Ukrainian Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko has said he is convinced that the Russian leadership will appear before the International Criminal Court in The Hague for annexation of Crimea and armed aggression against Ukraine.
“Ukraine is at war with Russia. It is fighting not only at the front, but in fact from scratch we started a legal war with Russia in 2014 without any experience, without sufficient financial resources… We began to file a large number of cases recording aggression and war crimes of the Russian Federation and its officials. Now five large cases by Ukraine against Russia are heard at the European Court of Human Rights,” he said at a congress of the People’s Front Party in Kyiv on Saturday.
Petrenko said that a number of lawsuits had been filed with the International Court of Justice and also expressed the conviction that “this road will end with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.”
He recalled that Ukraine had provided its legal position to the ECHR “which completely destroys any counterargument from the Russian Federation.”
“The Russian Federation committed crimes against Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and massively violated human rights. It actually carries out armed aggression in Donbas, kills Ukrainians, destroys property and in fact violates all human rights provided for by the [European] Convention [on Human Rights],” he said.
Petrenko also noted that investigators and prosecutors were close to ending the investigation initiated by Ukraine into the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
