Russian president Vladimir Putin will be in Mongolia on Tuesday, making his first visit to a member country of the International Criminal Court where he is wanted for alleged war crimes.
It is unlikely that Mr Putin will be handcuffed and arrested upon arrival despite every ICC member state being obliged to detain people against whom arrest warrants have been issued by the world court in The Hague.
Mongolia is therefore set to become the first nation to openly defy the ICC warrant against the Russian leader.
The Kremlin announced last week that Mr Putin would visit Mongolia to mark the 85th anniversary of the victory of Russian and Mongolian forces against Imperial Japan at Khalkhin Gol river in 1939.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Mr Putin in March 2023 after accusing him of committing war crimes by taking hundreds of Ukrainian children from orphanages during the war.
It accused Mr Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova of “unlawful deportation” of children “from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”.
The Kremlin said it had “no worries” about Mr Putin’s impending visit. “We have an excellent rapport with our partners from Mongolia,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “Of course, all aspects of the president’s visit have been carefully prepared.”
Mongolia, landlocked between Russia and China, is dependent on Moscow for imports of oil and natural gas. It has long been a close ally to Moscow.
The ICC and Ukraine had already pressed Mongolia to arrest Mr Putin at the weekend, and Human Rights Watch put its weight behind these calls on Monday.
“Mongolia would be defying its international obligations as an ICC member if it allows Russian president Vladimir Putin to visit without arresting him,” said Maria Elena Vignoli, senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch.
“Welcoming Putin, an ICC fugitive, would not only be an affront to the many victims of Russian forces’ crimes, but would also undermine the crucial principle that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.”
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it hoped Mongolia was “aware of the fact that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal” and urged it to arrest the Russian leader and hand him over to prosecutors at The Hague.
The ICC does not have any enforcement mechanism and its agreement with member countries exempts them from the obligation of carrying out an arrest under certain circumstances.
For Mongolia, the practical consequences of a fall out with Moscow would likely be worse than the consequences of upsetting The Hague.
Mongolia receives 95 per cent of its petroleum products from Russia, accounting for 35 per cent of all imports.
The country’s economy, heavily focused on the export of raw materials such as coal, copper and gold, depends largely on Russian fuel for transport to China.
In the past five years, Russian exports to Mongolia have increased at a rate of 8.85 per cent a year, from $1.6bn in 2017 to $2.44bn in 2022, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. The exports include planes, helicopters and spacecraft.
When Russia banned fuel exports from 1 March 2024 it made exceptions for friendly nations such as India, China and Mongolia.
Mr Putin last year avoided visiting ICC member country South Africa for the BRICS summit in Johannesburg.
President Cyril Ramphosa lobbied Moscow for months to keep Mr Putin from visiting in order to avoid a diplomatic crisis. He ultimately announced the two countries had reached a “mutual agreement” that the Russian leader would not attend a meeting that he’s normally a fixture at.
Mr Putin instead took part in the Johannesburg summit by video link, launching into a tirade against the West.
South Africa thus avoided a similar controversy to when it hosted Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir in 2015, sparking condemnation for failing to fulfil its obligations to the ICC by not arresting him on a pending arrest warrant.