US President Joe Biden has called the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin “justified”.
“Obviously he committed war crimes,” Biden said.
Biden reiterated that the court’s jurisdiction is not recognized by all countries, including the United States itself, but called issuing the warrant a “strong position.”
The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin on March 17. According to the prosecution, the President of the Russian Federation is personally responsible for the forced deportation of children from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.
Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. War crimes committed on Ukrainian territory since December 2013 fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators.
Biden in March 2022 already publicly called Putin as a “war criminal”. A year earlier, even before the invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine, the American president had responded positively to the question of whether he considered Putin a murderer.