Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the crimes being committed in his name, feel very personal to me. It is where many of my family once lived.
I visited for the first time in October 2010, to give a lecture on ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, two crimes invented in 1945 for the famous Nuremberg Trials, in which former Nazi leaders were indicted and tried as war criminals by an international military tribunal.
As an academic and lawyer, international crimes are my speciality, my day job. I decided to accept the invitation to Lviv — a city in west Ukraine I had barely heard of — after I realised that it was once called Lemberg and was the place of my grandfather Leon’s birth when the city was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
I found the house where he was born and learned that he fled the city in September 1914 aged ten, with his mother and two sisters, refugees from occupying Russian forces who had already killed his brother.
In recent days, thousands of refugees have again been descending on the wonderful railway station in Lviv from which Leon headed west.
Again they are trying to escape the Russian onslaught.
On that first visit to the city, I learned more about the terrible events that befell so many of those who would remain after Leon left — about the summer of 1942, when Hans Frank, governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland and formerly Hitler’s lawyer, delivered a speech unleashing the Final Solution in the area.
What followed was the extermination of hundreds of thousands of families, including my grandfather’s.
Some 80 of my relatives died as 150,000 or more Jews were ‘resettled’ from Lemberg to ghettos and camps.
Astonishingly, I also discovered that the inventors of those two legal terms ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ — Professor Hersch Lauterpacht of Cambridge University and Dr Raphael Lemkin, a former Polish prosecutor — happened to have studied at the very university which had invited me to give my lecture.
It is beyond tragedy that the land and city which gave birth to these definitions is once again the victim of the most terrible international crimes — this time being waged by President Putin in the name of Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accussed of war crimes after his invasion of Ukraine
This week, the International Criminal Court — a child of Nuremberg — launched a war crimes investigation into Russia’s invasion, as an unprecedented 39 countries urged it to act. (Nazi Hermann Goering during cross examination at the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes)
This week, the International Criminal Court — a child of Nuremberg — launched a war crimes investigation into Russia’s invasion, as an unprecedented 39 countries urged it to act.
The body’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan QC said he would begin work ‘as rapidly as possible’ to determine whether 'war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ have been committed in Ukraine.
The prosecutor’s decision is a welcome development. But it is not enough.
Although I believe they are taking place, war crimes and crimes against humanity can take time to prove and the process of gathering evidence on individual cases can be complicated.
There is a crime, however, which Putin is undoubtedly committing.
His invasion of Ukraine is a crime of aggression, a term also first used at Nuremberg, although then it was called a ‘crime against peace’.
At the Nuremberg judgment, where more than half the Nazi defendants were found guilty of it, aggressive war was branded the ‘supreme international crime’. .
In Ukraine, it is being repeated. Which is why, yesterday, I joined Gordon Brown and others in supporting the call by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba to set up an international tribunal — a new Nuremberg — to investigate Putin and his acolytes for the crime of aggression.
The crime is being committed before our eyes and is capable of being investigated and prosecuted without much difficulty, if there is political will.
And to those who say it is fanciful that Putin would ever end up on trial, I argue that it would at one stage have been unimaginable that Nazi leaders like Hermann Goring and others would find themselves in the dock.
Yet it happened. The same goes for Serbian leader and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial by tribunal began in 2002.
As I say, this feels very personal to me. In the years since my first visit to Ukraine I have returned on many occasions — and not not just to Lviv.
In September I was in Kyiv, to attend the 80th anniversary commemoration of the terrible killings at Babyn Yar, right in the heart of the city, when tens of thousands of Jewish residents were murdered in just a few days, a round-up ordered by the Nazis who had recently occupied the city.
The city’s National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II had asked me to donate some artefacts from my grandfather.
The Nuremberg trials led to the creation the Hague International Criminal Court, which has launched an investigation into Russian war crimes
As I wrote in my best-selling book East West Street, after leaving Lviv, he lived in Vienna.
He married and soon after his daughter — my mother — was born, he fled to Paris to escape the Holocaust.
There too he faced serious risks and was made to identify himself as a Jew: I donated to the museum in Kyiv two yellow silk squares he kept, with a Star of David and the words ‘Juif’ (Jew) printed on them.
It is appalling that this week Babyn Yar, with its Holocaust memorial, was bombed by Putin.
Speaking after the missile attack, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was ‘beyond humanity’ and accused the West of not doing enough to stop Putin.
‘What is the point of saying “never again” for 80 years,’ he said, ‘if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?’
He is right. Lviv and Ukraine are not the faraway places some people might imagine them to be: they are the beating heart of Europe, of our values and principles and of the legal order Britain did so much to create at Nuremberg.
If we do not act today to safeguard them, we will in due course pay an even greater price.
How did we get to this point? The warning signs have been around for years.
In 2008 I was part of the legal
