It’s rarely wise to poke a bear in the nose.
Mexico’s President, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, obviously knows this. In October, a new president of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (the United Mexican States) will be inaugurated, and it seems one of the international attendees will be Russian President Vladimir Putin. There’s a problem: Tsar Vladimir the First has an arrest warrant, issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of which Mexico is a member. The government of Ukraine has asked Mexico, should the Tsar show up in October, to arrest him.
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One can just imagine how that conversation went.
AIDE TO PRESIDENT OBRADOR: “Señor Presidente, we have a request from the government of Presidente Zelensky in Ukraine, marked most urgent.”
PRESIDENT OBRADOR: “Oh? And what does he want?”
AIDE: “He wishes for us, in October at the inauguration, that we would please arrest Russian President Putin and deliver him for trial to the International Criminal Court.”
OBRADOR: “Dios mio! Is he completely mad? We can’t antagonize Russia like that! They would squash us like an insect! Tell them no!”
That conversation, while hypothetical, is certainly supported by Mexico’s official response.
The Mexican president on Thursday rejected a request from Ukraine’s government to arrest Vladimir Putin if the Russian leader defies an international arrest warrant and attends the inauguration of Mexico’s next president in October.
“We can’t do that,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters at a regular government press conference.
“It’s not up to us.”
Ukraine asked Mexico to arrest Putin if he attends the Oct. 1 swearing-in ceremony of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum. The request, in a statement from Ukraine’s Mexican embassy dated Aug. 7, pointed to an arrest warrant issued by the U.N.’s International Criminal Court (ICC).
It’s important to note that the UN’s ICC has no actual operatives that can go arrest people. They instead rely on, well, this sort of thing: The member nations are technically supposed to arrest anyone who has a warrant if they enter the member nation’s territory, then presumably deliver them up for trial.
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Ukraine still seems to think that Mexico will somehow arrest the Russian President.
“We hope the Mexican government is aware that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal with an arrest warrant against him,” Ukraine’s embassy said in its statement, arguing that Putin is suspected of ordering the kidnapping of Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia.
The statement expressed confidence that the Mexican government will comply.
The ICC issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest last year, accusing him of war crimes for illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine to Moscow after it launched its invasion of the neighboring European nation in early 2022.
Let’s say it straight out: Mexico isn’t going to arrest Vladimir Putin – not in a million years. There are some bears you just don’t poke, and for Mexico, this is one of them. As Kamala Harris might say, Russia is, basically, a really big country, and Mexico is a much smaller country. Treaty or no treaty, ICC or no ICC, Mexico has nothing to gain by this except provoking the ire of a much larger, much more powerful nation, who by the way, is one of Mexico’s major trade partners.
Just as we here want our American government to look out for the interests of Americans first, so should Mexico’s government look out first for the interests of Mexicans. Mexico and its people will gain nothing by antagonizing Russia and stand to lose rather a lot. Annoying as Tsar Vladimir the First is, and however entertaining it would be to see him in an 8×10 cell awaiting trial, Mexico is doing the smart thing here.
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