Sec. 2. Sense of Congress
372 words·~2 min read·
/bill/117/hr/7276/rs/section-2A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
It is the sense of Congress that— in its premeditated, unprovoked, unjustified, and unlawful full-scale invasion of Ukraine that commenced on February 24, 2022, the military of the Government of the Russian Federation under the direction of President Vladimir Putin has committed war crimes that include but are not limited to— the deliberate targeting of civilians and injuring or killing of noncombatants; the deliberate targeting and attacking of hospitals, schools, and other non-military buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, such as the bombing of a theater in Mariupol that served as a shelter for noncombatants and had the word children written clearly in the Russian language outside; the indiscriminate bombardment of undefended dwellings and buildings; the wanton destruction of property not justified by military necessity; unlawful civilian deportations; the taking of hostages; and rape, or sexual assault or abuse; the use of chemical weapons by the Government of the Russian Federation in Ukraine would constitute a war crime, and engaging in any military preparations to use chemical weapons or to develop, produce, stockpile, or retain chemical weapons is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which the Russian Federation is a signatory;
Vladimir Putin has a long record of committing acts of aggression, systematic abuses of human rights, and acts that constitute war crimes or other atrocities both at home and abroad, and the brutality and scale of these actions, including in the Russian Federation republic of Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, demonstrate the extent to which his regime is willing to flout international norms and values in the pursuit of its objectives; Vladimir Putin has previously sanctioned the use of chemical weapons at home and abroad, including in the poisonings of Russian spy turned double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and leading Russian opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, and aided and abetted the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; and in 2014, the Government of the Russian Federation initiated its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine which resulted in its illegal occupation of Crimea, the unrecognized declaration of independence by the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” by Russia-backed proxies, and numerous human rights violations and deaths of civilians in Ukraine.