On February 24, during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, was informed that Russia’s invasion of his country had begun. Moments later, Kyslytsya turned to his Russian counterpart Vassily Nebenzia and told him: “There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell.”
There is little doubt that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international law and the UN Charter. It is also a crime. It should be called that, not only by defenders of human rights and justice, but by states.
In recent days, many state representatives, media outlets and academics have gone to great lengths to highlight the abominable behavior of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But it is almost as if what Putin is doing now is particularly egregious. This invasion is the calling card of the Russian president and war crimes are his signature.
Everything that is happening now in Ukraine, including reports of rocket attacks on civilian buildings, is par for the course for Putin. Days ago, international law scholars Frédéric Mégret and Kevin Jon Heller predicted that Putin would commit the crime of aggression by invading Ukraine. No one should be surprised if the situation worsens. Putin’s personal biography is full of embraces of heinous crimes and human rights violations.
Putin rose to fame and eventually power thanks to Russia’s war in Chechnya between 1999 and 2000. In crushing the breakaway region’s separatist movement, the Russian government unleashed appalling levels of violence. Human Rights Watch has documented legions of atrocities, including allegations that Russian forces “indiscriminately and disproportionately shelled and shelled civilian objects” and “ignored their obligations under the Geneva convention to target combatants.” The West meekly responded to accusations of war crimes. Instead of being condemned, Putin was widely hailed as a leader who promised Russians a better life and the West better relations when he succeeded Boris Yeltsin as Russian president. That was not going to be the case.
In 2008, Putin turned his attention to Georgia, ordering Russian troops, whom he called “peacekeepers,” to invade the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They weren’t there to keep the peace. While Moscow invoked humanitarian language in arguing that it had a “responsibility to protect” its citizens in both territories, Russian forces indiscriminately attacked civilian targets, a war crime.
In 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine, leading to the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, while also igniting conflict in Lugansk and Donetsk that cost some 14,000 lives. During the violence, Russian-backed militants bombed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Attacks by Russian forces on civilians were common, and killings and torture were reported in the detention centres, dubbed “Europe’s last concentration camps”, run by pro-Russian separatists.
These are just a small cross-section of Putin’s crimes that have been documented by investigative and human rights bodies.
The alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Putin’s forces also galvanized the International Criminal Court (ICC), which opened an investigation into atrocities in Georgia in 2016 and completed a review of those committed in Ukraine in 2020, concluding that there were reasonable grounds. believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed.
And then there is Syria. For a decade, Putin has supported Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad despite evidence of atrocities that war crimes investigators believe are the “strongest since the Nuremberg trials.”
Russian air forces have bombed hospitals and attacked civil defense forces working to rescue survivors after the bombings. A 2020 report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, found that Russia had bombed civilian areas in violation of the Geneva Conventions. As Kenneth Ward of the Arms Control Association has noted, Russia was also a facilitator of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Moscow shielded Syria from any judicial scrutiny for its atrocities committed with and on behalf of Assad, by vetoing a referral of Syria to the ICC in 2014.
As if involvement in widespread and systematic international crimes were not enough, Putin has also been accused of ordering the poisoning of Russian dissidents in the UK and the jailing of defenders of democracy and human rights. He has also been linked to corruption on a scale that amounts to a violation of human rights.
None of this is Russia’s fault. Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin. In recent days, thousands of protesters across Russia have taken to the streets to protest the invasion of Ukraine, while “No to War” graffiti have appeared in numerous Russian cities. It is Putin, and his cabal of sycophants and enablers, who must be held accountable.
Addressing the actions of the Russian president now is not just about the attacks in Donetsk, Luhansk or the outskirts of Kiev. It is also about the atrocities he has committed with impunity in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, Chechnya and elsewhere. It is about the atrocities that he has perpetrated and that too many states have turned a blind eye to in the false hope of being able to contain and reason with him.
As the armored columns entered Ukraine, Canadian Ambassador to the UN Bob Rae called Putin “a war criminal.” It may be that Putin will never face justice in an international court like the ICC. But the international community should organize the collection and preservation of evidence of his atrocities as they happen, in real time before the eyes of the world. Perhaps one day that evidence could be used to prosecute Putin and his regime. Above all, states must treat Putin for what he is and what he has done: a criminal to whom the laws of war and the norms of humanity mean nothing at all.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Exquisite Post.