The evidence is mounting that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. That's an accusation never to be made lightly in reference to a major world leader because even the United States has engaged in actions abroad that could constitute war crimes. But in Putin's case, a strong case can be made that the decisions, tactics and strategies are coming straight from the top, and it's reasonable for the world to demand that he account for those decisions and atone for the mass death and destruction he has wrought on Ukraine.

The attack by Russian forces on Europe's largest nuclear power plant, in southern Ukraine, was beyond reckless and irresponsible. The attack sparked a big fire that threatened the plant's reactor. As Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted, there are 15 nuclear plants around his country under threat of Russian attack, dramatically escalating the chances of a Europe-wide nuclear disaster.

Back in the days when Putin was a KGB agent and Russia was the seat of a vast communist empire, a Russian-run nuclear plant in Chernobyl exploded, prompting the worst nuclear disaster in world history. Putin aims to restore the Soviet motherland's expansive majesty by re-absorbing Ukraine, and he seems intent on killing as many people and destroying as many civilian buildings as necessary to bring Ukrainians to their knees.

U.S. officials have denounced the nuclear plant attack as a war crime. Examples of other crimes are multiplying to bolster the case against Putin. He has used cluster bombs, banned under international law, including one attack on a preschool. He has targeted civilian areas on a mass scale — not just an errant bomb strike here or there but rather persistent attacks on apartment buildings, schools and hospitals. Putin might argue that since Ukrainian civilians have joined their military counterparts, using Molotov cocktails against Russian soldiers, they can legitimately be considered combatants. But Putin's strikes on sleeping children in apartment complexes, or on refugee shelters, belie any such justification.

In its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States used cluster bombs on a civilian suburb of Baghdad. The U.S. justification for invading Iraq — that it possessed weapons of mass destruction — was just as fictitious as Putin's excuses for invading Ukraine. A Spanish judge actually brought a war crimes case against then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But at least in Iraq's case, the war accomplished the capture of a far worse war criminal, Saddam Hussein, who attacked his own people with chemical weapons, tortured his opponents and ordered mass executions of Shiites.

Putin's goal appears to be wanton death and destruction for the sake of terrorizing an entire people into submission. Despite the low chances that he would ever be captured and face trial, attaching a war criminal label to his historical legacy would forever remind the world who the real Vladimir Putin is.

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