8.15.25
The ICC has jurisdiction in countries signing a 2002 international treaty agreement, called the Rome Statute, obligating signing nations to cooperate with ICC investigations and prosecutions. The ICC is the only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Russia signed the Rome Statute in 2000 and withdrew from the agreement in 2016. The US has never signed the Rome Statute (the US did indeed initially sign the document, but the signature was withdrawn by the George Bush administration in 2002). As such, as long as President Putin does not fly into the airspace of a Rome Statute signee – the country nearest to Alaska and Russia is Canada – then the Russian leader would not be subject to arrest. However, if the ICC arrest warrant is reckoned legitimate on moral grounds, then the Trump administration’s failure to deliver Putin up to the ICC could be considered official US acceptance of and unwillingness to take action against a war criminal.
According to official Kremlin statements, the Russian state has transported underage Ukrainian citizens to locations outside Ukraine for their safety and psychological welfare. The Kremlin position is that the Russian state removed the Ukrainian children – most orphans or living in state institutions for other reasons - from Ukraine for their own good. In the Russo-Ukraine War, by Russian state policy, children removed from Ukraine are placed in Russian institutions, sometimes as far away as Siberia. In those institutions, by Russian state policy, the Ukrainian children are subjected to Russian state propaganda, punished for using the Ukrainian language, taught in school that Ukraine is a Nazi state, and forced to participate in “patriotic” Russian youth activities designed to make children enthusiastic Russian leadership and wanting to volunteer for service in the Russian military. State-sponsored removal of children from the country they were born in is a near-textbook definition of the war crimes – illegal forced deportation of persons, and illegal transport of persons.
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