For peace in Ukraine, Putin must be offered something. Here’s what he should get

The worst man in the world has been having a good week. The red carpet was rolled out for Vladimir Putin over the ice in Alaska, notwithstanding his guilt for starting the war in Ukraine, which has killed half a million people so far. He has refused to end it without obtaining some spoils of victory, like conquered land and mineral rights, guaranteed by the blinking idiot who is the president of the United States. So it’s now back to the drawing board for the diplomats to devise “security guarantees” (possibly including Australian “boots on the ground”, but not those of Americans frightened of arrest for war crimes) to protect a country that has no security at all.

Putin’s reception from lawyers in The Hague has been rather different. They have finally worked out how to prosecute him for the crime of which he is pellucidly guilty, that of aggression, for breaking the UN charter and invading a peaceful neighbour without just (or any) cause. The Council of Europe (a coalition of 46 democratic countries), in an agreement with Ukraine, has set up a “Special Tribunal for Aggression” (STA) in The Hague to prosecute him, with its prison and courtroom borrowed from its neighbour, the International Criminal Court (ICC). There will be a trial court of three and an appeal court of five judges who “shall not be disqualified solely on the basis of his or her nationality”. This anticipates motions for disqualification of judges from NATO countries, though Australian judges would probably be objected to as well if Australian troops were providing security from Russia.

The obvious problem will be to get Putin down from his red carpet and deliver him into the dock. The answer has been found in giving him a trial in absentia. The ICC bans such trials, but for no good reason – when the facts are clear and the defendant properly represented, they can be fair even if he chooses to stay away and declines to give evidence by video link. Such trials are acceptable in Ukraine and in most European countries, as long as anyone convicted has the opportunity to return for a retrial. Absentia trials have been used in international courts (see the recent Lebanon tribunal) and even at Nuremberg, where Hitler’s missing personal assistant, Martin Bormann, was properly represented and fairly convicted – he was thought to be advising the government of Syria, but his remains were found some years later underneath a motorway in Berlin.

If a trial in absentia is to work for Putin, he must be given the best advocates to take every point of fact or law available to his defence. This is why the in-absentia trial of the Russians who shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 did not cut much ice. They were not allowed to have defence lawyers, and the verdicts (of murder and not manslaughter by gross negligence) were unreliable. But when the evidence is properly tested, the importance of a verdict that settles the truth can be invaluable: the great thing about the judgment at Nuremberg was that it confounded and destroyed Holocaust denialism – and it still does.

And such a refutation is necessary for Putin’s lies about the causes of the war. There is a sudden spate of publicity alleging that Putin had every reason to invade because of the neo-Nazi government of Zelensky or because of genocide in Donbas. These allegations are ridiculous and will easily be disposed of. The only reasonable point that Putin apologists can make is that just three months before the invasion he sought a guarantee from NATO that it would not “put weapons that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory”.

The reply, from Jens Stoltenberg, the pig-headed Norwegian running NATO, was rude and aggressive, saying that NATO could do what it liked where it liked. This was foolish: any country obviously has a right to complain if a neighbour puts nuclear weapons on its borders, just as the US complained in 1962 about Russian missiles in Cuba. That crisis was only resolved when Kennedy secretly but reasonably withdrew US missiles from Turkey.

So what can be done now if “security guarantees” do not work? Certainly, sanctions can be tightened, especially on third parties such as India who keep Russia afloat by buying its oil. So can cultural ostracism – it is not enough for Wimbledon to scrub the nationality of Russian competitors off its scoreboards; they should simply scrub any Russian competitor who is insouciant about their army killing more women and children than died in the Blitz. As for diplomats, they are well aware of international law and know that Russia has breached it. They should be declared persona non grata and kicked out – the air of Australia, even of Canberra, is too pure for these brutalists to breathe.

But for peace in Ukraine, Putin must be offered something. So let it be no more than his entitlement. He cannot be entitled to keep the spoils from an illegal war. But because he is entitled to security on Russia’s border, he may demand that reckless NATO expansion should end at Ukraine and in any event without the deployment of the “nukes”. Ukraine is the innocent party and deserves compensation from both sides – Russia and NATO – the sandwich in which it has been meat for some 3½ years.

Geoffrey Robertson AO, KC, was the first president of the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone and is the author of Crimes Against Humanity (Penguin Books 2024).