By Galina Korol | 2024-03-01

KYIV -- Bulgarian authorities have announced plans to launch criminal proceedings against the Kremlin for war crimes in Ukraine, joining a growing list of countries investigating Russia's transgressions.

To do that, Bulgaria is writing amendments to its criminal code, Bulgarian Justice Minister Atanas Slavov told Euractiv on February 8.

"Our goal is for Bulgaria to be able to launch criminal proceedings, exercising universal jurisdiction, for the committed war crimes and crimes against peace and humanity in Ukraine," Slavov said.

"This will be an act of support for international efforts to investigate Russian aggression in Ukraine."

In the future, the changes to the criminal code will enable Bulgaria to prosecute the military and political leadership who ordered the military operations in Ukraine, added Slavov.

"It is crucial that Bulgaria can initiate proceedings for war crimes in Ukraine ... given the large number of Ukrainian refugees in the country. They can testify," Slavov said.

Russian crimes

Universal jurisdiction refers to the principle that a national court may prosecute individuals for serious crimes against international law, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Of the 21 countries investigating Russia's crimes in Ukraine, 14 belong to the European Union (EU), Eurojust President Ladislav Hamran noted during a visit to Lithuania in January 2023.

Eurojust is the EU's hub for judicial cooperation.

Of the remainder, four countries -- including Ukraine -- are in Europe but do not belong to the EU, and the other three are the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

"Many countries are actually providing legal support in the investigation," Oleksii Izhak, a department director at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, told Kontur.

"They have allocated funds and sent their own investigators who have experience in investigating war crimes and understand how it's done, and now all the evidence is being collected," Izhak said.

"It's great that investigations like this are being conducted because on the one hand they ease the burden or can ease the burden on our [Ukrainian] system," Andrii Yakovlev, managing partner of the Umbrella law firm and a human rights specialist, told Kontur.

"And if they cooperate with our [Ukrainian] law enforcement agencies, that will make it possible to formulate a single set of investigation standards in all the [countries] where these investigations will be conducted. And most important, that will create the infrastructure for enforcing verdicts."

Consequences

The consequences of the prosecution of war crimes should not be underestimated, say observers.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague in March 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the unlawful deportation of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia amid the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine.

Although Putin has yet to be delivered to The Hague, the significance of the warrant for his arrest should not be underestimated, Yakovlev said.

"All the countries that ratified the Rome Statute bound themselves to enforcing that decision, and consequently, Putin won't go to those countries. For example, he didn't go to the BRICS meeting [held in Sandton, South Africa, last August] even though he was planning to because the arrest warrant stopped him," Yakovlev said, referring to the bloc named for members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The warrant is also "rather effectively helping to reduce child deportations... we know that although the process [of child repatriations to Ukraine] is complicated, it's moving forward," he said.

"I don't know if Putin will be convicted while he's alive as [former Serbian president Slobodan] Milošević was or posthumously like [Adolf] Hitler, but it will happen," Eduard Bagirov, a rights activist and director of the Protection of the Rights of Citizens of Ukraine, told Kontur.

The first payment for Russia's aggressive war will be financial, said Bagirov.

"I'm sure that soon -- by 2025 at the latest -- a legal mechanism will be created and the assets that are now frozen will be transferred to Ukraine. Then Ukraine will use those funds to rebuild everything that the occupiers damaged and destroyed, while for Russia this will spell financial collapse," Bagirov said.

"Undemocratic regimes always lose," Yakovlev said.

"The free world always attracts talented people, and at this point the free world has prevailed, so I have no reason to believe that things will happen differently in our situation."