By Kontur | 2025-07-09

On a summer day in Strasbourg, France, as artillery still thundered in Ukraine's east, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed an agreement that felt quietly momentous.

On June 25, inside the marble halls of the Council of Europe (CE), he and CE Secretary General Alain Berset put pen to paper to launch a tribunal for investigating and prosecuting Russia's war of aggression.

The war shows no signs of ending. Yet Ukraine is already laying the legal groundwork for how it wants the story to be told and remembered. This tribunal won't change the front lines, but it could shape what follows. It offers Ukraine a way to preserve the facts, define accountability and set the tone for whatever kind of peace eventually comes.

On July 1, Zelenskyy signed the documents to ratify the agreement on the "special tribunal for Russia."

"Russia must feel this year that responsibility for the crime of aggression is inevitable," he wrote on Telegram. He called on Ukrainian lawmakers to ratify the agreement quickly and prepare the legislation needed to bring the tribunal to life.

The paperwork begins a process meant to outlast the war itself.

ECHR holds Russia to account

The wheels of European justice took another turn against Russia July 9. The CE's European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russia committed a string of human rights violations in backing anti-Kyiv separatists in eastern Ukraine from 2014, downing the MH17 flight that year and invading Ukraine in 2022.

The downing of MH17 (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17) over Ukraine by Russian-backed separatists killed all 298 passengers and crew on board.

The ECHR still handles cases against Russia that were brought before Russia left the CE in September 2022.

The war crime with a name

The coming CE tribunal focuses on a single, weighty charge: the crime of aggression. International law defines it as the planning, preparation, initiation or execution of armed force against the sovereignty of another state. The charge addresses the political decision to go to war: not just what happens during the fighting but the choice to start it.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already taken action against Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2023, it issued an arrest warrant accusing him of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children. But the court may not prosecute the invasion itself, because Russia and Ukraine never ratified its founding treaty. The Special Tribunal steps into that legal gap.

Unlike the ICC, the Special Tribunal will focus exclusively on the crime of aggression. However, it faces structural limitations. As international legal precedent stands, it cannot prosecute sitting heads of state, prime ministers or foreign ministers, shielding Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for now.

"[U]kraine will perceive this as a painful compromise," Claus Kreß, a professor of international law at the University of Cologne and advisor to the ICC's prosecutor, told Deutsche Welle earlier in July.

Ukraine hoped this court would treat personal immunity like the ICC does -- as irrelevant in cases of grave crimes. However, that did not happen.

"The main reason is that, unlike the International Criminal Court, the special tribunal is not intended to have universal jurisdiction -- it will be a regional court," Kreß explained.

Even so, the tribunal may launch investigations, collect evidence and file charges.

"A pre-trial investigation may be conducted: building the evidence base and so on. And once Mishustin and Lavrov leave their positions -- there are doubts regarding Putin -- the case may be fully pursued and brought to court: in principle, everything will already be ready by then," Ukrainian lawyer Natalka Kostyshyn told Obozrevatel this month.

International justice often unfolds slowly, but slow does not mean idle.

"International justice processes are quite complex. Even at the ICC, ultimately 80% of the accused do end up under investigation. And in Putin's case, we're dealing with specific exceptions," Alexander Pavlichenko, executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said in a comment to Obozrevatel.

"As for the Special Tribunal -- once Russian perpetrators lose their immunity, the trials will begin immediately."

The notion of immunity itself is still being challenged. The very principle is eroding, Bohdan Yaremenko, a member of Ukraine's parliament and a former diplomat, said.

"Much of what is currently being done in the realm of addressing Russia's crimes against Ukraine is absolutely unprecedented. We are witnessing the erosion of long-established legal norms rooted in medieval concepts of the sovereign, the monarch and so on -- norms that prohibit prosecuting sitting heads of state. But why should that be the case, really?" he told Obozrevatel.

Memory and leverage

The tribunal does not interfere with peace talks or force rigid diplomatic terms. It offers a legal path that runs alongside political negotiations, one that builds leverage without demanding military escalation. It allows Ukraine's Western allies to back justice while remaining pragmatic.

Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha called the agreement "a historic moment not just for Ukraine, but for global justice." That framing speaks to the broader stakes. The tribunal may not move quickly, but its purpose is permanence, not speed.

And Russia's reaction speaks volumes. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova dismissed the tribunal as null and void, calling the CE's role illegitimate and claiming that any state supporting the process would be seen as escalating the conflict.

Despite that, the court enjoys broad support from European countries and beyond. However, critics have raised concerns about selective justice.

Professor Kreß said there was a kernel of truth in this criticism, as it touches on a fundamental principle of law -- the fair and consistent application and enforcement of legal norms.

"To respond convincingly, one must address the root cause of the International Criminal Court's limited jurisdiction. This requires amending the ICC's founding treaty, which, without sufficient justification, treats the crime of aggression differently from the Court's three other core crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes," he explained.

That reform is under debate right now.

On July 7, ICC member states gathered in New York for a special session on amending the Rome Statute, the ICC's founding treaty. Germany, along with Costa Rica, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Vanuatu, introduced a proposal to expand the court's authority.

The vote could succeed, especially with growing support from the Global South, said Kreß.

"There are numerous indications that the two-thirds qualified majority required to adopt the reform could realistically be achieved," he said.