The News
Ukraine on Friday called on Mongolia to detain Russian President Vladimir Putin when he visits the country next week, saying the country should honor the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the Russian leader.
“We call on the Mongolian authorities to execute the binding international arrest warrant,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Mongolia on Tuesday, his first visit to an ICC member country since the court ordered his arrest last year. The court said Mongolia has “the obligation to cooperate,” although a Kremlin spokesperson brushed off suggestions that he could be arrested, saying there were “no worries” about the visit.
SIGNALS
ICC ruling continues to shadow Putin
It appears unlikely that the Russian president will end up arrested in Mongolia next week. “There is no risk of Putin’s arrest,” a political consultant close to the Kremlin told Bloomberg, noting that Mongolia would have given guarantees not to detain Putin or members of his delegation in order for the trip to take place. Even so, the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin has made life more difficult for the Russian leader. He did not attend last year’s summit of leaders of the BRICS grouping in South Africa over uncertainty about whether Johannesburg would comply with the ICC decision, and it is unclear if he will travel to an upcoming summit in Brazil, where authorities have left it up to the courts to decide whether he would be arrested.
Mongolia remains vulnerable to Russian energy pressure
More than 95% of Mongolian fuel comes from Russia, meaning that the Kremlin could bring the country to a grinding halt if desired, two analysts wrote in Foreign Affairs. Energy shortages last winter due to operational issues at Russian power plants laid bare the “strategic liability” of relying on Moscow for energy, Mongolia Weekly reported, comparing the issue to Europe’s dependence on Russian gas before the war in Ukraine. Despite a desire not to aggravate relations with Russia, not all Mongolians are happy with the decision to host Russia’s widely condemned president. Putin’s visit will “undermine the very international law that is supposed to protect a small country like Mongolia,” a former presidential aide wrote on X.
Ulaanbaatar seeks to strike a delicate balance between Russia, China, and the US
Squeezed between Russia and China, Mongolia has long had a need to maintain good relations with its larger, more powerful neighbors, even while seeking closer ties with the US. The country has held military exercises with troops from all three powers in the past year, and has long sought to balance its ties to Moscow and Beijing with what it calls its “third neighbors,” which include the US, Japan, and the EU. This balancing act has only become more difficult since the start of the war in Ukraine, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute argued: Mongolia “cannot endanger its own population by poking the bear to its north, but it also cannot alienate the world’s leading democracies.”