Dmitry Medvedev: We’ll attack any country that tries to arrest Putin

Enforcing the ICC arrest warrant would be seen as ‘declaration of war’, says the deputy head of Russia’s national security council.

Dmitry Medvedev, left, said Moscow would respond ‘with everything we have’ if Vladimir Putin was arrested. Picture: EPA/The Times

Russia has warned that any attempt to enforce an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin would be viewed by the Kremlin as a declaration of war.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s national security council, vowed that Moscow would respond immediately with missile attacks.

“Let’s imagine – it’s clear that this is a situation that will never happen – but nevertheless let’s imagine it does. The current head of a nuclear state arrives on the territory of, say, Germany, and is arrested. What is this? A declaration of war against the Russian Federation,” Medvedev said.

“In this case, everything we have would fly toward the Bundestag, the chancellor’s office and so on,” he added. He was speaking after Berlin confirmed that it would arrest Putin if he ever set foot in Germany.

Medvedev, a former prime minister who also served as president between 2008 and 2012, was once seen as a relative liberal. Since the start of the war, however, he has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s biggest hawks. He has warned that supplies of weapons by western countries to Ukraine are bringing closer “a nuclear apocalypse”.

Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian presidential commissioner for children’s rights, is also wanted by the ICC. Picture: Reuters/The Times

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-funded broadcaster RT, said last week that Russia would launch nuclear weapons at any country that arrested Putin. Neither Medvedev nor Simonyan explained how the president would then avoid being killed.

Last week the ICC accused Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Kremlin’s top official for children’s rights, of being responsible for the forced deportations of Ukrainian children to Russia. The Kremlin said the ruling was meaningless because Russia was not a signatory to the court. However, the ICC’s move seems set to limit Putin’s foreign trips.

He was expected to visit South Africa in August for a Brics summit with the leaders of Brazil, India, China and South Africa. The trip is now in doubt. South Africa, one of the ICC’s 123 member states, has said it is aware of its “legal obligation”. South Africa refused to detain President Bashir of Sudan when he visited the country in 2015, despite an ICC request for his arrest on war crimes allegations.

South Africa said on Thursday that the issue would be discussed within the government, as well as with Russian officials, to “determine the way forward”.

Hungary said on Thursday that it would not arrest Putin if he entered the country. Gergely Gulyas, chief of staff to Viktor Orban, the prime minister and an ally of Putin, said arresting him would violate the constitution because Hungary had not put into law the statute of the International Criminal Court.

He said of the warrant: “I think these decisions are not the most fortunate because they lead toward escalation and not toward peace.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported that Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group, will scale back his private army’s operations in Ukraine after losing manpower and supplies of ammunition.

The Times