| Summary/Abstract |
THE WEST'S judicial and legal activities, including efforts to give the military conflict in Ukraine the semblance of an international criminal procedure - putting Russia as a whole, its military, and top officials on trial, as it were - are inevitable and predictable. In the past, international law in its traditional form (and at some point, since World War II, also in the form of criminal procedure) used to take center stage only after the cessation of hostilities, as the victors' right to define a new international order, but these days, it tends to accompany military actions and sometimes even precede them. This has to do with, among other things, the transformation of classical wars into "hybrid" ones that include not only military but also information, economic, and other components and feature no less fierce and crucial legal battles. It also has to do with the unwillingness of certain Western elites to risk their lives on the actual battlefield, participating instead in armchair battles and seeking to appropriate the morally unchallenged legacy of World War II while demonizing the enemy who will allegedly be put on trial at a new Nuremberg tribunal, etc.
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