By XHABIR DERALLA

Already in the first hours of the first invasion against Ukraine on February 20, 2014, Russia trampled international law. Nevertheless, the aggression in which Putin’s Russia occupied 44,000 square kilometers, or 7% of Ukrainian territory in 2014, didn’t prompt any particularly strong and decisive reaction by the international community. The European countries continued with business as usual with Russia.

Business as usual

The UN wrote several declarations and adopted several declarations and a “set of measures”. Not one of the measures of the international diplomacy and of the UN contributed to freeing Ukraine from the unwanted “guest”. The reason for that was the hypocrisy of the big and rich who didn’t want to give up the benefits that the “dirty dance” with Putin brings. Just as, actually, they haven’t done so in the other fifteen wars that the Russian Federation has caused or waged since the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991 (in average one war every two years).

Crime without punishment, still

In the period following Russia’s first aggression against Ukraine, from February 20, 2014 to February 24, 2022, more than 14,000 people lost their lives, and over 30,000 were injured. This number includes also the 298 victims of the Boing 777 MH17 flight that went down, who were killed as a result of the terrorist attack on July 17, 2014. The Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down by the BUK missile system, which was transferred to the occupied territory of the Donbas region that the Russian Federation occupied.

It seems that the sharpest condemnation for Putin’s militant and criminal regime, in the dawn of the large-scale military aggression in 2022, came from a well-known Russian general. Leonid Ivashov, in an interview for radio “Echo of Moscow“, demanded, not only resignation of Putin, but also trial of Putin as a war criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

“Today, certainly, much depends on Putin. And he needs someone normal – I don’t see normal people around him – to come and say to him: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, the consequences will be as such, you will definitely be tried, as were the main war criminals in the Nuremberg Tribunal’. Not just for this. And then there will be a trial also for the crashed Boing, the pollution of the planet’s environment and similar” – stated Russian General Ivashov.

Long list

With the military aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Russia violated the basic norms and principles of international law. Long is the list of international documents that Putin trampled already with the first aggression against an independent, sovereign and peaceful country in its immediate neighborhood. The Russian Federation directly violated the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act (1975). Furthermore, it violated numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, including the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurance in relation to Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Weapons (1994); Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (1997); Treaty Between the Russian Federation and Ukraine on the Russian-Ukrainian State Border  (2003) and many other. The Russian occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as well as certain territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk region, fall fully within the “Definition of Aggression” of the UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX), December 14, 1974.

State death

Russia challanged and trampled the pillar of international law: the right to territorial integrity of states. As Tanisha Fazal writes, Professor at the University of Minnesota, in her book “State Death“, it is a state when the country can no longer function on the international scene.

“At the beginning of the era of modern states, one reason for the death of states dominates: the trauma of brutal force”, writes Professor Fazal in the essay “The Return of Conquest”, published in Foreign Affairs (May/June, 2022), where she gives an answer to the question – Why the future of the global order depends on Ukraine?

The author of this very interesting scientific work reflects on the world map of 1816. Half of those states from that time don’t exist today.

Very often, states that are between powerful states-rivals, become their prey and disappear. Hence, in the period from 1772 to 1795, Poland was attacked and trampled from all sides. – from Russia, Austria and Prussia. Poland, simply, disappeared from the world map for more than a 100 years. Paraguay in South America had a similar fate, when it was attacked and torn apart by Brazil and Argentina in 1870. At the beginning of the 20-th century, Japan was at war with Russia and China on the Korean peninsula. Then, it annexed Korea. In the 19-th century and the first half of the 20-th century, according to the research of Dr. Fazal, on average, one country “died” every three years.

After the end of World War II in 1945, the world entered an era in which the territorial integrity of states was protected by international law, while “state death” became a very rare phenomenon.

A new bloody era

Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine, already in 2014, and even more with the attempt for full invasion in 2022, again created a space for “killing of states”, by denying the territorial integrity of states. Hence, this bloody conflict in which the humiliating defeats on the front are compensated by Putin’s soldatesque with war crimes against civilian population and with a global threat to energy and food, could become an everyday life around the world.

If Putin and his partners succeed at least partially in their criminal intents and if they escape the responsibility for the brutal aggression and targeting of civilians, the world that we know will sink into oblivion. Instead, we could expect everyday new war hotspots and terrorist actions, nuclear threats, hunger, insecurity and brutal violence all around the world.

Therefore, the fate of Ukraine is also the fate of the world.

Translation: N. Cvetkovska