Fanfare and red carpet: Vladimir Putin was received with great pomp on Tuesday in Mongolia, for his first visit to a member country of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since the issuance of an arrest warrant against him, on suspicion of illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Mongolia, a member of the ICC, was therefore obliged to arrest him. But on Monday evening, upon his arrival in Ulaanbaatar, the Russian president was greeted with great pomp by the guard of honour.
Ukraine reacted angrily: Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi accused Mongolia of “allowed the accused criminal to escape justice, thereby sharing responsibility for his war crimes”.
His trip appears to be an act of defiance towards the ICC, war-torn Ukraine, and many Western countries and human rights organisations that had called for his arrest.
The Court based in The Hague, Netherlands, recalled last week that its member countries have the« obligation » to arrest individuals targeted by an arrest warrant. But, in practice, any possible sanctions from the ICC are essentially limited to a verbal reprimand.
A democracy landlocked between the two authoritarian countries of Russia and China, Mongolia has maintained close ties with Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. A former satellite country of the USSR, it did not condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and abstained from voting on the conflict at the UN.
The Kremlin had assured last week that it had not “no worries” regarding a possible arrest of the Russian president in Mongolia.
Ahead of the trip, the Russian leader had praised the “promising economic and industrial projects” between the two countries, in an interview with the Mongolian newspaper A cellAmong these projects: the construction of a gas pipeline crossing Mongolia to connect China and Russia.
