Russia Ukraine war: the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant against PUTIN

The International Criminal Court today issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for his barbaric invasion of Ukraine.

The ICC accused Putin of being responsible for the war crimes that his troops have committed in Ukraine.

In the year since, the world has watched in horror as Putin’s soldiers fired missiles at apartment buildings, tortured civilians before shooting them to death, and systematically raped women and girls.

Men, women and children – the youngest known victim is a 14-year-old boy – have been executed by Russian soldiers, dumping their bodies into deep channels dug into the ground.

The scale of the suffering and the indiscriminate attacks against men, women and children have caused the death of at least 7,000 civilians and the flight of nearly eight million Ukrainians to countries across Europe.

In March of last year, a month into the war, Russian soldiers dropped a series of indiscriminate bombs on civilian areas, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

During a three-month siege of the southern city of Mariupol, Russian forces razed the city, killing hundreds of civilians in missile attacks. The world watched in horror as Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital on March 9, killing a pregnant woman and her baby and injuring at least 17 people.

A week later, Russian planes again launched missiles on civilian areas, this time on the Donetsk Regional Theater in Mariupol, which housed hundreds of civilians and had “children” written on it in large white letters outside. At least a dozen people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack.

Attacks against civilians continue. On January 14, a Russian missile attack on an apartment building in the city of Dnipro killed at least 44 people, including five children, and injured 79 people.

Since October, Russian forces have also repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, plunging cities into darkness and leaving millions without heat during bitterly cold winter months.

In the first months of the war, Russian forces were forced to withdraw from Ukrainian towns and cities, but as they withdrew, the war crimes they had committed against civilians became apparent.

Since March, mass graves have been filled with the bodies of thousands of civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs, along with torture chambers uncovered in liberated areas of Ukraine in areas of the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, including the cities of Bucha, Irpin and Izyum.

Zelensky was visibly moved and stood stock still as he surveyed the scene of utter devastation he encountered when he visited Bucha in April last year, with dozens of bodies shot at point-blank range lying in the empty streets.

Surviving civilians have detailed how Russian soldiers detained them for months and subjected them to electric shocks, mock drowning and beatings.

Horrifying testimonies, including how Russian soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Ukrainian mother, sexually abused her husband and made the couple have sex in front of them before raping their four-year-old daughter, have also shown how the Putin’s men have used rape as a weapon of war.

In many cases, Russian soldiers shot or threatened to shoot the women’s husbands as soon as they tried to defend their wives from being raped.

Russian soldiers have also detained more than 20,000 Ukrainian ‘hostages’ and sent them to Russia, Ukraine’s human rights envoy said in January.

This is breaking news, more to follow…