How the International Criminal Court helps Putin with its arrest warrant
Tom Rogan
Video Embed
Russia‘s historic social identity is heavily shaped by nationalist pride and a deep skepticism of foreigners.
This bears renewed consideration amid the International Criminal Court’s issuing of an unenforceable arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin. It might make some Western liberal idealists happy, but this ICC action will do more harm than good.
Don’t get me wrong. Has Russia committed the crime for which Putin is accused, forcibly relocating thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia? Without question. Russian authorities have repeatedly been documented doing so. These kidnappings are distinctly unpleasant even to those who might otherwise be sympathetic to Putin. That’s likely why the ICC chose to issue an arrest warrant on this particular concern.
Still, as evinced by its disinterest in confronting China’s Uyghur genocide, the ICC is ultimately a politically motivated entity more than an independent arbiter of justice. Moscow will now exploit that reality in furtherance of its own propaganda.
At the most basic level, Putin isn’t headed to the ICC’s base at The Hague. Certainly not anytime soon. While the Russian intelligence services love running around that Netherlands city, Putin’s Presidential Security Service isn’t suddenly going to hand him over to the court. That security unit is well trained and, incidents of hostile intelligence activities aside, professional. Putin’s guards wouldn’t take kindly to any attempt to actually or symbolically detain him.
More importantly, however, this arrest warrant does not ultimately serve Ukraine’s interests.
The key interest for Ukraine must be to end the war on a basis that allows for the maximal recovery of territory and a rapid evacuation of Russian forces. By putting Putin in what a very large number of Russians will regard as Western internationalist crosshairs, the ICC plays perfectly to Putin’s narrative — namely, that the war is an existential struggle between Russia’s sovereign security and a Western liberal orthodoxy that aims to subsume the world.
Even for those Russians skeptical of Putin, the idea of their president being arrested by an international court will not play well. Again, Russian society is built on pride and nationalism. The ICC has now made Putin a physical metaphor for those national identities. It has given him ammunition for his Peter the Great framed claim that he is not a killer waging a war without moral cause but rather is a courageous Russian patriot struggling against an encroaching Western behemoth — a Western behemoth that defends Ukraine’s democratic sovereignty only so far as it enables a dismantling of the Russian state structure.
This is a lie, of course, but it is one that the ICC’s antics will help Russia to repurpose as tempting truth. At the margin, this will move Russians to support Putin’s war as a struggle for survival, rather than oppose it as a pointless body grinder.
Top line: The way to end the war in Ukraine and liberate those children kidnapped from their homes is not via feel-good antics like this one. Instead, so far as aligns with U.S. strategic interests, it is via the continued defeat of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory and the associated understanding of Russian leaders, via their people, that they must sue for peace.