You don't do war crimes unless you expect to get away with it, which means either you're fighting a war that more powerful nations don't care about, or you expect to win it.
Putin can't win against NATO but he can make both sides lose.
I used to think he was rational and only minorly evil, but now I'm not so sure of the rationality... and clearly he's more than minorly evil.
1) The West has already weaponized the law. It is currently operating on the Latin American dictator model of "for my friends, anything; for my enemies: the law!".
2) The United States strongly opposes the ICC treaty and does not accept its jurisdiction overs its nationals and is even willing to use military force to free any of its nationals should the ICC ever try to enforce jurisdiction over an American[1]. In similar, but less violent terms, Russia withdrew from the ICC back in 2016.
So my point is, why would Russia care what some court with no jurisdiction says? It's already obvious it won't matter. The West is already going full Treaty of Versailles on them - so what difference does it make? There is little credibility left for the West, either in terms of rule of law or moral authority to be telling anyone what is right or wrong.
This is something that most of the world sees by now, but the West is comically unable to look in the mirror and see this and I'm afraid they will only notice when it's too late. It's absurdly self-destructive but the West consider it "winning", yet the history books will almost certainly mark this as the most obvious inflection point where the West lost the plot.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...
Westerners, that are scrutinizing every single move of Russia today, ignored every time it was pointed out that the U.S. was waging a proxy war in Ukraine for 8 years.
The Minsk agreements, mediated by NATO members, were NEVER applied, and there have been 14000 deaths in the Donbass war since 2014. All the while, U.S. politicians have been publicly gloating that they "are fighting Russia in Ukraine". Their involvement in this is clearly documented -- except Westerners do not even care to look.
The current act of freezing the assets of the Russian state -- completely arbitrary thievery -- just sends the following message to outside governments that have seen this unfold: the West is not to be trusted.
I think it's the later - Putin is not going to lose this war since he's racking up hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of damage and compensation for injury/death that Russia would have a hard time paying for if he admits defeat.
There probably is a tactical advantage from the Russian side to putting out the idea that Putin has gone crazy.
Or he really has gone crazy. We can't really know but the fog of war spreading to social media does not seem like a great development.
What other explanation is there for invading a European country with close ties to the USA and NATO -- one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
Putin thought he would win quickly, get troops to lay down arms and overthrow the government. For whatever reason he was wrong, it seems clear this is what was expected but pushback has been more effective. Probably in no small way because organizing the logistics of such a large operation is hard and has not gone smoothly.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZLhRP01jz8 seems like a possibility.
> one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
Well, look at what's happened. Look at what has happened previously in Crimea, look what happened in the Ukraine separatist regions before. Look at what is happening now. He would not necessarily have to be totally irrational to believe objectives could be achieved there.