The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin. Position of the T4P initiative

The Tribunal for Putin Initiative welcomes the decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova in connection with charges of illegal deportations of Ukrainian children, which constitutes a war crime under international law. This decision is an extraordinary event for international criminal justice, as it is the first time that the head of a state that is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world has been charged with an international crime.

We are grateful to the ICC Prosecutor and Judges for their unwavering commitment to the ideals of international criminal justice, which gives millions of Ukrainians hope that those who brought pain and suffering to Ukrainian soil will inevitably be punished fairly.

We call on the ICC to continue to take all necessary steps to prosecute and punish war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed on the territory of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people expect that the killings and torture of civilians in Bucha, Izyum and other towns and villages of Ukraine, the killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka, large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, humiliating filtration procedures in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and other atrocities committed by representatives of the Russian Federation will not be overlooked by the ICC.

We note that this historic decision would not have been possible without the ICC’s close cooperation with the Ukrainian authorities, foreign states, human rights organizations and all people of goodwill interested in restoring justice.

The Tribunal for Putin Initiative calls on all states for which the ICC’s decision to arrest Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova is binding to provide the ICC with full and complete assistance in the implementation of this decision.

We believe that this decision destroys the myth of politicization and ineffectiveness of the ICC, which is often used in Ukrainian politics to explain Ukraine’s non-ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC. In view of this, we urge the Ukrainian authorities to take all necessary steps to ratify the Rome Statute in the near future.

The Tribunal for Putin Initiative reminds that the ICC is a “court of last resort” that operates on the principle of complementarity, i.e. it takes cases only when the state is unwilling or unable to do so, and the primary responsibility for prosecuting and punishing international crimes lies with states. In this regard, we call on Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and courts to continue to make every effort to effectively prosecute and punish international crimes committed by Russians on the territory of Ukraine.

Background information: The global initiative Breaking the Vicious Circle of Russia’s Impunity for Its War Crimes” («Tribunal for Putin» in short) was created in response to the full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation in February 2022. The participants of the initiative document the events that show signs of atrocity crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in all regions of the country that were attacked or suffered collateral damage. The initiative is actively working at the international level to use existing mechanisms in the UN, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the EU and the International Criminal Court to stop the brutality of these violations.