Crimes and Punishment

AS THE WAR DRAGS ON AND EVIDENCE OF RUSSIAN ATROCITIES MOUNTS, UKRAINE SEEKS JUSTICE

- SIMON SHUSTER/KYIV

IN THE OFFICE OF ANDRIY Smyrnov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, the wanted posters spread across the desk serve as a kind of mission statement. They show the faces of five Russian officials, led by President Vladimir Putin, next to a list of the charges Ukraine has leveled against them: aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity. “We had these printed as a reminder,” Smyrnov says while pacing around his desk on the third floor of the presidential compound, one floor down from the chambers of his boss, President Volodymyr Zelensky. “There’s no alternative to putting Putin on trial,” he says.

The question is where, and under whose authority. As the top aide to Zelensky on judicial matters, Smyrnov, 42, has spent the past year charting a path to an improbable destination: a courtroom, somewhere, with Putin in the dock. Every step has been painstaking, with Ukraine’s closest allies often blocking the way. But Smyrnov, who has no experience in international law, has made surprising progress. Last fall, he says, “nobody even wanted to talk to us about a tribunal. Now look at how quickly the civilized world is waking up.”

On March 16, investigators working with the U.N. Human Rights Office reported that Russian forces had committed crimes against humanity, a rare rebuke from a U.N. body against a sitting member of the U.N. Security Council. The following day, the International Criminal Court in the Hague (ICC) issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest, charging him in connection with another alleged war crime: the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Less than two weeks after that, the U.S. set out a plan to put Putin on trial for the crime of aggression, which some scholars describe as the root of all war crimes.