International Criminal Court accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes
Kyiv:
In its arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president of the war crime of illegal deportation of people, especially children, and their illegal transfer from the occupied territories of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The ICC issued a separate warrant for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, on the same charges.
Moscow rejected Friday’s move, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling the allegations “outrageous”. Russia, which has denied targeting civilians since its invasion in February last year, has repeatedly denied that its forces committed atrocities and dismissed previous accusations of illegally relocating Ukrainians Is.
The following are some of the key facts and figures provided by the Ukrainian authorities on this issue:
– Daria Herasimchuk, Ukraine’s president’s adviser-commissioner for children’s rights and resettlement, in an interview with Reuters on March 17, described five main ways she says Russia illegally relocates children to Ukraine. Used to do.
they include:
offering families living in the occupied territories to take children on vacation to Russian children’s camps and not return them within an agreed time frame;
removal of Ukrainian children from care institutions in the occupied territories;
separation of children from parents at filtration checkpoints – places where Ukrainian citizens from Russian-occupied territories are checked and processed before being allowed to enter Russia;
the taking away of parental rights through the laws applicable to the Occupied Territories;
Taking children in cases where they were living with other adults after their parents were killed in war
– Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrey Kostin said on March 17 that prosecutors were investigating cases of deportation of more than 16,000 children from the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions. “But the real figure could be much higher,” Kostin said on his Facebook page.
Officials said that Ukraine has so far been able to bring back 308 children.
– Irina Vereshchuk, minister for the reunification of the temporarily occupied territories, on Saturday issued a public appeal to the Russian authorities asking for a list of all Ukrainian orphans and all Ukrainian children whose parents have been deprived of parental rights. were given to those currently in the occupied Ukrainian territories or were illegally transferred to Russia.
— A report published in February by the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health as part of the Conflict Observatory said Russia held at least 6,000 Ukrainian children — possibly many more — in Russian-held Crimea and Russia in sites whose primary purpose appears to be political re-education. The report said researchers at Yale University had identified at least 43 camps and other facilities where Ukrainian children were held that were part of a “large-scale systematic network” operated by Moscow.
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