Maduro to face U.S. courts as America bypasses international justice system — expert

Oleksandr Kraiev, an expert at the Ukrainian Prism Foreign Policy Council, expressed this opinion on Espreso TV.

"If we start with the question of international law, the Americans, to put it mildly, don't have a great track record there. It's well known that since the Iraq campaign, and even earlier, the U.S. has had strained relations with international judicial institutions. This is primarily because American politicians and military leaders were subject to certain indictments, and to protect them, the U.S. has tried over all these decades not to participate in the work of any international judicial institutions," noted Oleksandr Kraiev.

According to him, it's worth recalling Ukraine's example: over the past three years, even under the Biden administration, Americans consistently proposed that we avoid contact and cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other similar courts, and instead create a separate tribunal within which to work. They said that then the U.S. could support us. But regarding the UN judicial system and international law in general, the United States would remain silent and wouldn't be able to do anything. This is a quite telling example of how the U.S. views the decisions of these institutions and avoids such cooperation.

"Most likely, we won't see the U.S. referring to, relying on, or waiting for international court decisions to do something about Maduro. The U.S. will be quite unilateral. What can they do with Maduro? At minimum, we'll see—if not a full Supreme Court session—a federal-level court that will handle this matter. Or in the ideal case, as has happened before, we'll see a major Senate session, which within its authority can play the role of a political and even international legal body. A jury panel and judge are selected in the Senate, with the judge most often being the Senate Speaker. All other senators participate in this session as both prosecution and defense, if necessary," the expert commented.

In his opinion, we'll likely see a political dimension to this process, which the U.S. will try to make as public and media-friendly as possible. At minimum, this would be worth expecting, and from the U.S. perspective would be correct, and would also add certain legitimacy. After all, the publicity of such a process and providing international media and partner states access to it brings the process to the logical conclusion of the operation conducted by U.S. armed forces.

"And the second question regarding Venezuela is the formation of a transitional cabinet and holding democratic elections. And this will be the next challenge for the Americans, which, as we remember, previous administrations didn't handle well in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Therefore, it's important that these mistakes are taken into account now, otherwise Trump risks falling into the same trap his predecessors fell into," Kraiev concluded.

• On January 5, 2026, a trial is set to begin in the Southern District of New York against the captured Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was brought to the United States. The indictment text is 25 pages long and is publicly available.