Human rights lawyers, who are working with Ukraine's public prosecutor, are preparing a war crimes dossier to submit to the International Criminal Court (ICC) where it would accuse Russia of deliberately causing starvation during the 18-month-long conflict which started in 2022, media reports said.
The aim is to document instances where the Russian invaders used hunger as a weapon of war, providing evidence for the ICC to launch the first prosecution of its kind that could indict the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, The Guardian reported.
Yousuf Khan, a senior lawyer with law firm Global Rights Compliance, told the UK news outlet, “The weaponisation of food has taken place in three phases,” starting with the initial invasion where Ukrainian cities were besieged and food supplies cut.
Among the incidents documented was when 20 civilians were killed in Chernihiv in the early morning of 16 March 2022, when Russian fragmentation bombs exploded outside a supermarket in the city where Ukrainians were queueing for bread and food.
Investigators are also focusing on the siege of Mariupol, Khan added as quoted by the newspaper.
The second phase includes the destruction of food and water supplies as well as energy sources across Ukraine during the fighting, which the lawyer described as “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”.
Such attacks, Khan argued, were “not crimes of result but crimes of intent” because “if you are taking out objects that civilians need, like energy infrastructure in the dead of winter, there is a foreseeability to your actions”, reports The Guardian.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine recently told world leaders in the UN General Assembly that alongside its ongoing nuclear threat, Russia is also weaponising essentials like global food and energy markets, and using them “not only against our country, but all of yours as well”.
Since the start of the war, Ukrainian ports in the Black and Azov seas were blocked by Russia and its ports on the Danube River targeted by drones and missiles, he said.
“It is a clear Russian attempt to weaponise the food shortage on the global market, in exchange for recognition of some, if not all, of the captured territories.”