Russia-Ukraine War Latest News: The arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin may not actually lead to his arrest but it shows the recognition of alleged war crimes committed by his soldiers in Ukraine. The International Criminal Court has accused Putin of targeting civilians with forced deportation among other things. At the heart of the warrant is the way Russian authorities dealt with Ukrainian children.
A Reuters report quoting Kyiv officials said the data collected by Ukraine gives a critical insight into the ways in which Moscow mistreated the Ukrainian children.
1: The Russians asked the families in the occupied areas to send children to camps across the border for ‘holidays’. But these children never returned to their families.
2: Other times, the kids were simply taken away from the care homes located in the occupied areas.
3: The Russian soldiers are also accused of separating the children from their parents at key checkpoints by using a dubious ‘filtration’ process. These checkpoints served as the gateway for people fleeing the occupied areas into Russian territory.
4: In some instances, the Russians clamped down certain laws in the occupied territories to take away the parental rights of the civilians.
5: And at last, the Ukrainian authorities say that the children were taken away in case one or both parents or any other adult in the family was killed during the conflict.
Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, said that roughly 16,000 children were forcibly taken away by Russian authorities. The families in the occupied regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson are worst affected.
Since the war began last year, Kyiv has managed to get custody of 308 kids, the Reuters report said.
Unfazed by the arrest warrant, the Russian President will meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during an important meeting on Monday. The visit comes at a time when Russia is facing increased isolation from the Western powers. Beijing is trying to project Xi Jinping as the ‘global peacemaker’. Xi is being seen as someone who can broker an end to the Ukraine war.