[Source: tasnimnews.com]

With large-scale protests against war and austerity engulfing the streets of Western (EU) countries, the political elite, in full-fledged panic mode, launched a propaganda stunt by indicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Lvova-Belova is the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights. She and Putin are accused of kidnapping children from what the West calls Ukraine, but what according to new Russian law, obtained by a referendum, is actually now part of Russia.

Maria Lvova-Belova
Mary Lvova-Belova posing inside a Russian Orthodox church. [Source: telegraph.co.uk]

In retaliation for the arrests, Russia’s top investigative body has opened a criminal case against the ICC prosecutor and judges who issued the arrest warrant, which Russia claims is illegitimate.

The Kremlin called the issuance of the ICC warrant outrageous and legally void, as Russia is not a signatory to the treaty that created the ICC.

Allegations Moscow Grabs Ukrainian Children

The ICC claims as evidence, regarding the abduction of children, comes from an October 2022 Associated Press (AP) article by Sarah El Deeb, Anastasia Shvets and Elizaveta Tilna titled: “How Moscow grabs Ukrainian children and makes them Russian.”

Filled with photographs of children who had allegedly been abducted, the article begins with the paragraph: “Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry.”

The article then goes on to claim that many children, like Lopatkina’s kids, were abducted by Russian forces in the Donbas and taken to Russia; Russia points out that it was actually saving the kids since they had been orphaned by the war and subjected to bombing by the Ukrainian army.

Children from an orphanage in the Donetsk region, eat a meal at a camp in Zolotaya Kosa, the settlement on the Sea of Azov, Rostov region, southwestern Russia, Friday, July 8, 2022. Russia's open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is emerging as one of the most explosive issues of the war. (AP Photo)
Abducted children featured in the AP story. [Source: apnews.com]

Drawing from interviews with parents, children and officials in both Ukraine and Russia, email and letters, Russian documents and Russian state media, the AP claimed to have found evidence that many of the kids had been taken without their consent, had been lied to by Russian soldiers who said they were not wanted by their parents, had been used for propaganda and were given to Russian families and given Russian citizenship.

A person in a suit and tie

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Stephen Rapp [Source: wikipedia.org]

Stephen Rapp, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Obama administration, who is advising Ukraine on prosecutions, is quoted as saying that “it’s not something that happens spur of the moment on the battlefield. And so your ability to attribute responsibility to the highest level is much greater here.” He added: “Even where parents are dead, their children must be sheltered, fostered or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia.”

Petro Andryushchenko [Source: helsinki.org]

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, is also quoted as saying: “It is absolutely a terrible story. We don’t know if our children have an official parent or [step-parents] or something else because they are forcibly disappeared by Russian troops.”

Maria Lvova-Belova is quoted in the piece saying that more than 1,000 children from Ukraine were in Russia and that these children need Russia’s help to overcome trauma that has left them sleeping badly, crying at night and drawing basements and bomb shelters.

At first, she said, a group of 30 children brought to Russia from the basements of Mariupol defiantly sang the Ukrainian national anthem and shouted “Glory to Ukraine!” But now their criticism has been transformed into a “love for Russia,” and she herself has taken in one, a teenager.

Lvova-Belova’s comments indicate that the children are being used as political pawns. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the majority actually had parents or a home to return to after being displaced by the war.

Finian Cunningham [Source: wikispooks.com]

Irish journalist Finian Cunningham wrote that “Russia has evacuated thousands of civilians, including children, from the regions formerly of eastern Ukraine that are now part of the Russian Federation for the precise reason of taking them out of harm’s way from the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev, whose forces have been indiscriminately shelling the Donbass and other areas.”

The AP article leaves out that the majority of atrocities in Mariupol were committed by the Ukrainian Army, including especially the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, making the children victims of the Ukrainian and not Russian government.

Many of the children have been taken furthermore from regions that are now actually part of Russia (which has acquired new territory in the war).

Children from different orphanages from the Democratic People’s Republic (DPR) in Camp Zolotya Kosa, on the Azov Sea, July 8, 2022. [Source: apnews.com]

In the past, Putin and Russia have been accused of stealing children from Lugansk, which is also now part of Russia.

As a journalist, I visited Mariupol several times in 2022, when there was still heavy fighting going on, in the harbor and the city center.

Many people in the city told me that they were forced to live in cellars for weeks because of Ukrainian Army shelling and rampaging of the Azov Battalion, which was engaged in heavy fighting with the Russians and then hid in the Azov Steel plant before surrendering in May 2022 (in June 2022, I was the first Dutch journalist to visit the plant).

People waiting for food, water and aid, Mariupol city center, April 2022. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

President Putin paid an unexpected visit to Mariupol and the Donbas last weekend after being accused by the ICC, visiting new apartment blocks. Before that, he had visited Crimea, which declared itself in a referendum nine years ago to be part of Russia.

President Putin visiting Mariupol and speaking with residents of an apartment complex. [Source: vk.com]

The West’s Double Standards Continue

The West calls the ICC arrest warrant a big step in condemning President Putin. However, Finian Cunningham wrote that “if anyone should be facing prosecution for war crimes, it is the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Nazi-adulating commander, as well as their sponsors: American, European and NATO leaders.”

“The Kiev regime,” Cunningham continues, “has been shelling the Donbass for nine years since the CIA coup brought to power this fascist junta. NATO trained the Azov Battalion and other Waffen SS-style paramilitaries, which are firing U.S. supplied HIMARS rockets with the help of American, British, French, German, Canadian and Polish mercenaries. Russia intervened in Ukraine last year to put an end to the genocide that Washington and Europe along with their Western media are complicit in.”

A Kangaroo Court

A picture containing person, person, suit, necktie

Description automatically generated
Slobodan Milošević being transported to court hearing at The Hague. His arrest was very clearly political, as Croat and Muslim leaders who oversaw major war crimes in the Balkans conflict and fueled the break-up of Yugoslavia with U.S. and German backing were never prosecuted, nor were Clinton administration officials who sanctioned the bombing of Kosovo under fraudulent pretexts, resulting in the deaths of at least 500 civilians. [Source: forum.metropolitico.it]

In the past, we have seen how the ICC has been used as a political tool to bludgeon political opponents of the U.S. and West, like Serbian socialist leader Slobodan Milošević who was falsely accused of genocide right after he had been ousted in a CIA-backed color revolution.

The ICC has also gone after many African leaders who have resisted U.S. imperial designs—like former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, and Hutu leaders in Rwanda allied with France against the U.S./UK-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), whose leader, Paul Kagame, has never been prosecuted for his central role in the Rwandan genocide and invasion and plunder of the Congo.

Finian Cunningham noted that the week of the indictment of Putin marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. “[This was] a war that killed as many as one million civilians and destroyed a nation, based on outright fabricated lies, lies that Biden as a then-senator helped to promote. The main architects of those crimes, George W. Bush and Tony Blair have never been mentioned even in passing by lawyers at the ICC. Why is that? Because the ICC is a Kangaroo Court and a political plaything that Western imperialism uses to pursue political enemies.”

More U.S. Hypocrisy

After the indictment against Vladimir Putin was announced, President Biden said that, while the ICC also held no sway in the U.S., the issuance of the warrant “makes a very strong point.”

Logo

Description automatically generated
[Source: redbubble.com]

“He’s clearly committed war crimes,” he told reporters.

But if the latter was true, so had the U.S. To avert prosecution, both houses of the U.S. Congress have approved a law that provides for an invasion of a NATO partner country if American citizens are indicted before the ICC in The Hague.

All the illegal wars the U.S. has waged in recent years, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, to name a few, have resulted in the deaths of millions of people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, some of whom can now be seen wandering around in Europe.

Then there is Guantánamo Bay, the largest modern U.S. concentration camp, in Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And, of course, do not forget Camp Bucca, also in Iraq, where terrorists such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were trained and educated by the CIA.

[Source: dailydot.com]

Does President Putin have anything to fear from the ICC, of which the great superpowers of the world, such as the U.S., are not members? No, I don’t think so. The West is awash in hypocritical positions, clinging to a unipolar, neocolonial world.


CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptionsorders and donations from readers like you.

Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism

Click the whistle and donate

When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.

CovertAction Magazine does not receive corporate or government sponsorship. Yet, we hold a steadfast commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as increase the caliber of this work.

Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and enter the amount and your credit or debit card information.

CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your gift is tax-deductible for federal income purposes. CAI’s tax-exempt ID number is 87-2461683.

We sincerely thank you for your support.


Disclaimer: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s). CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI), including its Board of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff, volunteers and its projects (including CovertAction Magazine) are not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.

Differing viewpoints: CAM publishes articles with differing viewpoints in an effort to nurture vibrant debate and thoughtful critical analysis. Feel free to comment on the articles in the comment section and/or send your letters to the Editors, which we will publish in the Letters column.

Copyrighted Material: This web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a not-for-profit charitable organization incorporated in the State of New York, we are making such material available in an effort to advance the understanding of humanity’s problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. You can read more about ‘fair use’ and US Copyright Law at the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Republishing: CovertAction Magazine (CAM) grants permission to cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original CovertAction Magazine article. Also, kindly let us know at info@CovertActionMagazine.com. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: info@CovertActionMagazine.com.

By using this site, you agree to these terms above.


About the Author

1 COMMENT

Leave a Reply