Rights Monitors: Very Different War Crimes Are Lumped Together in Ukraine's Court Statistics
Monitors from Ukraine's Media Initiative for Human Rights say widely different war crimes are recorded under a single legal provision. A draft law would expand the list of war crimes and split them into five groups.
Ukrainian courts hearing war crime cases often classify very different acts under one heading: "violations of the laws and customs of war." This is the argument of Alina Kondratenko, a journalist and trial-monitoring coordinator at the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), which observes court proceedings. She says this creates a distorted picture of the scale and structure of the crimes. The text is an opinion column and reflects only the author's view.
One label, different crimes
She cites four cases. A district court in Vyshhorod, Kyiv region, convicted Russian soldier Dmytro Kalinovych in absentia of shooting a pensioner during the occupation of the village of Kozarovychi, sentencing him to ten years. A district court in Kyiv's Shevchenko district likewise sentenced Russian judge Serhiy Obraztsov in absentia to ten years for convicting Vladyslav Plakhotnik, a prisoner of war from the Azov brigade. The Vyshhorod court found Russian serviceman Arbi Imerzayev guilty of robbing a local resident. A court in Zaporizhzhia convicted six Russian servicemen over the seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar in March 2022. In the statistics, all of these appear as "other violations of the laws and customs of war."
Gaps in the law
The article on crimes against humanity entered Ukraine's Criminal Code only in October 2025, and the law is not retroactive. As a result, such crimes committed earlier, for example in Bucha, Izium or Mariupol, cannot currently be prosecuted under it. Ukrainian law enforcement has registered more than 250,000 war crimes, and over 600 cases are already in court.
What the draft law proposes
In 2025 a working group was set up under the Prosecutor General's Office, including MIHR. The draft law was published on the Verkhovna Rada's website in September. It would divide war crimes in Article 438 into five groups, including crimes against persons, crimes against property, prohibited methods and means of warfare, and crimes against cultural property. New items would include sexual slavery, forced passportization in occupied territories, hostage-taking and the use of "human shields." The protection of cultural heritage would be expanded and the definition of the crime of aggression revised.
The authors stress that the changes would not soften punishments or lead to reviews of verdicts already issued.
