The President of Ukraine is in The Hague on Thursday where he will meet with representatives of the International Criminal Court (ICC), official sources told Agence France Press (AFP).
The ICC is investigating war crimes allegedly committed by the Russian military in Ukraine, after it issued an arrest warrant for Russian head of state Vladimir Putin.
“We are in The Hague, we are going to meet with the leaders of the International Criminal Court,” Serguii Nykyforov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian president, told AFP.
The visit to The Hague comes a day after the Ukrainian head of state denied the participation of Kiev forces in the alleged attack against the Kremlin, in Moscow, with unmanned aerial devices (drones).
For Moscow it was an assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin.
In Finland on Wednesday, Zelensky responded to the Russian accusations by saying that Ukraine “does not want to attack Putin.”
“We want to leave it in the hands of the court,” said the president of Ukraine.
On March 18, an ICC statement indicated that Vladimir Putin “is allegedly responsible for the deportation (of children) and the illegal transfer (of children) from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
The possibility of putting Putin on the bench is very remote given that the Netherlands-based United Nations judicial body does not have a police force to execute arrest warrants in Russia, just as it is unlikely that the head of state Russian do it. travel to one of the 123 countries that have ratified the ICC.
On the other hand, prosecutor Karim Khan has made several trips to Ukraine with a view to installing an ICC delegation in kyiv so that investigations are more effective.
The ICC does not have jurisdiction to try Vladimir Putin for the crimes of invasion of a sovereign country.
This is why the Dutch government has offered to host a court that can be set up to try the “crime of aggression” and an office to collect evidence is being set up.
The new International Center for the Prosecution of Crimes of Aggression should be operational in the summer, as announced in February by the European Union judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust.
Source: TSF
