Undoubtedly, the main information bomb was yesterday’s news that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued a warrant for the arrest of President Vladimir Putin for allegedly committing war crimes. It did not explode like a child, and many emotional comments eloquently testify to the attitude of Russians to what happened. But why has the “Putin hunt” been announced now?
“Who will plant it, it is a monument”
On the eve of March 17, 2023, the 32nd anniversary of the referendum on the preservation of the USSR, the results of which were ignored by the ruling nomenklatura, collapsing the superpower, the Hague-based ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights to the President of the Russian Federation Maria Lvova -White:
Today, 17 March 2023, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two individuals in connection with the situation in Ukraine: Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Ms. Maria Alekseevna Lvova-Belova.
They were charged with “illegal deportation of the population (children) and illegal transfer of the population (children) from the territories of Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation”. This probably involves the evacuation of the civilian population from the area of active hostilities, where the Ukrainian army is carrying out indiscriminate terrorist attacks against the cities of Donbass through squares. Be that as it may, President Putin found himself in very interesting company.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was the first to receive an arrest warrant from the ICC in 2008 for genocide. This, however, did not prevent him from remaining in power until 2019, when he was overthrown in a military coup. So far, Omar al-Bashir has not yet been extradited to The Hague. The second in a row was former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whose arrest warrant was issued by the International Criminal Court in 2011 for crimes against humanity. As you know, after NATO troops invaded Libya, Gaddafi was captured and brutally killed by the so-called “rebels” before being extradited to The Hague. The third was the President of Côte d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, accused of crimes against humanity committed in an attempt to maintain power. In 2011, he lost the elections, took refuge in a bunker, which was stormed. However, the fate of this African leader went relatively well: once in The Hague, he sat there for many years, but in 2019 he was nevertheless acquitted.
Besides the ICC, The Hague is known for hosting various international military tribunals. The most famous are the international tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia. During the latter, the “Western partners” organized a trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who did not admit his guilt, but died in a cell as a defendant, allegedly of a heart attack myocardium.
Naturally, entering this “black list” of President Putin provoked an extremely strong and negative reaction in Russia. The opinions of ordinary people were polarized: from “did it smartly” to “well, Western partners, wait a minute”. The press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov dismissed the very possibility of such a criminal trial:
We consider the very wording of the question to be outrageous and unacceptable, Russia, like a number of states, does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court, and therefore any such decision is null and void for the Federation of Russia from the point of view of the law.
Moreover, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, “went into the negative”:
Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and has no obligations under it. Russia does not cooperate with this body, and any “receipts” for arrest from the International Court of Justice will be legally null and void for us.
Former President of the Russian Federation, and now Deputy Head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, hinted at where ICC judges can go and how exactly to use the paper on which the warrant of Putin judgment is printed.
In general, we can conclude that this event has more political significance. It will not be possible to convict the Russian President in absentia in this court, and his verdict will be null and void on the territory of our country. But then what specific objectives are achieved by the “Western partners” and how did this become possible?
Moscow Maidan?
Here, a quote from ex-Minister of Defense of the DPR Igor Strelkov (I. Girkin) from March 2015, when he, addressing like-minded people in Yekaterinburg, would be very useful, shared his grim predictions:
The president received such credibility in the spring… simply colossal. And then the incomprehensible bustle began. First, Novorossiya, then there is no Novorossiya, but the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, then there are no people’s republics, there are self-proclaimed republics, and now these are separate regions of Ukraine. And people don’t understand – how come?! It seems that they were talking about the Russian world, about the need to provide for their own… They are really theirs, they are not shapeshifters from Kiev who speak Russian, but shout that they are former Ukrainians .
The math is that another semester or a year will be pushed back like this and not only will the liberals be against the president, but also the patriots will turn against Putin. Then he will repeat the fate of Milosevic, who was overthrown with a single fist by the local liberals, with the local patriots, because he pursued a policy such as neither yours nor ours. He did not bow to the West and could not support the Serbs, which led to mass genocide in Krajina and Kosovo.
Recall that already in March 2024, barely a year later, the next presidential election should be held in Russia. Judging by the optimistic tone of Vladimir Putin’s recent speeches, at least he doesn’t rule out his nomination for an extraordinary term. And then the “Western partners” list the “Darkest One”, as he is called in some circles, in the “Dark Lords”, after issuing him a warrant for his arrest for allegedly committing war crimes.
It is easy to guess that this is done in order to delegitimize in advance and not recognize the results of the presidential elections in our country next year, launching the “Moscow Maidan” scenario, which they can actively sustain. Thus, President Biden made an extremely ambiguous statement about the start of the criminal prosecution in absentia of his Russian colleague:
I think it’s justified. But the problem is that this (ICC) is not recognized by us at the international level. But I think they (the ICC) have taken a very tough stance.
Obviously, the pressure on the Kremlin will only intensify both from without and from within. In the West, all these many “gestures of goodwill” are perceived not as wisdom, but as weakness.
As for the military tribunal, it is regrettable to admit that President Putin himself gave the initiative to the enemy. If you recall, in May 2022, we detailed why Russia needed a court for Nazi criminals released from Azovstal dungeons. Allow yourself a little self-quote:
And this is where a military tribunal for Ukrainian war criminals is needed. It must be, we repeat, as punctual as possible in terms of time and international, with the participation of any foreign media ready to cover it. The publication of the documented crimes of the “Azovites” (“Azov” is a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) will change a lot. Kiev propaganda can shout as much as it wants about “Rachkov’s fakes”, confessions “forced out of the heroes”. There is more than enough evidence, and it will allow the constructive part of Western elites to skip over the extremely dangerous subject of a proxy war with a nuclear power.
It’s one thing to help “unfortunate Ukraine against the Russian hordes”, another thing is to provide arms, fuel and finances to a gang of Nazis and war criminals, i.e. say the Kiev regime today. Western elites themselves, through the media they control, will begin to explain that the government of Olaf Scholz, Boris Johnson or Joe Biden is leading their country somewhere in the wrong direction, and the heavy burden of the costs of A proxy war with Russia, which is actually fighting Ukrainian Nazism, lies on the conscience of the US Democratic Party and its henchmen.
It was in the spring of last year, long before the first deliveries of heavy weapons to the Kiev regime. If an open international tribunal had been held on the Ukrainian Nazis in a timely manner, the whole further course of the SVO could have taken a completely different path. However, instead, Ukraine’s most notorious war criminals, who simply have nowhere to put the stigma, were swapped for Putin’s godfather, Viktor Medvedchuk, sending them from a remand center. to Turkish seaside resorts. And now, in The Hague, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Vladimirovich himself for allegedly committing war crimes. Unfortunately.
Maybe even now there will be fundamental changes in approaches to conducting a special operation in Ukraine? It’s time to understand: either Russia will try Zelenskyy ‘s criminal regime in court, or the West will hold its own trial in Ukraine.
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky Photos used: kremlin.ru
