Prosecuting Russian Propagandists
Holding individuals legally accountable - even in the face of direct calls for violence - remains a significant challenge.
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Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence maintains a public database dedicated to Russian propagandists who it accuses of consistently legitimising the occupation of Ukraine and endorsing Russia’s military actions.
Part of the War & Sanctions portal, the database currently nearly 200 so-called Kremlin Mouthpieces and is regularly updated; recent additions include poet Ilya Reznik, television host Leonid Yakubovich, comedian Andrey Rozhkov and singer Alexander Buynov.
“Today, the Kremlin is waging war not only with missiles, tanks and guns,” the website stated, adding, “Russian propaganda supports violence, justifies aggression and war crimes, uses dehumanisation and hatred of Ukraine as fuel for war, argues Ukraine’s ability to continue the fight.
“It has faces that the whole world needs to know - to know in order to block, impose sanctions, deny entry, close bank accounts, and cease all cooperation.”
However, even in the face of direct calls for violence, holding these individuals legally accountable and proving their personal involvement in international crimes remains a significant challenge.
Establishing a propaganda campaign as part of a criminal scheme is exceptionally difficult. It requires showing coordination with perpetrators, awareness of the planning of the crime, shared intent and the tangible impact of the words on the events themselves. This is a significantly higher bar than proving physical participation in a crime.
Scott Martin of Global Rights Compliance, an international law foundation, argued that if information narratives “deliberately derail investigations, conceal crimes or obstruct criminal proceedings” this can be considered participation in a joint criminal enterprise. In this framework, the propagandist ceases to be a mere bystander and becomes an accomplice, like a getaway driver who helps a criminal escape the scene.
“Real-life examples include well-known tragic cases,” Scott continued. “Information operations by the Russian Federation in Ukraine follow a systematic pattern: ahead of attacks on the Mariupol Drama Theatre, the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, the POW camp in Olenivka, and other crimes, alternative narratives were disseminated that directly contradicted the actual intent.”
He argued that state structures and affiliated media actively promoted these versions before, during and after the attacks, until they partially obscured the truth.
“The aim of such actions is to facilitate the crime by sowing doubt about responsibility and deliberately delaying and distorting public discourse in order to achieve military, geopolitical, and criminal objectives,” he concluded.
According to Yevhen Zakharov, head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, international law offers very limited avenues for prosecuting so-called speech crimes.
“They can only be prosecuted for genocidal acts under the Rome Statute,” he noted, referring to the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Only one specific offence - “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” - is explicitly covered.
This requires prosecutors to prove specific intent, that is, the goal of destroying a national, ethnic or religious group. The court must establish that the individual was not merely using aggressive language, but consciously sought the destruction of people.
“The key is to establish intent to destroy that group, and this requires a much higher standard of proof than in cases of war crimes,” Zakharov said.
National Verdicts
There are precedents in international practice in which propagandists have been held criminally liable. However, this has usually occurred not solely because of their statements, but due to their direct connection to serious crimes.
An illustrative case is that of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, the editor-in-chief of the antisemitic Der Stürmer newspaper, convicted at the Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity. Although he was not a direct perpetrator of violence, his long-term propaganda was recognised as a factor that contributed to genocide.
Another well-known example is related to the activities of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The leaders and ideologues of this media outlet were found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for directly incited genocide through their broadcasts.
Serbian politician Vojislav Šešelj was tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for inciting violence and crimes against humanity through his public speeches and political activities. Although his case waspartially reconsidered on appeal, the very fact that he was prosecuted demonstrates that propaganda can be treated as an element of international crimes.
The case of Anton Krasovsky, the former director of the Russia Today (RT) state propaganda channel, illustrates the difficulty of holding those engaging in incitement accountable.
Krasovsky was convicted in absentia in Ukraine of public incitement to genocide and sentenced to five years in prison with asset forfeiture. The conviction stemmed from his on-air calls to drown Ukrainian children. However, Krasovsky remains in Russia and there is no viable mechanism for his extradition.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office is continuing to register criminal proceedings related to propaganda and collaboration under Article 111-1 of the criminal code of Ukraine, aiding an aggressor state (Article 111-2) and justifying the Russian Federation’s aggression (Article 436-2). Cases also include calls to change Ukraine’s borders, public incitement to aggressive war and propaganda in education or during illegal elections.
A significant number of these cases are still pending and final verdicts have not yet been delivered. The prosecutor general’s office has argued that Ukraine was effectively pioneering the legal practice of holding individuals accountable for promoting a war of aggression. Ukraine views this propaganda as a distinct informational phenomenon and a component of Russia’s large-scale hybrid aggression, aimed at undermining national security and legitimising war crimes.
At the international level, however, the situation is more complicated. In 2024, human rights organisations - including the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Centre for Civil Liberties and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group - filed a submission with the ICC concerning a number of Russian propagandists and urging that they be investigated for criminal hate speech.
Illia Nuzov, head of the International Justice Desk at FIDH, explained that the goal of their submission was to encourage the ICC to examine the category of information crimes more thoroughly.
He said that following the submission, meetings were held with ICC representatives who acknowledged the materials as useful but drew the claimants’ attention to the legal complexity of the proposed theory.
While Nuzov acknowledged that these episodes will likely not be considered as standalone crimes, they may instead be integrated into broader proceedings - specifically, used as evidence of intent, contextual elements, or as components of other crimes such as incitement to genocide.
However, he argued that individual orders could be issued either for specific statements or against propagandists under different legal qualifications, such as complicity or incitement. In these cases it would be necessary to establish a causal link between the statements and the crimes.
“In international law, there is a concept known as an inchoate crime, where the mere act of making a call to action is enough to qualify as an offence,” Nuzov said. “In particular, in the case of incitement to genocide, it is not necessary to prove that the genocide actually occurred - one public call alone is sufficient to recognise the act as a crime.”
To classify a statement as such a crime, prosecutors must prove specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group, as such. This intent cannot be abstract; it should be concrete and consciously held at the very moment the statement is made.
In the case of propagandists, prosecutors must prove that they were not merely using aggressive rhetoric, but genuinely sought the destruction of a people. This is an extremely high standard of proof.
However, a broader category exists: crimes against humanity, which includes the act of persecution. In theory, systemic hate speech that accompanies a widespread attack on a civilian population could be classified as such. But this presents another problem: there is no specific international convention that explicitly defines hate speech as a crime against humanity. Human rights advocates rely on the precedent set by international tribunals, which have recognised propaganda’s role in fueling mass atrocities. Nevertheless, the court would have to be convinced that such a legal framework can be applied in a given case.
