The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued this Friday an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, as “suspected responsible” for the illegal deportation of children and their transfer from occupied areas in Ukraine to Russia, which is a crime of war. He also issued another arrest warrant for Russian politician Maria Lvova-Belova, Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia, with the same accusation.
Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation of the population (of children) and the illegal transfer of the population (of children) from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation,” the court said. “The crimes would have been committed on Ukrainian territory occupied at least since February 24, 2022,” the court continued. There are “reasonable grounds to believe that Putin is personally responsible for the above crimes,” he added.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan declared this month after a visit to Ukraine that the alleged child abductions were the subject of “priority investigation.” The court, created in 2002 to judge the worst crimes committed in the world, has been investigating for more than a year possible war crimes or crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine during the Russian offensive. Neither Russia nor Ukraine are members of the ICC, but kyiv accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory and works with the prosecutor. Experts admitted that Moscow was unlikely to hand over the suspects to the court.
In this framework, Russia denounced a “meaningless” legal decision of the Court. “The decisions of the International Criminal Court are meaningless for our country, even from a legal point of view,” the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova, wrote on Telegram, without expressly mentioning Putin in her message.
For his part, the Ukrainian attorney general thanked the ICC for the arrest warrant issued by this court based in The Hague against the Russian president. “I personally thank the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan for this historic decision,” the head of the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office, Andriy Kostin, wrote on his Twitter account, recalling that the Ukrainian justice system is investigating the forced deportation to Russia of more than 16,000 Ukrainian children. of territories occupied by Moscow.
“We fear that the real numbers are much higher,” added the Ukrainian attorney general, who also explained that the Kiev authorities have shared with The Hague more than 40 volumes and a thousand pages of evidence documenting these cases. Kostin recalled that the order issued by The Hague obliges the countries that are part of the court to arrest and hand over the Russian president to the ICC. “World leaders should think twice before shaking hands or sitting down with Putin,” the Ukrainian prosecutor stressed.
Ukraine had initiated several proceedings against Russia in The Hague for the more than 70,000 Russian war crimes it claims to have documented in the territory. It is the first time in history that the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against the president of a country that is a member of the UN Security Council.
