Vladimir Putin has become a war criminal. That is what is clear from his launching of an unprovoked all-out war against civilians. Yesterday’s horrific Russian bombing of a maternity and children’s hospital in besieged Mariupol is but the latest of the many outrageous examples of his devastating assault on humanity in Ukraine.
The accepted definition of a war crime or a crime against humanity includes the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilian populations, the willful killing of non-combatants, the causing of suffering among the same population, the destruction and seizure of property, and one or more (in his case myriad) violations of the laws of war.
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has already opened an investigation of Putin’s alleged war crimes and President Volodymr Zelensky of Ukraine calls what Putin is doing to his country as “state terrorism.” U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hinted on March 6 over CNN that by deliberatively targeting civilians Putin had committed war crimes.
By employing cluster bombs in Kharkiv and elsewhere in Ukraine, Putin’s army and air force have also breached the Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed by 110 nations in 2008. Russia is not a signatory.
Four years ago, well after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, the International Criminal Court began to investigate his abuses of the laws of war. At the time, its chief prosecutor believed that torture, rape, and the intentional targeting of civilians had occurred in 2014, and that Putin should be held accountable. But the coronavirus pandemic made detailed examinations of his alleged infractions difficult to pursue. Now, of course, those earlier alleged depredations pale besides the vicious war and many violations that occur everyday as Putin’s army and air force attempt to reduce Ukraine to rubble and submission. Preventing civilians from fleeing war zones is a clear violation of any number of civilized norms.
At the heart of the concept of war crimes is the proposition that an individual and a leader may be held responsible for the actions of a nation and that nation’s armed forces. Since the 1907 Hague Convention and, in the modern era, the establishment of the ICC by the Rome Statute in 1998, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the mistreatment of civilians during civil hostilities are all war crimes. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention is specific: “Willful killings…willfully causing great suffering…and the extensive destruction…of property” are all war crimes.
Arguably, Putin is also engaged in genocide, as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, to which the Soviet Union adhered itself. Article II of the Convention prohibits 1) “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” and 2) the actual killing of members of a group and the deliberate infliction on a group “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part.” In other words, and Article III of the Convention spells it out, genocide is the intent and commission of acts against whole peoples (or parts thereof).
“Ethnic cleansing” has no accepted legal definition, but it is widely regarded as a crime against humanity. The attacks on whole populations in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Darfur, and different parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (earlier Zaire) are considered examples of ethnic cleansing. What is happening in Ukraine is another, and it clearly infringes upon provisions of the Genocide Convention as well. President Zelensky yesterday called what Putin was doing “genocide.”
The Nuremberg trials after World War II ended impunity for war criminals. But whether Putin is tried for war crimes and genocide depends, obviously, on what happens to him and to Russia at the conclusion of his purposeful aggression in Ukraine. Russia withdrew in 2016 from the jurisdiction of the ICC but Ukraine, although never a signatory, acknowledges the authority and reach of the Court. Putin could therefore be designated a war criminal, and be indicted for his breach of the provisions of the Rome Statue, the Geneva Conventions, the cluster-bomb prohibitions, and the Genocide Convention. He would thus stand alongside indicted perpetrators of crimes against humanity like former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who killed wantonly in Darfur, Kordofan, and elsewhere in his country; and Joseph Kony, the fugitive leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, now believed alive in the forests of the Congo. Putin would also join such war criminals as Serbians Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić.
Admittedly, to try Putin, just as Sudan refuses to release al-Bashir to the ICC and Kony has escaped capture, world order would have forcibly to remove Putin from his lair and his protectors. Doing so is inherently unlikely, no matter the ultimate outcome of the war in Ukraine. But today Putin justifiably can be tried in the court of global public opinion for his many breaches of humanity. Broadly publicizing such charges, and fully articulating the nature of the charges might conceivably influence what happens in Russia, and within dictatorships more broadly. It is now time to prepare the world for a second Nuremberg tribunal, and for the positive impact the holding of Putin to account could have on other miscreants who commit outrageous and odious crimes against humanity.
Well done.
On one point: the USA is not a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions either, and as many of us know, we have used those weapons (and also thermobaric weapons AKA "vacuum bombs") ourselves, starting, I think, in the Vietnam era. That does not weaken your argument, I don't think. However, as Americans, we should be aware that if use of those weapons is considered a war crime, we also are guilty.
I'm furious about Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And I'm upset with myself for not speaking up earlier, when he destroyed Aleppo, and, before that, Grozny.
His utter disregard for civilians, his bellicose nuclear bomb threats, his unbelievable chutzpah just wrecking another country.
There could very well be a Nuremberg trial when all is said and done, but, first, all needs to be said and done. Meaning - he needs to be stopped by force. It is the only language he understands.