European countries members of the International Criminal Court should arrest Putin if he visits
The US government has advised European nations that are parties to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he visits the country.
Last week, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin for his role in a Russian government effort to forcibly deport Ukrainian children to Russia and rehabilitate them.
The United States, Russia and Ukraine are not parties to the ICC, but on Wednesday March 22, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that any European country that is a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC) should arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he visits.
“I think anyone who’s gone to court and has obligations should fulfill their obligations,” Blinken said in response to a question from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
Blinken did not say whether US authorities would hand over the Russian president to the ICC if he came to that country, noting that the US is not a party to the court.
“I don’t think he plans to travel here anytime soon,” Blinken said.
Putin has barely left Russia in recent years and he hasn’t traveled to the United States since 2015.
A report released in mid-February by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab’s Conflict Observatory found that more than 6,000 children between the ages of a few months and 17 years old were detained in Russia at some point during the war. , although the “total number of children is not known and is probably well over 6,000.”
He identified 43 institutions that are part of the vast network where the children have been sent, stretching “from one end of Russia to the other”, including Russian-occupied Crimea, the “eastern Pacific coast – closer to Alaska than to Moscow” and Siberia, said Nathaniel Raymond of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
The main purpose of the camps appears to be political re-education,” he said, noting that at least 32 of the facilities identified in the report “appear to be engaged in systematic re-education efforts that expose children in Ukraine to university studies centered on Russia, cultural, patriotic and, in two cases, specifically military education”.
