ARREST WARRANT ISSUED AGAINST PUTIN

March 17, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Today the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of being responsible for war crimes committed in Ukraine. For now, the warrant specifically limits the charges to allegations of forced deportation of Ukrainian children. Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, is also included in the warrant.

Despite Russia’s old Soviet-style blanket denials of any and every war crime committed or even documented throughout it’s war in Ukraine, the public statement issued from the Hague states that “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes”.

The ICC was established to replace intermittent UN criminal trials in 1998 -ratified by the United Nations General Assembly after what is known as the Rome Conference- and became the permanent court on July 1, 2002. Although 123 countries are signed to the “Rome Statute,” at least 40 are not, including China, North Korea, India, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. A further few dozen nations did sign the statute but never legally ratified it. These include Russia, The United States, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan and Syria. The ICC has no powers of arrest.

The full ICC decision can be found here: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and