Having served in both Afghanistan and East Timor, Glenn Kolomeitz is a former New South Wales Police detective and an attorney who spent more than a decade protecting veterans’ rights. Now, he will bring his exceptional experience to lead war crimes investigation efforts in Ukraine.
The Australian veterans’ resource Veterans 360 Australia writes that “Glenn joined the military in 1986 and completed trade training as an aircraft technician, working on Blackhawk, Iroquois and Kiowa helicopters. He did his Year 12 in the Army and was subsequently commissioned as an officer, serving as a military police officer and investigations manager.”
At this point, there are already “20,000 outstanding allegations after Russia’s invasion of the country” that will require Mr. Kolomeitz’s attention in Ukraine.
“There are a lot of lawyers there who have studied international law, but they wanted that ex-military, boots-on-the-ground experience and the policing experience, the ability to work in high-intensity crime scenes,” Mr. Kolomeitz commented on his appointment as the lead investigator of the war crimes mobile teams.
“The war crime investigations will focus on several areas including command responsibility, indiscriminate targeting of civilians and infrastructure, use of sexual violence, forced transfers of people into Russia and genocide,” writes the Australian ABC News.
While there is not a single war crime in Ukraine that does not look like a scene from a horror film, one special war-crime-related area that Mr. Kolomietz will focus on is sexual violence. Russian aggression and occupation have produced rapes, whose victims range from 13 to 82 years old, both females and males. In fact, “Russia is using rape and sexual violence as part of its “military strategy” in Ukraine,” emphasized a UN envoy. “There are protocols in place internationally and that goes into the protection of the witnesses, the victim-survivors. We have to make sure their well-being is catered to,” said the newly appointed investigator.
ABC News highlights that “Mr. Kolomeitz will also use his experience as a police officer and crime scene equipment operator to help train Ukrainian investigators. ‘One tool, it’s an angle protractor, which allows me to measure the angle of impact of a missile tail to then be able to trace the trajectory of that missile back to its point of departure, he [Glenn Kolomietz] said. Then link that — it’s called linkage analysis — to the Russian unit, link the Russian unit to the Russian commanders and there is our brief.”
At the moment, Mr. Kolomeitz considers waiting for the judicial prosecutions to start in the next half a year to be the greatest challenge. “These prosecutions may take years, so I’ll put together these briefs, but I want to see the end product, I want to see the Russian chain of command in the dock.”
