Russia Ukraine war: International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for PUTIN

The International Criminal court has today issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his barbaric invasion of Ukraine. 

The ICC accused Putin of being responsible for the war crimes his troops have committed in Ukraine. 

In the year since, the world has watched in horror as Putin’s soldiers have dropped missiles on apartment buildings, tortured civilians before shooting them dead, and systematically raped women and girls. 

Men, women and children – the youngest known victim being a 14-year-old boy – have been executed by Russian soldiers, their bodies thrown into deep troughs dug into the ground.

The scale of the suffering and the indiscriminate targeting of men, women and children has seen at least 7,000 civilians killed and nearly eight million Ukrainians flee to countries across Europe.

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The International Criminal court has today issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his barbaric invasion of Ukraine

In March last year, a month into the war, Russian soldiers unleashed a series of indiscriminate bombs on civilian areas, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

During a three-month siege in the southern city of Mariupol, Russian forces levelled the city and killed hundreds of civilians in missile attacks. The world watched in horror as Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital on March 9, killing a pregnant woman and her baby, and wounding at least 17 people.

A week later, Russian aircraft again dropped missiles on civilian areas – this time on the Donetsk Regional Theatre in Mariupol, which was housing hundreds of civilians and had ‘children’ written in large white letters outside. At least a dozen people were killed and scores more were injured in the attack.

The attacks on civilians continue. On January 14, a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in the city of Dnipro killed at least 44 people, including five children, and injured 79 people.

Since October, Russian forces have also repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, plunging cities into darkness and leaving millions without heat during the bitterly cold winter months.

In the early months of the war, Russian forces were forced to retreat from towns and cities across Ukraine – but as they retreated, the war crimes they have committed against civilians has become clear.

Since March, mass graves have been filled with the bodies of thousands of civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs, along with torture chambers discovered in liberated areas of Ukraine in areas across the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions – including the cities of Bucha, Irpin and Izyum. 

Mr Zelensky was visibly emotional and stood motionless as he surveyed the scene of utter devastation he encountered when he visited Bucha in April last year, with dozens of bodies shot at close range lying on the empty streets.

The civilians who survived have detailed how Russian soldiers detained them for months and subjected them to electric shocks, waterboarding and beatings.

Horrific testimonies – including how Russian soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Ukrainian mother, sexually abused her husband and made the couple have sex in front of them before raping their four-year-old daughter – have also shown how Putin’s men have used rape as a weapon of war.

In many cases, the Russian soldiers would shoot dead the women’s husbands – or threaten to do so – as soon as they tried to defend their wives and stop them from being raped.

Russian soldiers have also detained more than 20,000 Ukrainian ‘hostages’ and sent them to Russia, Ukraine’s human rights envoy said in January. 

This is a breaking news story, more to follow…