Since the onset of the full-scale invasion, the «Tribunal for Putin» initiative has recorded about 48 thousand war crimes, and more than 80% of them were attacks on civilian objects and population. The occupiers repeatedly caused harm to the civilian population by shelling residential buildings, hospitals, schools, churches, cultural monuments, and life support infrastructure facilities. The investigation of these war crimes can last for years, if not decades.

In order to draw the attention of the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Court to the egregious scale of such crimes and initiate the prosecution of the perpetrators, the «Tribunal for Putin» initiative collected and organized data on the shelling of civilians in a large submission to the International Criminal Court. In the submission, human rights defenders describe the facts, systematicity, and scale of the shelling, provide legal qualifications, differentiate the types of shelling, provide an analysis of the shelling incidents documented in the T4P database, and name the responsible Russian commanders who presumably directed the shelling. The authors of the submission together with the documenters will discuss how this data was collected, why such documents are important, and how they can affect the investigation of war crimes committed by the occupiers.

Date and time: 22 August 2023, beginning at 11.00 a.m. Kyiv time

Event format: offline, online broadcast

Venue: «Nakypilo» Press Center, Kharkiv, Mystetstv street, 14

The broadcast will take place at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/@LIVE-kn5ir

Participants of the press conference:

• Maksym Revyakin, expert at the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, co-author of the submission
• Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group
• Nataliya Yesina, war crimes documenter in Sumy oblast, representative of the Northern Human Rights Group
• Iryna Brynosh, war crimes documenter in Odesa oblast, representative of the Odesa regional branch of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine.

Moderator: Sviatoslav Ruban, war crimes documenter, informational coordinator at the Center for Civil Liberties

This event is the first in a series of submissions to the International Criminal Court by the «Tribunal for Putin» initiative. The next event will take place on 28 August 2023, at 11.00 a.m. Kyiv time, at the following address: 8/16 Bohdan Khmelnytskyy street, Kyiv, 01001 (UKRINFORM). Event topic: «Genocide in Mariupol. Legal justification of the international crime».

The submission was prepared with the support of the US Embassy in Ukraine.

Background: The global initiative «Tribunal for Putin» (T4P) was created in response to the full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation in February 2022. The participants of the initiative document the events which contain elements of the crimes established in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) in all regions of the country under attack. The initiative actively works at the international level in order to use the existing mechanisms of the UN, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the EU, and the International Criminal Court to prevent such brutal crimes and bring perpetrators to justice. The initiative was founded by the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, Center for Civil Liberties, and Ukrainian Helsinki Union of Human Rights.