Editorial of the “World”. There are sometimes in the wars a battle more bloody than the others, a more cruel or massive massacre than the precedents that provokes an electroshock on public opinion. It happens that this event, by the symbolic weight of its horror, constitutes a turning point in the conflict. The discovery, Sunday, April 3, hundreds of corpses of Ukrainian civilians after the departure of the Russian army of villages around kyiv, including that of Bantcha, should be of those.
For almost forty days, the images of civilians terré in cellars, bombed hospitals and soldiers killed in combat are part of the media of Europeans, virtual witnesses of the war that Russia leads to Ukraine, on their own continent. Those who appeared on their screens Sunday have taken a new landing, that of barbarism: images of civilians executed with a ball in the neck, sometimes hands bound in the back, or slaughtered on their bicycle, images Calcinated bodies after being screened with bullets, shared pits images overflowing with corpses. Images of carnage and devastation.
These are images of war crimes. Moscow, as might be expected, denied all the responsibility of his troops in these abuses and claimed that it was a “provocation” orchestrated by the Ukrainian authorities for the Western media. The bad faith of the Kremlin in this conflict and his art consommated lies leave little room for the credibility of this denial, contradicted by the testimonies collected by journalists on the spot and by the organization Human Rights Watch.
Indignation is no longer sufficient
Many Western leaders, including the President Emmanuel Macron and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, expressed their indignation Sunday – with the exception of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who, widely re-elected for a fourth term, appointed President Ukrainian. Volodymyr Zelensky as one of those who tried to hinder his victory. But indignation is no longer enough.
Since the beginning of the war, on February 24, the Attorney General of Ukraine, Iryna Veediktova, works with its services in the collection of evidence for the constitution of war crimes complaints and crimes against humanity. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the British Karim Khan, opened an investigation in this direction and has already went to Ukraine.
It is crucial that European states, in particular, give these investigative work and a collection of evidence of the increased means, especially in personnel, so that those who make the decisions in Moscow and execute the orders know what They expose themselves. International justice must be able to be rendered in realistic deadlines, without the culprits can flow peaceful days. If stop mandates can be launched, they must be without delay, including at the highest level.
On another plan, the European Union will examine this week, in response to the macabre discovered on Sunday, a fifth part of sanctions. They will probably focus on imports of coal and oil. Will it be necessary to wait for the discovery of new hinges in Maroupol to go to those of the gas?
The slaughter massacre imposes a turning point to the Europeans: to abandon this pitiful gradation of the response and counter the murderous offensive of Vladimir Putin by a real counter-offensive of solidarity with kyiv.