Heads of State as War Criminals: The Prospects and Challenges of Tracing War Crimes to Senior Political Leaders in Russia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
War crimes are not typically leadership crimes, unlike aggression. In cases where they mobilize important state resources, are committed on a large or consistent scale or are ordered at the highest level, one question is how they can be attributed to heads of state. This chapter discusses some ways in which Vladimir Putin, the current President of Russia, could be brought to trial for alleged war crimes being committed by Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Specifically, it investigates some modes of liability under which could he be held criminally responsible that would particularly make sense of his special responsibilities as head of state. Two main possibilities are discussed: ordering and superior/command responsibility. We evaluate what specific challenges and opportunities each of these options involve. We contend that command or superior responsibility would probably come with the highest chance of success and express a strong sense that the head of state is ultimately responsible for how their troop behave in the field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".