Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to visit Mongolia next week for the first time in a decade.
The Kremlin said the visit is at the invitation of Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh “to participate in the ceremonial events dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the joint victory of the Soviet and Mongolian armed forces over the Japanese militarists on the Khalkhin Gol River.”
It’s seen as a strategic visit for the longtime allies, but there is one small problem: In March 2023, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, put out a warrant for Putin’s arrest on charges of the unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the ongoing war in Ukraine.
As a signatory of the Rome Statute — the founding treaty of the ICC — Mongolia is required to detain individuals on their soil if they have an arrest warrant out in their name. (Russia also signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but withdrew its signature in 2016 and never became a member of the ICC.)
This is Putin’s first visit to an ICC member country since the warrant was issued.
So what will Mongolia do?
“Mongolia is never going to arrest him, of course,” said Talita Dias, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
Dias said that although Mongolia is obligated to arrest Putin, there will probably be no major consequences if it doesn’t.
Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Moscow has “no worries” about the upcoming trip. “We have a wonderful dialogue with our friends from Mongolia,” he said.
As a judicial institution, the ICC does not have its own police force or enforcement body for its judgments. “It’s very difficult to operate in this space of states without enforcement power,” Dias said.
In a similar case, South Africa was censured by the ICC for failing to arrest Sudan’s then-president, Omar al-Bashir, in 2015.
Dias told BI that in that instance, since Sudan was a non-member state, the UN Security Council got involved, which escalated the situation.
In Putin’s case, it’s also the first time the court issued a warrant against the leader of one of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members.
Dias said that with Russia a permanent Security Council member, it’s unlikely there will be far-reaching consequences for either country in the event of a failure to comply with the warrant.
“There will be legal proceedings, probably at the ICC,” she said, adding: “There would be a finding that Mongolia has breached the Rome Statute. Maybe some countries will sanction Mongolia for that, and then that’s it.”
“I’m curious to see what will happen,” she told BI.
Hungary and Armenia have previously assured Putin that he would not be arrested on their soil despite being ICC members.
Russian and Mongolian government representatives did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment.
