I was kind of waiting for arrest warrants to go out for the other guy today, but getting this announcement of arrest warrants for trump's evil puppetmaster Putin will do nicely (via Mike Corder and Raf Casert at AP News):
The International Criminal Court said Friday it has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes because of his alleged involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine.
The court said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
It also issued a warrant Friday for the arrest of Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, on similar allegations.
The court’s president, Piotr Hofmanski, said in a video statement that while the ICC’s judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court has no police force of its own to enforce warrants...
There is of course no way that the Russian government will honor the Hague's warrants, I don't believe they are even signed onto the treaties that created this court.
But this puts the whole world on notice. In the eyes of the international communities, of their legal systems, and in the name of justice, it is a matter of public record that Putin is the war criminal here in his uncalled and unjust invasion of Ukraine since 2022 (arguably well back into 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Donbas region).
The ICC said that its pre-trial chamber found there were “reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”
The court statement said that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the child abductions “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...”
Anybody trying to defend Putin's actions from here on will have to justify Putin and Russia's illegal kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, which they can't. Everything else Putin is doing that's illegal - such as the bombing of civilian areas and the killing of innocents - becomes harder for his apologists to excuse away as well.
The sweeping investigation also found crimes committed against Ukrainians on Russian territory, including deported Ukrainian children who were prevented from reuniting with their families, a “filtration” system aimed at singling out Ukrainians for detention, and torture and inhumane detention conditions.
But on Friday, the ICC put the face of Putin on the child abduction allegations.
WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN YOU STOLE, PUTIN?
1 comment:
The abduction and "resettlement" of children is an old standby in the fascist playbook. The American right doesn't really practice it (any more) because they don't want to have to support the children they are hell-bent on indoctrinating.
Putin already has to travel by armored train inside Russia. Now I guess he just won't be able to leave the country.
A bit like the way Dick Cheney and W don't visit Europe...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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