The visit comes just two days after a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges was issued, and has been viewed as a show of defiance by the Russian leader. 9News
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin arrived in Mariupol late Saturday after visiting Crimea, a short distance south-west of Mariupol, to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula's annexation from Ukraine.
Putin arrived in Mariupol by helicopter and then drove himself around the city's "memorial sites", concert hall and coastline, Russian news reports said. Speaking to the state RIA agency Sunday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin made clear that Russia was in Mariupol to stay. He said the government hoped to finish the reconstruction of its blasted downtown by the end of the year.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world denounced as illegal, and moved on last September to officially claim four regions in Ukraine's south and east as Russian territory, following referendums that Kyiv and the West described as a sham. Peskov reaffirmed on Sunday that Moscow considers "any decisions by the International Criminal Court's legally null and void".
The three deaths were in the eastern Donetsk region, where fierce battles are taking place for control of the city of Bakhmut, its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Ukrainian TV.
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