Strikes on multiple fronts, including capital Kyiv and the western Lviv province, come hours after ICC’s announcement.
The Ukrainian Air Force said in the early hours of Saturday that Ukraine was attacked by 16 Russian drones on Friday night.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against
Vladimir Putin was historic and blamed the Russian president for the deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of war crimes for his alleged involvement in the abduction of children from Ukraine.
Putin and a Russian official, Maria Alekeseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights, are accused of deporting
people, particularly children, from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia beginning Feb. 24, 2022, the start of the Russian invasion
of Ukraine.
A prosecutor presented the allegations, which were reviewed by independent judges who decided “there is a sufficient reason to
believe that these crimes have been committed by these persons and as a result of this consideration, the arrest warrant was issued by the court today,” ICC President Piotr Hofmanski told VOA.
U.S. officials initially appeared hesitant to publicly cheer the ICC action, given past American antipathy for the court. The United
States was one of only seven countries (along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen) to vote against the court’s
establishment in 1998 at the United Nations.
Considering the sometimes “very tense” history between Washington and The Hague, “it would not be surprising that it would take them a moment to think through their position,” Leila Sadat, a Yale Law School fellow and international criminal law
professor at the University of Washington in St. Louis, told VOA.
The U.S. ambassador at the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield,walked away from reporters on Friday when asked to comment
about the court’s arrest warrant for Putin.
