"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 1

Episode 1: Will Vladimir Putin Get Away with War Crimes?

May 1, 2023

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 1

Episode 1: Will Vladimir Putin Get Away with War Crimes?

When a newly hired intern at the International Criminal Court was arrested and revealed to be a Russian spy, it begged the question: what was he up to? Now that Vladimir Putin has a warrant from this court for his arrest, it’s not hard to imagine the spy was planning to tell Moscow about evidence that is accumulating in the case against Russia for its atrocities in Ukraine. Turns out the evidence is abundant—and this may be the conflict that finally makes it hard to get away with war crimes.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Christo Grozev: Victor Muller Ferreira does not exist. That's a fictional character, a fictional identity created by Russia's military intelligence many, many years ago in order for them to have a cover for one of their spies.

This fictional character ran into some real world trouble in 2022. That's when Dutch authorities announced they'd busted the spy as he tried to infiltrate the world's leading court for prosecuting war criminals.

Christo Grozev: This particular character is particularly interesting because he was a long-term sleeper agent and he was sent undercover under the guise of a Brazilian citizen, to roam the world in order to collect secrets for the Russians. And they sent him straight into the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

Outside of the Kremlin, there aren't many people who know more about this strange episode at the International Criminal Court, known as the ICC, than the guy you're listening to now.

Christo Grozev: My name is Christo Grozev and I'm lead Russian investigator with Bellingcat and Bellingcat is a platform that since 2014 has been investigating international crime, usually government-committed crime.

Christo Grozev: Well, much of the government crime in the last several years has been perpetrated by the Russian state. So it just comes natural that we've developed a specialization into that.

Now, Dutch cops didn't catch this Russian spy sneaking in in the middle of the night, trying to climb through a hole he cut in the roof of the courthouse. Russia's plan was to have this spy walk right through the front door.

Christo Grozev: This is actually one of the scariest elements of this story: that the ICC had not figured out that he was a Russian spy. They had given him the job of an intern.

Peter Bergen: Just to be clear, the International Criminal Court offered him an internship and he was on the way to do this?

Christo Grozev: Yes. And he was going to be assigned exactly at the war crime unit. The Russians had decided to use him not just as a regular run of the mill, long-term sleeper agent who will just be working at a company and collecting contacts and creating networks of people that might provide interesting information for future use.

Before this spy started his “internship” at the Court, Dutch authorities detained him and then deported him back to Brazil, where he’d been building up a fake identity for many years.

The Russians call this kind of long term sleeper agent an “illegal.”

I had my first exposure to illegals when I got addicted to a spy show about them called The Americans.

ARCHIVAL The Americans Speaker 1: They're not Americans. They're Russian spies.

ARCHIVAL The Americans Speaker 2: We're from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In case you can't tell from our suits.

The show followed a fictional pair of Soviet “illegals” who’d spent decades building up identities as a married couple running a travel agency in suburban Washington D.C.

The travel agency job made for great cover when the characters suddenly needed to drop everything and disappear to do shady spy stuff:

ARCHIVAL The Americans Speaker 3: Elizabeth's having trouble with that, um, client in Houston. The guy's a real jerk, so I'm gonna have to go down, help her out.

Christo Grozev: I'm a big fan of The Americans. I think it's one of the most realistically written, best dialogued shows ever.

Grozev and his colleagues have investigated several cases of real-life Russian “illegal” sleeper agents. Unlike on TV, he says the real illegals never do heists or assassinations.

Instead they spy on their friends and personal networks, looking for secrets that might be useful for Russia. But as Grozev investigated the agent busted at the Hague, one aspect of the truth did imitate fiction.

Christo Grozev: To make it even more surreally similar to The Americans, his first job as a fake Brazilian, was to run a local travel agency.

Peter Bergen: The Russians seem to have spent a huge amount of money, and time in investing in this guy. Talk us through what the investment is here.

Christo Grozev: The investment is large. We're talking about several million dollars per person. Uh, and thus the loss of any one of them is a huge dent to their pride and budget. But it's mostly the investment in time and skills that actually is humongous. It’s a preparation that takes at least 10 years before they are deployed to their final jobs. Usually they have to come up with a cover story that makes them younger than they actually are because the years at GRU Training Academy have to somehow be hidden.

The spy's identity may have been fake but his education was real. He'd actually completed degrees at Trinity College, Dublin, and at SAIS, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

[MUSIC SHIFT]

Christo Grozev: What is also interesting is that they usually do excel at the schools that they attend on the way to their final career step.

Peter Bergen: I taught at SAIS for four years. And as I think about it, as you are saying these things, you know, everybody at that school is gonna go into the Pentagon or the State Department or take some eventually high level job, usually inside the U.S. government or in national security broadly. I didn't know that there were spies who were at the school. But it makes sense now you're explaining it to me.

Christo Grozev: Exactly because of networking the value of these spies is to be around for 20 years to provide ongoing information about their friends, um, that may end up in the Pentagon. And again, to never ask too direct questions, never ask for favors, but just to pass on this information to other Russian spies, just because they'd be burned otherwise. Which again, points to the unusualness of this attempt to get into the ICC. This was a very high risk move and it shows some sort of desperation by Russia.

Peter Bergen: So why do you think the Russians- why would they throw this guy who they'd expended so much resources on into the Hague in order to access the International Criminal Court?

Christo Grozev: They wanted to know what evidence exists. They wanted to discredit the sources. They wanted to discredit the evidence and possibly to delete evidence.

This evidence would form the backbone of a war crimes case against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates. And earlier this year the International Criminal Court made it clear that they were working on such a case.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Tonight an international arrest warrant, issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Wanted: Russian president for alleged war crimes.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: It is a historic move for the ICC. This marks the first time the Global Court has issued a warrant against one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

Cases against Putin and other Russian leaders will be crucial for Ukrainian victims to get justice on the world stage. And the idea that you could even seek justice on the world stage is pretty new. The International Criminal Court only started hearing cases in 2002.

Past war crimes tribunals that you may have heard of - in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and in Europe after World War II - these were held at ad hoc courts set up on a temporary basis. The number of convictions remained extraordinarily small - a few hundred or so, total - while the victims have numbered in the tens of millions.

[MUSIC]

The ICC was founded to create a permanent court for prosecuting the most serious crimes like genocide, and crimes against humanity. But since then, it’s only convicted 10 people. You heard that right. Ten.

In a moment you are going to hear from people helping to build cases against Putin and the Russian military for their actions in Ukraine. They have dedicated their lives to the belief that there should be such things as laws that apply to every person on earth – even to the most powerful people in the world.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In The Room.

[MUSIC]

I want to start by having you meet a journalist and war crimes investigator who’s risking her life to gather evidence of atrocities happening right now in Ukraine - the kind of evidence a Russian spy infiltrating the International Criminal Court might want to get his hands on.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: My name is Natalia Gumenyuk. I'm a Ukrainian journalist, author, filmmaker. I'm the co-founder of The Reckoning Project, which documents war crimes in Ukraine. And I live in Kyiv.

Peter Bergen: Nataliya, thank you very much. What is the evidence that you are trying to gather?

Nataliya Gumenyuk: For us, the most important is still human testimony because the human testimony is the most important evidence for the real courts.

Peter Bergen: What is daily life like for you?

Nataliya Gumenyuk: Since October, the country, especially the Ukrainian capital is almost every week attacked by missiles, by drones with the task to destroy the Ukraine infrastructure, to make the life in the main city of the country unbearable.

A day before we talk now, we had an attack. We had last week a serious attack. So for instance, for the last two days, I wouldn't have a proper electricity in my home. There is a blackout in my office. You know, Ukraine, we are resilient. We think that these things won't break us, but it's extremely annoying and difficult.

Peter Bergen: Usually war crimes are investigated well after the fact, but your work is happening in real time. Can you tell us how that makes the investigation more or less difficult than what's been done before?

Nataliya Gumenyuk: The scale is one of our, kind of, biggest challenge. Today the Ukrainian General Prosecutor office says that they had registered around 52,000 cases.

Peter Bergen: So there are 52,000 separate cases that the Ukrainian prosecutor has,

Nataliya Gumenyuk: Yes.

Peter Bergen: that are war crimes?

Nataliya Gumenyuk: Yes, they are open cases,, with a possible breach of the laws of war.

Breaking the laws of war – especially to intentionally harm civilians – that’s a pretty good umbrella definition for war crimes. Since I spoke with Gumenyuk, Ukrainian investigators now say they're looking into more than 65,000 potential war crimes. And there are many reports of large-scale atrocities that seem like they could qualify - such as the 2022 massacre in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where investigators say Russian soldiers killed more than 450 civilians.

But Gumenyuk says it’s also important not to overlook the countless, smaller tragedies.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: You go to a village, a random village, and then people say, ‘Oh no, we have just one man killed.’ But it would happen in every village you go. In every liberated village. And the idea that there are so many, these unknown people whose cases you would never remember, but it would be every village.

There was a day when I randomly asked for the guidelines for the road of three men in three separate villages. By chance it happened that each of them was a father of the son who has been killed.

[SOUNDS OF REPAIR WORK IN A UKRAINE VILLAGE]

Nataliya's team filmed an interview with a person like this, in a village called Yahidne, which was rebuilding and cleaning up after Russian forces left town.

[SOUND OF A SPEAKING EMOTIONALLY IN UKRAINIAN]

The voice you're hearing right now is a father who has suffered a terrible loss.

He's standing beside a blasted-out house holding a flat bladed shovel and a little broom made of twigs.

[SOUNDS OF SWEEPING]

He's sweeping up pulverized concrete from the street. He's got bushy gray eyebrows, and a deeply creased face.

[SOUND OF A SPEAKING EMOTIONALLY IN UKRAINIAN]

He’s talking about his sons. Viktor and Anatolii. Anatolii has gone missing.

[SOUND OF A SPEAKING EMOTIONALLY IN UKRAINIAN]

As for Viktor, he’s saying, the Russian soldiers shot him behind his barn and buried him. They shot him in the head, he says. His hands were tied.

You can still hear him speaking as he sweeps another tiny mound of gravel into the shovel, then dumps it onto a pile of rubble beside a ruined house.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: The most important is to build a clear legal case.

Proving that torture or the killing of civilians is a war crime can depend on things like whether actions were intentional, or systematic, or a result of orders given and followed down a chain of command.

One of the goals of Gumenyuk’s work is establishing that Russian atrocities fall into a pattern.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: We tried to identify the people and the chain of commands and then patterns. Somehow it happens that in Chernihiv in the north, in Kharkiv in the west, in Kherson in the south, people are tortured in the very same way. Very similar things are happening in various regions. It's not one brigade. You can also say that, hmm, it's not something special about this unit. That's how the Russian army is acting. We recorded dozens of testimonies of the people who'd been tortured. When I try to understand who are the people who have been detained and maybe tortured, the only reason, the only thing they share, they are not openly loyal to the Russian government. They actually are Ukrainians who do not really understand why they should be invaded.

For the most part Gumenyuk says she focuses on gathering testimony from Ukranians who've had it far worse than her. Still, she says, there are moments when Russian aggression feels personal.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: The moment when I feel the angriest, and I would say the only moments when I really feel hate towards Putin, it's if at night you somewhere on assignment in a difficult place where you taken like hours to get, and there is a airstrike, and at 3:00 AM you need to go to the basement, and you need to wake up in two hours to make your story. And you cannot control yourself because it's in the middle of the night and you say like, ‘I hate this guy. Why this guy wants to kill me?’ You know, and that is like very unconscious, but you really understand in a difficult moment, apart from fuck Putin, you don't think anything else. You know, like, how these horrible people can do this to us. Why they're doing that to us?

Peter Bergen: You've written that and I'm quoting you, “We owe it to the dead and missing to tell their stories and to try to find some measure of justice. No matter how long it takes.” How long might it take? How long are you prepared?

Nataliya Gumenyuk: I believe it would be faster than we expected. When we just started to work, everybody asked us to be very patient. To say that it would be, you know, years and years, but by now many of them say that in fact we can speed up. We have so much evidence.

David Scheffer: This is the most significant evidence-gathering venture in atrocity crimes in the history of humankind.

That’s David Scheffer.

David Scheffer: I was the Ambassador At Large for war crimes issues during the Clinton administration and a professor of international criminal law since then, at Northwestern and now at Arizona State University.

Scheffer says that even with all the evidence that’s being gathered in Ukraine, these cases are harder to prove than you might think. He knows what he’s talking about. He helped set up war crimes tribunals from Cambodia to Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia and even played a part in creating the International Criminal Court.

He says the modern era of prosecuting war crimes began after the atrocities of World War II gave birth to a radical new idea.

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newscaster: The crowded flood lit courtroom with the 21 Nazi leaders taking their places in the dock.

For the victors of World War II, the radical new idea amounted to this: Even if an action was legal according to the laws of some nation - like say, Nazi Germany - some crimes are simply so awful, so outrageous, such a violation of the shared morals of the world community - that the world just has to step in, and demand justice.

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newscaster: Eagerly awaited in every part of the world was the climax to the long and strenuous months of the Nuremberg trial.

The winners of World War II set up the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany in 1945. Their stated purpose was to prosecute Nazi officials for violating older international treaties established after World War I that banned things like using poison gas and bombing hospitals.

But the tribunal went much further. It took the principles of those older treaties and forged them into two new commandments of international law: a ban on crimes against humanity - which encompasses all sorts of brutal atrocities - and a ban on the crime of aggression.

The crime of aggression is pretty simple: Starting a war for no good reason, just as Hitler did when he ordered the invasion of Poland in 1939. It was this crime, perhaps surprisingly, that was the key focus of Nuremberg prosecutors when they put high-ranking Nazis on trial after the end of World War II.

ARCHIVAL Judge Francis Biddle: War for the solution of international controversies undertaken as an instrument of national policy, certainly includes a war of aggression and such a war is therefore outlawed .....

Peter Bergen: When we first started talking about war crimes, you said something that kind of surprised me and I didn't know about Nuremberg, because we tend to think of Nuremberg as about the Holocaust but you corrected me and said, you know, the main charge was the crime of aggression. So why was that the main charge?

David Scheffer: Well Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, was our guy, at Nuremberg. And he took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court to do this. He was very, very focused on the aggression that unleashed hell in Europe, from 1939 onwards, and he felt that that was the supreme international crime. But he also knew that there was not the kind of solid treaty law among nations saying that if you start a war this way, you can be individually criminally liable for doing so. And what Jackson tried to emphasize, he did this in a memo, to President Truman just before he left. He said, ‘Sir, we're going to go to the edge in Nuremberg and we're going to make some international law because I'm going to nail aggression to the wall.’

ARCHIVAL Robert Jackson: Any resort to war, any kind of war is a resort to means that are inherently criminal as means.

A similar tribunal was set up in Tokyo to prosecute 28 high ranking Japanese leaders in 1946.

David Scheffer: It was not until Nuremberg and Tokyo that that part of international law, which we looked to for international criminal justice, actually came to the fore. And it was then really pressed forward quite dynamically at Nuremberg and Tokyo. But then it went to sleep again during the Cold War. So it was not really until the 1990s that this part of international law came alive again with frankly, just the imperative need to start to build courts that could actually address this issue.

The imperative need that Ambassador Scheffer's talking about arose in part from two spasms of gruesome violence that horrified the world in the mid 1990s.

ARCHIVAL 1990s Newscaster: Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans are fleeing the intense tribal and political bloodletting...

In Rwanda, one ethnic group, the Hutus, killed more than half a million ethnic Tutsis in just a few months in 1994.

And a year later during the Bosnian civil war, Serb forces massacred 8,000 Muslim civilians.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II…

Subsequent U.N. tribunals convicted 61 perpetrators in Rwanda and 91 in Bosnia and elsewhere in the Balkans.

Janine di Giovanni: I felt during the war in Bosnia that my colleagues and I did make a difference. I really do.

That's Janine di Giovanni. She's a co-founder of The Reckoning Project, where she works alongside Nataliya Gumenyuk, the Ukrainian war crimes investigator you heard from earlier. But before she started investigating war crimes, di Giovanni was a war correspondent who spent decades covering conflicts all over the globe. She won America's prestigious National Magazine award for her coverage of the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia. She believes that the reporting of journalists like herself helped to spur political leaders to intervene to stop further atrocities.

But di Giovanni says that, even after the fighting stopped in Bosnia, it was still hard to get justice. One reason? When it comes to prosecuting war crimes: You actually have to arrest the perpetrators. Which is pretty rare - but it can happen. If the perpetrators get detained while traveling in another country… or if the tide turns against them at home.

Janine di Giovanni: Slobodan Milosevic, the man who destroyed Yugoslavia and who wreaked four wars on his people, Everyone said, ‘we'll never get him. We'll never get him.’ Well, they did get him.

In 2000, Serbians pushed Milosevic out of power and then handed him over to an international tribunal - but even then, justice moved far too slowly.

Janine di Giovanni: By the time they got him, they then started investigating and gathering evidence and it was far too late. He did land up in the Hague only to defy justice by dying in his cell under mysterious circumstances. And I, having had reported 19 wars, I think, over a more than three decade long career as a war reporter, I just had this very deep sense of shame and sorrow and anger. A massive amount of anger at seeing so many victims who never got anywhere near justice.

This time around, di Giovanni hopes things will be different. In past decades, war crimes tribunals were set up years after the atrocities had been committed. Since 2002, there’s been a permanent place for trials like these. The International Criminal Court - the same place that the Russian spy you heard about earlier was trying to sneak into. Di Giovanni hopes that evidence of atrocities in Ukraine will be ready to present quickly because teams like hers are gathering it right now, before the war is even over.

Janine di Giovanni: We're very nimble. You know, we're not the U.N. which gets encumbered by paperwork and, you know, travel requests and we can be on the ground very quickly. We have a mobile unit in Kyiv with Natalia Gumenyuk and one of our videographers. And when something happens, they're on the first train, they're in a car, they're there immediately and they're highly skilled with working on war crimes.

Peter Bergen: What's the difference between a news story that you write as a journalist and what your team is doing for the Reckoning Project?

Janine di Giovanni: It's actually very different. So Janine di Giovanni, as a journalist, might have asked a question such as, ‘When you saw the Russian tanks coming into your town, what did you do?’ Instead, we would ask them to identify what the tanks looked like, what the soldiers looked like, what their accents were like, what their uniforms were like, any markings of insignia. I think journalists, their intent is much more about telling the story, getting the truth out there. There are elements of that in what we do but ours is much more of a three-step process, which is documentation, verification, and then building of the cases.

Peter Bergen: Is it sort of cold comfort now for you that you are more involved in a direct attempt to secure justice? What's the difference for you personally?

Janine di Giovanni: By doing this, I feel that, you know, we're a very tiny drop in a big ocean, but it's definitely having a ripple effect. I just don't want the bad guys to keep getting away with it.

Peter Bergen: I hear you. But I guess there's a sort of skeptical side of me that says, well, look, Putin's not a dummy and nor is his other henchmen. They will probably not be taking vacations in the United States anytime soon.

Janine di Giovanni: So, I do understand the skepticism and we get it a lot, but I have to constantly counter it by saying, ‘We've got our heads down and we're working.’

Peter Bergen: So let's fast forward three or four years down the road, these cases have been built up. Some of them are at the International Criminal Court or wherever they end up. Play it out over the next several years.

Janine di Giovanni: Okay, so if I had the crystal ball they give out when we do human rights training, I would, but, but I will speculate. And again, I use the Milosevic example. No one ever thought he'd fall from power, right? But somehow the tide changed. A group of young people actually pushed him out of power and the government changed and there was a call to bring him to justice.

The seemingly impossible became possible with Milosevic. And it could also become possible for Putin and his top lieutenants.

Janine di Giovanni: This could happen in Russia. It could be some of his very high level people want to go skiing in Megève, or go on their yachts in Nice.

Beth van Schaack: We do not have an international police force that can forcibly cross borders, abduct individuals and bring them to The Hague to justice.

That's Beth van Schaack. She's the U.S. Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice. She started her career helping to prosecute war crimes and now it's her job to bring attention to the issue of war crimes around the world on behalf of the U.S. State Department.

She says the countries that are working together to investigate Russian war crimes should be preparing the evidence necessary to arrest any suspects the moment they leave the safety of Russia.

Beth van Schaack: There are fewer and fewer safe havens these days. States around the world say, ‘Let's get a sense of what's being committed, what sort of violations, and then let's be ready. If a perpetrator lands within our jurisdiction we are gonna be ready to move because we've lined up some witnesses and then we can press charges.’

Ambassador van Schaack is both modest and optimistic about finding justice for victims of atrocities in Ukraine.

Beth van Schaack: It is absolutely the case that we will never get full accountability for everyone who probably deserves it, but we will have accountability, there will be justice, and it's just a matter of time, patience, and an investment by the international community.

Peter Bergen: For somebody who's lost their entire family or their partner or spouse has been tortured and killed, I mean, what is justice in this context?

Beth van Schaack: I've never been in that situation, so it's hard for me to put myself in that place. What I do know is having been a lawyer who has represented those people my entire career, this is a demand of all of them. It's cross-cultural. It's part of human nature. I'm a hundred percent convinced of that. And having a lawyer represent you, giving you a platform in which to tell this story, and having a judge listen to you and validate what you experienced and put that against a body of law that says, yeah, that never should have happened. That is powerful. It's small solace. I'm sure if you asked anyone, would you rather have your family member back? That would be the answer. Where that is still impossible, you know, justice is what we can offer to survivors.

The Ambassador has described the growing global consensus that Russia must be held responsible for war crimes in Ukraine as a “new Nuremberg moment.”

Beth van Schaack: The international community is dealing with a true full scale international armed conflict of the like we have not seen in a long time, levels of brutality that mirror those of the World War II period. It's so blatant and so flagrant, and every day we're learning more about the kinds of atrocities that are being committed.

But if this is a new Nuremberg moment, what about the crimes that formed the most serious part of the prosecution of the Nazis in Nuremberg? The crime of starting the war itself. The crime of aggression.

Beth van Schaack: That crime has not been prosecuted since Nuremberg. The Ukrainians are very keen to see that crime prosecuted now because they see that as the font, as the original sin that all of the other abuses that happened would not have happened but for the decision to ultimately invade.

I talked to the person who held van Schaack’s job in an earlier American administration about this issue. He's David Scheffer, the scholar of international law you heard from earlier in the show. He pointed out that the U.S. invaded Iraq over the objections of much of the rest of the world and also under false assumptions. And that could complicate American efforts to prosecute Russia for its war in Ukraine.

David Scheffer: It is a dilemma for the United States. The Iraq invasion in 2003, created a precedent that subjects the United States to the charge of hypocrisy. And frankly, also our leaders ultimately did not face judicial scrutiny under U.S. law for the Iraq War. There's no getting around the fact that by invading Iraq without Security Council authorization -

Peter Bergen: From the U.N. -

David Scheffer: From the U.N., we created a problem for ourselves. We've made mistakes in the past, and frankly, we have overreached in the past. And we need to just say that bluntly, and admit to it.

Still, he thinks there’s a pretty straightforward case to be made against Russia for waging a war of aggression in Ukraine.

David Scheffer: It may turn out to be the easiest charge just because of the blatant, highly publicized, and documented reality. Putin himself keeps incriminating himself every time he speaks. He obviously acknowledges that he is launching this aggression and sustaining it.

Whether or not the United States takes part in that specific aspect of a future prosecution, both the former and current U.S. war crimes ambassadors agree: there's something different about this conflict. Something they believe will make the atrocities in Ukraine harder for the world community to ignore. And that’s the sheer scale of the documentation that's going on in Ukraine.

Beth van Schaack: When I started my career in this field, back in the late nineties. We were lacking information and we were desperate for that information, for eyewitnesses, for some documentation, et cetera. Now we have almost the reverse problem. There's too much evidence. It's like looking for a needle in a stack of needles.

A world with publicly available satellite images and soldiers on social media and cell phones in every pocket means there are vastly more chances for evidence of atrocities to be recorded and passed on to investigators. Add drones and security camera footage into the mix – and the possibility for evidence collection grows even more.

David Scheffer: It's enormous, it's daily. It takes place on many fronts.

This growing mountain of evidence may help answer the question I posed right at the beginning of the show. That is, why would Russia risk someone as valuable as a long-term, deep-cover sleeper agent, to infiltrate a war crimes court?

Christo Grozev: I think the idea was mostly to create their own, alternative reality version of events. And regardless of whether or not it can be proven in court - because of course it will be proven in court that they committed war crimes - it doesn't distract Russia from arguing otherwise publicly.

And there’s plenty of reasons for Russia to want access to this information - beyond using it to plan a counter argument in court. It would make excellent grist for the Russian propaganda mill. They’ve done something similar before.

Christo Grozev: Let's look at another example. Russian citizens were indicted over the downing of the Malaysian airline, MH 17, by a court in the Netherlands. But Russia continues to trumpet internationally that all of that was a fake court and that they didn't do it, and it was Ukrainians who did it.

Investigators said pro-Russian forces shot the passenger jet down in 2014 as it flew over eastern Ukraine. Nearly 300 people were killed. Grozev says Russian spies infiltrated one of the teams investigating that crash.

Christo Grozev: And through that they were able to get access to the internal communication and they would handpick individual correspondence and leak it publicly to so-called journalists, and that would create a completely perverted view of what was happening.

And even if no one ever goes to jail for Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, still the colossal forensic project of the criminal investigations taking place there is building up an unassailable record of what’s truly gone on. Whatever their limitations, the trials of the perpetrators of past atrocities have created mountains of facts that loom large in the historical memory of mankind. And in Ukraine, investigators like the ones you’ve just heard from say that, one interview at a time, they’re making a mountain of evidence of their own.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: For me, it's also important that these crimes won't be denied. Apart from the legal courts, there are the courts of the public opinions. Russia from the first day worked on the denial of what they were doing.

Janine di Giovanni: We do not want, in 10 years time, people to say ‘this didn't happen’ or there to be a revision of history. We want to say ‘Here's our dossiers, here's our cases that we built. Here's our witness statements. They're locked down in an archive. And you can never say, ‘this didn't happen’ because we were there.We were documenting, we were watching, we were verifying, and the hard truth will always be there.

If you’re interested in digging into this topic further, we’d like to recommend a few books:

East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide,’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity, by Phillipe Sands. And All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals, by David Scheffer. Both are available on Audible. We also recommend Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni.

CREDITS:
In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and Fresh Produce Media.
This episode was produced by Erik German, with help from Luke Cregan.
Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.
Katie McMurran is our technical director.
Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.
Theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our executive producers for Fresh Produce are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.
Our head of development is Julian Ambler.
Our head of production is Elena Bawiec.
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Maureen Traynor is our head of operations.
Our production manager is Herminio Ochoa
Our production coordinator is Henry Koch
And our delivery coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

Head of Production at Audible Studios: Mike Charzuk
Head of US Content: Rachel Ghiazza
Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki
Head of Content, Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah.
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber and Vanessa Harris.

Please note: This episode includes excerpts from BBC News, from Deutsche Welle News, and from Reuters.

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