Black mark for Putin: how all Russians received status of 'war criminals' for abducting Ukrainian children

The general exhaustion from daily shelling and obituaries may have prevented us from fully enjoying the International Criminal Court's warrant for Putin's arrest for war crimes.

First of all, it is moral satisfaction. Because this decision puts Putin on a par with another well-known Russian directly involved in the occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, Igor Girkin. He has a conviction for the downing of MH17, and this was the first black mark against Russia and its crimes against humanity.

Putin is being compared to the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was issued such a warrant shortly before his public execution live on television. The Yugoslavian murderer Slobodan Milošević had the same role as a war criminal. Only after his death in a prison cell from a heart attack did the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia close the case.

It is important to know what exactly Putin was issued a warrant for. For the abduction of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories. This was one of the worst Russian practices, which was drawn to the attention of the international community by our volunteers, human rights activists, the Prosecutor General's Office, and modern thinkers like Timothy Snyder.

At some point, after our authorized representatives made public at least the official data on the abducted children – 16,221 boys and girls – Putin and his accomplice, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, began to publicly boast about the theft of Ukrainian genes. And the fact that our children from the south and Donbas are being sent to Siberia and Sakhalin.

Children abducted from the occupied part of the Donetsk region. Photo by Getty Images

But it is obvious that even this pair of thieves is a little bit ticked off by the warrant. And so Maria Lvova-Belova admitted that the children were abducted. But they were taken away because “there was no request for the return of relatives.” Of course, where would those relatives be if parents, grandmothers, and second-order relatives could have died in the imaginary Mariupol?

Kidnappers – this is the status that is now sticking to Putin, the Russian elites, and every Russian who has decided that the war does not concern them and that they can “just sit this situation out.”

Photo Getty Images

However, the arrest warrant is the most politically significant of the recent developments, as it identifies Putin as a wanted suspected war criminal subject to arrest in any country that recognizes the International Criminal Court. Separately, this is one of the most powerful signals for various Russian oligarchs. Do you want personal sanctions lifted? Do something about the local Karabas (an evil fictional character of Aleksey Tolstoy's 1936 book The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino).

A child wounded during Russian shelling. A hospital in Zaporizhzhia. Photo by Getty Images.

The status of a war criminal is a 100% obstacle to Putin's international travel. He is extremely fearful and every time he boards any plane, even a private jet, he has to ask if the pilot will be tempted to take him somewhere where he could be arrested. Moreover, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has explicitly said that every country that is a member of the International Criminal Court, if Russian President Putin appears on their territory, must arrest him and extradite him to the ICC in accordance with the warrant. There are 124 countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. There are 15 countries that have signed but not yet ratified the Rome Statute, but they must also respect the arrest warrant. Perhaps this warrant will push the dictator's entourage to remove him, as he has become extremely toxic to them.

Will Putin fight back against this decision? A trip to Sevastopol, the main military base of Russians in Crimea, and to the city that became the main trophy of the great war, Mariupol, is nothing more than a jackal's grin for the ICC warrant. This is an attempt to reassure Russians and his own entourage that despite everything, Putin is “an invincible wartime leader who can visit a war zone without fear.” And also the marking of territories – that we have conquered this and it is ours. There is also a third point: the public grunting of the ICC and the warrant. After all, Ukraine signed the Rome Statute back on January 20, 2000, but never ratified it, although after the Association Agreement with the EU in 2014, ratification of this document is one of Ukraine's direct international obligations. Therefore, this is a public demonstration that there are no threats for him in the occupied territories of the victim country, which was infantile about its own future. By the way, even despite the great war, it is still “not the right time” for the President’s Office and for the Deputy Head for Legal Affairs Andriy Smyrnov, who says “let's do it after the victory.”

What does this warrant give to active Ukrainians who have spent years of their lives, health, and nerves trying to finally pull Ukraine out of the colonial trap? At the very least, it gives them moral satisfaction and an impulse to fight.

Mariupol. Photo by Reuters

Let's look back a little bit.

Last May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Italian media about a very unpleasant conversation with French President Emanuel Macron.

“He offered me some things related to concessions on our sovereignty in order to save President Putin's face. I don't think it's very correct,” he said. But over time, first the CAESAR howitzers and then the AMX armored vehicles significantly changed the situation on the battlefield. The latter paved the way for the supply of Western heavy tanks, including the famous Leopards.

Memes and jokes circulated about Chancellor Olaf Scholz's calls to Putin, but later he got out of it and said that he was calling to remind the Kremlin dictator that his war against Ukraine would be unsuccessful.

I think it's worth recalling how Western analysts who had never been to Ukraine predicted that a very strong Russian state would defeat Ukraine last summer. And we should agree to neutrality and the exchange of territories. It is worth remembering that the mass abduction of children was kept silent for a long time, and our human rights activists have done a titanic job. We need to make sure that the modern genocide in the style of the Middle Ages is noticed between the demand for tolerance, divorce and Russian tales of terrible Russophobia.

And I see the most liberal Russians in Prague and London pressing for pity after the warrant for Putin was issued. How they come up with new perverse excuses to justify the kidnapping of Ukrainian orphans. They say it's okay that Ukrainian children are stolen. Our children, they say, are also suffering.

But it's one thing to have living parents, even if they are completely saturated with the victory madness and the Russian Orthodox Church, and to live in your own home. It's another thing to survive in Mariupol among the corpses of your relatives. To be in the most disgusting place in Russia. And to suffer from new foster parents, for whom you are a slave who urgently needs to erase memories of identity.

All this shows that all these liberal journalists, cardboard oppositionists and Prague fugitives have not realized that a piece of this warrant affects them as well. Anyone who has been silent or has worked for the Russian evil machine over the years is nothing more than a kidnapper. That is why when you see a Russian on the street, you should hide your child, otherwise they will turn him into a Janissary. And this brainwashed soldier will undoubtedly come to the mother's house to steal the washing machine.

About the author: Maryna Danyliuk-Yarmolaieva, journalist, political commentator, TV host.