Analysis: West is running out of ways to punish Putin

Western outrage, new sanctions and promised state-of-the-art weapons came too late to save the man found shot to death next to his bicycle on a lawn outside Kiev.

The man was photographed in a weekend of gruesome footage from the city of Bucha, Ukraine.

He was one of many innocent civilians whose fate randomly collided with President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion. Scenes being revealed as Russian troops withdraw from Kiev are causing flashbacks to the atrocities the Nazis last carried out on Ukrainians in WWII.

This is a record of the bloody price Ukrainian civilians are paying for Putin’s obsession with Russia’s Cold War humiliation, and it summarizes how global responses to crimes against humanity – with the exception of military action – struggle to keep up the vicious pace. of the war on Ukrainian soil.

The sense of revulsion over what is happening in Ukraine produced fresh impetus to hold Russia accountable on Monday. The European Union and Ukraine have launched a new investigation into possible war crimes in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, where bodies were found strewn across the street.

Members of the US Congress urged President Joe Biden to speed up the flow of arms to Ukraine to repel the invasion. The European Union is facing mounting pressure to accept what would be a painful economic blow by cutting Russian oil and coal exports entirely. Biden reacted to the growing list of brutalities on Monday by calling for more sanctions and a war crimes trial against Putin.

“You may remember that I was criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Biden said. “He is a war criminal. This guy is brutal.”

But the terrible tragedy unfolding in Ukraine is that all the measures the West has used to punish Moscow and impact the long-term course of the war cannot do much to save the civilians being targeted now.

And it is questionable whether any of the possible responses to Putin’s troops’ bloodlust will influence the ruthless Russian leader in any way. The reflex of leaders offering horrified condemnations, demanding accountability and attacking Putin is understandable. It is also critical that the world not be numbed by acceptance.

But the West is unlikely to halt Putin’s atrocity campaign in the short term — especially as the Russian leader has proven himself immune to moral outrage. And given the scale of the carnage already committed, including attacks on apartment buildings, hospitals and bomb shelters, he also appears to have passed the point of any restraint.

A fresh push for new sanctions on Russia followed a weekend when harrowing images emerged of civilians shot dead, some execution-style, in Bucha. A team from CNN also observed a mass grave in the city on Sunday and witnessed the removal of bodies from a basement on Monday (4).

Ukraine warned on Monday that such scenes could be the “tip of the iceberg”, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said even worse atrocities were being uncovered.

“There is already information that the number of victims of the occupiers could be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated cities,” said Zelensky, who speaks to the UN Security Council on Tuesday (5).

“In many villages in the liberated districts of the Kiev, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the occupiers did things that the locals had not seen even during the Nazi occupation 80 years ago.”

Putin knows the limits of the West

The toughest sanctions ever, Russia’s new status as a global pariah, and its cultural, diplomatic, economic and sporting isolation have not yet stopped the Kremlin’s strongman. Given Putin’s seemingly secure political position, he shows no concern about being labeled a war criminal, and the chances of him being tried are remote, barring political changes in Russia.

Russia’s contempt for the notion of responsibility, meanwhile, shone through its absurd claims that scenes of decomposed bodies being pulled from the basement and images of civilians apparently killed execution-style were staged by Ukrainians.

Armed with the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear warheads, Putin understands that the West is unwilling to intervene directly in Ukraine and risk a disastrous confrontation with Russia with measures such as a no-fly zone to save civilians.

He is offering a lesson in why other dictators might consider pursuing nuclear weapons. The kind of Western intervention to save civilians in places like Kosovo or Libya is banned in Ukraine, simply because of the implied might of the Russian leader’s arsenal — and his saber swinging at the start of the war.

Eighty years after dictators like Adolf Hitler in Germany or Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union spread terror at home and abroad, Putin is creating a terrifying new spectacle for the 21st century – that of a dictator who cannot be deterred.

A special kind of impunity

Putin’s willingness to absorb punishments already imposed on Russia for the invasion gave him a special kind of impunity. Sanctions on the Russian economy and the oligarchs could have a long-term debilitating impact. But they clearly failed as a war deterrent tool.

The Russian leader also appears willing to tolerate heavy casualties among his troops in the face of heroic resistance from Ukrainian forces. The recalibration of Russian strategy to try to consolidate control of the eastern regions may, however, show that even Putin can be moved by events over time.

From the outside, the war is a military, diplomatic and economic disaster for Russia after its failure to achieve key objectives. But it could still be a perverse success for Putin if his aim is simply to destroy as much of Ukraine as possible and create a victory parade for Russian state media.

So in many ways he is playing an asymmetrical game with the West, whose sanctions and punitive measures are based on a more logical view of Russia’s interests and its own limitations.

Still, the White House reacted to the growing horror in Ukraine by promising to accelerate the pace of military, humanitarian and economic aid to Kiev.

“Bucha’s images powerfully reinforce that now is not the time for complacency,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday.

Such help could shorten the war and alleviate attacks on civilians in the coming weeks and months. But Putin has been besieging and bombing Ukrainian cities for weeks. Millions of people have already been expelled from the country to Western Europe as refugees.

A Nuremberg-style trial?

The push is also growing for some sort of formal mechanism to hold Russian leaders accountable for war crimes. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told Jake Tapper of CNNthat the invasion was the biggest disaster in Europe since World War II and would deserve a justice system similar to the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

“We need to prepare now. We urgently need to launch some sort of joint investigative group to be prepared to bring Putin to justice and see Putin sitting behind bars.”

But the nature of the post-Cold War international system would complicate the establishment of a system that enjoyed global legitimacy. Russia, for example, would certainly veto any attempt to involve the United Nations with its vote in the Security Council.

China would also seek to derail any effort to impose accountability for human rights abuses, given its own crackdown on Uighur Muslims that the United States has called genocide.

Still, the difficulty of bringing Putin to justice does not mean that Russians further down the chain of command cannot be investigated, although the International Criminal Court in The Hague does not conduct trials in absentia. The organization, however, already has investigations underway in Ukraine, which has accepted its jurisdiction even though it is not a member of the court.

A potentially significant new blow to Russia could come from Europe as the European Union drafts new sanctions. French President Emmanuel Macron backed a ban on Russian exports of coal and oil to the EU later this week.

But it is doubtful that other major powers, including Germany, would go that far, given the energy shortages and spikes in already high inflation that would result.

Such a move would undoubtedly make headway in starving Ukraine for war funding.

But in the short term, it would also raise two questions: Is Putin still vulnerable to pressure? And how many more Ukrainian civilians will die until he is?