Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova and her office have already opened over 8,000 criminal investigations related to the country's war against Russia and identified over 500 suspects, including Russian ministers, military commanders and propagandists
The first woman to serve as Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Venediktova speaks with steely resolve and occasional humor, and approaches her task with a relentless work ethic.
“The main functions of the law are to protect and to compensate. I hope that we can do it, because now it’s just beautiful words, no more rule of law,” Venediktova says. “It’s very beautiful words. I want them to work.”On a Tuesday morning, Venediktova marches up to a thick line of refugees waiting in the chill sun to register at a district administration building in Lviv. Her security detail, armed and dressed in black, hovers as she stepped into the crowd of women and children.
Prosecutors ply the line of refugees at Lviv’s centre each day, looking for witnesses and victims willing to submit a statement. Some stories are not told. People have come too far, they’re too tired. Or scared. Their infants are fussing. They have places to go. “We need proof for them to be punished,” she says. “I am lucky. I am still here to talk about what happened to me.”Shortly before noon, Venediktova leaves the refugee centre and climbs into a black SUV headed to the Polish border, an hour or so north. A police escort speeds her through a landscape of rough houses and the wintery bones of trees, past old cemeteries, rusted children’s swings, the shining domes of churches.
She has taken on high-level legal advisers from the U.K. and is working with the United States and the European Union to build mobile investigative teams with international expertise. Clint Williamson, a former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, helps oversee that effort, which is funded by the U.S. State Department.
Verstiouk says she spent a week sheltering at Mariupol’s drama theatre. She left the day before bombs killed an estimated 300 people there.“Why did Russia attack me?” she says. “It destroyed my city - for what? For what? Who will give me an answer to that, and how do I go on living?” She has pitched herself as a reformer. Thousands of prosecutors have been fired for failing to meet standards of integrity and professionalism, and so she’s got an office that is not fully staffed preparing war crimes cases against what she predicts will be 1,000 defendants.
Venediktova also has encouraged ordinary citizens to help by collecting information with their smartphones and submitting it online to warcrimes.gov.ua. Five weeks into the war there were over 6,000 submissions. He sends his incident report to the International Criminal Court and uploads it to Venediktova’s database.
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