While we are still learning the details of last weekend’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, there is understandable hope that the chaos in Russia might hasten the end of the war in Ukraine. But it is just as likely, perhaps more so, that the Wagner mutiny created conditions that could actually prolong the war.
In the faceoff between liberal democracies and autocracies, the competing camps are enlisting backers across the globe, and Latin America has become an important battleground. Venezuela has emerged as the epicenter of activity for the anti-Western front, as highlighted by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to Caracas last week.
Ukraine has called for an ICC investigation into the bursting of the Kakhovka dam as an act of “ecocide.” But if the ICC does frame the intentional breaching of the dam as an attack on the natural environment rather than on civilians, the relevant rules of international law would not make such a prosecution a simple matter.