Daily Briefing: War in UkraineInternational Criminal Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Putin
The court at The Hague accused the Russian president of bearing criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Human rights groups praised the move, though the likelihood of an imminent arrest appeared slim.
- Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters
- Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
- Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
- Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
- Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
- Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Reuters
- Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
- Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The International Criminal Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for war crimes, saying he bore criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.
Ukrainian officials and human-rights groups hailed the warrant as an important step in holding Moscow to account for abuses during its yearlong war. The country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the warrant represented the beginning of “historical responsibility.”
The likelihood of a trial while Mr. Putin remains in power appears slim because the court cannot try defendants in absentia and Russia has said it will not surrender its own officials. Still, the warrant deepens Mr. Putin’s isolation from the West and could limit his travel overseas.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, noted that Russia does not recognize the court and called its decision to issue a warrant “null and void.”
Here are other developments:
Mr. Putin will receive China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for a state visit to Russia starting on Monday that Beijing said would promote peace efforts between Russia and Ukraine. The United States has questioned whether China can play a mediating role, given its close relationship with Russia, and a White House spokesman said Friday that the United States was opposed to China’s proposal for an immediate cease-fire because it would cement the position of Russia’s troops.
Turkey announced that it would move to ratify Finland’s application to join NATO, clearing a significant hurdle for the Nordic nation’s bid to join the alliance but leaving neighboring Sweden on the sidelines for now.
The government of Slovakia said that it would send 13 Soviet-designed fighter jets to Ukraine, a day after a similar announcement by Poland’s president. The pledge from a second NATO ally could be a marked shift in increasing arms supplies for Kyiv. But most of Slovakia’s MIG-29 warplanes are not in working order so their delivery to Ukraine, likely to provide spare parts for Ukraine’s own fleet of Soviet-era jets, will not change the balance of force on the battlefield.
The deal with Russia enabling Ukraine to resume shipments of its grain abroad that has been in place since July is set to expire on Saturday. Russia is willing to extend the deal for 60 days, but U.N. negotiators are holding out for 120 days. Martin Griffiths, the U.N. aid chief, told the Security Council on Friday that U.N. officials were “sparing no effort” to secure an extension.
Asked about the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, President Biden said Friday, “I think it’s justified.” He noted that the I.C.C. is not recognized by the United States, but said the warrant “makes a very strong point.” Putin has "clearly committed war crimes," Biden added, speaking to reporters at the White House as he boarded Marine One to head to his house in Delaware for the weekend.
The International Criminal Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant for war crimes for President Vladimir V. Putin and a second Russian official. Here’s a closer look at the court, the warrant and what it could mean for Russia’s leader.
Why did the International Criminal Court issue the warrants?
The court says that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February last year. The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who has been the public face of a Kremlin-sponsored program in which Ukrainian children and teenagers have been taken to Russia.
The court said in a statement “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
A New York Times investigation published in October identified several Ukrainian children who had been taken away under Russia’s systematic resettlement efforts. The children described a wrenching process of coercion, deception and force. Russia has defended the transfers on humanitarian grounds.
Lawyers familiar with the I.C.C.’s case recently said they expected prosecutors to proceed with the arrest warrants because there was a strong trail of public evidence. On Friday, the court said in a statement that it was mindful “that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes.”
What is the International Criminal Court?
The International Criminal Court was created two decades ago as a standing body to investigate war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity under a 1998 treaty known as the Rome Statute. Previously, the United Nations Security Council had established ad hoc tribunals to address atrocities in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The court is based in The Hague, a Dutch city that has long been a center for international law and justice.
Many democracies joined the International Criminal Court, including close American allies like Britain. But the United States has long kept its distance, fearing that the court might one day seek to prosecute American officials, and Russia is also not a member.
The Biden administration has been engaged in an internal dispute over whether to provide the court with evidence gathered by the U.S. intelligence community about Russian war crimes. Most of the administration favors transferring the evidence, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations, but the Pentagon has balked because it does not want to set a precedent that could pave the way for eventual prosecutions of Americans.
What does the warrant mean for Mr. Putin?
Human rights groups hailed the warrant as an important step toward ending impunity for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, but the likelihood of a trial while Mr. Putin remains in power appears slim, because the court cannot try defendants in absentia and Russia has said it will not surrender its own officials.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed the warrants, noting that it is not a party to the court. Still, the warrant for Mr. Putin’s arrest deepens his isolation in the West and could limit his movements overseas. If he travels to a state that is party to the I.C.C., that country must arrest him, according to its obligations under international law.
“This makes Putin a pariah,” Stephen Rapp, a former ambassador at large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the U.S. State Department, said. “If he travels, he risks arrest. This never goes away.” And, he said, Russia cannot gain relief from sanctions without complying with the warrants.
“Either Putin is placed on trial in The Hague,” Mr. Rapp said, or “he is increasingly isolated, and dies with this hanging over his head.”
So Putin may never face trial?
The court has no power to arrest sitting heads of state or bring them to trial, and instead must rely on other leaders and governments to act as its sheriffs around the world. A suspect who manages to evade capture may never have a hearing to confirm the charges.
However, late last year, a legal move complicated the issue. In November, the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, petitioned to move ahead with the confirmation of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Joseph Kony, the Ugandan militant and founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army, even though he is not in custody and has been a fugitive for years. Mr. Kony, who transformed kidnapped children into soldiers, is accused of murder, cruel treatment, enslavement, rape and attacks against civilian population.
Mr. Khan’s petition amounts to a trial balloon, to see whether the court will agree that charges can be confirmed even if someone is not in custody. The decision is pending.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA spokeswoman for the National Security Council said the United States supports efforts to bring war criminals to justice, noting the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is independent and makes decisions based on evidence. “There is no doubt that Russia is committing war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine, and we have been clear that those responsible must be held accountable,” the spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson, said in a statement.
The International Criminal Court’s announcement on Friday that it had issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia instantly put him in the company of notorious world leaders who have been indicted or convicted in The Hague, either by the I.C.C. or under ad hoc tribunals.
The I.C.C. was modeled after the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals held after World War II, which laid bare the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed then. The court was created in 2002 at The Hague, a city in the Netherlands that has long been a center of international law, where other tribunals have also sought to bring world leaders to justice. Here are some examples:
A few months before the I.C.C. came into force, an ad hoc tribunal began the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader whose embrace of nationalism set off almost a decade of Balkan warfare that took more than 200,000 lives.
Milosevic died in 2006 in his prison cell at The Hague before a verdict could be reached, but his public reckoning made legal history nonetheless. Human Rights Watch later declared that the trial was “the end of the era when being a head of state meant immunity from prosecution.”
In June 2011, the I.C.C. issued an arrest warrant for the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi for the murder and persecution of civilians during the Arab Spring uprising, prompting celebrations in some areas of the country. The case was closed shortly after his grisly death in October of that year, which saw him bloodied and dragged through the streets.
Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, is also wanted by the I.C.C. for crimes against humanity, and remains at large.
Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has been wanted by the I.C.C. since 2009. He was indicted on charges of genocide and war crimes for the horrors his government unleashed in a long conflict in the western Sudanese area of Darfur, where at least 300,000 people were killed. That he has managed to elude being sent to The Hague for so long, even after being deposed in April 2019, has become a prominent and vexing example of the I.C.C.’s limitations.
In 2012, Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president and warlord, became the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials. The judge who presided over his sentencing near The Hague said he was guilty of “aiding and abetting, as well as planning, some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history” during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Explosions echoed across Kyiv on Friday night as air defense systems were engaged. Ukrainian officials reported swarms of Russian drones targeting cities around the country. Air defenses were at work in the Odessa, Dnipro and Chernihiv regions, though there were no immediate reports of successful strikes. Russia often uses drones as a prelude to missile strikes to wear down Ukraine’s air defenses.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday — and also one for Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights and a loyal party servant.
Ms. Lvova-Belova has led Russia’s efforts to deport thousands of Ukrainian children, including their removal by Russian forces. The United States imposed sanctions on Ms. Lvova-Belova in September for coordinating what the Treasury Department said were policies that facilitated forced adoptions into Russian families and for legislative changes aimed at expediting Russian citizenship for Ukrainian children.
Although Russia has consistently defended these actions, presenting them as a humanitarian effort to protect orphaned or abandoned Ukrainian children, the I.C.C. and Ukraine view them as forced abductions and an attempt to erase the children’s heritage.
Plans to place Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territories with Russian families were discussed publicly just days after the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and by the time Mr. Putin met with Ms. Lvova-Belova on March 9, 2022, “more than one thousand” children from occupied Ukraine had already been moved to Russian territory. Ms. Lvova-Belova has said that she herself adopted a teenager from Mariupol.
The estimates of children taken from Ukraine to Russia vary widely, but Ukrainian prosecutors say they have documented the deportation of 16,000 children.
Researchers at Yale University have called Ms. Lvova-Belova “one of the most highly involved figures in Russia’s deportation and adoption of Ukraine’s children, as well as in the use of camps for ‘integrating’ Ukraine’s children into Russia’s society and culture.”
Ms. Lvova-Belova studied to be a conductor and started her professional life as a guitar teacher in the Penza region. In 2019, she joined the United Russia party, which is closely aligned with Mr. Putin, and became part of its leadership council. In 2020, she became a senator in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper chamber of Parliament.
Mr. Putin appointed Ms Lvova-Belova as his commissioner for children’s rights in October 2021.
She responded to news of the warrant with defiance.
“Firstly, it’s great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country, that we don’t leave them in the war zone, that we take them out, that we create good conditions for them, surround them with loving caring people,” she told the Russian outlet RBK. “There were sanctions from all countries, even Japan, against me, now there is an arrest warrant. I wonder what will happen next. Well, we continue to work.”
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has denounced Russia’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children since the first weeks of the war, hailed the I.C.C. warrant for Vladimir Putin as the moment that “historical responsibility will begin.” “It would be impossible to carry out such a criminal operation without the order of the top leader of the terrorist state,” he said in a video statement.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
“Separating children from their families, depriving them of any opportunity to contact their relatives, hiding children on Russian territory, scattering them in remote regions — all this is obviously Russian state policy, state decisions, state evil,” Zelensky said. “Which begins precisely with the first official of this state.”
The International Criminal Court’s decision on Friday to issue arrest warrants for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his children’s rights commissioner over Russia’s kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children is not quite the same thing as indicting them. The court at The Hague has a different system, according to legal experts.
In the United States, it is common for targets of criminal investigations to be charged before they are arrested. A grand jury indicts someone and based on those charges a judge then issues an arrest warrant. Previous war-crimes courts, like the ad hoc tribunal for the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, also used indictments.
But at the International Criminal Court, the prosecutor — Karim Khan — at the initial stage goes before a panel of three judges in a “pretrial chamber” and presents evidence showing he has reasonable grounds to believe that individuals bear responsibility for certain war crimes. If the judges agree, they issue arrest warrants, putting the suspects on notice of what they would likely be charged with if they were tried.
Traditionally, if the suspects are later taken into custody and brought before the court at The Hague, they receive a pretrial hearing at which prosecutors present evidence that they contend is sufficient under a higher legal standard for the case to go to trial.
The pretrial chamber would then have the chance to “confirm” the charges, if any, issuing a formal charging document, more equivalent to a domestic grand jury indictment, according to Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor of international law and former top lawyer at the State Department in the Obama administration.
A suspect who manages to evade capture, however, may never have a hearing to confirm the charges. As a result, Mr. Koh said, for Mr. Putin, the arrest warrant “may be as much as we get.”
Complicating matters, however, late last year, Mr. Khan petitioned the pretrial chamber to move ahead with confirming charges against Joseph Kony, the Ugandan militant and founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army, even though he is not in custody and has been a fugitive for years.
Mr. Khan’s petition amounts to an experiment or trial balloon to see whether the court would agree that charges can be confirmed even if someone is not in custody. The pretrial chamber has not yet ruled on that petition.
Even if Mr. Putin is only ever the subject of an arrest warrant, Mr. Koh said, it still serves an important purpose. It further isolates Mr. Putin and further restricts his ability to travel abroad. It also potentially deters China from giving Russia weapons, sends a message to others in the Russian bureaucracy and might reduce resistance inside the Pentagon to sharing evidence with the court.
“I think it is a net plus — anything that enhances the pressure moves the dial,” he said.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA top E.U. official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said in a tweet on Friday that the I.C.C.’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin represented “the start of the process of accountability.”
The decision of the @IntlCrimCourt to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia is the start of the process of accountability. We appreciate & support ICC’s work.
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) March 17, 2023
There can be #noimpunity
Lawyers familiar with the I.C.C.’s case recently said they expected prosecutors to proceed with the arrest warrants because there was a strong trail of public evidence. The two people named by the court are Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who has appeared many times on television to promote the adoption of Ukrainian children; and Putin, who signed a decree in May to speed up access to Russian citizenship for Ukrainians.
The International Criminal Court said that the two Russians named in the arrest warrant it issued on Friday — President Vladimir V. Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights — bore individual criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.
The court did not give many more details about the accusations, but in October, The New York Times reported on evidence that pro-Russian forces had intercepted children who were trying to flee the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol and put them on buses headed deeper into Russian-held territory.
One girl, originally from eastern Ukraine but living in a group home in Mariupol when the war started, was later taken to Russia, placed in a Russian foster family and given Russian citizenship.
“I didn’t want to go,” said the girl, Anya, 15. “But nobody asked me.”
Other children described a wrenching process of coercion, deception and force as they were moved to Russia from Ukraine.
Ivan Matkovsky, 16, who lived in a government boarding school in Mariupol, was also rerouted at a checkpoint after trying to flee and ended up in a hospital in Russian-controlled Ukraine.
He and one of his schoolmates eventually managed to contact their school’s headmaster and arrange their return, but the other children were put on a bus for Russia. They protested. “No one listened to them,” Ivan said. “They had no choice.”
Among the other children in the hospital, Ivan said, was an 8-year-old boy named Nazar, who never found his mother after the Mariupol theater in which they had been hiding was pummeled by airstrikes in one of the war’s defining atrocities.
In Russia, the authorities were not hiding that they were taking these children. Instead, they promoted the efforts as a humanitarian mission, parading the children on television and welcoming them with teddy bears.
“We are not taking what is not ours,” said Olga Druzhinina, a woman from the Siberian city of Salekhard, along the Arctic Circle, who said she adopted four children, ages 6 to 17, from around the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, more than 1,600 miles away. She drew parallels to Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, a move widely seen as illegal.
“Our family is like a small Russia,” she said. “Russia took in four territories, and the Druzhinin family took in four children.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“This makes Putin a pariah,” Stephen Rapp, a former ambassador at large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the U.S. State Department, said in an emailed message. “If he travels, he risks arrest. This never goes away. Russia cannot gain relief from sanctions without compliance with the warrants.” Either Putin is placed on trial in The Hague, he said, or “he is increasingly isolated, and dies with this hanging over his head.”
A research project published in February by Yale University explored Russia's dealings with Ukrainian children, the focus of the arrest warrant the I.C.C. issued on Friday. The project identified 6,000 Ukrainian children who were held in 43 children’s homes and other facilities in Russia and in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine since the war began last year. Among them were orphans, those being cared for Ukrainian state institutions and those who were separated from their parents or legal guardians.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
The International Criminal Court‘s arrest warrant focuses on the Russia's wartime abduction of children, but Ukrainian prosecutors said on Friday that they were aware of more than 72,000 Russian war crimes, which includes acts that led to almost 10,000 civilian deaths, according to Mykola Govorukha, a representative of the Office of the Prosecutor General. The photograph shows the exhumation of a 15-year-old girl in the recently liberated southern Ukrainian village of Pravdyne in November.
In the past, the judges at the International Criminal Court have taken months to review charges before issuing arrest warrants. But the devastation taking place in Ukraine has put the court under pressure to act swiftly. More than 40 countries that are parties to the court have requested its intervention.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner come as the Biden administration has been engaged in an internal dispute over whether to provide evidence gathered by the American intelligence community about Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children — to the court at The Hague.
While most of the Biden administration, including the State and Justice Departments, favor transferring the evidence, according to people familiar with internal deliberations, the Pentagon has balked because it does not want to set a precedent that it fears could pave the way toward eventual prosecutions of Americans.
Under administrations of both parties, the United States has taken the position that the court should not exercise jurisdiction over citizens of countries that are not parties to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court — like Russia and the United States — even if the alleged war crimes took place on the territory of a country that is a member, like Ukraine and Afghanistan.
The Russian government cited that interpretation of the treaty on Friday in dismissing the significance of the arrest warrants. Some American legal specialists have urged the Defense Department to abandon that position, arguing that it will do little to deter future prosecutions of Americans because that interpretation is not widely shared around the world.
The legal specialists have said that the United States could instead argue that the International Criminal Court should only be used against nationals of countries that lack functioning investigative systems capable of addressing serious international crimes by their citizens. Under that criteria, Russia qualifies but the United States does not, they say.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in a phone interview that the warrants were “more than justified based on the evidence,” adding that “for the world to forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes, which are being committed on an industrial scale, would irrevocably undercut the rule-of-law-based world order since the end of World War II.”
Mr. Graham added: “I am hoping that the intelligence information available to the United States that would aid the I.C.C. in their prosecutions of Russian war crimes against Ukraine will flow unencumbered. The Department of Defense’s reluctance to share information is undercutting our efforts to hold Putin accountable.”
Reporting from Washington
The U.S. Department of Justice, which has been investigating several cases in which Americans were killed, injured or mistreated in Ukraine, is not currently investigating Mr. Putin for war crimes, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. But that could change, even if the possibility remains remote: Late last year, Congress gave prosecutors broader power to pursue cases involving non-American victims, provided that the perpetrator travels to the U.S. or is extradited by an ally.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
The I.C.C.’s arrest warrants can be kept secret to protect victims and witnesses, but the court said that in this case it was “in the interests of justice to publicly disclose the existence of the warrant.” The court added it was mindful “that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAs Russian troops pushed into Ukraine last year, children who were fleeing newly occupied territories were swept up. Many became part of a Russian effort to portray itself as a savior. In this episode of “The Daily,” New York Times reporter Emma Bubola tells the story of Anya, a child who was taken from Ukraine.
The International Criminal Court was created two decades ago as a standing body to investigate war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity under a 1998 treaty known as the Rome Statute. In the past, the United Nations Security Council had established ad hoc tribunals to address atrocities in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Many democracies joined the International Criminal Court, including close American allies like Britain. But the United States has long kept its distance, concerned that the tribunal could someday try to prosecute Americans.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have taken the position that the court should not exercise jurisdiction over citizens of countries that are not a party to the treaty.
President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but, calling it flawed, did not send it to the Senate for ratification. In 2002, President George W. Bush essentially withdrew that signature. Congress, for its part, enacted laws in 1999 and 2002 that limited what support the government could provide the court.
Still, by the end of the Bush administration, the State Department declared that the United States accepted the “reality” of the court and acknowledged that it “enjoys a large body of international support.” And the Obama administration took a step toward helping the court by offering rewards for the capture of fugitive warlords in Africa whom the court had indicted.
In 2017, however, the top prosecutor for the court tried to investigate the torture of detainees accused of terrorism during the Bush administration as part of a larger inquiry into the war in Afghanistan. In response, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the court’s personnel, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced it as corrupt.
A thaw in relations returned in 2021, when the Biden administration revoked President Trump’s sanctions, and a newly appointed prosecutor, Karim Khan, dropped the investigation.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine last year, prompting a bipartisan push to hold President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and others in his military chain of command to account for reported atrocities — and setting off debates inside the administration and in Congress about whether and how to help the court.
In late December, Congress included a provision about the International Criminal Court embedded in the large appropriations bill it passed in late December.
It created an exception to the general prohibition on providing certain funding and other aid to the court, enabling the government to assist with “investigations and prosecutions of foreign nationals related to the situation in Ukraine, including to support victims and witnesses.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe I.C.C. also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who sounded defiant in an interview with the Russian outlet RBC. “It is great that the international community has appreciated our work to help the children of our country,” she said.
Lvova-Belova has been the public face of the Russian effort to transfer Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin describes as a humanitarian gesture amid the war. She added: “There were the sanctions of all countries, even Japan, against me. Now there is an arrest warrant. I wonder what will happen next. Well, we will continue to work.”
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, said the arrest warrant was “a big step in restoring world justice.” “From now on, the world will never shake hands with the one who decided to start an unprovoked brutal war in Ukraine,” he said.
The International Criminal Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for war crimes, saying that he bore individual criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children since Russia’s invasion last year.
Human rights groups hailed the warrant as an important step toward ending impunity for Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The likelihood of a trial while Mr. Putin remains in power appears slim, because the court cannot try defendants in absentia and Russia has said it will not surrender its own officials.
Still, the warrant deepens Mr. Putin’s isolation in the West and could limit his movements overseas.
The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights. She has been the public face of a Kremlin-sponsored program in which Ukrainian children and teenagers have been taken to Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed the warrants, noting that it is not a party to the court.
The court said in a statement “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
The I.C.C. does not recognize immunity for heads of state in cases involving war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
The Kremlin has denied accusations of war crimes, but has not been secretive about the transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia, depicting them as adoptions of abandoned children and promoting the program as a patriotic and humanitarian effort.
“This is a big day for the many victims of crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine since 2014,” said Balkees Jarrah, the associate director for international justice at Human Rights Watch. “With these arrest warrants, the I.C.C. has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war against Ukraine for far too long.”
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said the announcement had “no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view.”
“Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and bears no obligations under it,” she said. “Russia is not cooperating with this body,” calling any efforts by the I.C.C. to make arrests “legally null and void for us.”
Ukrainian officials said the decision in effect branded Russia a criminal government and made the world a much smaller place for Mr. Putin. If the Russian leader travels to a state that is party to the I.C.C., that country must arrest him, according to its obligations under international law.
“This is just the beginning,” Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, said in a statement.
But the court’s limitations are well known — although it can indict sitting heads of state, it has no power to arrest them or bring them to trial, instead relying on other leaders and governments to act as its sheriffs around the world. This has been most prominently illustrated by the case of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted by the court but has been not been arrested in other countries where he has traveled.
A New York Times investigation published in October identified several Ukrainian children who had been taken away under Russia’s systematic resettlement efforts. They described a wrenching process of coercion, deception and force, and upon arrival in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, are often placed in homes to become Russian citizens and subjected to re-education efforts. Russia has defended the transfers on humanitarian grounds.
On Thursday, a United Nations commission of inquiry said that Russia’s transfer of children and other civilians from Ukraine to Russia may amount to a war crime, observing that none of the cases they investigated were justified under international law. Ukraine has reported the transfer of 16,221 children to Russia, but the commission said it had not been able to verify the number.
The I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has said the illegal transfers of children were a priority for his investigators. “Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war,” he said after visiting a children’s home in southern Ukraine this month that he said had been emptied as a result of alleged deportations.
Valerie Hopkins and Marc Santora contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe United States on Friday said it was opposed to a Chinese proposal for an immediate cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine because it would cement the position of the troops of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“A cease-fire now is, again, effectively the ratification of Russian conquest,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters, responding to an expected meeting next week between Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.
“It would, in effect, recognize Russia’s gains and its attempt to conquer its neighbor’s territory by force, allowing Russian troops to continue to occupy sovereign Ukrainian territory,” Mr. Kirby said.
The call for a cease-fire is part of a multipart peace proposal put forward by Mr. Xi, who heads to Russia for the meeting next week. The United States has long encouraged the Chinese government to play a constructive role in helping to end the war in Ukraine.
But Mr. Kirby expressed doubt that Mr. Xi’s meeting next week in Russia represents a genuine effort at peacemaking. He repeated that American officials were concerned that China is seriously considering an effort to directly provide lethal weapons to Russia for use in the war.
And he said that any meaningful meeting about peace would have to include President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as well.
“We also hope that President Xi will reach out to President Zelensky directly because we continue to believe that it’s very important that he hears from the Ukrainian side as well,” Mr. Kirby added. “And not just from Mr. Putin and not just from a Russian perspective.”
Mr. Kirby said he would not speak for Mr. Zelensky, who has in the past rejected the idea of an immediate cease-fire for similar reasons. But he made clear that the United States would counsel the leader of Ukraine to be wary of signing on to one at this point in the conflict.
“We certainly don’t support calls for a cease-fire that would be called for by the P.R.C. and a meeting in Moscow that would simply benefit Russia,” Mr. Kirby said, using the acronym for the Chinese government.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s fighter pilots have helped to keep Russia from controlling the skies above the battlefield in the yearlong war. But the fact remains that Russia’s air force dwarfs Ukraine’s and its pilots have far superior technology.
The addition of more than a dozen Soviet-designed MIG fighter jets from Poland and Slovakia will certainly help Ukraine, which has seen dozens of aircraft shot down or worn out after more than a year of combat. But Ukrainian officials and military analysts do not expect the MIGs pledged so far to fundamentally alter the battle in the skies.
Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, said new MIGs would not “radically change” the situation on the front lines. Most of Slovakia’s MIG-29 warplanes are not working, so they are likely to be used mainly for spare parts.
“To some extent, this will increase our combat capabilities,” he said in an appearance on Ukrainian national television Friday morning. “But one should not forget that these are still Soviet and not modern Western aircraft.”
Ukraine primarily uses its limited number of fighter jets to provide cover for bombers and assault aircraft striking Russian positions, Mr. Ihnat said in a recent interview with Channel 24, a Ukrainian news outlet.
Ukrainian engineers have also figured out how to attach Western-made anti-radar missiles to its existing fleet of MIGs, allowing Kyiv to better target Russian radar and air-defense systems. The High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, known as HARMs, pose a threat to Russian air defense operators, in many cases forcing them to turn off their radar and lie low while Ukrainian MIGs are in the air — thus creating more freedom of movement for other Ukrainian aircraft.
But these missions are still fraught with danger for Ukrainian pilots.
“To successfully complete the task, they must go deep into the enemy’s defenses,” Mr. Ihnat said. “It is very dangerous to fly deep into the enemy’s defenses and you need to stick closer to the ground. And if you don’t do this, you will easily become prey.”
Ukraine has lost 61 planes since the war began, including 18 MIG-29s, according to the military analysis site Oryx, which only counts losses that it has visually confirmed. Over the same period, Russia has lost 79 aircraft, according to the group, whose analysts believe the real numbers for both sides are most likely far greater.
Mr. Ihnat said that Moscow’s fleet of attack aircraft is five times larger than Ukraine’s, and “much more technological.”
He and other Ukrainian officials have said that the country should focus on acquiring one type of advanced fighter, and that the F-16 remained the best option. Many nations employ the F-16, meaning the United States would not have to supply them directly, although it does need to approve any transfers to Ukraine from other countries. The Biden administration has declined to send F-16s but has not ruled out deciding later to provide them or allowing another country to do so.
The Ukrainian argument is that the F-16 is better than the MIG at shooting down cruise missiles because of its powerful radar and modern missiles, and could offer vastly more protection from Russian bombardment.
“It has a weapons system tied to that radar that can engage the vast majority of Russian aircraft long before they can attack it,” Greg Bagwell, a former British Royal Air Force commander who is president of the Air and Space Power Association, said in a recent interview with Radio Liberty.
“It’s tiny, it’s hard to see on radar, it’s even harder to see in the air with the naked eye,” he said of the F-16, adding: “It’s a vicious, nasty, dangerous little airplane.”
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article described incorrectly MIG-29 fighter jets. They are Soviet-designed, not American-designed.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTRussia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday it would give state awards to the pilots of two Su-27 fighter jets that forced a $32 million American reconnaissance drone into the depths of the Black Sea on Tuesday, an incident that escalated tensions between the two superpowers.
The ministry announced in a statement that Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu would decorate the pilots for preventing “the violation by the American MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle of the boundaries” of airspace that Russia says it has restricted.
The Kremlin has said that the incident was caused by U.S. noncompliance with a flight restriction zone declared by Russia. The United States has said the drone was flying in international airspace and called its interception “unsafe” and “unprofessional.”
The Pentagon released video of the incident on Thursday showing two high-speed passes by two Russian Su-27 fighter jets, which spray a substance the Defense Department says is jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper drone. On a final pass, one of the Russian jets collides with the drone, the Pentagon says, and the camera feed is lost for about 60 seconds. The footage that was released does not show the collision.
The video then resumes, showing the aircraft’s damaged propeller, which the Pentagon said was struck by the Russian jet. Moscow has denied that its planes came into contact with the drone.
On Thursday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it would try to salvage the downed drone. State news media, citing an unnamed official, said an underwater robot had detected the remnants of the drone about 40 miles from the port city of Sevastopol, on the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, at a depth of about half a mile underwater.
Turkey announced on Friday that it would move to ratify Finland’s application to join NATO, clearing a significant hurdle for the Nordic nation’s bid to join the alliance but leaving neighboring Sweden on the sidelines for now.
“We decided to start the ratification process in our Parliament for Finland’s membership,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told a news conference, saying he hoped the vote would take place before elections in mid-May.
The announcement came as Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, met in Ankara with Mr. Erdogan. The leaders had both telegraphed that the announcement was coming, with Mr. Erdogan saying this week that Turkey would “keep our promise.”
For Finland to join NATO after decades of military nonalignment would be a major shift in the balance of power in the region between the Western military alliance and Russia. It represents a significant diplomatic and strategic defeat for Moscow and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Putin made clear before invading Ukraine last year that his intention was to block NATO’s expansion. But his invasion instead convinced Finnish and Swedish leaders that there was no real security guarantee for them outside the alliance.
Finland has a border of some 830 miles with Russia, the longest border with the country of any European Union nation, and an extensive history of resisting Moscow’s hegemony. Favoring self-reliance, Finland did not shrink its military after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 10 months ago it pulled a more reluctant Sweden along to apply to join NATO.
But Mr. Erdogan has been blocking them, claiming that Sweden has become a haven for Kurdish separatists and other dissidents he considers terrorists. So far, Stockholm’s efforts to satisfy him, including a new terrorism law, have failed.
The Turkish president has intermittently demanded the extradition of more than 120 people now in Sweden, as he did again on Friday. Talks will likely continue in the hope that Turkey will finally approve Sweden’s membership bid after the Turkish elections in May, but before NATO’s summit meeting in Lithuania in mid-July.
Mr. Erdogan’s decision opens the way for Turkey’s Parliament to ratify Finland’s membership in the alliance, which requires unanimous approval from the 30 nations in the bloc. Hungary is the only other country whose Parliament has not ratified the bids by Finland or Sweden. Its leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has vacillated on when the Hungarian Parliament will vote, although he insists that Hungary has no objection to membership of either Nordic country.
With elections in Finland on April 2, the country’s current government decided to pass all necessary legislation to join NATO in order to prevent any period of uncertainty while a new government is formed. So the only votes outstanding rest with the Turkish and Hungarian Parliaments.
On Friday, Mr. Niinisto thanked Mr. Erdogan for the move to ratify but told the news conference that Finland’s membership “is not complete without Sweden.”
The Turkish leader faces a tough election battle in mid-May with a ropy economy and high inflation, as well as criticism about his government’s handling of the recent devastating earthquake. The battle against Kurdish terrorism is popular politics in Turkey and plays well among opposition voters, too. And Turks in general like the attention and leverage that Mr. Erdogan’s unpredictability often provides.
Hungary has wielded its veto power within the European Union over sanctions against Russia to try to secure concessions on other issues, and analysts say Mr. Orban appears to be doing the same thing over Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Mr. Orban is also known to be annoyed by criticism of Hungary within the European Union from Sweden and Finland.
Johanna Lemola, Gulsin Harman and Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Finland’s border with Russia. Finland has the longest border with Russia of any European Union nation, not of any European nation.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Ukrainian military is firing thousands of artillery shells a day as it tries to hold the eastern city of Bakhmut, a pace that American and European officials say is unsustainable and could jeopardize a planned springtime campaign that they hope will prove decisive.
The bombardment has been so intense that the Pentagon raised concerns with Kyiv recently after several days of nonstop artillery firing, two U.S. officials said, highlighting the tension between Ukraine’s decision to defend Bakhmut at all costs and its hopes for retaking territory in the spring. One of those officials said the Americans warned Ukraine against wasting ammunition at a key time.
With so much riding on a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the United States and Britain are preparing to ship thousands of NATO and Soviet-type artillery rounds and rockets to help shore up supplies for a coming Ukrainian offensive.
But a senior American defense official described that as a “last-ditch effort” because Ukraine’s allies do not have enough ammunition to keep up with Ukraine’s pace and their stocks are critically low. Western manufacturers are ramping up production, but it will take many months for new supplies to begin meeting demand.
This has put Kyiv in an increasingly perilous position: Its troops are likely to have one meaningful opportunity this year to go on the offensive, push back Russian forces and retake land that was occupied after the invasion began last year. And they will probably have do it while contending with persistent ammunition shortages.
Natalia Yermak contributed reporting.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, will travel to Russia to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin next week in a visit that could have broad implications for Moscow’s war in Ukraine and the troubled relationship between Beijing and Washington.
Mr. Xi is expected to make a state visit to Russia from Monday to Wednesday, China’s Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin said in statements. It will be his first visit to Russia since the country launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.
Mr. Xi’s trip will be watched closely by leaders in the United States and Europe who are frustrated with China’s diplomatic and economic support for Russia. Although the two nations have not declared a formal alliance, Beijing maintains deep strategic ties with Moscow as a like-minded nuclear-armed power that seeks to weaken Washington’s geopolitical dominance. Just three weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin visited Beijing, where the two leaders declared a “no limits” friendship.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has warned that China is considering escalating its support for Russia by providing weapons for it to use in Ukraine, an accusation that Beijing has denied.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin will meet on Monday afternoon in Moscow for a one-on-one conversation and lunch, and the two leaders will also hold a news conference, said the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, said that Mr. Xi would use the visit to increase the “mutual trust and understanding” between the two countries, which he said had “established a new paradigm for international relations.”
At the same time, China would seek to play a mediating role between Russia and Ukraine, he said.
“President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this time is also for peace,” Mr. Wang said when asked whether Mr. Xi would try to push Mr. Putin to seek a political settlement with Ukraine. “China’s proposition can be summed up in one sentence, which is to persuade peace and promote talks.”
He also implicitly criticized Western nations’ tough approach to punishing Russia, saying that “unilateral sanctions” and “extreme pressure” would only worsen the crisis. The Kremlin said that talks between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi would center on the “comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation” between the two countries.
China has cast itself as a rare neutral party well positioned to negotiate a political settlement between Ukraine and Russia. The country recently released a position paper calling for an end to the war, but the document was widely criticized by Western leaders for lacking concrete plans and avoiding demands that could hurt China’s close ties with Russia.
Mr. Xi has sought to burnish his image as a global statesman, most notably with the announcement last week that Beijing had brokered a surprise deal to restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. That agreement came after extensive talks in which both sides had expressed a willingness to mend ties.
Mediating in the war in Ukraine would be a far greater challenge, with neither Ukraine nor Russia appearing ready to negotiate an end to the fighting. Many Western leaders are skeptical about Mr. Xi’s intentions because of his conflicting goals and interests. Beijing has never criticized Russia’s invasion and parrots the Kremlin’s assertion that NATO provoked the war.
It is unclear whether Mr. Xi will also meet or speak separately with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
On Thursday, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and China spoke over the phone in a rare official contact. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said the two discussed “the principle of territorial integrity.” China said its foreign minister, Qin Gang, told his Ukrainian counterpart that Beijing would “continue to play a constructive role in bringing an end to the conflict, mitigating the crisis and restoring peace.”
Mr. Qin said China was concerned the conflict was dragging on and could “spiral out of control.” He urged both sides to “exercise restraint” and “resume peace talks as soon as possible,” according to the ministry, while referring to the situation in Ukraine as a “crisis” rather than a war.
Mr. Wang, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, did not directly answer when asked if the foreign ministers had discussed potential contact between Mr. Xi and Mr. Zelensky, saying only that China continued to “maintain communication with all parties.”
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said on Monday that the United States had been encouraging Mr. Xi to speak to Mr. Zelensky, in part to discourage China from supplying Russia with arms.
“It would potentially bring more balance and perspective to the way that the P.R.C. is approaching this,” Mr. Sullivan said, using an abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China. “And we hope it would continue to dissuade them from choosing to provide lethal assistance to Russia.”
In addition to the war in Ukraine, Mr. Xi will also discuss with Mr. Putin how to continue strengthening cooperation between their countries, Mr. Wang said. Asked whether Russia and China would seek a formal alliance, Mr. Wang said they were interested in a “new type of major power relations.”
“This is completely different from the practice of some countries, which cling to a cold war mentality, gang up, engage in ‘small circle’ and factional confrontations, and bully all over the place,” he said.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.