The main building of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. File photoPARIS, Apr 28 The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has demanded the creation of a special international criminal tribunal for Ukraine, while initially identifying Russia as guilty before such an instance was created, and also ignoring previous signals of war crimes Kyiv in Donbass.
"Shaken by the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) called on all member and observer states of the organization to urgently establish a special international criminal tribunal, which should receive a mandate to "investigate and prosecute criminal aggression, allegedly committed by the political and military leadership of the Russian Federation", the organization says in a statement, despite the fact that Russia has repeatedly categorically denied accusations of war crimes on the territory of Ukraine.
Kosachev told why it makes no sense for Russia now to return to the Council of Europe and PACE. As PACE notes, such a tribunal should «have the authority to issue international arrest warrants and not be limited to state immunity or immunity of heads of state and government and other public officials.» The mechanism for creating a tribunal in the assembly did not explain. In early March, the prosecutor's office of the International Criminal Court in The Hague began an investigation into Ukraine. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia categorically denies Kyiv's accusations of war crimes on the territory of a neighboring state and recalls that it is not a member of the ICC. In March, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reported that the actions of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan demonstrate a desire to into the anti-Russian hysteria now blazing in the US and the EU, and that «neither the bloody anti-constitutional coup in Kyiv, nor the burning of people alive in Odessa, nor the many years of crimes against the inhabitants of Donbass have so far become a reason to intensify the investigation.»
Zakharova commented on Biden's call to organize a tribunal for UkraineAccording to the LPR Foreign Ministry, over the eight years of the conflict in the Donbass, the LPR and the DPR filed more than three thousand lawsuits about Kyiv's war crimes with the ECHR and the International Criminal Court, but the court never started investigating these cases. The Investigative Committee of Russia reported that representatives of legal entities prepared and sent to the ECtHR 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 seven thousand such statements. Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops and, on March 25, completed the main tasks of the first stage — significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.