Surrounded by a group of journalists, Irina Venediktova, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, stood against the backdrop of shelled and rubble apartment buildings in the town of Borodianka in the Kyiv region.
Venediktova bears the weight of bringing Nearly 2,000 cases of war crimes Committed by the Russian occupation forces to trial at home and abroad. Its office is the only body in Ukraine with investigative power. And through her office it Information on war crimes is collectedIt will conduct investigations and build domestic and international cases.
Reminiscent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to the newly liberated lands outside Kyiv, Venedictova walked around Borodianka with her subordinates watching for damage, wearing an army windbreaker and baseball cap.
Venediktova, who was appointed in 2019, said, describing one of the mass graves in a nearby town Bucha, which is being investigated as a war crime.
It is difficult to investigate war crimes. It comprises teams of different experts who can collect and analyze the physical, oral and open source evidence that will confront the defense. International criminal law judges individuals, not states, and so prosecutors must link the crime to the perpetrator.
“Before the war, the majority of Ukrainians did not trust the state,” Venediktova said. “There were reasons for that: the other prosecutors and the way they acted.”
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office has faced accusations of corruption and incompetence since the country declared independence.
There have been almost no successful major trials over the past 30 years, with dozens of protesters being shot in February 2014 in central Kyiv, the murder of two prominent Ukrainian journalists, the poisoning of Ukraine’s third president, and countless cases of state corruption and every failed bribery. in convictions.
Ukrainian NGOs, state employees and civilians involved in gathering evidence to build cases hope that things will be different this time because of how the war has penetrated the whole of society. But doubts remain about whether the war will change Ukraine’s notoriously opaque judicial system on its own or whether civil society will need to apply pressure.
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