Stamina needed to get justice for Ukraine, says prosecutor

The prosecutor for the international criminal court (ICC) said yesterday that the world needed to “have the stamina” to enforce international law by trying those accused of war crimes in Ukraine.

Karim Khan also challenged the Kremlin to allow Ukrainian children abducted by Russia to return home, four days after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, on the grounds that they had overseen the forcible transfer of thousands of children.

“This is a moment of crisis,” Khan said. “I don’t think that is hyperbole … we need to have the stamina to deliver on justice.”

Russia mounted a symbolic prosecution of its own against the ICC yesterday and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev threatened to target The Hague, where the ICC is based, with supersonic nuclear missiles, telling judges to look carefully at the sky.

Speaking in London, Khan said it was a sombre moment that for the first time the leader of a country that was a permanent member of the UN security council was being charged with war crimes.

Alongside Khan, Ukraine’s justice minister, Denys Maliuska, and its prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, continued to demand that Putin and his allies be charged with the crime of aggression on the basis that Russia had launched an attack on Ukraine that was not in self-defence and lacked authorisation by the UN security council.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, flew into Moscow yesterday, the first world leader to shake Putin’s hand since the warrant was issued, with Beijing saying the warrant reflected double standards on the ICC’s behalf.

Defending himself from the charge of double standards or western hypocrisy, Khan said: “What we oppose are actions that have been deemed criminal since Nuremberg. We don’t just whisper pious nothings, but we show those who need it most that the law provides shelter when even their own shelter is decimated under bombs that cause massive devastation.”

Russia rejects the ICC charges, calling the move unacceptable and saying it had no legal force as it is not an ICC member.

Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has brought thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, presenting it instead as a humanitarian effort to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.