The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin due to several alleged war crimes carried out by the government of Russia during the invasion of Ukraine, specifically focused on the illegal deportation of minors from that country to Moscow. From the Kremlin they denied the accusations and denounced this move as an outrageous situation.
Source: (DW)
Despite this inconvenience, there is little chance of anything happening on this issue, first, because the Court needs help from the nation where the person to be arrested is located, and second, because Russia it is not part of the ICC. However, this means that the president of the Eurasian country is prohibited from traveling to 123 other states that are members and where he would be arrested the moment he is on land.
This week, the United Nations published a report on this situation for which they issued an arrest warrant. According to the ICC, the president of Russia not only did he start the war, but he failed to use his presidential powers to stop this crime from happening any further. In addition to him, several other members of his cabinet also suffered the same fate, such as the commissioner for children’s rights of the european nation Maria Lvova-Belova.
“Children cannot be treated as spoils of war. They cannot be deported,” Karim Khan, the prosecutor in charge of this case, told the BBC, who indicated that this order was made “based on forensic evidence, scrutiny and the statements of various individuals.” When asked about the possibility of the trial never coming, he gave as an example Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian politician tried in The Hague for crimes he committed in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo during the 1990s and whom many thought would go unpunished.
The international reaction
While this is an important development for the future, the immediate reaction was very different in the various countries. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the court’s decisions “null and void,” while former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev directly compared them to toilet paper.
For their part, from the West they were more positive, such as political activist Ivan Zhdanov, who is a very close friend of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who stated that it is a “very important symbolic step”. In addition, Joe Biden also indicated the importance of this and was in favor of the arrest warrant.
