Putin’s crime of aggression in Ukraine

Abstract

This thesis is located within the framework of international criminal law through the analysis of the possibility of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, being convicted of the crime of aggression for having ordered Russian troops to carry out a large-scale attack against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The first section marks general aspects of the crime of aggression; the arduous task that international law has meant to achieve a definition of it as well as its legal provisions that are included in the Rome Statute by which the International Criminal Court is governed, being this the body that has jurisdiction over this crime. The second section refers to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but for this, it is necessary to analyse a series of events with a chronology before the current invasion, such as the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula since it was at that time when Ukraine is in a conflict in the east part of the country. The third chapter analyzes the reasons why the Russian President justifies his attack on Ukraine such as the progressive expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to those countries that were once part of the Russian sphere; or the accusation of Genocide that the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians suffer at the hands of the Ukrainian troops as a result of the conflict that has been going on since 2014 in eastern Ukraine. The fourth and last chapter includes an analysis of the possibility of Vladimir Putin being prosecuted for his crime of aggression through the different mechanisms provided by international criminal law.