Saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin committed war crimes in Ukraine, former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte told the Swiss paper Le Temps that the same war crimes committed in Rwanda and Bosnia were committed in Ukraine. Rwanda and Bosnia, at least as alleged by the U.N., were cases of ethnic cleansing, not a military operation like Ukraine. While it’s possible that certain units of the Russian or Ukrainian military might be guilty of war crimes, it’s also true that war is ugly business especially when it involves bombing and missile strikes, sometimes hitting their tagets and sometimes going off course, creating collateral damage. But the decision to keep the war going has not been all Russia but the United States and Ukraine have committed $15 billions to battling the Russian Federation with the hope of eventually getting rid of Putin.
Del Ponte expressed horror at the sight of more mass graves, similar to what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia, especially the 1995 Screbrenica massacre where some 8,372 Muslim Ethnic Albanians were executed by the Bosnia Serbs. Comparing the War in Ukraine to the genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia makes a mockery of the meaning of genocide. Even when the U.S. government accuses Beijing of genocide against Muslim Uyghurs, there’s zero evidence that anything comparable is happening in Xinjiang Province in Western China. But because Putin has been using all the military capability at his disposal to win the Ukraine War doesn’t mean that his policy engages in ethnic cleansing or genocide. Shooting guided missiles or precision bombing does not qualify as the kind of ethnic cleansing or genocide seen in more contemporary wars like Rwanda and Bosnia.
Claims by the U.S. and U.N. that Putin has engaged in a comparable form of ethnic cleansing an genocide play well in the press but are not backed by facts. “I hoped to never see these mass graves again,” Del Ponte told the Swiss newspaper Blick. “These dead people have loved ones who don’t even know what’s become of them. And that’s unacceptable,” said Del Ponte making a case against Putin for the same kind of arrest warrant as the late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic. Putin’s prosecuting a complicated military operation, battling heavily U.S. and NATO-armed Ukrainian forces. Putin set conditions for ending the conflict that have been rejected by U.S. and Ukrainian officials. Ukraine’s 44-year-old President Volodymyr Zelensky says he won’t surrender one inch of Ukrainian territory, even though he has no control of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
So Del Ponte, like all Western officials, blame Putin for starting the war, with all its carnage and destruction. But let there be no mistake, Ukraine wants to continue fighting, regardless of all the destruction and carnage. Threatening to charge Putin with war crimes doesn’t talk about how the war started, what pushed Putin to invade. President Joe Biden, 79, had warned the world about a Russian invasion for months because Putin massed over 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border. Putin put troops on the border to get Biden’s attention that if he kept arming Ukraine, the Kremlin would have no choice but to neutralize the Ukraine military. For three months, Biden rejected all of Putin’s calls to renegotiate security arrangements in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Biden told Putin that his ideas were all “non-starters,” not something subject to negotiation.
After three months of being told no by Biden, Putin invaded Ukraine Feb. 24, prompting Biden to call the war “unprovoked and unjustified.” But if you follow what really happened, Putin’s requests for renegotiating new security arrangements were utterly rejected by Biden. So when the war broke out Feb. 24, Biden kept repeating the war was “unprovoked and unjustified.” No one in the U.S. or foreign press has called out Biden to provoking Putin to invade Ukraine. But now that the war is on, Biden runs the war against Putin using Ukrainian troops as proxies, camouflaging his attempt to remove Putin from office. When Biden spoke March 24 in Warsaw, he said, “For God’s sakes, he cannot remain in power,” letting the world see the real mission of the Ukraine War. Putin understands the stakes, directing his firepower to beat back the U.S. puppet regime in Kiev.
Talk of prosecuting Putin at the International Criminal Court [ICC] at the Hague has no enforcement value to the United States or Russia, because both countries do not subscribe to the court. Zelensky likes to whip the U.S. and EU press into a frenzy, claiming that Putin is trying takeover all of Europe, but, more importantly, commit genocide against Ukrainians. On both counts, not a single country has bought Zelensky’s arguments. When Del Ponte says Putin commits war crimes, it’s part of the White House propaganda campaign, demonizing Putin to world public opinion. Biden can’t fathom the fact that China, the U.S.’s biggest trading partner, has not condemned Putin’s Ukraine War, nor has 71-year-old Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi, accounting for 1.4 billion people. Yet the White House continues to demonize Putin as the personification of all evil.
