The Kremlin says the International Criminal Court’s charges against Vladimir Putin are meaningless with respect to jurisdiction in Russia.
US President Joe Biden said Vladimir Putin had clearly committed war crimes in Ukraine and that the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president.
While the US, like Russia, is not a party to the international court, Biden said the ICC had made a strong case against Putin.
“He clearly committed war crimes,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “I think it’s justified,” he said, referring to the arrest warrant.
“It is also not recognized by us internationally. But I think it’s a very strong point,” he added.
The ICC earlier on Friday called for Putin’s arrest on suspicion of his involvement in the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia following Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The court also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, on the same allegations.
The ICC order now obliges the court’s 123 member states to arrest Putin and transfer him to The Hague for trial if he sets foot on their territory.
The Kremlin said the court’s charges against Putin were outrageous and meaningless with regard to jurisdiction in Russia.
A US-backed report by researchers at Yale University last month found that Russia has detained at least 6,000 Ukrainian children in at least 43 camps and other facilities as part of a “large-scale systematic network”.
Ukraine’s government recently said more than 14,700 children were deported to Russia, more than 1,000 of them from the port city of Mariupol, which was besieged and virtually destroyed for weeks.
The US has separately concluded that Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine and supports accountability for perpetrators of war crimes, a State Department spokesman said in an emailed statement.
“There is no doubt that Russia is committing war crimes and atrocities[in]Ukraine, and it has been clear to us that those responsible must be held accountable,” the spokesman added.
ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement that while the court’s judges have issued the arrest warrants, it is up to the international community to enforce them. The court does not have its own police force for this purpose.
According to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute, the ICC can impose a maximum sentence of life imprisonment “if justified by the extreme seriousness of the crime”. This made the ICC a permanent court of last resort to prosecute political leaders and other major perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities – war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
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