(COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.) — The alleged gunman in a deadly shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado is scheduled to make his first court appearance virtually on Wednesday, court records show.
Five people were killed and 17 others wounded by gunfire in the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs late Saturday night. Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.
The suspect, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, is being held without bond on 10 “arrest only” charges: five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of committing a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury, according to online court records.
Aldrich is expected to have his first court appearance on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. local time, court records show. The hearing is to let him know the charges he’s facing and advise him on the no-bond status, Colorado’s Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen, who serves El Paso and Teller counties, told ABC News.
The appearance will be done via video link from jail, according to the district attorney.
The district attorney’s office expects to file formal charges with the court within a few days of this first court appearance, Allen told reporters earlier this week. There may be more charges than what was initially included in the arrest warrant, he said.
“Very customary that final charges may be different than what’s in the arrest affidavit. Typically, there will be more charges than what is listed in the arrest affidavit. So don’t be surprised when you see a different list of charges when we finally file formal charges with the court,” he said.
The El Paso County District Court has sealed the arrest warrant and supporting documentation connected with Aldrich’s arrest. According to the motion by prosecutors, if the records were released, “it could jeopardize the ongoing case investigation.”
The gunman used a long rifle and was injured in the shooting, according to police. Two “heroes” — identified as Thomas James and Richard Fierro — confronted and fought with him, stopping him from shooting more people, police have said. Officers responded to the scene and detained Aldrich just after midnight and transported him to a local hospital, where he had been in custody in the days following the incident.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Springs Police Department said it had turned over custody of the suspect to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office at the jail.
Colorado Springs police said Tuesday they do not expect to provide additional updates on the case until Monday.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told ABC News that the suspect “had considerable ammo” and “was extremely well armed.” While a motive remains under investigation, Suthers said “it has the trappings of a hate crime.”
The Colorado state public defender wrote in court filings released Tuesday that Aldrich is nonbinary.
In June 2021, Aldrich was arrested in an alleged bomb threat incident after their mother alerted authorities that they were “threatening to cause harm to her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition,” according to a press release posted online last year by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. While no explosives were found in his possession, Aldrich was booked into the El Paso County Jail on two counts of felony menacing and three counts of first-degree kidnapping, according to the sheriff’s office.
Aldrich’s 2021 arrest may not have appeared on background checks because the case does not appear to have been adjudicated, officials briefed on the investigation have told ABC News.
ABC News and other news organizations have petitioned the court in Colorado to unseal the records regarding Aldrich’s 2021 arrest.
Allen told ABC News on Tuesday that after the suspect has their first court appearance, the DA will appeal to have Aldrich’s sealed 2021 records opened next week.
(WASHINGTON) — A Washington, D.C., jury began deliberations Tuesday in the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four other associates in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Rhodes and his alleged co-conspirators are charged with disrupting the peaceful transfer of power by conspiring to oppose by force the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, among multiple other felonies.
Rhodes himself did not enter the U.S. Capitol that day and maintains that his group only intended to provide security and medical aid to those attending multiple pro-Trump demonstrations around the city.
Prosecutors have spent months putting on their case, documenting what they said were the conversations, messages and actions of the defendants leading up to their involvement with the events of Jan. 6, and alleged efforts to cover up their criminal activity afterward.
Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who founded the Oath Keepers militia in 2009, sent increasingly frantic messages to members of the group, following the 2020 election, about their need to be prepared to prevent Biden from taking office, the government said.
“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” Rhodes said in a Nov. 5 message shown by prosecutors.
Rhodes took the rare step of testifying on his own behalf during the trial, and told the court he continues to believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, citing an unfounded theory that pandemic safety measures unconstitutionally affected voting.
Relying on testimony from the FBI, prosecutors allege that Rhodes worked between the election and Jan. 6 to rally his troops — many of them former law enforcement and military service members — and spent thousands of dollars on weapons and equipment as he traveled across the country toward Washington.
“It will be a bloody and desperate fight,” Rhodes wrote in a Dec. 11 message to other Oath Keepers, prosecutors said. “We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”
The charges: seditious conspiracy, obstructing government, aiding and abetting
Over dozens of hours in the D.C. federal courthouse, prosecutors have worked to reach the high bar of proving to the jury that the five defendants, Rhodes, Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs, all engaged in a conspiracy to forcibly oppose the execution of laws governing the transfer of presidential power.
The government attempted to preempt innocent explanations for the defendant’s actions with evidence they said shows Rhodes and his associates would continue plans to disrupt government operations following Jan. 6.
“We aren’t quitting,” alleged co-conspirator Meggs wrote the night of Jan. 6 in a message presented by the government. “We’re reloading.”
Rhodes continued posting about a violent revolution and spent thousands on firearms and related equipment in the days after Jan. 6, records presented by the government showed.
If convicted on the seditious conspiracy charge, they could face a maximum of 20 years in prison, though all five members face a range of other felonies that could carry hefty prison sentences as well.
Alleged Oath Keeper co-conspirator Jessica Watkins said in testimony last week she accepted responsibility and regretted some of her actions inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, despite claiming credit for storming the building and calling it a “patriot movement” on social media after the fact.
After making her way through the crowd at the grand double doors on the Capitol building’s eastern side — which she described as similar to being at a Black Friday sale — Watkins found herself in the middle of a mob, crammed into a hallway leading further into the Capitol building. Metropolitan Police Department officer Christopher Owens, who testified earlier in the trial, was at the other end of the hallway with fellow officers physically keeping the mob from advancing.
Watkins admitted to yelling “push!” and testified that she now regrets it and didn’t realize what was happening at the front of the group.
“I take full responsibility for what happened in this hallway,” Watkins said. “I know it opens me up to criminal liability. I’m going to get charged for it — I get it.”
The officers ultimately held the line, but Watkins and others remained inside the Capitol building before she left to help carry out someone who had been hit in the face with pepper spray.
Watkins described being “excited” upon entering the capitol. Even after the incident in the hallway, she can be seen on Capitol security camera footage smoking some sort of pen-sized item. She later told the FBI that she had smoked marijuana inside the building.
“It felt like a historic moment,” Watkins said. “We were making history and I wasn’t absorbing the fact that we are not only trespassing but we’re trespassing in one of the most secure buildings in the world.”
But prosecutors circled back to the political nature of Watkins’ views, especially as they concerned the 2020 election, suggesting Biden’s victory may have been threatening to her and her alleged co-conspirators.
“The election itself wasn’t a threat,” Watkins said, adding that she was more concerned about what might happen “after the inauguration.”
Watkins said she maintained a “steady diet of InfoWars and Alex Jones” in the months before Jan. 6, watching the conspiracy theorist’s rants and interviews several hours a day, which she testified informed her world view and concerns about the government.
Watkins became concerned about a variety of conspiracy theories promoted in far-right circles around the time of the 2020 election. She testified that she became worried about the United Nations deploying to Washington, D.C., to ensure Joe Biden took office, then forcibly taking guns from Americans, mandating COVID-19 vaccinations and allowing a possible Chinese invasion from Canada.
“In hindsight I feel like I was gullible,” Watkins told the court.
Defendants contend they were there to provide security
Defense attorneys have sought to dispute the government’s arguments that the group ever engaged in plans to disrupt the Electoral college certification — arguing prosecutors are selectively quoting their messages and conversations to cast their intentions as seditious in nature.
They have also vigorously disputed the government’s narrative about the so-called “Quick Reaction Force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers members stationed at a hotel just outside the city on Jan. 6, which prosecutors have argued were in place as part of the plan to potentially use force to prevent Donald Trump’s removal from office.
Defense attorneys note that at no point has the government alleged that any of the firearms at the hotel were brought into D.C. on Jan. 6 or afterward, and that Rhodes never called them to come to the Capitol in the midst of the riot. In his own testimony, Rhodes denied having any knowledge about the specifics of the so-called Virginia QRF, even though he did acknowledge recommending members who decided to bring their firearms to keep them out of Washington.
Rhodes, in particular, has leaned heavily into his defense that he was never calling for anything unlawful in his public and private pleadings to have Trump mobilize the militia by invoking the Insurrection Act.
Attorneys for the defendants attempted to break the line prosecutors drew between the election and the Capitol siege, regardless of their clients’ far-right political views.
“Yes, things were said,” Stewart Rhodes’ attorney, James Bright, said. “It was heated rhetoric. Horribly heated rhetoric. Bombast. Inappropriate.”
But Bright contended none of this talk amounted to any sort of Jan. 6 plan to stop official government proceedings.
Kelly Meggs attorney, Stanley Woodward, similarly sought to undermine the idea that a coordinated effort took place between the defendants on Jan. 6 while arguing that any coordination that was done involved providing security to VIPs who were speaking at events that day.
“We don’t take lightly the events of Jan. 6, but we do take issue with the government’s characterization of what happened that day,” Woodward said.
Both Bright and Woodward condemned the violence and destruction that happened in and around the Capitol on Jan. 6, while maintaining it was not at the fault of their clients.
Woodward showed security camera footage from inside the Capitol of Meggs and other Oath Keepers entering double doors on the eastern side of the building after they had been forced open by rioters. Video from outside shows the Oath Keepers advancing through the crowd, but not making it all the way to the front before entering the building.
During his closing arguments, Harrelson defense attorney Brad Geyer focused on the government’s video evidence where rioters on the Capitol’s eastern steps were singing the national anthem while officers were being attacked with chemical spray and the defendants were further behind, walking up the steps through the massive crowd.
“If the video doesn’t fit you must acquit,” Geyer said repeatedly during closing arguments, channeling a famous refrain from the O.J.Simpson murder trial.
Geyer drew the jury’s attention to part of the crowd that was in front of the Oath Keepers and the rioters who broke open the doors before Harrelson and the others made it up to that level. Upon entering, Harrelson spent about 20 minutes in the building before leaving.
“They want you to turn this man’s life upside down for 17 minutes,” Geyer said. “The absurdity boggles the mind.”
What is seditious conspiracy?
Prosecutors provided a specific roadmap for the jury to reach its judgments, breaking down the meaning of seditious conspiracy in plain terms: an agreement to oppose the government by force. There does not need to be a specific start or end date and all the defendants did not need to join the conspiracy at the same time, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy said last week.
The rarely-used seditious conspiracy statute was signed into law following the Civil War with the aim of prosecuting Southerners who might still have wanted to fight against the government.
The Justice Department hasn’t brought seditious conspiracy charges since 2010, when prosecutors indicted several Michigan residents and members of the Hutaree militia with conspiring to oppose by force the authority of the U.S. government. But the defendants were all acquitted after a judge determined that prosecutors had hinged too much of their case on statements that were First Amendment protected speech.
The last successful seditious conspiracy conviction was in 1995, when a jury found an Egyptian cleric and his followers guilty in a plot to bomb the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and a building housing an FBI office.
The Oath Keepers now on trial are not charged with seeking to overthrow the U.S. government — instead prosecutors argue their conduct falls within the portion of the seditious conspiracy statute related to conspiring to oppose the government’s authority and forcibly blocking the execution of laws.
(CHESAPEAKE, Va.) — Seven people have died, including the shooter, after a shooting at the Walmart on Sam’s Circle in Chesapeake, Virginia, Tuesday night, police said.
A law enforcement source told ABC News that “preliminary info is it was an employee, possible manager, went in break room and shot other employees, and himself.”
Police could not confirm if the shooting was contained to one part of the store and said it’s “very fluid, very new right now.”
“It’s sad, we’re a couple days before the Thanksgiving holiday,” Kosinski said.
“We’re only a few hours into the response, so we don’t have all the answers yet,” the city of Chesapeake tweeted. “Chesapeake Police continue their investigation into the active shooter event at Walmart on Sam’s Circle. We do know there are multiple fatalities plus injuries and the shooter is confirmed dead.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is en route to the scene, ABC News can report.
“Our first responders are well-trained and prepared to respond. Our communications team is set up and will be releasing additional information as it’s confirmed,” Chesapeake Deputy Director of Public Communications Elizabeth Vaughn said in a statement.
Law enforcement sources tell ABC News authorities are investigating whether this was a case of working violence.
Chesapeake mayor Rick West issued a statement following the shooting, calling it a “senseless act of violence.”
“I am devastated by the senseless act of violence that took place late last night in our City,” West said in a statement on Twitter. “My prayers are with all those affected – the victims, their family, their friends, and their coworkers. I am grateful for the quick actions taken by our first responders who rushed to the scene. Cheaspeake is a tightknit community and we are all shaken by this news. Together, we will support each other throughout this time. Please keep us in your prayers.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin also made a statement regarding the shooting on social media in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
“Our hearts break with the community of Chesapeake this morning. I remain in contact with law enforcement officials throughout this morning and have made available any resources as this investigation moves forward,” said Youngkin. “Heinous acts of violence have no place in our communities.”
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for SeriousFun Children’s Network
A new exhibit about John Mellencamp is set to open at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 30. The pocket exhibit will draw connections between Guthrie and Mellencamp, highlighting their many similarities.
“Most people might shortsightedly think of Mellencamp’s ‘Jack & Diane’ and mistake it as a pop song rather than a Midwesterner’s reverence to the innocence found in small-town, working-class youth,” Woody Guthrie Center Director Cady Shaw shares. “With a closer look, you’ll find Mellencamp has been weaving threads of Heartland charm with folk-steeped storytelling and heavy-mitted activism through his lyrics, paintings and advocacy his whole life,” adding, “Mellencamp has consistently been an active voice for the greater good.”
The exhibit will feature Mellencamp photographs and album covers, as well as the singer’s guitar that features a profane sentiment carved into it, similar to what Guthrie once did. It will also feature a painting done by Mellencamp himself, which depicts Bob Dylan and Guthrie together.
Tickets for the exhibit are on sale now at the Woody Guthrie Center website.
And speaking of Mellencamp’s art, the singer’s coffee table art book, John Mellencamp: American Paintings and Assemblages, is out now and can be purchased on the singer’s website.
Elton John is a bi-coastal guy: Sunday night, he was rocking the crowd at LA’s Dodger Stadium on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, and Tuesday night, he was singing in the middle of New York City’s Fifth Avenue.
This holiday season, Elton’s partnered with famed department store Saks Fifth Avenue for a curated holiday collection, proceeds from which will go to The Elton John AIDS Foundation. The collection is available to shop now and as part of the partnership, Saks is donating $1 million to the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
That’s why Elton was the store’s special guest Tuesday night as Saks unveiled its famous holiday windows. Fifth Avenue was shut down as a grand piano was rolled out into the middle of the street, and Elton’s husband David Furnish and their sons Zachary and Elijah took their seats. Elton himself then appeared, sat down at the piano and thanked Saks CEO Marc Metrick for the million-dollar donation.
“This will help turbo charge our mission to end AIDS and it means a great deal to me to have your support –thank you so much,” said Elton. “I’m so thrilled to kick off the holiday season tonight and be a part of this spectacular and iconic window unveiling and light show.”
He then invited Metrick, David and the kids to join him for “the exciting part” — they counted down to the unveiling.
The entire front of the Saks building was then illuminated with a dazzling light show, as Elton performed his signature hit, “Your Song.” Fireworks erupted from the top of the building, and even after Elton left, the display continued, soundtracked to Elton hits like “Step Into Christmas.”
You can watch the whole thing now at Saks Fifth Avenue’s website.
Matthew McConaughey has much to be thankful for, but there are two things in his life he holds most dear.
“Family and health,” he told ABC Audio ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The actor continued that while “a lot of people say” the same thing, he absolutely means it and “will say it again.”
“[I] look around and go, ‘The family’s still together and we’re healthy. We’re moving forward,'” McConaughey expressed. “That’s really the baseline of everything else in my life.”
While so many people already share his point of view, the Oscar winner explained why family and health should be on the top of everyone’s list. He explained, “I think in most of our lives, out of everything else we have to be thankful for, all of it pales. If the family’s not healthy, everything takes a backseat to that.”
McConaughey wed model and designer Camila Alves in 2012. They share three children — two sons and a daughter. Their eldest is 14, a son named Levi, and their youngest is 9-year-old Livingston. Their daughter Vida is 12.
(WASHINGTON) — As the winter holidays draw near, Dr. Anthony Fauci stood at the White House briefing podium one last time on Tuesday to give Americans health advice as he prepares to leave government after 50 years.
Get boosted, Fauci said, and if you’re not vaccinated yet, get vaccinated. That was his message as he appeared with White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha.
It’s advice he’s given hundreds of times, from that same podium and other forums, as the pandemic stretches on. Fauci plans to step away from his role at the National Institute of Health and as White House chief medical advisor at the end of the year.
But as the country faces its third Thanksgiving with COVID-19, Fauci said the country was inching closer to an “equilibrium” with the pandemic.
“The message that Dr. Jha and I are getting to you today is we can make that happen much sooner by vaccinating and by keeping updated on your booster. It’s just really as simple as that,” Fauci said.
For the holidays, Fauci said there’s “multiple actions” people can take to protect themselves — including masking and testing beforehand.
A younger person may choose to wear a mask if they have an immunocompromised or elderly relative at the table, Fauci said. He also said not to underestimate testing, and that it “makes sense that you might want to get a test that day before” any gatherings.
“Now, we’re not talking about requirements or mandating,” he said. “We’re talking about if you are in a situation and each individual person evaluates their own risk and that in the risk of their family member.”
Jha went so far as to suggest that if everyone followed the recommended vaccine and treatment course, they could “prevent nearly every death in America from COVID.”
“If folks get their updated vaccines and they get treated if they have a breakthrough infection, we can prevent essentially every COVID death in America,” he said. “That is a remarkable fact.”
Jha detailed a six-week long campaign to drive up booster awareness and hopefully increase vaccination coverage, particularly among seniors. The White House will invest nearly half a billion dollars in efforts to expand vaccination efforts at community health centers as well as organizations that work with older people and people with disabilities.
Americans can also expect to see more outreach, as the administration launches a media campaign targeting people over 50 with ads called “Can’t Wait.”
Though Jha had been urging Americans to get their updated booster shots by Halloween in order to get strong protection going into Thanksgiving and Christmas, he said that there was still plenty of benefit in getting the shot now.
The campaign comes as booster uptake has been slow — only about 11% of people aged 5 and older have received a bivalent booster, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and though rates have slightly ticked up as the weather has gotten colder, the rollout has not.
“It’s certainly not too late, if you think about the holidays that are coming,” Jha said. Though if takes about two weeks to get the maximum effect of the booster shot, Jha also said that some protection kicked in “relatively quickly.”
“People who get vaccinated this week, they will have a lot of protection during December, January, February, onwards, the time that we socialize the most.” Jha said.
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied former President Donald Trump’s request to block an appeals court order that he surrender his tax returns and other financial records to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The court offered no explanation for the decision. There was no noted dissent or vote breakdown. It marks the fourth time Trump has lost a high court appeal related to requests for his taxes.
The move appears to be the end of the road for Trump in the years-long saga of congressional subpoenas for his tax records in the stated interest of drafting oversight legislation.
“The Treasury Department will comply with the Court of Appeals’ decision,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in a statement in response to Tuesday’s high court action. The agency, which includes the Internal Revenue Service in possession of Trump’s confidential tax returns, declined to say when exactly it would provide the records to the Committee.
The Democratic-controlled committee has argued that — by the Supreme Court’s own guidelines laid out in a 2020 ruling in the same ongoing dispute — judges must defer to the legitimate legislative purpose behind a request for information. They said that standard was plainly met in this case.
“We knew the strength of our case, we stayed the course, followed the advice of counsel, and finally, our case has been affirmed by the highest court in the land,” chairman Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement reacting Tuesday. “Since the Magna Carta, the principle of oversight has been upheld, and today is no different. This rises above politics, and the Committee will now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.”
Neal will surrender chairmanship of the committee to a Republican in January after the GOP won majority control of the House in the midterm elections.
While Trump has claimed the subpoena is a politically motivated fishing expedition, the committee said the documents are critical for drafting “legislation on equitable tax administration, including legislation on the President’s tax compliance.”
On Nov. 1, Chief Justice John Roberts granted a temporary administrative stay of a lower court order regarding Trump’s tax returns and other financial records. Today, Roberts officially lifted that stay.
The committee had requested six years’ worth of Trump’s returns as part of an investigation into IRS audit practices of presidents and vice presidents.
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Trump accused the committee of seeking his taxes under false pretenses.
“The Committee’s purpose in requesting President Trump’s tax returns has nothing to do with funding or staffing issues at the IRS and everything to do with releasing the President’s tax information to the public,” the petition said.
A federal appeals court ruled unanimously in August that tax returns should be handed over to the House committee. The committee first sought the returns in 2019.
While Trump’s team claimed the House panel’s bid to obtain the tax returns is purely political, the committee insists the documents are valuable to assess how the Internal Revenue Service performs presidential audits.
At the heart of the dispute is a federal tax law mandating that the Treasury Department “shall furnish” tax information requested by the Ways and Means Committee, a law Trump’s lawyers suggest is unconstitutional.
Democrats have been clamoring to get a glimpse of Trump’s tax returns since 2015 when he launched his bid for president and broke decades of precedent by not releasing the documents.
Besides having his personal tax returns sought after, Trump is also facing pressure by criminal probes into his personal business, possession of government documents after leaving office and efforts to block the certification of the 2020 election results.
ABC News’ Lauren Peller, Katherine Faulders and Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Following the emergence of video suggesting Ukrainian fighters may have committed a war crime by firing on nearly a dozen surrendering Russian soldiers at close range, the country’s prosecutor general on Tuesday announced an investigation into the incident — although Kyiv has maintained its troops were responding to an attempted ambush.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, claims the brief video clips, which were circulated widely online, show the troops carrying out an execution and is calling for an international investigation.
Ukraine’s announcement comes after the U.S. State Department’s top war crimes adviser said Monday that U.S. officials were aware of the footage, and underscored that both Moscow and Kyiv are bound to follow the same international law on the battlefield.
“We’re obviously tracking that quite closely,” Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack said of the incident, which took place earlier this month in the Luhansk region of Ukraine.
“It’s really important to emphasize that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, both the aggressor state and the defender state,” she continued. “But when it comes to the war in Ukraine, that’s really where the equivalency ends. When we’re looking at the sheer scale of criminality exhibited by Russian forces, it’s enormous compared to the allegations that we have seen against Ukrainian forces.”
That assessment is supported by multiple international efforts to document war crimes and other atrocities committed in the course of the conflict. The United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary A. DiCarlo reported in September that the body’s independent commission was “struck by the large number of executions and other violations carried out by Russian forces” while investigators documented only two incidents of Ukrainian fighters mistreated Russian soldiers.
Van Schaack said how each country’s government handles allegations against its service members is also vastly different.
“Russia inevitably responds with propaganda, denial, myths and disinformation — whereas Ukrainian authorities have generally acknowledged abuses and have denounced, and have pledged to investigate them,” she said. “And so we would urge Ukraine to continue to abide by international obligations in this conflict. And we continue to reiterate the importance that all parties to the conflict must abide by international law or face the consequences.”
Though the videos, which have been verified by the New York Times, depict a slice of the war’s brutal reality, the circumstances surrounding the incident are unclear. The Russian soldiers appear to have opened fire while surrendering, but the actual killings or the events leading up to them are not shown, leaving room for the possibility that the Ukrainian fighters could have acted in self-defense.
While investigating potential crimes on the battlefield is a difficult task, Van Schaack spoke to the challenges that lie ahead for the international justice system once a conviction is reached, acknowledging that Russian bad actors could likely find refuge in their country for years to come — but perhaps not indefinitely.
“If Russian perpetrators remain in Russia, and absent any kind of political transformation there, it will be difficult to move forward,” she said. “But what we have seen in prior conflicts is that perpetrators do inevitably travel, particularly as time passes–they want to visit family, they have other reasons to leave.”
But Van Schaack also expressed optimism that the justice would one day reach the highest levels of power in the Kremlin, and that even Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might be held accountable for atrocities committed during the invasion.
“Superiors can be held liable for the acts of their subordinates,” she said, adding that while prosecutors will follow the evidence, investigators were documenting what appeared to be “systemic acts” that transcended rank and file members of Russia’s military.
“It’s very hard to imagine how many crimes could be committed without responsibility going all the way up the chain of command,” Van Schaack said.
