158 - Putin Accused of War Crimes: But Catching Him May be Harder than Arresting Trump
Crimes Against Humanity
It’s official. Putin is now a war criminal, on the lam. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) accused Putin last week of multiple war crimes. It issued an arrest warrant; every signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC (not Russia or the United States) is now obliged to nab him and turn him over to the ICC if he alights on a signatory’s territory.
But don’t hold your breath. This warrant for arrest is both unprecedented; the head of a nation that occupies a UN Security Council seat and runs a country as large and powerful as Russia has long been thought to be beyond normal international law. Moreover, in immediate practical and realistic terms there is no easy way of executing the warrant. The ICC has no army; NATO and the United States are unlikely to attempt a swift swoop and extrication of Putin from the Kremlin; the Osama bin Laden seizure of 2012 is hardly easily repeatable. (We missed a good chance over the weekend when Putin visited Crimea and Mariupol.) Nor is the ICC, by its own regulations, allowed to try culprits in absentia.
At home, Putin allegedly changes his domestic and kitchen staff frequently to avoid any attempts to tamper with his food or otherwise invent a method of feeding him poison. That is a technique that he has somehow used himself to weaken or eliminate for insubordination or other offenses (according to circumstantial reports) of upwards of forty Russian rivals, warlords, editors, journalists, businessmen, and “influencers.” Two of those allegedly targeted for assassination were a general (successful) and the Chechen despotic leader Ramzan Kadyrov (desperately ill, but alive).
The ICC’s labelling Putin “war criminal” is salutary. As a symbol of why Ukraine and the West are attempting to roll back Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, designating him a war criminal is helpful. Furthermore, it emphasizes the immoral as well as illicit nature of Russian war methods in Ukraine. Most of all, it assigns personal responsibility for much of the harm done to Ukrainians directly to Putin. And the ICC does so while the war’s destruction (now termed illicit) continues.
But there is a major downside to this otherwise welcome designation: eventual negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine may now be slowed or seriously derailed. As a prosecutable war criminal, Putin will hardly want to give up the war that protects him. Just as Binyamin Netanyahu is attacking Israel’s judicial system to evade conviction on charges of corruption, so Putin will want the war against Ukraine to continue to avoid being brought before any bar of world justice. .
The invasion of Ukraine was not provoked. Nor have inevitable excesses of war been occasional or accidental. Collateral damage is not excusable. What the naming of Putin personally as the chief perpetrator does is to attribute the innumerable and continuing aggressions against Ukrainian civilians and the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure to Putin and to cite the infringement over and over of the Geneva Convention norms of war as “crimes against humanity.” No indictment can be stronger.
The ICC cited both Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for “children’s rights” as responsible and arrestable for the crimes against humanity of forcibly abducting and transferring from Ukraine to Russia of at least 16,000 innocent Ukrainian children, both orphans and children from intact families. Many of those children have been “given” up for adoption by Russian households despite the existence of Ukrainian families to which some of the children may belong. The ICC says that Putin is directly and personally responsible for these coerced transfers.
The ICC also seems poised shortly to charge Putin with additional war crimes, including the targeting of civilians and civilian housing and utilities. Those, among a range of other collateral elements of a merciless continuing assault on the body and people of Ukraine, are specifically prohibited by the international laws of war as enacted both before and after World War II.
Such actions by the ICC are salutary. They put the world on notice. They may make Russians think again about backing Putin and the invasion. But their most significant effect might be to make Chinese President Xi Jinping pause in praising or too slavishly supporting Putin when he visits Moscow later this week. He hardly wants to associate China too closely with a regime run by a criminal. Nor does he want to be seen by any of the 123 signatories to the Court as an associate of a vain man now labelled “war criminal.”
Putin now ranks high on a list of indicted and in some cases captured and convicted war criminals. He joins former President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan (finally under domestic pre-trial detention in Sudan), deposed and deceased Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian President and war-lord Charles Taylor (imprisoned), and a handful of other odious largely African desperadoes, a few still on the run, others jailed. Initially, the destinations to which Putin can freely travel will be limited and the theoretical possibility of being arrested enhanced.
But only in the very unlikely eventuality that Xi Jinping takes the actions of the ICC as significant, chastises Putin publicly, and tries really to broker a meaningful peace rather than a temporary truce, will the ICC accusation and arrest warrant influence the course of the war in Ukraine. Nor is it likely to hasten those enablers like Turkey, Brazil, India, or South Africa that are assisting Putin’s war preparations, purchasing his petroleum and gas, and giving cover to his perpetuating of atrocities in Ukraine.
But the ICC’s action redoubles Ukraine’s irrefutable moral position and reinforces NATO’s resolve. At the individual and trench level, too, it should assist in boosting the morale of hard-pressed fighting legions. If any Russians learn about the ICC decision, it might reemphasize the illegitimate standing in their own minds of hapless Russian soldiers along the fighting front, and in the rear. Perhaps, too, the governments of Brazil, South Africa, and many others will think again about remaining ”neutral” regarding Putin and Putin’s invasion. Neutrality enables Putin; now those nations can rightly be accused of assisting in furthering a criminal. (South Africa under President Jacob Zuma allowed Bashir to escape when he visited Johannesburg in 2015.)
At the very least, the ICC putting out an arrest warrant for Putin sharpens the clear distinction between Ukraine, defending its sovereignty and the freedom of itself and the rest of the world, and the bullying and now clearly illicit actions of a single head of state and his war machine.
For earlier columns about Putin’s atrocities and crimes against humanity, see:
4 – “Putin, the War Criminal,” March 26, 2022
26 – “Atrocities and Accountability: Russian War Crimes,” April 8, 2022
155 – “Pursuing Putin’s Atrocities: Seeking Accountability,” March 10, 2023
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