ICC judges issue arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes

The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children, sending Russia another significant step on the path to becoming a pariah state.

The warrants are the first to be issued by the ICC for crimes committed in the Ukraine war, and it is one of the rare occasions when the court has issued a warrant for a sitting head of state, putting Putin in the company of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.

Khan said many of the children had been put up for adoption in Russia and that Putin had issued a decree expediting the conferral of Russian citizenship on the children, making them easier to adopt.

The Kremlin was defiant in the face of the ICC announcement.

Wayne Jordash, a Kyiv-based international human rights lawyer and managing partner of Global Rights Compliance, agreed that the warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova were likely to be the first of many.

The US was more guarded in its response. It is not an ICC member, and the Pentagon has resisted cooperation with the ICC out of fear that US soldiers could potentially be pursued by the court.