It would be politically very risky for any European democracy to not enforce this arrest warrant, much more so than for South Africa or Mongolia. Israel is not popular among the public in Europe, and if a government invites him for a political visit, and don’t arrest him, that government will have to pay for that in the next election (and probably sooner, with mass demonstration and public unrest).

Now, lets talk about Putin’s visit to South Africa. So Putin was scheduled to visit a BRICS summit in South Africa despite the ICC arrest warrant. South Africa claimed they wouldn’t enforce the arrest warrant. People got very mad. South Africa, in response, declared that Putin would only participate in the summit remotely, where the arrest warrant couldn’t be enforced.

Now this was obviously a way to bypass the ICC warrant, and the stunt did not go well in the general public. In the next election the ANC, the governing party at the time, lost their parliamentary majority for the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994. Now South Africans had several other reasons to ditch the ANC, but this stunt certainly didn’t help.

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