The prosecution of Vladimir Putin is easy. Easy, in the sense that the collision of three hurricanes is the ‘perfect’ storm. It is easy because the two obstacles that confront most war crimes cases are easy to surmount in the Putin case.
War crimes trials are two trials in one. First, the crimes themselves, out on the battlefield. The missile slamming into a hospital; murder and torture. The second trial is working up the chain of command to the boss. In complexity and expense, it is like one of the anti-Mafia prosecutions in Italy or the United States. Many trigger-pullers, many crimes, many bosses.
In most of the short history of war crimes trials, proving both the crimesand the chain of command to the top are a problem. Finding the trigger-pullers means sifting mass graves and locating survivors. The chain of command is equally difficult to establish because few commanders order war crimes in writing. And, in much of the world, a commander has no formal position, and there is no easy way to tie them to crimes of subordinates. Neither is a problem with the Putin case.
A day after the Vuhledar hospital missile attack, detailed reports were published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Unlike most wars, investigators were on the ground to watch crimes as they happened. The problem was not shortage of evidence, but the huge quantity of it.
Putin announced that the Ukraine invasion was a ‘special military operation’ and would last a few days. Ukrainian resistance, and weapons from Nato, wrecked that timetable. Russia’s forces were too poorly equipped and too few in number for the multiple axes of advance of the invasion. In late March, Russian forces abandoned their attempt to encircle the capital, Kyiv, and retreated to the Belarusian border. Ukrainian forces surged into the vacated territory and found new horrors. In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the bodies of 419 civilians killed by various weapons were found. Dozens had their hands tied behind their backs, killed with a bullet to the head.
A torture chamber was uncovered in a basement, where mutilated bodies were discovered. Survivors emerged from the ruins to tell investigators, from the ICC and from Ukraine itself, about torture and beatings. Women and teenaged girls reported being gang-raped by soldiers. Crucially, investigators were able to identify the Russian units involved. The evidence came from witnesses and signals intercepts, but also from more unlikely sources: cellphones found on the bodies of dead soldiers, discarded uniforms, identification panels on smashed tanks, graffiti on the walls and intercepted text messages from the soldiers themselves.
Positively identifying the units, and often the soldiers, who had committed the crimes made the second part of the case equally easy. Evidence for a chain of command stretching to the Kremlin was provided by Russia itself. Article 87 of the Russian constitution specifies that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. That makes him responsible for what those for
