Russian war crimes: How The Hague can prosecute Putin and his backers for wholesale attacks on Ukrainian civilians

When the war in Ukraine eventually ends, we are likely to witness war crimes trials on a scale unprecedented since the end of the second World War.

Last March, Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, indicted Russian president Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvovoa-Belova, on suspicion of deporting thousands of Ukrainian children.

Nicolas Ligneul, a Franco-Swiss lawyer based in Paris and accredited to the ICC, travelled to Ukraine this summer, then to The Hague where he filed 15 lawsuits for war crimes on behalf of Ukrainians.

Ligneul has been impressed by the Ukrainian government’s painstaking accumulation of evidence. “Every time there is an explosion, the police and forensic scientists arrive immediately after the rescue services. They catalogue and keep every missile part. They receive advice from US and French investigators.”

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Under article 8 of the Rome Statute which established the ICC, intentional, direct attacks on civilians are war crimes.

“Will they prosecute every artillery gunner?” Ligneul muses. “In 1942, no one thought the lowliest kapos in Auschwitz would be brought to justice. But what I can say is that the entire country is conscious of the fact that this is necessary. There is great determination to do it.”

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Ligneul believes the number of war crimes far surpasses 93,000, the figure cited by Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin in July. The government does not discuss military losses and announces only partial statistics for dead and wounded civilians. Ligneul believes this is because they want to avoid sowing panic.

Virtually every Ukrainian prisoner released by Russia has a Z, the symbol of Russian forces in Ukraine, burned onto his torso

US officials estimate 200,000 people have died in 18 months of war, about half of them Russian and half Ukrainian.

Ligneul came to represent Ukrainian victims almost by chance. When the full-scale invasion occurred in February 2022, he gave his car to his friend David Piguet, a former French army officer who headed the office of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk.

Piguet used the car to rush back to his partner Halyna Solyanik, who refused to leave her country, and their two children. The couple then spearheaded the creation of the Ukrainian Fund for International Volunteers, known by its French acronym Fuvi.

Fuvi initially ferried jumpers, electrical generators and food to Ukraine and Ligneul was recruited for its legal task force. They received requests to help Ukrainian soldiers missing in action. But the authorities told them not to get involved; Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs were negotiating the fate of prisoners between them.

The ombudsman’s office in Kyiv put Fuvi in contact with the Russian political exile Mikhail Savva at the Centre for Civil Liberties, which was co-laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

Savva told Ligneul that virtually every Ukrainian prisoner released by Russia has a Z, the symbol of Russian forces in Ukraine, burned onto his torso.

Ligneul devotes 50 hours a week to Ukraine, in addition to his normal law practice. When he leaves for work in the morning, his three-year-old son asks him, “Daddy are you going to Ukraine?”

After Ligneul started working for Ukrainians, his firewall and internet connection in Paris crashed. The hackers had Russian IP addresses. “I got the message,” he says. “It’s an internet war too.”

When he posted an explanation of Putin’s indictment on social media, Russian trolls threatened to bomb Europe.

The cases Ligneul researched in Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s hometown, have marked him deeply. “I went to see for myself because I did not want to be the victim of propaganda or manipulation,” he says. “I saw the points of impact. I have photos of destroyed buildings in my phone. I met the survivors. I am sure these are real crimes.”

Ligneul met refugees from Kherson who lost hands and feet because Russian forces mined the approaches to forests. The Russians had destroyed power plants and the victims wanted to collect wood for heating.

Most of Ligneul’s cases are victims of bombardments. He tells of a couple who were sleeping in separate rooms one hot night because he wanted to sleep with the window open and she wanted it closed. “A first missile exploded in the street. The husband opened the bedroom door. He turned and saw another missile coming. He screamed, ‘Hide, hide’ and slammed the door shut. His wife dived under the bed. The missile exploded and killed him.”

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Another woman was out grocery shopping when she heard an explosion and rushed home. “She told me the story like this: ‘I opened the front door. My house had no more roof, no more walls. I found my son in the living room, riddled with shrapnel. He was dead.’”

The woman’s husband was at work when the attack happened. When she told him their son was dead, he had a breakdown and has been hospitalised ever since. “She says her life will never be the same. She thinks her husband will not recover, and she lost her only child,” Ligneul says. “We discussed the legal procedure. She said she wants to make the Russians pay for what they did.”

The arbitrariness of bombardment is terrifying. Ligneul tells the story of a woman who lived a few kilometres from her daughter and grandchildren. The daughter’s house, across the street from a school where refugees were sheltering, sustained a direct hit.

“It took eight hours to dig out her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, one of them 19-months old,” Ligneul says. “When I asked the grandmother what she wanted me to do, she burst into tears and cried out, ‘Bring back my children’. At times like that, I know it’s worth doing what I do.”

There is an arrest warrant for Putin, which is why he did not go to South Africa for a summit with African states. He’s afraid of being arrested. He’s travelling less

Ligneul’s meeting with a 22-year-old Ukrainian refugee in the Netherlands left a deep impression. “She was not wounded. She was not raped,” he said. “She was just locked up for two weeks while the Russians were in Bucha. It has been a long time, but the psychological shock was so great that she hasn’t recovered. She is still in deep depression.”

Sceptics point out that Russia never ratified the Rome Statute and does not recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC. Ligneul says it doesn’t matter.

“There is an arrest warrant for Putin, which is why he did not go to South Africa for a summit with African states. He’s afraid of being arrested. He’s travelling less. If the war ends and he decides to have no relations with western Europe or the US or South America, that’s two-thirds of the globe. Of course, North Koreans may commit war crimes and nobody goes to North Korea to arrest them. If Russia becomes like North Korea and Putin never goes out, we can’t do anything. But I don’t think that will happen.”

It is also possible that Putin will attempt to impose immunity for himself and his henchmen as a condition for any peace deal. “That would be complicated, because there is already an arrest warrant for him. They could try to put pressure on the prosecutor [of the ICC], but he alone decides, and he answers to no one. Article 27 of the Rome Statute says no immunity for heads of state. Prosecutor Khan is doing his job and he sticks to the statute.”