Vladimir Putin: War Criminal

Earlier in the week Vladimir Putin went on a diatribe reminescent of the rantings of Adolph Hitler which caused many to question whether he is losing it mentally.   Putin's wild rantings aren't the only parallels with Hitler.  Based on his invasion of Ukraine and damage to civilian property and deaths of civilians, Putin is a war criminal under the Geneva Conventions and international law.  Ideally, he needs to be captured, tried, and with luck found guilty and, in my view, executed, sending a message to other would be war criminals.  A revolution within Russia that leads to Putin's demise would be similarly welcome as well. The relevant definition of war crimes reads in part as follows

        Article 8     War Crimes

1. The [International Criminal] Court shall have jurisdiction in respect of war crimes in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.
2. For the purpose of this Statute, ‘war crimes’ means:
1. Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention:
1. Wilful killing
2. Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;
3. Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health;
4. Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; . . . .

b.       Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts: . . . .

iv.       Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will     cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;

                     v.      Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or                                      buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;.  

The news and social media coverage coming out of Ukraine document that the foregoing events are occurring.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Putin's transgressions of international law.  Here are excepts:

In the eyes of the world and almost certainly history, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday was an epic miscalculation, drawing comparisons to Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein for cold-blooded aggression that could challenge the world order and change its borders. The Russian leader appeared almost delusional in a pre-dawn speech from the Kremlin announcing a “special military operation” to “protect” Donbas, the eastern region where Russian-backed separatists have waged a war for eight years. Putin, instead, immediately ordered Russian tanks into Ukraine and air strikes on the capital and more than a dozen cities in a country of forty million people. “Peace on our continent has been shattered,” the NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg told reporters. “We now have war in Europe on a scale and of a type we thought belonged to history.” Putin’s “reckless” attack risks “countless innocent lives,” Stoltenberg warned.

Putin is now, at minimum, a pariah condemned by leaders across the world. “Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war,” President Biden said in a speech to the nation announcing new sanctions on Russian financial institutions and élites. He charged that Putin “has much larger ambitions than Ukraine.” “He wants to, in fact, reëstablish the former Soviet Union,” Biden said. . . . French President, Emmanuel Macron, called the attack “a turning point” in history that will have a profound and lasting impact across the continent.

Putin may now also qualify as a war criminal, according to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. War crimes include willful killing and extensive destruction of property “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.” The term has been inconsistently interpreted and unevenly applied to leaders or countries—including to the U.S. and its officials—who have initiated aggression for reasons considered unjustified. In Ukraine, Putin’s “war of choice” has clearly violated international law through his invasion of a sovereign country and attempt to oust its government. After an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting, on Wednesday, the Secretary-General, António Guterres, warned that the Russian invasion could be the “worst war” of the century “with consequences not only devastating for Ukraine, not only tragic for the Russian Federation” but for the entire world.

Putin has lied at every stage of the Ukraine crisis . . . As he spoke, however, his military was setting up field hospitals near the Ukrainian border stocked with fresh blood supplies. “You don’t need blood unless you plan on starting a war,” President Biden noted on Tuesday.

Putin’s invasion is based on wild accusations, including a claim that he needed to “denazify” Ukraine, a country led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is, in fact, Jewish. Putin vowed to end the “humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime,” when, in fact, separatists backed by Russia have for years waged a war in eastern Ukraine. . . . . He described the government in Kyiv as a “junta,” even though it was democratically elected in 2019. And Zelensky, in fact, won in a landslide with seventy-three per cent of the vote, defeating thirty-eight others who ran for President.

Putin was, in fact, the one who sparked the crisis with an erroneous—even fictional—claim that Ukraine would soon gain membership in NATO. Joining the Western military alliance is an aspirational goal for Ukraine, which it enshrined in a constitutional amendment in 2019. But NATO’s leadership has openly said that Ukraine does not yet qualify for membership. It would have to introduce and enact multiple reforms that may be years away.

As Russian forces advance across the country, Putin’s goal now appears to be regime change by military force—a step that he criticized the U.S. for taking in Iraq. In a reflection of his paranoia, Putin even suggested that the invasion of Ukraine was to protect Russia from the U.S. . . . And he brazenly reminded the world, “Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states.”

Russia experts and former U.S. officials increasingly question Putin’s stability, especially as he has surrounded himself with like-minded advisers and yes-men who encourage his ambitions to rewrite history.

Nina Khrushcheva, an international-affairs professor at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, told me. She said the Russian leader appears to “have lost all grip on reality, more so than I was willing to admit only yesterday.” She added, “I didn’t think he was suicidal, but he clearly is, and is taking the world and us with him.” She described Putin as a “ruthless megalomaniac with a giant imperialist agenda” akin to Stalin and Mao.

Others compared him to Hitler. “There are many parallels between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, who is now at Stanford University, tweeted on Thursday. Putin no longer appears to be a rational actor on the international stage, experts say. “I hate comparing people to Hitler, but Putin’s crazy talk is making it hard to avoid,” . . . . My Russian friends suggest something different—is this guy losing it?”

Putin is betting his political future on whether Russia can prevail long-term in Ukraine. “Putin’s gamble seems to be that he can be in charge of what comes next, how far and wide this spreads,” Karen J. Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, told me. “That is a foolish lack of appreciation for the power NATO and the other countries have to contain his incursion—and in that lies his miscalculation.”

Holding Ukraine, given its vast size and population, will be a challenge militarily and politically. Russia has the largest land army in Europe, but it would need to send in many more troops than it already has to occupy the entire country, which is roughly the size of Texas. The Ukrainian government has called up reservists and promised weapons to civilians to form a public resistance force. They could create an insurgency challenging Russian control of part or all of Ukraine, experts predict.

Russia propaganda outlets will keep trying to hide the truth and claim success for its military operation against a made-up threat,” he said. “But history has shown time and again how swift gains in territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of massive mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead ends.”

Be very afraid of what this unstable individual with delusions of grandeur may do.  He needs to be taken out by whatever means necessary.  Western governments need to be much more aggressive in going after the oligarchs who help keep Putin in power by confiscating assets - homes, bank accounts, yachts, investments, etc. - and perhaps taking those  in western nations into custoday as accomplices to war crimes.  Too much is at stake to take only half measures.  As the lead up to WWII demostrated, giving into bullies and despots only encuages them to take further lawless actions.