A New Nuremberg-Style Tribunal Awaits Putin’s Arrest, Extradition

Russia’s repeated threats of war against any state that moves to arrest Vladimir Putin for war crimes, under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, violate the United Nations Charter, and its escalating aggression could endanger the entire world order, says a prominent Irish legal scholar on international law.

So far Kremlin commissars have threatened to wage war against two nations—Germany and South Africa—to stave off Putin’s detention, and have even provocatively warned that the headquarters of the ICC, in the Dutch city The Hague, could be blasted by Moscow’s missiles.

These threats run “contrary to international law, specifically the prohibition of the threat or use of force under United Nations Charter Article 2,” says Dr. Andrew Forde, assistant professor of European Human Rights Law at Dublin City University in Ireland.

Article 2, Dr. Forde tells me in an interview, is the central pillar of the UN structure, and states: “All [UN] Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

The UN was designed by the Allies in the twilight times of World War II, and during the dawn of the post-war era, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” the organization’s co-founders state in the Charter’s preamble.

These “Peoples of the United Nations” added they aimed “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security,” and to ensure that global conflict would never again threaten the future of humanity.

But now, Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, and threats against the International Criminal Court and its member states—if left unchallenged—could “embolden autocrats everywhere and will make the world a much more dangerous place for us all,” says Dr. Forde, co-author of the new book Russia, the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights – A Troubled Membership and Its Legacy.

After the ICC issued its globe-spanning order to detain Russia’s commander-in-chief, and then Germany’s minister of justice said he would execute the warrant if Putin ever stepped onto German territory, one of Putin’s top lieutenants lashed out in belligerent anger.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said in a message posted on Telegram that Berlin’s detention of Putin “would be a declaration of war on the Russian Federation,” reported the leading German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

“In that case,” Medvedev warned, “all our assets—all our missiles—would fly to the Bundestag, to the chancellor’s office.”

A courtier in Putin’s inner circle, Medvedev likewise threatened a missile attack on the site of International Criminal Court, which is surrounded by Dutch government buildings.

“It’s quite possible to imagine a hypersonic missile being fired from the North Sea from a Russian ship at The Hague courthouse,” Medvedev said, according to reports across the European press, including in the British Independent newspaper.

One of the Kremlin’s top warmongers, Medvedev, since the start of Moscow’s missile blitzkrieg on Ukraine, has likewise launched a fusillade of threats that Russia could tap its nuclear-tipped ICBMs, the world’s largest armory of atomic weaponry, to target any Western Allies directly aiding Kyiv.

In his latest skirmish, with U.S. President Donald Trump, Medvedev boasted about Russia’s apocalyptic nuclear attack system, in a tirade that infuriated the American leader.

President Trump said that in response to these Russian provocations, he ordered the repositioning of two American nuclear submarines, according to CNN. Just weeks earlier, Medvedev declared in an online joust with Trump that he risked starting World War III by challenging Moscow over its rocket assaults on Ukrainian civilians.

Dr. Forde, a globally renowned scholar at Dublin City University’s School of Law, says the Kremlin’s battles to force Ukraine into a renewed Russian empire, and its combative taunts of the Western Allies, threaten to upend the UN’s role as the central guardian of global peace, in favor of a chaotic world where nuclear might makes right.

An expanding consensus on the dangers of Russia’s violent expansionism has fostered a coalition, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, to create a new court aimed at punishing Moscow for its unprovoked and illegal attacks on Ukraine, Forde says.

This new Special Tribunal will be specifically aimed at trying the top Russian leaders, and their allies, who have mapped out and orchestrated the attempt to forcibly take over Ukraine, he says.

The tribunal will zoom in on Russia’s wartime aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and on the very top leaders orchestrating the invasion.

In effect, Forde tells me, this will be “a new Nuremberg,” or the direct progeny of the International Military Tribunal that the Allies created to try the Nazi leaders who presided over the occupation and razing of Europe, and the killing of millions of innocents, nearly a century ago.

And while Putin, with his armed takeover of sections of Ukraine and ongoing weapons build-up, now seems a world away from the international judges and prison that await his arrest, so did the leaders of the Third Reich when the Western powers originally conceived the future Nuremberg system of justice.

Adolf Hitler’s Panzer tanks and storm troopers occupied most of Europe in 1942, when the Allies began planning the Nazis’ upcoming trials. German missile designers launched their V2 rocket for the first time—the forerunner of the ICBM that would blitz the United Kingdom—and Berlin’s Luftwaffe dominated European skies.

Yet just three years later, most of the Nazi high command would be in the dock at Nuremberg, charged with the most outrageous crimes of the century.

The Special Tribunal will likely aim its earliest prosecutions on the Kremlin’s leadership “troika,” Forde predicts, that has planned and executed the lightning war on Ukraine, including the Russian president, prime minister, and foreign minister.

And while the International Criminal Court is set to try Putin and military cohorts on a litany of charges, ranging from war crimes to genocide to crimes against humanity, prosecutors will have to prove a link between specific crimes, like the bombing of a hospital or cathedral, or the kidnapping of Ukrainian kids, to one of the Kremlin’s commanders, Forde says.

In contrast, Putin’s role as mastermind of the entire invasion has been intricately documented, and will form the primary evidence of guilt on charges in the Special Tribunal of the “crime of crimes, i.e. the crime of aggression,” adds Professor Forde, a onetime advisor to the 46-nation Council of Europe, one of the world’s top human rights organizations.

While the head of state, head of government and foreign minister in the troika—in any nation—are all protected by the longstanding doctrine of “personal immunity,” Forde says, that shield from prosecution disappears the instant any individual leader leaves office.

Hypothetically, Forde adds, anyone tagged with an ICC or Special Tribunal warrant could be arrested and extradited quite swiftly after leaving his post.

“The Special Tribunal would eventually issue indictments to bring those most responsible for the invasion before the court.”

“This would almost certainly include V. Putin, as president of the Russian Federation,” he predicts. “The aggression against Ukraine appears to be primarily his initiative.”

“It could also include top level government and military leadership.”

Yet Putin, who likely has a coterie of scholars on international criminal law who have explained to him the mechanics of personal immunity, is likely to do everything to hold onto power for as long as possible, to avoid losing his protection from trial for war crimes and armed aggression.

That means the most probable path for Putin to travel to The Hague for trial at the ICC, or at the Special Tribunal, which might be sited in the same city, could depend on “regime change” inside the Kremlin, potentially brought about by Russia’s long-persecuted democratic underground—gaining power in a popular revolution—or by a rival military faction that staged a coup d’état.

Peering into the future, Forde forecasts Vladimir Putin “could only be arrested under a new, hypothetical, future Russian administration.”

He also says the ICC and Nuremberg-style tribunal will closely collaborate, which means Putin might first be tried at the criminal court, and then transferred to the tribunal to face a panel of international judges who determine his guilt in the “super-crime” of armed aggression against another UN member.

And there is no guarantee that the Special Tribunal’s defendants will solely be Russians, Forde predicts.

While the Western powers that defeated the Axis dictatorships in World War II set up separate tribunals to prosecute the Nazi and Imperial Japanese leaders who spearheaded the invasions of other lands, the new Special Tribunal will have jurisdiction to try Russia’s international confederates in waging war on Ukraine, he says.

After reviewing evidence that has been assembled since the start of the war, he predicts, prosecutors might begin issuing arrest warrants for top-echelon leaders in North Korea and Belarus determined to have aided or actively joined Moscow’s missile barrages and armed incursions into Ukraine.

“It is well known Russian troops entered Ukraine via Belarus,” Professor Forde says.

“It is reasonably well documented,” he adds, “that North Korean troops supported the Russians in certain theaters of operation.”

The U.S. government, with its own high-resolution imaging satellites, and with spacecraft operated by its leading-edge partners including Planet Labs, has been documenting not only Russia’s attacks, but also those of the Kremlin’s wartime accomplices.

A senior official at the U.S. Department of Defense told reporters attending a briefing just days after Russian tanks and rockets began crashing across Ukraine’s borders that the Pentagon had intricately tracked Belarus’ participation in launching missiles at Ukrainian targets.

Of the 480 missiles shot into Ukraine that the U.S. imaged in the first days of the war, he said, more than 160 were launched from Russia, and “more than 70 are coming from Belarus.”

Yet the Special Tribunal, even with the global reach of its arrest warrants, will find it difficult to apprehend Belarus ruler Alexander Lukashenko or Kim Jong-un, head of the globally isolated North Korea, anytime soon, he forecasts.

Taking custody of Putin’s top two military partners, Professor Forde says, probably “would require those individuals to either voluntarily hand themselves in [or] to be transferred by a new regime in their country."

Leaders across the EU have heralded the creation of the new Special Tribunal, and its mission to restore peace and justice across the continent.

The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, said during a recent summit in Ukraine that the tribunal’s founding "means that nobody can be left unpunished for the crimes committed, not even the [Russian] leaders who have decided to send all these soldiers here to commit war crimes and all the atrocities that we have recognized here,” according to Le Monde, France’s leading broadsheet.

Professor Forde, meanwhile, says the fantastical satellite imagery that has been captured by spacecraft operators including Planet Labs of Russia’s invading tanks and missile brigades, its rocket attacks on cities and cathedrals, and the mass graves left behind by occupying troops is likely to take center stage at the ICC and Special Tribunal trials.

“It is clear that the nature of evidence in international criminal prosecutions has transformed dramatically since the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.”

“There are massive projects ongoing in Ukraine to try to document digital and other evidence to support prosecutions.”

“I think that satellite imagery could be very compelling if it is corroborated by other evidence,” Forde says, “e.g. photographs, witness testimony, reports of troop movements, reports by independent monitors,” including the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Satellite imagery, he adds, “in the context of a broader book of evidence, could be very powerful indeed.”

Will Marshall, the utopian co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs, told me in an earlier interview that the outfit has teamed up with investigators at Human Rights Watch to compile Planet’s astounding imagery of rocket attacks on Ukraine’s ancient houses of worship and cultural sites—all remarkable evidence that can be presented to the war crimes judges gathering at The Hague.