LVIV, Ukraine (AP) – Real-time messaging, reports from all over Ukraine:
One civilian was killed.
Thirteen military casualties.
Five civilians were injured.
Chief Prosecutor Irina Venediktova looks at her mobile phone. Explicit numbers and explicit bills spinning in her hand are just the beginning; its staff will catalog, investigate and try to bring Russian war crimes perpetrators to justice.
That is her goal: to make Vladimir Putin and his forces pay for what they have done. As courts around the world work to hold Russia accountable, most of the investigation – and most of the prosecution – is likely to be conducted by Ukraine itself.
For Venediktov, this is personal.
“I defend the public interest of Ukrainian citizens. And now I see that I can’t protect these dead children, “she said. “It’s a pain for me too.”
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This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and FRONTLINE, which includes the interactive experience of War Crimes Watch Ukraine and an upcoming documentary.
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The first woman to be Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Venediktov spoke with steely determination and occasional humor and approached her task with a relentless work ethic.
Venediktov, a 43-year-old former law professor, is on the move every few days, and her old-life jacket and dresses are increasingly being replaced by olive clothes and body armor. She takes food quickly in the car or misses it completely.
No more working hours. There are only hours of war that start early and end late, as Associated Press reporters who spent a day with her will learn.
Her office has already launched more than 8,000 war-related criminal investigations and identified more than 500 suspects, including Russian ministers, military commanders and propagandists – even as a number of international war crimes investigations are gaining momentum.
“The main functions of the law are to protect and compensate. I hope we will succeed, because now they are just beautiful words, there is no more rule of law “, says Venediktov. “These are very beautiful words. I want them to work. “
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On Tuesday morning, Venediktova marched in a long line of refugees waiting in the cold sun to register at the Lviv regional administration building. Her bodyguard, armed and dressed in black, hovers as she steps into the crowd of women and children.
Venediktov has deployed prosecutors in refugee centers across the country and at border crossings, trying to gather pieces of the suffering of millions of Ukrainians and turn them into facts and evidence before they disappear.
Venediktov climbs up, down a narrow corridor to a bare room with two large black desks, which she calls “the heart of the war crimes service” in Lviv. Its war crimes unit has about 50 dedicated prosecutors, but it has redeployed all its staff to focus on the mission.
Many do not want to show their faces in public. There are serious security issues, both for its people and for the information they collect. Prosecutors here tend to talk about the future with grim pragmatism. It is not just the unpredictability of war; it is a tacit acknowledgment that they may not be around tomorrow to finish what they started.
Prosecutors patrol a number of refugees in central Lviv every day, looking for witnesses and victims who want to make a statement. Some stories are not told. People have gone too far, they are too tired. Or scared. Their babies are fussing. They have a place to go.
Interviews can take hours. Leaning over laptops, prosecutors are waiting for people’s tears to ask how the shelling sounded, what scattering munitions were made in the crash. They ask what uniforms, what insignia the soldiers wore. This is the raw material for accountability, the first link in the chain of responsibility that Venediktov hopes to connect with the Russian leadership.
Ala, 34, sits with prosecutors and explains how she lost her home. She does not want her last name published because her 8-year-old daughter remains trapped in Russian-controlled territory.
But she promises to return with a fragment of a mortar that destroyed her apartment in Vorzel, a town a few kilometers west of Bucha. She had collected the metal, thick and gray in her hands, as a memento of what she had survived. And as proof.
“We need evidence to be punished,” she said. “I’m lucky. I’m still here to talk about what happened to me.”
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Shortly before noon, Venediktov left the refugee center and boarded a black jeep heading to the Polish border, about an hour north. A police escort takes her through a landscape of rough houses and winter tree bones, past old cemeteries, rusty swings, gleaming church domes. The only signs of war are provocative billboards declaring victory for Ukraine and death to the enemy, and checkpoints with sandbags and barricades of hedgehogs to stop tanks that have not yet arrived.
Venediktov knows these roads well. She rides them endlessly back and forth to meet foreign officials who dare not go to war.
“I actually live in a car,” she says. “I need help, support, advisers. I need people who understand what will happen next. ”
Her office works closely with prosecutors from the International Criminal Court and nearly a dozen countries, including Poland, Germany, France and Lithuania, all of which have launched criminal investigations into atrocities in Ukraine.
She has hired high-level legal advisers from the United Kingdom and is working with the United States and the European Union to build mobile investigative teams with international experience. Clint Williamson, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes, is overseeing the U.S. Department of State-funded efforts.
“We have to face this,” Williamson said. “It needs to be shown that the countries are determined to uphold international humanitarian law and hold people who violate it so grossly accountable.
Part of their task now is to make sure that the evidence gathered meets international standards, so that the testimonies of people like Ludmila Verstiuk, a 58-year-old woman who survived the siege of Mariupol, will not be thrown out of court.
Venediktov meets Verstyuk at an impromptu office at the Krakivets border checkpoint on the border with Poland. She arrived from Mariupol with documents, a phone and clothes on her back – a suede dress, black socks, white winter boots. Her apartment was bombed on March 8th, and she told prosecutors that when she fled, she left her 86-year-old father in the burning building. He has Alzheimer’s and can’t walk.
Verstiuk says she spent a week in the Mariupol Drama Theater. She left the day before the bombs killed about 300 people.
She was unable to contact anyone who was inside the phone. Or her father.
“Why did Russia attack me? she says. “It destroyed my city – for what?” For what? Who will answer this for me and how to live?
In a five-hour interview, prosecutor Stanislaw Bronevicki took Verstiuk’s statement. “She can remember every detail, every minute and every second,” he says.
He wrote the story of Verstiouk and uploaded it to a central database.
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Huge parts of Ukraine have become potential crime scenes. Every day tragedies multiply, creating an insurmountable pile of facts that must be established and saved.
There is too much work even for the more than 8,000 employees who work for Venediktov. Returning from the border by mid-afternoon, Venediktov continues her campaign in support of Zoom talks with Amal Clooney and a group of international donors.
When President Vladimir Zelensky appointed Venediktov in March 2020, she inherited a service plagued by allegations of corruption and inefficiency, and a legal code that said outside experts said she desperately needed reform.
She introduced herself as a reformer. Thousands of prosecutors have been fired for failing to meet standards of integrity and professionalism, and so it has an office that does not have a full staff that prepares war crimes cases against what it predicts will be 1,000 defendants.
Venediktov has formed alliances with human rights groups – some of which have a history of antagonism with Ukrainian authorities – and often distrust the public.
In March, a group of 16 Ukrainian civil society organizations formed a coalition at 5 a.m. to document potential war crimes. In addition to analyzing open source material, they run networks of trained observers who gather evidence across the country to share with prosecutors.
They are joined by researchers from around the world, such as the Center for Information Sustainability, Bellingcat and the International Partnership for Human Rights, who are searching the flow of social media posts to see what happened and who is responsible.
Venediktov also encouraged ordinary citizens to help by collecting information with their smartphones and sending it online to warcrimes.gov.ua. Five weeks after the war, there are more than 6,000 applications.
Artem Donets, a criminal lawyer who has joined the Kharkiv Territorial Defense Forces, says he is part of a group of 78 Telegram lawyers, all involved in gathering evidence, gathering incidents that prosecutors and police may not have time to arrived.
“We are a legitimate battalion,” he said.
On the day he spoke to the AP, Donets had gone out to document the latest attack on civilian infrastructure in Kharkiv. He found himself in front of his own home.
As usual, he pulled out his cell phone. He took GPS coordinates and trained his camera on a crater in the asphalt, tracking its shape with his finger. “Damage to the facade of the building,” he said in an even, professional voice. “Destruction of windows, windows, doors.”
Donets announced that he found a rocket from a cluster …
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