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.

 

 

For updates click hompage here