Day: March 18, 2023

• The focused allegations are on illegally repatriating children from Ukraine to Russia.
• Moscow has refuted the claims and characterized the warrants as “outrageous”.
• Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, is also wanted by the ICC for the same crimes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been served with an arrest order by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The court accuses him of war crimes and has focused its allegations on illegally repatriating children from Ukraine to Russia.

According to the report, the atrocities were perpetrated in Ukraine beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

Moscow has refuted the claims and characterized the warrants as “outrageous”.

The effort is unlikely to have any impact because the ICC has the authority to arrest individuals and can only exercise jurisdiction within its member countries, of which Russia is not one.

Nevertheless, it may have significant consequences for the president, such as preventing him from traveling internationally.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been served with an arrest order by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ICC stated that it had reasonable reasons to think Mr. Putin committed the crimes in collaboration with others. It also accused him of failing to use his presidential authority to prevent the deportation of children.

Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, is also wanted by the ICC for the same crimes.

In the past, she has spoken openly of efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainian children taken to Russia.

Ms. Lvova-Belova said in September that some children transported from Mariupol “talked negatively about the [Russian President], said horrible things, and sang the Ukrainian anthem.”

She also claimed to have adopted a 15-year-old Mariupol kid.

The ICC stated that it considered keeping the arrest warrants confidential at first, but decided to make them public in the case that it prevented more crimes from being committed.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan told the sources: “children can’t be treated as the spoils of war, they can’t be deported”.

“This type of crime doesn’t need one to be a lawyer, one needs to be a human being to know how egregious it is,” he said.

The warrants drew immediate criticism from Russian officials, who dismissed them out of hand.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev compared the warrant to toilet paper, according to Dmitry Peskov, the court’s spokesperson.

“No need to explain WHERE this paper should be used,” he wrote on Twitter, with a toilet paper emoji.

However Russian opposition leaders welcomed the announcement. Ivan Zhdanov, a close ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, tweeted that it was “a symbolic step” but an important one.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was grateful to Mr. Khan and the criminal court for their decision to file charges against “state evil”.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said the decision was “historic for Ukraine”, while the country’s presidential chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, lauded the decision as “only the beginning”.

But, because Russia is not a signatory to the ICC, it is unlikely that Vladimir Putin or Maria Lvova-Belova will appear in The Hague.

The ICC relies on government collaboration to arrest people, and Russia is “obviously not going to cooperate in this regard,” according to Jonathan Leader Maynard, a lecturer in international politics at King’s College London.

Mr. Khan, on the other hand, pointed out that no one expected Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader on trial for war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, to end up in The Hague.

“Those that feel that you can commit a crime in the daytime, and sleep well at night, should perhaps look at history,” he said.

Yet, this does pose a legal difficulty for Mr. Putin.

While he is the head of a G20 state, and set to shake hands with China’s Xi Jinping in a historic summit, Mr Putin is now also a wanted man, and this will unavoidably place constraints on which nations he may visit.

There is also some embarrassment for the Kremlin, which has constantly denied claims of Russian war crimes, that such a powerful, pan-national authority as the ICC simply does not trust its denials.

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