This is not an April Fool’s joke.

On April 1, Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked ambassador to the United Nations will take over as president of the UN Security Council. This is a position that rotates among the member states of the council. Ironically, Russia also held the same position in February 2022––the same month Putin gave the orders for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign country.

That same Vladimir Putin is now wanted by The Hague. On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Russian president and his henchwoman Maria Lvova-Belova, a key figure in an initiative to ship Ukrainian children to Russia. 

It’s hard to take that much hypocrisy in one go. The validity of the Russian Federation’s place on the Security Council is open to debate; there are many in diplomatic circles who believe the RF resides there illegally. But the federation bulldozed its way into its position on the council in December 1991, once the former Soviet Union—which had held a permanent seat as a result of the 1945 United Nations Charter—vaporized. 

Back then, there was no debate and no constitutional ruling. In this case, as in many, Russia got what Russia wanted. Still, the news from The Hague on St. Patrick’s Day was more than “an important moment”—the words of Piotr Hofmański, the International Criminal Court’s president. It was monumental.

According to respected international legal scholars like Dr. Claus Kress, from the University of Cologne—a special adviser to Karim Khan, King’s Counsel, the ICC’s prosecutor—the slate of charges against Putin “marks a historic encounter between power and law. At a moment in time when Russia continues with the execution of its war of aggression against Ukraine, the World Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against Russia’s supreme leader sends out a message of particular symbolic force.”

It is more than symbolic, though. First off, since the news has broken, one can presume that there have been many war criminals rethinking their own strategies. They’re going to feel less comfortable on the lam. Indeed, there is a history of many of them fading into the background, yet eventually getting caught. Take Paul Touvier, “The Hangman of Lyon,” who hid in a monastery and on occasion was seen dressed as a priest. Or Radovan Karadźić, who, when he was arrested in Belgrade, was living as an alternative-medicine guru under the alias Dragan Dabic. Or one of the world’s worst war criminals—Liberia’s Charles Taylor—who despite having a $2 million bounty on his head, brazenly drove a Land Rover loaded with drugs and cash over the Nigeria-Cameroon border before being caught. They were all nabbed and brought to face justice. Even despots like Muammar al-Qaddafi and Saddam Hussien could not evade capture: each was discovered hiding underground—Qaddafi, in a drainage pipe; Hussein in a bunker, with a supply of hot dogs, 7 UP, and Bounty Bars.

Second, these new charges suggest that the International Criminal Court, in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, now has a renewed sense of mission and momentum. Personally, I can’t think of The Hague without a certain amount of bitterness, given its history of missed opportunities and pulled punches. And yet this decision has made me rethink international justice. Experts in international law, such as Kress, feel tribunals like the ICTY (the criminal court that prosecuted war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia) were vital––the first of its kind since Nuremberg. The ICTY managed to get Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić, and Radovan Karadžić all in the dock. And for those of us who witnessed the burning villages in Bosnia, who saw the mass graves, who heard the testimonies of victims of rape and concentration camps—and, ultimately, the genocide at Srebrenica—Hague-style justice was delivered far too slowly.

But that might be changing. A top EU official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, wrote in a tweet on Friday that the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin represented “the start of the process of accountability.” If Fontelles is correct, we may well be ending a long, drawn out period of impunity that started in the 1990s with Bosnia and Rwanda and has continued to the present day, with horrific wars in places such as Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Syria, the latter conflict having been almost completely shelved and forgotten by the international community.  

Considering Syria, it’s hard to see why its president, Bashar al-Assad, has not been issued an arrest warrant after launching and continuing a war (with help from his friend Putin) that has claimed more than 500,000 lives and displaced an estimated 13 million people, including 5.6 million refugees. Assad literally burned down much of his own country. Instead, he and his wife, Asma, were given the red-carpet treatment this past week when they traveled to the United Arab Emirates. In the same week that we saw one war criminal facing a roster of charges, another was virtually lauded as royalty.

In a column for the Hive last month, I outlined how Putin’s atrocities and crimes against humanity go back more than two decades, beginning with his decision in the early months of his presidency to effectively wipe Grozny off the face of the earth. But the current arrest warrants do not focus on the wholesale slaughter that has been a hallmark of the Russian leader’s military campaigns in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine. Instead, these accusations are extremely specific. They center on a Russian program that is difficult to fathom without revulsion: the alleged war crimes of abduction and deportation of children, which is a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Also named in the indictment is Maria Lvova-Belova, Putin’s so-called children’s rights commissioner. A musician who studied conducting—and was once a guitar teacher before being elevated to senator and then commissioner—she is the architect of an inhumane and hard-hearted policy of transporting Ukrainian children across national borders to be adopted by Russian families. The government claims it is rescuing orphans to protect them from harm or repatriating children who have been separated from their guardians. Some of the children, however, are taken coercively; the parents of others have been strong-armed into sending them away to “camps” in Russia for their “safety.” (The gentler precedent: many London parents during World War II placed their kids on trains bound for the countryside during the Blitz to protect them from Germany’s relentless bombings. But those kids were allowed to go home when the bombs stopped. Many of these children are adopted by Russian families.)

Most human rights experts believe this Russian “program” is an appalling violation of international law. Many Ukrainian parents who let their sons and daughters go have come to learn that their children have reportedly been caught up in intense indoctrination classes and become part of a Russification process that has echoes of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and China’s Cultural Revolution. In some cases, the children’s Ukrainian names have been erased. In a camp in Chechnya, as described in one recent study, boys have allegedly been schooled in military tactics and appear to be handling firearms and learning war studies.

The Yale School of Public Health’s Conflict Observatory program recently issued a groundbreaking report estimating that there are some 6,000 children in 43 different centers throughout the Russian Federation who have been “forcibly transferred” from their Ukrainian families. (Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy puts the number at 16,000 or more.) The Russians, meanwhile, far from having denied that such an effort exists, have gone to great lengths to tout the humanitarian nature of the endeavor. Lvova-Belova herself claims to have proudly “adopted” a 15-year-old boy from Mariupol last year; she reportedly has at least 10 other children.

Last year, Vanity Fair and the Reckoning Project, where I serve as executive director, collaborated on a story chronicling the harrowing saga of one such “divided family.” Reporter-researcher Iryna Lopatina tracked the journey of three children who were separated from their father in Mariupol and sent to Russia. By sheer determination, the eldest child, Matvii, managed to track down his father and urge him to rescue Matvii and his siblings before they could be assigned to Russian families. This was one case of a Ukrainian family being reunited; most are not so fortunate.

There are international observers who have argued that the arrest warrants are merely a symbolic move. Russia, for its part, has issued statements noting that its government (like that of the United States) is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which recognizes the legitimacy of the ICC. For many of us tracking these crimes, however, the criminal court’s decision is an unqualified milestone. Some are even calling it a potential turning point in the Ukraine War.

“Never before,” notes Kress, “had proceedings before an international criminal court been instituted against a figure as powerful as Vladimir Putin. It only adds to the extraordinary significance of this instance of international criminal justice that the victims of the alleged international crimes are children, the weakest and hence most vulnerable members of the human society.”

Even if Putin never gets to The Hague, credibility is important to him. And this month his international standing has been trampled. He cannot be sitting comfortably in Moscow, with his Chinese visitors as his only friends. A field trip to Mariupol to see the buildings he wasted––which Putin took great pains to choreograph this past week—won’t satisfy his Peter the Great expansion fantasies. Not when he finds himself trapped inside the Russian Federation, knowing that if he sets foot in certain countries he could be arrested and spirited off to a holding cell in the Netherlands. 

At the same time, his chief diplomatic emissary, Sergei Lavrov, the minister of foreign affairs, has to get on a plane and travel to interact with his counterparts on the world stage. But he will surely find an inescapable iciness when he returns to Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, the United Nations headquarters, or to Geneva, where the Human Rights Council sits. 

That said, Putin and company are continuing their chilling strategy, even as the ink dries on the arrest warrants. According to a statement released last week by the Ukrainian National Resistance Center, the government agency that monitors events in occupied Ukraine: “The Russians are deporting more and more people from the temporarily occupied districts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.”

At the beginning of March, a historic conference took place in Lviv, the Ukrainian city where two of the greatest international lawyers of the last century studied: Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term genocide in the aftermath of the Holocaust) and Hersch Lauterpact (who became an important adviser to the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials). The gathering was chaired by Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, and was attended by many from the European and American legal elite who are steeped in the arcana of wartime atrocity. I attended as a representative of the Reckoning Project. And it was the first time in many years of reporting war crimes that I felt there was real commitment and political will to catch the bad guys. Europe is fiercely united toward accountability and the Biden administration, whose ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice is the extremely impressive former Stanford professor Dr. Beth Van Schaack, has done extraordinary work to support Ukraine.

As positive as the news is, however, I cannot help but feel tremendous sadness when I get messages from my Syrian friends who see Assad parading around in sharp suits, being feted in Middle East capitals. Sadder still are my Bosnian friends, who endured a cruel and debilitating war at the tail end of the 20^th century, and feel they did not receive the justice they deserve. “I’m happy for the Ukrainian people,” one said to me. “But why couldn’t this have happened for us?”

Janine di Giovanni, a Vanity Fair contributor, is the executive director of the Reckoning Project.