ICC issues war crimes arrest warrant for Russia’s Vladimir Putin

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin and an official in his office responsible for children’s rights over their alleged involvement in the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. 

The ICC, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands, alleges Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova are responsible for war crimes. 

Ukraine has already arrested and convicted some Russian soldiers, all of them low-ranking, for war crimes in Ukraine. The ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova marks the international court’s first arrest warrant since Russia invaded Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied allegations of war crimes in Ukraine. 

The ICC did not provide any details about the number of cases or children the allegations refer to, citing the need to protect victims and witnesses and to “safeguard” the ongoing investigation. It said it was making the arrest warrants public because it believed doing so could prevent the “further commission of crimes.”

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes … for having 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, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility,” the ICC said in a statement. 

David Scheffer, the first U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, said the charges are significant for boththe war in Ukraine and for the global geopolitical stage.

“This is not the first time the ICC has indicted or issued an arrest warrant for a head of state. It did so before with Bashir in Sudan and with Qaddafi in Libya,” he said, referring to Omar al-Bashir, former President of Sudan and Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya’s former leader. “Henceforth, Putin will always be described as not only the President of Russia but as an indicted fugitive of the International Criminal Court as a war criminal.”

Scheffer, who is now the director emeritus of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University’s law school, said there’s no statute of limitations on the war crimes which Putin’s charged with.

Since the start of the war, Lvova-Belova, Putin’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, has been the public face of one of the most distressing consequences of Russia’s year-long war in Ukraine: The deportation, including by coercion and force, of potentially tens of thousands of Ukrainian children without their families.