Defiant Putin parades at ‘children’s palace’
President makes surprise visit to centre after order by court to arrest him for child abductions
VLADIMIR PUTIN yesterday made a last-minute visit to Crimea to tour a “children’s palace” he commissioned, a day after being labelled a war criminal for abducting thousands of boys and girls from Ukraine.
The Russian president ostensibly arranged the trip to mark the ninth anniversary of his annexation of the Ukrainian territory in 2014, but it was seen as a pointed response to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to issue an arrest warrant for him.
“The president knows how to surprise,” said Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Kremlin-installed governor of the region. “Everything had been prepared for a video conference when before you know it he comes down here personally. By car. He was at the wheel.”
Putin had ordered the Korsun Children’s Centre to be built in May 2021, seven months before his planned invasion of Ukraine and the start of the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.
The four-storey “Byzantine-style” building set in parkland on the lush Black Sea coast has been completed but is not yet open. Its website said that it hosts a theatre, a cinema, more than 500 classrooms and can sleep up to 300 children. In one room, colourful beanbags were scattered around and in another touchscreen information monitors had been set up, according to an earlier online video of the facility.
In footage of his visit, Putin was dressed in a dark blue zip-up jacket over a blue T-shirt. He walked with a slight limp and his hair looked grey and thin.
He could be seen admiring artworks and sculptures, asking questions as he wandered through various rooms and inspecting equipment. He made no official statement.
Metropolitan Tikhon, a senior Russian Orthodox priest and close associate of the Russian president since the 1990s, led Putin on the tour.
“Here will be a very interesting museum, a very interesting exhibition about the history of Crimea from ancient times to the present day,” the priest said at one point. At the end of the footage he got into the driving seat of a 4x4 car with blacked-out windows. Putin has not celebrated the annexation of the peninsula in Crimea for three years. He last visited the territory in December when he drove a car across the 12-mile bridge that links mainland Russia with the peninsula after it had been patched up following a Ukrainian attack two months earlier.
Crimea is reported to be a major thoroughfare for children taken from Ukraine and the centre could be used as part of that. The Kremlin has previously been accused of pushing Ukrainian children through Russian indoctrination centres.
Those accusations were part of the ICC’s arrest warrant, which formally placed Putin and his children’s representative, Maria Lvova-Belova, on its wanted list. Putin is only the third sitting national leader, after Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, to be labelled a war criminal by the ICC.
Russia is not a signatory of the treaty that governs the ICC and the Kremlin has described the label as a Western plot. All 123 signatures of the treaty are supposed to arrest a wanted person if they travel to their territory. This, theoretically, limits Putin’s travel options.
A deal allowing Ukraine to export millions of tons of grain through the Black Sea has been extended in spite of the continuing conflict.
Kyiv is looking for the extension to last for 120 days, but Russia wants it to last for 60 days unless sanctions against Moscow are softened.