The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President, Vladimir Putin on Friday, March 17, 2023, accusing him of war crimes. However, Serbian populist President, Aleksandar Vucic, who had in the past boasted about his personal relation with the Russian leader, has criticized the court’s decision.
“I think issuing an arrest warrant for Putin, not to go into legal matters, will have bad political consequences and it says that there is a great reluctance to talk about peace (and) about truce” in Ukraine, Vucic told reporters in Belgrade.
“My question is now that you have accused him of the biggest war crimes, who are you going to talk to now?
“Do you really think that it is possible to defeat Russia in a month, three months or a year? There is no doubt that the goal of those who did this is to make it difficult for Putin to communicate, so that everyone who talks to him is aware that he is accused of war crimes.”
Aleksandar Vucic
Asked if Putin would be arrested if he comes to Serbia, Vucic replied that it is “a pointless question, because it is clear that as long as the conflict (in Ukraine) continues, Putin has nowhere to go.”
Although Serbia is seeking European Union membership, it has maintained close ties to Russia and is the only European state that has refused to join international sanctions against Moscow.
Vucic was a ranking official of an ultranationalist party whose leader Vojislav Seselj and several other members ended up in the international war crimes court on trials for crimes they committed during the wars in the 1990s.
In the late 1990s, Vucic was information minister in the government of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic during the war in Kosovo where Serb troops were accused of various war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian separatists.
Milosevic was arrested in Serbia on war crime charges in 2001. He died at the International Criminal Court in the Hague in 2006 before his trial on the crimes committed by Serbian troops during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s ended.
Putin Visits Occupied City Of Mariupol
Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the occupied port city of Mariupol, his first trip to the Ukrainian territory that Moscow has illegally annexed.
Kremlin Spokesman, Dmitry Peskov divulged that Putin arrived in Mariupol after visiting Crimea, a short distance southwest of Mariupol, to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine.
Peskov informed reporters that the trip had been unannounced, and that Putin intended to “inspect the work of the (command) post in its ordinary mode of operation.”
The visits, during which Putin was shown chatting with local residents in Mariupol and visiting an art school and a children’s center in Crimea, were a show of defiance by the Russian leader after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges.
Putin has not made any comments on the arrest warrant, which deepened his international isolation despite the unlikelihood of him facing trial anytime soon. The Kremlin has rejected the move by the International Criminal Court as “legally null and void.”
Speaking to a news agency, Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Marat Khusnullin emphasized that Russia was in Mariupol to stay. He stated that the government hoped to finish the reconstruction of its blasted downtown by the end of the year.
“People have started to return. When they saw that reconstruction is under way, people started actively returning,” Khusnullin said.
When Moscow fully captured Mariupol, an estimated 100,000 people remained, out of a prewar population of 450,000. Many were trapped without food, water, heat or electricity.
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