The Tribunal for Putin presented its first legal assessment of genocide in Ukraine

On 28 August, the human rights initiative T4P presented its submission to the International Criminal, which justified that Russia committed genocide in Ukraine’s Mariupol.

Yevgen Zakharov, the director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, which co-founded the initiative, says, “We chose to document it in Mariupol as it is most difficult. Since there has been no connection in Mariupol and no access to communal service since 2 March 2022, it presented a particularly dire situation. We can gather information on international crimes only via direct communication with victims and witnesses of the crimes.”

“We are sure that the crime of genocide took place in Mariupol and the territories adjacent to it,” says the co-author of the submission Mykhailo Romanov, “And we indicate that it took place in three forms. These are murder, creating conditions of life, calculated to destroy a protected group, and the third being the deportation of children.”

The authors of the submission estimate that the death toll resulting from the occupation of Mariupol by Russia is approximately 100,000 people. Mykhailo Romanov comments on this number, “Back then, we could not set the exact number. But by indirect means, i.e., by deducting from the total population those who reportedly had been evacuated, transferred to Russia or else, we calculated that around 100,000 must have been murdered. They were murdered in different ways, in different methods, from different weapons, but in any case, these were murders.”

The submissions are available in online library on human rights in both Ukrainian and English. Earlier, the T4P presented its submissions regarding Russia shelling the territory of Ukraine – according to the initiative’s data, 84 percent of war crimes are directed at the civilian population.

“We finally transit from what we feel to what we want recognized as an international fact, written down in history books, and not only as accusations against Putin but also the whole ruling authority of the Russian Federation in the last nine years. Because we see that Mariupol is a great example of how thousands of people are suffering from the decision of Putin and power authority to wage aggression against Ukraine to destroy it and its nation.” Commented the Executive Director of the Centre for Civil Liberties Oleksandra Romantsova.

“It is actually very frightening – how the Russians methodically shelled and destroyed houses, one after another. How snipers were shooting people standing in a queue for water and people cooking food on a fire. Some people died because they stayed on the upper floors with no access to them, and they died of hunger and thirst. How, during bombardments, people jumped from the upper floors, unable to tolerate this nightmare. They committed suicide, as they no longer had the strength to cope with it and saw no opportunity to escape. There are so many stories like this,” said Yevgen Zakharov.

The testimonies of events in Mariupol was earlier published in the “Voices of War. Mariupol”, consisting of 24 interviews with the people from Mariupol who had managed to escape and been interviewed by the Kharkiv Human Rights Group. The book is to be presented later this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In Ukraine, it is available for sale in a bookshop network Knyharnia «Ye».