Ukraine war latest news: Vladimir Putin makes surprise trip to Crimea as arrest warrant issued

Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine.

In Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, Mr Putin met Moscow-installed governor Mikhail Razvozhaev, with whom he visited an art school and a children’s centre that are part of a project to develop a historical park on the site of an ancient Greek colony, Russian state news agencies said.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, in a move most of the world denounced as illegal and which soured relations between Moscow and the West. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said any peace settlement would involve Russia withdrawing from the peninsula as well as the regions it has occupied since last year.

Mr Putin has shown no intention of relinquishing the Kremlin’s gains. Instead, he stressed on Friday the importance of holding Crimea.

Ukrainian forces outside the eastern city of Bakhmut are managing to keep Russian troops at bay so ammunition, food, equipment and medicines can be delivered to defenders, the army said on Saturday.

Kyiv said its troops had killed 193 Russians and injured 199 others during the course of fighting on Friday.

Russia has made the capture of Bakhmut a priority in its bid to take control of the country’s eastern Donbas region. The city has been largely destroyed in months of fighting, with Russia launching repeated assaults.

“We are managing to deliver the necessary munitions, food, gear and medicines to Bakhmut. We are also managing to take our wounded out of the city,” military spokesperson Serhiy Cherevaty told the ICTV television channel.

It comes as widespread Russian attacks continued in Ukraine following the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.

Apart from the ICC, several former leaders have been tried by other international courts.

Among the notable cases is that of Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia who became the first former head of state to appear before an international tribunal since World War Two when he was tried at a UN court for alleged crimes during the 1990s Balkan wars. He died in custody in 2006 before a verdict was reached.

Liberian former leader Charles Taylor was jailed for 50 years in 2012 after he was found guilty of war crimes by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. He was the first former head of state to be convicted of war crimes by an international court since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after World War Two.

Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, one of Milosevic’s adversaries in the 1990s Balkan wars, left office after being indicted for war crimes by the Kosovo war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He denies all the charges and is due to go on trial next month.

Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi are the only other leaders to have been indicted by the ICC while serving as head of state. Charges against Gaddafi were terminated after he was overthrown and killed in 2011.

Bashir, who was indicted in 2009 for genocide in Darfur, remained in office for another decade until he was toppled in a coup. He has since been prosecuted in Sudan for other crimes but has not been handed to the ICC.

While in office, he travelled to a number of Arab and African countries, including ICC member states Chad, Djibouti, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda, which declined to detain him. The court rebuked those countries or referred them to the UN Security Council for non-compliance.

The ICC has tried one former head of state after he left office: former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, who was acquitted of all charges in 2019 after a three-year trial.

The ICC’s 123 member states are obliged to detain and transfer Putin if he sets foot on their territory. Russia is not a member and neither are China, the United States or India, which is hosting a summit later this year of leaders of the G20 group of big economies, which includes Russia.

The world’s permanent war crimes court was created by the Rome Statute, a treaty ratified by all the EU states, as well as Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland, 33 African countries and 19 nations in the South Pacific.

Russia signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but withdrew its backing in 2016 after the ICC classified Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula as an armed conflict.

“Putin is not stupid. He’s not going to travel abroad to a country where he might be arrested,” said assistant professor of history at the Utrecht University Iva Vukusic.

“He is not going to be able to travel pretty much anywhere else beyond the countries that are either clearly allies or at least somewhat aligned (with) Russia,” Vukusic said.

The ICC’s arrest warrant was the first issued against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.

The move has been dismissed by Moscow and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough. But, the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognise its jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have met around 40 times since China’s leader assumed the presidency in 2012. In many ways, the camaraderie between the pair has come to define the diplomatic relations between Moscow and Beijing across the last decade (Chris Stevenson writes).

Xi made Moscow his first overseas visit as president in 2013 and this latest visit comes next week in the wake of him being handed an unprecedented third term as president. During that time, the greetings between Xi and Putin have evolved from “dear president” to “dear friend” and later to “my old friend”. Last year, just a few weeks before Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine the leaders met and announced a “no limits” partnership between their two nations.

Historically, relations between China and Russia have been fraught with distrust and confrontation, particularly at the height of their Cold War schism in the late 1960s, but Putin and Xi have changed the dynamic. On his last visit to Moscow, in 2019, Xi spoke of his “deep personal friendship” with his Russian counterpart. “In the past six years, we have met nearly 30 times. Russia is the country that I have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague,” Xi said. Both leaders share an objective of altering the world order, and they will continue to pursue that.

US president Joe Biden said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “clearly committed” war crimes during the course of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since the conflict erupted in the former Soviet nation in February last year.

“He’s clearly committed war crimes,” the US president said on Friday referring to the Russian leader.

Speaking on the arrest warrant for Mr Putin issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, Mr Biden said: “Well, I think it’s justified. But the question is – it is not recognised internationally by us either. But I think it makes a very strong point.”

The US is not a member country of the global court.

Pope Francis met today with thousands of refugees and the charity groups helping them as he sought to promote legal migration routes to Europe as an alternative to smuggling operations that he said have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a “cemetery.”

Francis said “humanitarian corridors,” which have operated in Italy since 2016, saved lives and helped newly arrived migrants get acclimated while church groups provided housing, education and work opportunities.

“Humanitarian corridors not only aim to bring refugees to Italy and other European countries, rescuing them from situations of uncertainty, danger and endless waiting; they also work toward integration,” he said.

The Sant’Egidio Catholic charity, the Federation of Evangelical Churches and the Waldensian Church spearheaded the ecumenical humanitarian transfer initiative in Italy, which has brought more than 6,000 people to Europe, Francis was told.

Families from Syria, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Ukraine were in the Vatican auditorium to meet with the pope.

As the Russia-affiliated Wagner group embarks on a mass recruitment drive, get up to speed on the band of mercenaries led by Vladimir Putin’s former caterer: