‘Lvova-Belova belongs only in one place — in the dock at the ICC — to answer charges of heinous crimes committed in Ukraine.’
A top U.N. official has planned to meet the Russian official credibly accused of war crimes through Moscow’s forcible deportation and resettlement of Ukrainian children taken from conflict zones, sources say. National Review learned that a group of countries outraged about the matter demanded answers from the U.N. secretary-general’s team yesterday.
“It was her intention,” Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.N. Sergiy Kyslytsya told NR in a message about the itinerary of Virginia Gamba, the U.N. official in question. He added that he hadn’t been able to stay abreast of the matter today, due to other meetings.
While it’s not immediately clear that the meeting has taken place, it’s known around U.N. offices that Gamba intended to have the meeting this week with Maria Lvova-Belova, Putin’s children’s rights commissioner, during a trip to Moscow this week. Gamba is U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres’s special representative for children and armed conflict.
A recent report by Yale University and the State Department presented evidence that Russian forces have undertaken a “systematic” deportation of at least 6,000 Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied parts of the country, sending them to camps across Russia and Crimea — which is a war crime. The International Criminal Court subsequently issued a warrant for Lvova-Belova’s arrest.
In that sense, Gamba’s plan is a remarkable development, demonstrating that credible war-crimes allegations have not kept the U.N. away from meetings with Russian officials implicated in those acts. It’s also not clear what diplomatic purpose a huddle with Lvova-Belova would hold.
Another diplomatic source said that various countries’ U.N. missions were briefed that Gamba planned to hold the meeting, during a trip to Moscow on May 18-19. “We don’t have confirmation that the meeting with [Lvova-Belova] happened yet,” this person said.
Several Western countries held a meeting with the U.N. secretary-general’s office last night, demanding to know why it viewed such a meeting as essential, the source said. Internal U.N. guidelines ban meetings with officials wanted by the ICC, unless there’s a compelling reason to meet with them.
In the past, even U.N photo ops with Omar al-Bashir, the former ICC-indicted Sudanese president, inspired outrage. But the diplomatic source told NR that it was strange that this meeting has not yet seemed to spark a similar response, perhaps because the information was more closely held and the U.N. is less transparent today.
“Ukrainian victims deserve to see Lvova-Belova behind bars in the Hague, not meeting with high-level UN officials,” Balkees Jarrah, associate director in the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, said.
“Senior UN representatives like Gamba should avoid contact with persons subject to ICC warrants. It’s hard to imagine any circumstance that would justify Gamba meeting with a suspected war criminal, when there are clearly other officials she could meet with instead. Lvova-Belova belongs only in one place — in the dock at the ICC — to answer charges of heinous crimes committed in Ukraine.”
In response to National Review’s questions, U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said only that the U.N. official’s meetings in Moscow are fully in line with relevant U.N. resolutions. “Virginia Gamba will be in Moscow this week and her activities there are part of the implementation of the Children and Armed Conflict mandate per relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.” He declined to answer a subsequent question about the U.N. secretariat’s meeting with the outraged Western countries.