The Kremlin said Wednesday it did not recognise the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for two senior Russian officers over their actions in the Ukraine conflict.
The court accused lieutenant general Sergei Kobylash and navy admiral Viktor Sokolov of targeting Ukraine’s power infrastructure with strikes between October 2022 and March 2023.
“We don’t recognise this,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, he said.
“This is not the first decision, we also know that there are also various closed processes going on there, which are kept secret,” he continued.
The court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin in March last year, a ruling that Moscow called “void”. Russia levelled its own warrant against the ICC’s president in response.
The ICC, based in the Hague, does not have its own police force for enforcing the arrest warrants. It relies on the justice system of its 124 members to carry them out.
