Thirty-Six Nations Sign Treaty to Prosecute Russian Leaders Over Ukraine Invasion

Thirty-six countries and the European Union went to Chișinău on May 15 to sign the statute creating a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The court will sit in The Hague and is aimed at the Russian officials who ordered the invasion, from Vladimir Putin down to his senior generals.

It is the first international tribunal devoted to the crime of aggression since Nuremberg and Tokyo. That matters for smaller European states, Ireland included, because the whole post-war bargain rests on the idea that borders cannot simply be redrawn by force. But creating a court is the easier part. Getting the accused into the dock is another matter entirely, and the coalition behind the project is narrower than its architects wanted.

What the Court Can Do, and Why It Was Necessary

The tribunal exists because the current system has a gap in it. The ICC, the world's permanent war crimes court, cannot prosecute aggression if the accused state is outside its jurisdiction. Russia signed the ICC's founding treaty in 2000 but withdrew in 2016. The other route would be a UN Security Council referral, which Moscow can veto.

The new court gets around both problems through an "enlarged partial agreement", a Council of Europe mechanism that allows willing states to move without unanimous consent (Jurist). The statute removes head-of-state immunity. Putin, his prime minister and his foreign minister can be indicted, although proceedings against those three are automatically suspended while they remain in office.

Military commanders such as Valery Gerasimov and Sergey Shoygu have no equivalent protection. They can be tried in absentia immediately.

Participating states will elect 15 judges, with a single independent prosecutor serving a seven-year term (Cambridge International Legal Materials). Ukraine expects first verdicts by 2028 (Ukrainska Pravda).

The Enforcement Problem

The court will not have its own police force. Every arrest will depend on a member state deciding to act.

The history here is not encouraging. The ICC issued a warrant for Putin in 2023; Mongolia failed to detain him when he visited. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon convicted Hezbollah members in absentia in 2020 for assassinating former prime minister Rafic Hariri. None were ever arrested.

The Yugoslav tribunal indicted Radovan Karadžić in 1995. Serbia arrested him 13 years later, only when its EU accession ambitions made sheltering him more costly than handing him over.

Moscow has already shown how it intends to treat the court. On May 13, the Russian Duma voted 384–0 to authorise the president to deploy military force abroad to "protect Russian citizens" facing prosecution in foreign or international courts (TASS, DW). The law puts into statute the same doctrine Russia invoked before entering Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.

A Coalition With Gaps

The tribunal's 36 signatories are overwhelmingly European (Council of Europe, DW). Only two non-European states joined: Australia and Costa Rica.

No African, Asian or major Latin American government endorsed it. That absence gives weight to a criticism already moving through non-aligned capitals: that this is selective Western justice, applied to Russia but never to NATO interventions in Iraq or Libya.

Inside Europe, 12 Council of Europe members refused to sign. Four are EU states: Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Malta. Hungary and Slovakia have repeatedly blocked EU sanctions packages and used the Druzhba oil pipeline as leverage.

Bulgaria's caretaker government gave no public explanation. GERB, the main opposition party, called the refusal a "political mistake" incompatible with NATO and EU membership. Among the non-EU holdouts, Turkey's absence is the one that stands out: a NATO member declining to endorse accountability for aggression against a partner state.

The United States, which is not a Council of Europe member, has stayed silent. Washington previously preferred a lower-profile hybrid tribunal and fears that making aggression prosecutions normal could expose American military operations to future legal challenge.

The Trump administration's non-engagement has raised concerns about budgetary shortfalls for a court whose estimated annual operating cost is €75 million. The European Commission has pledged €10 million for the initial set-up, but long-term funding is still unresolved.

The Open File

The tribunal's real value may lie less in immediate convictions than in keeping a legal file open. International courts build records. Those records matter when domestic politics shift, alliances change or accused men start travelling again.

France joined the steering committee in April, with foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot declaring "Il n'y a pas de paix sans la justice, ni de justice sans la vérité" (Le Figaro). The Netherlands confirmed The Hague as the seat, adding another layer to the city's role as the world's judicial capital.

Whether the court gets from indictment to enforcement depends on questions no statute can answer: how long Putin remains in power, whether his generals ever travel outside Russia, and whether Europe's coalition holds when the political cost of enforcement begins to rise.