Nothing more than toilet paper. That’s how Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev described the arrest warrant that was issued by the International Criminal Court, or ICC, against Moscow strongman Vladimir Putin.

The ICC said that Putin must be arrested for committing war crimes in his invasion of Ukraine, specifically by deporting Ukrainian children across the Russian border.

The Kremlin issued a two-pronged response against the ICC declaration, the first appealing to reason; and the second by showing a mailed fist.

According to top Russian officials, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Putin or any Russian, for that matter, like Maria Lvova-Belova, because Russia was “not a party to the Rome Statute” that created the ICC.

A similar arrest warrant was issued by the ICC against Belova for her actions, whatever those may be, as Presidential Commissioner on Children’s Rights.

Russia’s line is akin to the position of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte that the ICC has no jurisdiction over his person regarding the conduct of his anti-drugs campaign as president from 2016 to 2022 and as Davao City mayor previous to that.

If Russia maintained to never have had anything to do with the ICC and the Rome Statute from the start, the Philippines, on the other hand, never ratified and even pulled out from the same statute. Same logic, and the same effect.

By issuing the lame arrest warrant against Putin, the West’s favorite villain at the moment, the ICC judges showed they are not willing to play by their own rules.

How the ICC judges fathomed to have gotten jurisdiction over Russia, never mind Putin, if Russia never signed the Rome Statute, showed not just their overreach but their megalomania.

These ICC judges must think of themselves as the equals of those who presided over the Nuremberg Trials that sentenced to death Nazi Germany’s top government and military officials for war crimes committed during World War 2.

But the ICC judges are like household cats compared to the lions of Nuremberg because of vastly different situations, foremost of which is the fact the Allied forces have won World War 2 and had taken custody of those who were put on trial.

Israel? Well, it simply assassinated those whom it identified to have presided over the holocaust or the mass extermination of Jews.

Same thing with the arrest, trial, and execution by hanging of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. It only happened because a different set of Allied forces, one still led by the United States like in WW2, first toppled him from power.

Therein lies the foolishness of those ICC judges and the danger of Russia being pushed to the brink of using its “second option” — to respond militarily against any nation that would be dumb enough to arrest Putin.

There’s no point in even going into whether Putin committed those crimes as alleged by the ICC. The only question is whether anyone can arrest Putin while he’s still the leader of superpower Russia and while he or his trusted men still have their trigger fingers on Moscow’s nukes.

“I would like to see the country that arrests Putin by the decision of The Hague, some eight minutes after, or however long the flight time to its capital,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state broadcaster RT, said.

That’s as clear a threat that came straight from the Kremlin, referring to the flight time of nuclear missiles reaching any European country after being launched from Russia.

Naive. That’s how to characterize the ICC and its members, and more so its prosecutor Karim Khan, who cited Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor and Radovan Mladic as people who thought they were out of reach, but were ultimately apprehended.

Milosevic, Taylor and Mladic were patsies compared to Putin who has not even bothered to honor with a reply the ICC arrest warrant.