Judges for the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued on Friday arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another top Russian official — the court’s first such decision related to the war in Ukraine.
The warrants come amid intense international pressure to hold Putin accountable for atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and marked a highly unusual decision by the court during an ongoing conflict.
The move is largely symbolic: Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. The court does not try people in absentia — and international law experts say it’s unlikely, barring major political change in Russia, for Putin to end up in front of the court.
But the warrants could create difficulties for those named to travel to countries that cooperate with the court. And for Putin — the first head of state of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant — it’s a major reputational blow, as his war in Ukraine continues into its second year with no end in sight.
Top Ukrainian and European officials hailed the announcement as a crucial step toward holding Russia accountable. In an address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the warrants an indictment of Russia’s “state policy, state decisions, state evil.”
Putin issued a decree last May to make it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children. Ukrainian officials are investigating more than 16,000 incidents of forced removal of children from Ukraine to territory held by Russia, according to Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
Lvova-Belova, who reports to Putin directly, has been the official face of Moscow’s effort to bring Ukrainian children to Russian territory. She has worked with colleagues to hand dozens of children from Donetsk over to Russian families and coordinate the transfer of children in orphanages in Donetsk and Luhansk, in occupied eastern Ukraine, to the custody of Russian citizens, according to the Kremlin.
A religiously devout mother of 22 children who openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities, Lvova-Belova herself adopted an orphaned teenage boy, Filip, from the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol. In August, she told a conference in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok that Filip had to change his Ukrainian ways.
Lvova-Belova has insisted that none of the children have Ukrainian families, while Ukrainian officials say all of them belong in Ukraine. As of November, more than 10,000 Ukrainian children had been reported by relatives, family or friends to have been taken to Russia without their parents, said Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s top children’s rights official, said in November.
Number of children’s camp
facilities in Russia
According to a report by the Yale School of Public Health, the Russian government is operating 43 facilities that have held at least 6,000 children from Ukraine.
6 camps
1
Arctic
Ocean
Crimea
UKR.
Moscow
TUR.
RUSSIA
KAZAK.
MONGOLIA
IRAN
CHINA
Data as of Feb. 14. Crimea was annexed
by Russia in 2014. Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine
are self-proclaimed separatist republics in
eastern Ukraine.
Source: Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of
Public Health
JÚLIA LEDUR/THE WASHINGTON POST
Number of children’s camp
facilities in Russia
According to a report by the Yale School of Public Health, the Russian government is operating 43 facilities that have held at least 6,000 children from Ukraine.
6 camps
1
Arctic
Ocean
UKR.
Moscow
Crimea
RUSSIA
TUR.
KAZAK.
IRAN
MONGOLIA
CHINA
Data as of Feb. 14. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine are self-proclaimed separatist
republics in eastern Ukraine.
Source: Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health
JÚLIA LEDUR/THE WASHINGTON POST
Number of children’s camp facilities in Russia
According to a report by the Yale School of Public Health, the Russian government is operating 43 facilities that have held at least 6,000 children from Ukraine.
6 camps
1
Arctic
Ocean
UKR.
Moscow
Crimea
RUSSIA
TURKEY
KAZAKHSTAN
MONGOLIA
IRAN
CHINA
Data as of Feb. 14. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014. Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine
are self-proclaimed separatist republics in eastern Ukraine.
Source: Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health
JÚLIA LEDUR/THE WASHINGTON POST
Rights groups have called the transfers a deliberate Russian strategy to destroy Ukrainian identity.
The United States, Britain, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Switzerland have imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova over the forced adoptions of Ukrainian children. She calls the accusations “fake.”
The arrest warrants, issued swiftly by international law standards, come more than a year after the ICC’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced a probe into possible violations of international humanitarian law committed in Ukraine. While Kyiv is not a party to the court, it had previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory.
“Incidents identified by my office include the deportation of at least hundreds of children taken from orphanages and children’s care homes,” he said, under circumstances that “demonstrate an intention to permanently remove these children from their own country.”
Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is illegal for an occupying power to forcibly transfer or deport protected people from occupied territory.
The warrants accuse Lvova-Belova and Putin of direct participation in the abduction and deportation of children, and say Putin is responsible “for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts,” the court said in its announcement.
Some experts and rights advocates have called for top Russian officials to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity or genocide, in addition to war crimes. The transfer of children by force can count as an act of genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948. But successful prosecution would require demonstrating an intent to at least partially destroy Ukrainians as a national group — a more challenging case to prove.
Kremlin officials dismissed the warrants and vowed not to cooperate.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said on Telegram Friday.
“No need to explain WHERE this paper should be used,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council and the country’s former president, said in a tweet, alongside a toilet paper emoji.
Theoretically, the 123 states that are party to the ICC should turn Putin over to the court if he travels to their territory. But Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Putin and propagandist, wrote on Telegram the warrant would have no practical effect, since Putin will not visit “hostile countries” anyway.
It is highly unusual for the ICC to issue arrest warrants for war crimes when the conflict is ongoing, American University law professor Robert Goldman said — and “rather unprecedented” to pursue a sitting head of state, though the ICC did issue arrest warrants for former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir while he was in power. South Africa came under fire for failing to arrest Bashir when he traveled to the country.
The alleged forcible transfer of children is a “very serious war crime,” Goldman said. But he raised the concern that pursuing legal action against Putin now could complicate the eventual pursuit of a peace deal.
“It delivers to Ukraine a very strong case to say that as a condition of a settlement, we’re either not going to deal with the guy who’s wanted for war crimes, or that this person must be delivered to the ICC to pay for his crimes,” an unrealistic proposition, Goldman said.
But other international law experts and rights groups said the arrest warrants could deter future unlawful conduct and comfort victims of alleged crimes.
It’s not just prosecutions that deliver justice, said Mark Kersten, an expert on international justice at the University of the Fraser Valley, but “the process of trying to hold people to account and announcing loudly, from The Hague and the world: ‘We are on your side, and we believe that what happened to you was an atrocity.’”
Mary Ilyushina, Francesca Ebel, Emily Rauhala, David L. Stern, Natalia Abbakumova and Beatriz Rios contributed to this report.