President Biden considers the arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin issued by the ICC justified, despite the fact that the US does not recognize this court.

“I think it is justified. The issue is that it’s not recognized internationally by us either, but I think it’s a very strong argument,” Biden, who has previously accused his Russian peer Vladimir Putin of “genocide,” said on Friday.

Indeed, the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and has traditionally opposed several of the body’s investigations, such as the one aimed at investigating whether US forces had committed war crimes in Afghanistan or another that called for looking into cases in which its ally, the Israeli regime, committed crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.

Hence, from Washington, they specified that the U.S. accuses Russia of alleged war crimes in Ukraine, regardless of the ICC’s rulings.

“U.S. determinations regarding war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine are independent of ICC rulings on the matters before it. The prosecutor’s evidence will ultimately be weighed by the Court,” a State Department spokesperson stressed.

The ICC measure obliges the court’s 123 member states to arrest Putin and transfer him to The Hague for trial if he sets foot on their territory for being “allegedly responsible for the war crime of illegal population deportation and illegal population transfer [of children] from the occupied areas of Ukraine.”

For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov considered the ICC ruling “unacceptable”, since Moscow does not recognize the jurisdiction of that court.

“We consider the very formulation of the case outrageous and unacceptable. Russia, as well as a number of countries, does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court, and for Moscow any such decision from the legal point of view is insignificant,” he stressed.

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