South Africa says the arrest of Putin might scuttle the BRICS conference.

The International Criminal Court's (ICC) warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin has thrown a "spanner in the works" of an upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa in August, a spokesman for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Wednesday. As a signatory to the 2002 Rome Statute, South Africa is obliged to enforce the ICC's warrant for Putin's arrest. However, the country is also hosting this year's BRICS summit, at which the leaders of the world's largest emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are due to meet. Ramaphosa's government has been aware of the dilemma surrounding the warrant since its issue, with Magwenya last month declining to say whether Pretoria would enforce it. Ramaphosa announced on Tuesday that he would dispatch an envoy to Washington to clarify his "non-aligned" stance on the Ukraine conflict. Pretoria has its own issues with the ICC, and was chastised by the court in 2017 for failing to arrest former Sudan