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Schoolchildren who fled Ukraine attend a mixed class with other Ukrainian children living in Vienna, Austria.
Efforts underway to return Ukrainian children from Russia
There’s no sign the Russian and Ukrainian governments are ready to talk peace, but there has reportedly been progress made in mediating agreements to return Ukrainian children, taken by Russian forces into Russian territory, to their families in Ukraine.
The Russian seizure of these children has led the International Criminal Court to charge Russia’s Vladimir Putin with war crimes, but the Financial Times has reported on mediation efforts, led by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to repatriate as many Ukrainian children as possible.
Russian officials claim the children have been moved to protect them from the fighting. Ukrainian authorities charge the kids are being put into special children’s homes where Russian teachers feed them propaganda about the war and try to erase their Ukrainian identities. Some have been adopted by Russian parents.
The first task for mediators is to work with Ukrainian and Russian officials to build an accurate record of the thousands of Ukrainian kids now held inside Russia. Once completed, the goal is to find the best family solution for each child based on the location of their closest living relatives.
Given how emotive, and therefore sensitive, the issue is, none of the governments involved in this process has commented publicly on it. There are some grounds for hope that mediation efforts on this issue – with trusted outsiders working with the Ukrainian and Russian sides separately – could eventually lead to peace talks with a similar structure.
Print photocopies of Benjamin Ferencz, while he served as a prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials, on a table at his home in Delray Beach, Florida on June 1, 2022.
Nuremberg now: the legacy of Ben Ferencz
At 27 years old, with no trial experience to speak of, Ben Ferencz entered the courtroom at Nuremberg in November of 1945. He was tasked with holding to account a regime that had slaughtered millions and tried to annihilate his own people. Acting as chief prosecutor, Ferencz secured convictions against 22 Nazis.
Ferencz, the last-surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, passed away last week at the age of 103. As a child, he and his family fled anti-semitism in Romania. After finishing law school at Harvard, he joined the US army, taking part in the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge. He was then assigned to General Patton’s HQ as part of a special unit investigating Nazi atrocities, interviewing survivors and witnessing first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps. That experience would shape the rest of his life. He would remain a warrior, not on the battlefield but in the public arena as a professor of international law and tireless campaigner for justice for the victims of genocide.
The Nuremberg trials marked a watershed moment in the history of modern human rights law. Never before had an international tribunal sought to hold global leaders to account for starting a war and carrying out crimes against humanity. They also included a new term- genocide – as part of the indictments.
In the decades since, the notion that war criminals may face justice has – however imperfect in practice – become an accepted part of international norms. That’s especially true since 2002 when Ferencz’s efforts helped to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague. International courts have judged the perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in ways that were unimaginable when Ferencz was a child.
Still, more than 75 years after Nuremberg, international justice remains a work in progress. Participation in the ICC is voluntary, and even the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, refuses to do so, out of concerns that it would limit American sovereignty. That puts Washington – which has faced its own human rights allegations in the past – in the unsavory company of serial abusers like Russia, China, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, which also refuse to ratify the ICC’s underlying statutes.
Despite a recent ICC warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, there’s little chance that he’ll face prosecution. Bashar al-Assad, for his part, has survived the civil war he helped create, and is unlikely to face justice for the gruesome crimes that his regime committed during the war.
The coming years pose particular challenges to the cause of international justice. For one thing, the emergence of new major international powers may make it even harder to secure universally-applicable mechanisms of human rights law. Technological advances, meanwhile, enable state and non-state actors to spread disinformation in an attempt to erode trust in facts and evidence. For instance, the Russian disinformation narratives have asserted that the civilian massacre in Bucha, Ukraine was staged.
Nevertheless, Ben Ferencz and his colleagues gave today's international human rights lawyers and activists the tools to document evidence and gather witness testimony, and the mechanisms to hold leaders accountable.
Ferencz himself was under no illusions about the challenges of creating a system that would bring war criminals to justice. In his later years he remarked “Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task.”
But he also reminded us that “if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.”
Xi & "friend" Putin could call for Ukraine ceasefire
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
The big story geopolitically is Xi Jinping's trip to Moscow, a three-day state visit, by far the most geopolitically significant summit of the year since the Russian invasion, frankly, a year ago. And also a deeply problematic geopolitical summit, in the sense that it goes strongly against the interests of the United States and all of its allies. Let's keep in mind this summit comes on the back of the International Criminal Court, that is recognized by 123 countries around the world, though not by Russia, the U.S. or China, declaring that Putin is a war criminal and that he should be arrested by any member state if he travels there. Indeed, the German government's already announced, if Putin were to go to Germany, that's it, they're arresting him. Never going to happen. But nonetheless, on the back of that, and then Putin's trip to Crimea and his trip to Mariupol occupied Ukrainian territory over this weekend. Mariupol, first time, he's been in territory the Russians have taken since February 24th.
All of that obviously told to Xi Jinping before the trip was being made. And now, you see these two men, these two authoritarian leaders side-by-side on a global stage. And by far, the friendliest meetup they have had, since February 4th, a year ago when Putin made that trip to Beijing during the Olympics, and they declared that they were friends without global limits. This is very different from what we saw from Putin and Xi Jinping the last time they met in-person back in September. That was in Samarkand. It was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. That was where Putin was on the back foot, he had lost a fair amount of territory from a Ukrainian counteroffensive. His military was underperforming. And indeed, Putin had to publicly recognize that the Chinese had concerns about the Russian War in Ukraine. He's not recognizing that right now.
In fact, what Putin and Xi Jinping are talking about is an opening of negotiations with the Ukrainians, that the Ukrainians are not prepared to accept the potential of a ceasefire on Ukraine, which would allow the Russians to keep the territory they've occupied right now, which the Ukrainians, of course, would not accept.
This is Putin feeling much more comfortable about his geopolitical alignment, at least as far as China is concerned. And that's his most important, most powerful friend on the global stage. Why is that happening right now? Well, number one, it's a bookend to what happened just a couple of weeks ago when Xi Jinping in Beijing was an unprecedented fashion, making comments against the United States, saying that, "Confrontation would come if the U.S. maintained its position of attempting to contain China." We've not seen Xi Jinping call out the Americans directly like that, since he came to office for the first time a decade ago. So he's unhappy with his role vis-a-vis China. That was particularly true when the Americans came out publicly with intelligence that showed that the Chinese were negotiating to provide direct military equipment to Russia, the U.S., the UK and NATO all publicly disclosing that information and warning the Chinese that sanctions would, come direct sanctions if they were to proceed with it.
In other words, exactly the way the Americans treated the Russians with the intelligence they had before the invasion into Ukraine. The Russians denied that invasion. The Chinese denied that they were sending any weapons to Russia. The intelligence seems very hard from what I've heard from a number of actors that have seen it. The point is that the Chinese really didn't like being treated the same way that the Americans were treating the Russians. Of course, in part, that's driving them into a more public relationship with Putin that is warmer and friendlier. At the same time, China also sees, believes that time is increasingly on Russia's side. They don't want their friends, the Russians, to lose this war, but they also see divisions, especially in the United States with Republicans trying to run for the presidency. People like Trump, in particular, but also to a degree, DeSantis and others that are trying to caution against the level of support the Americans are presently providing to Ukraine. And something that the Chinese, of course, would like to see the back of.
So for all of these reasons, this Xi Jinping visit to Russia is a very big deal. I don't believe that the Chinese will actually start providing weapons to the Russians, at least not unless the Russians start performing very, very badly indeed on the ground. So, we'll watch and see how the counteroffensive goes in the coming weeks. I expect the Ukrainians will grab at least some ground, because the issue of the artillery that they've desperately needed, the ammunition appears to have been resolved by the United States and its allies. That should allow the Ukrainians to start a significant counteroffensive in coming weeks. But it also means they need to take a lot of territory back, because otherwise the potential that U.S. support will start to weaken as we get towards 2024, that the US will be more divided and the Europeans will become more divided on the back of that.
That is a big concern, indeed. Now, the big question for the next 24 hours is, will China directly call for a ceasefire and will the Russians support that? I think it is possible. Let's keep in mind that Xi Jinping and Putin are not constrained by checks and balances, by separation of power, by rule of law, which doesn't exist in their country. So if Putin, Xi Jinping individually decide that's what they want to say, they can and they will. The Ukrainians, of course, will have a very hard time with that. They'd have a hard time with calling for negotiations. Let's also keep in mind that while Xi Jinping has a three-day state visit to Russia, they have not yet announced a date for even a phone call, a video call with the Ukrainian President, Zelensky. So while Ukraine is being careful in what he's saying about the Chinese publicly, he absolutely knows that China is playing ball here for the Russians. There is no honest broker, in terms of China's interests in bringing this war to a close.
So Ukraine's in a bit more of a challenging position today, than they were a week ago. Russia certainly feeling stronger than they were a week ago. China feeling on the back of this peace breakthrough that they have resolved with the Saudis and the Iranians, that the Americans were no part of. Now, Xi Jinping is in Moscow, not the message that if you are a NATO country, you want to be seeing coming out of the Kremlin right now.
- What We’re Watching: Putin meets Xi, US takes out ISIS leader, Costa Rica votes ›
- Kevin Rudd: Xi thinks Putin is a "dummy" ›
- Xi Jinping & Vladimir Putin: No trust among autocrats ›
- China-Russia relationship status: It’s complicated ›
- Xi plays peace broker - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: Putin's partners and allies - GZERO Media ›
What We're Watching: Africa desperate for vaccines, US-EU truce on airplanes, ICC probes Duterte
Africa is running out of vaccines: Africa has received fewer vaccines than any other continent, and the results are now showing. Faced with a third wave of infection, many African countries say that cases are soaring and that vaccine deliveries from the WHO-managed COVAX facility remain sluggish, in large part because of shortages from Indian drug manufacturers. South Africa, Namibia, and Uganda say that their healthcare systems are inundated with COVID cases; ICU beds are scarce, and COVID patients are dying while waiting for hospital beds. To date, just 0.6 percent of Africa's 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated, and new variants are spreading, making containment across the continent even harder. (Cases in the South African province of Gauteng, home to the hubs of Johannesburg and Pretoria, where South Africa's more transmissible COVID strain has run rampant, have doubled over the past week, and doctors are bracing for a surge in deaths.) Meanwhile, the G7 countries agreed this week to send 1 billion COVID doses to poor countries, but experts warn that these may not arrive in Africa before most states' supplies run dry.
US and EU agree to truce on Boeing-Airbus row: After 17 years of quarreling, the US and the EU have agreed to put their differences aside in the ongoing saga over subsidies for Boeing and Airbus, their respective aerospace champions. In 2019, the World Trade Organization found that Brussels had illegally been providing subsidies to Airbus, essentially clearing the way for Washington to slap billions of dollars' worth of tariffs on EU products. Shortly after, the WTO found that Washington was doing the same thing for Boeing, violating international trade regulations and leading Brussels to threaten tariffs on US exports. In reaching this truce on the sidelines of the recent G7 summit, US President Joe Biden and EU representatives have agreed to suspend punishing tariffs — championed by former US President Donald Trump — worth a collective $11.5 billion a year on a range of products like whiskey, cheese, spirits, and tractors. But why now? President Biden has made it abundantly clear that he wants to get the Europeans on side in an increasingly bitter fight with China over a range of economic, human rights and tech abuses. The Biden administration also says that this move will help stabilize manufacturing jobs in aerospace and other sectors, reflecting its "foreign policy for the American middle class."
ICC to probe Duterte's drug war: The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has asked permission to launch a full investigation of alleged crimes against humanity committed during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs from 2016 to 2019. Duterte's crackdown on drug traffickers has killed about 6,000 people, according to official police data, though local human-rights groups say the real figure is much higher. As expected, the Philippine government blasted the Hague's decision and vowed not to cooperate with the probe. In fact, Manila withdrew from the ICC in March 2019 in response to its preliminary investigation into the drug war. Duterte himself has kept quiet so far, but the threat of a full ICC probe won't draw any sign of remorse for his war on drugs, the signature campaign promise that helped elect him five years ago. Indeed, these days the Philippine president is more focused on choosing whom he'll endorse to run for the top job in next year's elections, and whether he'll be on the ballot as a vice-presidential candidate.