INVESTIGATION: 36 States Sign in Chișinău — and the Lukashenko File Keeps Waiting for The Hague

On May 15, 2026, in Chișinău, thirty-six states signed the same document.

Thirty-four members of the Council of Europe, plus Australia, plus Costa Rica, plus the European Union: the Enlarged Partial Agreement giving the future Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine its management committee — which is to say a budget, a governance structure, an administrative existence.

Thirty-six states.

That day, the cameras were watching Vladimir Putin, the obvious target of a tribunal designed to judge the crime of aggression. But in the shadow of that judicial construction site, another file keeps thickening — quieter, slower, almost silent: the file on Alexander Lukashenko's regime.

No verdict. No indictment. Not even a registered Ukrainian criminal case, as of today.

Only a machine assembling itself, piece by piece, along three separate rails — and a former servant of the regime carrying the evidence himself.

This investigation reconstructs the three rails. Nothing else, nothing less.

Three rails, three speeds, one direction. The first runs through the ICC and concerns Belarusians themselves. The second runs through a tribunal under construction and concerns the invasion of Ukraine. The third runs through boxes of evidence and concerns one man: Alexander Lukashenko.

A referral out of Vilnius

First rail: everything starts on September 30, 2024, with a legal move that had almost no precedent.

Lithuania formally referred the situation in Belarus to the International Criminal Court. It is a state-to-court referral — the most solemn mechanism available to a member of the Rome Statute — and Prosecutor Karim Khan publicly acknowledged its receipt.

The peculiarity jumps out at any lawyer: Belarus is not a party to the Rome Statute. Vilnius worked around the obstacle by targeting crimes whose effects partly unfold on Lithuanian territory — the deportation and persecution of Belarusians driven into exile.

Eighteen months of preliminary examination followed.

A year and a half of apparent silence. Analysts in the Prosecutor's Office reading, cross-checking, filing. Nothing leaked. That is the part of international law the cameras never film — and the part that decides everything.

Then, on March 12, 2026, the Court crossed the line: a full investigation was opened into alleged crimes against humanity — deportation, persecution — committed against Belarusians by their own regime.

Hold on to the exact nature of this first rail, because everything else flows from it: that investigation is not about the war in Ukraine. It is about what the regime does to its own people. The victims are Belarusian; so are the alleged perpetrators.

Before answering for its complicity abroad, Minsk already has to answer for its repression at home.

What the ICC cannot judge

So why build a special tribunal, if the court in The Hague is already investigating?

Because there is a hole in international law, and Russia and Belarus have both settled comfortably inside it.

The ICC cannot prosecute the crime of aggression — the very decision to launch a war — when it is committed by nationals of states that are not parties to its Statute. Moscow is not a party. Neither is Minsk. The original crime, the one from which all the others flow, is structurally out of the Court's reach.

That is the hole the second rail comes to fill.

The precedent is known to every jurist: Nuremberg did not only judge massacres, it judged the war itself — the "supreme crime," the one that contains all the others. Since then, no head of state has answered for that crime before an international court. Precisely the anomaly the tribunal under construction wants to close.

On June 25, 2025, Ukraine and the Council of Europe signed the agreement creating the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. A jurisdiction tailor-made to judge what the ICC cannot touch: the decision to invade.

Since February 2026, an advance team has been at work — funded by the European Union to the tune of ten million euros, for a maximum mandate of twenty-four months, under an agreement signed on January 24.

Jurists drafting statutes, budgets falling into line, premises being scouted: the birth of a tribunal looks like the birth of an administration. It is less cinematic than a dock full of defendants. It is the precondition for there ever being one.

Chișinău, the afternoon it all became real

Come back to May 15, 2026, because it is the pivot date of this whole story.

On the margins of the 135th session of the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers, in Chișinău, the Enlarged Partial Agreement was adopted and signed: thirty-four Council of Europe states, Australia, Costa Rica, and the European Union in its own right.

Thirty-six states, then — with Brussels as a thirty-seventh signatory of a particular kind.

Euronews captured the mood in a phrase borrowed from the diplomats in the room: the point of no return. The tribunal is no longer a declaration of intent; it now has members, a management committee, a funding key.

On the Ukrainian side, Deputy Justice Minister Iryna Mudra signed and pronounced the word that matters: the tribunal's launch has become "irreversible." Ukraine's presidency published the statement the same day, spelling out precisely the jurisdictional hole this court comes to close.

A few weeks later, on July 3, the Netherlands offered to host the jurisdiction in The Hague — the city already home to the ICC and the International Court of Justice.

An address, a budget, signatures.

And a list of signatories that tells its own story. Australia signed from the other side of the world. Costa Rica, which shares no border with the war, signed. This tribunal is not carried only by Russia's frightened neighbors: it is an arc reaching well beyond Europe.

Impunity feeds on institutional emptiness. Since Chișinău, the emptiness has been filling up.

The man who delivers the evidence

Third rail: the evidence. And here, the story acquires a face.

Pavel Latushka served the regime before fleeing it: a former minister who crossed over to the opposition in 2020, he is today deputy head of the Belarusian United Transitional Cabinet, in exile. It was he who, on August 8 and 9, 2026, announced the existence of a consolidated body of evidence documenting the Lukashenko regime's involvement in Russia's aggression.

Intended recipients: Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prosecutor General's Office. Hoped-for destination: that Belarusian responsibility be taken up within the framework of the future Special Tribunal, alongside that of Russia's leaders.

Nothing about it was an isolated stunt.

Already on June 22, the Belarusian opposition had handed Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha a thirty-page report documenting how Belarusian territory was prepared for war — the infrastructure, the logistics, the state apparatus placed at the service of the 2022 invasion.

And as early as 2023, the same opposition had transmitted to the ICC material on another, most painful chapter: the transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarus — more than two thousand one hundred, by its count. That chapter already has its own judicial history; it is mentioned here only as a piece of the same puzzle.

Three deliveries in three years. Evidence in 2023 for the Court. Thirty pages in June for the diplomats. Then a consolidated corpus in August for the prosecutors and, he hopes, for the tribunal. The Belarusian exile community no longer merely protests: it documents, it archives, it delivers.

Take in the irony of the scene: the evidence against Lukashenko is being carried to Kyiv by Belarusians — including a man who was once his minister.

Complicity that catches up has one peculiar habit: it recruits its clerks from among the former servants.

What Kyiv has done — and not yet done

Faced with this accumulation, where does the Ukrainian state itself stand? The honest answer fits into two columns.

The column of acts. On February 18, 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a sanctions decree naming Alexander Lukashenko personally, promising "special consequences"; Kyiv then counted more than three thousand Belarusian companies supplying Russia's war effort. Three months later, on May 25, Sybiha received opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and pronounced the formula: "no impunity" — with, attached to it, joint evidence-gathering efforts for the tribunal.

Sanctioning is not judging. It is a promise not to forget to judge.

Then the column of waiting. On July 31, 2026, the President's Office formally asked the Prosecutor General's Office to consider opening criminal proceedings against Lukashenko. As these lines are written, no such proceedings have been registered.

No verdict, no indictment, no charge sheet: a request for review.

That precision is not a lawyer's affectation. It is the only honest way to describe the stage we are at — the stage where the judicial apparatus sniffs at a file before deciding whether to open it.

Four and a half years after the armored columns rolled out of Belarusian territory toward Kyiv, the question of the criminal responsibility of the master of Minsk is sitting on a prosecutor's desk. Sitting there. Not settled.

What the file is made of

What exactly does the accusation of complicity that history will try consist of?

The public elements, restated in the documents delivered to Kyiv, form three layers.

The 2022 layer: territory. It was from Belarus that Russian forces poured toward Kyiv in February 2022 — roads, rails, airfields, military hospitals made available. The thirty-page report handed to Sybiha documents precisely that preparation of the ground.

Next comes the economic layer: the suppliers. More than three thousand Belarusian companies provisioning Russia's war machine, according to the Ukrainian count that accompanied February's sanctions.

Finally, the human layer: the transferred children, a chapter already in the ICC's hands since 2023.

None of these layers can be argued in a single afternoon. The first demands movement and logistics records. The second, commercial registries. The third, testimony — the most fragile and heaviest form of proof there is.

Each layer has a different legal status, a different burden of proof, a potentially different courtroom. That is exactly why there are three rails and not one single trial — and exactly what makes this file slower, and perhaps more solid, than outrage would want it to be.

History does not judge in bulk. It judges piece by piece, and the pieces add up.

What Minsk answers

An honest investigation must also say what this text does not contain.

It does not contain Minsk's defense, because the regime does not plead: it denounces, globally, proceedings it deems political, and it has answered none of the steps described here with a detailed public legal argument.

Nor does it contain any definitive criminal qualification: complicity in a crime of aggression requires precise criteria — knowledge, intent, substantial contribution — that no judge has yet applied to the Belarusian case.

No prognosis either. And a tribunal that does not yet have a courtroom guarantees no trial; a body of evidence is not an indictment; thirty-six signatures convict no one.

What the facts do allow is one sentence: for the first time since 2022, there simultaneously exists an open international investigation, a jurisdiction under construction with a budget, and an organized flow of evidence aimed at the Belarusian regime.

The three had never existed at the same time.

This accumulation prejudges nothing. It only changes the nature of Minsk's silence: yesterday, that silence looked like indifference; today, it looks like waiting.

The calendar of patience

There remains the question of time, and it is less cynical than it sounds.

Look at the intervals. From the Lithuanian referral to the opening of the investigation: eighteen months. From the Ukraine–Council of Europe agreement to the Chișinău signing: eleven months. From the advance team to the first consolidated Belarusian evidence corpus: six months. The machine is slow; it is not motionless.

Six months, eleven months, a year and a half: none of these intervals was dictated by public emotion — and that may be their best guarantee of holding up, one day, in front of judges.

The slowness has a function. Botched, a file collapses at the first cross-examination, and a judicial collapse would amount to a political acquittal for Minsk. The people assembling this file know it — which is probably why none of them promises a date.

The slowness also has a cost, and it would be dishonest to hide it: every passing month is a month in which the regime keeps serving the war, and in which witnesses age, scatter, fall silent.

Between those two truths, the law picked its side at Nuremberg: better to judge late and solidly than fast and badly.

The precedents bear it out. Milošević was indicted during the Kosovo war, arrested two years later, tried in The Hague. Karadžić ran for thirteen years before his cell. The timeline of international justice is not read in months. It is read in decades — and it has ended, more than once, in a courtroom.

This kind of justice does not run. It lasts.

Lukashenko, for his part, long bet on a third option: never being judged at all.

That is precisely the bet the Chișinău signing, with its thirty-six flags lined up, has begun to crack.

Complicity that catches up

Recap it coldly, because coldness is the best ally the facts have here.

A state referral filed by Lithuania. An ICC investigation opened on March 12, 2026 into crimes against humanity committed against Belarusians. The Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, endowed on May 15 with a management committee signed by thirty-six states and the European Union. An advance team funded with ten million euros. An offer of a home in The Hague. A consolidated evidence corpus in early August. A thirty-page report on the minister's desk. A request for review on the Prosecutor General's.

Counting helps you stay accurate. Between the armored columns of February 2022 and the request for review of July 2026: fifty-three months. That is long for the victims. It is short for an aggression file — Nuremberg opened six months after the capitulation, but Germany was defeated and its archives seized. Lukashenko's Belarus is intact, closed, and still moored to Moscow.

Taken in isolation, no single piece threatens Alexander Lukashenko's hold on power tomorrow morning.

Taken together, they describe something else: a regime that assumed its complicity of 2022 would evaporate in Moscow's shadow, and is discovering that it has been archived, numbered, translated, transmitted — by its own exiles, to a tribunal that did not exist when it lent out its territory.

International justice almost always disappoints in the short term. In the long term, it has one quality dictatorships systematically underestimate: it closes nothing.

Thirty-six states signed so that the crime of aggression would finally have a judge.

The Belarusian file, meanwhile, keeps waiting for its hour in the advance team's boxes — and its hour, from now on, has a framework, a budget and a probable address.

So the real question is no longer whether Lukashenko will one day stand trial; no one can promise that. It belongs to you as much as to the prosecutors: if complicity took four years to be archived and ten to be judged, would you, at some point, stop looking at it as a crime?

Sources :

Sources Primaires :

International Criminal Court — Situation Lithuania/Belarus (official page on the September 30, 2024 referral)

International Criminal Court — Statement of Prosecutor Karim Khan on the receipt of the referral by the Republic of Lithuania

European Commission — EU and Council of Europe agree to set up the advance team of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression (January 24, 2026, €10M, 24 months)

European External Action Service — EU adopts the Enlarged Partial Agreement on the Special Tribunal's management committee (Chișinău, May 15, 2026)

Presidency of Ukraine — In Chișinău, 36 states and the European Union sign the Special Tribunal agreement (Iryna Mudra: "irreversible" launch)

Sources Secondaires :

Reuters — ICC opens probe into alleged crimes against humanity by Belarus (March 12, 2026)

Kyiv Independent — The ICC investigation into alleged crimes against humanity in Belarus

Kyiv Post — Pavel Latushka announces a consolidated corpus of evidence of the Lukashenko regime's involvement (August 8–9, 2026)

Kyiv Post — A 30-page report on Belarus's preparation for the war handed to Andrii Sybiha (June 22, 2026)

Ukrainska Pravda — The President's Office asks the Prosecutor General to consider proceedings against Lukashenko (July 31, 2026)

Ukrainska Pravda — Sybiha receives Tsikhanouskaya: "no impunity," joint evidence-gathering (May 25, 2026)

Euronews — "Point of no return": 36 countries join the Special Tribunal (May 15, 2026)

Euronews — Ukraine sanctions Lukashenko: "special consequences," 3,000+ Belarusian companies (February 18, 2026)

Kyiv Independent — Belarusian opposition transmits evidence to the ICC on the transfer of Ukrainian children (2023)