Chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan visited Kharkiv on June 16 with Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova to document evidence of war crimes. During his visit Khan called the city a "crime scene," and toured the places hardest hit by Russian bombing. "We must make sure that the whole world sees that the law works," Khan said, promising to prosecute war criminals. Venediktova praised Khan for his visit, saying, "Prosecutors are working even under fire gathering evidence for [Ukrainian and international] courts." Venediktova reported that 760 civilians have been killed, over 1,000 injured, and 4,000 buildings destroyed in Kharkiv oblast due to Russian shelling.

From Anarchist Black Cross Belarus, June 10:

A full-scale war in Ukraine has been going on for over three months now. The anarchist movement has responded to the Russian invasion in different ways during these three months—some have begun unconditionally supporting their comrades in Ukraine, while others continue to repeat the story of NATO aggression in the region. We also felt it necessary to make a statement about our view of events.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv by indiscriminate Russian shelling using widely banned cluster munitions and inherently inaccurate rockets, Amnesty International said June 13. A new report, entitled 'Anyone Can Die at Any Time', documents how Russian forces have shelled residential neighborhoods in Ukraine's second largest city almost daily since the start of the invasion, causing "wholesale destruction." Amnesty found evidence of Russian forces repeatedly using 9N210 and 9N235 cluster munitions as well as scatterable mines, both of which are subject to international treaty bans because of their indiscriminate effects.

A group of 33 legal scholars and genocide experts on May 27 released a report accusing Russia of incitement to genocide in Ukraine, and calling on the international community to prevent a genocide from occurring. The report, released by the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy n Washington DC and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, used "open-source evidence" to assert that Russia has breached the UN Genocide Convention, a treaty to which Russia and Ukraine are both parties.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban on May 24 declared a state of emergency, citing threats originating from the war in Ukraine. The declaration, allowing him to rule by decree, came days after his Fidesz party used its supermajority in parliament to pass a constitutional amendment allowing the government to impose a state of emergency in the event of a war in a neighboring country. Órban declared a similar emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and those assumed special powers, having been extended by the National Assembly multiple times, were set to expire just days before the new declaration.   

In Episode 124 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues his deconstruction of the increasingly sinister, fascist-abetting politics of Noam Chomsky. In the latest in the endless litany of sycophantic interviews with Chomsky, this time from an outfit called EduKitchen, this supposed icon of the left actually praises Donald Trump for advocating appeasement of Putin in Ukraine—for which he was favorably tweeted by the inevitable Glenn Greenwald. Most perversely, the interview is entitled "Noam Chomsky on the Russia-Ukraine war, The Media, Propaganda, Orwell, Newspeak and Language." Yet Chomsky is advocating positions that are utterly inimical to everything Orwell ever stood for. This constitutes an Orwellian exploitation of Orwell, mirroring Putin's fascist pseudo-anti-fascism, and the pseudo-pacifist war propaganda of his Western enablers.

A court in Russia has sentenced another group of Crimean Tatars to lengthy prison terms on charges of belonging to a banned political organization. The Southern District Military court in the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don on May 12 sentenced Bilyal Adilov to 14 years, while Izzet Abdullaev, Tofik Abdulgaziev, Vladlen Abdulkadyrov and Mejit Abdurakhmanov each received 12-year sentences. The men are accused of being members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an organization that advocates for the peaceful restoration of an Islamic Caliphate. It operates freely in Ukraine but is banned in Russia as an "extremist" organization. The men, arrested in March 2019 in a sweep along with more than a dozen other Tatars, were also members of the group Crimean Solidarity, formed to oppose the illegal Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Since the annexation, over 30 Crimean Tatars have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, more than half this year alone. (Al Jazeera, RFE/RL)

Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova announced May 14 that her office is preparing war crimes cases against 41 suspects, on charges including "the bombing of civilian infrastructure, the killing of civilians, rape and looting." Venediktova has said that her office is investigating more than 10,700 potential war crimes involving more than 600 suspects.