Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that an arrest warrant for Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin would have negative consequences. He allegedly will continue the war in Ukraine.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader on March 17. He has been charged with war crimes because Putin is personally responsible for kidnapping Ukrainian children during the Russian invasion.

Vucic condemned Putin's arrest warrant

The Serbian president, who has boasted in the past of his personal closeness to Putin, has criticized the decision of the International Criminal Court.

I think that issuing an arrest warrant for Putin, without going into legal details, will have bad political consequences and will indicate a great reluctance to talk about peace and a truce. My question is, now that he's being accused of the worst war crimes, who are you going to talk to? Do you really think that it is possible to defeat Russia in a month, in 3 months, in a year? Vucic said.

According to him, there is no doubt that the goal of those who did this is to make it difficult for Putin to communicate, so that everyone who talks to him knows that he is being accused of war crimes.

When asked if Putin would be arrested if he came to Serbia, Vučić replied that ” this is a meaningless question, since it is clear that as long as the conflict continues, Putin has nowhere to go .”

It should be noted that although Serbia seeks EU membership, it maintains ties with Russia and is the only European state that has refused to join international sanctions against Moscow.

Vučić, a staunch opponent of international war crimes tribunals, was a member of the ultra-nationalist party whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, was put on trial for war crimes committed in the 1990s.

In the late 1990s, Vučić was Minister of Information in the government of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Then, during the war in Kosovo, Serbian troops were accused of massive crimes against Kosovo-Albanian separatists.

In 2001, Milosevic was arrested in Serbia on charges of war crimes. He died in the prison of the Hague Tribunal in 2006, without waiting for the completion of the trial.

ICC issues arrest warrant for Putin

• The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova over the illegal deportation of children from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.
• The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine handed over to the ICC more than 40 volumes of materials, including on the removal of more than 16,000 children from Kharkiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. However, prosecutors note that this figure could be much higher.
• President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that this order is a historic moment from which historical responsibility begins.
• In turn, US President Joe Biden noted that the ICC decision regarding Putin is “a very strong argument.”