Latest / Reformed Thinking / Judging Aggression, Managing Expectations: What the Special Tribunal for Ukraine Can—and Can’t—Deliver

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Judging Aggression, Managing Expectations: What the Special Tribunal for Ukraine Can—and Can’t—Deliver · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back to Reformed Thinking.
• 0:03
  Good to be back. We are doing something a little
• 0:05
  different today. Usually we look at culture or,
• 0:09
  you know, broad theological concepts.
• 0:11
  But today we're looking at a very specific, very sharp point
• 0:15
  of friction in the modern world. We're looking at the machinery
• 0:19
  of international justice, specifically regarding the war
• 0:22
  in Ukraine. And we're asking a question that
• 0:25
  I think keeps a lot of us up at night.
• 0:27
  I think it does. In a world that is clearly
• 0:29
  broken, where the guys with the biggest guns seem to make the
• 0:33
  rules, is justice actually possible?
• 0:36
  Or is it just a nice word we use to make ourselves feel better?
• 0:39
  It's the oldest question in the book, isn't it?
• 0:40
  It's Habakka complaining to God. Why do you make me look at
• 0:44
  injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
• 0:46
  And today we're looking at a very concrete attempt to to
• 0:50
  answer that complaint. We're analyzing the proposed
• 0:53
  Special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.
• 0:57
  And before anyone tunes out thinking this is just legal
• 1:00
  technicalities, let me frame the stakes here.
• 1:03
  We're looking at 2 documents today. 1 is a technical
• 1:07
  breakdown from the Council of Europe, very legal, very
• 1:10
  precise. The other is a theological
• 1:13
  analysis applying the Westminster Confession to
• 1:16
  international law. And the tension they both
• 1:19
  highlight is what they call a jurisdictional gap.
• 1:22
  Which is a polite way of saying a massive loophole.
• 1:25
  A massive loophole. A loophole where we can
• 1:27
  prosecute the 19 year old soldier who commits a war crime
• 1:31
  on the ground, but the 60 year old leader in the suit who
• 1:34
  ordered the invasion in the 1st place?
• 1:36
  He's totally untouchable. That is the crux of it.
• 1:39
  We've built a system of international law over the last
• 1:42
  80 years that's very good at catching the small fish, the
• 1:45
  foot soldiers, the mid level commanders.
• 1:48
  The guys on the ground. But the sharks, the architects
• 1:50
  of the chaos, they often swim free.
• 1:54
  Today we're talking about why that gap exists, how this new
• 1:57
  tribunal tries to close it, and honestly, whether a Christian
• 2:00
  should put any hope in it at all.
• 2:02
  So let's start with the crime itself.
• 2:03
  I think most people hear war crimes and they just lump
• 2:05
  everything together. Right, it's all one big bucket.
• 2:07
  Bombing a hospital, torturing prisoners, starting a war, it's
• 2:11
  all just bad stuff in war. But the sources, they make a
• 2:15
  really hard distinction here. They do, and it's a distinction
• 2:18
  that goes back to the foundations of just war theory,
• 2:21
  which, frankly, Christian theologians developed centuries
• 2:24
  ago. That's interesting.
• 2:25
  Yeah, you have Justin Bello and just Ed Bellum.
• 2:28
  OK, let's break that down. Justin Bello being the laws in
• 2:31
  war. Right.
• 2:32
  That's the conduct of the fighting.
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  If you target civilians, if you use chemical weapons, if you
• 2:36
  execute prisoners, those are war crimes.
• 2:39
  And the International Criminal Court, the ICC, that's their
• 2:43
  area. That's their bread and butter.
• 2:45
  They're investigating those in Ukraine right now.
• 2:47
  That is all about how you fight. And just that Bellum, is about
• 2:50
  why you're fighting. Or right that then you started
• 2:53
  fighting illegally. Correct.
• 2:54
  This is the crime of aggression. It's the act of a state using
• 2:59
  armed force against the sovereignty, territorial
• 3:01
  integrity or political independence of another state.
• 3:04
  It's the decision to start the war in the 1st place.
• 3:06
  It is. The Nuremberg Tribunal after
• 3:09
  World War 2 called this the supreme international crime.
• 3:13
  I have that quote right here. They said it differs from other
• 3:15
  war crimes because it contains within itself the accumulated
• 3:20
  evil of the whole. Think about the theology of that
• 3:23
  statement for a second. It's the upstream offense.
• 3:25
  The upstream offense, I like that.
• 3:27
  If you don't start the illegal war, none of the specific war
• 3:31
  crimes happen. The bombing of the theater in
• 3:33
  Mariupol. The torture chambers in Bucha.
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  All of it. None of that happens if the
• 3:38
  initial decision to invade isn't made.
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  It's the poison in the well from which all the other streams of
• 3:43
  evil flow. So in a reformed category, we
• 3:45
  might call aggression the federal headship of the crime.
• 3:49
  That's pretty good. Just as Adam's sin brought death
• 3:52
  to all, the aggressor's decision brings all the subsequent
• 3:55
  atrocities into being. That is a very apartment
• 3:57
  analogy. It is the original sin of the
• 4:00
  conflict, the soldier on the ground.
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  He's committing actual sins, specific acts of evil, but the
• 4:06
  leader who launched the war is responsible for the condition
• 4:10
  that allows and even encourages all those other sins to
• 4:13
  flourish. So here's where I get
• 4:14
  frustrated, and I think you, the listener, will too.
• 4:18
  If aggression is the supreme crime, the root of all the evil,
• 4:22
  why isn't the ICC prosecuting Putin for that?
• 4:25
  Yeah, it's the obvious. Question, it's an arrest warrant
• 4:27
  out for him but it's for or is it deporting children?
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  Unlawful deportation of children, yes, Which is a
• 4:33
  horrific crime, don't get me wrong.
• 4:34
  A clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
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  Of course, but it's not the main thing.
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  It's not the supreme crime. No, it's technically a war
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  crime, a Justin Bello violation, not the crime of aggression.
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  And the reason they can't charge him with aggression is because
• 4:49
  of a structural flaw in the ICC. It's a design feature, not a
• 4:53
  bug. This is the Kampala amendments
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  issue the source mentioned. Yes, so when the nations of the
• 4:58
  world updated the ICC rules in Kampala in 2010 to finally
• 5:02
  define the crime of aggression. Which took decades, right?
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  Oh, decades of argument. But when they finally did it,
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  they added a massive caveat, a huge asterisk.
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  OK, they said. The ICC cannot prosecute the
• 5:13
  crime of aggression if it is committed by a state that is not
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  a party to the Rome Statute. And Russia, famously, is not a
• 5:22
  party to the Rome Statute. They signed it back in 2000 but
• 5:25
  never ratified it, and then they formally withdrew their
• 5:28
  signature in 2016 after the annexation of Crimea.
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  So because they aren't members of the club, the club's rules on
• 5:34
  aggression don't apply to them. It feels like a get out of jail
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  free card they gave themselves. That's a pretty good description
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  of it. But wait a minute, the ICC can
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  prosecute them for war crimes on Ukrainian soil even though
• 5:45
  Russia isn't a member. Why the difference?
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  That's the Q distinction. Because Ukraine is effectively
• 5:52
  under the IC CS jurisdiction for war crimes.
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  They filed the declaration accepting it.
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  So the rule is if you commit a war crime on the territory of a
• 6:01
  member state or a state that accepts jurisdiction like
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  Ukraine has, you are liable. The location of the crime gives
• 6:08
  them the hook. So the war crimes happened in
• 6:09
  Ukraine, so the ICC has a claim. Right.
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  But for aggression, the leadership crime, the decision
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  made in Moscow, the rules are tighter.
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  Both the aggressor state and the victim state generally have to
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  be members. Which they aren't.
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  Unless, and this is the only other way, unless the UN
• 6:27
  Security Council refers the case.
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  And the UN Security Council is never, ever going to refer this
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  case. Not a chance.
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  Because Russia is sitting right there at the table with a veto
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  pen. Exactly.
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  It's a complete deadlock, A jurisdictional gap.
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  The only body that could charge the leadership is blocked by the
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  leadership itself. It's like having a suspect in a
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  murder trial also sitting on the jury with the power to just
• 6:49
  dismiss the case whenever they want.
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  It makes the whole system look like a joke.
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  It's a huge problem, and it's what led to this whole
• 6:57
  conversation. So enter the special tribunal.
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  This is the workaround. If the main door is locked, we
• 7:02
  build a side door. That is the idea, the proposal,
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  and it's backed by the Council of Europe, so it has weight, is
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  to create a specific limited tribunal just for this conflict.
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  So it isn't a new permanent global court.
• 7:15
  No, not at all. It's a specialized tool for a
• 7:19
  specific job to fill this one very specific, very glaring gap.
• 7:24
  Now, looking at the structure here in the source, it seems
• 7:27
  like they're trying to thread a very difficult needle.
• 7:29
  It's a. Legal and political balancing.
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  Act. They want it to be international
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  enough to have legitimacy, but Ukrainian enough to have a solid
• 7:36
  legal basis. It's a hybrid model.
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  It's rooted in Ukrainian criminal law.
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  I mean, at the most basic level, Ukraine has every right to
• 7:44
  prosecute people for invading it.
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  Of course, that's just national sovereignty.
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  Right. But if Ukraine just held a trial
• 7:51
  in Kiev, what would the Russians say?
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  This is a kangaroo court. You're biased.
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  It's Victor's justice. And they would probably be
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  right, or at least the appearance of bias would be
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  undeniable to much of the world. You'll be dismissed.
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  OK, so that's not a good option, no.
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  So you take that Ukrainian and authority and you
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  internationalize it. You bring in international
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  judges, you get a majority of non Ukrainian judges on the
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  bench. And you put it somewhere else.
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  You're situated in The Hague, not Kiev.
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  You run it under the auspices of the Council of Europe.
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  You give it the veneer and, more importantly, the actual rigor of
• 8:26
  an international body. So it's Ukrainian law, but with
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  international oversight. That's the formula they're
• 8:31
  trying to perfect. Let's pause on the theology of
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  this for a second, because this all sounds very secular, very
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  bureaucratic. Why should we, as Reformed
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  Christians, care about the mechanics of a court in The
• 8:44
  Hague? It does.
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  It sounds like something for policy wonks, but it gets to the
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  heart of our doctrine of government, which goes right
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  back to Romans 13. Paul writes that the civil
• 8:52
  magistrate is God's servant for your good.
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  The magistrate bears the sword to be an avenger who carries out
• 8:59
  God's wrath on the wrongdoer. The Paul was writing about the
• 9:02
  Roman Empire, a Pagan local government.
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  Does that principle really apply to an international treaty
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  organization? I think the principle applies to
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  the function of governance itself.
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  In a fallen world, a world of, as our confession says, total
• 9:16
  depravity, we need restraints. We can just let things run wild.
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  If every man does what is right in his own eyes, you get
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  anarchy, you get brutality, you get the Book of Judges.
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  God ordained the magistrate in all its forms to put a lid on
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  that chaos. It's an institution of
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  preservation. So the tribunal acts as a levy
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  against chaos. Precisely, It is an act of
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  common grace. Let's define that.
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  Common grace is the grace of God that is common to all humankind.
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  It's the rain that falls on the just and the unjust.
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  It's the moral conscience in every person.
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  And it's the structures like government and law that restrain
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  the full expression of human sinfulness.
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  So it's not saving grace. No, absolutely not.
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  This tribunal won't preach the gospel.
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  It won't save anyone's soul, but it might save a village from
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  being shelled. Or at least it affirms that
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  shelling the village was wrong. It upholds the moral order of
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  the universe which God himself instituted.
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  And that moral order says that leaders are not gods.
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  Yes, I was reading the section and the source on the troika,
• 10:19
  the specific targets of this court, and it's very narrow.
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  We're talking about the head of state, the head of government
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  and the foreign minister. The big three, in Russia's case,
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  that's the president, the Prime Minister and the foreign
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  minister, the people who can actually direct the power of the
• 10:32
  state. Historically, these people were
• 10:33
  untouchable. The whole idea of the divine
• 10:36
  right of kings. You couldn't sue the king
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  because the king was the law. And that is where the Reformed
• 10:40
  tradition specifically pushed back hard.
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  OK, You have figures like Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish
• 10:45
  Presbyterian, who in the 1640s wrote a book called Lex Rex.
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  Lex, Rex. It means the law is king.
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  He argued directly against the popular idea of Rex, Lex, or the
• 10:57
  King is Law. So he flipped it.
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  He flipped it on its head. He argued that the king is under
• 11:01
  the law and more to the point, under God.
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  If the king becomes a tyrant, he violates his covenant with the
• 11:07
  people and with God, and he forfeits his authority.
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  So stripping immunity from a head of state isn't some modern
• 11:13
  liberal invention. It's actually a very old, very
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  biblical idea that no man is above the moral law.
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  It is. But, and here's the giant butt
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  that the sources spend pages and pages on, the international
• 11:26
  community is terrified of actually doing it.
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  This is the immunity problem, and I have to say, reading this
• 11:31
  part of the legal analysis made me want to throw the document
• 11:34
  across the room. It's frustrating, I get it.
• 11:36
  Walk us through what you saw there.
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  So the statute for this proposed tribunal says on one hand, and
• 11:43
  it's very clear, official capacity is irrelevant to
• 11:46
  responsibility. Right.
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  Plain as day. Meaning it doesn't matter if
• 11:50
  you're the president, you are still guilty of the crime.
• 11:52
  Your job title isn't a shield. A core principle of post
• 11:56
  Nuremberg justice. But then, almost in the next
• 11:59
  breath, it has this suspension clause.
• 12:02
  It says that if the indictment concerns a sitting member of the
• 12:06
  Troy Caso, if Putin is still president, the proceedings have
• 12:10
  to be paused. The pretrial judge cannot
• 12:12
  confirm the indictment. It just gets put on ice.
• 12:14
  The pause button. It feels cowardly.
• 12:17
  It feels like they're saying you're a criminal, but you're a
• 12:19
  powerful criminal, so we'll wait until you retire.
• 12:22
  If the crime is aggression and the aggression is happening now
• 12:24
  every single day, why are we waiting?
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  It seems to gut the whole purpose.
• 12:28
  This is where the the expert side of me has to play the
• 12:32
  buzzkill. The source calls this a realism
• 12:34
  clause. Realism or fear?
• 12:36
  Maybe a bit of both. We have to understand the
• 12:39
  environment these lawyers and diplomats are working in.
• 12:42
  International law, unlike domestic law, relies 100% on the
• 12:47
  voluntary cooperation of states. There's no world police to
• 12:50
  enforce it. Zero.
• 12:52
  So they are afraid that if they issue an arrest warrant for a
• 12:56
  sitting leader of a nuclear power, other countries will just
• 13:00
  bail on the whole project. They're worried about the
• 13:02
  precedent. They're terrified of it.
• 13:04
  And it's not just fear of Russia.
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  Think about the United States, think about China, think about
• 13:07
  the United Kingdom or France. Do you think Western leaders
• 13:11
  want to set a precedent where a sitting head of state can be
• 13:14
  indicted by an international court?
• 13:16
  So if they do it to Putin, maybe five years from now some other
• 13:19
  court tries to do it to AUS president over a drone strike or
• 13:22
  something. Exactly.
• 13:23
  There's a lot of self preservation baked into this
• 13:25
  system, but there's also a pragmatic argument they make
• 13:29
  which is about peace negotiations.
• 13:31
  What's that argument? There's a school of thought that
• 13:33
  says if you indict Putin as a war criminal today while he's in
• 13:38
  office and the war is ongoing, you back him into a corner, OK?
• 13:42
  He has no exit ramp. He can't negotiate a peace deal
• 13:45
  because he knows the moment the war ends he's on a plane to The
• 13:48
  Hague, so he has every incentive to fight to the death.
• 13:51
  The cornered rat theory. So you leave him a potential way
• 13:55
  out to, in theory, save lives by ending the war sooner.
• 13:59
  That is the argument. It's a classic justice versus
• 14:02
  peace dilemma. Sometimes, the argument goes,
• 14:05
  you have to trade a little bit of immediate justice to get
• 14:08
  peace. It's a tough till to swallow.
• 14:09
  It is, but the tribunals answer to this seems to be a
• 14:13
  compromise. They're trying to find a third
• 14:15
  way. And that is?
• 14:16
  They say, OK, we won't issue the public indictment, but we will
• 14:20
  investigate, we will gather the evidence, we will build the
• 14:23
  file. We'll have the indictment
• 14:24
  drafted and ready to go. They just won't unseal it until
• 14:27
  he leaves office. The source calls it being future
• 14:30
  ready. It's trading immediacy for
• 14:32
  durability. They are making a long term bet.
• 14:35
  A bet. A bet that Putin won't be
• 14:37
  president forever. He will die, he will be ousted,
• 14:40
  or he will retire. And when that post office moment
• 14:42
  comes, the trap snap shut. The file is already there.
• 14:46
  The legal work is done. It requires a lot of patience,
• 14:49
  and biblically it reminds me of the tension we see all over the
• 14:52
  Psalms. How long, O Lord, we want
• 14:55
  justice now. We want a lightning bolt from
• 14:57
  heaven. But often God's justice, and
• 14:59
  certainly human justice, is slow.
• 15:01
  It's methodical. The arc of the moral universe is
• 15:04
  long. As Martin Luther King Junior
• 15:06
  said, the Reformed view acknowledges that the wicked
• 15:09
  often prosper in this life. Jeremiah 12.1 asks that explicit
• 15:14
  question. Why does the way of the wicked
• 15:17
  prosper? Why do all who are treacherous
• 15:20
  thrive? And there isn't an easy answer,
• 15:22
  no. The fact that a tyrant stays in
• 15:24
  power and eats fine food while his victims suffer is a painful
• 15:28
  reality of a fallen world. This tribunal is trying to build
• 15:32
  a mechanism that says you may prosper for a season, but the
• 15:35
  record is being kept, the books are not closed.
• 15:37
  Let's talk about that record keeping, because another huge
• 15:40
  issue here is enforcement. Next big hurl.
• 15:43
  We've established we probably can't arrest him while he's
• 15:45
  president, but even if he wasn't president, Russia forbids
• 15:47
  extradition in its own constitution.
• 15:50
  They aren't going to just hand people over to The Hague.
• 15:52
  No, and the tribunal has no police force, it has no army.
• 15:57
  As I said before, it has the power of the keys, the authority
• 16:00
  to make a judgement, but not the power of the sword to enforce
• 16:03
  it. So we run the very real risk of
• 16:05
  this being a paper tiger, a court that barks but can't bite.
• 16:09
  You get a conviction, a piece of paper, and the convicted person
• 16:13
  is still living freely in Moscow.
• 16:15
  That is the biggest risk, and that leads to the really
• 16:18
  interesting and controversial discussion in the sources about
• 16:21
  trials in absentia. Right, This was fascinating to
• 16:24
  me because most international courts like the ICC generally
• 16:27
  don't do trials if the guy isn't in the room.
• 16:30
  Correct. They pause everything until an
• 16:31
  arrest is made, sometimes for years or even forever.
• 16:35
  But this special tribunal is designed from the ground up to
• 16:38
  allow trials without the defendant present.
• 16:40
  It's a really big deal. It's a controversial mechanism.
• 16:42
  On the one hand, it solves the deadlock.
• 16:44
  If the defendant refuses to show up or if they can't be arrested,
• 16:48
  you hold the trial anyway. You present the evidence, you
• 16:52
  call the witnesses. The defense lawyers appointed by
• 16:55
  the court can still challenge everything.
• 16:58
  And at the end, you issue a verdict.
• 17:00
  So it prevents the criminal from viewing the justice system just
• 17:04
  by hiding. That's the main benefit.
• 17:06
  You don't let the powerful escape judgement just because
• 17:08
  they can't be caught. But on the other hand, does it
• 17:10
  look like a real trial, or does it look more like a university
• 17:14
  lecturer or a truth Commission? That is the danger.
• 17:18
  That is the big trade off. We all remember the images from
• 17:21
  Durenberg, Goering and Hess and the other sitting in the dock
• 17:24
  wearing those headphones, listening to the translation,
• 17:27
  the visual of these once mighty leaders looking small and
• 17:30
  defeated and being held to account.
• 17:32
  That was half the power of the proceedings.
• 17:34
  It was a spectacle of justice. If.
• 17:36
  You do it in absentia, you lose that.
• 17:38
  You just have an empty chair. You do, you lose that visceral
• 17:41
  satisfaction and you risk the criticism that the defense
• 17:44
  wasn't adequate because the guy wasn't there to whisper in his
• 17:47
  lawyer's ear. No, that's not what happened.
• 17:50
  It could be seen as less legitimate.
• 17:53
  It could, but the sources argue that the tradeoff is worth it
• 17:57
  because of the value of what they call the forensic record.
• 17:59
  This is what I wanted to get into the deliverables because
• 18:02
  even if we don't get an arrest, the sources argue the tribunal
• 18:05
  still achieve something massive. And the first thing is truth.
• 18:09
  We live in an age of hybrid warfare.
• 18:11
  Disinformation is a weapon. Russia and other actors, to be
• 18:15
  clear. They flood the zone with lies.
• 18:17
  We didn't bomb that, they bomb themselves.
• 18:19
  It's a special military operation, not a war.
• 18:22
  We're fighting Nazis. Gas lighting on a geopolitical
• 18:25
  scale, A tribunal, especially 1 conducted with rigorous
• 18:29
  international standards, cuts through that fog like a knife.
• 18:33
  It's a rigorizing machine. It takes a plane.
• 18:35
  It demands evidence. Satellite photos, intercepted
• 18:37
  communications, witness testimony.
• 18:39
  It tests that evidence and it issues a finding of fact.
• 18:42
  So it's about establishing A baseline reality.
• 18:45
  Yes, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you can't have
• 18:48
  revisionist historians saying, well, it was complicated, we
• 18:51
  don't really know who started it.
• 18:53
  You have a court judgement that says no On this date.
• 18:56
  This order was given by these people and it was a crime.
• 19:00
  It settles the historical record.
• 19:02
  Theologically, that resonates deeply.
• 19:05
  We are people of the truth. The 9th Commandment forbids
• 19:08
  bearing false witness. A tribunal is a massive
• 19:12
  institutional way of bearing true witness.
• 19:14
  It is and it validates the victims experience.
• 19:17
  Imagine you're a refugee for Mario Bowl.
• 19:20
  Your city was destroyed and you hear people denying it.
• 19:23
  Ever happened to have a judge in The Hague say what happened to
• 19:26
  you was a crime and the person who did it as a criminal?
• 19:29
  That matters. Even if the criminal is safe in
• 19:31
  Adasha outside Moscow. Even then, the moral reality has
• 19:35
  been declared. The truth has been spoken into
• 19:37
  the public. Square, There's also a financial
• 19:39
  angle here that I hadn't fully grasped.
• 19:41
  The tribunal isn't just about jail time.
• 19:43
  It opens the door to asset seizure.
• 19:46
  This. Is huge.
• 19:46
  It connects to what's called the register of damage.
• 19:48
  Explain that. We know there are billions,
• 19:51
  maybe hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian state assets
• 19:54
  frozen in Western banks right now, OK?
• 19:57
  But you can't just take that money and give it to Ukraine
• 20:00
  legally. It's very complicated, A
• 20:02
  judgement from this tribunal. Finding that the state itself
• 20:06
  committed the crime of aggression creates a powerful
• 20:09
  legal hook. It provides the legal
• 20:10
  justification for seizing those assets it.
• 20:13
  Allows you to say, yeah, these assets are now sore fitted as
• 20:16
  proceeds or penalties of the crime of aggression and that
• 20:20
  money can be funneled to Ukraine for reconstruction.
• 20:22
  Which brings us back to biblical justice.
• 20:24
  It does. Look at the mosaic long in
• 20:26
  Exodus Kung Ku. If you steal a sheep, you don't
• 20:29
  just say I'm sorry, you pay back fourfold.
• 20:31
  There's a cost. There's a cost.
• 20:33
  Biblical justice is rested institution.
• 20:35
  It's about making the victim whole as much as possible.
• 20:38
  We can't bring back the dead, but we can rebuild the bridge,
• 20:41
  the hospital, the power grid, and this provides a legal
• 20:45
  pathway for the aggressor to pay for.
• 20:46
  It So even without an arrest, you get a historical record and
• 20:49
  you get a basis for reparations. What else?
• 20:51
  The sources mentioned isolation effects.
• 20:53
  Yes. An indictment, even if an arrest
• 20:56
  isn't made, is not just a piece of paper.
• 20:59
  It severely constricts the world of the accused.
• 21:03
  They can't travel to any country that might cooperate with the
• 21:05
  tribunal. Their world shrinks to Russia
• 21:08
  and maybe a handful of allies. Any personal assets they have in
• 21:11
  Western banks are frozen. They can't do business.
• 21:15
  So it makes them a pariah. It delegitimizes them.
• 21:17
  You can't host AG 20 summit with an indicted war criminal.
• 21:21
  It changes the diplomatic calculus for every other country
• 21:24
  and turns them into a liability. Speaking of the cost, I want to
• 21:27
  shift gears. We've been very cerebral so far.
• 21:30
  Legal jurisdiction, immunity clauses.
• 21:32
  It's easy to treat this like a chess game.
• 21:33
  It is but one of our sources, the theological one.
• 21:37
  It stopped the legal analysis and just put the numbers on the
• 21:40
  table and it was jarring. And we need to sit with these
• 21:42
  numbers and we need to let them weigh on us.
• 21:44
  The source focused on the projections and realities for
• 21:47
  2024 and 2025, and what shocked me is that it noted that
• 21:51
  civilian caveaties are not going down, they're going up.
• 21:54
  A 27 to 31% increase projected for 2025.
• 21:58
  Think about that. We are years into this war and
• 22:01
  it is getting more deadly for civilians, not less.
• 22:04
  We've almost gotten used to it, but the reality on the ground is
• 22:06
  getting worse. The source attributes this to a
• 22:09
  shift in tactics, less focus on frontline battles and more on
• 22:15
  terrorizing the civilian population.
• 22:17
  The use of long range ballistic missiles.
• 22:19
  The Shaheed drones swarming cities hundreds of miles from
• 22:23
  the front. And specifically the systematic,
• 22:26
  deliberate targeting of energy infrastructure.
• 22:28
  They mentioned 50% of the energy generation capacity has been
• 22:32
  damaged or destroyed. Imagine living through a
• 22:35
  Ukrainian winter with half the heating grid con.
• 22:38
  That isn't collateral damage from a stray bomb.
• 22:41
  That is a deliberate strategy to freeze a population into
• 22:44
  submission. It's weaponizing winter.
• 22:46
  And the casualty count over 53,000 confirmed civilian
• 22:50
  casualties. And Confirmed is doing a lot of
• 22:52
  heavy lifting there. That's just the bodies the UN
• 22:55
  can count. We know that in occupied
• 22:57
  territories, places like Mary Pole, where the destruction was
• 23:00
  almost total, the real numbers are likely exponentially higher.
• 23:04
  We're talking about 10s of thousands of bearers of the
• 23:08
  Imago Dei. Limits of God.
• 23:09
  Yes, extinguished. We can't just see them as
• 23:11
  statistics. And the displacement, 3.7
• 23:14
  million internally displaced, 1,000,000 more as refugees
• 23:18
  abroad, a whole generation of children growing up away from
• 23:21
  their homes. It's a demographic catastrophe.
• 23:24
  When we look at the crime of aggression through this lens, it
• 23:27
  stops being a dry legal term. It becomes very real.
• 23:30
  The source says aggression is a continuous crime.
• 23:33
  It isn't just the one time event of the tanks crossing the border
• 23:36
  on February 24th, 2022. No, it is every single day that
• 23:41
  the war continues, every morning that the order isn't rescinded,
• 23:44
  the crime is committed again. The evil is renewed.
• 23:47
  This is where the theology of lament comes in.
• 23:49
  I think sometimes in the West, especially in our can do
• 23:51
  culture, we skip straight to the solution.
• 23:53
  We want to fix it. OK, bad things happen.
• 23:56
  How do we fix it? Send more weapons?
• 23:58
  Build a court, Sanction them. But the Psalms teach us to stop
• 24:02
  and groan first. We have to.
• 24:04
  If we don't lament, if we don't allow ourselves to feel the
• 24:06
  grief and the horror of it, we become cynical or we become
• 24:10
  technocrats. We just move pieces on a board.
• 24:12
  And we lose our humanity. We do Lament is the proper
• 24:16
  spiritual response to the horror of sin.
• 24:19
  It's looking at the rubble of a bakery in Kharkiv and saying
• 24:22
  this should not be. It's sharing in the grief of
• 24:25
  God, who hates violence and the shedding of innocent blood.
• 24:29
  And it's acknowledging that this tribunal, even if it works
• 24:32
  perfectly, even if it gets every conviction and seizes every
• 24:35
  asset, it cannot fix this. That is the critical realism we
• 24:39
  have to land on. The expert source warns US
• 24:42
  against what it calls over realized eschatology.
• 24:44
  OK, translate that for us. It means expecting the not yet
• 24:48
  to happen. Now we are waiting for the
• 24:50
  Kingdom of God where justice is perfect and tears are wiped away
• 24:53
  and lions lie down with lambs. That is the not yet.
• 24:56
  The end of the story. The end of the story.
• 24:58
  If we expect a human court in The Hague, run by fallen human
• 25:03
  beings, to deliver that kind of perfect restorative justice, we
• 25:07
  are going to be crushed by disappointment.
• 25:09
  The tribunal can't resurrect the dead.
• 25:11
  It can't heal the trauma of a child who lost their parents in
• 25:14
  a missile strike. It can't.
• 25:16
  It is a Band-Aid, a necessary Band-Aid, a divinely ordained
• 25:20
  Band-Aid via the office of the magistrate.
• 25:23
  But it is not the cure. The fall is too deep, the wound
• 25:27
  of sin is too grievous for a court to fix.
• 25:29
  So how do we apply this? We like to use a head, heart
• 25:32
  hands model here to make this practical for you listening.
• 25:35
  OK, so head, how should we think about this head?
• 25:39
  We need to understand the function and the limits of the
• 25:41
  law. We support the Tribunal not
• 25:43
  because it's perfect, but because the alternative is
• 25:45
  impunity, which is chaos. A lot at the jungle.
• 25:48
  We understand that justice in this life is always going to be
• 25:51
  a compromise like that immunity pause.
• 25:53
  It's a messy, it's on, it's unsatisfying.
• 25:56
  But we support the effort to restrain evil because that is a
• 25:58
  good, God-given function. OK.
• 26:01
  Heart how should we feel? Heart, we hold on to that
• 26:05
  tension of anger and humility. We should be angry.
• 26:09
  Righteous anger at injustice is a good thing.
• 26:12
  It reflects the heart of God. But not a self-righteous anger.
• 26:15
  No, the source mentioned soul sentence in that dumbest line
• 26:19
  about how the line separating good and evil passes not through
• 26:22
  states nor between classes, but right through every human heart.
• 26:25
  So it's a check on our pride. It is the check on our self
• 26:28
  righteousness. We want justice for Putin, but
• 26:31
  we also have to recognize that the same seeds of aggression,
• 26:34
  pride, greed, wrath, the desire to dominate are in us.
• 26:38
  We aren't invading countries. No, but we are capable of
• 26:41
  destruction in our own smaller spheres, so we seek justice with
• 26:44
  a certain humility without becoming hateful.
• 26:47
  And Hanums, what do we do? We're podcast hosts and
• 26:49
  listeners. We are international lawyers or
• 26:51
  diplomats. We advocate we can support
• 26:54
  leaders and policies that value the rule of law, but primarily
• 26:57
  for the Christian, the work is prayer.
• 26:59
  And the source had a challenging call to prayer here.
• 27:01
  It's easy to pray for the victims.
• 27:03
  It's harder to pray for the judges and prosecutors.
• 27:05
  Yes, for wisdom, for courage, for protection.
• 27:08
  But then it said we must also pray for the troika.
• 27:11
  That is the hardest command of Jesus.
• 27:13
  Pray for your enemies. It feels so counterintuitive.
• 27:17
  We want to pray for their destruction.
• 27:18
  And the Bible has language for that, the imprecatory Psalms.
• 27:21
  It does. Calling on God to stop the
• 27:24
  wicked and bring their plans to nothing is a valid biblical
• 27:27
  prayer. But Jesus adds another layer.
• 27:30
  We also pray for repentance. We pray that the hearts of stone
• 27:35
  would be turned to flesh, that they would see the evil they are
• 27:38
  doing and turn from it. And if not repentance, then at
• 27:41
  least restraint. Lord confuse their plans,
• 27:45
  frustrate their logistics, stay there hand.
• 27:48
  There's a valid and necessary prayer.
• 27:51
  I want to circle back to one final theological point the
• 27:54
  expert source made. It was really powerful.
• 27:56
  It contrasted the trials in absentia with the last
• 27:59
  Judgement. That really stuck with me too.
• 28:00
  We worry about the empty chair in The Hague.
• 28:03
  We worry that these leaders will never face a judge, that they'll
• 28:06
  die of old age and comfort. And many tyrants throughout
• 28:09
  history have. But the Christian hope is
• 28:11
  grounded in the absolute certainty that there is a higher
• 28:14
  court where there are no trials in absentia.
• 28:17
  No immunity deals. Not a one.
• 28:19
  No sovereign immunity. No veto power on the Security
• 28:23
  Council, No pause because you're a busy world leader.
• 28:27
  Revelation 20 sees the dead, great and small, standing before
• 28:31
  the throne. Sanding, not hiding, not sending
• 28:34
  their lawyer. Everyone shows up, every knee
• 28:36
  bows and the books are opened. That is a terrifying thought for
• 28:41
  the Tarrant, but it is a profoundly hopeful thought for
• 28:44
  the victim it. Is the ultimate answer to the
• 28:46
  problem of injustice. If this life was all there was,
• 28:49
  if The Hague was the highest court, then yes, history is a
• 28:52
  tragedy. The bad guys often win.
• 28:55
  But that's not our worldview. No, because there is a final
• 28:57
  judgement. We know that justice is
• 28:59
  inevitable. It might be delayed, but it's
• 29:01
  absolutely inevitable and that. Frees us, doesn't it?
• 29:03
  It frees us to support imperfect justice now without despairing
• 29:07
  when it falls short. It's We can build the tribunal,
• 29:10
  we can gather the evidence. We can testify to the truth,
• 29:13
  knowing that we are just setting the stage for the ultimate
• 29:16
  verdict. We're doing our small part in
• 29:18
  this age. We're just keeping the minutes
• 29:20
  for the meeting that really matters.
• 29:21
  That is a powerful place to leave it.
• 29:23
  The Special Tribunal for Ukraine is a flawed, complex,
• 29:28
  bureaucratic, frustrated attempt to do something good in a bad
• 29:32
  world. It might fail.
• 29:34
  It might be a paper tiger. But the impulse behind it, the
• 29:38
  desire to draw a line and say this is wrong, that is a
• 29:41
  reflection of the God who loves justice.
• 29:43
  Amen. So we'll leave you with this
• 29:45
  final thought to Mull over. We support justice here and now,
• 29:49
  not because it is the ultimate solution, but because it
• 29:52
  testifies to the truth. Yet as we watch the gavels of
• 29:55
  men, we have to ask ourselves, is our ultimate hope in The
• 29:59
  Hague? Or are we looking for the city
• 30:01
  whose designer and builder is God?
• 30:03
  A good question to end on. We hope this deep dive gave you
• 30:06
  some categories to think through the headlines.
• 30:08
  It's not just legal jargon, it's about the moral structure of our
• 30:11
  world. And it's a call to keep watching
• 30:13
  and keep praying. Thanks for listening to Reformed
• 30:15
  Thinking. We will catch you on the next
• 30:17
  deep dive.