France has dispatched a team of police officers trained in forensics to investigate alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, The Kyiv Independent reported Monday.
The team will reportedly begin investigating crime scenes on Tuesday, focusing on the Kyiv suburbs, where retreating Russian forces left the streets littered with civilian corpses.
Axios notes that "war crime charges are notoriously difficult to prosecute," but that forensic crime scene evidence, such as DNA, could help prosecutors "bring cases against some specific members of the Russian military."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing war crimes in Ukraine. After images of dead civilians in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs emerged earlier this month, even previously neutral nations like Turkey, India, and China called for investigations.
Russia has denied killing civilians in the Kyiv suburbs, calling the video and photo evidence a "monstrous forgery," and accusing Ukrainian forces of having killed the victims — some of who appear to have been bound before being shot — with indiscriminate airstrikes.