Did Russia’s invasion violate international law? Part II

Part II

The 2019 RAND Reports “Extending Russia” and “Overextending Russia” suggests that the United States must try to exploit Russian vulnerabilities, “weaken Russia” and “destabilize the Russian regime”. The first RAND Report argues that the United States must limit Russia’s ability to export gas and oil by making Europe replace its dependency on Russian gas with U.S. gas. The U.S. should impose tough sanctions on Russia in order to weaken Russian economy, but according to the UN Charter (Art. 39, 40, 41 and 42), it is the UN Security Council that is the authority that will decide what measures shall be taken. It is not up to the single state or group of states to decide. RAND argues that arms provided to Ukraine might force Russia to directly interfere in the war in Donbass in eastern Ukraine, which would then open the door for a major war with Russia. It now turns out that such a war almost certainly was the precondition for making Europe and particularly Germany replace its Russian gas with U.S. gas. To be able to replace the European dependency on Russian gas with U.S. gas, the United States had to initiate a war between Germany/Europe on the one hand and Russia on the other.

Since 1981, central figures in the U.S. Administration (incl. CIA Director Bill Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Advisor Dick Allen) have all tried to do everything to convince the Europeans about giving up their gas collaboration with Moscow but without success. Neither the CIA attempt to destroy the gas pipeline in 1982 (according to Dick Allen and to his Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Reed), nor the fact that the world was on the verge of nuclear war in 1983 (declassified CIA documents) convinced the Germans and the Russians that they had to stop their collaboration. The end of the Cold War in 1989-90 was to a large extent a result of the German-Russian confidence developed after years of collaboration. President Mikhail Gorbachev and important German actors wanted to have a zone of low tension between the major nuclear powers to reduce the risk of conflict escalation. Gorbachev wanted to unify Europe and build a “Common European home”, which would make a European war something of the past. The gas pipelines and the mutual Russian-German dependency on gas and industry was the material basis for a future peaceful Europe. This was, however, in direct conflict with the vision of central figures in the United States like then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who both wanted to profit from the Russian weakness by moving U.S. forces eastwards and Cheney wanted to eliminate Russia as a major power. To this U.S. power elite, it became necessary to cut the Russian-German gas pipelines and this presupposed not only the presentation of Russia as alien power, but almost certainly a European-Russian War to make the Germans turn against the Russians. To start such a war was a precondition for a European decoupling from Russia, for cutting off the Russian gas supplies, but the RAND Report does not say that explicitly, but it wants to exploit Russian vulnerabilities to let Russia pay “a high price”.

President Zelensky's military adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told Ukrainian television in 2019 that Ukraine should not end the war in eastern Ukraine, because this war in the east could develop into a major war with Russia and such a war was, according to Arestovych, necessary to prevent Ukraine from being dragged into the Russian sphere of influence. Accordingly, Ukraine had to decouple itself from Russia. This idea mirrored the US strategy to decouple Russia from Europe and to include Ukraine in NATO. Ukraine and the U.S. would apparently do anything to drag Russia into a war in order to weaken Russia and to cut off Russia’s ties with Ukraine.

Eastern Ukraine, especially Donetsk and Lugansk, was the industrial heart of Ukraine and it was since the Soviet era intertwined with the Russian economy. For the new nationalist elite in Kyiv and for the West-Ukrainian elite, it became necessary to make eastern Ukraine cut its ties with Russia, and this was only possible in the event of a major war. Asked by Ukrainian television in 2019 what is best for Ukraine, Arestovych replied: “Of course a major war with Russia, and NATO membership as a result of a victory over Russia”. He also said: “With a probability of 99.9 percent our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia”. By deploying U.S. weapons in Ukraine, by training the Ukrainian forces, by preparing for NATO membership, and by the use of a mass killings of Russians in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv and Washington apparently hoped that Russia would feel obliged to intervene. They tried by all means to get Russia to enter a “full-scale war” in Ukraine.

There is reason to question whether the Ukrainian leadership with Zelensky and Arestovych really understood the consequences of their own policy. Were they seduced by American and British intelligence? Or were they just assets working for them? Did Zelensky and Arestovych understand that much of Ukraine would lie in ruins and that Russia would never allow the West to prevail in Ukraine? Probably not. Russia would always perceive a Western military presence in Ukraine as an “existential threat”, because of Ukraine’s location and strategic importance for Russia. Kyiv’s neglect of the Minsk Agreement and the Ukrainian buildup of forces along the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk showed that Ukraine, or rather Kyiv, wanted a war. President Zelensky’s 2021 decree (on March 25) that Ukraine should retake Crimea showed that the war with Russia was inevitable, and nobody was in doubt that Ukraine would try to take Donetsk and Lugansk before Crimea. The Minsk Agreement would have been a guarantee for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and it would have given Donetsk and Lugansk autonomy within the State of Ukraine. When Kyiv would not accept such an autonomy, which would give the people right to speak Russian, the war became inevitable to Moscow. When more than a hundred thousand Ukrainian forces along the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk began a massive artillery shelling from February 18, the attack had already started. On February 19, 2022, when Zelensky stated at the security conference in Munich that Ukraine would leave the Budapest Memorandum, the Russians immediately saw that this would give Ukraine a nuclear option, which would be unacceptable to Russia. It meant war. The only logical reason why Zelensky stated this, in this very tense situation, was to try to push Russia into the war.

Today, we can say that the United States and Ukraine did everything possible to “increase the likelihood” of a Russian invasion. This is more or less the same tactic as the U.S. had used in Afghanistan in 1979. From March 1979, the Pentagon discussed the arming of the Afghan insurgency to suck “the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire”, to quote later CIA Director Robert Gates. From July 1979, long before the Soviet invasion 25 December 1979, the CIA started to support the Islamist Mujahideen groups to destabilize the pro-Soviet regime to “increase the likelihood” of a Soviet invasion. Brzezinski said: “The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War’”. It was, according to Brzezinski, a trap to make the Soviets enter an impossible war to demoralize and finally to “breakup of the Soviet empire.” In 2021, the U.S. took one decision after the other to make the situation unbearable for Moscow and for the Russians in Ukraine in an attempt to make it impossible for Russia not to intervene. The U.S. wanted to trigger an “Afghanistan War 2.0”. In 1979, the United States wanted to a “breakup of the Soviet empire”, now Cheney’s protégé Victoria Nuland seems to continue Cheney’s policy with an attempt to breakup of the Russian state.

The United States and Ukraine wanted to remove the possibility of a peaceful solution by putting an end to the Minsk Agreement. They confronted Russia with one violations of the UN Charter after the other. From spring 2021, it became all the clearer to Russia that the war was inevitable, and from mid-February 2022, Moscow believed it had to intervene in “self-defense” and to protect the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. Would it be possible for Russia at this moment to avoid the war? It all boils down to Moscow’s understanding of the seriousness of the threat they were facing. But equally important: The question is whether all these Western violations of international law make the Russian invasion legitimate. At the same time, every war must be perceived as morally questionable, because of all the suffering and destruction. Whether this war is morally justifiable is also largely decided by how we assess the “military-virological complex” and its threat to humanity. This requires a separate analysis, but after this preliminary analysis the Russian invasion of Ukraine appears as a war in self-defense and much more legitimate than, for example, the 2011 bombing of Libya by the United States and others.

The West's bombing of Libya was legitimized by the claim that Muammar Gaddafi wanted to kill the people of Benghazi and that he was thus a threat to his own people. Many would then refer to the principle of “Responsibility to Protect”, or R2P, which could enable the Security Council to use force to protect a population from ethnic cleansing and genocide. The principle has been described as controversial because it interferes with the sovereignty of individual states and can be used as an excuse for a war for regime change. In the Libya case in 2011, the Security Council decided about initiating negotiations and as a last resort of the use of military force. But immediately after this decision, the U.S. and its NATO allies began a massive bombing of Libya. A new Libyan regime was installed. The successful negotiations of the African Union, Norway and especially of the U.S. Africa Command were interrupted. Rear Admiral Charles Kubic told how US Africa Command had reached an agreement with Libya, but this peace agreement was shot down at a higher level. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted a war. She was able, in collaboration with the French and the English, to close all negotiations.

n retrospect, it turned out that there had never been a threat to the people of Benghazi. It was false information, and it was shown and documented by the UK Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee’s Libya Report in 2016. There were no such Libyan mass killings or plans for mass killings. The only mass killings that took place were carried out by the Islamist opposition forces that killed black Africans in specific black African communities. The claim that Muammar Gaddafi wanted to kill people was merely a pretext for the opposition’s desire for regime change. Russia and China are unlikely to be fooled by such a game once more. The Kyiv regime, on the other hand, had been guilty of such mass killings in eastern Ukraine, in Donetsk and Lugansk. From 2014, Ukrainian military forces defected to Donetsk and Lugansk and to Crimea. The Kyiv regime was forced to use extreme rightwing militias (the Azov Battalion, Aidar and the Right Sector) in its war with the two republics. Up to 14,000 died in the fighting between rightwing militias and local forces. Azov and Aidar killed 3,000-4,000 Russian-speaking civilians, and 1.5 million were forced to flee from Donetsk and Lugansk to Russia. So, while it was false information about human rights abuses that prompted the United States, France, and the United Kingdom to raise the issue of “Responsibility to Protect” in Libya in 2011, the Security Council was blocked by the Americans when it came to the real human rights violations in Ukraine. While false information came to legitimize the war in Libya, it was a genuine mass killing directed against Russian-speakers and Russians in the eastern Ukraine that came to legitimize Russia's involvement in this Ukraine civil war.

This would ultimately trigger Russia’s invasion, just as Arestovych had hoped for and predicted in 2019. In early 2022, Kyiv had massed up to 122,000 men along the borders of the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Vershinin told the UN Security Council on 17 February. There was a massive mobilization. The next day, Ukraine started its offensive with artillery fire. The two republics asked for support from Moscow. Russia entered the war a week later. In this planned Ukrainian invasion, which would most likely would begin around 1 March, Donetsk and Lugansk risked losing tens of thousands of lives. Russia also risked receiving millions more refugees. For Russia, the situation became unbearable.

In the Ukrainian presidential elections of 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2010, the choice was between the West-Ukrainian candidate and the East-Ukrainian candidate, and it was the candidate from East who won except in 2004 when Viktor Yushchenko defeated Viktor Yanukovych. Or rather Yanukovych, the Russian-speaking candidate from Donetsk, had won the November election by three percent. This was the start of massive demonstrations (“the Orange Revolution”), and the election was declared invalid shortly afterwards. The OSCE said that the election “did not meet international standards”, and the U.S. leading election observer, Senator Richard Lugar, spoke of “election fraud”. “The Orange Revolution” in support of Viktor Yushchenko continued and a new election was organized in December with Yushchenko as the winner with close to eight percent. It is difficult to say whether one election or the other was the fair one, but one could say that the candidate from the east and the candidate from the west were fairly even. In the 2010 election, Viktor Yanukovych won a majority. According to the OSCE, there had been no irregularities. Western Ukraine voted for Yulia Tymoshenko, while Yanukovych won in Eastern Ukraine. Due to the large population in the east, he won the elections in Ukraine by 49 to 45 percent. Yushchenko was eliminated in the first round with only 5 percent of the votes.

For the extreme nationalists in Western Ukraine, Yanukovych’s victory had to be stopped at all costs. Yushchenko had ties to the extreme right, and he had named nationalist Stepan Bandera “Hero of Ukraine”. Bandera’s organization OUN (Organization Ukrainian Nationalists) had collaborated closely with the Nazis during World War II and his groups were responsible for massacres of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russians. Yushchenko former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko had also ties to the extreme right, and from late 2013, mass demonstrations were mobilized by the loosing side in the elections in support of the minority in Western Ukraine. From February 2014, these demonstrations became increasingly violent. They were now led by extreme nationalists, and on February 22 they forced President Yanukovych to flee the country. More than 50 people were shot and practically all the shots originated from two buildings controlled by the extreme nationalists. These buildings were located behind the demonstrators and the demonstrators were shot in the back. They were not shot by the state police forces in front of them. This was a violent coup d’état and a seizure of power that in every respect was a violation of the Ukrainian constitution. The nationalist leaders appointed a new government after instructions from the United States. Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed prime minister after Victoria Nuland had given the U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, clear instructions that Yatsenyuk should lead the new government. A phone call, in which Nuland instructed Pyatt, was recorded on tape and published. Everything is there: who should and who should not be in the Government, and who Yatsenyuk should talk to “four times a week”. George Friedman, Chief Intelligence Officer for Stratfor in the U.S., described seizure of power as “the Most Blatant Coup in the History of Mankind”.

This U.S. coup d’état was definitely a violation of international law. An elected president was violently ousted, and a new government was installed at the direction of a foreign power, but the United States could veto any criticism in the Security Council. The new government received four ministers from the former Nazi-party, Svoboda. The language reform of the nationalists triggered major counter-demonstrations and uprisings in the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine. The demonstrations in Odessa and Kharkiv with several counties were suppressed, while the counties of Crimea and Donetsk and Lugansk declared independence. 8,000 men from the Ukrainian army defected to the rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk. The Kyiv regime was forced to employ more or less pro-Nazi groups such as the Azov Battalion, Aidar and the Right Sector (which uses Bandera's flag from the 1940s) to continue to run the war against Donetsk and Lugansk. Jacques Baud (2022) says that 20,000 of 22,000 Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea defected to the rebels. In the referendum in Crimea, support for independence and then for joining Russia was 96.8 % (with 83% turnout). This corresponds fairly well to a referendum in 1991, before Ukraine became an independent state, which showed that 93.6 % of Crimea’s inhabitants would prefer to belong to Russia (Baud 2022). After the West-Ukrainian regime’s attacks on Russians and Russian-speakers in the East in 2014, this percentage was for natural reasons even higher.

If we look at the language people used in their homes in 2009 (Matlock 2021), we find that in West-Ukraine with 8 million inhabitants, people spoke primarily Ukrainian. In Ukraine’s eastern and southern counties with 19 million inhabitants, most people spoke Russian, while in central Ukraine, with around 12 million inhabitants, the majority spoke a “mixture” of Russian and Ukrainian: Surzhyk. Compared to those who spoke Ukrainian, the Russian-speakers were no small minority, and the division into language groups corresponded exactly to the political division between the West-Ukrainian and East-Ukrainian candidates. As early as in 2008, the US Ambassador to Moscow, current CIA Director William Burns, wrote to the State Department that a conflict between Ukrainian and Russian speakers could lead to a civil war that drags Russia into the war. When the new coup regime in 2014 first demanded everyone to speak Ukrainian in public, it led to confrontation in this already divided country. It led to a civil war that forced a large population to flee from Donbass to Russia. Russian-speaking Ukraine was weakened, and it came to change the balance in the elections in favor of Western Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych had, with the support of the Russian-speakers, won the 2010 elections. Given the ethnic cleansing that followed the 2014 war, it was no longer possible for Russian-speakers to win an election. And this cleansing had been carried out with the support of the United States.

After the first massacres in Donetsk and Lugansk in 2014, Ukraine had to sign a peace agreement between the parties: the Minsk Agreement, which was negotiated with the help of Germany and France. If Ukraine had not accepted this, it is possible that Russia might have deployed forces in Donetsk and Lugansk already in 2014 to protect the Russian-speaking population. However, President Vladimir Putin did not want to split Ukraine. In a letter to Putin, the two republics asked to be admitted to Russia, but that was rejected by Putin, Jacques Baud (2022) writes. Putin persuaded Donetsk and Lugansk to accept the Minsk Agreement, and from 2015, Minsk II became a legally recognized international agreement following a decision made by the UN Security Council. The agreement was supposed to be a guarantee for the Russian-speaking population in the east. They would thus be given a relative autonomous status with right to their own language in Ukraine. But it turned out that the nationalists of West-Ukraine would never accept this autonomy for Russian-speakers. It was unacceptable to them.

For the nationalist minority in Ukraine, such autonomy conflicted with their idea of a nation, a purely “Ukrainian Ukraine”. Oleksy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine's National Security Council, told AP in January 2022 that “the fulfillment of the Minsk Agreement means the country’s destruction”. “Danilov warned the West against pressuring Ukraine into fulfilling the Minsk deal”, AP wrote. Kyiv had signed the Minsk Agreement. The sovereignty of Ukraine was therefore subordinate to the decisions of the Security Council. According to the UN Charter (Art. 25), any member of the UN must undertake to “implement Security Council resolutions”, but Kyiv had no intention of implementing this resolution, and Kyiv had the support of the United States, which could veto any attempt to use force against Ukraine despite the fact that the U.S. itself had signed the agreement. One would have thought that to keep the Minsk Agreement should have been a Ukrainian priority. It would have secured both Ukrainian territory and peace, but then you don’t realize that the new Ukrainian elite actually wanted a major war with Russia to drag NATO into the war in order to eliminate the Russian influence.

As of 2021, we learned that Kyiv had never intended to implement the Minsk Agreement. That would have made it impossible for the nationalists in the west to “Ukrainify Ukraine”. It would make it impossible to purge the Russian-speaking East-Ukraine. In June 2022, former president Petro Poroshenko told Deutsche Welle that Ukraine had signed the Minsk Agreement just to buy time. “We won eight years” he said. He let the U.S. and Britain build up Ukraine militarily to give Kyiv the capacity to conquer, first Donetsk and Lugansk and then Crimea (Zelensky signed the decree to retake Crimea on March 25, 2021). But to recapture and “Ukrainify” Donbass would be a violation of the Minsk Agreement. It would have required the population to be replaced. It would be a violation of an international agreement signed by the UN Security Council. The coup d’état, the ethnic cleansing (by the U.S. and Ukrainian nationalists) and the negligence of the Security Council resolution must all be described as serious violations of international law and violations of the UN Charter.

The Security Council was paralyzed because the United States could use its veto. President Putin believed that the Minsk Agreement was a sufficient guarantee for the Russians in the east and for the Russian-speakers, while Ukrainian and American officers, with US Army Brigadier General Joseph Hilbert, referred to their Ukrainian counterparts telling media 4 May 2022: “The biggest mistake the Russians made was giving us eight years to prepare for [the war]”. The Minsk Agreement – an international enforceable agreement – was signed by Ukraine in order to buy time, to have eight years of military buildup. And the longer the Russians waited to intervene, the harder it would be to guarantee the already agreed rights of Russian-speakers in accordance with the Minsk Agreement, and the stronger the U.S. military bridgehead would become in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin asked: How can one even trust an agreement signed by Ukraine and the United States in the future if they never intended to follow this agreement. In December 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-French President Francois Holland said that the Minsk Agreement gave Ukraine the opportunity “to buy time”. The task of the agreement seems to have been to deceive the Russians. This has now a direct bearing on the Russian perception of the war. Not even a written agreement with the West will be trusted. The Russians simply believe that they have to force the West into a military fait accompli.

On 10 November 2021, a partnership between the United States and Ukraine was established to allow for Ukrainian NATO membership. Moscow had been making clear since 2008 that Russia would face such a membership with war. The elite in Washington knew it. Moscow perceived such a partnership as an unbearable threat. The only reason for such a U.S. policy was that the U.S. wanted a war. This US-Ukrainian policy is as far from the UN Charter’s primary ambition to “remove threats to the peace” and to “maintain international peace” as one can imagine.

The events in Donetsk and Lugansk have a relevant parallel in Kosovo in 1999. It was claimed that there had been a Serbian massacre of Albanians in the village of Račak in Kosovo. At the same time, more than a hundred thousand Albanians had fled Kosovo. This could, according to Western lawyers, justify a Western military intervention to eliminate the Serbian forces, and many subsequently described the attack on Serbia as an R2P operation. But no decision had ever been taken in support of the operation in the UN Security Council. And in order to make the Western intervention “legitimate” under international law, several Western states subsequently came to recognize Kosovo as an independent state.

On 17 February 2008, the Provisional Institutions in Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. In accordance with Article 96 in the UN Charter, UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice on 8 October 2008 the following question: “Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law”. But the General Assembly did not ask if this “unilateral declaration of independence” was in accordance with domestic Serbian law. The International Court of Justice concluded in 2010 that “the declaration of independence of 17 February 2008 did not violate general international law”

The “State of Kosovo” could then request military support and create a military base under US leadership to “ensure its independence”. One might argue that such a statement opened for a dubious interpretation of the UN Charter. But there had been a referendum in 1991 supporting independence for Kosovo and Kosovo representatives who were elected in 2007 supported independence. In May 2014, Donetsk and Lugansk voted for independence with 89 % support in Donetsk and with 96 % support in Lugansk. The minority that did not support independence was smaller than it had been in Kosovo. In February 2022, Russia used the same principles as had earlier been outlined for Kosovo. On 21 February 2022, Moscow recognized Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states, and on 24 February, Russia deployed forces to support and protect the “two new states”. Vladimir Putin referred to the UN Charter's Article 51 on the right to “collective self-defense”. This Russian argument may have been as dubious as the Western argument when it comes to Kosovo, but with the West’s 1999 war and with the recognition of the independence of Kosovo in 2008-2010, a precedent was now apparently established. Perhaps Vladimir Putin sought to point to the hypocrisy of the West when the U.S. used one argument for Kosovo and another for Donetsk and Lugansk. The Western countries had not condemned their own attack on Serbia in 1999, and their recognition of Kosovo should thus have allowed for similar recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk. Unlike the small number of people killed in fighting in Račak in 1999 (there had never been a massacre) and the limited number of Albanians killed, Russia could refer to the killing of thousands of civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk and perhaps more important to the fact that it was obvious that Ukraine had violated an international agreement (the Minsk Agreement).

It is important to say that there is a general perception that international law is developed through practice. But it’s doubtful whether the precedent now set after the Kosovo War would make the Russian invasion more legitimate for that reason. More importantly, Russia has intervened in support of Donetsk and Lugansk after Kyiv had refused to implement the Minsk Agreement, a legally binding international agreement that was supposed to guarantee the autonomy and the security of the Russian-speakers in Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia has now used military force to guarantee for the Russian-speakers’ security, a decision that the Security Council was obliged to implement, but which had been stopped by a U.S. veto.

From a purely legal point of view, from the point of view of international law, the arguments of Russia appear here to be more legitimate than the arguments of the U.S. and Ukraine, but that does not mean the Russia’s argument are morally acceptable. And despite the fact that Moscow’s arguments seem to outweigh those of the Western countries, this does not mean that they can simply legitimize a continued war with the killing of another hundreds of thousands of people. What we definitely can say, however, is that Western weapons support to Ukraine will continue to increase the mass killings, because Russia will never accept a loss in a war for its existence. The Western weapons will only prolong the war and kill hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians and also many Russians. Or to quote U.S. former Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman: “We will fight to the last Ukrainian”, while the Russians will fight until Ukraine’s Western ammunition is finished or until there are no Ukrainian soldiers left. Alternatively, the conflict will escalate, but the Russians will under no circumstances let Crimea fall before London or Washington.

As long as the Russian leadership believes that the war is not about conquering Ukrainian territory, but about Russia facing an “existential threat” from the West, Russia will wage the war by any means. Negotiations requires the West to take the Russian demands seriously. Otherwise, the war will escalate, and more and more countries and soldiers will be drawn into the war.

If one side outweighs the other, militarily, legally, and morally, this in itself should be a reason for a ceasefire and negotiations. But the United States’ willingness to accept restrictions on its own deployments of weapons in Europe may be a precondition. The U.S. concept of deterrence and its forward deployment of threatening weapons systems may have to be replaced by a more defensive approach. The strategic nuclear deterrence may not be possible to replace for a long time, but the U.S. use of “a local deterrence” with offensive forces close to the border of Russia, presupposes a U.S. strategic superiority that we do not have. It will open up for preemptive strikes. It will have an extremely destabilizing effect, something the present war is evidence of.

If we proceed to a “broader” definition of international law that also recognizes a “threat to the peace” as illegal under the UN Charter, we can say that the U.S. and Ukraine have now violated the UN Charter on one point after the other. These violations have taken place without a UN Security Council intervention because the U.S. and U.K. have been able to use their veto.

First, all Western leaders promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move its military presence east of Germany, which made Gorbachev withdraw Soviet forces from East Germany. However, the West did not keep its oral commitments, which is a violation of international law.

Second, the U.S. has moved its military presence into Central Europe and Ukraine so far that it has become a Western bridgehead close to Moscow and thus has become “a threat to the peace” (as described by the UN Charter) and a violation of international law.

Third, the US has built up a Ukrainian system of laboratories, a military-virological complex, which store deadly viruses and bacteria, weapons of mass destruction, at the border to Russia that pose “a definitive threat to peace”. It is a violation of the UN Charter.

Fourth, through mass killings and ethnic cleansing, through a coup d'état and violations of a Security Council resolution, the United States and Ukraine have been guilty of violating the UN Charter and international law in several respects.

Fifth, through their policies of radical nationalism and “Ukrainification”, the United States and Ukraine have violated international law by using the Ukrainian-speaking West to confront the Russian-speaking East, which then U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William Burns already in 2008 considered a “threat to the peace”.

If we use a “narrow” definition of international law, Russia would be guilty of violating the UN Charter. However, if we accept is a “broader” interpretation, in which a “threat to the peace” and “threatening” deployments are violations of international law, the United States have several times been in breach with the UN Charter and the U.S. veto in the Security Council has let the United States with impunity repeat its violations. The question is whether Russia’s war should be considered a “war of self-defense” in accordance with international law. For the United States, a Russian war was also a precondition for cutting off the gas pipeline and to decouple Europe from Russia. This may even have been the primary U.S. reason for initiating the war in the first place.

The widespread claim that Russia wants to conquer Ukraine has no support either in rhetoric or in practice. Those are unsubstantiated claims, as I have described above. Russia would probably have needed a ten times larger force to occupy Ukraine and that is something Russian military planner would have been well aware of. But the more weapons with ever-longer range that the West gives Ukraine, the more Ukrainian territory Russia will claim in order to protect itself from Western attacks. For Russia, this is about protecting the Russians and the Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine from mass killings, but also about denying the West any military presence, including biological laboratories, in Ukraine. This will possibly open up for some kind of Finnish solution for the rest of Ukraine after a Russian victory on the battlefield. After Ukraine refused the Minsk Agreement and after Ukraine refused the agreement of April 2022, Ukraine will have to accept a major loss of territory and a “Finnish solution” for the rest of Ukraine.

This is something Russia wants to push through at all costs. Russia perceives the West’s activity as an “existential threat”: a war directed against Russia. To survive as a state, Russia will wage the struggle by all means at its disposal, including nuclear weapons if necessary. Russia has said that one will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, against a “brother nation”, but if the war will escalate into Poland, it is possible that nuclear weapons will be used in order to restore our “fear of atomic escalation”, to quote Sergey Karaganov. This has nothing to do with our preferences for Russia or not. One might, for example, argue that Russia is an autocratic and brutal state, but the Russian invasion was never about conquering Ukrainian territory, it is from Moscow’s point of view about defending the Russian people and defending the very existence of a unified state.