Here’s what the ICC arrest warrant for Putin has accomplished in the past yearHere’s what the ICC arrest warrant for Putin has accomplished in the past year

The final day of the Russian presidential election coincides with the anniversary of the utterly meaningless move against the incumbent

One year ago, on 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued two politically important – to put it neutrally – arrest warrants, one for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the other for Maria Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights, a position within the Office of the President.

The warrants reflected that the ICC, to be precise its Pre-Trial Chamber following the court’s Prosecutor Karim Khan, found what it considered “reasonable grounds to believe that President Putin and Ms. Lvova-Belova bear criminal responsibility for the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” Khan further argued that “these acts… demonstrate an intention to permanently remove these children from their own country.” In sum, the arrest warrants depicted an extensive kidnapping operation during wartime.

Public – and published – opinion in the West preponderantly celebrated the warrants as not only justified but salutary. They were supposed to promote the protection of civilians during war and put pressure on Russia by increasing its international isolation, a geopolitical aim that the West was struggling to achieve.

As the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, this was “the first time the leader of a nuclear superpower” was “called to account before the court, an independent institution established … to end impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.” The American President, Joe Biden, thought the ICC operation made “a very strong point.” Not to be outdone, reliably extremist Senator Lindsey Graham and equally reliably conventional publicist Fareed Zakaria both displayed historical illiteracy by absurdly claiming that Putin was copying Hitler. Historian here: Hitler’s victims would have disagreed.

Some Western commentators warned that the warrants were unlikely to be enforced and that convictions were even less likely. Yet such reservations did not challenge the overall Western consensus that the ICC move was both correct and, in some way, useful, even if

mostly in a “symbolic,” that is, really, political manner.

Russian officials, unsurprisingly, responded very differently. They rejected both the charges as “null and void” and the jurisdiction of the ICC. Russia, like the US, is (after withdrawing in 2016) not a signatory state to the 1998 Rome Statute, on which the court is based.

Hence, the decisions of the ICC have “no meaning for Russia,” as Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it. Russia even started its own investigation against members of the ICC, and later Graham.

Russian commentators, as well as dissenting voices in the West, also denounced the ICC warrants as an abuse of judicial procedures for political purposes, amounting to a form of information war or lawfare against Russia. The Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal, for instance, investigated the ICC’s evidence and found that it was fundamentally flawed. Their work was thorough, and their findings were detailed as well as, for the ICC and Karim Khan personally, deeply embarrassing.

The key point was that Khan had based much of his case on a report produced by the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale University, an organization “funded and guided” by the US State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.” In addition, the executive director of HRL, Nathaniel Raymond, started contradicting himself. Whereas he had initially made grandiloquent public statements in the Graham-Zakaria register – even including a bizarre reference to “genocide” – he greatly toned down his allegations once challenged by investigative reporters. No wonder, as the HRL report was weakly sourced, and its content actually contradicted Raymond’s inflammatory rhetoric.

In other words, the ICC prosecutor had relied on a tainted source that crudely served the information warfare purposes of Russia’s main geopolitical opponent, to such a degree that even its executive director ultimately got cold feet. That this badly undermined Karim’s case and his reputation as a professional needs no further belaboring. Washington will be Washington, but why should the ICC join it? If, that is, it seeks to be respected.

In legal terms, the cases have already been shown to be shoddy. They are unlikely to succeed, and not only because of practical and political obstacles, but, more importantly, because there is much more politics than evidence behind them. In terms of those politics, ironically, they have also failed: The warrants have not led to or increased the isolation of Russia or its president. If they have weakened anything, then it is the standing of the ICC, and, in particular, of its Prosecutor Karim Khan. The ICC is already struggling with a deserved reputation as a willing tool of Western geopolitics, while turning a blind eye to the West’s crimes. The attempt to engage in geopolitical lawfare on Russia during a Western proxy war against it has made this image problem worse. Whether a coincidence or not, the fact that one of the judges who issued the warrant for the Russian president has just become the ICC’s new president will only deepen this impression of bias.