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The Netherlands announced Monday that it will soon send three more teams of investigators to Ukraine, to help the International Criminal Court (ICC) in its investigation into alleged war crimes committed since the Russian invasion.
The missions, scheduled for late 2022 and next year, follow deployment to Ukraine in May 2022. several Dutch researcherswithin the framework of greater detachment of this type carried out by the ICC in the history of its existence.
“We remain fully determined to see justice done for war crimes in Ukraine,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said on Twitter.
“This is why the Netherlands will soon send three new forensic teams to support the Ukrainians and the International Criminal Court in their investigation,” the Dutch MFA continued.
The investigators will work “under the banner of the ICC,” which is based in The Hague, the Netherlands, the Dutch foreign, defense and justice ministries said in a joint letter sent to parliament.
Teams from the Dutch military police will be sent”in the fall of 2022 and, situation permitting, in the spring of 2023 and again in the fall of 2023″, they did.
Just a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of the country, on February 24, the T announced the opening of an investigation in Ukraine into alleged war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed there.
That international judicial body deployed a team of 42 members for Ukraine in Mayincluding a large number of Dutch forensic experts.
The first accusations in the international press about war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine came after Russian troops withdrew from the town of Bucha, near the Ukrainian capital, kyiv, where hundreds of bodies of civilians were found. with signs of having been executed. with their hands tied and shot in the head, in mass graves, scattered in the streets and in charred heaps in the streets, which the Ukrainian multinational company, Dmytro Kuleba, classified in April as simply “the tip of the iceberg” of the brutality of the ongoing Russian invasion of the country.
Even earlier, in March, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, had described the Russian head of state, Vladimir Putin, as a “war criminal“.
Until now, the ICC has refused to reveal when it intends to take the first legal action against perpetrators of crimes in Ukraine.
In June, Dutch authorities stated that they had prevented a Russian intelligence agent, posing as a Brazilian intern, from infiltrating the ICC.
Source: Observadora