Ajit Karn
Moscow: Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, said that trying to arrest Vladimir Putin abroad after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an order for him would be seen as a “declaration of war” by Moscow.
Since Putin sent troops to Ukraine, Medvedev, who was president from 2008 to 2012, has been giving more and more aggressive talks and making more and more nuclear threats.
He said late Wednesday that a country would be hit with Russian weapons if it caught Putin.
The ICC, which is based in The Hague, issued an arrest order for the Russian leader last week. The Russian leader is accused of sending Ukrainian children away.
“Let’s imagine,” the Putin friend said. “It’s clear that this situation will never happen, but let’s imagine it does.”
“The current leader of a nuclear state goes to, say, Germany and is arrested when he or she gets there. What’s going on? A call to war with the Russian Federation.”
Medvedev said that if this happened, “all of our weapons, rockets and other things, will fly on the Bundestag, in the Chancellor’s Office, and so on.”
Medvedev, who is the vice head of Russia’s security council, said that the ruling by the ICC will make things even worse with the West.
Two days earlier, Russia had started a criminal probe into ICC prosecutor Karim Khan and a few other ICC judges, saying that their ruling was “illegal.”
The Hague court had also issued an arrest order for Maria Lvova-Belova, who is in charge of protecting the rights of children in Russia.
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Wednesday, the ICC’s governing body said it was sad that the court had been “threatened” over its order.
In a statement, the chair of the assembly said that it was sad that people were trying to stop international efforts to make sure that people who did things that were against international law were held accountable.
