Putin’s terror: the politics of war crimes

In early February, when Vladimir Putin’s troops were on the Ukrainian border and much of the world thought he was bluffing, the Russian military’s guidance on mass graves was changed. Bodies should be covered with chemicals, diagrams showed, and then rolled over by a bulldozer to flatten the ground. The advice seemed so grotesque as to be a decoy: surely a brutal invasion would not be so clearly signalled?

The story of the mass grave found in Bucha shocked the world because it represents how fast things have deteriorated and that we are now seeing the kind of barbarism Europe thought it had left behind. The pictures of dead children and the corpses with their hands and feet bound were proof that nothing has changed, and a reminder of our impotence: all of Ukraine’s allies have ruled out direct conflict with Russia.

Right from the start of the conflict, Volodymyr Zelensky tried to persuade his allies that Putin should be recognised not just as an aggressor but as a war criminal. This week he repeated the message. ‘Civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road,’ he told the United Nations. ‘Women were raped and killed in front of their children.’ President Biden has said that war crimes proceedings should start – but to what end? It sounds, as one British minister puts it, ‘a bit like virtue signalling. What are the chances of Putin ending up in the dock? Or any Russian government sending Russian soldiers to stand trial?’

This is, nonetheless, a new front in Britain’s war effort. Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, has offered £1 million to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to begin the process of prosecution. Suella Braverman, the attorney-general, is working with Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor–general, to identify and bring charges against Russians accused of atrocities in Mariupol and elsewhere under Ukraine’s own court system.