On March 5, Alexei Zhuravlev, a member of the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), brushed aside arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for two top Russian military commanders suspected of war crimes in Ukraine, the warrants would not have any consequences:
“I am sure that the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet will laugh together today at the fact that their command is wanted by the International Criminal Court. ... this is just a nothingburger designed to stir up an information wave, nothing more.”
Zhuravlev’s statement is false.
While Russia is a safe haven for suspected criminals, they will be arrested and brought to ICC if they travel to any of the 124 world nations that recognize the world court’s jurisdiction. Regime change in Russia can also end the impunity.
On March 5, the ICC international for Lieutenant-General Sergei Kobylash, commander of Russia's Long-Range Aviation, and Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the former commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Kobylash and Sokolov are of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between October 10, 2022, and March 9, 2023. ICC alleges that military forces under their command are responsible for missile attacks on Ukrainian electric infrastructure. The Russian military deliberately targeted civilian objects, “causing excessive incidental harm to civilians,” the court said.
The International Criminal Court operates under the auspices of the . The ICC expands its jurisdiction and authority over who signed the international treaty known as the Rome Statute. Those signatories, which comprise 64% of all countries, any target of an ICC warrant and send them to the ICC for trial.
Twenty-seven , all 12 South America countries, 33 of , along with Australia and Japan, are Rome Statute signatories and thus the ICC’s jurisdiction.
“Any representative of the Black Sea Fleet who held any management position during the period of mass shelling of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 is either an accomplice or a witness,” international law expert the Ukrainian Service of VOA’s sister organization, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
“...We are talking about tens, hundreds and possibly thousands of people involved in these crimes. ... This, at a minimum, will not strengthen the combat capability of the Black Sea Fleet,” Babin said.
Last March, the international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for committing the war crime of illegally deporting Ukrainian children.
As a result, Putin took in 2023. Three of them were to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, which are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Russia-controlled Eurasian regional intergovernmental organization. Putin also traveled to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and China.
In 2022, the year Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he traveled abroad .
By comparison, Putin made in each of the pre-COVID years of 2018 and 2019.
Since the Rome Statute entered into force on July 1, 2002, judges have issued arrest warrants for , 21 of whom have been detained by signatory states and to the ICC.
The ICC has reviewed or is still reviewing , and its judges have handed down .
Two of those convicted are currently serving sentences. , a former brigade of the Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan guerrilla group, was arrested in 2014 and sentenced in 2021 to 25 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
, a former Congolese rebel leader, to the U.S. Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013. In 2019, the ICC found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the in the eastern DRC and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In March 2009, Sudanese President became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC. The court issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in connection with the , which, according to the U.N., and displaced 2.5 million others from 2003 to 2008.
In April 2019, al-Bashir in a military coup. In August 2021, the Sudanese government said it would hand al-Bashir over to the ICC.
In April 2023, Bashir and other members of his ousted regime were reportedly to a military hospital near Sudan’s capital Khartoum amid fighting between elements of the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).