EU sets up center for investigating russian crimes in Ukraine

The European Union's judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust, is setting up a new center to support efforts to gather evidence of the crime of russian aggression in Ukraine. The new center should be operational by the summer.

The database will contain the most important evidence of russian aggression. It will be a part of the current support structure of the Joint Investigation Team that ensures optimal coordination between investigations into war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and crimes of aggression.

Eurojust also plans to launch a central database of evidence on major international crimes (CICED). Technical solutions for the secure transmission and secure storage of evidence are currently being developed. An advanced analysis module is upcoming in the coming months.

The Eurojust representative Myroslava Krasnoborova stated russian leaders will be held accountable for their crimes.

"The impunity for this supreme international crime should never be accepted",  she said.

Krasnoborova said Ukrainian authorities already are investigating the crime of aggression.  Ukrainian prosecutors have registered more than 71,000 alleged war crimes since the war began. She said 99 cases have been sent to courts and 26 verdicts have been reached.

These war crimes include cases of

• torturing,
• murdering,
• raping,
• migration,
• assaults on civil structures.

Andriy Kostin, the Prosecutor General, said how the discussion about the tribunal over the russian federation changed. In September 2022, no state officially supported the launching of a special tribunal over russia. Currently, more and more countries are supporting the idea, and soon an international investigation center for the crime of aggression will be established.