(The Hill) – The International Court of Justice announced on Monday that it would issue a ruling on Wednesday in the case regarding “Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation).”
The court’s president, Judge Joan E. Donoghue, will deliver the order at 4 p.m. on Wednesday at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the court said in a statement.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only members of the court and parties related to the case are permitted to be present at the hearing which will be livestreamed.
Last week, the court held its first hearing in the case which Russian representatives skipped, a move Ukrainian envoy Anton Korynevych said “speaks loudly.”
“They are not here in this court of law: they are on a battlefield waging an aggressive war against my country,” he added, calling upon Moscow to “lay down your arms and put forward your evidence.”
In its application to the ICJ filed earlier this month, Ukraine said that Russia “falsely claimed that acts of genocide have occurred” in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, Ukraine’s two separatist regions in that Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized as independent in the days ahead of his full-scale military invasion.
Ukraine added that Moscow “declared and implemented a ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine with the express purpose of preventing and punishing purported acts of genocide that have no basis in fact.”
The country also told the court Russia is “now engaged in a military invasion of Ukraine involving grave and widespread violations of the human rights of the Ukrainian people.”
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, at least 79 children, 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers and 12,000 Russian troops have been killed, and over 2.5 million people have fled Ukraine, according to Kyiv’s estimates.