ICC issues arrest warrant against president Putin 

The International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued a warrant of arrest against Russian president, Vladimir Putin for unlawfully deporting children from Ukraine to Russia.

The arrest warrant was initiated on Friday following the applications submitted by the prosecution on February 22, 2023.

READ ALSO: War against Ukraine hasn’t started yet – Putin

Reacting to the development, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, wrote on her Telegram channel: “The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view.”

“Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and bears no obligations under it.”

Senior Ukrainian officials applauded the ICC decision, with the country’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin hailing it as “historic for Ukraine and the entire international law system”.

Putin is only the third serving president to have been issued an ICC arrest warrant, after Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

The ICC issued the warrant on suspicion of the unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, on the same charges.

Russia has not concealed a programme under which it has brought thousands of Ukrainian children to the country but presents it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone, according to Daily Trust.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia found the very questions raised by the ICC “outrageous and unacceptable”, and that any decisions of the court were “null and void” with respect to Russia.

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