The Justice Ministers of the EU Member States met in Council in Brussels on Tuesday 5 March.
Over lunch, they welcomed the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Andriy Kostin, to discuss the fight against impunity in the context of Russian aggression. Discussions focused on developments in prosecutions and efforts to combat impunity at EU and Member State level, since the Council first addressed this issue in March 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion.
At the end of the meeting, Mr Kostin expressed his satisfaction at what he described as a “historic” meeting in its aim to unite in order to do justice “to all the victims, all the survivors of this war of aggression”.
“It is important for the European Commission and the European States to show that we are united with Ukraine and that this means that we do not accept impunity”, added the Belgian Minister of Justice, Paul Van Tigchelt.
At the end of the debates, it was above all the cooperation with the International Criminal Court that was praised. And with good reason, “During our meeting, we received an official statement from the ICC concerning new arrest warrants for two military commanders from the Russian Federation”, Mr Kostin announced.
An established international partnership. On Tuesday, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Sergei Ivanovich Kobylash, a lieutenant-general in the Russian armed forces, and Viktor Kinolayevich Sokolov, an admiral in the Russian navy. The two men, who at the time of the events were respectively Commander of the Air Force and Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, are wanted for alleged crimes committed in Ukraine between at least 10 October 2022 and 9 March 2023.
They are both presumed responsible for various war crimes, which allegedly consisted of attacks against civilian objects and excessive accidental damage to civilians or civilian objects, as well as crimes against humanity, through the practice of inhumane acts.
“I am very grateful to the ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, and his team, not only those working on the ground in Ukraine, but also those working on an almost daily basis with our prosecutors in The Hague, because we are one and the same team”, said Mr Kostin, who also recalled the many months of hard work to provide “thousands of pieces of evidence and information”.
“Today, we have reached a new milestone”, he enthused.
The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, and Minister Van Tigchelt reiterated that if justice is to be “done in time” in Ukraine by prosecuting the aggressors, this responsibility falls both on the aggressed State and on the EU, which, through the European judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust - which hosts the International Coordination Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression and heads a dedicated joint investigation team - has been able to coordinate the collection of evidence and data and the investigation of the crime of aggression in collaboration with the International Criminal Court and the United States.
“We are preparing a dossier to submit to a tribunal and we will try again to make progress at the next meeting of the working group in Vienna, on 7 March, on the subject of such a tribunal”, said Mr Reynders.
While the European Commissioner affirmed the EU’s determination to continue moving forward, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General has expressed his complete satisfaction for the time being: “I will return from Brussels with the feeling of the very strong unity of the whole civilised world and of all our partners and friends in the European Union on our path to ensure justice”. (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)