Moscow on Wednesday rejected arrest warrants issued a day ago by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on behalf of two of its commanders, General Serhii Ivanovich Kobylash and Admiral Viktor Mykolayovych Sokolov, reminding that Russia does not recognize the international court, Reuters reported. .

Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov said during a daily press conference that Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the ISS, and therefore Moscow does not recognize the arrest warrants issued on its behalf for the two high-ranking officers.

“We are not part of the statute, we do not recognize it,” Peskov answered questions about this topic from Kremlin-accredited journalists. “This is not the first such decision. We also know that there are various closed processes that are kept secret, and we treat such decisions,” he added.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court on behalf of two of its commanders suspected of war crimes in Ukraine were irrelevant to Russia and that they were a “challenge.”

Who are the two Russian commanders wanted internationally for war crimes?

The ICC announced on Tuesday that it had issued arrest warrants for Kobylash and Sokolov on charges of war crimes during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Kobylash is the chief of the Russian long-range aviation, and Sokolov was the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. According to the ICC, the arrest warrants were issued for “alleged crimes committed between at least October 10, 2022 and at least March 9, 2023.”

“During this period of time, there was an alleged campaign of attacks on numerous power plants and substations, which were carried out by the Russian armed forces in several places in Ukraine. Pre-Trial Chamber II found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the alleged strikes were directed against civilian objects and, for those installations that could have been qualified as military objects at the relevant time, the expected casualty and damage to the civilian population would have been clearly excessive compared to the expected military advantage,” the judges of the Hague Court declare.

Essentially, the ISS is investigating these two for attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine, with Kobylash allegedly responsible for long-range bomber attacks and Sokolov for Kalibr missile attacks by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

In the middle of last month, Russian military bloggers and a former Kremlin adviser announced that President Vladimir Putin had replaced Sokolov as commander of the Black Sea Fleet after a series of humiliating failures.

But this information has not yet been officially confirmed by either the Russian Ministry of Defense or the Kremlin.

The International Criminal Court also issued an arrest warrant for Putin

In March of last year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, charging him with the war crime of illegally deporting at least 100 children from Ukraine.

Separately, the court issued warrants against Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, against whom she made the same allegations.

Moscow then reacted through the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, who dryly stated that “the decisions of the International Criminal Court have no significance for our country, including from a legal point of view.” “Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and has no obligations under it,” she emphasized then.

Ukraine said that this was a historic decision, but that it was “just the beginning.” High-ranking officials of Ukraine highly praised the decision of the International Court of Justice, and the Prosecutor General of the country Andriy Kostin called it “a historic decision for Ukraine and the entire system of international law.”

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