俄罗斯入侵将乌克兰人的人生清晰地分割为“战前”和“战后”，作者从2019年至2022年担任副总检察长，如今自2022年2月24日参军后在前线 dug-out 中每晚只睡约三小时，眼前是过多的伤亡。自2016年起，他系统收集俄罗斯在克里米亚和顿巴斯的战争罪证据，却发现仅有证据并不会自动带来正义。
他痛苦地意识到，历史上正义多半属于强者和胜利者：二战后的纽伦堡和东京审判曾许诺法治战胜暴力，但随后在柬埔寨、卢旺达、斯雷布雷尼察和叙利亚等地，国际司法不是来得太迟就是严重受限。早在2022年前，西方对伊拉克战争、关塔那摩等“例外”的容忍已经削弱了国际刑事法院，使其在面对大国时过于谨慎。
如今，普京在遭到国际刑事法院通缉的情况下仍得以前往包括乌兰巴托和杜尚别在内的多个首都，美国与俄罗斯甚至提出一份包含对“战时行为”全面大赦的和平草案，这象征国际威慑和法律约束的溶解。作者认为，由受害国主导设立侵略罪特别法庭既难以突破国家元首豁免，也缺乏持久合法性，更好的路径是赋予国际刑事法院审理侵略罪的完整权力，并拒绝任何要求乌克兰放弃法律追诉的谈判条件，以免重演一战后放弃审判威廉二世及苏联罪行未受清算所酿成的灾难。
The Russian invasion has split Ukrainian lives into a clear “before” and “after,” as the author moved from serving as Deputy Prosecutor General from 2019 to 2022 to becoming a front-line officer since 24 February 2022, sleeping roughly three hours a night amid heavy casualties. Beginning in 2016 he led systematic collection of evidence on Russian war crimes in Crimea and Donbas, only to learn that evidence alone does not guarantee justice.
He concludes that justice has usually been reserved for the powerful and the victors: after the second world war, Nuremberg and Tokyo promised that law could overcome violence, yet in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Syria, international justice arrived late, narrowly, or not at all. Even before 2022, Western tolerance of exceptions such as Iraq and Guantanamo weakened the International Criminal Court, which became too cautious toward powerful states.
Today, Vladimir Putin can ignore ICC arrest warrants and travel to capitals including Ulaanbaatar and Dushanbe, while an American-Russian draft peace plan even proposes “full amnesty for wartime actions,” symbolising the erosion of legal deterrence. The author argues that a special tribunal for aggression initiated by the victim state is vulnerable to accusations of partiality and unlikely to pierce head-of-state immunity; instead, he urges empowering the ICC to prosecute the crime of aggression and firmly rejecting any settlement that requires Ukraine to abandon legal claims, warning that repeating the failures to try Kaiser Wilhelm II and to punish Soviet crimes would invite new atrocities, even as fresh evidence from Pokrovsk shows prisoners and wounded soldiers being executed and tests whether the West will truly uphold the legal order it proclaims.