International Court issues warrants for top Russian military officials

RIGA, Latvia - The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two top Russian military figures who led the war on Ukraine for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, it announced Tuesday.

Former defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, were named in the warrants for multiple attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, in actions that the court alleged amounted to Russian state policy.

The court - to which Russia is not a signatory - last year issued indictments against President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, over the removal of Ukrainian children to Russia, a war crime.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the indictments as a warning to all that “justice for Russian crimes against Ukrainians is inevitable.”

Shoigu and Gerasimov “are accused of committing heinous crimes against civilians in Ukraine during Russia’s reckless bombing of Ukrainian critical civilian infrastructure,” Zelensky said in a statement posted on X. “These barbaric missile and drone strikes continue to kill people and inflict damage across Ukraine.”

The court has no powers of enforcement and relies on the 124 nations that are signatories to the Rome Statute that established the court to arrest those indicted on a charge of war crimes or crimes against humanity if they visit their territories.

Shoigu was defense minister until Putin removed him last month and appointed Andrei Belousov in his place. Shoigu, a Putin loyalist, was instead appointed as head of Russia’s Security Council.

According to the indictment, Shoigu and Gerasimov were responsible for the war crimes of directing attacks at civilian objects and “causing excessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects … and the crime against humanity of inhumane acts.”

The indictment alleges that Russia carried out multiple actions against civilian infrastructure that impacted Ukrainian civilians. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects intentionally caused great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health, thus bearing criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts,” it says.

The ICC indictment also cites alleged crimes from at least Oct. 10, 2022, until at least March 9, 2023, when Russia carried out a large number of strikes against Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure.

The indictment says there are reasonable grounds to believe the two officials bore “individual responsibility” for the alleged crimes either by ordering them or failing to control Russia’s armed forces.

The details of the case were secret to protect witnesses and safeguard investigations, the court statement said.

The Russian Security Council immediately dismissed the significance of the charges against Shoigu, calling them “null and void” and “part of the West’s hybrid war against Russia.”

But Ukrainian officials praised the indictments as an important step to ensure accountability for war crimes, in a conflict where massive amounts of video footage, much of it documenting actions that could be war crimes, have emerged.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin expressed gratitude to Ukrainian investigators, who he said had helped to build the case. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said the ICC could not have moved forward in the investigations without the help of Ukrainian prosecutors.

Since Oct. 10, 2022, Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, launching waves of attacks against power grids and power stations across the country, causing widespread damage, disrupting the country’s energy supply and depriving many people of heat and electricity during the winter months.

This spring, Russia once more began attacking Ukraine’s power grids, forcing it to implement rolling blackouts to save energy starting in mid-May.

Last week, Zelensky said that Russia had damaged or destroyed more than half of Ukraine’s power capacity.

Since the start of the invasion, Russia has also launched strikes on residential areas and civilian buildings, including shopping malls, restaurants and hotels. In recent months, Kharkiv has borne the brunt of Russia’s attacks.

The ICC’s mandate is to protect civilians, including vulnerable women, children, elderly and disabled people, from war crimes and to ensure that even powerful figures including national leaders are not beyond the reach of the law, given the frequent reluctance of nations to prosecute their own officials.

In practice, the court has often run into severe headwinds attempting to fulfill its role. For example, it has never been able to arrest and try the former president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, after he was indicted in 2009 and 2010 for alleged genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes.

In 2016, the court abandoned its case against current Kenyan President William Ruto, and in 2014 the court dropped charges against his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta. They were charged over post-election violence in 2007 and 2008, but the cases fell apart after Kenyan government officials failed to cooperate and witnesses disappeared or changed their testimony.

In May, Khan announced he had applied to the court for arrest warrants to be issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza during and after the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, authorities have prosecuted hundreds of Russian citizens who protested or commented on social media about Russian military actions in Ukraine under repressive wartime censorship laws that make it illegal to discredit the military.

Russia has also hardened its actions against foreign journalists, arresting Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, 32, in March last year and accusing him of spying, a charge that he, his employer and the United States have firmly rejected.

He has been charged with allegedly collecting classified information about the Uralvagonzavod military factory in the Sverdlovsk region and his trial, which is closed, begins in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on Wednesday.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday announced it would block the websites in Russia of 81 European media outlets from 25 countries, in retaliation for a European Union decision to block three Russian outlets - RIA Novosti, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Izvestia.

A German correspondent Björn Blaschke, from German radio station WDR, was convicted of discrediting the military in February over a 2022 social media post on the impact of Russia’s war on food security in Africa.

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Khurshudyan reported from Kyiv and Ebel from London.