US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack appears before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in January. (Shutterstock)
The US ambassador for global criminal justice said there is “no way” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “and his leadership and the military can argue that they were not aware” of the crimes being committed in Ukraine . Ambassador Beth Van Schaack told CNN that because there has been so much attention on these crimes, the Russian president and his inner circle could face international prosecution.
“There are legal doctrines that allow prosecutors to work up the chain of command, including the commander in chief, and individuals in leadership positions can be held responsible for ordering abuses if there is evidence of an order to do so . They can be held responsible for failing to properly train and supervise their troops, and they can be held responsible for failing to adjudicate violations when they become aware of them,” Van Schaack said.
He also noted that based on “the patterns of abuse that we are seeing, it is difficult to conclude that these are acts of rogue individuals or units.”
Van Schaack said there are “many courts with jurisdiction” to prosecute Putin for war crimes, but “the point is to get custody of him, and so as long as he remains in Russia, he may be out of reach.”
“There is no doubt that this is a long game and it has to be a long game. There is no way this can be achieved in six months or a year,” he added.
Van Schaack said that they have not yet made a formal determination of genocide in Ukraine, noting that “genocide is difficult to prove – the special element is this intention to destroy the group in whole or in part – but obviously we are tracking these events very well. carefully.”
US President Joe Biden accused Putin of committing genocide in Ukraine in April.
Van Schaack told CNN that Russia’s crimes against civilians in Ukraine have clear roots in its past atrocities, including those committed in Syria, and said Moscow “probably perceives that they’ve had a green light here when it comes to to use certain tactics”.
However, he said he hoped Russia would learn from the international community’s response to Ukraine.
He spoke about the work of the United States — together with the EU and the United Kingdom — on the Advisory Group on Atrocities, consisting of two main components: veteran advisers who are embedded with the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine and the deployment of “teams multidisciplinary and multinational mobile justice teams that are being deployed in the field to work side-by-side with” Ukrainian investigators working at the sites of the attacks.
Van Schaack also pointed to the Justice Department’s efforts, though he explained that the US war crimes statute requires a nexus to the United States for people to be prosecuted in the US.
