They have bombarded civilian targets - there are multiple pictures and videos of civilian buildings and infrastructure such as roads being bombed, with civilians dying. That's very war crimey.
Furthermore, crimes against peace are a type of war crime.
There's a long road to calling that a war crime. Largely what has to be shown is that they meant to target civilians and that there is absolutely no case in which they're targeting Ukrainian forces.
Well I guess we need to send every US President since Eisenhower to the Hague in chains, then.
Don't act like Russia is some sort of unique evil, here. The gallons of blood spilled in collateral damage to innocent civilians by US, US-led, or US-financed operations in countries we have absolutely no business being in can fill swimming pools.
Literally anybody writing, posting, tweeting, or writing column-inches about the horrible action by Russia from US soil needs to stop, notice where they are, and recognize that OUR government is orders of magnitude worse, and has been at it for far, far longer.
I will fault the Russians for one thing, here. The FSB should have fabricated evidence of WMDs held in Kiev, claimed that Zelensky was murdering babies, then went in under the banner of Freedom(tm).
This silly business of conducting military options unapologetically for national interests is so old-fashioned. Lying to the world through your media mouthpieces is the way to do it. You'd think there'd still be some of that Pravda spirit left over from the USSR, but I guess not.
Well, right now they've officially committed a "special military action" not a war - and there is plenty of stuff that was happening before even that weaksauce declaration came in.
That all said, they have been conducting mass detention of civilians in Ukraine so I think we've probably got some borderline war-crime actions. It'll take a long time to sort out exactly everything that's happened today and the last week - but I'd be surprised if war crimes weren't occurring.
That all said, war crimes are defined by the victor and their declaration and potential repercussions for them is an entirely political process. Countries exist at a scale where the "immutable definition of the law" isn't a thing that actually exists - unless we had a sole disinterested super-power that far surpassed every other power on earth and was able to serve as an impartial judge we can't really have the same concept of a legal system at the international level - this is why The Hague is usually focused on regional conflicts where China, the US, and everyone else has a little enough of a vested interest that they're happy to just score some PR points.
Yes the world is depressing, but it is the way it is.
> That all said, war crimes are defined by the victor and their declaration and potential repercussions for them is an entirely political process.
This is why I pointed out that what they're describing is not a war crime yet. What you're saying is not true, there is a court that deals with war crimes and they do have specific definitions. Unfortunately the term has been popularized and liberally thrown around since then, giving birth to this idea that war crimes are somehow only a colloquial term for bad things happening.
The ICC is what decides a war crime from a military action or act of war, and that takes in a lot of variables it would be difficult to account for. There'll be long investigations after this to figure things out, I'm sure. As I said in another reply, if I was a betting man, I would agree; however, I also dislike the popularization of the term war crime and just throwing it around.
