Prosecuting the Powerful by Steve Crawshaw review – from the Nuremberg trials to the pursuit of Putin and Assad

This history of international justice is an important primer for our dark times and surprisingly optimistic about our chances of putting today’s despots in the dock

On a Monday morning last month the Russian general Igor Kirillov left his flat in Moscow. A powerful bomb hidden in an e-scooter blew him up. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it was behind the assassination. The previous day it had charged him with war crimes: the use of banned chemical weapons that had poisoned more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

His killing was a brutal extrajudicial moment. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s embattled government has sought justice in two ways. Its agencies have targeted perpetrators responsible for murdering Ukrainians – the commanders who give orders, technicians who design long-range missiles used in nightly attacks.