US: Russia committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine

By Karl Ritter & Geir Moulson

The Associated Press

MUNICH—The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday, insisting that “justice must be served” to the perpetrators.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris said the international community has both a moral and a strategic interest in pursuing those crimes, pointing to a danger of other authoritarian governments taking advantage if international rules are undermined.

“Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population—gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape, and deportation,” Harris said. She also cited “execution-style killings, beatings, and electrocution.”

The Biden administration formally determined last March that Russian troops had committed war crimes in Ukraine and said it would work with others to prosecute offenders. A determination of crimes against humanity goes a step further, indicating that attacks against civilians are being carried out in a widespread and systematic manner.

“Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people, from Ukraine to Russia, including children,” Harris said. “They have cruelly separated children from their families.”

She also pointed to the attack in mid-March on a theater in the strategic port city of Mariupol where civilians had been sheltering, which killed hundreds, and to the images of civilians’ bodies left on the streets of Bucha after the Russian pullback from the Kyiv area last spring.

Harris said that as a former prosecutor and former head of California’s Department of Justice, she knows “the importance of gathering facts and hold - ing them up against the law.”

“In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt,” she said. “These are crimes against humanity.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who also was attending the Munich conference, said in a statement issued as Harris spoke that “we reserve crimes against humanity determinations for the most egregious crimes.”

The new determination underlines the “staggering extent” of suffering inflicted on Ukrainian civilians and “also reflects the deep commitment of the United States to holding members of Russia’s forces and other Russian officials accountable for their atrocities,” he said.

In an address to his country on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv this week had gotten “strong signals from our partners, specific agreements on the inevitability of holding Russia accountable for aggression, for terror against Ukraine and its people.”

“Every Russian attack … on every corner of our state will have concrete legal consequences for the terrorist state,” Zelenskyy said, citing attacks not just in the past year of war but dating back to 2014, when fighting with Russiabacked separatists in eastern Ukraine first broke out.

The president did not refer specifically to Harris’ remarks or name any countries that had provided agreements on Russian accountability.

Russia’s nearly yearlong invasion of Ukraine, has dominated discussions at the Munich conference, an annual gathering of security and defense officials from around the world. Harris told the assembled participants: “Let us all agree—on behalf of all the victims, both known and unknown, justice must be served.”

“Such is our moral interest,” she said. “We also have a significant strategic interest.”

“The concern that we have now is, based on information we have, that they’re considering providing lethal support,” Blinken told CBS’s “Face the Nation” shortly after he met with Wang. “And we’ve made very clear to them that that could cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.”

In their first in-person talks since the uproar over the balloon, Blinken told Wang that the craft’s entry into US airspace was an “irresponsible act that must never again occur” and warned China against helping Russia evade sanctions linked to the invasion of Ukraine, State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

Blinken’s remarks—and comments by Wang earlier in the day sharply criticizing the US over the balloon, Taiwan and recently introduced export controls—highlighted just how strained relations remain. Despite statements from both nations’ leaders that they want to stabilize the relationship, the disagreements made clear the US and China are nowhere near restoring normalcy to the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.

Saturday’s meeting took place on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. Wang lashed out at the US beforehand, calling President Joe Biden’s decision to shoot down the balloon over American airspace and the heightened state of alert “incomprehensible and almost hysterical.”

The airship, which China said was a weather device blown off course, led Blinken to cancel a planned trip to Beijing. An F-22 fighter shot the balloon down off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4. Since the balloon was identified and shot down, the US and China have traded accusations over global espionage efforts.

The US said the balloon over the US was part of a fleet of spy devices directed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. China countered that the US was overreacting and had flown similar airships over China—claims the White House has rejected.

“The Secretary made clear the United States will not stand for any violation of our sovereignty, and that the PRC’s high altitude surveillance balloon program—which has intruded into the air space of over 40 countries across 5 continents—has been exposed to the world,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement, referring to China by its formal name, the People’s Republic of China.

The US is consulting with allies and partners at the Munich conference and elsewhere, including sharing its concern that China may be giv - ing more tangible support to Russia’s military than before, according to a person familiar with the administration’s thinking.

Earlier at the conference, Wang said China would release a new peace proposal for Ukraine in the coming days that would be in keeping with previous efforts by President Xi Jinping. He condemned attacks on nuclear power stations.

“We oppose attacks on nuclear power stations, attacks on civilian nuclear facilities,” Wang said. “We have to work to prevent nuclear proliferation and nuclear disasters.”

The initial response was cautious. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock welcomed China’s idea but said “a just peace cannot mean that the aggressor gets rewarded.”

As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, “China is obliged to use its influence for global peace,” Baerbock said. A Russian troop withdrawal from Ukraine is a condition of any peace deal, she said.

Asked about Wang’s peace proposal, a US official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity said that Beijing appears to be trying to publicly promote peace and stability while covertly supporting Russia’s aggression against its neighbor.

State Department officials continue to say that Blinken’s trip to China will be rescheduled when conditions are right, but haven’t identified those conditions or potential timing.

The acrimony around the spy balloon—fueled in part by Republican criticism of the Biden administration—has pushed off any possibility to put ties on a more stable footing. Biden and Xi met late last year seeking to put a “floor” under the relationship and stop tensions from spiraling out of control.

While China initially expressed regret over what it said was the balloon’s accidental diversion over US territory, it has denied that the craft was intended for surveillance and denounced the decision to shoot it down as an overreaction.

On Thursday, Biden said he expected to have a call with Xi, without giving details.

“We’re also continuing to engage with China as we have throughout the past two weeks,” Biden said in a briefing.

“As I’ve said since the beginning of my administration, we seek competition, not conflict, with China,” Biden said. “We’re not looking for a new Cold War, but I make no apologies, and we will compete.” Bloomberg News

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