On Friday, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a war crimes-related arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and one of his top officials. The despot more than deserves it.
This is a major event because of the players and the crimes at issue, but fundamentally there’s nothing happening out of the ordinary here. A person has committed a series of crimes and the authorities want to take him into custody to answer for what he’s done and face the consequences. The main difference is scale, and that scale makes the need for accountability only more acute, not less.
Everyone ultimately understands that the odds that Putin will ever actually see the inside of an ICC courtroom are zero. The court lacks its own enforcement mechanisms.
