President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived late Monday for his first state visit to a member of the International Criminal Court since it issued a warrant for his arrest in March 2023. The court accused Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights of being personally responsible for the “unlawful deportation” and transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. Before Putin’s visit, the I.C.C. said that Mongolia was duty-bound to arrest Putin, but it is highly dependent on Russia for fuel, and an arrest was highly unlikely. The Kremlin has brushed aside the prospect.
“There are no worries; we have a great dialogue with our friends from Mongolia,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters on Friday, noting that “all aspects of the visit have been thoroughly prepared.” Putin was greeted at the airport by what seemed to be a Mongolian military guard.
He was spending the night in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, a sign that he was comfortable in the country. In defiance of that warrant from the I.C.C., Tuesday’s visit at the invitation of Mongolia’s president, Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, was a reminder that Russia still retains strategic influence over its southern neighbour despite efforts by the Mongolians to hedge.
As one implication of the visit: “Putin gets a symbolic win for sure,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. For Mongolia, he said, the visit shows that the need to maintain the relationship with Moscow outweighs the country’s pledge in 2002 when it signed the Rome Statute ratifying its membership in the I.C.C.
He added that Russia’s adversaries would have to “think twice” about the narrative that Putin is a pariah, he’s ostracized, and whenever there is an I.C.C. warrant for a country that’s ratified the Rome Statute, he will be arrested.
The international court, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest last year, accusing him of committing war crimes with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. The court also issued a warrant for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.
The I.C.C. needs an enforcement mechanism. Countries that have signed onto the court are supposed to detain those subject to its arrest warrants. Russia is not a signatory to the court and has consistently rejected its authority.
Landlocked Mongolia, wedged in between the two supergiants of Russia and China, treads a careful political line in balancing its two far more powerful neighbours. That has included taking a neutral stance on the war in Ukraine. While it has looked to the West to ease geopolitical pressure, hosting high-level guests like President Emmanuel Macron of France, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, is also economically reliant on its much larger neighbours.
Mongolia shares a 2,100-mile border with Russia and relies on the giant gas-producing neighbour for 95 percent of its fuel. It tries to maintain steady ties with Moscow, partly as a counterbalance to Beijing, which also wields tremendous influence in Ulaanbaatar through buying virtually all of Mongolia’s commodity-driven exports.
The Mongolian political establishment thinks that it is easier to manage secure and predictable relations with Moscow” by hosting Putin, said Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva, an independent geopolitical analyst who used to work at the National Security Council of Mongolia. “Ulaanbaatar is choosing to have predictable relations with Moscow and do the damage control later,” Bayarlkhagva said. “After all, geography cannot be changed.
Bayarlkhagva said Mongolia probably concluded that there would be little blowback for Putin’s visit because there was precedent for members of the International Criminal Court thumbing their nose at the Rome Statute. In 2015, for example, South Africa refused to arrest Sudan’s then-president Omar al-Bashir during his visit to Johannesburg even though the International Criminal Court wanted him on charges of genocide and war crimes in Darfur.
Last year, Johannesburg asked the I.C.C. for an exemption from arresting Putin so he could attend the BRICS summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. When it wasn’t granted, Putin opted to skip the summit.
There had been expectations that no announcements would be made on the prospective Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which would help divert Russian gas supplies that had gone to Europe through Mongolia to reach China instead. In August, Mongolia’s parliament voted not to include the pipeline in its budget for the next four years, which observers said indicated that it had low expectations that it would be built.
