A slap in the face to the strongman of the Kremlin.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) decided on Friday to issue an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of thousands of children in Ukraine and their illegal deportation to Russia. These mass kidnappings, orchestrated in times of conflict, are considered a “war crime” by the international tribunal.
From The Hague, in the Netherlands, the ICC has also issued an arrest warrant against Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, who since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine more than a year ago, became l public image of the program of deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the great promoter of their adoptions by Russian couples.
In a press release, the legal team in charge of the Ukrainian file says it has “reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of illegal deportation of people and that of illegal transfer of people from occupied areas of Ukraine. to the Russian Federation, to the detriment of Ukrainian children”.
The court adds that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the abductions of these children. The Russian president is accused of having “committed the acts directly, jointly with others and / or through other persons” and of not having exercised “proper control over the civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts”, can we read.
Last February, a report by Yale University’s Conflict Observatory revealed that Russia was running a mass abduction and deportation program targeting Ukrainian children. 6000 of them would have been forcibly sent to Russia in 43 “rehabilitation camps”, indicates the group. The Ukrainian authorities, for their part, claim that more than 16,000 children have been victims of this war crime.
Moreover, the Kremlin seems to have admitted its guilt for a long time, boasting of having indeed supervised the transfer of millions of Ukrainian civilians to its territory since February 2022, including more than 720,000 children according to figures reported by the Russian media. under the control of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. This migration would respond to “humanitarian reasons”, claims Moscow, to protect orphans and abandoned children in conflict zones.
On Friday, the President of the Court, Piotr Hofmanski, clarified that it is now up to the international community to follow up on the issuance of these warrants. “The ICC is doing its part as a court of justice,” he said in a video message. The judges issued arrest warrants. Execution now depends on international cooperation”.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday compared the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin to toilet paper. “The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin. No need to explain where this paper should be used,” he wrote on Twitter in English, ending his post with a toilet paper emoticon.
Russia will “continue the work”
Targeted by the ICC, the Russian commissioner for the rights of the child, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, for her part, became rebellious on Friday, indicating that Russia would “continue the work”. “It’s nice that the international community has valued our work in helping the children of our country,” she said, quoted by the Russian news agency Ria Novosti, while recalling that her program seeks to extract children from “military operations areas”.
On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov mocked the prospect of indicting Russian leaders by the ICC, stressing that Russia was not subject to the rules of this international body. “We do not recognize this court. We do not recognize its jurisdiction,” he said.
On the Telegram network, the spokesperson for Russian diplomacy Maria Zakharova added to this on Friday, saying that “the decisions of the International Criminal Court are meaningless for our country, including from a legal point of view”.
Recall that Russia is one of the signatory countries of the Rome Statute, which participated in 2000 in the founding of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, but Moscow has never ratified the agreement to become a member.
Worse, in 2016, the Kremlin even decided to reverse its first signature, the day after an international tribunal report classifying the annexation of Crimea initiated in 2014 by Russia as an illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory.
The issuance of these two international arrest warrants remains mainly symbolic in the context of the ongoing military conflict imposed on Ukraine by Russia. However, even if they were never to be executed, these indictments risk having a lasting mark on the image of the personalities who have become their targets today.