Making Putin pay for Russia's war crimes is a difficult task

There is some behavior even in a pitiless war zone that is so gruesome, so nauseating, it demands a more heinous label: war crimes.

Evidence of egregious violations by Russian combatants is flowing out of Ukraine. Dozens of corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. Civilians thrown in mass graves. The deadly bombing of a train station crowded with desperate people, including children. Repeated rape.

Many images and stories are coming out of Bucha and elsewhere, now that Russian soldiers have abandoned positions around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Bucha has turned into a graveyard of atrocity. Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernmental organization, has worked to document some of what happened, including one incident when Russian soldiers forced five men to kneel by a road, “pulled their T-shirts over their heads, and shot one of the men in the back of the head.”

The outpouring of outrage has been justified: President Joe Biden calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” the condemnation of the global community and call for a tribunal, and the opening of an investigation into atrocities by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Yet the horror continues.

War crimes are as old as human conflict, but doctrines codifying them date largely to the 19th and 20th centuries. These bleak transgressions, hard to define given the ugliness of war in general, have been addressed in international conclaves and agreements in the years after World War I, including the 1949 Geneva Conventions, leading to prohibitions against torture, murder, rape, conscription of children, and other violations at war.

TOUGH LEGAL TASK

It is necessary and good to categorize the awfulness of the behavior we’re seeing in Ukraine, but international justice moves slowly if at all. Rarely do top leaders ultimately responsible for atrocities suffer repercussions, and never quickly. The possibility that Putin would face international prosecution through any United Nations mechanism is distant at best. Putin would have to be captured and present for any proceeding; it is difficult to imagine that scenario. However, other Russian generals or soldiers could be tried if their actions could be tied to specific instances of barbarism.

It’s possible a tribunal can be set up in the coming years in the manner of Nuremberg, where World War II atrocities were dissected. But that would provide current victims little more than the hope of future deterrence. The current system of war crime tracking and prosecution has hardly been effective as dissuasion in the present, let alone modern history, with patterns of atrocities in Syria and — as recently as last month — Mali. Even as Human Rights Watch has been monitoring Ukraine, it released a warning about Malian armed forces and suspected Russian fighters in late March summarily executing an estimated 300 civilian men, some of who were suspected Islamist fighters.

As for the conflict in Ukraine, Russia is already signaling that it will fight allegations of war crimes, with some diplomats and spokespeople even suggesting that videos and images of dead bodies were hoaxes.

A DELICATE BALANCE

There are signs that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine could get worse before it gets better. As Russian forces regroup to try to take over eastern Ukraine, the fighting is expected to be fiercer and the casualties greater. Putin, isolated physically and politically thanks to COVID-19 and international sanctions, has made no secret of his ambitions to remake Russia into a great power and even an empire. He has chemical as well as nuclear weapons at his disposal. That makes him enormously threatening to his Eastern European neighbors, and to the global world order.

Biden is faced with the challenge of corralling an authoritarian leader and keeping Americans out of another disastrous war, while the corrupt autocrat on the other side says his finger is on the nuclear button. Hence the careful diplomatic dance of recent weeks, with escalating sanctions and the transfer of funds and certain weapons to Ukraine’s defenders, but not other machines of war such as fighter jets which could be deemed by Russia too much of a direct threat. Hanging above everything is the fear that a Putin attack on a NATO nation would engulf Earth in World War III.

But maybe it is not a binary choice. There is another weapon that the democracies of the world have against Russia: Europe, in particular, pays billions to import Russian energy, including coal, oil, and gas. Those purchases prop up the Russian economy and fund Putin’s war machine.

It’s easy for America, which relies less on Russian fuel, to call for belt-tightening elsewhere. Cutting off the Russian supply could lead to recession, outages, and economic pain. But with nothing else working to stop the horrors in Ukraine, Biden and our European allies must turn the screws of every last economic penalty and nonmilitary tool to discipline the rogue Russian state. The images out of Ukraine demand no less. War itself, unprovoked and undiminishing, demands no less.