The Swedish government has announced it will be sending a delegation of police to Ukraine to investigate possible war crimes committed by Russian forces during the invasion of Ukraine.
Swedish Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer, a member of the centre-right Moderates, announced that he believed Russia had committed war crimes in the country. The announcement follows the issuing of an arrest warrant for President Putin by an international court on war crimes allegations.
“We are at a point where it is no longer a question of if all the war crimes that Russia is guilty of in Ukraine should be prosecuted, but how it should be done,” Strömmer said, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
Along with contributing around £550,000/$675,000 and sending three prosecutors and six investigators to work on looking into Russian war crimes, the Swedish police authority will also be sending officers to a field office in Kyiv.
“The field office is being set up right now and will grow over time. At the initial stage, it is a matter of hiring three investigators from the Swedish side,” Strömmer said.
The allocation of the funding and the deployment of officers comes despite Sweden itself being desperately short of experienced police officers, with the country struggling to face down spiking levels of violent crime.
The Swedish move is in cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which put out an arrest warrant last week for Russian President Vladimir Putin after accusing the Russian leader of carrying out war crimes.
ICC president President Judge Piotr Hofmański spoke out about the warrant for Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Alekseyevna, which claims that Russia has kidnapped children from Ukraine and moved them to Russia.
“It is forbidden by international law for occupying powers to transfer civilians from the territory they live in to other territories,” ICC president President Judge Piotr Hofmański said Friday.
How the arrests will be executed is unclear as Russia pulled out of the Rome Statute agreement for the ICC in 2016 and Ukraine had never ratified the statute, although the country did sign it. The United States is also not a party to the court and has previously threatened it over potential war crimes investigations over its pursual of the Afghanistan war.
The arrest warrants came just days after Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly announced that regime change in Moscow was the end goal in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society, and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia,” Joly said.
“The goal is definitely to do that, is to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account,” she noted.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.