While fighting in Ukraine rages on with no end in sight, the country is giving it all in another fight, the fight for justice. Never before in modern history has a country attempted to investigate every crime and every violation of international humanitarian law immediately after they happened. Ukraine has been doing this since the very first weeks of Russia's invasion.

Kyiv is fighting on the diplomatic and judicial fronts at once, from work done in cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has a mandate to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, to its own national jurisdictions, via bilateral exchanges with allied states that have "universal jurisdiction," thanks to which they can try crimes committed off their land and by non-citizens.

Ukraine is also continuing to advocate for the creation of a special international tribunal for the crime of aggression. In 2023 in The Hague, five European countries sponsored the opening of an ad hoc office, the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, placed under the authority of the European agency Eurojust. But the allied powers on the United Nations Security Council (the US, the UK and France) remain reluctant to set up a real tribunal, fearing a precedent that could one day target their military interventions abroad.

In Kyiv, Yuriy Belousov, the head of the War Crimes Department in Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office, pointed out that the creation of a tribunal for the crime of aggression would not only be "legitimate" when one state aggresses another, as Russia has done to Ukraine, but that there is no guarantee that Russian President Vladimir Putin will ever be tried for war crimes by the ICC, even though it issued him an arrest warrant in 2023 for forcefully deporting Ukrainian children to Russia. Belousov said that a tribunal for the crime of aggression would be a means of "prosecuting the Russian troika protected by diplomatic immunity: The president, the prime minister and the foreign minister."

Belousov's day-to-day work, however, is far removed from such diplomatic considerations. Ten years after the start of the conflict in Crimea and the Donbas, and two years after the invasion of Ukraine, he has led 120,774 investigations into war crimes thus far. It is a titanic task. With a team of some 600 prosecutors and investigators, the investigations are coordinated with the Security Service of Ukraine and the police, who have already collected evidence from over 40,000 crime scenes that involve the deaths of 11,817 Ukrainian civilians, of which 522 were children. The figure does not take into account the territories that are still under occupation, like the city of Mariupol, where it is feared that, if the city is taken back, tens of thousands of additional cases of murder, torture and rape will be found.

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