THE MAN THE WORLD IS WAITING TO ARREST
Vladimir Putin is already a wanted war criminal. The only question left is who pays the price, and when.
By Brian Bullock | Everyone Knows | brianbullockwriter.com
Last night, Russia sent a wave of missiles and drones into the sleeping city of Kyiv. An eleven-hour barrage. Apartment blocks folded in on themselves. Rescue crews spent the morning pulling the dead out of the rubble, a five-year-old girl and her one-year-old brother among the wounded, a fifteen-year-old girl and her entire family still buried somewhere under the concrete as I write this. And then, right on cue, came the statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense: it was a strike on military and energy targets. High-precision weapons. Nothing to see here.
Look at the pictures and tell me that is a military base. Tell me the crushed nine-story residential tower in the Desnyanskyi district was a barracks. Tell me the burning hotel in the city center was a command post. You cannot, because it was not. It was a lie, spoken over the bodies of civilians, and it is the same lie Vladimir Putin has told every single time for more than four years.
The Charges Are Already Filed
Here is what most people do not know, and what Putin would very much like you to forget: he is not merely accused. He is charged. On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. Not for a policy dispute. For a war crime, the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, ripping kids from occupied territory and shipping them into Russia to be raised as Russians. Thousands of them. His own children's-rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, was named in the same warrant.
He is the first leader of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council ever to be hit with an ICC arrest warrant. Think about the weight of that. And it did not stop there. In 2024 the Court issued more warrants, this time for his former defense minister Sergei Shoigu and his top military commander Valery Gerasimov, for the campaign of strikes against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, the very kind of strike that killed families in their beds last night.
That warrant does not expire. It follows him for the rest of his life, in office or out. Right now it has already shrunk his world to the size of a prison yard with nicer furniture. He skipped the 2023 summit in South Africa because South Africa, as an ICC member, would have been legally obligated to arrest him on arrival. Mongolia got formally rebuked by the Court for rolling out the red carpet instead of the handcuffs. One hundred and twenty-plus nations are bound by treaty to seize him the moment he sets foot on their soil. He is a wanted man, and he knows it.
Why He Is Not Already in a Cell
So if the charges exist, why is he not on trial? Two reasons, and both of them should make you angry, because they are failures of the system, not proof of his innocence.
First, the International Criminal Court does not allow a full trial in absentia. Its rules require the accused to be physically present to be convicted and sentenced. It can hold hearings to confirm the charges without him, but it cannot finish the job while he hides behind the Kremlin walls. Read that again. The world's premier war-crimes court is built in a way that lets a tyrant run out the clock simply by refusing to show up. We try ordinary fugitives in absentia every day. The man who abducted children and leveled cities gets a loophole because he is powerful enough to hide.
Second, Interpol will not issue a Red Notice for him. Its own constitution bars actions of a political or military character, and it treats a sitting head of state as untouchable under that rule. So the one tool designed to make a fugitive radioactive at every border on Earth is switched off, not because of what he did, but because of the chair he sits in.
And that is the whole game, isn't it? Not that his crimes do not exist. They are charged, documented, and photographed. It is that a sitting nuclear head of state is practically beyond reach. Nobody is going to invade Moscow to serve a warrant. His office does not erase the crime, the ICC itself has ruled that heads of state get no immunity from its warrants for war crimes and genocide, a principle that runs straight back to Nuremberg. His office simply buys him time. For now.
When the Shield Falls
But time is the one thing no dictator keeps forever. And here is the part Putin has surely already calculated, because he is a survivor if he is anything: the day he loses power is the day the shield falls with it.
The moment he is no longer a sitting head of state, the Interpol excuse evaporates. The political-figure bar that protects him weakens the instant he becomes a private citizen wanted by the Hague. A Red Notice becomes not just possible but obvious. And a capture bounty, a reward for information leading to his arrest and delivery to trial, becomes exactly the kind of thing the civilized world already does with its most wanted fugitives.
We put twenty-five million dollars on Osama bin Laden's head. Bin Laden murdered roughly three thousand people on a single terrible morning. Putin has killed many times that number, methodically, over four years, and he is still doing it. So whatever number we would have paid for bin Laden, multiply it. Make it enormous. Make it the largest bounty in human history, and make it payable the day this coward no longer has an army standing between him and justice. Let every remaining day of his life be spent looking over his shoulder, wondering which of the men around him decided the reward was worth more than his friendship.
And notice how he is already behaving like a man who has done this math. His yachts, the ones he insists are not his, quietly repositioned toward Turkey. His personal security tripled. Stop and think about what that last one really means. A man that insulated is already untouchable from the outside. No foreign commando is reaching him in the Kremlin. So the extra ring of guards is not pointed outward at us. It is pointed inward, at them, at the very people standing next to him. You do not triple-lock a door that is already bombproof unless you have started to fear the people already inside the room. That is the phase every dictator reaches right before the end.
Reach the Men Around Him
Which brings me to the smartest thing the free world could do while we wait for that end to arrive. If we cannot reach Putin, we reach the men around him.
They do not have his shield. The generals who program the missiles into apartment blocks, the ministers who sign the orders, the oligarchs who launder the money and fund the machine, not one of them enjoys head-of-state immunity. And under the same Nuremberg principle that hangs over Putin, aiding and abetting war crimes is itself a crime. They are not bystanders. They are accomplices, every one of them.
The good news is this is already working where we have bothered to try it. The ICC did not only warrant Putin, it warranted his defense chief and his war commander. Western sanctions have already named and frozen hundreds of oligarchs and officials, seized their yachts, locked their accounts, chased their mansions. The theory is exactly right: squeeze the people with the most to lose until self-interest does what morality could not. So do more of it, and do it louder. Name every general. Freeze every asset. Indict every enabler. Make standing next to Vladimir Putin the most expensive decision a man can make, measured in his fortune and his freedom. Watch how fast loyalty evaporates when the price finally comes due.
The Countries Keeping the War Alive
And then there are the nations. Because Putin does not fight this war alone, and the honest truth is he could not fight it for another month without help from a small club of regimes that have decided a dead Ukrainian child is an acceptable cost of doing business.
Start with Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko has let Putin use his country as a launch pad and a staging ground since the very first day, when the original assault on Kyiv rolled in from Belarusian soil. He is not an innocent neighbor. He is an accessory, and history should record him as one.
Then North Korea, which has gone from spectator to full partner. Pyongyang has shipped Russia something on the order of twelve million artillery shells, by the assessment of South Korea's own intelligence service, enough that Western analysts estimate North Korean ammunition has at times made up roughly forty to half of every shell Russia fires. And it is not just metal. Kim Jong Un sent his soldiers, somewhere between fourteen and fifteen thousand of them, to fight and die for Putin's war in the Kursk region. Ukrainian intelligence now puts North Korean casualties above seven thousand. Seven thousand young men fed into a foreign dictator's meat grinder, and in return Pyongyang gets cash, combat experience, and help with the missiles it will one day point at Seoul, at Tokyo, at our own troops in the Pacific.
And then the quiet giant, China. Beijing is far too clever to ship rifles and get caught. Instead it has become, in NATO's own words, the decisive enabler. China supplies an estimated eighty percent of the critical components in Russia's weapons, the microelectronics, the drone parts, the machine tools, sold as civilian goods and reassembled into the drones that burned Kyiv last night. And it throws Russia an economic lifeline besides, buying the discounted oil and gas that fills Putin's war chest even as his own refineries burn. Xi Jinping could, as our own ambassador to NATO put it, call Vladimir Putin and end this war tomorrow. He does not. India, too, has kept the oil flowing, buying record volumes of the Russian crude that pays for the missiles. Every barrel is a vote for the war to continue.
None of these enablers can hide behind Putin's shield either. Their companies can be sanctioned. Their banks can be cut off. Their officials can be named. The tools exist. What has been missing is the will to use them at full strength, because using them costs us something too, and the comfortable nations of the world have preferred cheap goods and quiet markets to the hard work of actually strangling a war machine.
What Everyone Should Know
So here is where it all lands. Vladimir Putin is not a leader the world disagrees with. He is an indicted war criminal, charged for stealing children and charged for the slaughter of civilians, hiding inside the one fortress on Earth we cannot storm, protected by a shield that is already cracking and a ring of guards he no longer fully trusts.
His crimes do not become smaller because he wears the title of president. Nuremberg settled that argument eighty years ago. The only thing his office has ever bought him is time, and time is running out. When it does, the world should be ready, the Red Notice drafted, the bounty posted, the manhunt planned, so that the moment he is no longer untouchable, he becomes the most wanted man alive.
Until then, we go after everyone else. The generals. The oligarchs. Belarus. North Korea. China. Every hand that loads the gun and every wallet that pays for the bullet. Make them all radioactive. Make the whole rotten structure understand that the bill for what happened in Kyiv last night is going to be collected, from every single one of them, sooner or later.
The children he stole deserve it. The families crushed in their sleep deserve it. And Vladimir Putin, more than any man walking the Earth today, has earned it.
— Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | @EveryoneKnws1