My case against Russia’s war criminals

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Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

My favourite hotels in Lviv were all booked out over the weekend. The world’s justice elite were in town for a gathering on how to hold Russia accountable for its crimes. The US Attorney General and the Chief Prosecutor from The Hague, as well as President Volodymyr Zelensky, were there. It was an apposite location. In the early 20th century Lviv was home to the lawyers Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who later gave us a language to define modern evil by coming up with the concepts of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ respectively.

Russian media, military and officials boast openly of their genocidal intention in Ukraine and revel in their war crimes: just this week Russian soldiers posted a video of themselves casually executing a Ukrainian PoW as he stood defenceless in some woods. They want to show the world that they can act with impunity and that all the concepts that tried to tame evil with justice are meaningless. I grew up in a generation where relativism was considered sophisticated and thinking in categories like ‘evil’ was deemed naive. Now it feels as if we were running away from the much tougher question of how to challenge actual evil as it bears down relentlessly on everything you love.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago I’ve been working with an alliance of journalists and lawyers, the Reckoning Project, to collect evidence of war crimes that are also used for long-form stories about atrocities. If all the evidence-collectors – who also include local teachers, open-source intelligence nerds and first responders – band together, then maybe we can start to fight back against the mountains of Russia’s murders and lies. ‘Russia wants to divide us,’ my colleague Janine di Giovanni told the justice conference in Lviv, ‘but if we co-ordinate we can be more than the sum of our parts.’