This was published 1 year ago
Putin visits children’s centre in Crimea on ninth anniversary of annexation
By James Kilner
Vladimir Putin made a last-minute visit to Crimea on Saturday local time to tour a “children’s palace” that he commissioned, one day after being labelled a war criminal for abducting thousands of boys and girls from Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev visit the Children’s Art and Aesthetic centre in Sevastopol, Crimea on Saturday.Credit: AP
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 isn’t 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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev visit the Children’s Art and Aesthetic Centre in Sevastopol, Crimea on Saturday.Credit: AP
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 hasn’t 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 (19-kilometre) bridge that links mainland Russia with the peninsula after it had been patched up following a Ukrainian attack two months earlier.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (centre) and Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev (left) listen to Metropolitan of Pskov and Porkhov Tikhon Shevkunov (right) at the Children’s Art and Aesthetic centre on Saturday.Credit: AP
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.
But Putin’s allies are saying that the Kremlin has been rescuing children from the horror of war.
“You should have nominated Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] for the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Ramazon Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya in southern Russia.
The Telegraph, London
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