Putin has saved Ramaphosa a whole lot of grief

In 1939, British prime minister Winston Churchill said: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Nothing much has changed in the past eight decades when it comes to predicting or analysing the actions and decisions of the superpower. That’s why it is difficult to say whether Vladimir Putin’s decision not to attend next month’s Brics summit in South Africa was a sudden change of heart, or if he intended all along not to travel.

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Whatever the reason, the decision lets South Africa off a very big hook. If Putin had arrived, this country would have had no choice but to defy the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant of arrest for the Russian president for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Why? The alternative would have been, as President Cyril Ramaphosa stated this week, to declare war on Russia, because Moscow would consider the arrest of their sitting president as an act of war.

While there are provisions in the ICC laws – as codified by the Rome Statue, to which SA is a signatory – to plead to be excused, if a country believes its sovereignty will be threatened by executing an ICC warrant, Putin has saved us from having to hide behind those.

ALSO READ: Vladimir Putin will not be attending Brics summit in SA

That does sound like the act of a friend who does not want to see an ally suffer.

On the other hand, maybe Moscow calculated all along that allowing the saga to unfold would portray South Africa as potentially an innocent victim of the international power games of the West.

Also, a fracas over the arrival of Putin would have diverted attention from the summit itself. And that summit, in charting a possible new “bipolar” world no longer in thrall of the West, could be a watershed moment.

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