Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine: the ultimate reality check for international law

In spring 2022, three Organisation for security and co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine employees – Dmytro Shabanov, Maksym Petrov and Vadym Golda – were forcibly detained by Russian-controlled forces in the occupied regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Before that, on February 24, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the OSCE had abruptly ended its mission, precisely when eyes on the ground were needed most. The organisation stated that it had evacuated its staff from Ukraine, but in fact national staff were left behind. 

Ukrainian nationals Dmytro Shabanov and Maksym Petrov had worked in the occupied territory of the Luhansk Oblast since the early days after the Russias took control in 2014 – one as a security assistant, the other as a translator. Both held official OSCE certificates and immunity documents, identifying them as representatives of an international observation mission.

In September 2022, Petrov and Shabanov were sentenced to 13 years in prison for “treason” and “working for US intelligence” by a court in Luhansk. In July 2024, Vadym Golda received a 14-year sentence in Donetsk. All of these sentences were handed down by illegitimate courts in so-called separatist republics. By early 2025, their cases had been brought into line with Russian criminal law following the Kremlin's proclamation of the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian regions a few years earlier.

The three men were deported to remote, high-security penal colonies deep inside Russia with harsh conditions and extreme isolation. In these colonies, people disappear – legally, physically and psychologically. There are reports that Maksym Petrov's health is deteriorating rapidly, but his family has little chance of delivering medicine from Luhansk to the Russian Urals.

This year 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, a formative moment in the history of the OSCE. Furthermore, in 2025 Finland chairs this organisation that throughout the years has known moments of great impact – but also of irrelevance. On the positive side, it is today one of the few institutions still engaged in human rights monitoring in Central Asia. But in 2025, the continued imprisonment of Ukrainian OSCE staff also reveals something strikingly profound about the state of international law: international institutions meant to safeguard it are not even able to protect their own staff.

The OSCE and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have issued formal statements of "concern" about the detentions. Concern? That's clearly not enough.

---

‘The main challenge we face today is not a competing ideology, but rather a pervasive cynicism. The normalisation of atrocity’

---

Ukrainian human rights defenders and journalists have spent over a decade documenting Russia's political violence. Initially, their work echoed the moral legacy of the Helsinki Accords, pressing authoritarian regimes to acknowledge human dignity. But meanwhile, they increasingly believe there is only one way to protect people in occupied territories: liberation by force. After Russian troops were pushed out of Bucha, Kherson and Izyum, the persecutions of the local population stopped. Many Ukrainians have come to a painful conclusion: international law cannot stop atrocities. It cannot save lives. 

For years now, institutions like the OSCE have seemed hollow. Some commentators are even tempted to consider abandoning them altogether. The appearance of action – statements, declarations, resolutions – creates a dangerous illusion that something is being done when nothing actually happens. For us Ukrainians, who live in an aggravated reality, everything around us automatically undergoes a reality check, particularly our values and ideals.

Human rights violations are now mainstream conversations

But we also need to consider another recent shift in political reality. Before, the fight against hypocrisy used to belong to idealists. There was a time when autocrats pretended to follow international rules. Today, they boast about breaking them. Instead of hiding their wrongdoings, they commit so many that it's hard not to be overwhelmed, learning about the scale of atrocities, resulting in a feeling of powerlessness. 

In the context of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children, about which he openly bragged on Russian television. With Donald Trump's rhetoric, the international discourse has slipped even further, as when he is "not ruling out overtaking Greenland". The US president and Israeli officials are openly discussing the deportation of Palestinians, who are currently being starved to death in Gaza. Such discourse is no longer fringe conspiracies – they are mainstream conversations.

So perhaps the better question isn’t whether institutions are hypocritical, but whether hypocrisy might still be preferable to normalising blatant disregard for law. At least hypocrisy pretends that something matters.

Last year, I had a chance to present documentaries from The Reckoning Project – an initiative of Ukrainian and international journalists, lawyers and analysts to record human rights violations – to university students in Mexico. Usually, during my lectures and public speeches, I provide the official number of the alleged war crimes registered by Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office. At that time, the number was 130,000, while today it has reached 167,000.

But right before my presentation, I learned that over 111,000 people are officially missing in Mexico. So, what would these Ukrainian numbers mean for the audience in Mexico? A Mexican colleague helped me with the answer:  "We musn't normalise it. In Ukraine, despite your country being under attack every day, you document the violations. There's no war in Mexico, and yet many have stopped even filing cases." 

---

---

The main challenge we face today is not a competing ideology, but rather a pervasive cynicism. The normalisation of atrocity. Authoritarian regimes actively propagate the notion that nothing truly matters – that individuals are powerless and that collective action is futile. In doing so, they seek to delegitimize international institutions, portraying the global security architecture as inherently flawed. In some respects, they are not entirely wrong. But should we accept that?

The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine has laid bare the limitations of international law and demonstrated the insufficiency of security assurances grounded solely in multilateral treaties. They have to be backed up by power. Confidence in these mechanisms has significantly diminished, and most probably, in the future, states will increasingly turn to more concrete and regionally anchored security arrangements instead. Yet, despite these imperfections, investing in the dismantling of existing institutions is not helpful. The disbandment of USAID shows how easily institutions can be destroyed. Building new ones will be much harder.

In an interview, Mykhailo Vershynyn, a former Ukrainian prisoner of war and Mariupol's patrol police chief, who spent 123 days in Russian captivity and was brutally tortured, said: "I’d be a happy man if the Geneva Conventions were implemented at least 10 per cent." A statement both damning and clarifying – not because it exposes the failure of the rules, but because it reminds us what their absence would mean.

So, instead of giving up on order altogether, we should do what is necessary to return to a rules-based international system again.

We must accept that today even the best actions are not driven by utopian visions, but by the need to stop something worse from happening. That's not enough for the long run. Fighting against something may sustain us in the short term. But to survive the marathon, we must fight for something.

The war has made Ukrainians practical. When the task seems too big and overwhelming, instead of walking away or being paralyzed, we start with what is small and achievable. 

Thus, before we debate a new world order or reforming the institutions, can we begin with something concrete? Can, for instance, the OSCE bring back its employees from the Siberian prisons?

This may be the ultimate reality check. While working as a translator for the OSCE SMM in the Luhansk region, Maksym Petrov was also studying international law. After everything that has happened to him, he would probably be the one to give us the most honest answer to whether what he was taught is still something valuable.

This essay is based on Nataliya Gumenyuk's intervention at the Helsinki Debate on Europe, in May 2025. It is published in partnership with Debates on Europe