Vladimir Putin’s attendance at an upcoming emerging markets summit in Johannesburg was already a huge headache for his counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa, after the Russian president was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
And that was before this week, when Ramaphosa compounded the problem — and embarrassed South Africa — by wrongly claiming that the ruling African National Congress wanted the country to quit the court over “these types of problems”, when his party had resolved the opposite.
South Africa’s presidency swiftly backtracked on Ramaphosa’s comments on Tuesday, but they came at the worst possible time for the delicate diplomacy over whether Putin would turn up for the Brics gathering, against the backdrop of the global fallout from Moscow’s war in Ukraine. As an ICC member, Pretoria would be legally obliged to detain Putin on arrival.