The NPR Politics Podcast - We Traveled With Attorney General Merrick Garland To Ukraine

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

The U.S. attorney general traveled to Ukraine to discuss war crimes investigations with top justice officials from around the globe. In an exclusive conversation, NPR interviewed Garland about why this work is personal to him. This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, international correspondent Deb Amos, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Giveaway: npr.org/politicsplusgiveaway Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Lindsay and Paul sitting aboard our sailboat in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Today we're celebrating our first year of living aboard and sailing the Lesser Antilles. This podcast was recorded at... Carrie, I feel like we're doing something wrong. We have made poor choices in life, Mr. Detro. We definitely have. That being said, it's 106 Eastern on Monday, March 6th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but we'll still be splashing around the Caribbean Sea.

Okay, here's the show. Oh! Wow. Oh my God. That was coordination. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the White House. And I'm Keri Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And this is really exciting. NPR's Deb Amos is here as well. Hey, Deb. Hey, there. Nice to be here. We are honored to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. So, Keri, you are just back from a trip to Ukraine. You were the only journalist traveling with the Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Tell us what the trip was about. The Attorney General went at the request of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General. Merrick Garland had meetings with Ukrainian President Zelensky, a number of ambassadors and other heads of state and justice ministers. This whole conference that he was attending in far western Ukraine was all about war crimes and accountability for the atrocities Russians have allegedly committed over the last year of this war, this unprovoked aggression. What did the testimony in the meeting focus on in particular? You know, Merrick Garland talked about two things. One, the rule of law and the need to both hold accountable perpetrators of some of these atrocities for bombing maternity hospitals, schools, theaters,

civilian apartment buildings, and other things, and also to try to deter people in Russia and on the ground in Ukraine now from committing new war crimes. This was a multi-part message from the AG. Now, Deb, one of the alleged war crimes that has gotten a lot of attention is the alleged kidnapping of Ukrainian children being taken back into Russia. You have been reporting on this. Tell us what's been happening or what's been alleged. Just recently, Yale University, in cooperation with the U.S. State Department, has issued a report on this. And it was done very carefully to the standards of an international court as evidence. And what they discovered by using satellite imagery, by using social media posts, government statements,

phone records, is there are somewhere around 6,000 Ukrainian children who've been taken to Russia. There are more than 40 camps across the country from the Black Sea coast all the way to Siberia. And these children have been held in Russia against the wishes of their parents. And there were a lot of people who saw this high-level meeting in Ukraine, where Kerry was, and said, maybe this is the first indictment. Maybe this is the first international war crime that, alleged as it is, gets taken to court. That did not happen, but this may be the first case that is brought. Yeah, you know, listening to Kareem Khan, who is the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at this conference, he actually spoke with great emotion and depth about visiting a care home in Ukraine that was

basically abandoned. There were no children there. But in the silence of that moment with empty cribs to my right and to my left, with little shoes belonging to children on shelves and clothes donated by people who wanted these children to have a better future. I was struck by the paintings on the wall that we would find in any school in any country of the world or in the bedrooms of our own young children. Photographs of Christmas past, nativity scenes where children were dressing up and trying to look forward to that celebration. And instead of that joyful presence, there is silence. I mean, Deb, these are monstrous allegations. I don't think there's any other way to put it.

What is specifically going on here? Why is this being carried out, and how is it happening? So there's a couple of ways that it happens. For one thing, Ukraine has the highest rate of child institutionalization in Europe. There's maybe 100,000 kids in orphanages. And as the war raged, certainly in the East, you know, there's plenty of evidence that says the Russians took those kids out of those institutions and brought them to Russia. The other way it happened is you live in the middle of a war zone. The headmaster says, okay, let's have all the kids go to camp in Crimea for two weeks.

And you as a parent say, well, I don't know. I'm not quite ready. And the headmaster says, you know, your kid's been suffering. It's a war. Maybe you don't have enough food at home. Come on, let them go. And you wake up the next morning and 100 buses are in front of the school. And all these kids are being taken,

you know, across a front line. And two weeks later, you can talk to your kid who says, mom, they're going to move me. They're moving me to another camp. And you can't get your kid back. Now you're ashamed that you behave so stupidly. So part of the problem there is parents don't want to talk about it. The other way it happens in these filtration camps, they separate parents from kids. And there is plenty of evidence of this. They move the kids in groups to these camps. We know of 40, there may be as many as 100 across Russia. I mean, Carrie, sometimes a legal conference can be like a pretty academic and high-minded thing. But some of the alleged war crimes that we've been talking about and reporting on for the last year are so personal and so upsetting to even think about and hear about. I have to imagine there was a lot of emotion at this gathering of justice officials.

There was a lot of emotion, Scott. One thing that struck me was Ukrainian President Zelensky asking for a moment of silence for all the victims, for all the people who have died in this unprovoked aggression. And another thing that struck me was the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland really breaking with emotion, talking about his own family's experience. His grandmother made it to the U.S. before the Nazis marched across Europe in World War II, but two of her siblings never did. And Garland told me the family is still not sure what happened to them. And it's important for families and descendants to know what happened when there's been a period of atrocities. And the attorney general basically said he feels for people in Ukraine who don't know what happened to their loved ones. And he respects very much the bravery and courage of these investigators from Ukraine and other countries who were on the ground, exhuming mass graves and digging through rubble for evidence and clues as to war crimes. Yeah. A lot of questions for both of you about what happens

next and how much accountability can realistically be expected. We're going to take a quick break. We will come back and talk about that. All right. We are back. And we heard a bit from it already, Carrie, but as part of this reporting trip, you had an exclusive interview with Garland on the airplane. What else stood out to you from that conversation? You know, the attorney general said there are a couple of ways in which the U.S. is involved here.

One is supporting Ukrainian war crimes investigators on the ground, offering all kinds of advice about environmental crimes and helping them to build a database to gather and keep track of all this evidence. And another was the idea that the U.S. does have legal authority not only over war criminals here in the U.S., but also over people, Russian people, who might kill American citizens in Ukraine. And the AG made a little bit of news. He said that U.S. and Ukrainian prosecutors have already zeroed in on some specific war crimes committed by Russian forces. And they're working to identify the people involved. And with respect to Russians who may have killed Americans on the ground in Ukraine, the AG says they've already identified several suspects. He wouldn't tell me how many or how far along those cases might be.

Deb, I have a lot of questions about how this all works. I guess, first of all, what is the institution where these crimes would be charged and where these trials may or may not happen? There's a couple of choices, and each one of them have a tricky bit of jurisdiction about them. You can go to the International Criminal Court. But there's restrictions on can you charge the crime of aggression, which is called the leadership crime. And that is you go all the way up to the top of the leadership, but you can't set up that charge in the International Criminal Court. The only place you can do that is in an independent international tribunal. Impossible now to get to the UN Security Council because Russia and China have vetoes. You'd have to

ask for a vote in the UN General Assembly. Here's where the problem is there. A lot of the global South don't think this is their problem. In fact, if you look at the, I think the G20, only about half of those countries are keeping sanctions against Russia. The rest, they don't think that this is a war that's their business. Why do we want to get between the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese? So could they get that vote? That is not clear. Soterios Johnson Kerry, was this a topic of

conversation? And how are leaders like Garland thinking about this? Kirsten Yeah. So the U.S. Congress gave the Justice Department authority to prosecute anybody who's on U.S. soil for these kinds of war crimes. That's new. And strangely enough, some people, even some people who have committed some very bad acts, decide to go on vacation on U.S. soil or U.S. territory. And if that were to happen in the decades to come, those people might wind up in an American courtroom, the attorney general says. He also said it's quite clear that there are real efforts underway, both in the U.S. and Ukraine and with international counterparts, to try to go up the ladder of responsibility. Those are not just individual

one-offs. It's quite clear when taking a look at what happened in Bukha, in Meritopol. These are planned killings of civilians in significant numbers that the effort to forcibly deport children, Ukrainian children, from occupied areas into Russia are pre-planned. And the Ukrainians and our prosecutors and the members of the JIT, the Joint Investigative Team, are all trying to identify, to build evidence against the people who are directing this. And that is certainly the case if there, when, let's say there is a case on the Ukrainian children who've been moved to Russia. The Yale study, which was out a couple of weeks ago, does a chain of command. In fact, last week, the Treasury Department sanctioned four Russian governors who were named in the Yale report as being instrumental in holding back kids,

not letting Ukrainian kids go home. There are eight others that were named in that study. It's also possible that they too will be sanctioned. And the cases that will be built will certainly be focused on the chain of command as much as it is those camps and the local people who did care for those kids. The other name that really came up in my conversation with the attorney general was this name, Pergozin. He's one of the oligarchs who used to be known as Putin's chef, right? And his company, one of his connected companies, got in trouble in the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation, although charges were never fully pursued in that case for trying to manipulate the American election. Well, Pergozin, as Deb knows all too well, is the guy in charge of the Wagner Group,

this set of mercenaries that's on the ground in Ukraine. And Garland basically said that guy is a really bad actor. In Senate testimony last week, he called him a war criminal, which is a lot farther than maybe some of Merrick Garland's aides wanted him to go. But he's certainly on the radar of U.S. and Ukrainian authorities, too. All right. That is it for this episode. Deb, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And Carrie, thanks for your great reporting

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