Russia’s Vladimir Putin Faces Arrest Warrant by International Court

International Criminal Court’s move is linked to forced deportation of children from Ukraine

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another senior Kremlin official accused of war crimes, a historic move that focuses attention on tens of thousands of young war victims.

The warrants are linked to Russia’s forced deportation of children from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. It marks the first time the leader of a nuclear superpower has been called to account before the court, an independent institution established in 2002 to end impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the alleged crimes, the court said, both directly and for failing to exercise control of subordinates who carried them out.

The second official, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights in Mr. Putin’s office, has overseen the deportations, the court said. The charges carry a potential life sentence; the ICC doesn’t impose the death penalty.

“We must ensure that those responsible for alleged crimes are held accountable and that children are returned to their families and communities,” said ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, a British lawyer and former United Nations official. “We cannot allow children to be treated as if they are the spoils of war.” Friday’s warrants, he said, were “a first concrete step” in a continuing investigation.

“We have all seen the war crimes and atrocities committed by Russian forces since the outset of this war,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said, “and we have been clear that those responsible must be held accountable.” She stopped short of endorsing the ICC charges, saying that Mr. Khan “is an independent actor” whose evidence “will ultimately be weighed by the court.”

Ms. Lvova-Belova said, “It’s great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country,” according to Russian state newswire RIA Novosti. “We continue to work.”

The contents of the warrants will remain secret “in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation,” the court said. But because the alleged crimes continue and publication of the warrants “may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes,” the court said it was disclosing that they had been issued.

A senior U.S. official said Mr. Khan had been conservative in framing the charges. “Deporting civilians is a very well-established war crime,” the official said, and had been among the charges Allied prosecutors filed against Nazi officials at Nuremberg.

In proving the case, “there’s no ambiguity as there is in some of the charges you might bring in terms of attacks on civilian infrastructure,” where the defense might claim a school, for instance, had been converted to military use. Moreover, the official said, by focusing on the suffering of children and families, Mr. Khan had secured the moral high ground. “It is a very sympathetic victim community. It’s hard to imagine what those kids are going through,” the official said.

“Well, I think it’s justified,” President Biden said Friday when asked about the decision by the ICC, adding, “I think it makes a very strong point.”

The U.S. has had a fraught relationship with the ICC, in the 1990s helping lead the movement for a permanent war-crimes tribunal but declining to ratify its charter, known as the Rome Statute, after negotiators failed to give the U.S. and the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—including Russia—the power to squelch ICC prosecutions.

Although Washington has supported some ICC investigations, the Trump administration imposed sanctions blocking the ICC prosecutor from entering the U.S. The Biden administration lifted those restrictions.

Moscow likewise refused to join the court over concerns it might take action against Russian officials, and again rejected its authority on Friday.

“The very raising of the question is outrageous and unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday evening. “We do not recognize the jurisdiction of this court. Any decisions made by it are void from the point of view of law.”

The ICC has no police force and relies on the cooperation of its 123 member states to enforce its warrants, something they haven’t always been willing to do. That makes it unlikely Mr. Putin or Ms. Lvova-Belova will stand in the dock soon.

Still, the arrest warrants may interfere with the defendants’ ability to travel and the willingness of other leaders to be seen with them. “I think it also will eat away at their legitimacy within Russia,” said David Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. “They will be identified forever as indicted fugitives of the International Criminal Court.”

Although both are based in The Hague, the ICC, which prosecutes criminal cases against individuals, is separate from the International Court of Justice, an arm of the U.N. often called the world court that hears disputes between governments. Ukraine has a separate case against Russia pending at the world court, which a year ago ordered Moscow to halt military operations, over the dissent of the Russian and Chinese judges. Russia asserts the world court lacks jurisdiction and has ignored its orders.

Ukraine’s government welcomed Friday’s ICC announcement. “Wheels of Justice are turning: I applaud the ICC decision,” said Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Twitter. “International criminals will be held accountable for stealing children and other international crimes.”

Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, Daria Herasymchuk, said Russia had forcibly removed more than 16,000 children from Ukrainian territory since the start of the invasion and that 307 had been recovered.

Russia has been open about what it has termed adoptions. During a meeting with Mr. Putin last month, Ms. Lvova-Belova said that she had personally adopted a 15-year-old boy from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol that Russian forces seized in May after reducing much of it to rubble and killing thousands of civilians.

“Now I know what it means to be a Donbas child’s mother. It is difficult, but we definitely love each other,” Ms. Lvova-Belova said as she thanked Mr. Putin for making such an adoption possible.

“That’s the most important thing,” the Russian president replied. Mr. Putin said during the meeting that Ms. Lvova-Belova’s organization has been busy organizing adoptions from occupied Ukrainian areas for the past eight years.

War-crimes experts said that heads of state can no longer count on impunity when facing war-crimes charges.

Michael Newton, a Vanderbilt University law professor, said the Putin indictment signaled a new era of accountability. It showed “that heads of state and military leaders cannot commit war crimes with an absolute assurance of no accountability, no oversight,” he said.

As a U.S. Army officer, Mr. Newton was an American delegate to diplomatic meetings that produced the ICC, and worked on several international war-crimes cases including the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic before a U.N. tribunal.

“Everybody says, ‘It’s Vladimir Putin, he’ll never face justice,’ ” said Mr. Newton, who added that similar doubts were expressed when Mr. Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia, was charged in 1999. Mr. Milosevic later fell from power, was extradited to The Hague and died in prison during his trial.

“Russian officials will face accountability in one form or another,” Mr. Newton said. “That’s the importance of the indictment; it’s not going to go away.”

Hundreds of investigators from Ukraine and abroad have been gathering evidence of war crimes since the early days of the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this month more than 70,000 Russian war crimes had been identified since the full-scale invasion began.

Ms. Herasymchuk, the Ukrainian official, outlined several scenarios under which children had been taken to Russia. In some cases, Russians have forcibly transferred children after their parents have been killed, she said. In others, children have been taken directly from their families. Some children have been separated from their parents during filtration, when Russian security agencies screen Ukrainians to ensure they don’t pose a threat.

A fourth scenario is the creation of uninhabitable conditions and the offer to transfer children for rehabilitation and recreation. In some cases, children’s institutions have been relocated wholesale.

A report published last month by the Conflict Observatory, a program supported by the U.S. State Department, said the Russian government had systematically relocated at least 6,000 children from Ukraine to a network of re-education and adoption facilities in the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula and mainland Russia.

The report identified 43 facilities involved in holding children from Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Most are recreational camps where children are taken for ostensible vacations, it said, while others are facilities used to house children put up for foster care or adoption in Russia.

The U.N. said at least 8,000 noncombatants were confirmed killed—with nearly 13,300 injured—in the first year of Russia’s invasion, while acknowledging the true toll was likely much higher.

Human Rights Watch says Russian forces have committed a litany of violations of international humanitarian law during their invasion of Ukraine, including indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing and shelling of civilian areas. Homes, healthcare and educational facilities have been in the attacks, some of which the watchdog said should be investigated as war crimes.

In areas they occupied, Russian or Russian-affiliated forces committed apparent war crimes, including torture, summary executions, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and looting of cultural property.

Mr. Zelensky has said justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes, should be one of 10 points in a peace plan that form a basis for negotiations with Russia. Huge challenges loom in securing accountability, however.

Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin last month said 915 people had been charged with war crimes. Some 26 people were sentenced for war crimes, including 14 captive Russian soldiers and 12 people sentenced in absentia, he said.

Because linking individual war crimes to the Kremlin’s senior leaders is difficult, Ukrainian officials say they see the crime of aggression—the crime of instigating a war with another country in the first place—as the likeliest way to pin charges on Mr. Putin and other top Kremlin officials. But major political, legal and practical hurdles remain before any Russian officials could face charges for the decision to invade Ukraine.