t be able to avoid punishment.

Mr Belousov said he appreciated the international assistance, but coordinating it was the “biggest challenge” facing law enforcement authorities.

For example, prosecutors in Kharkiv used a shiny new forensic investigation kit donated by the European Union for their exhumation in Koropy, the village in northeast Ukraine. But a police officer from a unit in Dmytrivka, a 45-minute drive west of Kyiv, said he had not seen or met any international investigators or received any materials from them.

Mr Belousov said Ukraine wanted to take the initiative to pursue the cases – a departure from previous post-conflict situations in which national authorities initially left the process to international courts.

But most Ukrainian investigators have little experience in such investigations.

For example, Andriy Andriychuk, who joined the police force in the region west of Kyiv two years ago, said his job previously was to investigate local disputes or cattle rustling. Now it involves “a lot more dead bodies”, he said.

On a recent sunny afternoon, he was called to a wooded area near the town of Dmytrivka. A few days earlier, police had received a call from foresters who had come across a man’s grave. The dead, Mykola Medvid, 56, had been buried with his passport; his hat hung atop a cross made of sticks.

His daughter and cousin identified his body. The local morgue officially established the cause of death: a fatal bullet to the chest.

Since then, his daughter Mariia Tremalo has not heard from investigators. No witnesses came forward and it was unclear who might have killed his father or why. Yet she thirsts for justice.

“My father will never come back,” she said. “But I would like the perpetrators to be punished.”

Right now, that seems all but impossible.

In Koropy, the village near Kharkiv, Mr Ketler’s mother, Nadezhda Ketler, was inconsolable as gravediggers and inspectors worked. She wandered down the road to another part of her property. Six officials stood over her son’s body, photographing and documenting it as his best friend, Mykhailo Mykhailenko, who looked petrified and smelled of stale alcohol, identified him.

The following day, Mr. Ketler’s body was taken to the city morgue, where the final cause of death was established.

Eventually, Ms Ketler mustered the strength to show investigators the crater created by the bomb that killed him, leading police to the exact spot where he died. Mrs. Ketler watched the trees as they rustled in the wind. She didn’t speak to anyone. She said she was unsure if a guilty verdict in a war crimes trial, if it ever came, would ease the pain of losing her child.

“I had to bury my son twice,” Ms Ketler said later. “You know, it’s hard enough to do it once and have to do it a second time. A mother’s pain will go nowhere.

Evelina RiabenkoDiana Poladova and Oleksandr Chubko contributed report.