War crimes in Odesa: more from the Russian playbook

Thursday 12 February 2026

Odesa is a city built to face the sea, not to fear the sky. Yet, night after night in recent days, she has been forced into a routine of alarms, detonations, shattered glass and, afterwards, the slow realisation that the basics of civilised life have been switched off again. The most recent strikes have not been aimed at troop concentrations or artillery emplacements. They have been aimed at the sinews of ordinary existence—electricity substations, energy facilities and the related municipal systems that depend upon them. Ukrainian officials have reported that nearly 300,000 people in Odesa were left without electricity and water after one such attack, with heating also affected in hundreds of buildings. 

In wartime, language is often a weapon. Russia describes these attacks as legitimate blows against a hostile state; Ukraine describes them as terror. International criminal law asks a colder question: what is the legal character of conduct that is designed, in effect, to plunge a major civilian city into darkness, cold and thirst?

The answer—if one reads the Rome Statute as law rather than as aspiration—is that the nightly pounding of a city’s energy infrastructure, with foreseeable mass civilian deprivation as its direct consequence, sits uncomfortably close to the core prohibitions the modern laws of war were written to enforce.

The civilian city as the target

The foundational rule is simple: civilians are not to be attacked. The Rome Statute makes it a war crime intentionally to direct attacks against the civilian population as such, or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities. Odesa is not a trench line. She is a port city of families, hospitals, apartment blocks, markets and water pumping stations. A drone strike may be launched far from the city and guided by screens rather than sight, but the law does not require the attacker to see the faces of the people she harms. It requires intent in the legal sense—meaning, at minimum, that the attacker meant to strike what she struck, or knew that striking it would bring about the prohibited result in the ordinary course of events.

That matters because energy infrastructure in an urban winter environment is not merely “useful”. It is life-support. When electricity fails, water supply fails, sewage systems fail, heating fails and, in a modern city, the line between “infrastructure” and “human survival” is thin. The reported outcome in Odesa—hundreds of thousands without water, widespread heating disruption—was not a surprising side-effect. It was the predictable, foreseeable and, given the pattern, arguably intended consequence of the choice of target. 

International humanitarian law reinforces this point. Civilian objects “shall not be the object of attack”, and the attacker must distinguish civilian objects from military objectives.  Even if an energy installation can sometimes qualify as a military objective—because modern armies rely upon power—international law does not thereby grant a free licence to strip a whole city of essentials. The attacker must still apply proportionality and precautions: she must not launch an attack expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Those words are not sentimental; they are the legal mechanism by which the law tries to prevent war from becoming extermination by engineering.

The Rome Statute captures this as well: intentionally launching a disproportionate attack—knowing that the incidental civilian harm will be clearly excessive—constitutes a war crime.  When nearly 300,000 people lose water and power, the scale of civilian harm is not incidental in any normal sense. It becomes the event.

Deprivation as a method

There is a further, darker idea in the Rome Statute: that one can commit a war crime not only by killing directly, but by engineering conditions of life that make survival precarious.

Article 8 criminalises the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival. The word “starvation” may sound like famine rather than blackout, but the concept is broader than it first appears. Objects indispensable to survival plainly include potable water and, in an urban winter, heat. The modern city does not store these things in granaries; she circulates them through pipes and cables. To render those systems useless is to endanger civilians in ways that are not measured only in immediate death tolls, but in hypothermia, contaminated water, hospital failures and the slow accumulation of preventable harm.

Customary law makes the same moral judgement in plainer terms: attacking or rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population is prohibited. Treaty law, too, protects “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”. In other words a campaign that predictably leaves a major city without water is not merely hard-hearted; it is precisely the kind of conduct the post-1945 legal order sought to treat as criminal.

None of this requires proof that Russia intends to “starve” Odesa in the colloquial sense. It requires an assessment of whether she is using deprivation—of water, heat and power—as a method of warfare against civilians, or whether she is indifferent to that deprivation in a manner the law treats as culpable. Nightly strikes, repeated over time, point away from accident and towards method.

From war crimes to crimes against humanity

War crimes focus on how hostilities are conducted. Crimes against humanity focus on a broader pattern: certain inhumane acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a state or organisational policy. 

A sustained campaign against civilian energy systems, across multiple cities and across seasons, begins to look less like a series of battlefield misjudgements and more like a policy instrument. If the purpose is to break a population through cold, thirst and darkness—to produce internal displacement, fear and exhaustion—then the conduct starts to fit the “widespread or systematic” character that crimes against humanity are meant to capture.

The relevant acts under Article 7 need not be limited to killing. They include persecution and “other inhumane acts” intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. Cutting a city’s water and heat in winter—predictably affecting children, the sick and the elderly first—has an obvious relationship to “great suffering”. The law’s vocabulary may be clinical, but the lived reality is not: parents melting snow or searching for bottled water, hospitals running generators, apartment blocks freezing from the inside.

And what of genocide?

The word “genocide” carries a special horror, and it is often used as a moral description of mass cruelty. In law, however, genocide has a precise definition: prohibited acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. 

That specific intent—an intent to destroy the group—sets a very high evidential threshold. It is not enough that civilians are harmed on a large scale, or even that harm is inflicted deliberately. One must show that the harm is aimed at the destruction of the group as a group.

A campaign of infrastructural deprivation might, in some circumstances, contribute to genocidal conduct—particularly if it is coupled with rhetoric and operational choices demonstrating an intent to bring about physical destruction. But as a matter of legal discipline it is safer, and more accurate, to describe the Odesa strikes as presenting a strong prima facie case of war crimes and a plausible case of crimes against humanity, while recognising that genocide would require additional proof of specific intent beyond the already grave facts of mass deprivation.

This is not a concession to caution. It is respect for the law. Overuse of the genocide label can paradoxically weaken accountability by inviting arguments about intent that distract from the clearer, provable crimes already in view.

Jurisdiction and the question of accountability

The Rome Statute is not merely a moral charter. It is a prosecutorial instrument. The International Criminal Court has an open situation on Ukraine, covering alleged crimes committed in the context of the conflict since 21 November 2013. Ukraine has accepted the Court’s jurisdiction through Article 12(3) declarations. That means the legal framework exists to treat a campaign against Odesa’s civilians not as “regrettable” but as criminal, with individual responsibility reaching those who plan, order or knowingly facilitate such attacks.

The obstacle has never been the absence of law. It has been the presence of power. Russia is not ignorant of these rules. She has signed and argued about them for decades. The point of continuing anyway is to demonstrate that, in her view, the punishment will never arrive, or will arrive too late to matter.

Yet accountability has a cumulative character. Evidence accumulates. Patterns become clearer. Command chains can be reconstructed. A drone strike is not anonymous: it leaves procurement trails, operator logs, intelligence tasking, targeting processes and the signatures of the units that execute them. The city that freezes today may testify tomorrow.

Odesa’s winter and Europe’s conscience

There is a temptation in comfortable capitals to treat attacks on energy infrastructure as a kind of grim normality—part of the “infrastructure war”, a technical feature of the conflict rather than an assault on human bodies. That is precisely the moral failure international criminal law was designed to prevent. When water stops, people stop. When heat stops, infants, pensioners and the ill bear the consequences first. When this is done repeatedly, at scale, it is not simply pressure against a state. It is pressure against a population.

Odesa is not a legitimate military objective in the way Russia’s nightly routines imply. She is a civilian city enduring the deliberate unravelling of the systems that make civilian life possible. The Rome Statute’s provisions on attacks against civilians, attacks against civilian objects, disproportionate attacks and deprivation of indispensable objects exist because the world has seen, more than once, what happens when cities are treated as instruments rather than as communities.

The legal conclusion is stark. On the reported facts—hundreds of thousands without water and power after targeted strikes on energy systems—there is a compelling basis to characterise these attacks as war crimes, and a credible basis to examine them as part of a wider, systematic assault on civilian life that may amount to crimes against humanity. The moral conclusion is starker still: the method is the message. It says that civilians are fair game, and that modern war is not merely fought on front lines but in kitchens, stairwells and hospital corridors.

If Europe wishes to insist that law matters, she must speak about Odesa not only in the language of sympathy, but in the language of criminality—because that is what the law, read honestly, suggests this is.