JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to Mariupol City, Ukraine, one of the occupied cities and suffered the worst destruction of an invasion, a day after being accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
State television broadcast footage of President Putin walking around the city on Saturday night, meeting relocationd residents, briefed on reconstruction efforts by Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin.
Mariupol port city is known worldwide as a city full of deaths and destruction, as most of the city was devastated in the first months of war, which finally fell to Russian troops in May.
Hundreds of people died in the bombing of a theater that was a haven for children. Organizations for Security and Cooperation and Europe (OSCE) said Russia's initial bombing of a maternity hospital there was a war crime. Moscow denies this and says that since invading on February 24 last year, they have not targeted civilians.
President Putin's visit impressed like an disobedience after the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest on Friday, accusing him of committing war crimes by deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
He has not publicly commented on the move, but his spokesman said it was legally "real after law" and Russia considered the questions raised by the ICC "outrageous and unacceptable".
An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the visit to the destroyed city was the same as a perpetrator who returned to the scene.
"Criminals always return to the scene of the crime," Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
"When the civilized world announced the arrest of a 'war director' (Putin) for crossing its borders, the killers of thousands of Mariupol families came to admire the ruins of the city & grave. Synomism & lack of regret," he wrote.
President Putin's trip to Mariupol went into darkness. State TV shows he was behind the wheel of the car, driving through the city accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Khusnullin, and briefed in detail on the rebuilding of housing, bridges, hospitals, transportation routes, and concert buildings.
State media said President Putin visited a new residential environment that the Russian military had built and the first people to live there had moved last September.
"Do you live here? Do you like it?" President Putin was seen asking the residents.
"I really like it. This is a small piece of heaven that we have here now," replied a woman holding her hand and thanking Putin for "this victory."
Residents have been "active" again, Khusnullin told Putin. Mariupol had a population of half a million people before the war and was home to the Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest in Europe, where Ukrainian fighters lasted for weeks in underground tunnels and bunkers before being forced to give up.
"The city center has been badly damaged," Khusnullin said. "We want to complete (reconstruction) of the city center by the end of this year, at least the fascade.
Mariupol is in the Donetsk region, one of the four mostly occupied regions of Russia in Ukraine which was annexed last September by Putin, an action rejected by most countries in the United Nations General Assembly (UN).
The visit to Mariupol was President Putin's first visit to Russia's occupied Ukrainian Donbas region since the war began, and the closest to the front line.
From Mariupol, he went to Rostov in southern Russia, where state TV on Sunday showed he met with General Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, Russia's war commander in Ukraine.
It is known that if President Zelensky had made a number of trips to the battlefield to increase the morale of his troops and discuss strategies, President Putin was mostly inside the Kremlin while carrying out what Russia called a "special military operation" in Ukraine.
Kyiv and his allies say this invasion is a confiscation of imperial land that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions of people in Ukraine.
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