Ukraine has filed a law suit against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after a brutal invasion that has left thousand dead and injured.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Moscow ‘must be held accountable for manipulating the notion of genocide to justify aggression’.
It comes after President Vladimir Putin tried to justify sending tens of thousands of soldiers to ‘demilitarise’ Ukraine, after claiming the country has committed genocide in the Donbass region.
Mr Zelenskyy requested the court immediately orders Russia to halt its attacks, and that the country expects trials to begin soon.
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Earlier this week, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba said that Russia had committed war crimes in the country when it attacked an orphanage and a nursery.
‘Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute’, he tweeted on Friday, the day after the invasion began.
‘Together with the General Prosecutor’s Office we are collecting this and other facts, which we will immediately send to the Hague. Responsibility is inevitable.’
At the time, a local news outlet reported that Russia had shelled a kindergarten in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region.
It is unclear on what grounds the case was being brought to the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – which settles disputes between states in accordance with international law and gives advisory opinions on international legal issues.
In his rambling one-hour televised address to Russia on Wednesday evening, Mr Puting announced a ‘special military operation’ whose ‘goal is to protect people who have been abused by the genocide of the Kyiv regime for eight years’.
He said: ‘We will strive for the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians.’
However, his claims have been blasted as ‘baseless’ by Western leaders, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissing them as ‘ridiculous’.
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