Boris Johnson accuses Vladimir Putin of committing war crimes in Ukraine over Russia’s use of cluster bombs
The Prime Minister said the Russian leader’s use of munitions in attacks on Ukraine constituted a war crime
Vladimir Putin is guilty of committing war crimes following his use of indiscriminate cluster bombs, Boris Johnson has told MPs.
It is the first time that the Government has directly accused the Russian President of being guilty of war crimes since he launched his invasion of Ukraine.
The Prime Minister was responding to a question in the Commons when he was asked whether Putin was a war criminal and should face trial in the Hague.
SNP leader Ian Blackford stated that civilians were being “murdered in cold blood” by Russian troops, and he called for the UK to support prosecuting Mr Putin for the “crime of aggression” by a state.
Mr Blackford said: “With every passing hour the world is witnessing the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine… these are war crimes happening in Europe right now. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and one day soon Putin must face justice in The Hague.
“To prosecute Putin and his regime the full range of war crime charges need to be used including the crime of aggression by a state, but the UK’s always refused to sign up to the prosecution of this crime in international law.”
He asked whether Mr Johnson would look to change the War Crimes Act and push for the Russian leader to be tried for war crimes.
The Prime Minister replied: “What we have seen already from Vladimir Putin’s regime in the use of the munitions that they have been dropping on civilians in my view fully qualifies as a war crime.”
He added that the International Criminal Court prosecutor was already looking into whether Mr Putin was guilty of committing war crimes.
It comes after the Russian army bombarded civilian areas of the Ukrainian city Kharkiv with cluster bombs and multiple launch rocket systems in the past few days.
Western officials had previously warned that Mr Putin would turn to more lethal weaponry, such as the use of thermobaric rockets, also known as “vacuum bombs”, which can collapse the lungs of people near the blast.
Mr Johnson’s comments go further than those made by his deputy Dominic Raab on Tuesday, who said Mr Putin and his commanders must be held accountable for any war crimes during Moscow’s siege on Ukraine.
He told Sky News: “Those that engage in war crimes will be held to account.”
He said it must be clear to “both to Putin but also to commanders in Moscow and on the ground in Ukraine that they will be held accountable for any violations of the laws of war”.hey will be held accountable for any
Putin is a war criminal and should be treated as such
Throughout his long political career, the Russian president has been accused of countless atrocities.
Consultant at the Wayamo Foundation and a Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
On February 24, during a United Nations Security Council meeting, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN was informed that Russia’s invasion of his country had begun. Moments later, Kyslytsya turned to his Russian counterpart Vassily Nebenzia and told him: “There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell.”
There is little doubt that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international law and the UN Charter. It is also a crime. It should be called as such, not only by human rights and justice advocates, but by states.
In recent days, many state representatives, media, and scholars have rightly gone to great lengths to stress the abhorrent behaviour of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But it is almost as if what Putin is doing now is particularly egregious. This invasion is the Russian president’s calling card and war crimes are his signature.
Everything transpiring now in Ukraine, including reports of rocket attacks on civilian buildings, is par for Putin’s course. Days ago, international law scholars Frédéric Mégret and Kevin Jon Heller predicted that Putin would commit the crime of aggression by invading Ukraine. No one should be surprised if the situation gets worse. Putin’s personal biography is littered with the embrace of atrocity crimes and human rights violations.
Putin came to fame and eventually to power on the back of Russia’s 1999-2000 war in Chechnya. In annihilating the breakaway region’s separatist movement, the Russian government deployed horrific levels of violence. Human Rights Watch has documented legions of atrocities, including allegations that Russian forces “indiscriminately and disproportionately bombed and shelled civilian objects” and “ignored their Geneva convention obligations to focus their attacks on combatants”. The West responded meekly to allegations of war crimes. Rather than being condemned, Putin was largely hailed as a leader who promised Russians a better life and the West – better relations, when he replaced Boris Yeltsin as Russian president. That was not to be the case.
In 2008, Putin turned his attention to Georgia and ordered Russian troops – whom he called “peacekeepers” – to invade the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They were not there to keep the peace. While Moscow invoked humanitarian language in arguing that it had a “responsibility to protect” its citizens in both territories, Russian forces indiscriminately attacked civilian targets – a war crime.
In 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine, leading to the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea while also igniting a conflict in Luhansk and Donetsk that has cost an estimated 14,000 lives. During the violence, Russian-backed militants bombed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. Attacks by Russian forces against civilians were commonplace and allegations of murder and torture were reported in detention facilities – referred to as “Europe’s last concentration camps” – run by pro-Russian separatists.
These are just a tiny cross-section of Putin’s crimes that have been documented by human rights and investigation bodies.
The alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Putin’s forces also galvanised the International Criminal Court (ICC), which opened an investigation into atrocities in Georgia in 2016 and completed an examination into those committed in Ukraine in 2020, concluding that there were reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed.
And then there’s Syria. For a decade, Putin has propped up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad despite evidence of atrocities that war crimes investigators believe is the “strongest since the Nuremberg trials”.
Russian air forces have bombed hospitals and attacked civil defence forces working to rescue survivors in the wake of bombing raids. A 2020 report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, found that Russia had bombed civilian areas in violation of the Geneva Conventions. As Kenneth Ward of the Arms Control Association has observed, Russia was also an enabler of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Moscow protected Syria from any judicial scrutiny over its atrocities committed with and on behalf of Assad, by vetoing a referral of Syria to the ICC in 2014.
As if involvement in widespread and systematic international crimes was not enough, Putin has also been accused of ordering the poisonings of Russian dissidents in the UK and the imprisonment of pro-democracy and human rights advocates. He has also been linked to corruption on a scale that amounts to a human rights violation.
None of this is the fault of Russia. Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin. In the past few days, thousands of demonstrators across Russia have taken to the streets to protest the invasion of Ukraine, while “No to War” graffiti has popped up in numerous Russian cities. It is Putin – and his coterie of sycophants and enablers – who must be held to account.
Addressing the Russian president’s actions now is not just about the attacks on Donetsk, Luhansk or the outskirts of Kyiv. It is also about the atrocities he has committed with impunity in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, Chechnya and elsewhere. It is about the atrocities that he has perpetrated and that too many states have turned a blind eye to in the false hope that he could be contained and reasoned with.
As armoured columns drove into Ukraine, Canadian Ambassador to the UN Bob Rae called Putin “a war criminal”. It may be that Putin never faces justice at an international tribunal like the ICC. But the international community should organise the collection and preservation of evidence of his atrocities as they happen, in real-time before the eyes of the world. Maybe one day that evidence can be used to prosecute Putin and his regime. Above all, states should treat Putin for what he is and what he has done: a criminal for whom the laws of war and the norms of humanity mean nothing at all.
violations of the laws of war”. they will be held accountable for any violations of the laws of war”.