The former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, a constant supporter of the current head of the Kremlin, again threatens “any attempts” to arrest Vladimir Putin on the territory of a foreign state. He claims it would amount to a “declaration of war” on Russia and directly threatens to attack any country that “allows” Putin to be arrested, Reuters reports.

In an interview with several Russian media outlets, including the state news agency TASS and the social network VKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook), the vice president of the Russian Security Council raises new threats to the West.

He claims that any attempt to arrest President Vladimir Putin after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest “would be tantamount to declaring war on Russia.” Medvedev says the ISS, which is not recognized by countries such as Russia and China, is “a legal entity that has never done anything significant,” Reuters writes.

“All our missiles would fly in their direction”

• “This is a situation that will never happen, but let’s imagine for a moment that something like this could happen (the arrest of Vladimir Putin on the territory of another state – no).
• Let’s say the current head of a nuclear power goes to Germany and is arrested.
• What does it mean? This is a declaration of war against the Russian Federation.
• And in this case, all our rockets will fly to the Bundestag, to the chancellor’s office,” Dmytro Medvedev said.

German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann last week welcomed the ICC’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Putin, saying Berlin would have to comply if Putin set foot on German soil.

Commenting on this statement, Medvedev said: “Does he understand that this is a casus belli, that this is a declaration of war?”

Dmitry Medvedev also stated that the decision of the ISS “creates a huge negative potential” against the background of Russia’s already bad relations with the West:

• “We already have very bad relations with the Western world. Well, they probably never got worse than this story.
• Even by the time Churchill gave his famous Fulton speech (1946, in which he referred to the Iron Curtain between the two blocs), they were better. And they suddenly make such a decision regarding the head of our state.”

“They wanted to show that they don’t pee their pants in front of the largest nuclear power”

Dmytro Medvedev also reacted to the ICC decision on Monday, posting an extremely violent message on Telegram, full of vulgar language, in which he even threatens the judges of the International Criminal Court with a supersonic missile strike.

• “Who did he bring to justice? Three dozen strangers. The president of Sudan has spat on these accusations and despite a military coup in his own country, he is beyond the reach of “justice”. Others are not worth mentioning at all. That is, its effectiveness is zero,” Medvedev said.
• “A country and its leaders can be tried in two cases: 1. when the country itself has become extremely weak, almost lost its sovereignty and dared to agree to a trial; 2. when the country lost the war and capitulated. It cannot be otherwise. And everyone understands that. By the way, the most discredited episode, which killed almost zero confidence in the tribunal, was related to US crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The court sat on its own and could not do anything,” he continued.

A senior Russian official said, referring to Putin’s arrest warrant, that “the judges at the ICC are campaigning in vain” and that they only wanted to show that they were not “pissing their pants in front of the biggest nuclear powers”. .

At this point in his Telegram message, Medvedev turns to threats, telling the ISS judges that all people are “under God and under (the range of) missiles.

• “We can well imagine a close-range hypersonic strike from the North Sea from a Russian ship at the tribunal in The Hague. (…)
• And the tribunal is just a pathetic international organization, not the population of a NATO country. Therefore, there will not even be a war. They are afraid. And no one will regret it. So, citizens-judges, look carefully at the sky…” he also wrote.

It will be recalled that on March 17, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the war crime of illegal deportation of at least 100 children from Ukraine. The ruling obliges the court’s 123 member states to arrest Putin and hand him over to The Hague for trial if he enters their territory.

In the first reaction from Moscow, the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Maria Zakharova, stated in her Telegram channel:

• “The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no significance for our country, including from a legal point of view.”
• “Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and has no obligations under it.”

On Sunday, Putin defiantly visited Mariupol, a Ukrainian city in the Donetsk region occupied by Moscow forces.