Any potential reader who presumes to judge this book by its cover – i.e. its title, The Trial of Vladimir Putin – might find it a hypothetical too far, an exercise in wishful thinking. How could this political giant, with personalised power over Russia and almost 6,000 nuclear weapons at his beck and call, be made accountable to any court set up by other countries?

That was my view, on 24 June 2023, as I boarded a 24-hour flight from London to Sydney. The plane was equipped to receive Al Jazeera and CNN, which shortly after take-off were reporting that Yevgeny Prigozhin, ‘Putin’s chef ’, head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries who had been doing the deadliest work in Ukraine, had begun a ‘march for justice’ on Moscow. He had declared that Putin’s justification for war – genocide against Russians by Ukrainian Nazis – was nonsense and that Russia was in no danger from NATO but more from its own venal and incompetent generals. By the time my flight reached Dubai, his army had reached the command centre of Rostov-on-Don, having shot down a number of army helicopters, and he was pictured being welcomed by its citizens. Putin appeared briefly on the screen, with the colour drained from his face and looking suddenly vulnerable, talking of treason.

I watched – no sleep was possible – as Prigozhin drove off towards Moscow. I was excited at the prospect of Putin’s overthrow but terrified of the consequence of Russia’s nukes coming under the control of this deranged figure. By the time we were over Perth, Prigozhin had stopped his march, just 200 miles short of the capital. A few weeks later, his plane crashed and burned, killing a few of his cronies along with the pilot, co-pilot and a 39-year-old flight attendant. (The CIA now believes the plane was sabotaged by the FSB, successor to the KGB, with a bomb fitted to its wing while refuelling.) In any event, the moment passed by the time we reached Sydney and I confess to an overwhelming feeling of relief, that Russia’s nukes were still under the control of a bad man rather than a mad man.

But the episode demonstrated that Vladimir Putin may not be invulnerable. That was thought of Slobodan Milošević, when he was indicted by a UN tribunal, but the West failed to realise that he was silently despised by many decent Serbs who voted him out and dispatched him for trial at The Hague in return for the lifting of sanctions. Putin is seventy-one and can stay in power, constitutionally, for another twelve years, but age may take a toll and the Russian economy may tank as a result of sanctions brought about by his decision to go to a war which he may yet lose. International justice has no time limits: Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić hid from it for seventeen years but ended up in its prisons convicted after fair trials. So did Hissène Habré, the torturer of Chad, who managed to stave off a trial for almost as many years. The gold medal for avoiding legal nemesis is held by a French Cambodian businessman indicted for funding the radio station in Rwanda which summoned the Hutu people to commit genocide (‘the grave is only half full – who will help us fill it?’). For twenty years after his indictment, he hid in Nairobi and Paris, until dragged to court in Arusha, by which time dementia had set in and he could not be fairly tried.

If this is Putin’s fate, it will still afford some consolation to his victims – the people of Ukraine. Crimes against humanity are unforgivable and unforgettable but justiciable because the records, many visual, still survive, collected by prosecutors and (in Putin’s case) by a number of institutions in Ukraine and Europe, which have been busy amassing evidence of the war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine as a result of Putin’s invasion. Although he appears safe at present, with his generals and ministers paying him obeisance and having no political rival (Alexei Navalny having now been murdered or died from ‘sudden death syndrome’ at his prison in the Arctic Circle), change may come as it did with Milošević, and Putin may end up, years from now, shuffling into the dock like some old Nazi. But the dock of which court, and charged with what offence? The world must now prepare for this possibility and be ready to put him on trial for committing the greatest crime, causing the most casualties, since the Nazi blitzkriegs of the Second World War.

There is another reason for preparing a trial, namely the prospect of conducting it in absentia – without Putin being physically present. Such trials are frowned upon by many Anglo-American lawyers, who say they are not trials at all because a defendant by definition cannot contest the evidence or instruct counsel. But for all that, they are permitted in France and many other European countries – and most importantly in Ukraine. The UN’s Human Rights Committee, arbiter of international fair trial standards, has accepted that in absentia trials can conform to such standards if ‘accused persons, although informed of the proceedings sufficiently in advance, decline to exercise their right to be present’. This is subject to a condition that there must be a retrial should the absent defendant later appear to contest their conviction. A conviction of an absent defendant will give some solace to victims of the crime, although by no means as much as if they see the malefactor sent to prison, and will at least provide an authoritative judicial account of what happened. Colonel Gaddafi’s malevolence was exposed when his intelligence chief was convicted in absentia in France for blowing up a passenger plane over Niger. The same impact was not achieved by the Amsterdam court which convicted two Russian soldiers and a Ukrainian separatist in absentia for murder by shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, for one very good reason: they were not represented, and the more appropriate verdict, of manslaughter by gross negligence, was never argued.

If international law is to have any meaning, in absentia trials must be acceptable, so long as those indicted are properly defended by amici curiae – ‘friends of the court’, i.e. experienced advocates assigned to argue on behalf of a defendant who refuses to be present. This method enables questions of law to be properly adjudicated and available defences to be fully developed, albeit without the instructions of a defendant who insists on staying in their cell – or in Moscow. It allows the decision, where the court is composed of distinguished international judges, to have a certain force, both in stigmatising defendants and in giving some satisfaction to their victims. In Putin’s case, any tribunal called upon to try him for the ‘crime of aggression’ will have all the facts and all his relevant speeches and writings. There would be nothing that he could add to his defence by his physical presence, because ‘self-defence’ requires an objective appraisal of the well-known facts, while his intentions were clearly stated at the time. So far as war crimes, however, these must be charged before the International Criminal Court (ICC) – one crime, the unlawful transportation of children, has already been charged in this way – but that court has no power to hear such cases in his absence, unless its member states amend its statute. This may well be the only way to bring Putin to trial, and so the case for doing so will be considered in this book as well as the more familiar, but obviously less likely, possibility of having him physically present in the dock.

• • •

Putin’s war commenced with the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and it has taken innocent lives, both Ukrainian and Russian, every single day it has continued. At time of writing, in early 2024, tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed, about 1,000 of them children, and many more have been seriously injured, attacked by Russian forces with drones, bombers and tanks, taking the lives as well of many thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and defenders. Russian troop losses are estimated to be four times heavier – well over 100,000 – with legions more injured. Not a day goes by without some atrocity: the bombing of civilian homes and apartments (as seen regularly on television), a drone hit on a church or on children playing outside a pizza restaurant or a direct hit on a blood transfusion centre or a public hospital clearly marked on aerial maps as non-military targets but blasted nonetheless, by Russian commanders well aware they are committing war crimes with the approval of a supreme commander-in-chief who is more likely to award them medals than to prosecute them. In some war crimes, he is directly involved – for example, he has boasted about approving the transportation to Russia of Ukrainian children, for which his arrest is sought by the ICC.

In short, Vladimir Putin is a man who kills children and kidnaps them and bombs their houses, their parents and their families. He is the man responsible for starting this war, and he can be tried for two different classes of crime. The most heinous is the crime of aggression, which...