Ukraine and numerous NGOs are building a case to bring Russia before the International Criminal Court for war crimes. On April 11, 2022, a team of 18 gendarmes from the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale (IRCGN, the French National Gendarmerie’s Forensic Science Institute) traveled to Ukraine to assist their counterparts in the difficult task of disaster victim identification. AFP interviewed Major General Patrick Touron, head of the National Gendarmerie’s Judicial Division.
The French gendarmes deployed to Ukraine on Monday have as their primary mission the identification of victims and the determination of their causes of death, explained Major General Patrick Touron, commander of the Gendarmerie’s Judicial Division, to AFP. “This team of eighteen gendarmes from the IRCGN is mainly composed of victim identification specialists, supported by two ballistics experts and an explosives specialist,” the general specified. Their mission has no fixed end date, although rotations have already been planned. “As of Tuesday, they will be in Kyiv, which for now is the location of their mission,” the general added.
The IRCGN is one of the few technical units in Europe capable of deploying to an operational theater within two hours.
Major General Patrick Touron
They will be “supervised by Ukrainian security forces” and will work alongside their Ukrainian counterparts. “The IRCGN is one of the few technical units in Europe capable of deploying within two hours to an operational theater, whether it be a theater of war (as in Mali, for example) or a natural disaster (such as the December 2004 tsunami),” General Touron emphasized. In addition to a mobile laboratory dedicated to DNA analysis, the team traveled with seven vehicles, including a truck carrying twelve refrigerated mortuary chambers to preserve autopsied bodies. The unit is fully autonomous, equipped with the means to generate its own electricity, among other logistical capacities.
We are there for the victims—to help families find their loved ones, to examine the bodies, and to determine the causes of death, – insisted the General, stressing that this was a joint effort between France and Ukraine.
Subsequently, he added, “an international structure will be established as other countries send teams on-site” to take part in the identifications and in the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation into the “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. On Sunday, Ukrainian judicial authorities reported that 1,222 people had been killed in the Kyiv region since the beginning of the invasion, without specifying whether they were all civilians. Images of twenty bodies in civilian clothing lying in a street in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, have circulated worldwide. Ukrainian authorities denounced this as a “war crime” committed by the Russian army, a charge immediately denied by Moscow. On Friday, President Emmanuel Macron declared that France was in the process of “gathering evidence” of “Russian war crimes” in Ukraine and announced the deployment of French gendarmes and magistrates to the country.
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