A Yale legal scholar discusses the mechanisms for bringing Russian military officials to justice, whether U.S. policy has made doing so more difficult, and the future of international law after the Ukraine war.

As Russian forces have pulled back from Kyiv and its surrounding suburbs, a disturbing series of images have appeared, which seem to show the execution of civilians. In Bucha, bodies have been found with hands tied and gunshot wounds to the head. A report published by Human Rights Watch, on Sunday, documented sexual violence and alleged killings by Russian troops in other parts of the country. Earlier this week, President Biden called for the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to face a trial for war crimes. (Satellite imagery revealed that the dead bodies in Bucha had been present for weeks, casting doubt on Russian claims that they had been placed there after Russian forces departed.) On Tuesday, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the United Nations Security Council, and asked, “Are you ready to close the U.N.? Do you think the time of international law is gone? If the answer is no, then you need to act immediately.” (Later in the week, the New York Times posted a still frame from a video that appeared to show Ukrainian troops executing captured Russian combatants.)

To talk through what, if any, consequences the Russian leadership could face for these actions, I recently spoke by phone with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of the school’s Center for Global Legal Challenges and the co-author, with Scott J. Shapiro, of the book “The Internationalists.” She also serves on a committee that offers guidance to the State Department on international law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different mechanisms that could be used to bring members of the Russian military to justice, how American actions have undermined the prospects for international accountability, and how international law might change after the Ukraine conflict.

What does it mean, in practice, for a big and powerful country to commit war crimes in 2022?

Well, it means that the international legal order is really under serious stress. This is, of course, not the first time that a major country has committed war crimes, even in recent years. We’ve seen war crimes taking place, for instance, in Syria, for much of the last several years. But what’s distinctive about this current moment is that we haven’t seen a fight between a major global power (here, Russia) and another state (here, Ukraine) in the last couple of decades, where the rules of the Geneva Conventions, the vast rules of international humanitarian law, are being broken on a massive scale.

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