I was woken up at 3am last Monday. The wail of the air raid siren in Kyiv is so predictable that hardly anybody bothers to go to a bomb shelter anymore. Often, it passes without incident, but last week the explosions of drones, missiles and air defence ripped through the sky. The lucky ones among us were kept awake all night – the unlucky ones never saw the morning. By the time all-clear was given, the air was thick with smoke and flames; 22 people had been killed throughout the country.
The new Russian Ambassador to New Zealand, Stanislav Krans, told the Herald this week that “there is no war crime there”. He is on a charm offensive to remind New Zealanders about “great Russian” literature like Chekhov, and our shared origins of the pavlova. For him, the constant deaths of innocent Ukrainians must be an unfortunate distraction from these efforts. Unfortunately for him, evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine is everywhere.
In fact, this indiscriminate bombardment of huge civilian areas is what I can only describe as a grave war crime. It has happened so many times in this war that it passes without comment – two civilians were killed on a strike on the city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday this week, an event that didn’t make any international news. This happens every week throughout Ukraine.
In the port city of Mariupol that the Russians besieged for months, they killed thousands of civilians. The most notorious was an airstrike on the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre, where hundreds of families were sheltering, where the word CHILDREN was painted in huge white lettering outside. Amnesty International says it has gathered evidence that demonstrates this is a war crime.
This is what the Russian armed forces can do even from a distance. Perhaps we can be as generous to Ambassador Krans as possible and regard all these deaths in light of what he says, that “during the military conflict we understand it is very difficult to avoid any casualties”.
But what happens when his country’s troops enter and occupy a city is much worse. The most notorious, of course, was the massacres in the Kyiv region, particularly in the town of Bucha.
Shortly after Russian forces withdrew in the spring of 2022, I visited the town, where authorities were digging civilians out of mass graves. Local officials said authorities recovered 458 bodies; 419 of them bore the marks of being shot, tortured or bludgeoned to death, nine of them children. Many were found with their hands tied behind their backs and a bullet in the skull.
I fail to see how this can be anything other than a war crime. I’m not the only one: Human Rights Watch investigators who visited the region have prepared reports reaching the same conclusion.
I remember entering Novopetrivka – a small town in the southern Kherson region the Russians had recently withdrawn from – in November 2022. The first locals I met told me they had just dragged the bodies of two young men out of a nearby creek – the Russians had executed them, believing they were spies. A local woman told me she had been assaulted by two Russian soldiers who had tried to rob her in her house. On finding no money, they told her, “You can pay with your body instead.”
Ironically, the Ukrainians recounted these crimes speaking in the Russian language – these are the “Russian speakers” Putin claims to have been “liberating”.
Wherever Russian forces have gone, the same stories are repeated to me. Murder, sexual violence, looting, pillaging and all manner of other barbarism. For what it’s worth, I have been personally sanctioned by Russia and banned from ever entering the country for reporting these crimes on the ground.
A quieter, less physically violent but equally chilling crime occurs regularly in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have described how Russia has abducted thousands of Ukrainian children. These young people are often taken away from families whom the Russians do not believe are loyal to the new authorities, and are taken to Russia.
There, they are subjected to brainwashing and re-education, and stripped of their Ukrainian identity, as detailed in the indictment from the ICC, which issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin himself, and for his children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova.
Of course, these will legally remain only war crime “accusations” precisely because the accused will not set foot in a country that could deport them to The Hague, where they would face trial for this and scores of other crimes committed against Ukrainians.
The ambassador tells us that many countries start wars and no one speaks of courts or tribunals. Not only is this wrong (the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leadership over atrocities carried out during the war in Gaza), it is entirely irrelevant. The Geneva Conventions carry no exception for “others did it too”.
The most extraordinary thing Krans said, though, was not a denial but a redefinition. The invasion of Ukraine, he suggested, is an “internal” matter.
“We do not interfere in your internal affairs,” he told Kiwis. “Whatever is your assessment of what is in this conflict, our position has nothing to do with New Zealand.”
But Ukraine is a sovereign country – one Russia itself recognised repeatedly by treaty before the full-scale invasion – and it was Russia who invaded and waged years of brutal war on its civilian population.
Kate Turska, who founded the advocacy group Mahi for Ukraine, put the obvious objection plainly: to call that an internal matter, she says, “isn’t a different perspective; it’s a denial of Ukrainian sovereignty”.
She is just as clear about what the war means for the Ukrainians now living in New Zealand.
“For many New Zealanders this is a foreign policy issue,” she says. “For Ukrainians in NZ it is deeply personal. Many Ukrainians who came to New Zealand under the Special Ukraine Visa still have parents, children, siblings and friends living in Ukraine. Some have family serving on the front lines. Some have loved ones living under constant missile and drone attacks. The distance doesn’t make the worry disappear. If anything, it can make you feel even more helpless.”
Do not be fooled by Krans’ evident charm and literacy – it is the job of an ambassador to try to build connections and foster diplomacy with the country of his posting, and the Russians can be very good at it.
But in my eyes, he is whitewashing, denying and obfuscating some of the most brutal and most forensically documented war crimes of the 21st century. It isn’t just me – the world’s major human rights organisations, the highest authority – International Criminal Court – and governments (including our own) have accused Russia of committing war crimes based on the strength of the evidence.
“New Zealand has long been concerned about the mounting credible evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine,” then-Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said in a 2023 Cabinet paper.
Don’t allow Krans to make you forget it.
Thomas Mutch is a New Zealand journalist who has covered Ukraine war since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. He is the author of The Dogs of Mariupol.
