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TOPIC: war crimes

Geopolitics

Henry Kissinger: The World's Love-And-Hate Adieu To The Machiavelli Of Washington

China shares praise, Cambodia throws shade, Germans show pride … and from Moscow?

PARIS — The death of Henry Kissinger at the age of 100 marks not only the end of a U.S. foreign policy legend, but the end of an era in geopolitical history. The controversial German-born architect of late 20th-century American power influenced statecraft around the world before, during and well after his years as U.S. secretary of state and national security advisor under two presidents.

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Whether considered the consummate “Machiavellian” operator, bloodstained Cold War puppet master or the embodiment of the American Dream, the entire world is marking the passing of this highly divisive and influential diplomat and power broker:

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Israel v. Emmanuel Macron — And Who's Next?

Israel has reacted sharply to the French president's criticism of the IDF continued bombing of civilians in Gaza. France is the first country to break with Western unanimity on Israel since October 7, which explains the virulence of the reaction.

-Analysis-

PARIS — In the midst of the war in Gaza, Israeli leaders, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took the time to denounce recent remarks made by French President Emmanuel Macron. It’s an unexpected controversy — less than three weeks ago, Macron was at Netanyahu's side in Jerusalem, to express France's solidarity against terrorism.

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The French president had given an exclusive interview on Friday to the BBC, in which he shared his view that there is "no justification" for bombing and attacking civilians. "These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed," he declared. He added that there was “no reason for that and no legitimacy”, and urged Israel to stop, calling for it to comply with international humanitarian law. Thee only solution, he concluded, is a ceasefire.

It was these words that provoked the anger of Netanyahu, and even greater anger from his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, who wondered how France could give Israel "lessons in morality" in the midst of a war.

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Russia And Iran: At Least One Is Ready For Middle East Escalation

What happens next in the Middle East, including a possible expansion of the war at the Israeli-Lebanon border, will be determined by choices that are made in different capitals. Keep your eye on Tehran.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Iran holds one of the keys to the Middle East crisis: it can decide to either limit the scope to a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, or transform it into a regional confrontation with the opening of a new front with Lebanon's Hezbollah.

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Fighting The Russian Army's Systematic Campaign Of Sexual Violence In Ukraine

Hundreds of sexual crimes have been officially reported in Ukraine following the full-scale invasion by the Russian army, though the actual number is likely 10 times higher. Ukrainian news website Livy Bereg explores how the nation is documenting the crimes and responding to support victims and bring perpetrators to justice.

KYIV — Let's start with the official numbers. Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office has recorded 231 instances of conflict-related sexual violence. The aggressors target all demographic groups: men, women, children, and the elderly.

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Behind the official statistics are disturbing details, with 149 cases involving women and 82 cases involving men. Thirteen of the victims were minors, with 12 being girls and one a boy who also bore witness to his mother being raped. The youngest victim is 4 years old, while the oldest survivor is an 82-year-old female pensioner.

And these are only the officially documented cases. The actual number is likely to be 10 times higher.

Survivors often hesitate to speak out due to fear, trauma, and the social stigma attached to such incidents. This is changing, however, as more survivors of sexual abuse are coming forward to share their stories and receive the comprehensive legal, humanitarian, psychological, and medical support they need.

Mass sexual assault occurs wherever the Russian occupiers set foot. Most cases of sexual crimes have been documented in the de-occupied territories of the Kherson region. Following that are the Donetsk (55), Kyiv (52), Kharkiv (21), Zaporizhzhia (15), Chernihiv (5), Luhansk (3), and Sumy (2) regions.

“Ukraine needs to liberate its occupied territories to be able to work with all the victims,” says Iryna Didenko, who heads the Department of the Office of the Prosecutor General investigating such crimes.

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Society
Camilo Pardo Quintero

Sexual Violence In War: Listening And Healing — And Never Again

Three women who were victims of sexual violence during the Colombian Civil War recount their stories of struggle and survival. They speak up in the hopes that the judiciary will open a new case to bring justice to them and many more survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated during the conflict.

BOGOTA – Jennifer, Ludirlena and Diana suffered a living death at the hands of their aggressors. It was their self-love and resilience that saved them, after experiencing sexual violence during the nation’s civil war.

The Colombian government forgot about these women. But now, they are champions in a battle towards justice and dignity. With different perspectives, they manage to find a connection, something that will unite them forever: advocating so that no one else experiences what they endured.

All sides in the war perpetrated sexual violence. But in the case of these three women, it was specifically the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and United Self-Defences of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary groups who exerted power over their bodies, through the cruelty of their crimes.

These were not isolated incidents and, to the shame of our society, they remain a massive, forgotten outrage.

According to official records, during the war in Colombia there were 15,760 victims of sexual violence. Of that total, 61.8% were women, and another 30.8% were young girls and teenagers. Unfortunately, underreporting plays a significant role in these numbers. Organizations such as the Network of Women Victims and Professionals, the collective Focal Groups - Men Victims of Sexual Violence and the British organization All Survivors Project estimate that the real number may be as much as three times higher.

The three protagonists in our story show how armed conflict has marked the lives of thousands of women in Colombia. They are three voices among many that have come together to demand the opening of a "macro-case," or investigation into sexual violence through Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which would uncover the patterns of sexual and gender-based crimes among armed groups which have devastated entire communities.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Pierre Haski

She Was Investigating Russian War Crimes — Then One Killed Her

Writer and activist Victoria Amelina died from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. Her death is a cruel irony that reminds the world of both Moscow's objectives, and tactics.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Victoria Amelina was 37. She was a poet, writer and essayist. Her books were translated abroad and she had won prestigious awards. She had it all. She was only five years old when Ukraine became independent, a freedom that allowed her to choose her own path in life.

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And then came Feb. 24, 2022. The Russian army invaded her country. Victoria Amelina’s life was turned upside down, like millions of other Ukrainians.

The young woman succumbed on Sunday to skull injuries sustained last week when a Russian missile strike hit a restaurant in Kramatorsk, in east Ukraine. She was the 13th victim of this bombing of a totally civilian target.

In Moscow, the Russian army claimed that two Ukrainian officers and “foreign mercenaries” had been killed in the targeting of a “military target”. Rarely has the discrepancy between propaganda and reality been so blatant.

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Geopolitics
Christine Kensche

Middle East, Realpolitik: Inside Assad's Return To The World Stage

The Arab League has readmitted Syria, ending the regime's ten-year isolation. This is a defeat for the West — and an admission by the Arab states that there is no way around Assad.

-Analysis-

BERLIN — He has killed civilians with poison gas and barrel bombs, bombed cities to rubble, imprisoned and tortured his countrymen and triggered the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was among the world's most ostracized and isolated politicians — but now he is returning to the world stage.

The 22-member Arab League voted by a majority on Sunday to readmit Syria to its fold. As a result, Assad can now participate in regional summits again, 12 years after the Syrian civil war began. The next summit is scheduled for May 19 in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

The Arab family first disowned him when he shot down peaceful demonstrations against his corrupt regime. Like the West, most League member states called for Assad's resignation and supported groups fighting his forces.

Recently, however, some Arab states have sought to reconnect with him. Why are they rehabilitating the mass murderer now?

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Victoria Roshchyna

Inside Moscow's Vile Scheme To Kidnap And "Russify" Ukrainian Children

In Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, an estimated 19,000 children have been abducted and put in so-called "filtration camps," Soviet-era-like facilities where they are being "re-educated" in brutal conditions. Exclusive testimony from several victims who managed to escape.

KYIV — "If the whole world could hear me, I would say that we need to win this war as soon as possible so that all children can see their families again..."

Those words come from 12-year-old Sashko from the southeast Ukrainian city of Mariupol, who was separated from his mother by Russians during the so-called "filtration" procedure in the Donetsk region.

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Sashko is one of the thousands of children taken to the Russian Federation from the occupied regions of Ukraine under the guise of evacuation and ensuing rehabilitation ,to teach them to "love Russia."

On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of facilitating the forced deportation of children from the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories, violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

According to the Office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, at least 19,000 minors have been taken to Russia and annexed Crimea since the beginning of the full-scale war. Only 364 have been returned.

Ukrainska Pravda talked to dozens of children who have managed to get back to Ukraine, testimonies that can now help able to identify the places of their detention, methods of abduction, and the names and positions of Russians who facilitated the crime.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Mykhailo Gold, Oleksandr Demchenko

"Only I Survived" — A Year Ago Her Family Was Exterminated By A Russian Missile

When the invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, Iryna Zhyvolup hunkered down with three generations of her family in Izyum, Ukraine. A few weeks later, she lost her loved ones in a missile attack.

Iryna survived, but barely. Severely wounded in her city of Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, she spent eight days in a roofless house at -10°C until her neighbors found her. Then she spent 25 days in the basement of the local hospital under Russian occupation, beginning to be nursed back to health. But this story, as told to Livy Bereg reporters, has no happy ending.

On Feb. 24, 2022, at five in the morning, my son called me from Kharkiv and said they were being bombed. I jumped up and started screaming, saying, "Get down to the basement quickly, and then get to Izyum."

The next day, he took the last train down from Kharkiv. Then a colleague called and said their house had been destroyed. Friends called from the neighboring district, where their village had been bombed.

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The flow of wounded began. On Feb. 25, the Russians started shelling Izyum. I offered to leave, but like many others, my mother and husband did not want to.

Russian forces destroyed schools, churches and buildings that had survived both world wars.

We moved to my mother's house. At that time, the bombing was constant, one plane after another. It seemed to grow quieter for a day. On the evening of March 6, our dog barked, and I realized there was a Russian air raid.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Cameron Manley

Russia Boasts Of Capturing A Ukrainian Orphan Who'd Tried To Return Home

Last spring, after Moscow's troops occupied Mariupol, minors with no parents were forced from the southern city to go to Russia. One 17-year-old recently tried to escape, and return home to be with his sister. He didn't make it — and Russia proudly shared the story.

A 17-year-old Ukrainian who'd been forcibly taken from occupied Mariupol to Russia at the start of its full-scale invasion was trying to return home, but was captured by Russian security forces at the border with Belarus and will be sent back to Russia.

Maria Lvova-Belova, the so-called ombudsman for Children's Rights in Russia, held a press conference on Tuesday to share the news that Russian security forces had detained Bogdan Ermokhin and returned him to a "foster family" in Russia.

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Lvova-Belova said that Ermokhin had been emotionally manipulated and threatened by Ukrainian “agents” into returning back to Ukraine, where he has a sister. The agents supposedly organized transport and financial support for Ermokhin. “He was deceptively lured out,” she said, “at the last moment, we managed to stop him.”

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Important Stories

A Russian Soldier Confessed To Killing A Ukrainian Civilian — So Moscow Convicted Him Of Spreading Fake News

After Russian soldiers committed multiple war crimes last year during the attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, some confessed to their crimes. But now they are being tried in Russia for spreading misinformation about the military.

Following multiple reports of war crimes in the early weeks of the war in Ukraine, Russian soldier Daniil Frolkin was interviewed last August by Vazhnye Istorii. In the conversation with the reporter for the independent Russian media, Frolkin confessed to the murder of an unarmed civilian who Ukrainian authorities believe was a 47-year-old named Ruslan Yaremchuk.

Now this public act of truth-telling has led to Frolkin standing trial in Russia and being convicted for spreading misinformation about the Russian military.

He was found guilty and sentenced to probation, though the Russian prosecutor had asked for six years of prison. After the court proceeding Wednesday, Frolkin quickly left and refused to talk to journalists.

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This Happened

This Happened - February 12: Milosevic On Trial

On this day, 21 years ago, the trial of Slobodan Milošević began in the Hague, Netherlands.

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