ICC’s arrest warrant: Xi to visit Moscow, but Putin cannot ‘set foot’ in 123 countries!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for his alleged war crimes in Ukraine, he cannot ‘set foot’ in 123 countries, members of the ICC, the media reported on Saturday.
While US President Joe Biden welcomed it, Russia has dubbed the ICC move as having “no meaning”. But the arrest warrant has also given a new spin to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow next week.
Interestingly, neither Russia, China, nor Ukraine is a member of the ICC. Although Russia is not a member, ICC filed charges against Putin because Ukraine just accepted its jurisdiction over the current situation.
Besides Putin, the ICC also issued an arrest warrant against Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for alleged war crimes, including abducting children from war-hit Ukraine.
“That’s right,” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said when asked if Putin would be liable for arrest if he set foot in any of those 123 nations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia “does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court and so from a legal point of view, the decisions of this court are void.”
In fact, Russia signed the ICC’s founding Rome Statute but did not ratify it to become a member. When ICC launched a probe into the 2008 war in Georgia, Russia withdrew from it on Putin’s orders in 2016, the media reported.
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 ICC 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.”
An UN-backed inquiry also cited Russian attacks against civilians in Ukraine, including systematic torture and killing in occupied regions, as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The investigation found that crimes were committed against Ukrainians on Russian territory, including deported Ukrainian children prevented from reuniting with their families.
Hours after Friday’s announcement of Xi Jinping’s Moscow trip, the ICC issued the international arrest warrant for Putin, taking at least some wind out of the sails of the Chinese President’s high-profile visit. This diplomatic embarrassment came days after Beijing brokered an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume diplomatic relations and release what it calls a “peace plan” for Ukraine.
The Biden administration believes China’s desire to be seen as a broker for peace between Russia and Ukraine may be viewed more critically now that Putin is officially a war crime suspect, and hope the warrants will help mobilize heretofore neutral countries to weigh in on the conflict.
Xi Jinping’s Moscow visit is his first foreign trip after being “elected” to an unprecedented third term as Chinese President. Beijing and Moscow intensified ties in steps that began shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (on February 24, 2022) with a meeting between the two leaders in Beijing during last year’s Winter Olympics at which they declared a “no limits” partnership.
Since then, China has repeatedly sided with Russia in blocking international action against Moscow for the Ukraine conflict and, according to US officials, is considering supplying Russia with weapons to support the ongoing war.
But it has also tried to cast itself in a more neutral role, offering a peace plan that was essentially ignored.
