In The Hague or elsewhere, before the International Criminal Court or before a new Nuremberg, you will be brought to justice one day, Mr Putin, have no doubt about it!
The hearings will be long and your trial will last a long time because there will be so many people to hear, Mr Assassin.
We will hear from the children who have become adults without their dead parents.
We will hear from the survivors of Marioupol.
We will hear, the world will hear, the mothers crying for their fallen sons.
The world will hear, we will hear, Ukrainians who have become French, Swedish, Polish or Canadian, who have become citizens of the world on the roads of exile that their families had to take to escape your bombs, Mr Putin.
We will also hear, and Russia will hear, those men whom you sent, so young and so lost, against their will, to kill and to bring grief to their Ukrainian neighbours.
Russia will hear their shame, Mr Putin.
Russia will hear their despair and the sobs in which its own sons, these “malgré-eux”, will ask for forgiveness for the crimes you made them commit, and on that day, Mr. Putin, Russia will hate you, all of Russia will hate you as much as Germany hates Hitler to this day, for having disfigured the country to such an extent.
Then will come the time of the lawyers, yours too since you will have some, we are democrats, Mr Putin, we know and accept, of course, that even a monster has the right to a defence, but what will your lawyers be able to say?
Where will they find evidence of genocide? Of a single Atlantic Alliance missile that Ukraine directed against Russia? Of a single excuse, no, what am I saying, of a single mitigating circumstance for your crimes against Ukraine and its people?
Then the verdict will come and you will see the look on your children’s faces.
You will understand that they will not even want to bear your name, the name of the criminal that entered the history of crime, and you will leave to die behind bars, because we, Mr Putin, are opposed to the death penalty because, for us, unlike you, all life is sacred – it is the first commandment.
Then will come the long-awaited, long-hoped-for time when we will talk about our common continent, Europe, as our common home to be rebuilt together and refounded on peace, brotherhood and cooperation between the Russian Federation and the enlarged European Union – enlarged, yes, with Ukraine.
Without you, after you, the two parts of Europe will fraternise as Germany and France did after the war, and our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live in peace, in freedom, in democracy, in respect for the rule of law and human dignity, in all that you hope to destroy today but that you will have failed to destroy because it is freedom that we all aspire to and not tyranny, because it is not Stalin but Sakharov that we admire and because Russia, let there be no doubt, will soon have resumed, after you of course, the path opened by Mikhail Gorbachev, the path of the common home, the one that you would have liked so much to close, Mr Dictator, Mr Assassin.
