Russia will have to pay for the damage caused in the war in Ukraine. That was agreed yesterday by the vast majority of the 46 members of the Council of Europe at the summit held in Reykjavik. The meeting also gave new impetus to the idea of creating a special court to try "the political and military leaders" responsible for the Russian aggression, with Vladimir Putin at its head.
The leaders meeting in the Icelandic capital launched a "damage registry", which will be based in The Hague, whose task will be to collect and manage all claims for human and material losses. This information should serve as the basis for a future “international compensation system”. It will be Russia that will have to pay the reparations.
The Reykjavik declaration has 45 points and five appendices. It constitutes a dense and important legal corpus in the process that must repair the damages and place those who unleashed the war on the defendant bench. That will only materialize if Russia loses it and if there is a change in power in Moscow. It will not be easy, but the pressure is mounting because the international community is already thinking about the day after, just as the allies were paving the way in various conferences and meetings (those in Tehran, Yalta and others) during the Second World War, on how treat the future defeated Germany.
There was no unanimity because some countries maintain an ambiguous position, if not complacent, towards Russia, either due to ideological affinity, interests or fears. A total of 40 countries have joined the creation of the damage registry, including three that have observer status in the Council of Europe: the United States, Canada and Japan. Andorra, Bulgaria and Switzerland have not yet officially joined -because they need internal procedures-, but they have expressed their intention to do so. Six are the states that have demarcated, although it is not ruled out that some may end up forming part of the pact: Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Turkey and Serbia.
In the final press conference, the host of the summit, the Icelandic Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, downplayed the lack of unanimity. For her, the support for the registry has been “well above our expectations”. “It is an extremely positive result,” she emphasized.
The Council of Europe – an intergovernmental organization founded in 1949 to defend human rights, democracy and the rule of law, with headquarters in Strasbourg – not only calls for the total withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, but also from Georgia and Moldova. In these former Soviet republics, Moscow has controlled militarily, for years, enclaves with a Russian-speaking majority such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia – in the case of Georgia – and Transnistria, in Moldova.
Appendix II is dedicated to the situation of Ukrainian children deported to Russia. In addition to solidarity with Kyiv and firm condemnation of Moscow for its conduct, it is warned that crimes against children will be investigated with special zeal to punish the guilty. The goal is to achieve "the immediate return" to Ukraine of minors illegally transferred to Russia, Belarus or Ukrainian territories under occupation.
