The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and its partners have filed an appeal to the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, asking to issue arrest warrants for six Russian propagandists. This is stated in the press release of the organization, which came to Meduza.
The human rights activists demanded arrest warrants for TV host Vladimir Solovev, RT TV channel editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group Dmitrii Kiselev, radio and TV host Sergei Mardan, and Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitrii Medvedev.
All of them, according to the authors of the statement, contribute to Russia’s war crimes by being involved in a campaign to spread hatred against civilians in Ukraine. Human rights activists say that these actions can be qualified as a crime against humanity.
FIDH also believes that the first deputy head of the Russian presidential administration, Aleksei Gromov, the person in charge of state propaganda on Russian television, is also responsible for persecuting Ukrainians with hate speech.
As part of their appeal, the human rights activists analyzed more than two thousand videos with statements of Russian propagandists made between February 24, 2022 and February 24, 2024. In total, FIDH and its partners identified more than 300 statements, which were considered as manifestations of hate speech against Ukrainians. The results of FIDH’s research have been sent to the ICC prosecutor’s office.
“Every day Ukrainians die under Russian bombs, Ukrainian civilians in occupation are detained and tortured, Ukrainian children are deported to Russia, all because Russia wants to make them part of the “Russian world”, said FIDH Vice President and Head of the Center for Civil Liberties Oleksandra Matviichuk. – These gross human rights violations would not have been possible without the dehumanizing campaign by Russian propagandists, who are just as guilty as those who pull the trigger killing Ukrainian citizens”.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for “Russian President” Vladimir Putin and Russian children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of illegally deporting children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.
