Let’s not ignore the poetic justice: on 17 March, the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin; a scant two weeks later, a grand jury in New York voted to indict Donald Trump. Admittedly, the two cases are quite different. Putin is wanted for his role in orchestrating devastating war crimes. Trump stands accused of relatively minor crimes involving the payment of hush money to a former porn star. But there is a sense that these two men, so recently bound in mutual admiration of their bullying contempt for democratic norms and legal process, now find themselves in the clutches of the very systems of justice that they believed they could flout with impunity.
Of course, there is no guarantee that either man will ever be fully held to account. Those looking forward to the day of Putin’s reckoning before the ICC in The Hague should bear in mind that the only reason the allies succeeded in trying members of the Nazi leadership in Nuremberg was because Hitler’s Germany lay in ruins. Putin remains very much in power and presides over an arsenal of 6,000 nuclear warheads that he continues to recklessly brandish. Unless Putin finds himself ousted from power, his arrest warrant will remain a symbolic reminder that in the eyes of international law, the Russian leader is a pariah and a fugitive.
