Japan will carefully monitor the developments of an investigation against Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Saturday, according to Kyodo News.
PM Kishida made the above remarks while holding talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Tokyo. He also supports the International Criminal Court’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Putin on the grounds that he oversaw the war crime of forcible deportation of Ukrainian children during the Russia-Ukraine war, Sholz said.
In a first, the court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for the sitting head of state of a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Although neither Ukraine nor Russia are parties to the court, Kyiv grants the ICC authority over war crimes.
Earlier on Friday, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against the Russian President and Russian official Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova for the alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia, as reported by CNN.
According to Kyodo News, following the summit, in a joint news conference with Scholz, Kishida said that they both agreed that they would never accept Russia’s threat to use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine while reaffirming their commitment to maintaining sanctions against Moscow.
The meeting took place as Japan, which is currently in charge of the Group of Seven, tried to lay the groundwork for a G-7 summit that will be held in Kishida’s home constituency of Hiroshima in May. Last year, Germany held the G-7 presidency.
Along with the European Union, the G-7 also includes the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States. In January, Kishida travelled for a week to the G-7 countries apart from Germany in the run-up to the summit in this city in western Japan.
In light of increasing concerns that Russia may use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine in the ongoing war, Kishida has been eager to present his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons at the G-7 meeting in Hiroshima, which was completely destroyed by an American atomic bomb in August 1945, according to Kyodo News.
Kishida and Scholz stated during their discussion on Saturday that they will work together to ensure the success of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima.
The two leaders also agreed that, given their desire to join the United Nations as permanent members of the Security Council, Japan and Germany will cooperate to reform the organization. Along with the United States, Britain, China, France, and Russia, there are five regular council members who have the power to veto. All are nuclear forces.
The council, according to some critics, has come across as dysfunctional, especially after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. On Saturday in Tokyo, Japan and Germany conducted their first-ever high-level intergovernmental discussions.
In response to China’s expanding military and economic influence around the world, the countries confirmed that they would increase their economic security cooperation in the mineral and semiconductor industries.
