To Stop Russia’s Next War, We Need Justice for This One

Four years ago, I watched Russian forces circling the capital and wondered how Vladimir Putin and his officials would be held accountable for this act of aggression against Ukraine. Aggression is a specific crime under international law. But I saw that the terror Russia had unleashed on Ukraine was the result of the impunity Russia has enjoyed for decades for its actions in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Mali, Libya, and Syria, to name just a few. It commits aggression because it can.

If we want to stop future wars, we must punish the states and their political and military leadership for starting them. In modern history we have only one precedent: the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials following World War II. Subsequent tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone focused on war crimes but not the act of planning and initiating war. While Nuremberg and Tokyo were an essential step toward establishing accountability and justice in the last century, they have created the impression that justice is a privilege of the winners of a settled conflict. But justice is not a bonus, it is an essential human right.

In Ukraine, we must pursue justice regardless of the war’s trajectory and without waiting for the end of Putin’s regime. While Russia is already being pursued through international courts for its crimes in Ukraine, it is not for the planning, preparation, and execution of the invasion itself. At the International Criminal Court, jurisdiction for the crime of aggression only extends to signatories of the Rome Statute, which does not include Russia. With Russia wielding veto power in the Security Council, United Nations structures are not viable either.

We are moving closer to gaining justice. On May 15, 36 countries approved a resolution to support a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, established by the Council of Europe, with the Netherlands agreeing to host it in The Hague. We at the Center for Civil Liberties, the Ukrainian human rights organization I lead, are proud to have contributed to work that informed the resolution. It was an important victory, and now we need to see more countries lend their weight to the body as well as agree on defining the rules, staffing, and budgets.

I work with those directly affected by war and I know that people see justice in different ways. For some, it means securing compensation or seeing perpetrators behind bars. For others, the priority is discovering what happened to their loved ones (over 90,000 Ukrainians are registered as officially missing during the full-scale invasion). Then there are those who just want public recognition that what happened to themselves or others is not just immoral but illegal. That is why we are developing a comprehensive justice strategy to meet all these demands.

When Russia first invaded in 2014 to crush Ukraine’s democratic ambitions, the Center for Civil Liberties was the first human rights organization to send monitoring teams to Crimea and the Donbas. We focused on the illegal abduction, detention, torture, sexual violation and killing of civilians. In 2022, we combined forces with dozens of organizations across the country and the occupied territories, to build a national network of local investigators to record human rights abuses. We have since jointly documented over 100,000 incidents of Russian war crimes. I have interviewed countless survivors of Russian captivity who have provided graphic testimony detailing the excruciating torture they endured.

Russia cannot win on the battlefield in Ukraine and so resorts to terror as its primary weapon. It seeks to break the people’s resistance in the belief that this will make the country bend to its will and become easy to occupy. But this is already the most documented war in human history, and we can bring to the courts not our tears but evidence. While Putin dehumanizes Ukrainians, we return people their names and their dignity, even in death, by investigating the crimes against them. Every life matters.

Unlike in the totalitarian regimes that attack us, we derive our resilience through local democracy, freedom of speech, grassroots organizing, and the agency of ordinary people doing extraordinary things until they finally change history. Pursuing the architects of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and across the world is a crucial component of winning justice for the wronged and securing a meaningful peace. We must act not just for populations who have already suffered, but to prevent the next Russian attack on an innocent country.

On June 22, Russia marks the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany—which saw millions of Soviets murdered and interned. On this day last year, Putin attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Moscow, while Ukrainian rescue workers in the city of Kramatorsk pulled several bodies from an apartment building after it was struck by a Russian bomb. Putin and his accomplices may think that their actions today will be consigned to the ash heap of history but, like the Nazis, they will be defeated and forced to answer for their crimes in this lifetime.