Sandwiched between Russia and China, this land-locked country will have to choose between international obligations under the Rome Status treaty and national gains in the form of financial rewards.
Russia’s despotic leader Vladimir Putin is reportedly heading to Mongolia on September 3. The visit follows Mongolia’s recent decision to omit the gas pipeline Power of Siberia-2 – which should link Russia and China – from its long-term strategic development plan though a part of it is supposed to lie through Mongolian steppes.
This decision almost killed the project, which the Kremlin is desperate to implement in order to earn more cash for its war in Ukraine but failed to coordinate with the government in Ulaanbaatar, which thus probably felt neglected.
So, Putin – like Moscow tsars during the 13th-14th century Mongol invasions – will personally go to Ulaanbaatar to pay respects and to talk about imminent Russian concessions to the neighbor in exchange for Mongol approval. The official theme of the visit is “energy cooperation” between the two countries.
While it is understandable that Mongolia pursues its own economic gains, yet the country has signed and ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (in 2000 and, respectively, in 2002). This means its government is obliged to arrest and to extradite suspected criminals to the Hague-based ICC.
And Vladimir Putin is exactly the person falling under this profile. He is wanted to answer war crimes charges, particularly the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children and unlawful transfer of Ukrainian population from occupied territories.
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Will Mongolia arrest and then defer the Russian leader to international prosecutors?
The answer is somewhere between probably not and definitely not. In 2023, Putin attended the G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s guarantees that Brazil will not touch the high guest. The same year, Putin traveled to Kyrgystan for a Commonwealth of Independent States summit.
Both countries are members of the ICC Rome Statute. And both preferred to remain allies with Russia rather than follow the letter of the book.
The Power of Siberia-2 project needs to be pushed forward somehow since Gazprom's lost export volumes won't sell themselves. Convincing the Chinese on the spot didn't work out; more precisely, they set such conditions that it would be cheaper not to sell at all. Now, the Mongols have to be courted and they won’t easy to deal with.
Mongolia doesn't seem too interested in this pipeline - at least openly. Just before Putin's visit, it announced that there were no plans for a pipeline from Russia in the country's development strategy until the end of the decade. This doesn't mean the pipeline won't happen in reality; it's just a bargaining position, an invitation to negotiate.
Therefore, Putin travels to Mongolia to persuade them to show mercy and agree to the construction of a pipeline from border to border. In return, of course - money and gas. The main question is, at what cost?
Both the Chinese and Mongolians understand the Moscow’s desperate situation in this matter, which is why they are taking an extremely tough negotiating stance, essentially twisting Russia's arm. We can easily guess the Mongol narrative at the table: “You need this more than we do, so work for it, make offers, and give guarantees. We'll consider it.”
Putin, who bragged as a "super-businessman" and “super-negotiator,” is actually none of them. Before making a pivot to the East, he cut off his own air supply: saw Western investments draining out of Russia, withdraw from the European energy market, and had Russian sovereign funds seized. Now that China is Russia’s main trade partner, the bilateral trade value hit a record high of $240 billion in 2023, or +26.3% from the previous year, according to Chinese customs figures.
Chinese exports to Russia in 2023 exceeded $111 billion: 67% more than in 2021. And Chinese goods now account for 38% of Russia’s imports, while 31% of Russia’s exports go to China.
Half of Russia's oil and petroleum exports last year were shipped to China, Russia's state news agencies cited Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak as saying in December 2023.
The Power of Siberia-2 project is a proposed natural gas pipeline of 2,800 kilometers to export natural gas from Russia's Western Siberia’s Altai region to North-Eastern China. Moscow hopes to sell a volume accommodating its maximum capacity - 50 billion cubic meters per year, which is way too much even for China.
However, China currently imports natural gas, liquefied primarily, from Australia ($13.9 billion), Qatar ($10 billion), Russia ($5.93 billion), Malaysia ($4.39 billion), and Indonesia ($2.19 billion).
The project was put on hold in 2009 due to disagreements over natural gas price and competition from other gas sources in the Chinese market.
In spite of Russian military disaster in Ukraine and economic humiliation from China – and now Mongolia, yet the Kremlin seems to succeed in achieving at least one of its strategic goals: the disintegration of the existing global rules system. By traveling to Ulaanbaatar and other locations where the ICC’s authority extends, Putin not only defies the ICC in particular and Western justice law in general – he steadily demonstrates that this system is rotten and dysfunctional.
The ICC and member states indeed have little leverage, if none, over governments that choose to neglect their obligations under the Rome Statute. Even small Serbia hesitated for many years to deliver its former dictator Slobodan Milošević to the Hague war crimes tribunal.
Extraditing common criminals to ICC prosecutors is one thing while holding a chief of nation is different; I bet the authors of the treaty had overlooked this detail and thus failed to provide an effective enforcement mechanism. There’s a long list of former heads of state and governments who got arrested, tried, imprisoned, or extradited to answer for past crimes but history knows no active president or prime minister to be held and extradited by a receiving country.
Putin has been persuasive in showing that the Rome Statute treaty, in its current form, is inadequate to address the realities of modern geopolitics. However, the challenge is not merely in rewriting legal texts, but in restoring faith in the international system itself. If global institutions like the ICC are to remain relevant, they must evolve to meet the complexities of a world where power often trumps principle. Otherwise, the disintegration of the global rules-based order may be inevitable, leaving a dangerous precedent where might makes right and justice becomes a relic of the past.
As Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, put it, “We don’t worry about President Putin’s visit to Mongolia. We don’t have to.”
Perhaps it’s time to update this document by adding tough, enforceable consequences. Survival is not about being most powerful or cleverest but best adapted to changes.
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The text was originally published on News-Cafe.eu.