The American peace advocate Norman Cousins once said, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” The quote has often been linked to Ariel Dorfman’s profoundly moving play, Death and the Maiden. Therein, a middle-class Chilean woman who is a trauma survivor, having been subjected to torture and other unspeakable torments, confronts the man who had terrorized her years earlier during her country’s brutal dictatorship.

For decades, I have documented torture and war crimes, first as a journalist for Vanity Fair and now as executive director of the Reckoning Project (TRP), an organization that gathers evidence on the systematic horrors Ukrainians have endured since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. When survivors tell me how they managed to bear unimaginable physical pain, a common yet excruciating description I have heard is that they had to kill something deep inside their psyches.

How can these survivors ever hope to heal? One way—which is the main mission of the Reckoning Project—is to ensure that at least some of those who have committed war crimes are held accountable in court. If authoritarian leaders remain in power—as in Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, and in Russia today—accountability is impossible. The question then becomes: how to create a reliable legal framework so these victims and crimes don’t go unnoticed? A method gaining traction utilizes a principle known as universal jurisdiction, which allows existing global laws to be applied to serious international crimes in territories where the crimes weren’t committed. In many ways, this is justice without borders.

Consider the ongoing war in Syria. Two years ago, in Koblenz, a nondescript town on the Rhine, a verdict was handed down by a German court in the world’s first criminal case involving state-sponsored torture in Syria. Anwar Raslan, a senior Syrian official, was convicted of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. It was a decisive moment in Bashar al-Assad’s war, a conflict in which civilians have been routinely starved, gassed, or made to submit to other unspeakable acts. (A case against Assad’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Syria in 1982, will soon begin in Switzerland.)

In the past, most war crime victims have had no legal recourse. Civilian survivors of the Bosnian war of the 1990s, for example, knew they would die without ever seeing justice served. As a result, they had to just continue on, traumatized. I covered that conflict extensively, and one particular story still haunts me. I met a woman who had been held in the rape camps of Foca. When the war ended and she returned to her village, she had to see her rapists every day. She told me that with each encounter, she was the one who dropped her eyes in shame. And so the idea that her rapists might never be held to account was particularly cruel. The International Criminal Court and special tribunals—such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993—work notoriously slowly; few atrocities reach the docket. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, in which at least 800,000 people were killed in the 1990s, I was told by a prosecutor that it would take 40 years to try all of those who are guilty.

But things began to shift with the Koblenz initiative. Perpetrators of heinous crimes could now be investigated—in some cases prosecuted—in foreign countries. Ukraine took notice. The level of criminality inflicted on the country’s citizens has been so vast—Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin’s office has identified over 120,000 incidents—that TRP’s legal experts began to consider where outside of Ukraine or Russia they might plan trials against the transgressors.

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Since the war began, TRP has gathered more than 300 testimonies from victims of crimes that occurred in Ukraine. This week, thanks to key stakeholders in Argentina and Ukraine, the first universal jurisdiction complaint against members of Vladimir Putin’s military and its affiliates was filed in Buenos Aires. The initial case will present charges based on the testimony of one key survivor—and loads of supplemental evidence—accusing occupying soldiers of committing thousands of acts of extreme torture.

Why Argentina? Partly because of that country’s painful past. During the so-called Dirty War of 1976–1983, some 30,000 Argentinians were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. One favored method of torture involved electrocution (also allegedly used by Russians against Ukrainian captives). Thousands of Argentinians “disappeared.” In several instances, political prisoners were pushed out of airplanes into the Atlantic.

Today, a kind of solidarity has emerged between Ukraine and Argentina. Not only have the countries’ lawyers and prosecutors shared harrowing stories, but on Ukraine’s battlefields Argentinian forensic teams have been working closely with their Ukrainian counterparts to identify remains and determine causes of death.

For Ukrainian prosecutors, as well as for attorneys and investigators from the Reckoning Project, many vectors have lined up for using universal jurisdiction as a mechanism for legal resolution. The Syrian and Iraq war crimes expert Raji Abdul Salam, who is TRP’s chief data scientist in Ukraine, helped build the first Koblenz case. TRP’s chief legal counsel, Ibrahim Olabi, is a Syrian-British barrister whose work at The Hague has focused on Syrian chemical gas attacks. Argentina, meanwhile, has spent years trying defendants accused of torture. Moreover, Argentina’s prosecutors have opened universal jurisdiction investigations involving alleged human rights abuses committed by Saudi Arabia against Yemen civilians, by China in its repression of members of the Uyghur people, and by the Myanmar regime against Rohingya Muslims.

Prep work for the Ukrainian case has been laborious. Investigators and legal analysts pored over witnesses’ and victims’ testimonies and the corroborating evidence. Next, teams determined which victims of each complaint would be most credible—and whether they could fly to Buenos Aires to testify. Then came a contextualized review process with TRP’s barrister Jack Sproson, who examined summaries of 170 horrifying testimonies.

Sproson narrowed his target sample from 50 witnesses to 20, to 13, to 5, in search of one central accuser who might provide substantive leads on perpetrators, taking into account the threshold needed to establish the purported crimes as fitting the legal definition of torture. At TRP’s office in Kyiv, Sproson listened to their stories, all of which were traumatic. Each gave compelling testimony that was consistent and reliable. Eventually, he homed in on a single witness, whom I will call Mr. M, based on the evidentiary strength of his case and his testimony having the strongest possibility of leading authorities to single out those who committed the crimes. In Mr. M’s complaint, he was able to identify key persons, organizations, locations, and telltale insignia on his assailants’ clothing.

At the same time, another TRP lawyer, Oxford University legal scholar Tsvetelina van Benthem, flew to Buenos Aires to begin the groundwork for the case, meeting government officials, legal officers, and others. Accompanying her was Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, part of TRP’s media team, who briefed the Argentinian press and helped highlight Ukraine’s struggle against Russia. As of this writing, the Ukrainian team and Argentinian prosecutors are opening their investigation, hoping to pinpoint those who allegedly ran the torture facility where the main witness was held captive.

Mr. M’s statement is agonizing to read. He says he was repeatedly electrocuted, then strangled, in what his Russian captors referred to as “calling Lenin” (sometimes “calling Putin”). “I saw lightning,” he noted. “Tears and saliva started to come out. I fainted and had to be propped up by one of the men, but they still did not stop. Then they found a military baseball hat, put it on me—I think for fun—and said, ‘Now we again call Lenin.’” He described his torturers in great detail.

It is unlikely, of course, that those who savaged Mr. M will be captured and brought before a court of law. But, in absentia, their acts and names will be publicly revealed.

When he was released, Mr. M said he had a profound sense of “disappointment in humanity. I had never seen anyone behave like that. I saw the worst of human beings.” This raises two fundamental questions: Why do people resort to such brutality in wartime? And what can be done to help alleviate the lingering agony of those who survive that brutality?

Thirty years and eighteen wars later, I still haven’t answered the first question. But I am beginning to see how the pain of victims can be minimally assuaged. Is universal jurisdiction a perfect form of justice? No. But it provides a path forward. The coming trial in Argentina is a crucial step by which survivors of war crimes can envision a form of redress.

Janine di Giovanni is the executive director of the Reckoning Project.