Crime and the Criminal #3: Will Putin Be Indicted for War Crimes?
Will the world finally hold Putin to account?
Photo by Matthew Horwood, Getty Images
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic,” apocryphal quote attributed to Joseph Stalin
I’ve written about drug dealers, gangsters and murderers for a quarter of a century. In nearly every instance, they end up facing some sort of justice, most commonly an early grave or a long stretch in prison. Crime may pay in the short term, but it rarely does in the long run. There’s one exception: politicians.
Not only do some political leaders commit horrific war crimes, more often than not, they get away with it. Take, for example, Vladimir Putin. Putin has built a career on committing war crimes. Until now, the world has done little to hold him to account.
Putin rose to power after the 1999 bombings of four apartment buildings in Russia. Over 300 people died. A wave of panic swept across the country. Putin blamed the attack on Chechen terrorists, but journalists and historians now believe the Russian strongman orchestrated the bombings to pave his way to the presidency.
Putin used the bombings to justify an attack on the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Russia reduced the Chechen capital of Grozny to rubble. Human rights organizations claimed Russian soldiers engaged in multiple war crimes during the operation, including rape, torture, and murder. The brutal military campaign cemented Putin’s image as a strong man in the minds of Russian voters who elected him president.
In Syria, Putin used the same tactics against civilian opponents of the Assad regime. In 2020, a United Nations investigation accused Russia of war crimes for air strikes against a marketplace killing 43 civilians. Another airstrike at a compound for displaced civilians in northwestern Syria, killed 20 people. While it’s true that all sides in the Syrian conflict have committed war crimes, that doesn’t excuse Russian bombing schools and hospitals.
Now Putin has invaded Ukraine, leading the International Criminal Court—the world court that prosecutes war crimes and crimes against humanity—to announce it intends to investigate Russia’s actions
In a statement released on Monday, the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said: “Today, I wish to announce that I have proceeded with opening an investigation into the Situation in Ukraine, as rapidly as possible.”
So will Putin end up in the dock at the Hague? The answer is complicated.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that set up the ICC. That means the court has no jurisdiction to prosecute Putin for the initial crime: the crime of aggression.
International law defines the crime of aggression as waging an illegal war in defiance of the United Nations Charter. There are two ways for a war to be legal. One way is if the war is allowed by the UN Security Council. The second way is if it’s a war of self-defense. That’s why the Russian government manufactured the excuse that Kiev was committing genocide against Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine to justify its invasion of Ukraine .
However, because Ukraine accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC in 2015 in response to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea (but without ratifying the Rome Statute of the ICC, which would have made Ukraine a state party), then the ICC can prosecute ancillary war crimes connected to the invasion, such as the use of banned munitions, the unlawful killing of civilians, or the wanton destruction of civilian property.
Already, independent human rights groups are compiling evidence of war crimes committed by the Russians to submit to the ICC. But even if Putin is found guilty, and that could take years, the likelihood of him ever facing justice is slim. Because the ICC can not try war criminals in absentia, the Russian government would have to arrest Putin and physically hand him over to the ICC.
And then there’s the question of why the world is singling out Putin. It takes real chutzpah for the United States and the United Kingdom to criticize Russia for invading Ukraine after both countries launched their own illegal war of aggression in Iraq which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, created millions of refugees and directly led to the rise of ISIS. If Putin is prosecuted, why not George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
The United States refuses to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction in case the court prosecutes its soldiers. The U.S. also helps the Israelis commit war crimes against the Palestinians by supplying them with billions of dollars of free weapons. When the ICC announced it was launching an official investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza, Washington opposed the probe because, like Russia and America, Israel isn’t a party to the ICC. The hypocrisy is stunning.
This, despite ample evidence of Israeli war crimes such as the disproportionate use of force, failure to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure absent military necessity.
And let’s not forget, the United States is harboring one of the worst criminals of the late 20th Century, Henry Kissinger, a man responsible for a long list of war crimes which include carpet bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, and green lighting murderous crackdowns on left-wing dissidents in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s.
All people of conscience should welcome the news that the ICC is investigating Putin and his minions. But that should not blind us to how broken is the system for prosecuting war criminals. When it’s easier to prosecute some tin pot African dictator for war crimes while the big boys go free, then something is wrong. A world in which war crimes go unpunished is a world where justice is denied. War is the ultimate evil. And no matter the nationality, ethnicity or religion of the war criminals, crimes committed in war are the most serious crimes of all. It’s about time the world treated them as such.