On his first foreign trip this year, Putin calls for ex-Soviet states to expand influence

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on his first trip abroad since being indicted by the International Criminal Court in March, on Friday called on an alliance of former Soviet states to expand relations with non-Western countries.

In an address to the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Putin also defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to prevent war and blamed the United States as an integral cause of the current war between Israel and Hamas fighters.

His comments did not break ground but the trip was significant as his first venture outside Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine after the ICC indictment for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

The indictment would oblige any country that is party to the ICC to arrest him on their soil.

The CIS consists of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Armenia. Tajikistan has acceded to the ICC; Armenia, which recently approved joining the court, did not participate in the summit amid rising disputes with Russia.

Putin told the CIS heads of state that “it is important to work together, together with like-minded people from other regions of the world — with the countries of the so-called world majority, the Global South, whose views are very close to us.”

He deplored the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which broke out last week when Hamas launched raids on Israel, but took aim at the United States’ role.

“For many years, the one-sided line of the Americans led the situation further and further into a dead end,” he said. “The large-scale tragedy that Israelis and Palestinians are now experiencing was a direct result of the failed U.S. policy in the Middle East.”

On Ukraine, he reiterated Russia’s contention that sending troops into the country was justifiable because of years of fighting between the Ukrainian military and separatist forces in the country’s east.

Our special military operation is not the beginning of a war, but an attempt to stop it,” Putin contended.