… by Seth Ferris, …with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
When military power and sanctions can cancel law, what good is it?
[ Editor’s note: Seth Ferris gives us a breath-catching look back on some of the Ukraine events with a long needed look at the chaos of legal versus illegal claims being made in the 21rst century, despite all of the international organizations, treaties and case law we have behind us.
Are opposing powers taking advantage of loop holes left in past agreements to give themselves the wiggle room needed to join with them in the first place? And if so, what the hell good are they to the rest of us?
And if one of the signers who has a lot of military power decides they want to reinterpret what the agreements mean… what options do we have in terms of putting their feet to the fire for gaming the system?
Israel comes to mind as one glaring example of ignoring any international jurisprudence whatsoever, even though it has used courts around the world to extort WWII reparations from innocent contemporary victims while refusing to admit themselves as the new primo victimizer. Are the Zios not the “gold standard” for that peculiarity?
We know they rent out their Congressional whores to cash paying customers to get anything they want done on Capitol Hill. Is that not what the US and EU have done to Ukraine, with what has turned into a three ring circus of pathological lying without a diplomatic suicide to date over the embarrassment to the rest of us?
If our top elected leaderships cannot be trusted to present to their own publics what their real intentions and methods will be for pursuing objectives, simply classifying them to remove any public scrutiny, then how long are we going to wait to reinvent new governmental systems, which the last ten years have taught us we so desperately need? …Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published March 20, 2014 –
“The doctrine of justifiable war assumes a presumption against war —war should not be launched unless all the criteria are met (jus ad bellum), the war will be fought in a moral way (jus in bello), and it will be ended in a moral way (jus post bellum).”
Revolution in Ukraine
New Reality on Global Stage
In the post-George W. Bush period, wars no longer meet the three criteria set out above. Too often they serve private interests and not public ones. Already 300 US-paid mercenaries from the former Blackwater/XE/Greystone Limited, a subsidiary of Vehicle Services Company LLC, are in Ukraine providing illegal “non-state” military support to the thousands of mercenaries already in the country.
The arms they are using are also supplied by arms dealers who are significant contributors to US domestic political campaigns.
What is happening in Ukraine is not right against wrong, good versus evil, cops versus robbers. It is therefore little wonder that Russia views the overthrow of President Yanukovych’s democratically elected government as having been masterminded by the West and led by the US.
But as usual, the West is not talking about the mercenaries and arms dealers and what their agendas are. It is seeking to claim the moral high ground in its actions, justifying everything by grand principle, rather than any of the other things which lie behind any action, taken by anyone, in any area of life.
This battle for moral advantage, and the claims that every action the West takes in Ukraine is justified, and any opponents’ actions are illegal, will only hinder resolution of the conflict, as bombs and bullets kill no matter who uses them and why. Therefore it is important to examine the assumptions which lie behind the Western position, in order to see what is really happening on our TV screens every day.
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The Situation on the Ground
It is now being widely reported that radical Jew-bashing is taking place in Ukraine and ultra-nationalist anti-Semitic groups have seized control of the government. Nearly 100 people have been killed in Kiev, and among more recent attacks a 22-year-old man was stabbed to death in clashes in Donetsk between pro-Russian protesters and a crowd favoring European integration and denouncing Russian forces in supporting Crimea.
While such problems are not unknown in civil conflict situations, they are being justified in the West as an acceptable price to pay for removing the elected government and replacing it with one more in line with Western thinking.
After all, Ukrainians are too obtuse to have democratic rights, in the eyes of the West. After supporting the Orange Revolution, ostensibly a popular uprising against Yanukovych, they resoundingly rejected the government installed then and turned to Yanukovych at the polls. If a few hundred have to die now to correct the people’s stupidity, so be it, the West is arguing.
But it is being strung up by its own argument. Anatol Lieven, expert on the Chechen War and author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry” explains:
“Western governments, too, have put themselves in an extremely dangerous position. They have acquiesced to the overthrow of an elected government by ultra-nationalist militias, which have also chased away a large part of the elected parliament.
The West has stood by in silence while the rump parliament in Kiev has voted to abolish the official status of Russian and other minority languages and members of the new government threatened publicly to ban the main parties which supported Yanukovych – who was democratically elected – an effort which would effectively disenfranchise around a third of the population.”
In the light of all this, we may well ask if what the principles the Ukraine conflict is supposed to be about – self-determination, democracy, human rights – are actually anything to do with it. The answer is more sinister than anything implied by the question.
The West has no position without basis in moral authority. However, their claim to have it does not wash in this particular case.
For example, a fuss is being made of Russia’s Right to Protect doctrine. Western commentaries imply that this is a uniquely Russian phenomenon. However, all countries have the same doctrine in one form or another, and recognize a duty to protect their own nationals wherever they may be.
This is one of the reasons countries have embassies and consulates, and a Russian Embassy in Ukraine would hardly be able to help its citizens in the present situation without military support, even if it were allowed to do so.
The military intervention aspect to Russia’s Right to Protect Doctrine is criticized as being threatening or unnecessary. If misapplied, it is, but so is any other such doctrine. Most countries have some equivalent principle embedded in theirs. For example, France has recently invaded Mali because 400 of its citizens are under a perceived threat, whilst saying that Russia cannot protect millions of its citizens on the same basis.
Angela Merkel told the Bundestag (German parliament), “In Kosovo, we had years when the international community had no power to intervene while Slobodan Milosevic carried out his ethnic cleansing. NATO then decided to act alone because Russia continuously blocked any UN mandate on Serbia.
That situation is in no way similar to what is happening today in Ukraine.” She added, “… it is shameful to compare Crimea to Kosovo. And even if there had been other breaches of international law, Kosovo not being one of them, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are still a breach of international law.”
All this ignores one main fact, among many others: the legal government of Ukraine asked Russia, in writing, to send its troops in. It had the legal power to do so and Russia had the legal power to accept. We may agree with this action, we may not. But no one ever asked the EU to intervene in Kosovo, nor did the EU give the Serbs and others living there any right to self-determination – quite apart from the issue of the EU arming the demilitarized zones, a more obvious breach of international law.
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What goes around comes around
President Vladimir Putin has kept careful notes on the track record of the US and its use of “power over principle” in foreign policy. The US has long paraded around the world as a self-appointed policeman, invading countries and toppling legal governments under flimsy excuses, on the basis that its values must ipso facto be better than those of anyone who disagrees with it. Yet others are not allowed the same right, as only America has positive values, in its own eyes.
The US’ sordid interventions, even those conducted with its NATO partners under the guise of international law, are better described as wars of aggression – and invariably are, sooner or later, by the people who live in the countries the US maintains it is liberating. The countries take the US at its word and then see what it actually does.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Mussolini’s Italy, the people who begged for US-led change soon turned against the forces which brought it. Compare this to the reverence with which Imperial Russia is still held in the Slavic states of the Balkans, for whose liberation and independence they fought, and even Soviet repression, which has no support now, has not been forgotten.
Even before the referendum Russia already had a military presence in Crimea under treaties freely-signed, long ago, by both Russia and Ukraine. It has every right, under the terms of these treaties, to beef up its military presence there, and has a moral obligation to prevent the new government in Kiev from taking revenge on the citizens of that ethnic enclave and strategic naval base.
But therein lies the problem for the West. If you think your values are better than anyone else’s, only you can have a moral obligation, and only the actions you like can have a moral basis. If others are also moral you have to accept that you should not allow your less-than-moral actions, which you justify by the moral ones, to occur, because morality is not your exclusive preserve.
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Choosing Your Friends
The idea that only the West is moral is taking some extreme forms — Chancellor Angelia Merkel has advocated unconditional support for the new Ukrainian regime, thinking that as neither side likes Yanukovych, both are morally right. However Gregor Gysi, who is admittedly head of The Left, the successor to the East German Communist Party, has highlighted that the Chancellor of Germany, of all people, should know better than to be seen supporting rulers who have made the statements the new ones in Ukraine acknowledge having made.
“With fascists in power in Ukraine, Germany and the West are standing by and doing nothing. The Svoboda party has tight contacts with the NPD and other Nazi parties in Europe. The leader of this party, Oleg Tyagnibok, has said exactly this,” Gysi told the Bundestag, reading a direct quote from Tyahnybok:
“Grab the guns, fight the Russian pigs, the Germans, the Jewish pigs and others.”
The whole basis of the post-World War II German state is threatened if it supports rulers who make statements no different to those of Adolf Hitler, even if they welcome the overthrow of Yanukovych. This action is no different to anyone saying that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy. One action is widely condemned, the other not.
But Germany can keep Tyahnybok’s words up its sleeve for its own purposes. They constitute a threat to German citizens, and will be kept out of public discourse until he offends the West, which will then grant itself the right to do exactly what Russia has done.
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What is Really Happening
The EU wants the Ukraine because it is big, but it has lost it by demanding that Ukraine should never deal with Russia, despite the fact every EU country does. The United States and NATO want Ukraine because it is next door to the Russian Federation, which is still perceived as a geopolitical and geo-economic threat. The RF wants an independent Ukraine because it doesn’t want other people’s rockets next door to it.
What all sides are doing is trying to retain control of their own influence. They don’t want to admit that whoever sells the guns and controls the economy will win, right or wrong. That’s why they never admit to talking to lobbyists, those thousands of people who earn good livings doing nothing but privately talking to politicians and subverting the democratic process. All the sides from the so-called democratic West are fighting for themselves, not Ukraine, and not any moral principle.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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