Vladimir Putin began a massive invasion of Ukraine starting in February 2022, a situation from which he does not know how to emerge victorious and in which he is carrying out genocidal practices, such as the forced transfer of children to Russia, in addition to the bombardments of cities and the massacres of civilians.
By Ricardo López Göttig
Vladimir Putin, since he embarked on the military adventure of invading Ukraine massively in February 2022, as a second stage after seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and promoting the separatism of two regions (Donetsk and Lugansk) in the east, has entered in his own labyrinth of horror. He does not know how to get out of his own trap, of the “special military operation” that was supposed to last a few days and would allow the removal of the Kiev authorities. Instead, he met unexpectedly resistance -for him- from the Ukrainian population and their government. It also strengthened the Atlantic Alliance.
In his need to obtain military achievements that would allow him to display himself as the great statesman, that he is not, he enabled a series of war crimes, such as the killing of civilians, the robbery of soldiers, rapes and the conscription of convicts as mercenaries of the Wagner Group. The most shocking thing is his genocidal policy to erase the cultural identity of Ukrainians and forcefully Russify them, the most aberrational practice being the compulsive transfer of children to Russia to re-educate them and give them new families. This is typified as one of the forms of genocide according to the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of 1948, in its Art. II e, and by the Rome Statute in its articles 6 (e), 8 (2) (a) (vii) and 8 (2) (b) (viii) regarding the forced deportation and illegal confinement of a part of the population by the occupying country in the context of war.
Based on testimonies and evidence gathered on site by prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court. In February of this year, the exhaustive report from the Yale University Humanitarian Research Laboratory was released, in which, based on testimonies, reports, geolocation of confinement and «re-education» camps, and even statements from officials involved, it was possible to conclude that at least six thousand Ukrainian children were forcibly deported to Russian territory to erase their previous language and culture, a very strong indoctrination in the neo-imperial ideology of Putinist Russia and the demonization of their nation of origin.
The report points out that these are not isolated measures by mayors or governors, but a decision at the highest level emanating from the autocratic regime in the Kremlin, since the systematization of deportations and the distribution of these confinement camps in the Caucasus, in Siberia and even on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, reveal a deliberate and designed plan. That is why prosecutor Karim Khan requested the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and for the Commissioner for Children’s Rights of the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova, to which the International Criminal Court agreed a few days ago.
Russia is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, but it has signed (like the USSR) the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of 1948. In fact, the diplomatic delegation of the USSR intervened in the discussion of the Convention to restrict the definition of genocide, which was originally much broader in the sense that the jurist Raphaël Lemkin, present at those deliberations, had coined. The precedent that he took into account to classify this aberrational practice as a crime had been during the genocide against the Armenian people in 1915, in the Ottoman Empire, when children up to ten years of age were kidnapped and handed over to Turkish families to give them a new identity, culture and religion.
This is consistent with what Vladimir Putin and his ultranationalist circles maintain regarding the non-existence of Ukrainian nationality, in line with what Tsarist Russia maintained. The request for Putin’s arrest is, in principle, an accusation and moral sanction for a leader who aspires to have global relevance, and confines him to move between some countries. In this labyrinth of horror, he takes his country with him, dragging it into the mire of opprobrium, crime, and a senseless war that is costing him thousands of human lives, resources, and discrediting the nation he claims to love so much.
*Originally published on Infobae in 27 May, 2023.