On a Monday morning last month the Russian general Igor Kirillov left his flat in Moscow. A powerful bomb hidden in an e-scooter blew him up. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it was behind the assassination. The previous day it had charged him with war crimes: the use of banned chemical weapons that had poisoned more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
His killing was a brutal extrajudicial moment. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s embattled government has sought justice in two ways. Its agencies have targeted perpetrators responsible for murdering Ukrainians – the commanders who give orders, technicians who design long-range missiles used in nightly attacks.
At the same time prosecutors, police and investigators have meticulously gathered evidence. They have visited the scenes of bombings, taken photographs and exhumed victims from mass graves. For now, trials seem unlikely. The hope is that a future tribunal for crimes of aggression can be established, exposing Russian atrocities and holding individuals to account.
Steve Crawshaw’s latest book is a timely exploration of how the landscape of global justice has changed. As a one-time Russia and east Europe editor for the Independent, he reported from the frontline of the cold war and on the fall of the Berlin Wall. He covered the bloody conflict in former Yugoslavia, before joining Human Rights Watch as its UK director.
Crawshaw is surprisingly upbeat about the possibilities for transnational justice in the rules-busting age of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Two recent cases are encouraging, he thinks. One is the 2023 indictment by the international criminal court (ICC) of Russia’s president and his human rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. Both are accused of illegally abducting Ukrainian children and bringing them to Russia.
The Kremlin has shrugged off the charges. Even so, they are embarrassing. They mean Putin is liable to arrest in 123 countries that recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction over mass killings such as genocide. “Powerful figures have been prosecuted and jailed in ways that once seemed unthinkable,” Crawshaw notes, adding that survivors can “make their voices heard as never before”.
The other extraordinary development is the ICC’s indictment last year of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. They are accused of using starvation in Gaza as a deliberate tactic, and of other crimes during the Israeli-Hamas war including murder and persecution. Their arrest notices were a “remarkable” blow to the notion of impunity, writes Crawshaw.
Netanyahu, predictably, was outraged. The Israeli government has heaped abuse on the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and accused him of bias and antisemitism. But Crawshaw depicts Israel’s campaign in Gaza as relentlessly awful. According to the UN, more than 13,000 children have been killed and many thousands injured. Palestinian civilians have been entombed in their homes, as well as in “safe areas” such as hospitals and schools.
Khan also charged Hamas’s leaders with crimes against humanity after the 7 October 2023 massacre at the Supernova music festival. This didn’t stop the US, and other western governments including the UK and Germany, from uncritically siding with Israel. President Biden called Netanyahu’s indictment “outrageous”; Rishi Sunak said it was “deeply unhelpful”.
Typically, western states give a free pass to countries they regard as allies, while decrying the behaviour of enemies. The failure to criticise Israel while at the same time condemning Russian aggression against Kyiv has been deeply unhelpful, Crawshaw suggests. It has dented support for Ukraine in the global south. And it has fuelled hard-to-refute accusations of hypocrisy and double-dealing.
Prosecuting the Powerful charts the modern quest for global justice, beginning with the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials. There have been plenty of bad decades. For much of the postwar period the same governments that prosecuted the Nazis committed numerous colonial crimes of their own. They included British torture in Kenya, the My Lai massacre by American troops in Vietnam and French barbarities in Algeria.
Since the mid-1980s there has been progress, in what the book casts as a “Faustian tussle between hope and despair”. The Argentinians put their junta on trial. In 1992 Crawshaw asked the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević if he was worried about standing trial for war crimes. Milošević hadn’t considered the question. Nine years later, he appeared in The Hague.
There were massacres (Rwanda, Srebrenica) and gruesome wars (Chechnya), as well as shameful episodes of Washington-authorised rendition and torture (Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo). Nevertheless, the idea of universal justice grew. In 2002 the ICC was established. (It prosecutes individuals. The international court of justice, set up in 1945, adjudicates disputes between states.) The Bush White House tried to sabotage it, and threatened to storm it if a US soldier were ever tried.
Currently, Putin and Syria’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, appear untouchable. Assad is ensconced in Moscow, having fled Damascus last December. In what may help eventual prosecutions, Assad’s regime assiduously documented its many crimes. There are millions of files recording torture sites, victims and chain of command, some of them smuggled out of the country by brave activists.
This is an important primer for our dark times. Crawshaw has seen for himself the places of horror, and observes that terrible things happen in ordinary locations. These include the Ukrainian city of Bucha – where Russian soldiers executed 400 civilians – and the “soft hills around Srebrenica, where cuckoos can be heard calling in the woods”. Justice, he concludes, is needed to prevent the Buchas of the future.
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber