The Hague

Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to visit Hungary in the very near future, where he will meet United States counterpart Donald Trump for a second summit on ending the war in Ukraine. The first – in Alaska in August – failed to result in any agreement.

But, with an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant issued in 2023 for Putin’s arrest over the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children during Russia’s war with Ukraine, how will the fugitive from justice make it to the negotiating table?

Signatories of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the Hague-based court in 2002, are required to arrest those subject to warrants as soon as they enter their territory – which theoretically includes airspace, which is also considered sovereign territory under international law.

Hungary, which recently stated its intention to withdraw from the agreement – making it a safe space for Putin – is surrounded by countries which would be bound by this.

However, the ICC, which has 125 member states, has no police force and hence no means of enforcing arrests.

So what awaits Putin on his upcoming jaunt?

Isn’t Hungary technically an ICC member, too?

On paper, yes. But it’s on the way out.

In April, right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced the country would be ditching the ICC’s founding document when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit. Netanyahu is also on the ICC’s most-wanted list for Gaza war crimes – his arrest warrant was issued earlier this year.

The Hungarian parliament approved a bill back in May to trigger the withdrawal process, which becomes official one year after the United Nations Secretary-General receives a written notification of the decision.

Given Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s comments on Friday on the “sovereign” country’s intent to host the president with “respect”, ensuring he has “successful negotiations, and then returns home”, Putin seems safe from any arrest on Hungarian soil.

What about airspace? Could he be intercepted mid-air?

As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, “many questions” need to be resolved before Putin sets off on his journey. One of those questions is likely to regard the president’s flight path.

Putin will probably want to avoid the Baltic states after recent violations of Estonia’s airspace by Russian jets, which have put the region on high alert for a potential overspill from the Ukraine war. The Baltics could well force a hard landing.

Friendly Belarus might provide a convenient corridor between the Baltics and Ukraine further south, but this would set the president on course for Poland, which has historically strained relations with the Kremlin and recently warned Europe to prepare for a “deep” Russian strike on its territory. Russian drones have also recently breached Polish airspace.

Slovakia, which is led by Moscow-leaning populist Robert Fico, is still guzzling Russian energy in defiance of Trump’s orders to European countries to stop oil and gas imports, and may be more accommodating. Indeed, Fico is on a collision course with fellow EU members over sanctions against Moscow. But Putin would still need to cross Poland before reaching Slovakia.

Putin’s direct route to Budapest, therefore, appears littered with obstacles.

What about a more circuitous route?

Putin may be inspired by fellow ICC fugitive Netanyahu, wanted for crimes including using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinian civilians in war-ravaged Gaza, who avoided several European countries on his way to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York last month.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Wing of Zion plane briefly flew over Greek and Italian territory, but then ducked south, entirely avoiding French and Spanish airspace before heading over the Atlantic, according to FlightRadar24.

Flying south could be an option for Putin as well. Georgia, whose Georgian Dream governing party suspended Tbilisi’s bid to join the European Union, is a signatory to the Rome Statute but could potentially be relied on to turn a blind eye.

And Turkiye, which is not a party to the Rome Statute, but which has long walked a tightrope between Russia and NATO and hosted previous attempts between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators on ending the war, could be amenable to allowing the Russian president to pass.

From there, the main obstacle would be Greece, providing a route through the Balkan states to Orban’s respectful welcome.

Has Putin made other trips since becoming an internationally wanted war criminal?

Putin has clearly limited his travels since the ICC warrant was issued.

Last year, he hopped over the border to ICC member Mongolia, where he was treated to a lavish ceremony featuring soldiers on horseback by Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh.

Mongolia has very friendly relations with Russia, on which it depends for fuel and electricity. The country has refrained from condemning Russia’s offensive in Ukraine and has abstained during votes on the conflict at the UN, so it was little surprise to see the red carpet being rolled out.

Flying to Alaska for a bilateral with Trump last August was easy since the president could completely avoid hostile countries, flying over his country’s huge land mass over the Bering Strait to the US, which is not a signatory to the Rome Statute.

Similarly, this year’s visit to “old friend” and neighbour Xi Jinping for a huge military parade and a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation posed no problems since China is not a party to the ICC.

This month, the Russian president met Central Asian leaders with whom he is eager to bolster ties in Tajikistan, which has signed up to the Rome Statute.

Will Putin ever be arrested?

The arrest warrants mark the first step towards an eventual trial, although the capture of Russia’s president is almost inconceivable.

Only a few national leaders have ended up in The Hague.

The former Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, surrendered to The Hague earlier this year to face charges of crimes against humanity. The charges pertain to extrajudicial killings committed during his widely condemned “war on drugs”, which killed thousands of people.

The former Liberian president and warlord, Charles Taylor, was convicted in 2012 by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, which held proceedings in The Hague. He was found guilty of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Would a future Russian leader decide to forcibly hand Putin over, as was the case with Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, extradited to The Hague after his removal in 2000, for atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia wars?

That would necessitate a seismic shift in the Kremlin’s power dynamic, which seems unlikely for the time being.

Families and friends of Gaza-bound flotilla activists detained by Israeli forces joined a demonstration in the Netherlands demanding their release. Far-right Israeli officials have suggested the activists should be held in high-security prisons.

Dutch police deployed water cannons and tear gas to disperse a protest in The Hague. The protesters were rallying for immigration restrictions and stricter policies for asylum seekers.

Patrice-Edouard Ngaissona and Alfred Yekatom have been sentenced for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The International Criminal Court has convicted two leaders of a predominantly Christian rebel group in the Central African Republic for multiple war crimes committed against Muslim civilians during the country’s civil war in 2013 and 2014, sentencing each to more than a decade in prison.

The former president of the CAR Football Federation, Patrice-Edouard Ngaissona, along with Alfred Yekatom, a rebel leader known as “Rambo,” were found guilty on Thursday of their involvement in atrocities including murder, torture and attacking civilians.

The court sentenced Yekatom to 15 years for 20 war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ngaissona received 12 years for 28 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges stem from their roles as senior leaders in a militia known as the anti-Balaka, which was formed in 2013 after mainly Muslim Seleka rebels stormed the capital Bangui in March of that year and toppled then-President Francois Bozize, a Christian.

The violence that ensued left thousands of civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands of others. Mosques, shops and homes were looted and destroyed.

The ICC’s presiding Judge Bertram Schmitt read harrowing details in The Hague of the violence committed by the militia against suspected Seleka Muslims.

Yekatom’s men tortured one suspect by cutting off his fingers, toes, and one ear. This man’s body was never found. Others were killed and then mutilated.

Appearing in court dressed in a light brown suit and waistcoat, white shirt, and dark tie, Yekatom listened impassively as the judge read out the verdict.

Dressed in a bright blue jacket, Ngaissona nodded to the judge as his sentence was delivered.

The court found Yekatom not guilty of conscripting child soldiers and acquitted Ngaissona of the charge of rape.

Both men had pleaded not guilty to all charges laid out in the trial, which opened in 2021. It is the first case at the ICC, which began in May 2014, to focus on the violence that erupted after the Seleka seized power in the CAR in 2013.

Yekatom was extradited to The Hague in late 2018, after being arrested in the CAR for firing his gun in parliament. Ngaissona was arrested in France in December 2018 and extradited to The Hague.

The trial of an alleged Seleka commander, Mahamat Said Abdel Kani, is ongoing.

Last year, judges at the ICC unsealed another arrest warrant in the investigation. According to prosecutors, Edmond Beina commanded a group of about 100-400 anti-balaka fighters responsible for murdering Muslims in early 2014.

Separate proceedings against Beina and five others at a specially-created court are slated to begin in the CAR on Friday.

The CAR is among the poorest nations in the world and has endured a succession of civil wars and authoritarian governments since gaining independence from France in 1960.

Violence has subsided in recent years, but fighting occasionally erupts in remote regions between rebels and the national army, which is backed by Russian mercenaries and Rwandan troops.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” killed thousands of people.

For years, Catholic priest Flaviano Villanueva has gathered evidence of alleged extrajudicial killings.

He exhumed victims’ bodies for forensic examination and protected a key witness who claims he worked as a contract killer for Duterte.

In March 2025, the priest’s persistence paid off when Duterte was arrested and extradited to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court.

101 East follows Father Villanueva’s fight for justice for the victims of Duterte’s brutal crackdown.

Ukraine’s European allies pledged increased levels of military aid to Ukraine this year, making up for a United States aid freeze, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his ambition to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

“At this moment, the Europeans and the Canadians have pledged, for this year, $35bn in military support to Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance’s annual summit, which took place in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24-25.

“Last year, it was just over $50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at $35bn. And there are even others saying it’s already close to $40bn,” he added.

The increase in European aid partly made up for the absence of any military aid offers so far from the Trump administration.

In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to buy the US Patriot air defence systems Ukraine needs to fend off daily missile and drone attacks.

The Trump administration made its first sale of weapons to Ukraine the following month, but only of F-16 aircraft parts.

At The Hague this week, Zelenskyy said he discussed those Patriot systems with Trump. At a news conference on Wednesday, Trump said: “We’re going to see if we can make some available,” referring to interceptors for existing Patriot systems in Ukraine. “They’re very hard to get. We need them too, and we’ve been supplying them to Israel,” he said.

Russia has made a ceasefire conditional on Ukraine’s allies stopping the flow of weapons to it and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated that condition on Saturday.

On June 20, Vladimir Putin revealed that his ambition to annex all of Ukraine had not abated.

“I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” he declared at a media conference to mark the opening of the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum on Friday, June 20.

“But you know we have an old parable, an old rule: wherever a Russian soldier steps, it is ours.”

“Wherever a Russian soldier steps, he brings only death, destruction, and devastation,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the next day.

In a post on the Telegram messaging platform on June 21, Zelenskyy wrote that Putin had “spoken completely openly”.

“Yes, he wants all of Ukraine,” he said. “He is also speaking about Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, the Caucasus, countries like Kazakhstan.”

German army planners agreed about Putin’s expansionism, deeming Russia an “existential threat” in a new strategy paper 18 months in the making, leaked to Der Spiegel news magazine last week.

Moscow was preparing its military leadership and defence industries “specifically to meet the requirements for a large-scale conflict against NATO by the end of this decade”, the paper said.

“We in Germany ignored the warnings of our Baltic neighbours about Russia for too long. We have recognised this mistake,” said German chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday, highlighting the reason for an about-turn from his two predecessors’ refusal to spend more on defence.

“There is no going back from this realisation. We cannot expect the world around us to return to calmer times in the near future,” he added.

Germany, along with other European NATO allies, agreed on Wednesday to raise defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035.

It was a sign of the increasingly common threat perception from Russia, but also a big win for Trump, who had demanded that level of spending shortly after winning re-election as US president last year.

Of that, 1.5 percent is for military-related spending like dual-purpose infrastructure, emergency healthcare, cybersecurity and civic resilience.

Even Trump, who has previously expressed admiration for Putin, seemed to be souring on him.

“I consider him a person that’s, I think, been misguided,” he said after a moment’s thought at his NATO news conference. “I’m very surprised actually. I thought we would have had that settled easy,” referring to the conflict in Ukraine. “Vladimir Putin really has to end that war,” he said.

In the early weeks of his administration, Trump appeared to think it was up to Ukraine to end the war.

Putin continued his ground war during the week of the NATO summit, launching approximately 200 assaults each day, according to Ukraine’s General Staff – a high average.

Ukraine, itself, was fighting 695,000 Russian troops on its territory, said Zelenskyy on Saturday, with another 52,000 attempting to create a new front in Sumy, northeast Ukraine.

“This week they advanced 200 metres towards Sumy, and we pushed them back 200–400 metres,” he said, a battle description typical of the stagnation Russian troops face along the thousand-kilometre front.

Terror from the air

Russia continued its campaign of demoralisation among Ukrainian civilians, sending drones and missiles into Ukraine’s cities.

Russian drones and missiles killed 30 civilians and injured 172 in Kyiv on June 19.

“This morning I was at the scene of a Russian missile hitting a house in Kyiv,” said Zelenskyy. “An ordinary apartment building. The missile went through all the floors to the basement. Twenty-three people were killed by just one Russian strike.”

“There was no military sense in this strike, it added absolutely nothing to Russia militarily,” he said.

Overnight, Russia attacked Odesa, Kharkiv and their suburbs with more than 20 strike drones. At least 10 of the drones struck Odesa. A four-storey building engulfed in flames partly collapsed on top of rescue workers, injuring three firefighters.

A drone attack on Kyiv killed at least seven people on Monday this week. “There were 352 drones in total, and 16 missiles,” said Zelenskyy, including “ballistics from North Korea”.

A Russian drone strike on the Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday killed 20 people and injured nearly 300, according to the regional military administration.

Ukraine focused on drone production

Ukraine, too, is focused on long-range weapons production. Five of its drones attacked the Shipunov Instrument Design Bureau in Tula on June 18 and 20. Shipunov is a key developer of high-precision weapons for the Russian armed forces, said Ukraine, and the strikes damaged the plant’s warehouses and administration building, causing it to halt production.

“Thousands of drones have been launched toward Moscow in recent months,” revealed Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin last week, adding that air defences had shot almost all of them down.

But Ukraine is constantly improving designs and increasing production.

On Monday, the United Kingdom announced that Ukraine would be providing its drone manufacturers with “technology datasets from Ukraine’s front line” to improve the design of British-made drones that would be shipped to Ukraine.

“Ukraine is the world leader in drone design and execution, with drone technology evolving, on average, every six weeks,” the announcement from Downing Street said.

On the same day, Norway said it would invert that relationship, to produce surface drones in Ukraine using Norwegian technology.

Zelenskyy said this Build with Ukraine programme, in which Ukraine and its allies share financing, technology and production capacity, would ultimately work for missile production in Ukraine as well.

His goal is ambitious. “We want 0.25 percent of the GDP of a particular partner state to be allocated for our defence industry for domestic production next year,” he said.

Among Ukraine’s projects is a domestically produced ballistic missile, the Sapsan, which can carry a 480kg warhead for a distance of 500km – enough to reach halfway to Moscow from Ukraine’s front line.

Asked whether the Sapsan could reach Moscow, Zelenskyy’s office director, Andriy Yermak, told the UK’s Times newspaper: “Things are moving very well. I think we will be able to surprise our enemies on many occasions.”

Trouble with club membership

Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO and the European Union, leaving Russian orbit, is what triggered this war, and Russia has said that giving up both those clubs is a condition of peace.

NATO first invited Ukraine to its 2008 Summit in Bucharest. But in February, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said NATO membership for Ukraine was not a “realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement”, and a “final” ceasefire offer from the White House on April 17 included a ban on NATO membership for Ukraine.

Despite this, on Wednesday, Rutte told Reuters: “The whole of NATO, including the United States, is totally committed to keep Ukraine in the fight.”

Earlier this month, Rutte told a discussion at the Chatham House think tank in London that a political commitment to Ukraine’s future membership of NATO remained unchanged, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in the final communique of the NATO summit.

“The irreversible path of Ukraine into NATO is there, and it is my assumption that it is still there after the summit,” Rutte said.

If that gave Ukrainians renewed hope, this was perhaps dashed by the European Union’s inability last week to open new chapters in its own membership negotiations.

That was because Slovakia decided to veto the move to do so in the European Council, the EU’s governing body. Slovakia also blocked an 18th sanctions package the EU was set to approve this week, because it would completely cut the EU off from Russian oil and gas imports.

Slovakia and Hungary have argued they need Russian energy because they are landlocked. Their leaders, Robert Fico and Viktor Orban, have been the only EU leaders to visit Moscow during the war in Ukraine. Zelenskyy has openly accused Fico of benefiting personally from energy imports from Russia.

In a week of disruptive politics from Bratislava, Slovakia also intimated it could leave NATO.

“In these nonsensical times of arms buildup, when arms companies are rubbing their hands … neutrality would benefit Slovakia very much,” Fico told a media conference shown online on June 17. He pointed out that this would require parliamentary approval.

Three days later, the independent Slovak newspaper Dennik N published an interview with Austria’s former defence minister, Werner Fasslabend, in which he said Slovakia’s departure from NATO might trigger Austria’s entry into the alliance.

“If Slovakia were to withdraw from NATO, it would worsen the security situation for Austria as well. It would certainly spark a major debate about Austria’s NATO membership and possible NATO accession,” Fasslabend said.