Brazilian President Lula da Silva no longer guarantees that Vladimir Putin will not be arrested at the request of the International Criminal Court if he visits the country. He said this at a press conference following the G20 summit, Bloomberg reports.
"If Putin decides to come to Brazil, the court will decide whether to arrest him or not, not me," Lula da Silva said, speaking about the 2024 summit to be held in Rio de Janeiro.
Earlier, the Brazilian president assured that Putin should not be afraid to come to Rio.
"I believe that Putin can easily come to Brazil. I can tell you that if I remain president and he comes to Brazil, he will never be arrested," Lula said in a video interview with the Indian news platform Firstpost.
At a press conference on Monday, the Brazilian president promised to "study" the work of the ICC and the Rome Statute, according to which countries that have ratified it must arrest Putin. In particular, he promised to find out why Brazil has ratified the document, while the United States, Russia, and India have not.
"We'll see what happens by November 2024, when the G20 summit will be held in Brazil. I hope by then the war [in Ukraine] will be over and everything will return to normal. We will know whether Xi Jinping and Putin will attend closer to the date of the event," he promised.
Neither the Russian president nor the Chinese leader attended the summit in India.
On March 17, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Russian Children's Ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. They are accused of organizing the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children, which qualifies as a war crime.