Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose name is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March, may visit Turkey, a NATO member, at the invitation of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was recently re-elected. mandate to the leadership of Turkey, writes the Turkish publication Daily Sabah.

• “The President of Turkey has confirmed the invitation to our President to visit Turkey,” Vladimir Putin’s adviser Yuriy Ushakov said on Thursday, the Russian state news agency Interfax reported.

Plans for that visit are ongoing and a date has yet to be set, he added.

After a brief period of strained bilateral relations after a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian fighter jet during the war in Syria in 2015, diplomatic relations between Russia and Turkey have improved, and Putin and Erdogan are now considered friends.

Turkey was one of the few states that maintained relations with both Moscow and Kyiv after the war that Vladimir Putin launched in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Ankara tried to position itself as a neutral party, trying to mediate between the parties to the conflict. In addition, Turkey has been reluctant to participate in the sanctions imposed by other NATO member states against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

On March 17, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes related to the 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.

However, Turkey is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, the founding act of the International Criminal Court, and analysts believe that, most likely, Ankara will not execute the arrest warrant for Putin, writes DPA, which is quoted by Agerpres.

In the first reaction of Moscow after the issuance of the warrant for Putin’s arrest, the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, wrote 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.”