Russian official Dmitry Medvedev says Putin arrest would be a ‘declaration of war’

A top Russian official said Thursday that arresting President Vladimir Putin on the International Criminal Court’s warrant for crimes in Ukraine would amount to a “declaration of war.”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, made the startling comments when he fielded a reporter’s question about a German judicial official saying Putin would be arrested if he traveled to Germany.

“Just imagine — clearly that such a situation is never going to happen but still — let’s imagine that it has happened. The incumbent head of a nuclear country arrives in, say, Germany and is arrested. What does it mean? A declaration of war against Russia,” Medvedev said, according to Russian news outlet Tass.​

If the Russian president were arrested on the ICC warrant, Medvedev said, “all our weapons will target” the German chancellor’s office “and so on.” ​

He went on to mock German Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann for even suggesting arresting Putin.

“Does he even realize that it would be a casus belli, a declaration of war? Or was he a bad law student?” Medvedev said.

​The ICC issued the warrant last Friday, accusing Putin of orchestrating a scheme to illegally abduct thousands of Ukrainian children and deport them to Russia for political re-education.

Putin allegedly “committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (and) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts,” said the court, based in The Hague.

Russia has been accused of waging a yearlong war that specifically targets Ukraine’s civilian population, infrastructure and utility companies as a means to break the will of Ukraine’s forces.  

Mass burial sites have been uncovered in Ukrainian cities previously occupied by Russian troops, and accounts have surfaced of mass killings, rape and torture.

Medvedev also said an arrest of Putin would further erode relations between Moscow and the West, even invoking British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech that ushered in the Cold War.  ​

“Our relations with the Western world are already poor; they are perhaps at their worst ever. Even when Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech, our relationship was better. And all of a sudden, they make such a move against our head of state,” Medvedev ​said.