The War Crimes Department of the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) of Ukraine expects the Verkhovna Rada to settle the deadlines for investigating war crimes as soon as possible, otherwise the criminal proceedings without suspects, launched in February-March 2022, will be lost.

In an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine, Head of the PGO Department for combating crimes committed during the armed conflict Yuriy Belousov spoke about a legal conflict regarding the time limit for investigating war crimes.

He said the Criminal Procedure Code includes a separate article on martial law, but it does not contain an unambiguous interpretation. "When it was formulated, let's say, without malicious intent, they wrote that there are no deadlines in criminal proceedings initiated before martial law. That is, there is this 'before.' And a formalist lawyer will say that when martial law was introduced, cases already have a term for investigation," he said.

According to Belousov, the Criminal Procedure Code sets the term for the investigation of serious crimes of 18 months, and if those involved are not identified and no one is suspected, then the pretrial investigation ends after 18 months. Further, as the War Crimes Department's head said the case is either closed, or the prosecutor's office must extend the investigation period with the investigating judge.

"Here's the problem: objectively, we simply don't have enough judges to consider the entire array of applications for extension of terms. For example, we now have about 17,000 criminal proceedings for war crimes in the entire Kharkiv region. Extension of terms should be considered by courts at the location agency of pretrial investigation. There are four judges in the court of this district. And 17,000 of our proceedings. Judges have a million other cases. Even if they just put seals without considering, they will not be in time," he said.

Thus, as the War Crimes Department's head said, a critical situation is emerging, and it can be resolved through the adoption of bills relate to amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code regarding the timing of pretrial investigation during the war.

"We are counting on parliamentarians. We are grateful to the law enforcement committee, which is now considering major bill No. 9314. A number of alternative projects are also under consideration. All of them relate to amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code on the timing of pretrial investigation for the period of martial law," he said.

"We hope that the committee will find an opportunity to support these changes, and they will be voted in the session hall. For proceedings initiated in the first days of a full-scale invasion - in February and March of last year - the deadlines expire in August. If the bill is not adopted now, and we understand that objectively the judges will not be able to cope, we will begin to lose proceedings and we won't be able to do anything. Then the enemy will smile in our face, and we won't be able to do anything," Belousov said.