This Friday, the International Criminal Court, or ICC for short, issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes with the warrant stating that the Russian President was personally responsible for the abductions of children from Ukraine. The warrant includes the current president of Russia and another key Russian official that is part of Putin's inner circle. According to CNN, this is not only a historical blow to the reputation of Vladimir Putin, but it is a blow to the reputation of the modern Russian state.
Only three sitting heads of state have ever faced charges from the ICC while they continued to be in charge of a national government. The two other than Putin were the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and the former president of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, both of which were accused of committing crimes against humanity against their own people while being leaders.
If you read the charges of the warrant, in the ICC's own words, it specifically says 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.” The arrest warrant also states that there are “reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes.” The ICC even goes as far as to say that Putin's actions violate the Geneva Conventions, laws that were adapted to create protocols to signify the neutral status of nations in conflicts and to decide what actions should be constituted as war crimes.
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