Opinion: Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."But does any threat of war crimes trials deter Putin, or his Russian troops, from acts of savagery? Dozens more people died just yesterday in a Russian attack on a train station in Kramatorsk.

Charging Putin for potential war crimes is difficult, and any penalty hard to enforce
UKRAINE INVASION — EXPLAINED
Charging Putin for potential war crimes is difficult, and any penalty hard to enforce
The International Criminal Court has opened a war crimes investigation into Russian actions in Ukraine and can issue arrest warrants. But the idea of Putin taking a "perp walk" out of the Kremlin and put on trial at the Hague?

"I just don't see this happening," Michael Ignatieff told us this week. He was the head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, an author, historian, and former leader of Canada's Liberal Party.

International Criminal Tribunals were created by the United Nations to prosecute war crimes: in the Balkans in the early 1990s, and Rwanda in 1994. But those trials occurred years after the massacres, mass graves, and genocides.

I covered the wars in the Balkans and was back in Sarajevo at a time when there seemed to be daily sightings of Ratko Mladic, the Serb general, and Radovan Karadzic, the first president of Republika Srpska. They had been indicted for orchestrating the siege of Sarajevo, and the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed.

Both men evaded capture for more than a decade before being captured and put on trial. Karadzic, one of the authors of the murderous Serb policy called "ethnic cleansing," even concocted a new identity practicing alternative medicine in a Belgrade suburb."...