I.C.C. Issues Arrest Warrants for 2 Senior Russian Security Officials

The International Criminal Court said on Tuesday that it had issued arrest warrants for two top Russian security officials over strikes against civilian targets, delivering a stinging, if largely symbolic, condemnation of the Kremlin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

The Hague-based court accused Russia’s most senior military officer, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, and a senior member of the country’s Security Council, Sergei K. Shoigu, of directing a campaign of strikes against Ukraine’s power plants in the winter of 2022.

“The expected incidental civilian harm and damage would have been clearly excessive to the anticipated military advantage,” the court said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to the strikes. It issued the warrants on Monday.

Russia’s Security Council denounced the warrants, calling them “pathetic” examples of “the West’s hybrid war against our country,” according to comments provided to the Moscow-based Interfax news agency. Russia, like the United States, is not a party to the court.

Ukrainians applauded the court’s actions even if few expected to see the Russian military commanders in the dock at The Hague anytime soon. Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, called the decision “another significant step toward ensuring full accountability of the aggressor.” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the court’s decision was “a clear indication that justice for Russian crimes against Ukrainians is inevitable.”

General Gerasimov and Mr. Shoigu, who until recently served as Russia’s defense minister, are longtime loyalists of President Vladimir V. Putin and were among the architects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Their ambitious plans to take Ukraine’s capital in several days at the start of the war, which began in February 2022, failed spectacularly. They then sought to defeat Ukraine in what has become a grinding war of attrition, at the cost of at least tens of thousands of Russian soldiers’ lives.

They also sought to subdue Ukraine by strangling its economy, a campaign that included systematic attacks against energy infrastructure during the coldest months of the year.

The campaign has spread human suffering across Ukraine. In its most recent report, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that more than 5.4 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, and more than 8.1 million Ukrainians have fled as refugees to neighboring European countries.

The U.N. investigators found what they said was a grave, wide-ranging pattern of human rights violations against Ukrainian civilians that, in many cases, could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In recent months, as Ukraine ran low on Western-provided air defenses, the Russians stepped up their assaults on Ukrainian energy infrastructure; the country’s energy generating capacity has been cut in half. Millions of people now face daily rolling blackouts, with only a few hours of power, and there is deep concern about the country’s ability to recover in time for winter.

As of the end of May, the energy sector had suffered damages and losses totaling $56.5 billion as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a study by the Kyiv School of Economics. That includes $16.1 billion in damages directly resulting from attacks on electricity generation and transmission facilities as well as on oil and gas infrastructure.

“Unfortunately, we have to deal with the reality that the attacks are likely to continue,” he said. “And we have to be prepared, we have to restore as much of the generation as possible before winter.”

Despite Russia’s faltering initial performance in the war, Mr. Putin kept General Gerasimov and Mr. Shoigu at the forefront of the war effort for the first two years of the invasion.

General Gerasimov, who serves as the head of the Russian equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was promoted to lead Russia’s forces in Ukraine in January 2023, a position that he still occupies.

Mr. Shoigu, however, was eventually fired in a government reshuffle that Mr. Putin carried out last month after winning a rubber stamp re-election.

Several protégés of Mr. Shoigu were detained on corruption-related charges or lost their jobs in a subsequent purge of the Defense Ministry, a campaign widely seen as the Kremlin’s indirect condemnation of Mr. Shoigu’s performance in the war.

Mr. Shoigu had served as Russia’s defense minister for 12 years, becoming one of Mr. Putin’s longest-serving ministers. After losing his post, he was given a lower-profile job at the Security Council, the country’s defense advisory body.

General Gerasimov and Mr. Shoigu are the latest Russian officials to be charged by the court. Last year, it issued arrest warrants for Mr. Putin and Russia’s children’s rights ombudswoman, saying they bore individual criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“No individual, anywhere in the world, should feel they can act with impunity,” Karim Khan, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said in a statement.

But Russia has said that it does not recognize the arrest warrants, or the court’s jurisdiction, and that it denies committing war crimes. That makes it highly unlikely that Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov will be taken into custody in the foreseeable future.

Marlise Simons and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.