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The International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for two top Russian military officers, accusing them of war crimes in Ukraine for targeting civilians and destroying crucial energy infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The two officers \u2014 Lt. Gen. Sergei Ivanovich Kobylash and Adm. Viktor Nikolayevich Sokolov \u2014 are accused in a court statement of being personally responsible for numerous missile strikes by their forces on electrical power plants and substations in multiple locations between October 2022 and March 2023.<\/p>\n
The wintertime strikes were defined as war crimes because they were largely directed against civilian targets, causing \u201cexcessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects,\u201d the court said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
General Kobylash is a senior Russian Air Force officer who commanded the country\u2019s long-range aviation forces during that time period, while Admiral Sokolov was then commander of Russia\u2019s Black Sea Fleet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The two are also accused of crimes against humanity because of \u201cintentionally causing great suffering\u201d and serious physical or mental injuries in the general population.<\/p>\n
The court\u2019s statement said that full details of the new warrants would not be disclosed in order to protect witnesses and safeguard further investigations. The International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, is the only permanent international court mandated to address genocide, wars of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
Even though Russians have repeatedly bombed civilian structures and killed uncounted civilians, lawyers familiar with the I.C.C. investigation suggested that prosecutors singled out this specific time period because the weight of evidence and the clarity of the command structure known at the time could make the allegations easier to prove than many others.<\/p>\n