The Wall Street Journal
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another senior Russian official accused of war crimes, a historic move that focuses attention on tens of thousands of young war victims.
The warrants are linked to Russia’s forced deportation of children from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. It marks the first time a leader of a country with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council has ever been called for trial before the court, an intergovernmental institution not part of the U.N.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the alleged crimes, the court said. The second official, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights in Mr. Putin’s office, has overseen the deportations, the court said.
Ms. Lvova-Belova said, “It’s great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country,” according to Russian state newswire RIA Novosti. “We continue to work.”
The contents of the warrants will remain secret “in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation,” the court said. But since the alleged crimes continue and publication of the warrants “may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes,” the court said it was disclosing that they had been issued.
The ICC opened its doors in 2002 in The Hague after 60 nations ratified its governing charter, known as the Rome Statute for the 1998 diplomatic conference that drafted it. The U.S. took a significant role in drafting the Rome Statute, which President Bill Clinton signed, with reservations, in 2000. The George W. Bush administration repudiated the ICC and launched a campaign to undermine the court, out of fears it would target American personnel for politically motivated prosecutions.
Moscow likewise refused to join the court over similar concerns it might take action against Russian officials, and again rejected its authority on Friday.
“The very raising of the question is outrageous and unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday evening. “We do not recognize the jurisdiction of this court. Any decisions made by it are void from the point of view of law.”
Ukraine’s government welcomed the announcement. “Wheels of Justice are turning: I applaud the ICC decision,” said Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Twitter. “International criminals will be held accountable for stealing children and other international crimes.”
Ukraine’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Daria Herasymchuk said Russia had forcibly removed more than 16,000 children from Ukrainian territory since the start of the invasion and only 307 had been recovered.
Russia has been open about what it has termed adoptions. During a meeting with Mr. Putin last month, Ms. Lvova-Belova said that she had personally adopted a 15-year-old boy from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol that Russian forces seized in May after reducing much of it to rubble and killing thousands of civilians.
“Now I know what it means to be a Donbas child’s mother. It is difficult, but we definitely love each other,” Ms. Lvova-Belova said as she thanked Mr. Putin for making such an adoption possible.
“That’s the most important thing,” the Russian president replied. Mr. Putin said during the meeting that Ms. Lvova-Belova’s organization has been busy organizing adoptions from occupied Ukrainian areas for the past eight years.
War crimes experts said that heads of state can no longer count on impunity when facing war-crimes charges.
Michael Newton, a Vanderbilt University law professor, said the Putin indictment signaled a new era of accountability. It shows “that heads of state and military leaders cannot commit war crimes with an absolute assurance of no accountability, no oversight,” he said.
As a U.S. Army officer, Mr. Newton was an American delegate to diplomatic meetings that produced the ICC, and worked on several international war crimes cases including the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic before a U.N. tribunal.
“Everybody says, ‘It’s Vladimir Putin, he’ll never face justice,’” Mr. Newton said. Similar doubts were expressed when Mr. Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia, was charged in 1999, Mr. Newton recalled. Mr. Milosevic later fell from power, was extradited to The Hague, and died in prison during his trial.
“Russian officials will face accountability in one form or another,” Mr. Newton said. “That’s the importance of the indictment; it’s not going to go away.”
Hundreds of investigators from Ukraine and abroad have been gathering evidence of war crimes since the early days of the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this month more than 70,000 Russian war crimes had been identified since the full-scale invasion began.
Ms. Herasymchuk, the Ukrainian official, outlined several scenarios under which they had been taken to Russia. In some cases, Russians have forcibly transferred children after their parents have been killed, she said. In others, children have been taken directly from their families. Some children have been separated from their parents during filtration, when Russian security agencies screen Ukrainians to ensure they don’t pose a threat.
A fourth scenario is the creation of uninhabitable conditions and the offer to transfer children for rehabilitation and recreation. In some cases, children’s institutions have been relocated wholesale.
A report published last month by the Conflict Observatory, a program supported by the U.S. State Department, said the Russian government had systematically relocated at least 6,000 children from Ukraine to a network of re-education and adoption facilities in the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula and mainland Russia.
The report identified 43 facilities involved in holding children from Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Most are recreational camps where children are taken for ostensible vacations, it said, while others are facilities used to house children put up for foster care or adoption in Russia.
The U.N. said at least 8,000 noncombatants were confirmed killed—with nearly 13,300 injured—in the first year of Russia’s invasion, while acknowledging the true toll was likely much higher.
Human Rights Watch says Russian forces have committed a litany of violations of international humanitarian law during their invasion of Ukraine, including indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing and shelling of civilian areas. Homes, healthcare and educational facilities have been in the attacks, some of which the watchdog said should be investigated as war crimes.
In areas they occupied, Russian or Russian-affiliated forces committed apparent war crimes, including torture, summary executions, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and looting of cultural property.
Mr. Zelensky has said justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes, should be one of 10 points in a peace plan that form a basis for negotiations with Russia. There are huge challenges in securing accountability, however.
Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin last month said 915 people had been charged with war crimes. Some 26 people were sentenced for war crimes, including 14 captive Russian soldiers and 12 people sentenced in absentia, he said.
Because linking individual war crimes to the Kremlin’s senior leaders is difficult, Ukrainian officials say they see the crime of aggression—the crime of instigating a war with another country in the first place—as the likeliest way to pin charges on Mr. Putin and other top Kremlin officials. But major political, legal and practical hurdles remain before any Russian officials could face charges for the decision to invade Ukraine.
Evan Gershkovich and Yaroslav Trofimov contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications
The International Criminal Court is an intergovernmental organization. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was part of the United Nations. (Corrected on March 17)
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