As others have written, the proposed 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan that became public in late November was a “hot mess.” While the plan has reportedly evolved significantly from the initial proposal, at least one piece of the original plan is in direct violation of existing international law obligations and must not be included in any future text: a provision purporting to grant amnesty for any violations committed during the war. In this essay, I’ll explain why an amnesty would be unlawful and a moral abdication of the pursuit of accountability for victims in this war, which has no place in a peace plan.
Point 26 of the original plan stated: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.” The intent appears to have been to provide full amnesty for any violations committed during the war. This would prevent Russia or Ukraine from investigating or prosecuting people for possible war crimes.
Just three years ago, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the United States had enough evidence to conclude that members of the Russian forces had committed war crimes and that the United States was “committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions.” Now, the United States appears to be supporting an erasure of any accountability for war crimes, despite an open case in the United States against four Russians for alleged war crimes.
Ukrainian courts have already convicted over 100 Russians for war crimes, and earlier this year, Ukraine reported it had documented over 150,000 possible Russian war crimes. Numerous European jurisdictions have collected testimonies about violations and have started investigations as well. No country should support this amnesty, which is not only illegal but is morally reprehensible and which would close avenues for justice for the thousands of victims of this conflict.
Why A Full Amnesty Provision Would Violate Russia and Ukraine’s Legal Obligations
An amnesty for war crimes would be in direct violation of Ukraine and Russia’s international law obligations. Ukraine and Russia are both party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I of 1977. These are foundational international humanitarian law treaties, all of which apply to the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The four Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I require States to pass domestic legislation criminalizing certain offenses, and to search for alleged perpetrators of grave breaches of the treaties.
Grave breaches include the most egregious violations against persons and objects protected by IHL, such as targeting civilians and protected medical facilities and personnel, torture and inhumane treatment. States are obligated to either prosecute the alleged perpetrators themselves, or, with required safeguards in place, transfer them to another State for prosecution.
Each of the four Geneva Conventions (for example, article 131 of Geneva Convention III) provides that parties may not “absolve” themselves of grave breaches. The ICRC’s Updated Commentaries explain that this article was included specifically to ensure that parties to a conflict could not wiggle out of obligations through peace plans, and to ensure that a defendant facing war crimes prosecution could not use an amnesty provision in a peace plan in his defense.
The ICRC’s Updated Commentaries note that “amnesties granted to persons who have participated in an armed conflict must not extend to those who are suspected of having committed grave breaches or other serious violations of humanitarian law” because an amnesty would violate the obligation to prosecute or extradite alleged offenders. The commentary cites a decision from the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in the case of Ieng Sary, who was a Khmer Rouge leader to whom the Cambodian King Sihanouk granted an amnesty by royal decree. The Court determined that the amnesty did not absolve Cambodia of its “absolute obligation to ensure the prosecution or punishment of perpetrators of grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions . . .” This is a crucial judgment, as it makes clear that States have an obligation to prosecute people who commit grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and that States cannot provide amnesties to perpetrators, as had been proposed in the original Ukraine-Russia peace plan.
Additionally, international humanitarian law and human rights law require that victims have access to a remedy for violations. Allowing amnesty would close that avenue for many victims because they would not be able to seek redress in Ukrainian or Russian courts. Ukraine is already investigating thousands of violations, and remains the most likely jurisdiction for victims to seek justice since Ukrainian authorities are best placed to collect and analyze evidence.
This is not a novel tension; these issues have played out in other peace processes as well. For example, the 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement, which brought an end to fighting in Sierra Leone, included an article that provided “absolute and free pardon and reprieve to all combatants and collaborators in respect to anything done by them in pursuit of their objectives.” However, five years later the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which was set up to prosecute atrocities from the conflict, concluded that the amnesty could not prevent the Court from prosecuting people for atrocities who otherwise would have been covered by the amnesty. A year after concluding El Salvador’s 1992 peace agreement that ended the civil war, El Salvador passed a law allowing amnesty for grave violations of the law during the armed conflict. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights quickly said that this law violated El Salvador’s international human rights law obligations, which it reiterated in a report decades later. Although these were each non-international armed conflicts, the lessons hold for international armed conflicts as well.
Why it Matters in this Conflict
There is plenty of credible evidence that war crimes have been committed during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, including bombardments of health facilities, deportation of children, and abuse of prisoners of war. In March 2022, Blinken announced that the United States had determined that members of Russia’s forces had committed war crimes in Ukraine. Blinken specifically referenced the intentional targeting of civilians: “Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians.”
Within a year of the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, driven by a bipartisan outpouring of U.S. support and empathy for Ukraine, the U.S. Congress passed the Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act, which expanded the personal jurisdiction of the War Crimes Act in order to allow prosecution of alleged war criminal, regardless of nationality, who was found within US jurisdiction. By the end of 2023, the Department of Justice brought its first case under the expanded Act for alleged war crimes committed against a civilian in Ukraine. The defendants are all Russian nationals or other foreign nationals who were members of the Russian Armed Forces or the Donetsk People’s Republic militia; the victim is a Ukrainian civilian who was allegedly abducted and tortured by the defendants.
Dismissing Accountability Efforts
Not only would point 26 of the peace proposal violate international legal obligations, it perhaps unsurprisingly goes against former U.S. positions on accountability. In March 2022, when Blinken stated that Russians had committed war crimes, it would have been the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice that led the process of determining that war crimes had been committed. That office (where I previously worked) existed for decades and was created to craft U.S. policy responses to atrocity crimes, including war crimes. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed that office, among others in the U.S. State Department, in July 2025, and with it dismissed experts who supported the work of pursuing justice and accountability for these crimes.
Any future “peace plan” that allows amnesties would violate Ukraine and Russia’s international legal obligations and shut the door to justice for victims of the worst crimes, who the U.S. had previously supported in their quest for accountability. It is a bad plan, which has not worked in other contexts, and should not be supported by any state. All states are parties to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, which means all countries are under an obligation to search for and prosecute alleged perpetrators of grave breaches, including those found in their territory who are alleged to have committed grave breaches in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Not only should states not support an amnesty for war crimes, but they should be investigating perpetrators in their own territories. If investigations shut down, there would be no justice for the horrific and extensive violations that civilians and prisoners of war have endured. Justice supports peace in the long term. Dismissing justice and accountability will prevent a lasting peace from taking hold and must not be supported in any “peace plan.”
