Ukraine seeks to do a thing the planet has never ever accomplished: attempt a country’s leaders for aggression they are in the midst of committing.

“A lot of politicians nonetheless appear at the planet by way of the prism of the Nuremberg Trials, exactly where Nazi officials had been attempted but right after the Nazi regime had collapsed, and the narrative is, ‘Let’s wait till the finish of the war’,” stated Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel Peace Prize final year.

“I think it is the incorrect narrative due to the fact justice should be independent of [countries’] geopolitical interests and justice should be independent of the magnitude of the Putin regime’s energy,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We can not wait. We should establish the tribunal now and hold his regime accountable.”

The purpose for performing this is not merely moral but also sensible, stated Matviichuk, who has directed the centre for 17 years, like the nine years given that Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. That time was dominated by a simmering conflict in between Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and Ukrainian government forces.

“When I spoke with victims of the war these previous nine years, they told me that their perpetrators had been entirely confident that they will stay unpunished,” she stated.

A relative of a couple who died below the rubble of their apartment block right after Russia hit it with a missile mourns in the course of a funeral service in Dnipro, Ukraine [File: Roman Hrytsyna/AP]“When we begin – just begin – legal proceedings, they can build doubt, not amongst all but in some component of [the] Russian [military] that, ‘We do not know what the future will be. … Even if Russia will shield Putin, possibly it will not shield me due to the fact I’m not so considerable as Putin’, and this doubt can make a cooling impact to the brutality that is going on day-to-day,” she told Al Jazeera.

“This doubt can save a lot of lives.”

There is proof for this view.

In September, Ukraine’s military intelligence intercepted conversations revealing that quite a few Russian pilots had been pondering of absconding to South America to prevent international criminal tribunals.

They produced the remarks as an international legal noose was gradually tightening about Russia and its president.

This month, an independent commission of inquiry acting for the United Nations Human Rights Council identified that Russian authorities have committed “numerous violations of international humanitarian law”, like “wilful killings, torture, inhuman remedy, unlawful confinement” and “rape“.

The Center for Civil Liberties says it has documented 34,000 such crimes and Ukraine’s prosecutor basic has identified up to 77,000.

On March 17, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague indicted Putin “for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (youngsters)” to Russia.

It was the ICC’s initial arrest warrant issued for crimes allegedly committed in the course of the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine says it has confirmed the abductions of additional than 19,000 youngsters and believes this policy is component of an attempted genocide.

Russia denies the allegations.

“Putin says Ukraine has no appropriate to exist – there is no Ukrainian nation,” Matviichuk stated.

“Along with the interpretation of this statement by Russian propagandists, who say Ukrainians have to be either re-educated or killed, the prohibition of the Ukrainian language, culture, history, in occupied territories and the extermination of Ukrainian elites there – priests, journalists, nearby mayors, deputies, human rights defenders, volunteers, active persons of the territorial neighborhood – all this collectively shows us this genocidal policy,” she argued.

Despite the fact that Putin withdrew Russia from the ICC in 2016, it has jurisdiction more than crimes committed on Ukrainian territory due to the fact Ukraine accepted it in 2013.

But pursuing the crime of aggression is a challenging matter.

Crimes against humanity and war crimes committed on Ukrainian territory fall below ICC jurisdiction but due to the elevated jurisdictional complexity of indictments for aggression, that crime does not.

“Countries are a lot additional wary of providing the ICC jurisdiction more than the choice to go to war,” an international legal specialist told Al Jazeera on the situation of anonymity. “It’s just a query of manage.”

Even amongst the 123 nations that have accepted broader ICC jurisdiction, several have not accepted jurisdiction for aggression.

ICC referrals for aggression also have to have to be cleared by the UN Safety Council, exactly where permanent members China and Russia would probably veto them.

Ukraine is on a mission

Nonetheless, Ukraine has set out to do practically nothing significantly less than re-establish the planet technique of peace and safety.

“We should come to be a locomotive for modifications in approaches to international law,” Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, stated this month.

“International judicial institutions, which had been supposed to prosecute, are not functioning,” she stated. “After the Nuremberg trials, no 1 was prosecuted for aggression.”

She stated neither sanctions nor negotiations below conflict circumstances have been helpful.

“None of this will cease Russia … Let’s obtain some mechanism that will stop wars in the planet.”

Matviichuk echoed that view.

“We now perform below situations exactly where the law does not perform at all,” she stated. “The complete UN technique couldn’t cease Russian atrocities.”

Men and women inspect a multistorey apartment block broken in current shelling in Donetsk, in a Russian-controlled component of Ukraine [Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters]Ukraine has settled on what some may well describe as a Quixotic course of action – to go about the UN Safety Council and appeal straight to the Common Assembly (UNGA).

A two-thirds majority there, Matviichuk stated, could ratify an indictment against Putin for the crime of aggression.

That suggests Ukraine would have to sway 129 out of 193 members.

So far, Matviichuk stated, only 40 nations have backed the thought, but she is undeterred.

“It will be a push for the subsequent level of improvement of international criminal justice and international law itself,” Mativiichuk stated.

That is nonetheless virgin legal territory.

“It’s difficult to say if the two-thirds majority in the UNGA is a legal rule,” the legal specialist stated. “The guidelines are presently unsettled.”

But like Ukraine, the ICC is taking a maximalist legal stance.

“The ICC has taken the view that there is no immunity for heads of state prior to it and that a state that is celebration to the Rome Statute is obliged to arrest a head of state of a non-celebration,” the specialist stated.

Is the planet complacent?

Like several Ukrainians, Matviichuk believes the planet was slow to realise the complete implications of Putin’s actions.

In 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and armed a separatist movement in Donetsk and Luhansk, the European Union and United States responded with selective sanctions against banks and oligarchs but did not ban imports of Russian oil and gas or support Ukraine militarily.

3 years later, Russia’s military presence in Syria grew, assisting the repressive administration of President Bashar al-Assad.

Ukraine feels it is the victim of these failures to stand up to Russia and refuses to be the third failed test of the world’s resolve.

“Because Russians enjoyed impunity in Syria, they began this war in Ukraine,” Matviichuk stated.

“Crimea was a test due to the fact it was the initial time given that the Second Globe War that a nation annexed a component of one more nation and the planet did practically nothing,” she stated.

When Russia launched a complete-scale invasion of Ukraine in February final year, the Western planet did act, but it took a year for the most painful sanctions – a ban on Russian oil imports and a value cap on oil sales to third parties – to kick in.

This, Matviichuk stated, was due to the fact “even inside nations that assistance Ukraine, there are politicians who want to return to company as usual“.

That was her polite way of saying they do not want to sacrifice financial rewards for values, a criticism levied especially against Germany for backing the Nord Stream two gas pipeline, which was to have delivered Russian gas to Europe’s most significant economy.

Ukraine’s most current move is to attempt to eliminate Russia as a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Safety Council.

Critics say such an ostracism would be legally challenging and politically hazardous, but no matter if it functions may well be apart from the point.

As Matviichuk puts it: “Putin attempted to convince the entire planet that rule of law, democracy and human rights are fake values and a state with a powerful military prospective and nuclear energy can dictate their guidelines.”

Presenting its trigger as a clash of very good versus evil along with reaching considerable victories on the battlefield has helped Ukraine cement an alliance stretching effectively beyond NATO and not observed given that the Second Globe War.

Matviichuk hopes that obtaining come this far, that alliance will see Ukraine as the trigger that brings the UN Charter into complete impact for the initial time.

“We Ukrainians have a sense of urgency,” she stated. “Time for us has resulted in many deaths. … We really feel the urgency of the restoration of international order.”