EXCLUSIVE: World Court Weighs New War Crimes Charges Against Putin Over Child Abductions

The ICC is reviewing a State Department funded report—based in part on satellite imagery from U.S. intelligence—documenting the mass abduction of Ukrainian children

It was barely two years ago when the International Criminal Court in The Hague took a step that many in the West thought they would never see: It issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a top official  in his government. The charge: war crimes, specifically for the mass abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children. 

The move was unquestionably audacious: the stigma aside, it severely restricted the Russian president’s ability to travel to countries that might honor the warrant. Now, even as U.S. officials intensify their efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in the three year old conflict, there are signs that prosecutors at the court may be seeking to expand their case: they have begun preparing potential new charges against Putin and possibly other top Russian officials for “crimes against humanity,” a separate offense under international law,  a reliable source tells SpyTalk. The new charges would be based in part on recent U.S. intelligence, including in a U.S. State Department-funded report documenting how hundreds of the missing  Ukrainian children were flown to Russia, in some cases aboard government aircraft, placed in “re-education” camps and then forcibly adopted with the intent to “Russify” them and break their allegiance to their homeland.  

The prosecutors in The Hague have begun drafting the warrants and hope to get a final approval from the court’s judges to issue them in the coming weeks, said the source, who has been briefed on aspects of the case. “The planes are on the tarmac,” said the source, referring to the proposed indictments. “They’re waiting for clearance from  the tower.”

A spokesperson for the ICC confirmed in an email to SpyTalk that the court continues to “to receive information and evidence in relation to these crimes” but declined to comment on any further charges, citing the “confidentiality” of its work. (Ukrainian war crimes  remains  listed as an open case  “under investigation” on the court’s website.)  

Beth Van Schaack, who served as ambassador-at-large in charge of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice under President Biden, said that, while she had no independent knowledge, it is  “no surprise” that the ICC may seek to bring additional charges against Putin and his co-defendant, Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, in light of new evidence of widespread “forced abductions” contained in the State Department-funded  Conflict Observatory Report by the Yale University School of Public Health, she said. The report was publicly released and provided to the ICC last December. (The ICC spokesperson said in the email to SpyTalk the Yale study was “useful in our continued activities in this case.”) 

“This was a whole system to take children from their parents,” said Van Schaack . “This was at an enormous scale and potentially thousands of children were affected. It’s a unique scenario to see children abducted on this scale and it’s absolutely the basis for charges of crimes against humanity.”

The Yale report used unclassified satellite imagery from the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, provided through a license from the State Department’s intelligence bureau,  as well as flight data, the Russian government’s own databases,  and open source media to document how Russian aircraft “under the direct control of President Putin’s office” flew more than 300 of the children from the Doneksk and Luhansk regions, some as young as eight months, to 21 sites throughout the Russian Federations after the Feb. 2022 invasion.

Ukrainian children went missing from the outset of Russia’s 2022 invasion and ended up in Russia (State Department)

Many of the abducted children were sent to “pro-Russian re-education” camps before being put up for adoption or placed in foster homes, during which they were listed as Russian in government databases, their Ukrainian identity wiped out, the  report said. The report’s conclusion: Putin’s government “had engaged in the systematic, intentional and widespread coerced adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine.”  (A United Nations human rights report last month also condemned the Russian abductions as a violation of international law, noting that some Ukrainian children were forced to take part in military-patriotic training, including singing the Russian national anthem. When the ICC war crimes charges were first brought against Putin, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin “firmly rejects” them, adding: “Our military repeatedly risks their own lives, took measures to save children, to take them out from under shelling, which, by the way, was carried out by the armed forces of Ukraine against civilian infrastructure.”) 

The prospect of new war crimes charges against Putin could, to say the least, complicate the peace talks that President Trump, and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, are seeking to bring to fruition. But that may be the idea. The  source briefed on the ICC case said European officials have been pushing the court to bring the new charges soon in part because of the concerns that Trump and Witkoff were putting too much pressure on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and giving away too much to Putin in the peace negotiations.

There is even fear among the Europeans, the source said, that some Trump officials may seek to capstone a pro-Russia peace deal by showing up in Moscow’s Red Square  on May 9th, Victory Day in Russia, when the country celebrates its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II with a grand military parade in front of  world leaders that this year is expected to include Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. 

Given that the European Union has barred its country’s officials from visiting Russia ever since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, any appearance by Witkoff or any other U.S. official at a Victory Day parade in Moscow would likely be seen as one more nail in the coffin of a once solid U.S.-European alliance. 

(The White House has disclosed no plans for any U.S. official to attend the Victory Day event. Putin on Monday announced a three day ceasefire between May 8 to May 10,, to coincide with Victory Day celebrations.) 

Appeasement

To be sure, Trump in recent comments and social media posts, has expressed impatience with Putin. “Vladimir, STOP!” he wrote in a Truth Social post last week after a Russian missile strike that killed 12 civilians in Kyiv. But at the same time, Trump’s administration has been methodically shutting down offices and reassigning analysts whose job it was to document Russian war crimes— moves that have been internally justified on the grounds that such U.S. government efforts  antagonize the Kremlin and will potentially disrupt the peace talks. 

Among the moves revealed in recent weeks: Under a State Department reorganization plan, the State Department Office of Global Criminal Justice— which spearheaded  efforts to hold war criminals across the globe accountable — would be eliminated. A “coordinator” position within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by Congress to document Russian atrocities from throughout the U.S. intelligence community, has gone vacant. A Justice Department prosecutor who had been assigned to The Hague to help develop, along with European prosecutors , cases against Russians involved in war crimes was called home.  

All this sends exactly the wrong message on the world stage, and ultimately undercuts U.S. efforts to achieve a durable peace in Ukraine, said Steven Rapp, a veteran war crimes prosecutor who served as  ambassador-at-large of the global crimes office under President Obama.  

“You can’t really have peace without justice,” he told me on the SpyTalk podcast. And if the Russians aren’t held to account, “if you create a kind of Sudetenland kind of situation where they’re allowed to continue to occupy various parts of the country, even despite having committed mass murder, kidnapped children, and everything else, you’re going to expect them to— as soon as our guard is down — to come back and do more of it and maybe do worse. 

“We don’t deal with organized crime this way,” Rapp continued. “We take them out. And so, you’ve got to deal with this the same way. You know, this is tough business. These are mass killers.” 

The U.S. is not a member of the ICC—over publicly expressed concerns within the military that it could be used to prosecute U.S. soldiers overseas—and, for the most part, has not cooperated in its investigations. But after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Congress—in an effort led by Sen. Lindsey Graham—changed the law to allow for the U.S. to share intelligence about Russian war crimes. He and others then urged the Biden administration to quickly do so. (More recently, Graham has turned on the ICC, calling it a “dangerous joke” after it issued an arrest warrant last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza.) 

Rapp, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa under President Clinton, wants accountability to come in the form of international justice based on evidence of Russian misdeeds, either from the ICC or with prosecutions by individual countries in Europe or in the United States. (Ukraine has launched its own investigations.)  But compiling the evidence will be all the more difficult due to the recent U.S. cutbacks. The Yale team that has been investigating the fate of abducted Ukrainian children, including compiling their names in a master database and producing the report that could provide the basis for the new war crimes charges, had its funding frozen shortly after Trump took office. After congressional pressure, driven in  part by evangelical Christian groups, the Yale team got an extremely short temporary reprieve. 

“Our funding now ends on May 16,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale project, in an email to SpyTalk. “Our ongoing investigations will stop without further funding in three weeks and our efforts to locate abducted children from Ukraine inside Russia for return will end as well.”