Russia Ukraine war: the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant against PUTIN

The International Criminal Court today issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for his barbaric invasion of Ukraine.

The ICC accused Putin of being responsible for war crimes for his part in the abduction of children from Ukraine.

The court said in a statement that Putin is allegedly “responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation of population (children) and for the illegal transfer of population (children) from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

He also issued a warrant on Friday for the arrest of Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russia’s ‘Children’s Rights Commissioner’, on similar charges.

Russia criticized the court’s decision as “nonsense” because Russia is not a member of the ICC.

Court president Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement that while ICC judges have issued the orders, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court does not have its own police force to enforce the orders.

‘The ICC is doing its part of the job as a court of law. Judges issued arrest warrants. Execution depends on international cooperation,’ Hofmanski said.

A possible ICC trial of the Russians remains a long way off as Moscow recognizes the court’s jurisdiction, a position reaffirmed earlier this week by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and does not extradite its citizens.

Ukraine is also not a member of the court, but has given the ICC jurisdiction over its territory and ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has visited it four times since opening an investigation a year ago.

The ICC said its trial chamber found that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect is responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation of population and the illegal transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, to the detriment of Ukrainian children.’

Putin was allegedly responsible both directly for committing the acts and for “failing to exercise adequate control over the civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or enabled their commission,” the court said.

The ICC said the crimes date back to February 24 last year, when Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine.

On Thursday, a UN-backed investigation cited Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, including systematic torture and murder in occupied regions, among potential issues amounting to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

The extensive investigation also found crimes committed against Ukrainians on Russian soil, including deported Ukrainian children prevented from reuniting with their families, a ‘leakage’ system aimed at targeting Ukrainians for detention and torture, and inhumane detention conditions. .

But on Friday, the ICC put Putin’s face on the child abduction charges.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan launched an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine just days after the Russian invasion.

In the year since the war began, the world has watched in horror as Putin’s soldiers fired missiles at apartment buildings, tortured civilians before shooting them to death, and systematically raped women and girls.

Men, women and children – the youngest known victim is a 14-year-old boy – have been executed by Russian soldiers, dumping their bodies into deep channels dug into the ground.

The scale of the suffering and the indiscriminate attacks against men, women and children have caused the death of at least 7,000 civilians and the flight of nearly eight million Ukrainians to countries across Europe.

In March of last year, a month into the war, Russian soldiers dropped a series of indiscriminate bombs on civilian areas, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

During a three-month siege of the southern city of Mariupol, Russian forces razed the city, killing hundreds of civilians in missile attacks. The world watched in horror as Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital on March 9, killing a pregnant woman and her baby and injuring at least 17 people.

A week later, Russian planes again launched missiles on civilian areas, this time on the Donetsk Regional Theater in Mariupol, which housed hundreds of civilians and had “children” written on it in large white letters outside. At least a dozen people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack.

Attacks against civilians continue. On January 14, a Russian missile attack on an apartment building in the city of Dnipro killed at least 44 people, including five children, and injured 79 people.

Since October, Russian forces have also repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, plunging cities into darkness and leaving millions without heat during bitterly cold winter months.

In the first months of the war, Russian forces were forced to withdraw from Ukrainian towns and cities, but as they withdrew, the war crimes they had committed against civilians became apparent.

Since March, mass graves have been filled with the bodies of thousands of civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs, along with torture chambers uncovered in liberated areas of Ukraine in areas of the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, including the cities of Bucha, Irpin and Izyum.

Zelensky was visibly moved and stood stock still as he surveyed the scene of utter devastation he encountered when he visited Bucha in April last year, with dozens of bodies shot at point-blank range lying in the empty streets.

Surviving civilians have detailed how Russian soldiers detained them for months and subjected them to electric shocks, mock drowning and beatings.

Horrifying testimonies, including how Russian soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Ukrainian mother, sexually abused her husband and made the couple have sex in front of them before raping their four-year-old daughter, have also shown how the Putin’s men have used rape as a weapon of war.

In many cases, Russian soldiers shot or threatened to shoot the women’s husbands as soon as they tried to defend their wives from being raped.

Russian soldiers have also detained more than 20,000 Ukrainian ‘hostages’ and sent them to Russia, Ukraine’s human rights envoy said in January.

This is breaking news, more to follow…