EU backs Ukraine war crimes tribunal in riposte to Putin’s war parade

Good morning. Habemus Papam: Robert Prevost has been elected as the next head of the world’s 1.4bn Catholics, and the first American pope. The 69-year-old Chicago native, who will serve as Pope Leo XIV, is seen as a compromise candidate in a deeply divided church.

Today, I explain why EU foreign ministers are in Lviv to endorse the creation of a war-crimes tribunal for Ukraine, while Russia celebrates its history of conflict with its neighbours. And we report on the latest crackdown on an internal European security threat: wolves.

Have a great weekend.

War crimes and war criminals

Try this for a split-screen: EU foreign ministers will gather in Ukraine today and endorse creating a tribunal to prosecute war crimes; while in Russia, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico will attend Vladimir Putin’s parade of forces involved in his illegal war against Ukraine.

Context: Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine has long demanded that any post-conflict settlement should include initiatives to hold Moscow to account. The Kremlin holds a military parade each year on May 9 to mark the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

“All those who truly support peace cannot stand side-by-side with Putin”, EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas said yesterday. “Those who truly support peace should be in Ukraine tomorrow, not Moscow.”

Fico and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić are the two European leaders attending the parade, defying a barrage of condemnation from other western capitals.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will also attend the Red Square event, which is set to feature military units that have taken part in the invasion of Ukraine.

“Putin is waging a war right now, not a war from history”, said Kallas. “That remains on the conscience of those [attending].”

While Fico and Vučić flew to Moscow, Kallas and more than 15 EU foreign ministers instead travelled overnight to Lviv, where they will today formally give backing for the tribunal, alongside the release of another €1bn in financial support to Kyiv funded by frozen Russian assets.

The EU’s political endorsement of the tribunal is an important milestone in Ukraine’s campaign to address atrocities committed by Russian troops. It would be set up by the Council of Europe, Kallas said, “to address the crimes of aggression and war crimes”.

Brussels sees the endorsement and the mass visit to Lviv as a show of support for Kyiv, on a day when Putin will seek to maximise the propaganda value of having Xi, Lula and Fico watch soldiers who have killed Ukrainians march past, saluting their commander-in-chief.

EU diplomats are however quietly cheering the decision by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev not to accept Putin’s invite. Officials in Warsaw yesterday pointed to Kallas’ trip to Baku two weeks ago, when she strongly urged Aliyev to decline.

Chart du jour: Price rise

Portugal is grappling with a dramatic surge in electricity prices after deciding to temporarily slash its power imports from Spain, whose grid collapse last week triggered a blackout across the Iberian peninsula.

Wolf warriors

Wolves have bitten into EU politics again. EU lawmakers yesterday voted by a significant majority to lower the protection status of the predatory canines in a sop to farmers, writes Alice Hancock.

Context: Wolves were classified as “strictly protected” under the 1979 Bern Convention. But this status has come under increasing pressure as wolf populations have grown, threatening and killing EU livestock — including Dolly, the pony of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen’s political group, the European People’s Party, spearheaded the campaign against wolves as part of their mission to be the party of the farmers in the EU.

“Farmers can now breathe a sigh of relief. We have listened to their concerns”, said EPP lawmaker Herbert Dorfmann, who sits on the European parliament’s agriculture committee.

But despite many being sympathetic to the fate of Dolly and the plight of farmers, the issue has been divisive. Animal rights groups declared yesterday’s vote a betrayal of historic efforts to protect Europe’s wolves.

“Wolves are vital to healthy ecosystems, but today’s vote treats them as a political problem, not an ecological asset”, said Ilaria Di Silvestre from the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

The effort to lower the protection status of the marauding animals has increasingly become a totemic symbol of Europe’s rural-urban divide, with centrist parties fearing losing the rural vote to more rightwing groups.

NGOs noted that the vote had been done via an emergency procedure “as if authorising more wolf hunting was a matter of extreme urgency”.

What to watch today

1. Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz visits Brussels, meets top EU officials and Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte.

2. EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas and some EU foreign ministers visit Lviv.

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