SINGAPORE — On March 31, a bombshell report was unveiled by The Grayzone investigative journalist Jeremy Loffredo and editor Max Blumenthal that discredited the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s criminal arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin accusing him of “crimes against humanity.”
In late March, the prosecutor-general for the ICC had alleged that Putin was guilty of “war crimes,” quoting what it maintained was the “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from the Donbass regions. For years, these regions have been claimed by the globalist Kyiv regime under authoritarian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
Putin’s arrest warrant was based on just one secondhand report by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), an institution funded by the U.S. State Department.
Moreover, the executive director of the HRL, Nathaniel Raymond, recently made bombastic statements on left-wing media outlet CNN that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation.” Alluding to the Holocaust, Raymond said, “We are dealing with the largest network of children camps seen in the 21st century.”
Not long after, ex-CIA officer and incumbent State Department spokesman Ned Price jumped at the chance to use the HRL report that his employer bankrolled to decry what he termed as “Russia’s system of forced relocation, re-education and adoption of Ukraine’s children.”
However, as Loffredo documented in a new video report, the ICC had accused Putin of war crimes based on rudimentary Google searches, and “zero interviews with actual victims … the researchers didn’t even attempt to see any of the camps in person.”
Unlike the Yale HRL claimants who provoked the ICC’s arrest warrant, Loffredo enjoyed unrestricted access to a Russian government camp in Moscow that takes care of youth from the ravaged Donbass regions — the kind of center that both Yale HRL and the ICC have lambasted as “re-education camps” for alleged Ukrainian child hostages.
In his excursion, Loffredo captured footage revealing many happy campers attending free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from qualified instructors.
The journalist’s encounters mirrored claims made by Raymond in his own report to Yale HRL that most of the camps offered free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents hoped “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.”
Furthermore, during a phone call with Loffredo, Raymond admitted that “a large amount” of the camps his team reported on were “primarily cultural education — like, I would say, teddy bear.”
Put simply, Raymond, the main author of the report justifying the ICC arrest warrant for Putin, appeared to admit that the children in the camps were not stolen but rather offered a sanctuary from their conflict-ridden backyards.
In other words, Loffredo’s recorded first-hand experiences at one of the camps as well as Raymond’s own “teddy bear” remarks in his report and offered to Loffredo went against the spurious claims made by the State Department and the ICC.
Loffredo testified that while the Yale researchers and the ICC “are probably under the impression that no Western journalist has been to these so-called ‘re-education camps,’ that assumption would be wrong…. I visited one of these camps four months ago — unaware that it would be so important to future war propaganda.”
Instead of a re-education camp with hostile conditions for campers, Loffredo acknowledged that he came across “a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors.”
In an interview with Loffredo, one of the camp’s instructors, violin teacher Peter Lundstrem, disclosed that many of the 80 children from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions at the music camp had first-hand experience with the long, drawn-out conflict of nine years: “Some of them lost their relatives and friends,” Lundstrem pointed out. “In the conflict zone, they cannot continue their professional music studies.”
Blumenthal said that The Grayzone report “completely demolishes the entire case” against Putin and “exposes it as a public relations stunt that is driven by a hyper-politicized [ICC] prosecutor captured by the US and a State Department-funded report.” He added that the “three layers of journalistic inquiry” completely refuted “the allegation by the ICC … that Russia is running a network of camps that are holding children as hostages and committing a war crime by illegally deporting Ukrainian children.”
Regarding his exposé co-authored with Loffredo, Blumenthal indicated that not a single mainstream news outlet contacted him in the 24 hours following its publication. “Western media is doing all it can to ignore this devastating debunking of the Yale HRL report that inspired the ICC arrest warrant,” he highlighted.
Such radio silence by the mainstream media is not unexpected, Blumenthal said, as these outlets are trying “prevent the populations of countries whose governments are sponsoring this proxy war from learning the truth — which is that this is a politicized warrant driven by a bogus investigation that relied on no field research, whose own report debunks itself.”
Evidently, the ICC warrant and the U.S.-backed HRL report were “designed to obstruct diplomacy with the Russian government in order to prolong the war, and therefore to increase the level of human rights abuses that have been taking place,” Blumenthal declared.
Earlier in March this year, after the arrest warrant was issued, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced the ICC for kowtowing to orders from the globalist West.
“The International Criminal Court is headed by a prosecutor who is a naturalized Anglo-Saxon and who, of course, as we have all seen, is following the orders of his masters, who forbid this body to investigate the crimes of NATO member states and set it on ferreting out spurious pretexts, nonexistent facts, in order to advance the agenda of the so-called collective West,” Lavrov remarked.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would ignore both the ICC’s warrant and its jurisdiction.
Based on reports from Sputnik News, former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton cautioned the United States against working with the ICC, calling the ICC “fundamentally illegitimate,” as it does not have a constitutional framework to restrain its actions
Washington had previously been careful not to get too close to the ICC, to avoid setting a precedent for prosecuting Americans for atrocities perpetrated in countries such as Afghanistan. News outlet Politico reported that the Pentagon barred the Biden administration from contacting the tribunal as well, in spite of the willingness of other federal agencies. Having said that, however, the U.S. Congress modified legal curbs governing interactions with the tribunal in December to permit evidence sharing on Ukraine.
