It’s bizarre that the EU is floating the mantra that borders should not be changed by violence when that has been the most common method of changing borders throughout history.
Will the rest of Europe have to prepare for the next Russian incursion? They have not been willing to as long as uncle sugar is around.
I’m talking preparation for the next 80 years.
Well, that and post-colonial empire British mapmakers….
Whose lines drawn on maps have led to continuous conflicts
If the killing is ever going to stop common sense and inevitability must converge. That is what this sounds like.
2014 is the year of the Maidan coup that drove out a recently elected Uke president.
The Maidan coup, like the 2004 color revolution, looks like something that we cooked up. “We” being a powerful neocon foreign policy establishment. In both cases a Russian friendly Uke president was overthrown.
There’s certainly evidence that this neocon cabal worked hard at driving a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. They may even have wanted the war to start. Most of us weren’t paying any attention to what was going on there.
Ukraine would be wise to legally transfer the occupied lands. They've lost it anyways...
THEN they can join NATO to protect what's left and bring peace to their people.
It isn’t bizarre; that is the founding principle of the UN Charter as pitched by the Allies after World War 2.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”
The United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China were among the first to sign. Two Soviet republics - the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, also signed the UN Charter in 1945.
The UN is pretty toothless, because at least one of Russia/China/USA will veto any censure of their own behaviour of the behaviour of their allies. But there’s one thing that’d kill off any pretence of there being an internationally agreed framework for peace - if the original signatories start actively violating this principle in each others’ direction AND endorsing other signatories doing it.
Iraq and Kuwait aren’t in that bucket. Nor are North/South Korea. Nor was Serbia/Kosovo. The rules were broken but they didn’t fundamentally undermine the purpose of having a UN Security Council.
North Korea’s attack on South Korea in 1950, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991, NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which turned out to be down to George Bush having “unfinished business” rather than it being linked to 9/11), all violated that clause of the agreement.
Here’s the problem. Putin has serially attacked a founding signatory (Ukraine) to the UN Charter clause despite everybody knowing Ukraine had no beef with Russia. He’s been doing it for far longer than the vatniks admit - Russia’s attempted assassination of Yuschenko was years before Maidan and Putin was blackmailing the Ukrainian government and president for over a year before Euro Maidan.
On top of that, Putin has spent over 20 years orchestrating cyber attacks on two other founding signatories (UK and USA) to the point where you can barely point at a hospital, police station or government department in either country that hasn’t experienced significant damage.
Belarus has become a client state of Russia after Putin bailed out Lukashenko - after his people voted him out of office.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also violates multiple other signed memorandums of understanding, border treaties, and even Putin’s multiple assurances on the record that Russia had no claim to Crimea or the Donbas.
The big risk with where Trump is headed is, he isn’t just at risk of normalising past violations of this clause of the UN Charter - actively rewarding Russia for breaking it so egregiously puts Russia and the USA both in the camp of telling over 100 countries around the world that no peace treaty, no memorandum of understanding, and no ground rules for multinational conduct with the “great powers” is ever going to be worth the ink.