On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and Ombudsman for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

These warrants are normally kept secret, but the ICC issued a brief statement noting their issuance in light of the ongoing deportations of Ukrainian children.

Ukrainian law enforcement and human rights activists have been notifying the ICC of the war crime since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The Regional Center for Human Rights and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention were among the organizations lobbying the ICC.

Kateryna Rashevska, a human rights expert from the Regional Center for Human Rights, talks to The Village Ukraine about whether the deportation of Ukrainian children might prove that Russia is committing the crime of genocide, what the ICC arrest warrants mean for Putin and Lvova-Belova, and how Russian propaganda might affect forcibly adopted Ukrainian children.

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«The ICC would never have issued arrest warrants in the absence of clear evidence of these crimes»

– On 25 October 2022, the Regional Center for Human Rights and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention filed a report on the forced transfer of children with the International Criminal Court. You said that leading up to that, you submitted 14 inquiries to government agencies, carried out careful analytical work, met with representatives of the international community, and conducted 87 interviews.

– It’s difficult to be 100% sure that it was our report that set off this chain of events. We can’t say that, and I don’t think our role should be stressed. A French organization called Pour l’Ukraine, Pour Leur Liberte et la Notre (in partnership with lawyers from Vigo) filed a very similar report with the ICC soon after we did. Now we are working with them and they told us that they relied on our report before filing theirs. Ours was publicly available. Now we are working on a new joint report.

The ICC has initiated a proceeding based on the evidence they collected, while we – and other organizations – serve as one of the sources of this evidence.

Not once has the Russian Federation denied that it is deporting Ukrainian children. It claims humanitarian intentions when talking about these deportations, but the truth is simple: those children remain under Russian control, and they are subjected to a number of illegal treatments, including forced adoption into Russian families. And though Russia is trying to present this as guardianship or patronage, and not as adoption, this doesn’t matter to the ICC.

Forced transfer of children is a crime of genocide, and the Convention does not specify whether this transfer takes the shape of adoption or guardianship.

I can say with great certainty that the ICC would never have issued arrest warrants if it did not have clear evidence that these crimes had been committed. Our organization has worked with the ICC since 2016. During this time, we have filed numerous reports of crimes committed by the Russian Federation, but we have never yet seen an arrest warrant issued, even though the evidence we’d supplied has been used in [the ICC] reports on the situation in Ukraine.

I think the ICC was affected by several factors, including the fact that the international community was prepared to create circumstances which made it impossible for the ICC to avoid opening proceedings. Top media all around the world reported about Ukrainian children, international organizations issued various resolutions…

– When did your organization start documenting the deportation of children?

– We’ve been researching violations of children’s rights since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in late February 2022. We were already seeing lots of reports about the so-called “evacuation” of children from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics [DPR and LPR, illegal Russian-controlled occupation administrations in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts - ed.]. At the time, these were sporadic reports.

That April, the Russians handed over the first group of [Ukrainian] children for adoption in families in Moscow Oblast. That’s when it all became clear to me: forced transfer of children is one of the most easily proven elements of the crime of genocide in our case. From that moment on, we documented every such transfer we could find out about: through Lvova-Belova’s and Putin’s websites and through other open sources – often propaganda outlets, with some reputable media confirming those reports. By last June we already knew that we would file a report with the ICC.

It was quite a short report, stating that Maria Lvova-Belova, who has ties to Putin, was suspected in organizing the forced transfer of 386 (at the time) Ukrainian children to Russian families, which we could back up with solid evidence.

The crime of genocide was the broader context of our report, despite the fact that it is very difficult to prove. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to provide evidence that children had been deported. It’s important to also demonstrate that Russia intended to keep those children in Russia forever, thus destroying their Ukrainian identity. We have to prove this intent in the case of every single suspect. Fortunately, however, Russian officials provide ample evidence of their own criminal intent in their interviews and statements.

– What are the legal and political implications of these arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova?

– The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision to issue arrest warrants is binding on the 123 member states of the Rome Statute, as well as on Ukraine, which has recognized the jurisdiction of the court. So the joke circulating on social media that Putin will be hiding somewhere in the Carpathians [because Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute - ed.] doesn’t quite make sense.

– What about the US, they also haven’t ratified the Rome Statute, right?

– US law does not provide for the extradition of persons against whom the ICC has issued arrest warrants. US jurisdiction over war crimes prevails there. That is, if they detain such persons, they will be tried under [US] laws. The US operates in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction, which means it can prosecute international crimes regardless of where they were committed.

There is another procedure, though as far as I know the ICC has not used it yet: asking Interpol to add wanted persons to its database. Once those persons are detained, they must be brought to the ICC. Interpol has more member states than even the UN, 195.

Інфографіка «Слово і діло»

We appealed to the ICC, asking why they have not yet asked [the Interpol to include Putin and Lvova-Belova in its wanted database], but have not yet gotten a response. Sources told us the ICC is expected to do this as soon as possible.

I think that some countries that haven’t ratified the Rome Statute might say that the ICC decision is not binding, that Putin is a president and so this is political persecution. They might not comply with Interpol's decision, but the ICC member-states can’t sabotage its decisions. For example, the ICC Appeals Chamber decided that Jordan had to extradite Omar al-Bashir [the seventh president of Sudan, accused of several war crimes and ethnic cleansing related to the Darfur conflict - ed.].

Yes, we know that an entire state can’t be put behind the bars. But if it fails to comply with its obligations within an international organization, there are mechanisms to hold it responsible. The international legal order will remain this way for the time being, and probably in the future as well. It’s important to find more effective mechanisms to make sure states implement legally binding decisions.

«Will Putin be imprisoned in his lifetime? Unfortunately, I think he will die before that can happen»

– Lobbying the international community for such obvious actions like issuing an arrest warrant for war crimes takes a surprisingly long time. Does it make sense to expect that Putin and Lvova-Belova will be arrested and convicted in their lifetime?

– To be honest, Putin’s arrest warrant took me by surprise. The current head of a nuclear state…His arrest warrant is a very powerful political statement. From the legal point of view, there is clear evidence of his criminal actions.

Do I think that he will be imprisoned in his lifetime? Unfortunately, I think he will die before that can happen. If he is still alive when the armed conflict ends, and there is a political regime change, Putin will be handed over [to international authorities] in exchange for political or economic concessions, to show that Russia is once again a democratic state. Or in exchange for financial aid, financial aid, as it happened with Slobodan Milosevic.

As for Lvova-Belova, it is very likely that she will be handed over to the International Criminal Court. When the UK blocked her from presenting during a UN Security Council meeting, with countries staging a collective demarche during an Arria-formula meeting, she suffered a political death, as the representative of the Russian Federation and as the Ombudsman for Children’s Rights. Maria Lvova-Belova will no longer be able to present anywhere, except for organizations created by the Russian Federation.

Unlike Putin, Lviv-Belova can be extradited by her own regime. Her powers are quite limited. The Putin regime can claim that she has overstepped her remit, and say: here she is, you can put her on trial. She keeps saying that she was “thinking with [her] heart, not [her] head”, thus overstepping her official role. She can try that trick in the Hague. Moreover, Lvova-Belova was appointed to her position in violation of Russian law.

You also asked how long the investigation might take. The pace that we’ve seen so far is unusually fast for international justice. Even for justice on the national level.

Yes, Russians other than Putin and Lvova-Belova are involved in forcible deportation of [Ukrainian] children from Crimea, children whose whereabouts we can’t establish. For example, Anna Kuznetsova, former Russian Ombudsman for Children’s Rights – she is now heading a key decision-making body in Putin’s United Russia party. She is working on establishing legal grounds to “integrate” Ukrainian children into Russian society.

– According to the Children of War website, more than 19,000 Ukrainian children have been deported and only 361 have returned to Ukraine. Russian media claim that over 700,000 children have been deported. Do you have different numbers?

– We think the number is somewhere between 260,000 and 730,000. This huge range is because no one knows what the exact number is. Lvova-Belova, for example, talked about 730,000 [Ukrainian children deported to Russia].

As far as different groups of children are concerned, according to the data from Ukrainian organizations, 4,390 orphans have been deported, though Lvova-Belova said there were only around 2,000 of those kids, with 857 of them still remaining in five different Russian regions, and the rest allegedly taken back to the so-called DPR and LPR. I doubt she can be trusted.

As for the children that have allegedly been taken to a resort in Russia, [Russian Education Minister Sergey] Kravtsov said around 30,000 children were taken from the recently occupied territories, and some of them have been brought back. We have deduced that several thousand children or so still haven’t been brought back to Ukraine.

In some cases, children that were attending camps in Ukraine were taken to the Russian Federation and enlisted in Russian educational establishments, in violation of even Russian laws.Those kids were told they would live in a dorm and study at a local school. They were forced to attend classes but not given any food. Those kids bought their own food using the money they received from the Ukrainian government, college stipends for their studies in Ukraine. Around 1,000 of the deported kids had disabilities.

Children of War site statistics, April 24

– How is repatriating children back to Ukraine negotiated? There is no single mechanism or agreement for this process, as far as I know.

– Lvova-Belova said that parents or close relatives have to be the ones taking the child back [to Ukraine]. But what if the kid doesn’t have parents or close relatives? She said that [Russia] will not give orphans back “because [those] children know who has been bombing Donbas for eight years”.

The 45 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) member states, including Ukraine, invoked the so-called Moscow Mechanism in March 2022. An expert mission will gather evidence on international crimes committed during the war in Ukraine. The Russian Federation has to give the experts from the OSCE mission access to the information they need. Though I suspect that the Russian Federation would like to give OSCE representatives a show visit to the deported children and likely insist on their own conditions for giving these children back to Ukraine. As far as I know, though, OSCE experts are not going to go to Russia.

«States struggle to recognize and take responsibility for international crimes, even in peacetime»

– How have other countries dealt with similar cases?

– Even developed countries have had cases of forced deportation of children in their past. This was called all sorts of things: assimilation, acculturation, and so on. The victims were often children from Indigenous peoples and tribes, with the colonizers perpetrating the deportations.

For example Canada only officially recognized that it carried out what it referred to as “cultural genocide” over Indigenous children who had been taken from their families and placed in Canada’s state-sponsored “residential school” system, where they were forced to adopt Catholic faith and abused, with the stated goal of making them “real Canadian citizens”. Similar instances occurred in the US and Australia.

States struggle to recognize and take responsibility for international crimes, even in peacetime. Because it’s not physical destruction that’s at stake, but rather forcibly taking children from one group and placing them in another, thus preventing them from passing on their national [as well as ethnic or cultural] heritage to their own children. They might even become enemies of their own birth nation or group. This is what we’re seeing in the Russian Federation: [Ukrainian] children who only recently chanted “Glory to Ukraine!”, sang the Ukrainian anthem, and hated Putin, are now saying they “love Russia.” The Russian Federation is acting like a perfect criminal: its actions are prohibited by the [Rome] Statute.

– Evidence of forced deportation and adoption of children emerged after the collapse of Nazi Germany. Some of those children found out they were deported and adopted much later in life, some even when they were quite old.

– You know what the worst thing is? The children who had been transferred to Nazi families don’t have the legal status of victims and don’t receive any payments or benefits that other World War II victims do. The thinking was: they were placed in families, not concentration camps, and they were treated well. Yes, they were treated well – those were the official requirements in Göring and Himmler’s decrees.

– Is the influence of Russian propaganda on Ukrainian children who had been adopted in the Russian Federation reversible? Lots of children are already living in Russian families. They’re being treated differently by different families.

– When it comes to Ukrainian children adopted in the Russian Federation, we have documented cases of both good and bad treatment of forcibly deported kids. In some cases, adopted parents texted the child after the kid had been returned to Ukraine: “Come back, Seryozha, or we’ll be in trouble.” And there are also cases of children getting really attached to their new parents. Kids can’t put on an act like that – even for Russian TV.

Yes, it’s possible that some of the children will love their new Russian parents. But that’s not the point. The point is to observe the principle of the child’s best interest, which was developed, as you’ve already mentioned, when the children abducted by Nazis were being repatriated. This principle was further developed during the so-called Yugoslav Wars, and later during the Syrian civil war.

This principle states that it is against a child’s best interest to remain in a family in the aggressor state. So yes, these children will be separated from their adoptive parents.

Yes, this might cause trauma, and that’s why it’s important to develop a person-centered approach to return each of these children, to minimize harm.

After World War II there were instances of parents who had survived German concentration camps becoming friends with their child’s adoptive parents, who had essentially saved the child’s life. If Ukrainian parents want to befriend their child’s Russian adoptive parents – they are free to do so. But I suspect this will not happen very often. Meanwhile, Ukraine has a duty to repatriate its citizens, according to its international obligations. And it will repatriate them.