On Warmongers and Pawns.

A 21-year-old Russian called Vadim Shishimarin sits alone in a Ukrainian court house surrounded by the energy of hostile intent. He stands accused of a war crime on the basis that he shot dead an unarmed Ukrainian civilian, a charge he admits. I see his picture every day on the BBC world news pages, and now I have to explain to myself and anybody who cares to listen why I feel sorry for him.

The reason is simple enough: when I see that forlorn and friendless figure staring sadly into space I see another victim of war. You may say that he is not an innocent victim because he committed murder, and I can’t disagree. But he says he was acting under orders from a superior officer, which seems entirely plausible. And a guiding principle of military training (for which read indoctrination) is that in order for a military unit to be effective, a pre-eminent principle is that commands given by senior personnel must always be obeyed without question and without regard for the consequences. It’s a principle which came under intense scrutiny at Nuremberg, but it’s a grey area so dense that it fails the test of exactitude. It’s the sort of thing which holds when it suits and falls when it doesn’t.

And so if this young man is found guilty – which is a foregone conclusion – he will be sentenced to life imprisonment. His future, with all the hopes and plans and dreams you have as a 21-year-old, will have been snuffed out by the violent machinations of the man in the Kremlin. And that’s where the finger should be pointed: at the men throughout history – be it Alexander, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, George W Bush, Tony Blair – who started wars without the reasonable and honest justification of defence. They’re the ones the human race should refuse to tolerate. They’re the ones who should be taken out of human society because they’ve forfeited the right to belong.

I’m not saying that soldiers who commit atrocities in times of war should not be brought to account. I believe they should, but in the final analysis they are the dogs of war, let slip by the territorial and personal ambitions of men who often slip through the judicial net because it isn’t strong enough to catch them. The pawns, as ever, are expendable.

(And on that note, and in the matter of the wider context of war crime culpability, the question of whether the United Nations will continue to have any credibility when the dust settles on the Ukraine issue remains open.)