PUTIN'S crony who is accused of snatching children from Ukraine and taking them back to Russia has bragged about her crimes during a meeting with the Russian president.
A shocking state TV broadcast captures the moment accused child abducting war criminals Putin and his children's commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova casually discuss how she brought back a child from an invaded Ukrainian city.
In the video, Putin is seen approving Lvova-Belova's personal adoption of the boy from Mariupol, a city in southern Ukraine flattened by the Russian invasion last year.
The clip, filmed almost one month ago, seems to prove the allegations made by Kyiv that the Kremlin has approved the mass deportation of children from captured Ukrainian lands – a war crime.
In the short video, Putin's children's commissioner tells tyrant Vlad that she was only able to adopt the child – a boy named by Russian media as Filip – because of him.
Putin asks her: "Have you adopted a child from Mariupol?"
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Giggling and blushing, Lvova-Belova replies: "I have, thanks to you, Vladimir Vladimirovich."
Putin then asks if it was a baby, to which she replies: "No, he is 15 years old. Now I know what it means to be a mother of a Donbas child."
Describing her relationship with the teen, she goes on: "It's complicated, but we love each other very much."
Putin then says: "This is the key thing."
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Lvova-Belova adds: "Yes, indeed. I believe we'll overcome everything, don't you think?"
To this, Putin responds: "Of course."
Mother-of-23 Lvova-Belova, 38, has made a name for herself as a nationalistic defender of Mother Russia, projecting the image of the ideal Russian woman.
The blonde junior politician is married to a Russian Orthodox priest, and on her social media she is often pictured in traditional dress.
Since being appointed Putin's children's commissioner in 2021, she has portrayed the forced deportation of Ukrainian children as a Russian rescue mission.
She has adopted 18 children, including the latest, and the couple also have five biological kids.
In January, she was seen on stage at a rally where abducted Ukrainian children were brought up and paraded for the crowd.
Singling out one Ukrainian girl, Lvova-Belova said: "Nastya from Donetsk is one of those children we found foster parents for.
"Now she has a big family and a kitten that she has always dreamed of."
Now I know what it means to be a mother of a Donbas child
It comes as the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova for the abduction of Ukrainian children.
A panel of judges agreed that there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that Vlad and his children's rights commissioner bore responsibility for the "unlawful deportation" of Ukrainian children.
The warrants are the first to be issued by the ICC for crimes committed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
At least 6,000 children from Ukraine have allegedly been sent to Russian "re-education" camps in that time, according to a report released last month by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has put the number of deported children as high as 16,000, as he called the warrants "a historic decision which will lead to historic accountability".
In a statement on Friday, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said: "Incidents identified by my office include the deportation of at least hundreds of children taken from orphanages and children's care homes."
Khan said that most of those children had been put up for adoption in Russia.
Putin himself issued a decree speeding up the process of granting the children Russian citizenship, making them easier to adopt.
Khan went on: "My office alleges that these acts, amongst others, demonstrate an intention to permanently remove these children from their own country.
"We must ensure that those responsible for alleged crimes are held accountable and that children are returned to their families and communities … We cannot allow children to be treated as if they are the spoils of war."
The Kremlin responded immediately to the ICC announcement, defiantly claiming that the court in the Netherlands had no power over Russia.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel: "The decisions of the international criminal court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view.
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"Russia is not a party to the Rome statute of the international criminal court and bears no obligations under it."
Lvova-Belova told Russian media this week that the warrant for her arrest was a reflection of the "appreciation" for her work "to help the children of our country, that we don't leave them in the war zone, that we take them out".
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