The World Must Hold Putin and His Henchmen Accountable for Their War Crimes in Ukraine

A conversation with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. Putin's "refusal to allow for the safe evacuation of civilians or to allow humanitarian aid in" is a war crime in itself.

Mariana Vishegirskaya outside a maternity hospital destroyed by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. She survived the shelling and later gave birth to a girl in another Mariupol hospital. (AP Photo/Mstyslav Chernov)

By Michael Judge

I spoke with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, just 48 hours after Russia’s barbaric bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, the besieged city in southeastern Ukraine where so many civilians have been murdered by the Russian military that families are forced to lay their dead in the streets, covered with whatever scraps of tarp or sheets they can find. Of the once nearly 500,000 residents, more than half have fled, while more than 2,000 of those who remained have been slaughtered in what residents call “a living hell.”

I’ve worked with Roth on projects in the past, most recently when I commissioned an op-ed from him in 2020 titled, “Shun the autocrats, re-embrace human rights.” In that piece, he was highly critical …