We all remember these atrocious images of the war in Ukraine. Corpses scattered in the city of Boutcha: the massacre perpetrated by the Russian army had claimed more than 400 victims in March 2022. These children found dead in the theater of Mariupol, after the bombardments by Russia, while Ukraine had yet signaled their presence in giant letters and in Russian.
More recently, the explosion of a building in Sloviansk, the target of a Russian strike, which killed eight people. A succession of morbid nightmares that inspires disgust and anger. An irrepressible desire for justice. Accused Putin, stand up! Because it was he, the master of Russia for more than two decades, who threw his country into war, ordering his army to crush Ukraine. We know the rest: the resistance of a people and the courage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, fourteen months of fighting, razed villages, a frozen front line, deaths in shambles, children deported to Russia…
History textbooks are full of despots. There is no doubt that in these, Putin, Stalin’s dark heir, will appear in the category of bloody dictators. Is this enough to calm the anger of his victims and their loved ones, and of all those who aspire to find a little harmony in this corner of Europe set on fire and blood? Wouldn’t it be time to bring the Russian president before an international tribunal, as was the case for the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic or the Liberian Charles Taylor?
The arrest warrant issued against him in March by the International Criminal Court provides the beginning of an answer, in the absence of justice. And for good reason: if this body is indeed responsible for judging the authors of the “most serious crimes affecting the entire international community”, its judgments remain very symbolic, Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC on its territory. Guilty, necessarily guilty, Vladimir Putin. But safe in the fortress of the Kremlin. The “J’accuse” by Robert Badinter, in our pages of L’Express, should shake the walls of this one. Hoping they end up cracking.