The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Tuesday Valery Gerasimovthe current military chief of staff, on charges of war crimes in Ukraine.
Both are said to be responsible for ‘directing attacks’ on civilian targets in Ukraine.
The ICC judges said there were sufficient grounds to believe that Shoigu and Gerasimov bore individual criminal responsibility, either by ordering the attacks by others or by failing to exercise proper control over the forces under their command.
Specifically, the court alleged that Shoigu and Gerasimov were responsible for rocket attacks on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure from at least October 10, 2022 to at least March 9, 2023.
“During this period, a large number of attacks were carried out on numerous power plants and substations by the Russian armed forces in multiple locations in Ukraine,” the court statement said.
The court found that “the alleged strike campaign constitutes a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts against a civilian population, carried out in accordance with state policy.”
Given all this, “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects deliberately caused great suffering or serious injury to the body or to mental or physical health and thus bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity or other inhuman acts,” the court wrote in a statement. .
Shoigu was dismissed as defense minister by Russian President Vladimir Putin in May, after having held the post since 2012. The court had also previously issued an arrest warrant for Putin for alleged war crimes, including the forced deportation of Ukrainian children.
The court does not have an enforcement mechanism, but all states parties to the court are obliged to arrest and extradite the requested persons to the court if they are within their territory.
