The joy began a few days after the missiles began to fall on Ukraine. “Get ready for Nuremberg 2.0,” a former Russian diplomat wrote in a WhatsApp message. Vladimir Putin’s invasion to “de-Nazize” the country has always pointed to a purge and show trials. Now Moscow can seize this opportunity.
As Russia holds hundreds of Azovstal steel prisoners in Mariupol, its prosecutors in eastern Ukraine have raised the idea of holding a Nuremberg-inspired “military tribunal” that observers say would reflect a trial. aimed at justifying Russia’s invasion of the world.
“We are planning to organize an international tribunal in the territory of the republic,” said Denis Pushilin, leader of a Russian-controlled territory in the Donetsk region. One model could be the Kharkiv trial of 1943, he said, when the Soviet army tried, convicted and hanged three Germans and a Ukrainian. A key audience was the world press. Photos of the hangings were printed in Life magazine.
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. Mariupol. The annexed head of Crimea said a Russian-occupied court in eastern Ukraine, where local authorities support the death penalty, would serve as a “lesson for all those who have forgotten the Nuremberg lessons.” .
The signaling of a great political trial has raised fears that Russia is about to pass another horrific milestone in its revival of World War II, simulating a triumphant legal process that would tarnish the legacy of the Nuremberg verdict. One expert called it an Orwellian distortion of post-war human rights language.
It would be “a political trial whose purpose is to present a particular narrative about the war that supports Putin’s argument for de-Nazification, that supports his claim that Ukraine is being run by Nazis, and that supports his claims that there are direct links between Ukrainian collaborators during World War II and today’s Ukrainian soldiers, “said Francine Hirsch, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Soviet Trial in Nuremberg: A New history of the International Military Tribunal after World War II.
“I think it will serve to try to present what in the West we understand as fiction as if it were a reality. That’s what rehearsals are all about. “
With a growing focus on Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including an international investigation into the massacre of civilians in cities like Bucha, some observers believe Moscow may launch a military tribunal as a countermeasure as more atrocities are revealed.
“They are trying to counterbalance all the talk of the international criminal court and the Ukrainian prosecutions” for war crimes, said Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London and author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and crimes against humanity.
“I suspect that … they are creating another form of leverage for what is to come in due course.”
Russian soldiers register Ukrainian soldiers as they are evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. Photography: AP
Sands has been part of an ongoing effort to form a special criminal court to try Russia for the crime of aggression, a charge that was originally coined at the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials by a Soviet lawyer as “crimes against peace.”
He said there was irony in Russia’s adoption of a Nuremberg-style trial that would ignore any accusations of launching an illegal war against Ukraine.
“For me, the crime of aggression is at the heart of this whole issue,” Sands said. “At the end of the day, if Putin had not gone to war, none of the other crimes would have taken place.”
As part of World War II history, the Nuremberg trials remain a deeply personal matter for the Kremlin. The decision to propose a military tribunal is a deeper dive into what a former councilor called a historic “mania,” where terms such as “deazification” are seen to have the potential to mobilize the Russian public.
The Kremlin “thinks this is what the public wants to see … feel part of the story,” said the former adviser, who has worked with Putin.
He also said he believed senior officials had bought his own propaganda about the resurgence of Nazism in the West.
History seems to be the source of both Kremlin propaganda and state politics. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s security council and one of Putin’s main allies, said in an interview this week that his policies for “de-destabilizing” Ukraine were exactly the same as in Nazi Germany. 1945.
“It’s bigotry,” the councilor said.
The Nuremberg trials condemning Nazi war criminals reflected the political divisions of the time. Western representatives were concerned that the Soviets would treat them as a repetition of their own spectacle trials of the 1930s. Soviet judges were dismayed when Winston Churchill delivered his famous “iron curtain” speech on the threat of communism while the trial was underway.
Today, Russia has used the trial as a shield against accusations of Stalin’s crimes. After the European Parliament condemned Russian state propaganda in 2019 for “whitewashing communist crimes and glorifying the Soviet totalitarian regime”, Putin countered that the statement “questioned the conclusions of the Nuremberg trials” and could “undermine the foundations of the whole “Post-war Europe”. .
“There is a story about Nuremberg that has become really important. “It’s a story where the Soviets are the heroes and the Soviets are the victims, but they weren’t responsible for any crime,” Hirsch said. “There’s a way Nuremberg has really become a part of the patriotic education of Russia “.
There are now new concerns that Russia may use a court inspired by a glorious past to whitewash its new invasion of Ukraine.
“If this kind of thing happens, we have to be prepared for it and journalists have to really think about how you cover it,” Hirsch said. “How do you cover something that you know is a play but deadly?”