The building of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands. File photoMOSCOW, May 17The United Nations International Criminal Court (ICC) sent 42 officers to Ukraine on Tuesday to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity, prosecutor Karim Khan said. experts and support staff.
The ICC prosecutor assured that he does not take the side of Ukraine or the side of Russia. «This is the largest mission of the specialists of my office since its foundation,» Agence France-Presse quoted Khan as saying. The ICC officially began its work on July 1, 2002. On March 2, the ICC prosecutor's office began an investigation in Ukraine. On March 11, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that the court's investigation team had begun collecting evidence as part of this investigation. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia categorically rejects Kyiv's accusations of war crimes on the territory of Ukraine and recalls that it is not a member of the International At the same time, in March, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, reported that the latest actions of Prosecutor Khan demonstrate a desire to contribute to the anti-Russian hysteria now blazing in the US and the EU, and that «neither a bloody anti-constitutional coup in Kyiv, nor the burning of people alive in Odessa, nor long-term crimes against the inhabitants of Donbass have not yet become a reason to intensify the investigation. «Earlier, the DPR reported that Donbass public activists sent case files on thousands of war crimes of Ukrainian security forces in the region to the ICC. An investigation was never launched on any of the appeals. According to the LPR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during the eight years of the conflict in the Donbass, the LPR and the DPR filed more than 3,000 lawsuits about Kyiv’s war crimes with the ECHR and the International Criminal Court. However, the court did not start investigating these cases. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reported that representatives of Russian legal entities prepared and sent to the ECHR more than 7,350 complaints from residents of Donbass who suffered from the actions of the Ukrainian authorities. The Ministry of Justice of Ukraine also reported that there were more than 7,000 such statements.
