The President of Ukraine, Volodímir Zelenski, has assured this Thursday that the agreement signed by his country for the opening on Ukrainian soil of a representative office of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will allow a better investigation of war crimes committed by Russia .
“Today we have a result that we have been working on for some time. An agreement was signed on the opening of a representative office of the International Criminal Court in Ukraine,” Zelensky said in his usual late-night speech.
According to the Ukrainian leader, this initiative “will allow international justice to be even more active in investigating the crimes of the Russian army” on Ukrainian soil.
Therefore, the President of Ukraine has expressed its gratitude to “the entire team of the International Criminal Court, the Office of the Attorney Generalour partners, all who help in the work of international justice, the investigation of Russian crimes against Ukraine and the Ukrainians.”
On the 17th, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin as “suspected perpetrator” of the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children and their transfer from occupied areas in Ukraine to Russiawhich is a war crime under this court’s treaty, the Rome Statute
This Thursday it was also announced that the European Commission (EC) and Poland will organize a conference with the purpose of helping to locate the 16,200 Ukrainian children deported by Russia to its territory during that country’s war of aggression against its neighbor.
“In association with the Ukrainians, the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, and I have launched an initiative to repatriate Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia“, announced the president of the EC, Ursula von der Leyen, at the end of the first day of the summit of leaders of the European Union in Brussels.
According to him, there are 16,200 children who have been deported while only 300 have returned so far.
“These criminal actions fully justify the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court,” he asserted, referring to those against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for have deported Ukrainian minors to Russia.