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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

Which is really why this international criminal court has no real meaning - only the winner in a conflict gets to also win in the court.

For example, do you really think that by charging putin, that he'd really get arrested in participating countries? Or would the warrant be ignored?

And if putin does lose his war, and goes into exile, the ICC warrants would then be possible to enforce (now that no nukes is on the line). But putin knows this, so if the war goes badly, would it not make better sense to fight it out to the bitter end, rather than lose out to being arrested if he goes on exile?

The court that has no enforcement mechanism is mostly just political show boating.

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There is the slim possibility that if the war goes very badly a small group of very senior Russian generals arrange to capture Putin, depose him, put themselves in place as some sort of junta, remove russian ground forces from Ukraine, and hand him over to the ICC to repair Russia's relationship with the rest of the world.

Yeah, except the West isn't equal to the world and chances of Russian generals handing Putin to ICC are the same as US generals delivering Bush or Obama to the ICC.

This is misunderstanding how Russia works - Russia is not a military dictatorship, it's a security services dictatorship.

The Military in Russia is a low-status organisation and it is not capable of doing anyrhing in internal politics. They commonly end up on the recieving end of racketeering by low-level gangs. Yes, people that drive tanks and fire missiles pay 'taxes' to bandits armed with pistols.

Putin was sending generals to their deaths without worry.

Various internal police forces have a higher chance of removing FSB from power than the military does. If thongs get bad enough, thats not impossible.

Thank you for pointing this out! It makes sense, but I hadn’t made those connections.

You can say approximately the same about the Stalin's USSR when Beria was the most feared man. But just after Stalin's death Beria was promptly executed and the military played the major role in that.

Sounds like Serbia.

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