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Vyacheslav Volodin, an ally of Putin's, said that Russian
legislation should be amended to prohibit any activity of the
ICC in Russia and to punish any who gave "assistance and
support" to the ICC.
"It is necessary to work out amendments to legislation
prohibiting any activity of the ICC on the territory of our
country," Volodin said in a Telegram post.
Volodin said that the United States had legislated to prevent
its citizens ever being tried by the Hague court and that Russia
should continue that work.
Any assistance or support for the ICC inside Russia, he said,
should be punishable under law.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant earlier this month accusing
Putin of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of
children from Ukraine. It said there are reasonable grounds to
believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility.
Russian officials have cautioned that any attempt to arrest
Putin, Russia's paramount leader since the last day of 1999,
would amount to a declaration of war against the world's largest
nuclear power.
In its first warrant for Ukraine, the ICC called for Putin's
arrest on suspicion of unlawful deportation of children and
unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the
Russian Federation since Feb. 24, 2022.
The Kremlin says the ICC arrest warrant is an outrageously
partisan decision, but meaningless with respect to Russia.
Russian officials deny war crimes in Ukraine and say the West
has ignored what it says are Ukrainian war crimes.
Big powers such as Russia, the United States and China are not
members of the ICC though 123 countries are state parties to the
Rome Statute, including Britain, France, Germany and some former
Soviet republics such as Tajikistan.
Ukraine is not a member of the ICC, although Kyiv granted it
jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed on its territory.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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