The U.S. president publicly accuses the Russian president of committing war crimes and a genocide in Ukraine. Evidence of mass executions, torture, and forced deportations seem to support the allegation. And the International Criminal Court has launched a formal investigation.
Which all puts us in uncharted waters. The leader of a nuclear armed superpower has never been charged with war crimes — let alone genocide.
So where do we go from here? On The Power Vertical Podcast this week, host Brian Whitmore speaks with David Crane, the Founding Chief Prosecutor at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone who recently authored a white paper on Russian war crimes in Ukraine; Paul Williams, a Professor in Law and International Relations at American University; and Mark Vlasic, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University who served as the youngest prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Srebrenica genocide case at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.