HAGUE COURT: ARREST PUTIN!
Dictator’s ‘crimes’ include mass child kidnapping
A warrant was issued Friday by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of war crimes including a scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
The court called for Putin’s arrest on suspicion of unlawful abduction and deportation of children along with the illegal transfer of people from Ukraine to Russia, in its first warrant related to the Kremlin’s brutal, yearlong invasion.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes,” the Hague, Netherlands-based court said.
Regarding the child abductions, Putin allegedly “committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (and) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.”
Separately, the court issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, on the same charges as her boss.
Lvova-Belova, who works directly under Putin, has openly advocated stripping children of their Ukrainian identities and has led the effort to do so.
The move followed a year-long investigation by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, who has visited Ukraine four times since the outbreak of the war to gather evidence of possible war crimes and genocide.
While the judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them because the court has no police force of its own capable of carrying out arrests, ICC Judge Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement.
President Biden believes the arrest warrant is “justified” but might be difficult to enforce.
“The question is it’s not recognized internationally by us either,” Biden, 80, told
reporters before departing the White House for Delaware Friday.
“But I think it makes a very strong point,” the president said, adding that Putin “clearly committed war crimes” in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed the move in a speech Friday night. “In the criminal proceedings being investigated by our lawenforcement officers, more than 16,000 forced deportations of Ukrainian children by the occupier have already been recorded. But the real, full number of deportees may be much higher,” Zelensky said. “Such a criminal operation would have been impossible without the order of the highest leader of the terrorist state.”
Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, wrote on his Telegram channel the warrant for Russia’s leader is “only the beginning.”
Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba remarked that the “wheels of justice are turning” and added that “international criminals will be held accountable for stealing children and other international crimes.”
The Kremlin responded with anger. “We consider the very posing of the question outrageous and unacceptable. Russia, like a number of states, does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court and, accordingly, any decisions of this kind are null and void for the Russian Federation from the point of view of law,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tweeted Friday.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel.
The warrant from the ICC in The Hague came a day after a UN-backed report found that Russia’s “systemic and widespread” use of torture, rape and killings of civilians during the conflict in Ukraine amounted to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.
Child abductions carried out as part of Russia’s “filtration” system represent a particularly painful facet of the conflict.
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s commissioner for children’s rights, recently told the UK Sunday Times her office has documented 16,221 child kidnappings, but the real figure could be in the hundreds of thousands.
Some of the children have been ripped from their families and placed in re-education camps under the guise of being sent to health camps in annexed Crimea, according to reports. Russians have been candid about finding new homes for Ukrainian children, who they claimed had been abandoned.