ISLAMABAD/MARIUPOL: Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited Mariupol, a Ukrainian city in the Donetsk region which has been under Moscow’s occupation since May last year.
The Russian president flew to Mariupol by helicopter, the TASS agency reported on Sunday, quoting officials in Kremlin.
He drove a car and travelled around several districts of the city, making stops and interacting with residents, the agency said. Russian state TV showed Putin – who was accompanied by the local Moscow-appointed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev – visiting the Black Sea port city of Sevastopol on Saturday.
Reports of the Mariupol visit come a day after Putin travelled to Crimea to mark the ninth anniversary of the Russian annexation of the black sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, following a referendum that was neither recognised by Kyiv nor the international community.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded Russia’s withdrawal from the peninsula as well as the areas it has occupied since last year.
Visit follows Putin’s arrest warrants
Putin’s visit to Mariupol also comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday issued an arrest warrant against him accusing the Russian president of commiting the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
Putin has yet not publicly commented on the warrant while the Kremlin spokesman has termed it “null and void” and said that Moscow finds the very issues raised by the ICC to be “outrageous and unacceptable”.
