Russian TV pundits went where Fox News dare not go. Russia’s rubber-stamp Duma, or parliament, actually did what House GOP committee chairmen Jim Jordan and Rep. James Comer could only dream of doing. Russian parliament members Andrey Klishas and Vladimir Dzhabarov both said Russia should immediately issue warrants for the arrest of all ICC judges, according to Yahoo News. Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, said the ICC should issue arrest warrants for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “his pack and their western backers.”
The official TASS news agency reported on March 20 that Russia’s Investigative Committee, sometimes described as the “Russian FBI,” had opened a criminal case against ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan and the three judges who issued the arrest warrant for Putin.
According to the committee, the case against Khan “was opened on charges of criminal prosecution of an innocent person with illegal charges of committing a grave or especially grave crime, as well as of plotting an attack on a foreign official enjoying international protection with the aim of aggravating international relations,” TASS reported. The judges were accused of illegal imprisonment and plotting an attack on a foreign official enjoying international protection with the aim of aggravating international relations.
On April 3, the independent Russian news outlet Meduza, now operating out of Latvia, reported that state Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin was encouraging legislators to support amendments to current legislation that would criminalize collaboration with the ICC or public calls to enforce its decisions on Russian territory. The proposed legislation would in effect ban the ICC’s activities in Russia.
Arrest warrant catches pro-Putin propagandists off guard
Russia media monitor Julia Davis, writing for The Daily Beast, said many pro-Putin propagandists “were taken completely off-guard” on March 17 when the arrest warrant for Putin was announced. Some had earlier expressed their concerns that the Russian leader might be charged with war crimes by the ICC, but thought this was possible only if Russia lost the war in Ukraine.
Radio host Sergey Mardan told The Daily Beast: “It seems to me like all of us were bewildered. I had the feeling that our entire system did not anticipate that they would make such a crazy and irreversible move.”
As to who was to blame for the charges, Trump’s supporters and Putin’s propagandists both wrongly pointed a finger at U.S. President Joe Biden for their dear leaders’ legal troubles. Olga Skabeyeva, known as “the iron doll of Putin TV,” simply posted a photoshopped picture captioned, “Putin goes to surrender to The Hague,” in which the Russian dictator is mounted on Biden’s back.
Putin’s TV pundits went into immediate overdrive after the ICC issued the arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova on March 17. ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said the court decided to make the existence of the warrants public “in the interests of justice and to prevent the commission of future crimes.” He said the execution of the warrants “depends on international cooperation.”
More than 120 countries have signed the agreement recognizing the ICC. Russia, China, India, and the United States are among the countries that are not parties to the agreement.
The ukrainian perspective
Zelenskyy issued a statement praising the ICC’s action as a “historic decision, from which historical responsibility will begin.”
“Over 16,000 cases of forced deportation of Ukrainian children by the occupier have already been recorded in criminal proceedings investigated by our law enforcement officers. But the real number of deportees may be much higher,” he said. “It would be impossible to commit such a criminal operation without the order of the top leader of the terrorist state.”
In mid-February, NPR wrote a story about the systematic network operated by the Putin regime to remove Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia:
The Russian government is operating a systematic network of at least 40 child custody centers for thousands of Ukrainian children, a potential war crime, according to a new report by Yale University researchers in a collaboration with the U.S. State Department in a program to hold Russia accountable.
The report, “Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-Education and Adoption of Ukrainian Children,” describes a system of holding facilities that stretch from the Black Sea coast to Siberia.
“This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor,” says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. “It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident.”
The Russian reaction to the arrest warrants was completely unhinged, going far beyond anything seen here in response to Trump’s indictment by a Manhattan grand jury. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump warned of “potential death and destruction” if he were indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He called on his supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK.”
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Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled Russian media organization RT, literally went ballistic over the Putin arrest warrant on her Telegram account. “I’d like to see a country that would arrest Putin under the ruling of The Hague. In about eight minutes, or whatever the [missile] flight time to its capital,” Simonyan wrote.
There was just one slight problem with that plan: She was basically calling for Putin to be nuked in any country that arrested him.
‘the era of civility is over’
Simonyan later appeared on Russia’s leading propaganda show, Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. She said Russia merely “took the children no one else wanted.” She called the ICC “sh-t” and said “the era of civility is over.” She then noted that Trump was likely to be arrested soon, and with a laugh, said: “I wish Trump the best of luck. His fate is of no interest to me.”
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev came up with another plan for a missile strike on his Telegram account. He said Russia should target the ICC building in the Hague. Medvedev, who is now deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, ranted: “The ICC judges got all worked up in vain. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘we’re brave, we’re not too chickensh-t to raise a hand against the largest nuclear power.’ Alas, gentlemen, everyone walks under God and rockets. It’s not hard to imagine the targeted use of a hypersonic ‘Onyx’ from the North Sea from a Russian ship on the Hague courthouse.”
Another “cunning plan.” Just launch a missile strike on a city in the Netherlands, a NATO member, and see what happens. It’s hard to believe that Medvedev was actually once considered by the West to be a moderate and a source of hope for better relations with Russia. Medvedev later resorted to potty humor in describing what should be done with the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin: “No need to explain how this [piece of] paper should be used,” adding a toilet paper roll emoji to his Twitter post.
Solovyov, Russian TV’s chief propagandist, initially came up with an outlandish but less belligerent proposal, suggesting on his Telegram account that the ICC instead should have nominated Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize for the so-called “rescue of the children of Donbas.”
“You parasitic comrades from The Hague should be nominating Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize because of these children. We in Russia have given children from Donbas shelter, food and education. And you couldn’t even accept Ukrainian refugees humanely in the European Union,” he wrote.
But Solovyov couldn’t restrain himself later from spewing his typical hateful bile on his TV propaganda show. As The Daily Beast reported:
Vladimir Solovyov called for arrest warrants to be immediately issued for all ICC judges, describing them as “bastards” and “degenerates” who should be hunted down and arrested by Russia’s intelligence services abroad. He demanded nuclear strikes against any country that might try to arrest Putin and added, “They should fear us!”
On Russian radio, Henry Sardaryan, dean at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, suggested that Russia should respond by initiating charges against Biden.
“To accuse us as a country of war crimes is laughable. … Why don’t we take the initiative and make a move that would force the entire American society to discuss for several days straight whether Joseph Biden will be arrested, whether he will end up in an electric chair or spend the rest of his days in faraway places?” Sardaryan said.
placing blame
Political commentator Yevgeny Satanovsky claimed that Biden “fervently approved of the arrest warrant” issued by the ICC for Putin. He railed: “We have made it all the way to Berlin and Paris before. I understand that Hague would be on our way to Paris. If things keep going this way, we might visit Washington as well.”
Trump biographer Kirill Benediktov, appearing on Mardan’s radio show, bemoaned the legal jeopardy that Trump and Putin both find themselves since they are not being accused of the most serious crimes. Instead of being charged with genocide, Putin is being accused of “sending children to a resort,” he said.
He added: “It’s possible that our Donald Fredovych Trump might end up in the slammer for the same kind of a crime for which people used to get released without a bond. Of course, it’s shocking.” (Trump was released without bond pending trial.)
With propagandists like these as well as near-total control of Russian media, Putin didn’t have to post his own rage messages on a failing social media platform as Trump did on Truth Social. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov simply said: “Russia, like a number of other countries, does not recognize this court’s jurisdiction, and accordingly, any decisions of this sort are null and void for Russia from a legal point of view.”
Putin thumbed his nose at the ICC just days after the arrest warrant was issued by visiting the scene of some of Russia’s worst war crimes: the occupied city of Mariupol. That’s where the Russian air force bombed a maternity hospital and a theater serving as a bomb shelter for women and children in March 2022. The Associated Press estimated that about 600 people were killed inside and outside the theater.
Footage released by Russian authorities showed Putin walking around the city after dark and meeting with some residents, CNN reported on March 20. Putin told one man, “We need to start getting to know one another better.”
Russia’s answer to the Duggars
Lvova-Belova, also indicted by the ICC, told the story of a group of 30 children brought to Russia from Mariupol, according to the AP. She said at first the children defiantly sang the Ukrainian national anthem and shouted, “Glory to Ukraine!” but now their criticism has been “transformed into love for Russia.” She herself adopted a teenager from Mariupol.
“Today he received a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation and does not let go of it!” she posted on Telegram on Sept. 21, along with a photo. “(He) was waiting for this day in our family more than anyone else.”
the ramifications for putin
In the leadup to Russia’s 2024 presidential election, the Kremlin planned to present Putin to voters as a “warrior against the West” and a “defender of Latin American and African countries against colonial oppression,” Meduza’s sources said. However, that plan would necessarily involve overseas trips that Putin will now likely be unable to take; because of the warrant against him, the Russian president could theoretically be detained in any of 123 countries. According to sources close to his administration, the Kremlin is unsure how it would be possible to “ensure the security” of the president given the new circumstances.
Although Putin has not visited any Western countries since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, he has regularly traveled abroad to participate in forums and summits in such countries as Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. These visits, sources told Meduza, were very important for domestic propaganda because pro-government media could tell citizens that Russia “still has more friends than detractors” and that it remains “one of the pillars of the multipolar world.”
Last October, the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa attempted to leave the ICC, but ended up revoking its request after the country’s high court deemed it unconstitutional. An unidentified government official told News 24:
“The Ramaphosa administration is the one that revoked the earlier decision to leave the ICC and decided the country would stay. So they can’t now go against their own decision by allowing Putin to come. They would not want to take decisions that might harm the interest of the country in the long term. South Africa does not want to be a pariah state.”
Four of South Africa’s lead trading partners—the U.S., Germany, Japan, and Britain—have imposed sanctions against Russia. China, its leading trading partner, has not.
According to a source who works in one of Russia’s federal ministries, the first thought that occurred to Putin’s most active supporters after the ICC’s announcement was that they could also become the targets of war crimes warrants. “It was an instant thought: that [we] might be facing not just sanctions but more serious things, and that it won’t be possible to leave the country,” he said, adding that he personally doesn’t expect to be prosecuted, but that members of the government “very well might.”
A political strategist close to the Kremlin gave a similar account: Russia’s top officials, he said, are actively speculating about who might be next, and what consequences that person might face. “The ICC warrant has divided the loyal and disloyal camps more clearly than before; it’s polarized them,” he said. “Now proximity to the president isn’t just talk; it’s a real step towards being prosecuted by international law enforcement.”
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