July 31, 2026
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
Re: "We Cannot Allow Putin to Act With Impunity," (Opinion by Iryna Mudra, Mykola Yurlov, Taras Semenyuk, and Mark Ellis, July 30, 2026, A23)
To the Editor:
Iryna Mudra, Mykola Yurlov, Taras Semenyuk, and Mark Ellis compromise their unanswerable case for prosecuting Russian President Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression against Ukraine by their deafening silence over the ongoing corresponding crime of aggression against Iran by American President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The article correctly notes that Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson before the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal understood its aggressive war standards for criminal accountability would be universal, not selective. Aren't the authors mute about Iran because of a crass, realpolitik calculation that truth would lose them needed political support from the United States and Israel to prosecute Putin?
International justice is made of more principled stuff.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of American Empire Before The Fall
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