Collateral damage

Collateral damage is well known in different wars, whether they are of high, medium or low intensity. Even conflicts in which human beings kill each other for reasons that are mainly in the interests of those who provoke them are rated by experts, research centres and the media, which are used in one way or another. 

For or against. The Geneva Convention was even drawn up in 1949 to protect the victims of armed conflicts. The development of awareness of the moral, ethical and executive obligation to try to put some limits to war crimes led to the creation of the International Criminal Court where some murderers have appeared to take responsibility for their infamous cruelties. 

The clearest examples are the radical Serb leaders Slovodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic. One a politician, who died in his cell five years after his trial, and the other a military officer sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide during the last Balkan war. It is said that justice is slow, but it comes. It is a rather relative satisfaction for the victims, their families and friends, although it is a certain advance as a guarantee of the survival of democratic systems where the rule of law and respect for the life, integrity and freedom of human beings prevails. 

One of the objectives of the Court and the system is to deter the powerful from using and abusing their force against their weaker adversaries. It is also to ensure that victims can respond, in their own measure, in kind, as was the case in Bosnia. Where this reflection leads us is whether we will see Vladimir Putin sitting in the dock in The Hague, the seat of this tribunal, and all those who committed war crimes during the invasion of Ukraine. 

We will have to wait and see how events unfold. For the time being, Putin is responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in Ukraine through indiscriminate shelling of homes, and he is also waging a war to freeze to death the inhabitants of various cities. The systematic destruction of Ukrainian power plants is a criminal strategy to break the will and morale of the Ukrainian people because of low temperatures, no water, no electricity and no heating. 

This is known as collateral damage, which occurs in all wars, as in the Second World War. In recent years, collateral damage was caused by the explosion of a missile aimed at terrorists using civilian houses as hiding places. Putin does not have Ukrainian military objectives, he intends to win by freezing the Ukrainian people to death.