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Russian president Vladimir Putin will skip next month’s summit of leaders from the Brics group of nations in South Africa, avoiding the possible spectacle of his arrest there on an International Criminal Court war crimes warrant.
The decision that Putin should not travel will come as a huge relief to South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, whose government would have faced a legal obligation to arrest Putin when he arrived in Johannesburg for the summit with his Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and South African counterparts.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Wednesday that the Russian president would instead join via video link, which he claimed amounted to “full participation”. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov will take his place at the Brics gathering that begins on August 22, Peskov told state newswire Ria Novosti.
The South African presidency had said earlier that Putin would not attend the summit “by mutual agreement”.
South Africa had been stepping up efforts to dissuade Putin from taking up an invitation that Pretoria made before the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges in March.
Ramaphosa claimed in court papers released this week that his country was risking war with Russia if it sought to execute the warrant on Putin.
But South Africa’s president also said in the papers that his government was “fully cognisant” of its international legal obligations as a member of the court, even as it approached the ICC to warn that it would have problems effecting an arrest.
Putin will be the only Brics head to miss the summit, as South Africa has confirmed the attendance of the leaders of Brazil, India and China. It will be the bloc’s first in-person gathering since the coronavirus pandemic.
Peskov earlier dismissed the idea that Russia had threatened to declare war on South Africa if it moved to arrest Putin. “This was not said,” Peskov told reporters. “There’s nothing to explain here. Everyone in the world knows what an attempt on the head of the Russian state would mean,” he added, without elaborating.
South African diplomats had been working for months on contingency options including a virtual summit, moving the gathering to China, which is not a member of the ICC, and Lavrov attending in Putin’s place.
But ultimately officials concluded that Ramaphosa, who has cordial relations with the Russian leader, would have to personally convince Putin not to come. Ramaphosa planned to use next week’s Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg to do so, they said.
South African activists hailed confirmation that Putin would not come as a sign of the country taking its ICC obligations seriously. This contrasts with its failure under Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa’s predecessor, to arrest Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir on a warrant from the court in 2015.
The end of the drama over Putin’s attendance also removes a significant distraction from the summit, at which the core Brics nations will debate adding new members and embracing alternatives to the US dollar for trade between their economies.
“President Ramaphosa is confident that the summit will be a success,” his office added on Wednesday.
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