AGENCIES

Russian President Vladimir Putin must be brought to justice for his war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday in The Hague, calling for the creation of a war crimes tribunal separate to the International Criminal Court.

“The aggressor must feel the full power of justice. This is our historical responsibility,” Zelensky said in a speech.

“Only one institution is capable of responding to the original crime, the crime of aggression: a tribunal. Not some compromise that will allow politicians to say that the case is allegedly done, but a true, really true, full-fledged tribunal.”

An act of aggression is defined by the United Nations as the “invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state (on) the territory of another state, or any military occupation”.

The ICC, which is based in The Hague and which Zelensky visited earlier in the day, issued an arrest warrant for Putin for suspected deportation of children from Ukraine, reports Reuters.

But it does not have jurisdiction over alleged crimes of aggression, and the European Commission, among others, has already brought its support for the creation of a separate international centre for the prosecution of the crime of aggression in Ukraine, that would be set up in The Hague.

Meanwhile, Russia yesterday accused the US of masterminding a drone attack on the Kremlin and said sabotage attacks by Ukraine behind Russian lines had reached “unprecedented momentum”.

The Kremlin has said Ukraine carried out the attack with two drones aiming to kill President Vladimir Putin -- a charge which Kyiv has denied, reports AFP.

“Decisions on such attacks are not made in Kyiv, but in Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “Kyiv only does what it is told to do.”

“Washington should understand clearly that we know this,” he said.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Russia’s claims that the United States is behind a drone attack on the Kremlin are false.

“I can assure you that there was no involvement by the United States in this. Whatever it was did not involve us,” Kirby told MSNBC in an interview. “We had nothing to do with this.”

Peskov said Putin was working in his office in the Kremlin as normal yesterday but added that security measures in Moscow would be beefed up following the attack, which the Kremlin said occurred in the night between Tuesday and Wednesday.

“Of course, everything will be strengthened. Everything has already been strengthened in preparation for the Victory Day parade” on May 9, he said.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Moscow to not use an alleged drone attack that it said targeted the Kremlin to escalate its war in Ukraine.

“We call on Russia not to use this alleged attack as an excuse to continue the escalation of the war,” Borrell told journalists as he went in to attend an EU ministers meeting in Brussels yesterday.