these magistrates who collect evidence of Russia’s “crime of aggression” for an international trial

The International Criminal Court, which has already issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin, has been collecting thousands of pieces of evidence since the start of the war in Ukraine, in order to one day be able to conduct a major trial on this conflict.

Two years after the start of the war in Ukraine, will Vladimir Putin and his close entourage, civilian and military, one day be judged for their crimes? In The Hague, Netherlands, investigators from the International Criminal Court working on Ukraine occupy an entire floor of Eurojust, the European agency for justice cooperation. These are prosecutors seconded by European capitals, joined by an American magistrate. They have all been working hand in hand for two years with their Ukrainian counterparts present on site and the International Criminal Court.

An international collaboration, which aims to collect, analyze and classify the hundreds of thousands of evidence of crimes collected since the start of the war: photos, sometimes posted on social networks by Russian soldiers themselves, satellite images of gutted buildings, videos, or recordings of telephone conversations. These elements are added to the hearings and evidence provided by victims and witnesses of the killings, rapes, kidnappings attributed to Russian soldiers, as well as the testimonies collected in Ukraine but also throughout Europe from refugees.

A future trial against Vladimir Putin and his relatives?

An unprecedented collection in terms of its scale, but above all because it is carried out in times of war. Everything is also digitized, which will make it possible to cross-reference evidence, such as the testimony of a victim of the Boutcha massacres with images recovered from the networks. Everything is translated, both into English and Ukrainian, by this “International Prosecutor’s Office” called the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression (ICPA). All evidence is stored on an ultra-secure server, with a view to a future trial, the form of which remains to be defined.

If the International Criminal Court does not have the jurisdiction to prosecute Russia for the crime of aggression, it can prosecute Vladimir Putin or Russian soldiers for “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity”. An arrest warrant has already been filed in March 2023 against the Russian president for the deportation of Ukrainian children. To hit the Russian regime and the order givers, we must therefore be able to use this notion of “crime against humanity” and therefore have tangible elements on which the law can rely.

So to fill this gap in international law, we must agree on a special tribunal, the legal contours of which need to be developed. Will he be in Ukraine? On neutral ground? Backed by the UN? Meanwhile, this massive collection of evidence is the first attempt since the days of the Nazi war crimes tribunals to build a case against senior leaders for this crime of aggression.