- Antoinette Radford, Frank Gardner
- BBC Security Correspondent
image source,Getty Images
Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Levova-Belova met last month
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The court charged Putin with responsibility for war crimes, with a focus on the illegal transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia.
The ICC said the crimes were committed in Ukraine from February 24, 2022 – the date when Russia launched a full-scale invasion.
Moscow has denied the allegations and called the arrest warrant “shocking”.
The likelihood that the arrest warrant will lead to actual action is extremely slim — the ICC has no power to arrest suspects and can only exercise jurisdiction within its member states, of which Russia is not a member.
However, it will affect the Russian president in other ways, such as not being able to travel internationally.
the international criminal court ina statementChina said there were reasonable grounds to believe that Putin had committed war crimes both directly and in cooperation with others. The court also accused Putin of failing to use presidential powers to prevent the illegal transfer of children.
Asked regarding the ICC’s action, U.S. President Joe Biden said: “Well, I think it’s justified.” Putin, he said, had “clearly committed a war crime.”
Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova is also wanted by the ICC on the same charge.
She has spoken out in the past regarding indoctrination of Ukrainian children brought to Russia.
In September last year, Belova complained that some of the children taken from Mariupol “speaked ill of (the Russian president), said some nasty things and sang the Ukrainian national anthem”.
She also claimed to have adopted a 15-year-old boy from Mariupol.
The ICC said it initially considered keeping the arrest warrant secret but later decided to make it public because it prevented further crimes from being committed.
“Children cannot be treated as trophies, they cannot be removed,” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan told the BBC.
“You don’t need a lawyer for this kind of crime, as long as you are an individual, you will know how excessive it is,” he said.
Kremlin officials responded minutes following the arrest warrant was announced, promptly dismissing it.
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov called any decision by the court “invalid”, and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev compared the arrest warrant to toilet paper.
“No need to say where this paper should be used,” he tweeted, adding a toilet paper emoji.
Russia’s opposition leaders, however, welcomed the declaration. 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 Karim Khan and the criminal court for their decision to indict the “rogue regime”.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said the decision was “historic for Ukraine”, while the head of Ukraine’s presidential administration Andriy Yermak hailed it as “just the beginning”.
Video: Is Putin likely to be arrested? (English)
But since Russia is not a signatory to the ICC, the chances of Putin and Levois-Belova appearing in the dock in The Hague are slim.
Jonathan Leader Maynard, a lecturer in international politics at King’s College London, told the BBC that the ICC relies on the cooperation of governments to apprehend criminals, and that Russia “clearly won’t be there.” cooperation in this regard”.
However, Karim Khan pointed out that no one expected that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who committed war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, would end up in The Hague.
“People who think they can commit war crimes during the day and sleep soundly at night should probably look at history,” he said.
Legally, though, this does pose a problem for Putin.
Although he is the head of the G20 and is regarding to shake hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a historic summit, Putin is now a wanted man, which will inevitably limit which countries he can visit.
There will also be a degree of embarrassment for the Kremlin, which has long denied that Russia has committed war crimes, but now an influential pan-ethnic institution like the International Criminal Court does not believe its denials at all.
Will Putin really face trial?
——Analysis by BBC reporter Robert Plummer
There are at least two obstacles to this. First, Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
The court was created in 2002 under an agreement known as the Rome Statute.
The Statute states that it is the sole responsibility of individual Governments to enforce criminal jurisdiction over those who commit transnational war crimes. The ICC can only intervene if governments are unable or unwilling to investigate and prosecute perpetrators.
A total of 123 governments have agreed to abide by the statute, with some important exceptions, including Russia.
So you’ll see, the legal ground here has been a little bit shaky.
Second, although it is not uncommon for trials to be held in the absence of the defendant, this option was not available in this particular case. The International Criminal Court does not conduct institutional trials, so this path will not work.
