CNN reports that the Department of Justice has tapped its top “Nazi hunter” to lead a U.S. war-crimes prosecution team supporting Kyiv’s efforts. Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement during his surprise trip to Ukraine earlier today:
The team, Garland said, will be led by the department’s best-known Nazi hunter Eli Rosenbaum, and will be made up of experts in investigations involving human rights abuses and war crimes. Rosenbaum, a 36-year veteran of the Justice Department, previously served as the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy, and helped the department over 100 cases to strip citizenship from or deport accused Nazis, according to the Justice Department.
The announcement is a signal from DOJ that it is interested in investigating war crimes in the ongoing war in Ukraine and follows a previous effort by the department to lock down the assets of Russian oligarchs.
Garland made the announcement after meeting with Iryna Venediktova, the top Ukrainian prosecutor.
Rosenbaum’s War Crimes Accountability team will streamline multiple ongoing department efforts to investigate war crimes and “provide wide-ranging technical assistance, including operational assistance and advice regarding criminal prosecutions, evidence collection, forensics, and relevant legal analysis” to Ukraine, according to a Justice Department statement.
The team will also “play an integral role” in U.S. prosecutions involving Russian war crimes, such as when U.S. journalists are killed by Russian forces while covering the invasion.
While prosecuting top Russian leaders for their roles in the atrocities they ordered remains a very unlikely prospect for the time being, empowering the Ukrainians to go after Russian soldiers is a realistic option.
In addition to identifying hundreds of war-crimes suspects, Venediktova’s team secured the first conviction of a Russian soldier, for shooting an unarmed civilian, in May.
Still, needless to say, whatever legal actions the Ukrainian authorities are able to initiate won’t, for the foreseeable future, come close to meeting the scale of the atrocities that have been carried out across the country, and continue to be carried out, every day.
These smaller prosecutions are a no-brainer, but no one disputes that securing any true measure of justice for the massacres, torture, and rapes of Ukrainians will only begin with a battlefield victory.