By
Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Ukraine as an inflection point for the West
As we pointed out, Vladimir Putin's admiration
for Peter the Great is well known, but he now seems to have ideas of
'Great'-ness. Equating Russia's invasion of Ukraine today with Peter's
expansionist wars some three centuries ago and making his strongest
acknowledgment that his war is a land grab. Yet Putin's apparent
empire-building ambitions bode ill for Ukraine and have irked other neighbors,
including Estonia, which called his comments "completely
unacceptable."
But perhaps there is another lesson from the history books. Peter
the Great eventually conquered land from the Baltics to the Black Sea. But
Russia was fighting its Great Northern War for 21 years.
As images of Russian tanks rolling over the Ukrainian border and
families huddled in subway stations, concerns in national capitals about the
local impact of tougher measures, including neutral countries such as
Austria and Sweden, had closed their
airspace to Russian planes or were preparing to do so.
To this comes the sheer volume of the documented war crime cases is too overwhelming for Ukraine's justice
system as well as for the International Criminal Court (ICC), raising questions
about how many cases will be brought to trial and how many accused of Russian
war criminals could ultimately face justice.
By May
24 already about 20,000 war crimes have been
registered. Destruction and subsequent hostage-taking are among the
incidents being probed.
Putin's Nuremberg
moment
"This
is a Nuremberg moment" Russia has perpetuated Russia in this invasion,
said the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice. "Even the
most well-resourced prosecutorial office would have difficulty grappling with
the sheer scale of the criminality on display."
A slew of Western countries and international institutions
devoted resources to helping Ukraine document and collect evidence on as many
alleged war crimes as possible, from Russian soldiers torturing, raping, and
executing Ukrainian civilians to Russian armored units and air forces
indiscriminately shelling civilian targets.
When Russian forces withdrew from the Kyiv region in early April, they
left in their wake nightmarish scenes of bodies strewn along the roads of
Bucha. The massacres came to symbolize Moscow's savage disregard for civilian
life. They raised fears about what awaits investigators in cities such as
Mariupol, which endured months under siege by Russian forces.
The efforts to document and eventually prosecute these war crimes are
large without precedent, veteran human rights activists say, both because of
the sheer amount of documented cases flooding into Ukraine's central
government—and the fact that the government managing these cases is still
battling the Russian invasion.
There are so many alleged Russian war crimes that the investigative response is also
unprecedented. The ICC, the premier intergovernmental body tasked with
prosecutions of war crimes, has dispatched
42 investigators to probe possible war crimes in Ukraine, its
"largest-ever" team of experts to carry out such a task. Other
European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Poland,
joined Ukraine in setting up a so-called Joint Investigation Team to cooperate
on war crimes investigations. The U.S. government is funding complementary
efforts to document war crimes and support Ukrainian organizations dedicated to
doing so. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a leading
multilateral organization, has also established an expert mission to document
human rights abuses. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the prosecutor general's office has
brought forward several war crimes trials against captured Russian soldiers. It
is investigating thousands more while civil society groups are training
volunteers on how to properly document evidence of possible war crimes,
effectively crowdsourcing the early stages of investigations for future cases.
There's a growing concern among officials and Ukrainian activists that
all these concurrent efforts could eventually trip over one another and may
start doing more harm than good—unless there's a central hub to coordinate all
the work. "It's been a little bit chaotic," conceded one U.S.
official working on supporting efforts to document war crimes in Ukraine, who
spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to talk to the
media.
Looking forward
December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near
Moscow's Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had
held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the
holiday honoring the Russian security services. "The task of infiltrating
the highest level of government is accomplished," Putin quipped. His
former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia.
When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he speaks
the empire's familiar language. For five
hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered
"tribes," treating them as incapable of governing themselves.
Several lessons have become clear in the two
decades that have seen the rise of Putin's world. Isolating Russia and refusing
to deal with it, however appealing that may appear to some, is not an option.
On the other hand, pursuing "resets" despite Moscow's Suez moment to achieve
qualitative improvements in ties to Putin's Russia is a fruitless quest for the
foreseeable future.
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