South Africa says Putin will not attend the BRICS summit in August “by mutual agreement”

The US assures that Putin’s absence from the forum will show that he has become an “international pariah”

19 (EUROPA PRESS)

The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has confirmed this Wednesday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, will not attend the summit to be held by the BRICS –Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa– in August, a decision adopted “by mutual agreement” between both countries.

“By mutual agreement, Putin will not attend the summit, in which Russia is represented by its Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov,” the South African Presidency said in a statement on its website, confirming that the presidents of the other members of the block.

Later, the Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, has assured that the Russian president will participate in the BRICS summit via videoconference. “It will be an appropriate participation,” he said, according to information collected by the Russian news agency TASS.

Likewise, South Africa has highlighted that “Ramaphosa has confirmed South Africa’s willingness to host the historic 15th BRICS summit” and has highlighted that “it will be the first to be held in person since the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent global restrictions.

“Ramaphosa is confident that the summit will be a success and asks the nation to extend the necessary hospitality to the many delegates who will arrive from different parts of the continent and the world,” the South African Presidency concluded.

Ramaphosa himself said on Tuesday that a possible arrest of Putin if he traveled to the country in connection with the arrest warrant against him by the International Criminal Court (ICC) would amount to “a declaration of war.”

“It would be a reckless, unconstitutional and illegal exercise of the powers vested in the government to declare war on Russia by arresting President Putin,” he said, before asserting that “risking going to war with Russia” would be “incompatible with the Constitution.”

However, Peskov has responded to this information and has ensured that the Russian authorities “never” have expressed such an extreme. “We never said that. Nobody has tried to make anyone understand anything,” the Kremlin spokesman said on Wednesday.

“In this world, it is absolutely clear to everyone what it means to try to mess with the Russian head of state. So there is no need to explain anything,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

Later, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, asserted that Putin’s future absence from this forum is one of the many signs that “this war has been a strategic failure for Russia”, which he has seen as his position has been “enormously diminished in the world.”

“The president of Russia, President Putin, can hardly leave his own borders now. He is an international pariah who can hardly leave his own borders for fear of being arrested,” the spokesman for US diplomacy said at a press conference. .

The ICC issued an arrest warrant in March for Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, Maria Lvova Belova, for the war crime of illegal deportation of Ukrainian minors to Russian territories in the context of the war in Ukraine, which began in end of February 2022.

South Africa is part of said court, so according to the Rome Statute it would be obliged to proceed with the arrest, although already in 2015 it avoided arresting the then president of Sudan, Omar Hasan al Bashir, alleging that he had immunity as visiting head of state. official.