This is a guest opinion column

Birmingham attorney Stephen Humphreys has spent most of the last year in Ukraine mainly working on war crimes investigations, volunteering to help train Ukrainian armed forces, and teaching law and history at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.

August 24, 2023, will mark the second Independence Day since Putin sent soldiers to capture Kyiv, kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and erase Ukraine from memory—which Americans think of as the start of the war. It will, in fact, be the tenth time Ukraine has celebrated its freedom with a stark reminder of the alternative: Russian invaders on Ukrainian territory, where they killed over 14,000 Ukrainians who were defending their country since 2014.

Ukraine has marked many stark anniversaries in the meantime.

March 14 was the anniversary of Fox News journalists killed in a crossfire near Irpin. Six weeks of horrors and atrocities followed under Russian occupation at Bucha, Irpin and Borodyanka.

One year later, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin. The warrant specified Russia’s program of removing Ukrainian children from occupied territories and sending them to live with new families in Russia. But the investigations and indictments are just getting started.

The warrant does not yet address the most basic war crime, the unprovoked aggression and invasion for conquest, the kind of pure territorial expansion and subjugation outlawed at Nuremberg. Putin’s actions contradict our most basic notions of territorial integrity, sovereignty, and right to self-determination.

The kidnapping of Ukrainians named in the warrant, is not limited to children orphaned when Ukrainian parents are killed by Russian bombing. Filtration camps select Ukrainians of all ages for deportation from occupied territories to Russia. These deportation camps stir dark memories in Central and Eastern Europe.

And those are not the only children lost. On the anniversary of the Russian invasion, while working on the Russian war crimes investigations in a cemetery near Borodyanka, in addition to a new mass grave, I found a mother there grieving her son, shot dead at a Russian checkpoint a year before.

Out in Borodyanka, Olga Dmitrenko has published her own book of stories about that time: the people kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Russians who were just practicing their malicious skills, firing tank blasts into houses, on their way to Bucha and Irpin (where, after a month of occupation, a fiery hell awaited the mercenaries for their sins). Olga asked, why are our brothers killing us?

She even asked the Russian soldiers—”Why are you here?”

“To liberate you,” they said.

“How can slaves liberate a free people?” Olga asked. A Russian soldier told her they were liberating her from the Jews, a strange take on Putin’s de-Nazification myth. Olga notes that the poor Russian bastards in Borodyanka who were about to die in Bucha and Irpin were slaves to lies.

Here is the most disturbing, emerging conclusion of multiple ongoing war crimes investigations. These violations of the Geneva convention and atrocities against civilians are not being committed by rogue units that are out of control or under duress.

The evidence we are amassing shows that these horrors, including those against civilians, including Ukrainian women and children, are part of a systematic and deliberate plan handed down from the highest level of the Kremlin. This rape, torture, and execution of unarmed civilians is Putin policy. American politicians now seeking to minimize the aggression and atrocities, as a mere “territorial dispute” that does not concern the United States, are seriously misguided in following the lies of Russian propaganda that survives unchanged from the days of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Some of these off-course statements by American politicians came out at the same time the well-deserved warrant for Putin’s arrest was issued. This shows we have more work to do to understand Putin’s influence and control over segments of American political parties.

My students in Kyiv are astonished when they hear Fox News pundits and politicians say Ukraine should give in to Russian domination of their country. Tommy Tuberville alternately called for the US getting out of Ukraine and, after that did not go over well, reducing support for Ukraine and blaming Biden instead of Putin. Representative Barry Moore sponsored a resolution ending aid to Ukraine.

The danger of partisanship over Ukraine just grew greater as Alabama’s Republican congressional delegation endorsed Ukraine’s worst enemy and Putin’s biggest supporter, Donald Trump.

The Ukrainian Declaration of Independence in 1991, which accomplished Reagan’s most fervent dream of bringing down the Soviet Union, should remind us of our own Declaration of 1776, and remind us that we stand in solidarity with freedom-loving people and against tyrants whose political opponents are poisoned by radioactive and nerve agents, shot, tossed out of windows, and jailed on false charges after a show trial.

Let’s hope that by August 24, 2024, Ukraine will be truly independent, free from Russian invaders. Let’s hope that Ukraine will set an example for America as a beacon of hope and freedom and that MTG will have to shut up. Next year, let’s hope there are no Ukrainian mothers grieving the anniversary of their children’s murder. Only when we help save Ukraine will we be truly free to celebrate Independence Day.