The glee began only days after the missiles began falling on Ukraine. “Get ready for Nuremberg 2.0,” a former Russian diplomat wrote in a WhatsApp statement. Vladimir Putin’s invasion to “disinfect” the country has always led to purges and demonstrations. Now Moscow can seize this opportunity.
With Russia holding hundreds of prisoners at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, its representatives in eastern Ukraine have come up with the idea of holding a “military tribunal” inspired by Nuremberg, which observers say will cover a mass demonstration to justify Russia’s invasion.
“We plan to organize an international tribunal on the territory of the republic,” said Denis Pushilin, leader of the Russian-controlled territory in the Donetsk region. A model may be the trial in Kharkov in 1943, he said, when the Soviet military tried, convicted and executed three Germans and a Ukrainian by hanging. One key audience was the world press. Pictures of the curtains were printed in Life magazine.
Whether the Kremlin will follow such a terrible spectacle remains unclear, but the idea has found supporters in the foreign ministry and among senior lawmakers, who have angrily said there should be no exchange of prisoners of war for captured prisoners in Mariupol. The leader of annexed Crimea said a tribunal in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, where local authorities support the death penalty, would serve as a “lesson for all who have forgotten the lessons of Nuremberg”.
The signal for a major political trial has raised fears that Russia is on the verge of another horrific landmark in World War II, simulating a triumphant legal process that will tarnish the legacy of the Nuremberg verdict. One expert called it an Orwellian distortion of the post-war language of human rights.
This would be a “political process aimed at presenting a concrete account of the war, which supports Putin’s argument for denazification, which supports his claim that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis, and which supports his claims that there are direct links between Ukrainian collaborators during World War II and Ukrainian soldiers today, “said Francine Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the Soviet Court in Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II.
“I think it will be used to try to present what we in the West see as fiction, as if it were reality. That’s what show rehearsals do. “
With a growing focus on Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including an international investigation into the massacre of civilians in cities such as Bucha, some observers believe Moscow could launch a military tribunal as a counter-trial as more atrocities are uncovered.
“They are trying to counterbalance all the talks between the International Criminal Court and the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office,” said Philip 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 they’re creating another form of leverage for what’s to come.”
Russian troops search Ukrainian soldiers as they evacuate from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. Photo: AP
Sands is part of the ongoing effort to set up a special criminal tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, an indictment originally introduced during the Nuremberg trials of 1945-46 by a Soviet lawyer as “crimes against peace.” .
He said it was ironic that Russia was accepting a Nuremberg-style trial that would ignore any accusations of starting an illegal war against Ukraine.
“For me, the crime of aggression is the beating heart of this whole issue,” Sands said. “After all, if Putin had not gone to war, none of the other crimes would have happened.
As part of the history of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials remain a deeply personal matter for the Kremlin. The decision to propose a military tribunal is a deeper immersion in what a former adviser called historical “mania”, where terms such as “denazification” are seen as potential to mobilize the Russian public.
The Kremlin “thinks this is what society wants to see – to feel part of history,” said the former adviser, who worked with Putin.
He also said he believed senior officials were engaged in their own propaganda for the revival of Nazism in the West.
History seems to be the source of both Kremlin propaganda and state policy. Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s Security Council and Putin’s main ally, said in an interview this week that its policy of “denazifying” Ukraine was exactly the same as in Nazi Germany in 1945.
“This is bigotry,” the adviser said.
The Nuremberg trials, which convicted Nazi war criminals, reflect the political divisions of the time. Western officials were concerned that the Soviets treated them as a repetition of their own demonstration processes in the 1930s. Soviet judges were horrified when Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech on the threat of communism while the trial was ongoing.
Today, Russia is using the trial as a shield against accusations of crimes under Stalin. After the European Parliament condemned Russian state propaganda in 2019 for “whitewashing communist crimes and glorifying the Soviet totalitarian regime,” Putin said the statement “challenges the conclusions of the Nuremberg Trials” and could “undermine the foundations of postwar Europe.”
“There is a story about Nuremberg that has become really significant. This is a story in which the Soviets are the heroes and the Soviets are the victims, but they are not responsible for any crimes, “Hirsch said. “There is a way in which Nuremberg has really become part of Russia’s patriotic upbringing.
There are now new fears that Russia could use a tribunal modeled on its glorious past to whitewash its new invasion of Ukraine.
“If things like this happen, we have to be ready for it, and journalists have to really think about how to cover it,” Hirsch said. “How do you cover up something that you know plays a role but is deadly?”
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