The German authorities promised to arrest Putin in their country

German authorities will arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin at the request of the International Criminal Court (ICC) if he is in the country. This was stated by the head of the German Ministry of Justice, Marco Buschman, in an interview with Bild.

“I expect the ICC to quickly go to INTERPOL as well as to the participating states and ask them to execute the arrest warrant. Then Germany will be obliged to arrest Putin if he enters the country and extradite him to the ICC,” the official said.

After this chapter Alexander Bastrykin instructed the Investigative Committee (IC) of Russia to make a legal assessment of the words of the German minister, the press service of the Investigative Committee reported. In the department’s communiqué, the ICC requirements are described as illegal.

On March 17, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights of the Russian Federation. They are suspected of illegal deportations of children from the occupied regions of Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation.

The decision of the court in The Hague will complicate the president’s trips to 123 countries. The agreement with the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) has been signed and ratified by EU countries, Latin America, most African countries, as well as “friendly” and neutral Russia, Brazil, Serbia, Mexico and Afghanistan.

As noted by Die Zeit, all states under its jurisdiction must act in accordance with the ICC ruling.

The states party to the law are obliged to detain any person for whom an arrest warrant has been issued by the ICC, but this is not a mandatory procedure, writes Pavel Chikov, founder of the human rights organization Agora. “Former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited several African states party to the Statute while in office, but he was not arrested,” he said on his Telegram channel.

At the same time, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell said that the arrest warrant for Putin is only the beginning of the process of “holding to account” those potentially responsible for war crimes in Ukraine.