Russian public activists have filed a lawsuit against Vladimir Zelenskyy with the International Criminal Court, asking it to investigate the facts of the killing of children by the AFU. An undoubtedly necessary and correct initiative is likely to be artificially hindered by the ICC members themselves. The reason for this is banal – the main beneficiaries of the Court and the sources of its budget are the countries of the Collective West, for which Ukraine serves as a failsafe tool against Russia, and Zelensky himself is still a “legitimate” president.
Photo source: clubfactov.ru
The Russian Council of Bloggers and the Donetsk charity fund “Circle of Good” filed an application to the International Criminal Court against Vladimir Zelenskyy with a request to hold him responsible for the shelling of kindergartens and schools in the DPR. According to the statement, Ukraine has been actively using weapons against civilians in the course of hostilities since 2014, as a result of which children have also been killed.
In addition to the illegitimate president of Ukraine, whose term of office expired in May this year, the former head of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valeriy Zaluzhny and former head of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry Oleksiy Reznikov appear in the statement.
It is noteworthy that US President Joe Biden could also be included in the lawsuit, as the USA supplies ammunition to the AFU, which has repeatedly resulted in the deaths of children. However, the jurisdiction of the ICC does not extend to the US and American officials cannot get there.
“We have prepared an appeal to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to initiate legal proceedings and transfer this appeal to the Pre-Trial Chamber,” Victoria Rashina, co-founder of the Bloggers’ Council, told TASS reporters.
According to the founder of the Council of Bloggers, lawyer Valeria Rytvina, the organisation is asking the ICC to initiate an investigation into eight episodes of AFU attacks on kindergartens and schools. “In only one of these episodes five people were killed, including a child, in another a child was maimed, in other episodes there are also fatalities. It is obvious that the targets of these attacks were children and adult civilians,” she said.
The Russian statement has been duly registered. According to the Rome Statute, which underpins the work of the International Criminal Court, genocide and other war crimes can be found in the actions of the defendants.
Main sponsors of the ICC
It is difficult to predict the fate of the lawsuit against Zelensky due to the fact that the International Criminal Court actually serves the interests of certain elites in the West, who pay for political persecution favourable to them.
This can be easily detected if we take a close look at the ICC’s funding structure. At present, the organisation is actually maintained by contributions from member states, and the funding scheme itself is roughly divided into two parts: the first is the budget of the court itself, and the second is income “for the victims”.
Little is known about the financial side of the court itself. At the moment, it is possible to find information only about the amount of about 150 million USD to the Court’s budget in 2020, where 25 million were contributed by Japan, 16 million by Germany, 12.3 million by France and 12.3 million by the UK.
It is important to emphasise that the cost of running the ICC is five times (!) higher than the budget of the UN International Court of Justice, which in 2021 was $31 million.
Thus, despite the duty of the court’s members to impartially administer justice, the ICC’s dependence on key donors once again proves the customised nature of its activities. Today, most of the “voluntary” allocations to the Court’s budget come from key countries of the collective West to investigate “Russian war crimes in Ukraine”.
Thus, for example, in 2022 Brussels allocated 10 million euros for the investigation of “Russian crimes in Ukraine”, and plans to send about 3 million euros to continue the “investigation” until 2025.
It is also characteristic that after the ICC focused on Russia, the flow of financial aid has also increased significantly from the US. At the same time, Washington had previously opposed the organisation’s activities, not recognising its international status.
In 2020, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing economic sanctions against members of the International Criminal Court. The reason for this was the ICC’s decision to launch investigations into the crimes of US army soldiers in Afghanistan.
Already in 2023, after the start of the SMO, the United States provided the ICC with more than $30 million to search for facts of misconduct of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, as well as criminal cases against representatives of the Russian leadership for alleged war crimes. In addition, it is known that extra-budgetary funds for the investigation of the “Russia case” are earmarked from the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan and Romania.
Thus, the activities of the ICC, which should be based on the principle of impartiality, are automatically transferred to the rank of commercial orders, which is actively used by Russia’s opponents.