The International Criminal Court (ICC) has announced that it has issued two arrest warrants in the context of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

One of the orders is against the Russian president Vladimir Putinwhile the other is for the civil servant Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.

In a statement, the Court finds that Putin would be responsible for the war crime of the deportation and illegal transfer of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.

“The crimes have allegedly been committed in the occupied territory of Ukraine since at least February 24, 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin is individually criminally responsible for the above crimes,” it said.

Lvova-Belova is the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation and is accused of the same crimes as Putin.

The order was issued by Pre-Trial Chamber II. “The Chamber considered that it is in the interests of justice to authorize the Secretariat to verify the existence of the arrest warrants, the names of the suspects, the crimes for which the warrants have been issued and the modalities of responsibility imposed by the Court have been determined to be made public . Room”, was added.

Putin’s arrest warrant is “only the beginning” of justice, the head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, Andrii Yermak, immediately declared on Telegram.

The prosecutor’s office of the former Soviet republic, which has been facing a Russian invasion since February 2022, hailed a “historic decision”.

The court has not specified how it plans to carry out the arrest warrants, especially as Russia is not a member of the ICC.

“The decisions of the International Criminal Court are meaningless for our country, even from a legal point of view,” Russian diplomacy spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.

And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev compared the decision to toilet paper.

Russia is one of the countries that has not signed the Rome Statute, so it is unlikely that Putin will be arrested and transferred to the Court’s detention center in The Hague.