Putin has rarely travelled abroad since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and is not known to have left Russia since the ICC issued in March a warrant for him on suspicion of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. The Kremlin denies those allegations.
“At the invitation of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, Sadyr Japarov, on October 12 of this year, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, will make an official visit to the country,” the Kyrgyz presidential administration said in a statement on its website.
Putin agreed in May during talks with Japarov to visit Kyrgyzstan, but there has been no official confirmation yet from the Kremlin that the Russian president will travel there tomorrow.
The Russian leader is also due to travel to China next week for the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. Neither Kyrgyzstan nor China are members of the ICC, which was established to prosecute war crimes.
Moscow denies the ICC allegations and the Kremlin said the warrant was evidence of the West’s hostility to Russia, which opened a criminal case against the ICC prosecutor and the judges who issued the warrant.
CIS summit
In Kyrgyzstan, Putin is set to also take part in ceremonies dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the opening of an air base in Kant, which is home to the Russian Aerospace Forces’ 999th Air Base, the Kyrgyz presidential office said.
Separately, Kyrgyzstan’s presidential office said that the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan told Japarov that he will not be attending a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit in Bishkek on Friday.
The office said that Pashinyan told Japarov in a phone call that he would not be able to attend due to “a number of circumstances.”
The CIS was formed among a number of post-Soviet republics after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and includes Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan, among others.
Japarov’s office said Putin planned to attend the summit.
Russian-Armenian ties have been badly strained by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and Armenia’s move to subject itself to the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Armenia has also accused Russia of inaction as Armenia’s neighbour Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh last month, a region controlled for three decades by ethnic Armenians, most of whom have now fled.
Last week, Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev pulled out of a European Union-brokered meeting with Pashinyan in which Brussels said it was standing by Armenia.
Pashinyan said yesterday that plans were proceeding for a meeting with the Azeri president to discuss a lasting peace accord.
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