Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived Monday in Mongolia, a member of the international court that issued an arrest warrant for him.
The official visit, in which he is to meet Tuesday with Mongolian leader Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, is Putin’s first to a member country of the International Criminal Court since it issued a warrant for his arrest nearly 18 months ago on charges of war crimes in Ukraine.
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Ukraine has called on Mongolia to arrest Putin and hand him over to the court in The Hague. A spokesperson for Putin said last week that the Kremlin isn’t worried about the visit.
Members of the international court are bound to detain suspects if an arrest warrant has been issued, but the court doesn’t have any enforcement mechanism.
Mongolia, a sparsely populated country between Russia and China, is heavily dependent on the former for fuel and electricity and on the latter for investment in its mining industry.
The ICC has accused Putin of being responsible for the abductions of children from Ukraine, where the fighting has raged for 2½ years.
Putin and the Mongolian leader on Tuesday are to attend a ceremony marking the 1939 victory of Soviet and Mongolian troops over the Japanese army that had taken control of Manchuria in northeastern China. Thousands of soldiers died in months of fighting in a dispute over where the border was between Manchuria and Mongolia.
Though Putin has faced international isolation over the invasion of Ukraine, he visited North Korea and Vietnam in June and has also visited China twice in the past year.
He joined a meeting in Johannesburg by video link last year after the South African government lobbied against him showing up for the BRICS summit, a group that also includes China and other emerging economies. South Africa is an ICC member.