Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday hailed the “historic” decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) which issued an arrest warrant for Russian head of state Vladimir Putin for war crimes.
“A historic decision, which marks the beginning of a historic responsibility,” Zelensky stressed in a video broadcast on the Telegram social network.
Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that Putin and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, are now “suspected of a war crime”, recalling their intervention in the “illegal transfer of thousands of children “Ukrainians to Russian territory.
“It would be impossible to carry out such a criminal operation without the order of the main leader of the terrorist state. Separate the children from their families, deprive them of any opportunity to come into contact with their relatives, hide the children on Russian territory, disperse them in remote regions – all this is obviously Russian state policy, state decisions, state malice,” he stressed.
The Ukrainian official also praised the team of ICC Attorney General Karim Khan for their help in the “fight for justice.”
The ICC has issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president on war crimes charges for his alleged involvement in child abductions in Ukraine.
In a statement, the ICC accuses Putin of being “allegedly responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation of population (children) and illegal transfer of population (children) from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
At stake will be thousands of institutionalized Ukrainian children who were forcibly transferred to Russia or the occupied territories.
A report on Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Children from Ukraine, published in February by the Yale School of Public Health’s (HRL) Humanitarian Research Laboratory, estimates that more than 6,000 Ukrainian minors are placed in 43 re-education camps or orphanages after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The report admits that the number could be much higher.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates, in another report, that thousands of Ukrainian children living in orphanages were forcibly transferred to Russia or the occupied territories.
The Russian military offensive on Ukrainian territory, launched on February 24 last year, plunged Europe into what is considered the most serious security crisis since World War II (1939-1945).
Source: TSF
