Russia War in Ukraine: International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for PUTIN

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

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

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

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

The scale of the suffering and indiscriminate attacks on men, women and children have left at least 7,000 civilians killed and nearly eight million Ukrainians fleeing to countries across Europe.

In March last year, a month after the start of the war, Russian soldiers dropped a series of random bombs on civilian areas, causing death and destruction.

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

A week later, Russian planes again dropped missiles on civilian areas – this time on the Donetsk Regional Theater in Mariupol, which housed hundreds of civilians and had “children” written outside in large white letters. The attack killed at least a dozen people and injured dozens more.

The attacks on civilians continue. On January 14, a Russian missile attack 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, shrouding cities in darkness and leaving millions without heating during the bitterly cold winter months.

In the early months of the war, Russian troops were forced to withdraw from towns and cities across Ukraine – but as they retreated, the war crimes they committed against civilians became apparent.

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 of the Kiev and Kharkiv regions – including the cities of Bucha, Irpin and Izyum.

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

The survivors have described how Russian soldiers held them for months and subjected them to electric shocks, waterboarding and beatings.

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

In many cases, the Russian soldiers shot or threatened to kill the women’s husbands as soon as they tried to defend their wives and prevent 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…