Russian President Vladimir Putin is not losing sleep over the fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against him last Friday, his spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, said on Monday. But the decision of that Court has served as an excuse for former Russian president Dimitri Medvedev, a former liberal, to once again take all the bile out of him against the West.
Medvedev, who is now vice president of the Russian Security Council, stated on his Telegram channel that a precision missile attack against the ICC headquarters in The Hague (Netherlands) is “completely imaginable”.
“We are all at the mercy of God and missiles,” wrote Medvedev, Putin’s right-hand man for years. Between 2008 and 2012 he was president of Russia, which allowed Putin to return to the Kremlin by avoiding the constitutional prohibition on staying in power for more than two consecutive terms. Medvedev was Russia’s prime minister from 2012 to 2020.
In his Telegram message, a medium that he has used in recent months to brandish the nuclear threat in the midst of the conflict with Ukraine, he stated that “the precise use of an Onyx hypersonic missile launched by a Russian ship from the North Sea is completely imaginable against the seat of the Tribunal in The Hague”.
“The Court is just a miserable organization, it is not the population of the NATO countries. That is why they will not start a war. They will be afraid. No one will be sorry. So, judges, look carefully at the sky…”, warned the former president.
And he added that the consequences of issuing an arrest warrant against a president of a nuclear power will be monstrous under international law.
“Now no one will go to international bodies, all agreements will be separate. All the stupid decisions of the UN and other structures will be shattered. The gloomy twilight of the entire system of international relations begins,” he predicted.
Faced with Medvedev’s bellicose speech, spokesman Peskov has been calmer in his public appearances to assess the arrest warrant against Putin.
On Friday, he called the judges’ decision “scandalous and unacceptable.” This Monday he has assured that Putin “does not take seriously” the order of the Court and that he treats it calmly.
“We are seeing so many openly hostile demonstrations against our country and our president in the world… If every one of these hostile demonstrations is taken seriously, nothing good will work out. So we treat it calmly, we fix everything carefully. We continue to working. And, most importantly, the president is still working,” Peskov said.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant on March 17 against Putin and against the presidential commissioner for the Rights of the Child in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova, justifying him for his alleged responsibility for war crimes for the illegal deportation of hundreds of children from Ukraine. .
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the order is “null and void from the point of view of law”, and the Kremlin stressed that Moscow does not recognize the jurisdiction of that Court. Russia is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the founding law of the ICC, adopted in 1998.
