Hearing follows House passage of H.R. 7691, the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Representative Peter Meijer (R-MI), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, this week participated in a subcommittee hearing titled, “Accountability and Justice for War Crimes Committed in Ukraine by the Russian Federation.” The hearing followed Tuesday’s House passage of H.R. 7691, the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act, which Rep. Meijer supported.
During the hearing, Rep. Meijer questioned The Honorable Michael R. Carpenter, Ph.D, Permanent Representative of the United States to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at the U.S. Department of State.
The full text of Rep. Meijer’s remarks as delivered is below.
“I’m grateful that we’re having the chance to hold this subcommittee hearing, and I appreciate some of our earlier work when we hosted some of the other open-source observers who’ve been cataloging a lot of these Russian atrocities.
“My first question for Ambassador Carpenter is – when we’re looking at cataloging the war crimes, to my knowledge, there hasn’t yet been the kind of smoking gun plan coming from the Russian generals, from Vladimir Putin, that says we want to kill off the civilian population systematically and categorically in Ukraine. We’ve obviously seen the intercepted messages from more senior officers, but more mid-ranking members, and then also the awareness on behalf of some of the lower junior officers and lower enlisted who are perpetrating many of these crimes. How are we looking at the question of intentionality? The specific targeting as we saw in Mariupol where it could not have been clearer that this was a facility with children inside versus the indiscriminate attacks, the lack of any efforts made to reduce civilian casualties. That is frankly seen to be the modus operandi of the Russian military.”
“…I know President Biden has suggested labeling or designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Can you speak at all to what type of overlap that would have on the war crimes and kind of atrocity international prosecution side if those are two wholly separate channels? I’m just curious. I feel like we haven’t had necessarily a robust discussion on that, and in prior instances we’ve looked at here with the Russian equivalent… We’ve looked at sort of mercenary forces or aligned but not necessarily in the full military chain of command. How are you seeing that being weighed, FTO designations for constituent components versus the Russian Federation itself being labeled a state sponsor of terror?”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. My time is expired. I yield back.”
Original source can be found here.
