From the editor
The organisation that oversees the International Criminal Court has reacted angrily to threats and intimidation from Russia that came after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights Maria Lvova-Belova last Friday on suspicion of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. On his Telegram channel Dmitri Medvedev suggested firing a hypersonic missile at the ICC building in The Hague, and Russian authorities opened a criminal case against the ICC’s judges and prosecutor.
ICC President Piotr Hofmański announces that an arrest warrant has been issued for Putin
The Presidency of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute said in a statement on Wednesday that it “reaffirms its unwavering support for the International Criminal Court.” It said that it regrets Russia’s “attempts to hinder international efforts to ensure accountability for acts that are prohibited under general international law”. 123 countries are states parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC. Russia and the United States signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but have not ratified it.
Putin now finds himself in the ranks of Joseph Kony, Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the ICC but never caught, along with convicted defendants such as Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army warlord Dominic Ongwen and DRC warlords Thomas Lubanga Dyilo and Bosco Ntaganda. It is notable that South Africa, a state party to the Rome Statute, failed to arrest the then-president of Sudan, al-Bashir, when he visited the country in 2015, and that Putin is due to go to South Africa for the BRICS summit in August (although he may well not attend in person). A spokesperson for President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government was “cognisant of our legal obligation” to arrest Putin, which does not inspire enormous confidence. Russia has been actively courting South Africa lately, including holding joint naval exercises off the country’s coast.
Putin, or someone resembling him, demonstrated his contempt for the arrest warrant by visiting occupied Crimea and Mariupol – which he bizarrely drove himself around at night. During one of his brief staged meetings with joyful residents of new blocks of flats in the devastated city a woman could be heard shouting in the background, “None of this is true, it’s all for show!” The Russian dictator then tried to further boost his credibility by hosting Xi Jinping. The main result of the meetings between the two was that commentators speculated on whether Russia is now fully a vassal state of China: possibly not exactly what Putin intended.
The ICC’s move is a welcome step forward in holding Putin and his top associates accountable, and no doubt a morale boost for Ukrainians. While the wanted criminal may or may not have skulked around in Mariupol, Volodymyr Zelensky made a courageous visit to the front lines in Bakhmut to give medals to the city’s defenders, and also hung out with them in a petrol station. It has been reported by Bloomberg that Yevgeny Prigozhin is planning to scale back his Wagner mercenaries’ activities in Ukraine after their failure to take Bakhmut, and that he will be focusing more on propping up regimes in Africa. Perhaps he will have better luck there. Time is inexorably running out for all the war criminals, and it is to be hoped that more will soon be charged.
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New book analyses propaganda’s effect on Russians
The newly-published book Russia’s War by Jade McGlynn of King’s College London published by Polity Press methodically analyses what Kremlin propaganda narratives have been doing to Russian minds and why the majority of the country’s population supports the war or is indifferent to it. McGlynn, who interviewed many ordinary Russians and political commentators, even points out that the Kremlin would like to turn active war supporters into passive supporters because any form of political involvement could be a threat. As previously described by Peter Pomerantsev in his 2015 book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, McGlynn writes that the goal of propaganda is not to persuade people to believe something specific, but to confuse them and provoke their emotions so that they believe nothing. Besides, it is always preferable to believe your cause is just than that you are committing genocide.
McGlynn concludes: “Ultimately, I see Russia’s genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine as a deranged quest to prove an imagined essentialist vision of Russianness spurred by the fear and trauma of having overcome and address Russians’ lack of national ‘bondings’, to borrow Putin’s neologism. The war has been conceived and packaged based on an internal Russian World that often does not correlate to external reality but is shaped by Russians’ interpretations of it. As such, while the war is over or about Ukraine it cannot be solved in Ukraine because its roots lie in the Russian political and societal imagination of what their own country is and what it must be.”
Two Ukrainian soldiers get 25-year sentences in occupied territory
A court in the “Donetsk People’s Republic” has sentenced two Ukrainian soldiers, Andrii Nayden and Danila Kolenov, to 25 years in prison for allegedly killing civilians in Mariupol. The two defended the city in the Azovstal factory until their surrender last May. They were accused of opening fire on two men when they came out to a street on March 5.
Russian soldier who killed civilian gets suspended sentence for “fakes”, anti-war couple get real ones
A military court in Russia’s far east has given a 5 ½-year suspended sentence to Daniil Frolkin, 21, for “spreading fakes” after he confessed last year to killing Ukrainian civilian Ruslan Yaremchuk, 47 in the village of Andriivka outside Kyiv. “I just put a bullet through his forehead,” Frolkin had told a Russian media outlet. At least 40 of Andriivka’s 1,000 residents were killed during the two months at the start of the invasion when Russia occupied the village. Meanwhile a court in Konakovo, Tver Oblast, sentenced a couple, Lyudmila Razumova and Alexander Martynov, to seven and 6 ½ years in prison for “vandalism” and “spreading fakes” for their posts on VKontakte and anti-war slogans they wrote on walls.