While you were asleep: Ukraine accuses Russia of war crimes with hundreds of dead civilians found

A man lay dead on the roadside in the Ukrainian city of Bucha on Sunday with his hands tied behind his back and a bullet wound to his head.

He is one of hundreds of local residents that officials say have been found dead in the wake of weeks of Russian occupation in the city. 

There have been calls for new sanctions against Russia after Ukrainian officials accused their neighbours of committing war crimes and carrying out a “massacre” in the town of Bucha.

The Russian defence ministry has denied such allegations and called the images and videos showing the bodies “yet another provocation” by the Ukrainian government.

Bucha was recently liberated from Russian occupation with the mayor of the city, Anatoliy Fedoruk, telling Reuters, “Any war has some rules of engagement for civilians.

The Russians have demonstrated that they were consciously killing civilians.”

Fedoruk said more than 300 people had been killed in Bucha, which lies just 37 km northwest of the capital, Kyiv. 

The European Union has been scrambling over the weekend to implement fresh sanctions against Russia, but the bloc has so far been unable to come to a consensus on what those sanctions might entail. 

One of the major players in the bloc, Germany, has been reluctant to impose sanctions that would target the Russian energy sector because of the Germans’ large reliance on it for its domestic supply. 

But German chancellor Olaf Scholz did deliver stern words against Russia, saying, “Putin and his supporters will feel the effects and we will continue to make weapons available to Ukraine so it can defend itself against the Russian invasion.”

Any talk of war-crimes related punishment may be disappointingly weak given that the EU would need unanimous support to impose such measures.

In a statement released on Sunday, a New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it had found “several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations” in Russian-controlled regions.” 

The International Criminal Court in The Hague defines war crimes as “grave breaches” of the post-World War II Geneva Conventions, agreements which lay out the international humanitarian laws to be followed in wartime.

Examples of such breaches would include targeting civilians and targeting military targets where civilian casualties would be high.

It would appear as if that is what Russia has done given the grim images coming from Bucha but neither Russia nor Ukraine are members of the ICC and if a case were to be pursued, Russia could simply choose not to cooperate and any trial would be delayed until a defendant could be arrested. 

Read this explainer to understand how someone like Russian President Vladimir Putin could be prosecuted for war crimes. 

In the markets, the rand starts the week trading flat at R14.65/$ despite Moody’s raising SA’s credit rating from negative to stable on Friday.

The dollar is trading unchanged this morning in Far East markets with Chinese markets closed for a holiday while the rand is likely to hold within the R14.40/$ to R14.80/$ range as developments between Russia and Ukraine unfold. 

On the commodity front, gold is trading lower at $1,915, platinum is flat at $985, and palladium is a touch firmer at $2,307.

The oil price is on the backfoot thanks to a cease-fire in the war in Yemen and US President Joe Biden’s plan to release 180 million barrels of US oil reserves. Brent is currently trading at $104.60, while WTI is at $99.35.