From Nuremberg to NATO, the gavel has always followed the gun. Now, Europe resurrects the tribunal—not to prosecute war crimes, but to criminalize resistance.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 9, 2025
Beneath the Wig, a Bayonet
When imperialism puts on its powdered wig and quotes the Geneva Conventions, the first duty of a guerrilla intellectual is to laugh—then dig. The article in question, syndicated by Reuters and hosted on Poland’s state broadcaster TVP, is not journalism. It’s jurisprudential cosplay. TVP, as a communications arm of the NATO-aligned Polish state, has spent years laundering U.S.-EU talking points into Slavic respectability, while Reuters, with its long history of British colonial entanglement and elite financial clientele, functions as an imperial press office with a press pass.
The names quoted here—Estonian EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, British FM David Lammy, Zelenskyy himself—form a familiar constellation. These are not independent actors voicing moral outrage; they are disciplined operatives within a Euro-Atlantic war machine that bombs Libya, blockades Gaza, and props up apartheid regimes with a smile and a statute. That same bloc now wishes to crown itself the supreme arbiter of justice.
Let’s examine the script. The article frames the so-called “special tribunal” as a noble response to Russian “aggression,” conveniently omitting the role NATO played in laying the geopolitical tripwire. There is no mention of the 2014 Maidan coup, no reference to NATO expansion, and certainly no comparison to the unpunished invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, or the NATO destruction of Yugoslavia. Instead, we get a sanitized legalism—a narrative where only non-Western leaders commit war crimes, and where “law” is not a system of class violence, but a mirror that somehow never reflects Brussels or Washington.
Even the timing of this announcement—Victory Day in Russia—is a form of imperial trolling, an information warfare tactic masked as diplomacy. The intent is symbolic dominance: to erase Russia’s antifascist legacy while elevating Europe’s self-declared moral authority. It is not law. It is narrative warfare.
When the Criminal Wears Robes: Western Hypocrisy and Imperial Arrogance
Let’s strip the theater bare and examine the material beneath the robes. The article confirms that 37 countries—the so-called “core group”—have endorsed the formation of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian leadership for the “crime of aggression.” The tribunal will operate under the Council of Europe, an institution born out of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order, whose human rights framework has never once indicted the colonial looting of Africa, the occupation of Palestine, or NATO’s wars in Yugoslavia and Libya. This is not incidental. This is structure.
Also revealed: the ICC can’t prosecute the “crime of aggression” here because Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute, and Ukraine wasn’t either at the time of invasion. So, like clockwork, the imperial bloc creates an ad hoc tribunal outside the ICC—yet again inventing legal infrastructure to enforce its military and economic dominance. Just as the U.S. created special courts in Iraq and NATO ran kangaroo tribunals in the Balkans, this tribunal reflects not justice but jurisdictional improvisation for empire.
What’s omitted from the article? Everything. The illegal NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999—no tribunal. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003—no tribunal. Obama’s destruction of Libya—no tribunal. Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen—no tribunal. Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza—no tribunal. What we’re looking at is not international law, but selective enforcement—where power, not principle, determines who stands accused.
And the language? A case study in cognitive warfare. “Freedom will prevail,” declares British FM David Lammy, echoing every colonial campaign from India to Kenya. “A good step,” says Dutch Justice Minister van Weel—toward what? A precedent to criminalize any nation that breaks from NATO’s script? The truth is, this tribunal is not being built to stop war crimes. It’s being built to codify imperial impunity and delegitimize multipolar resistance under the guise of law.
The Gavel and the Drone: Lawfare in the Age of Hyper-Imperialism
Let’s call this tribunal what it is: not a mechanism of justice, but an instrument of hyper-imperialism. Its gavel doesn’t serve victims—it reinforces victors. Its real target isn’t just Putin. It’s every nation that dares to assert anti-imperialist sovereignty outside of U.S.-EU command. This is legal warfare designed to paralyze resistance and normalize the idea that only the West can decide what counts as a “crime.”
This isn’t about holding leaders accountable. If it were, Bush, Blair, and Obama would already be behind bars. This is about rehabilitating the dying legitimacy of the imperialist bloc by wrapping its violence in robes and rituals. After decades of destroying nations under the pretense of “human rights,” the empire now wants to pose as the world’s courtroom. But the world is no longer buying it.
Russia’s military operation in Ukraine—regardless of one’s political interpretation—must be understood within the collapse of post-Cold War illusions. It was not a rogue crime. It was a geopolitical rupture, a refusal to surrender sovereignty to NATO encirclement and IMF recolonization. From the view of international proletarian legality, it represents a contested break in a world order that has, for centuries, been violently arranged to benefit Euro-American capital.
What this tribunal fears isn’t just Putin. It’s precedent. Because if Russia can defy NATO’s map, if Palestine can refuse Israeli erasure, if the Global South can de-dollarize and re-nationalize, then the whole imperial “rule of law” regime cracks. This tribunal is empire’s emergency measure—a last legalistic gasp to contain a crumbling unipolar order. But its own contradictions expose it: the tribunal invokes Nuremberg, yet the real fascists wear suits in Brussels and bomb shelters in Gaza.
The real question is not “Will Putin be tried?” but “Who decides what justice looks like?” And until the answer comes from the oppressed—not the occupiers—there is no justice. Only lawfare.
From Lawfare to Liberation: Mobilizing Against Imperial Justice
We do not recognize the moral, political, or judicial authority of this tribunal. We recognize Gaza. We recognize Donbas. We recognize the martyrs of Fallujah, Belgrade, Tripoli, and Baghdad. Our allegiance is not to courts of empire, but to the revolutionary justice of the oppressed.
To every comrade in the belly of the beast: expose this tribunal in your workplaces, campuses, and unions. Educate people on the crimes of empire that go unpunished—because they are systematized, not exceptional. Build study groups on lawfare and counterinsurgency. Dissect how liberal legalism launders violence. Turn “international law” into a site of struggle, not surrender.
To our fraternal forces across the Global South: continue to build parallel institutions of legitimacy. Support calls for a new non-aligned legal architecture. Raise the names of Lumumba, Chávez, and Sankara when they raise the names of Nuremberg. The law is not neutral—it is an arena of class and colonial war. Occupy it accordingly.
To revolutionaries everywhere: this is not a debate. This is a weapon. A weapon forged in the colonial courts of empires past, now redeployed in the age of technofascism and hybrid war. It must be confronted head-on. Not with appeals, but with rupture. Refuse to let the memory of Iraq be erased by the performance of Ukraine. Refuse to let a thousand Western atrocities be concealed behind a single Eastern scapegoat.
No more fake tribunals. No more imperial prosecutors. No more illusions that empire can ever judge itself. The only tribunal we recognize is the tribunal of history—and history has already issued its verdict: the empire is guilty.
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