In a historic move, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights. The warrants are related to war crimes involving the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia and represent a major international rebuke of Putin and his administration.
The warrants accuse Lvova-Belova and Putin of direct participation in the abduction and deportation of children and say that Putin is responsible “for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.” According to a report by Yale School of Public Health, the Russian government operates 43 facilities that have held at least 6,000 children in Ukraine. Rights groups have called the transfers a deliberate Russian strategy to destroy the Ukrainian identity. The United States, Britain, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Switzerland have imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova over the forced adoptions of Ukrainian children.
The ICC maintains it can bring charges against Russian officials because Ukraine has accepted its jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed by Russia on Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin, however, has dismissed the warrants as meaningless and “outrageous and unacceptable”, given that Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, prosecutor general Andriy Kostin and chief of staff Andriy Yermak all praised the warrant, stating that it is only the beginning in the process of holding international criminals accountable.
The arrest warrants come amid a highly charged international atmosphere, with a high stakes meeting between Putin and the Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled for the coming weeks. International law experts and rights groups say that arrest warrants could deter future unlawful conduct and comfort victims of alleged crimes, and call for top Russian officials to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity or genocide, in addition to war crimes. So far, 16,221 cases of child kidnappings by Russia have been documented and only a little more than 300 children have been retrieved from Russian captivity.