While conversation on Russia-Ukraine war shifts to discussion of concession Ukraine should or should not make to establish some sort of peace, the count of alleged Russian war crimes keeps growing. Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland are involved in documenting war crimes cases and sharing their findings with international courts, but not all are willing to prosecute under universal jurisdiction in their countries. Ukraine is dealing both with the legal system’s unpreparedness to process over 150,000 cases and the challenge of doing all that during war.
By Ondřej Plevák | Euractiv.cz, Yana Sliemzina | Gwara Media Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | Euractiv.pl, Natália Silenská | Euractiv.sk
Czechia
Shortly after the Russian invasion in February 2022, Czech authorities began investigating war crimes in Ukraine and collecting evidence and testimony from Ukrainian refugees.
As Deník N media reported in 2023, Czech detectives spoke to many refugees who provided evidence of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women, of murders, or of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia. Most of the information comes from areas where fighting has taken place.
As Euractiv.cz has now learned from the High Public Prosecutor’s Office in Prague, Czech police are continuing to investigate suspicions that war crimes were committed on Ukrainian territory, regardless of which side committed them.
“Individual findings or evidence are being evaluated, including in cooperation with foreign authorities, to confirm whether or not a war crime has been committed, because every report of a suspected war crime does not mean that it happened, or that the way the fighting was conducted was in violation of international humanitarian law,” explained prosecutor Martin Bílý, who said that the process is nevertheless very lengthy.
According to Bílý, the Czech findings can then go to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, or to a foreign state if the person in question is located there. Criminal proceedings can also take place directly in the Czech Republic if the appropriate conditions are met.
One such case was concluded this January. “As part of the clarification of suspected war crimes committed in Ukraine, a Czech citizen was finally convicted of the crime of plunder in the area of war operations in conjunction with the crime of service in foreign armed forces,” Bílý said. He was referring to the case of former soldier Filip Siman, who is now serving an eight-year prison sentence.
Czechs are active elsewhere too. In 2023, a group of Czech military police officers directly reinforced an ICC team, which periodically operates both in Ukraine and in the Netherlands.
The Czech footprint also appears in Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) missions. Veronika Bílková, an expert in international humanitarian and criminal law from the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague, has participated in four such missions.
The first two focused on non-compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law and the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict in Ukraine. The third mission focused on the deportation of children and the fourth on the detention of civilians by the Russian Federation.
As Bílková said in an interview with the server HlídacíPes.org in the summer of 2024, although the reports from the missions received a fair amount of attention elsewhere in the world, “they did not arouse much interest in the Czech Republic.”
Unfortunately there is no reliable data available to show the level of Czech interest in the topic of war crimes in Ukraine.
“We have never asked [respondents] about this, and I don't know that anyone else in Czechia has asked about this,” Jaromír Mazák, an analyst at STEM, a sociological research institute, told Euractiv.cz.
“We have had questions like, ‘who is to blame for the war’, where two-thirds (of respondents) blame Russia for the war, but the same people often say that the conflict should end now and Russia should keep the eastern parts of Ukraine. But the view of Russian crimes, how to hold (the culprits) accountable, or even the belief that these crimes are happening there in the first place, we haven't examined that,” Mazák said, referring to the long-running STEM surveys.
On the political level, however, the topic of war crimes in Ukraine comes up quite often. “Russia is consistently committing war crimes, Russia is stalling negotiations and doing everything it can to ensure that the killing continues,” Czech President Petr Pavel said about the recent attack on the town of Sumy. The government of Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS, ECR), especially Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský (independent), is also using the same rhetoric.
The strongest opposition parties, on the other hand, do not comment much on the subject. Both the far-right SPD (ESN) and the populist ANO (Patriots) movement are more lenient towards Russia, even though the former prime minister and head of the latter party, Andrej Babiš, declared in January 2023 that Russian President Vladimir Putin belongs before a war tribunal.
Ukraine
On April 22, commenting on Russians executing Ukrainian prisoners of war (PoWs), Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Ombudsman, urged the international community to “condemn Russia’s actions as war crimes and acts of genocide” and “help Ukraine to document war crimes.”
“The silence empowers the aggressor,” Lubinets said.
The ombudsman’s remarks echo those of numerous officials, lawyers, human rights experts, and journalists from Ukraine, spoken since 2014 and increasingly urgent since Russia's full-scale invasion.
European leaders’ response to Russian war crimes varied. While Viktor Orbán said Putin is not a war criminal “to him,” officials in other European countries condemned uncovered atrocities and responded to Ukraine’s appeal to join efforts to hold Russia accountable.
Six EU member states—Poland, Slovak Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania—and Europol are participating in a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) into alleged core international crimes committed during the war.
JIT began its work just three weeks after February 24, 2022, and now receives support from the ICC and, to date, the United States Department of Justice. JIT experts have interviewed 4,000 witnesses, and the evidence databases they are working with contain over 3,700 files submitted by 16 countries.
Olha Kotsiuruba, Senior Legal Advisor at Civil Network OPORA, told Gwara Media that the work of their Poland branch (OPORA in Poland) would not have been possible without cooperation from the Polish government. The organisation is collecting testimonies from refugees who have survived Russian war crimes.
The locations of refugees’ residences are not public, so to talk to them, OPORA experts have to be in contact with local voivodeships. They would then inform refugees about OPORA coming to the area—and inform OPORA about where to go.
The organisation’s Polish branch, established in 2022, has interviewed over 2,400 survivors who either remained in Poland or passed through the country’s refugee centers. These individuals included those crossing Ukraine’s border and those fleeing Russian-occupied territories via Russia and Europe. The collected testimonies have been shared with both Polish law enforcement and Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office and security services.
To efficiently investigate alleged war criminals across the globe, however, countries have to have legislation establishing universal jurisdictions, says Kotsiuruba. Then, they’ll be able to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed in Ukraine in their countries.
Poland is one of the countries that’s wrestling with legislation on universal jurisdiction. Those who oppose it, according to Kotsiuruba, usually say that there’s no legal obligation to do it and that there’s no justification to spend money on the judicial process.
Only a few cases of foreign courts opening proceedings into Russian war crimes are known—and even fewer of those have been brought to the verdict. For example, the JIT, having collected many testimonies, helped the Lithuanian Prosecution Service issue notices of suspicion in absentia against six suspects. The Court in Finland sentenced a life sentence to a Russian for committing war crimes at the beginning of the war — in 2014.
“If more countries now start at least investigating Russian war crimes and open specific cases into actions of specific individuals, that will already signify international support in holding Russia accountable,” Olha Kotsiuruba said.
“If there’s no cascade of cases across Europe, in which these [investigations] will open, and [countries] start doing something, that will be no clear signal for Russia. They’re collecting [evidence], sure. It’s been three years, and certain questions arise. Who will be held accountable?”
For non-governmental organizations on the ground in Ukraine — those who talk to survivors of Russian torture, detention, rape, or other crimes of the Russian military — European funding and knowledge sharing are often the best help.
For Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHRPG), Tamila Bespala says to Gwara Media, that aid of Dignity—Danish Institute Against Torture was “very involved.”
They both helped with supporting survivors of Russian war crimes and trained Ukrainian psychologists, legal experts, and medical specialists on how to use Istanbul Protocol guidelines to interview people so that their accounts would then be accepted as evidence in further criminal proceedings.
The most difficult war crime to document is the Russian shelling of civilian buildings, Bespala says. Kharkiv and Kharkiv region, where KHRPG main office is located, is attacked incessantly — and there are simply not enough experts to conduct all “military-technical forensic assessments that would prove Russian responsibility for shelling.”
Not because Russian responsibility for shelling is unclear — but because there are simply too many an instance of these attacks. “For most cases, we’ve collected relevant data and are now waiting for better times,” Bespala admits. Without those assessments, she says, these cases cannot be submitted to international courts.
As of April 2025, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine has records of 159,000 cases of alleged Russian war crimes. All of them have to be investigated while the war is still ongoing and under the legislative base that is often unprepared to signify the crime properly.
Zera Kozlyieva from Truth Hounds, an organisation that investigates and documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, says to Gwara Media that they’ve been sharing cases with legal, judicial organizations in European countries, e.g. Netherlands, to lessen the pressure on Ukraine’s legal system. Collaboration like that also helped to cover “legislative gaps” in Ukraine’s Criminal Code for the investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially so before Ukraine ratified the Istanbul Convention. “For instance, (these countries) could better protect survivors, often have more expertise,” Kozlyieva argued.
The main reason for engaging foreign legal organizations to investigate Russian war crimes doesn’t have to do with Ukrainian legislation or Ukraine's legal system's intense caseload.
“If [the court in another country] makes a verdict, it’d be perceived as more objective by the international community than when the verdict is made in Ukraine—because we remain a side of this conflict,” Kozylieva said.
The expertise of foreign lawyers and human rights experts, while helpful, was sometimes brought to Ukraine’s human rights NGOs without understanding the challenge of documenting war crimes in one's own country, during the war, in places that are not safe.
“They often tell us about ideal things that are a priori impossible,” Tamila Bespala stressed. For instance, it’s unfeasible to establish “proper conditions” for interviewing survivors of Russian war crimes in a small village in Izium in the Kharkiv Oblast that has neither security nor infrastructure to comply with all foreign colleagues’ recommendations.
News about future “peace negotiations” or things like humiliating—for people in Ukraine—meeting in the White House’s Oval Office between Zelenskyy, Trump, and JD Vance, impact the willingness of survivors to share their accounts, Olha Kotsiuruba shares.
“If the opening of the Register of Damages (funded by the Council of Europe) had a positive effect because everyone understands that while there’s no compensation for now, something is being done, these things have the opposite effect. After news like these, we might have fewer respondents in some refugee center. People are disappointed, which means it’s harder to get through to them that it’s necessary to document (their accounts of surviving war crimes), that sooner or later it will be important.”
All three experts Gwara talked to agreed that Russian war crimes are not discussed enough in public discourses of Europe.
Kotsuriuba noted the lack of attention given to the reason Ukrainian refugees live in the hosting countries and not at home, attributing one of the reasons to the fact that not many journalists are ready to come to refugee centers outside Warsaw and hear people’s stories of survival.
Bespala said, “We have to scream about those things — but there’s not enough advocacy, even today. I think in Europe, they don’t want to hear or don’t want to believe that the Russian war crimes are really happening. They have another reality there, and sometimes even when they come here, and you show (the consequences of Russian attacks) to them, talk (about Russian war crimes), they still think we’re imagining things.”
Poland
Poland's support for the creation of a special tribunal to investigate Russian crimes in Ukraine has been unwavering. This position has been consistent across both the previous conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government and the current pro-EU administration led by Donald Tusk, demonstrating a sustained commitment since the idea's inception.
“Prosecuting the perpetrators of international crimes committed in and against Ukraine, particularly the crime of aggression, is essential to demonstrate that international law does not allow for impunity, and that individual criminal responsibility can also apply to state leaders,” PiS Foreign Ministry stated in March 2023.
“It was the act of Russian aggression that unleashed an unimaginable scale of other international crimes. Leaving the perpetrators of this unprecedented crime unpunished, while at the same time seeking accountability for other crimes, would result in injustice and undermine the fundamental principles of international law,” the ministry said.
It highlighted the importance of preserving evidence for the successful prosecution of international crimes, particularly aggression. They expressed their support for initiatives that aid this goal, specifically the establishment of the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression.
Various institutions and organizations in Poland are documenting the Russian crimes in Ukraine. The Pilecki Institute has established the Raphael Lemkin Center for Documenting Russian Crimes in Ukraine.
“The Lemkin Center collects individual, first-hand testimonies from civilians. Based on these accounts, an anonymized archive is being created, documenting crimes committed by Russian forces on Ukrainian territory,” it told Euractiv.pl in a comment.
Since its establishment, the Lemkin Center “has collected around 1,600 testimonies in various formats—written and audiovisual,” it said.
“It has also documented a significant number of accounts from individuals who suffered or fled the war and were located outside the borders of Ukraine and Poland.”
The Center has recently published a report “We do not attack civilians…” The Green Corridor in Lypivka as a trap set by the Russian occupying forces, documenting witness accounts of the Russian attack on a civilian evacuation column from the village of Lypivka in the Kyiv region of Ukraine on 12 March 2022.
“The Lemkin Center is committed to holding the Russian military accountable for crimes against civilians in Ukraine, ensuring the world remembers the conflict, and developing strategies to prevent future Russian aggression against any other nation,” the center said.
Relations with Kyiv were described as "good, even close" by the center, noting that Ukrainian Ambassador Vasyl Bodnar invited Director Krzysztof Ruchniewicz to a working meeting. Also, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications for European Integration, Andriy Nadzhos, visited the center’s main office a month ago.
The Center emphasized that, as a research institute, it does not have the authority to press charges or prosecute anyone. “However, we work closely with the Polish prosecutor’s office, to which we provide, among other things, information obtained from witnesses about possible war crimes committed in Ukraine,” it noted.
Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a frequent topic in Polish political discourse, it is typically framed in terms of the potential threat to Poland rather than documenting and prosecuting Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Despite harbouring negative sentiments towards Russia, the Polish populace has displayed a surprising lack of interest in probing Russian war crimes in Ukraine. This disinterest is glaringly evident in the conspicuous absence of the topic from both traditional and social media landscapes.
Nonetheless, Russia and Ukraine remained a recurring theme throughout the ongoing presidential campaign.
"Russia typically comes up in the campaign when someone accuses someone else of being a Russian agent, and Ukraine usually appears when scaremongering about Ukrainian refugees," noted political image expert Dr. Mirosław Oczkoś in an interview with Euractiv.pl.
He highlighted that right-wing parties, such as Law and Justice (PiS) and Confederation, are incorporating these themes into their campaigns. He gave examples of former Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak’s (PiS) comment about Ukrainians driving “luxury cars,” and Confederation MPs’ alarming claims that Ukrainians would receive priority medical treatment in Poland.
Earlier this month, Błaszczak suggested in an interview with the public Polish Radio that funding previously allocated for child benefits for Ukrainians should be reallocated to the healthcare system. He argued that while Poles initially welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms, the situation has changed. "Today, we see the luxury cars Ukrainians are driving," he remarked, implying that the financial assistance is no longer necessary.
“So we can see that both Russia and Ukraine are being used to frighten Poles,” Oczkoś concludes.
Slovakia
As a country directly bordering Ukraine, the Slovak Republic has been involved in investigating Russian war crimes. According to the Presidium of the Police Force, Slovak law enforcement authorities conducted interviews with witnesses who had crossed the Slovak-Ukrainian border.
“Procedural actions were carried out based on an agreement, adopted at the international level, to establish a specialized investigative team. The police cannot further comment on individual procedural actions,” the communications and prevention department told Euractiv.sk.
Several other Slovak institutions and NGOs also took part in the documentation and investigation process. Among them was the Human Rights League (HRL), which worked in cooperation and coordination with the General Prosecutor’s Office and the former National Criminal Agency (NAKA).
“Alongside our core activity — which is providing legal information to displaced persons from Ukraine — we actively sought out witnesses and victims of war crimes and informed them about the possibility of giving testimony to Slovak law enforcement authorities,” said Barbora Moravčíková, HRL’s Chief Legal Aid Coordinator, for Euractiv.sk.
If someone expressed interest in testifying, the organisation collected the necessary information about them and, with their consent, passed it on to NAKA. HRL also helped coordinate interview appointments, provided interpreters, and supported victims and witnesses in preparing for their testimony.
The Integration Centre in Košice region, which borders Ukraine, also informed people about the possibility of testifying to prosecutors. Denys Ladin, a first contact staff member, explained that the centre provided information about where such testimony could be submitted.
“There was also a campaign by the Prosecutor General of Ukraine – a video in Ukrainian that circulated in Slovakia as part of a campaign by the Slovak Prosecutor’s Office. This also included field visits by prosecutors across Slovakia,” he told Euractiv.sk.
Slovakia’s approach to the war in Ukraine can be split into two phases — before October 2023, under the pro-Western and pro-Ukrainian governments of Eduard Heger (Demokrati) and Ľudovít Ódor (PS), and from October 2023 to the present, under the pro-Russian government of Robert Fico (Smer-SD).
The previous administrations provided symbolic and material support to Ukraine — among other things, they were among the first to supply MiG-29 fighter jets. They also strongly condemned Russian war crimes and personally visited sites in Ukraine where atrocities had occurred. Ministry and state authority communication departments openly flagged Kremlin disinformation about attacks in Ukraine, including the massacres in Bucha and Irpin.
These communication efforts ceased with the arrival of Fico’s government. While the prime minister calls for peace and compliance with international law — acknowledging that Russia violated it by invading — he often adopts pro-Kremlin narratives or avoids commenting on such events altogether.
For example, regarding the Russian massacre in Bucha, Fico said, “We don't have enough evidence to convict anyone,” even though Russian denials have been repeatedly debunked by survivors and numerous investigative teams and media outlets, including Bellingcat, the NYT, and the BBC.
He used the same “lack of information” argument after a recent Russian attack on civilians in the city of Sumy — making him one of the few leaders who did not condemn it. The massacre was condemned even by members of his own cabinet who typically lean pro-Russian, including Foreign Affairs Minister Juraj Blanár. President Peter Pellegrini also condemned the massacre.
There is a lack of public opinion polling in Slovakia specifically focused on the perception of Russian war crimes. However, available data suggests that Slovaks are divided in their views on responsibility for the war and on their attitudes toward Russia.
According to the GLOBSEC Trends 2024 survey, 51% of Slovaks do not place the primary blame for the war on Russia, but either blame the West or even Ukraine. Only 41% of respondents identified Russia as the main culprit. At the same time, 49% of Slovaks see Russia as a security threat. While this is more than in 2022 (when the figure was just 21%), the trend has been declining since 2022.
Experts attribute these results to the strong presence of pro-Russian actors and narratives in Slovakia — such as the Russian Embassy in Bratislava, which is the most active diplomatic mission on Facebook in the EU — as well as other factors. Amongst them is the low trust in the mainstream media, poor state of educational system, rhetoric of leading (now governing) politicians, and the pro-Russian sentiment among parts of the population, which has historical roots.
The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea.
