A wanted man traveled to Ukraine this weekend.
In a surprise move, Vladimir Putin showed up in occupied Mariupol after a visit to Crimea, where he celebrated the ninth anniversary of what the Western world still considers a flagrantly illegal annexation.
Assuming there are degrees of flagrant illegality, Putin’s September annexations, which included Donetsk, where Mariupol is located, were deemed even more brazen. The visit to the city came just a day after The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin, and just two days before Xi Jinping was due for a state visit in Moscow.
Naturally, Putin made a show of machismo — he apparently insisted on driving himself around the city, where he “examined the coastline [by] the yacht club” and other “memorable places,” according to the Kremlin.
In an especially contemptuous display, Putin visited a children’s center in Crimea. The ICC arrest warrant was predicated on allegations tied to what many international observers describe as the systematic abduction of Ukrainian children.
Mariupol was an early symbol of Ukrainian resistance. Fighters barricaded in a steel mill there held out for months against a brutal onslaught by Russian forces, who eventually managed to commandeer the city.
In what could be interpreted as a testament to the intractability of the conflict, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said Sunday that Russia intends to reconstruct downtown Mariupol by year-end, in a bid to encourage those who fled the city to return of their own volition.
By the time Russian forces managed to break the siege at the steel mill, the city’s population had declined by an estimated 75%, and those who remained were left to cope with Third World-style conditions, in many cases lacking clean water and electricity.
Mariupol was home to two of the most infamous Russian airstrikes of the conflict. Just days after the invasion began, Russia decimated a maternity hospital and, shortly thereafter, a theater which, at the time, was the city’s de facto community bomb shelter.
In September, at a signing ceremony marking the annexations of four Ukrainian territories, Putin said, of the local populations, “They will become our citizens forever.”
