This is exactly the kind of discussion where the difference is important. Your reading of the point they were trying to make is impressively charitable. I shall try to learn from it.
I have to applaud coming up with a sentence like that. The same sort of beauty one might find in an Escher piece.
Let me address the point underlying that contortion by asking a question: In the alternate semantic universe we're constructing, if that Russian later passes through a US-friendly country and is arrested, did the US court turn out to retroactively have had the authority to issue the warrant, and we pretend it always had it, or is it supposed to work some other way?
And undoubtedly I agree that if Putin or Netanyahu pass through Europe they should be arrested. But I'm not sure if that's a legal decision or a political one.
There was no hostile intent or ill feelings. Some things were meant to be humorous, but in good spirits. If anything came across otherwise, that's a communication failure on my part. I'm sorry.
Likewise I think where I'm uncertain with Putin is that while he's undoubtedly a nefarious guy and we have written down rules and norms he has broken, those norms do not apply to the Russian world. We claim they apply, but we could only make them apply through force of arms which runs opposite to the rule of law. That is rather the rule of "might makes right."
I'd say that these things are not opposites. Rather the rule of law is a way of tempering the power of force of arms. Look at your Nuremberg example - having won the war and enacted occupation by force of arms, the Allies were in a position where they could have simply imposed summary execution. Legalization was a stepping back from this dynamic - likely due to the amount of unilateral killing that had just gone on.
> those norms do not apply to the Russian world
The crux of the matter here is that parties on the receiving end of aggression (Ukraine, Palestine) have assented to adopting those norms. The legalistic theory is that by aggressing onto those parties, the aggressors become subject to the jurisdiction of whom they're aggressing against. I personally don't particularly like this model of international jurisdiction, but it is on solid longstanding ground. And so while I'll argue against this sort of thing at an individual level (especially where the nexus is say electronic communications), I don't feel much sympathy for leaders who end up suffering this dynamic because they decided to attack other countries.
In reality of course yes, to apply those laws requires force of arms - for there even to be something to temper in the first place. So Ukraine/Palestine assenting to those treaties is essentially asking would-be allies to defend them in some well-scoped circumstances, modulo the underlying diplomatic concerns.