After vetoing MH17 tribunal, Russia proposes tribunals for Vietnam War and atomic bombings of Japan

The deputy chairman of the Russian Senate’s international relations committee, Andrei Klimov, is calling for the establishment of an international tribunal on the Vietnam War.

In an interview with the radio station Govorit Moskva, Klimov said that “major Western thinkers created a moral, unofficial tribunal [on Vietnam], but unfortunately it never became legally binding.”

Klimov says the war against Vietnam was illegal and accuses the United States of “clear aggression.”

“It’s not just that there were major casualties. There was never even a formal declaration of war here. For ten years, they tore Vietnam to shreds, with torture, and camps, and burning people alive with napalm,” Klimov said.

On August 5, Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin called for the creation of an international tribunal on the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Naryshkin says the use of atomic weapons was not a military necessity, and accuses the United States of trying to silence discussions about the attack.

In late July, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have established a tribunal to find those responsible for the MH17 crash, which took place in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and killed 298 people. Eleven of 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution, with Angola, China, and Venezuela abstaining from the vote.