Whither Ukraine?

The Westphalian world on the edge

Just after Christmas I was given wifely approval to finally unload some baby furniture and I offered it for free to the first person to show up. I had lots of enquiries, but no one showed up. Finally, someone with Google Translate English asked for my address and said she would be right over. Another no show but she wrote again to say that she was new to the city and couldn’t find my house.

“No problem,” says I. “Where are you and are you home now? I will bring it to you.”

I was a bit desperate to be rid of the stuff. This is how I met a lovely Ukrainian family who had ended up in Canada after fleeing the war in their country. They were a mother and father with a teenaged son and a pregnant, married daughter and her husband. Their English skills after three months in Canada were remarkable and I was left thinking that Canada had just received some pretty good immigrants.

“But no”, they said. “We will return home in a few years when the war is over.”

I didn’t say anything, but I wonder if they will have a home to return to. Canada’s gain.

This past week, in a history class I teach to middle school kids, we looked at the futility of the Thirty Years War and spent some time discussing the Treaty of Westphalia which concluded that war. It is argued that this treaty established the nation-state. I don’t agree with that assessment, but it did define norms to prevent one nation from interfering with the politics of another nation and established that an army crossing the border into another country is a declaration of war. A “rules-based world order” if you will. And happily, for the Dutch, it freed them from the Spanish and established their republic.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the academic literature has been filled with papers declaring the end of the nation-state in a post-Westphalian world. In my history class we discussed the pros and cons of the globalist desire to create a post-Westphalian world with no nation-states and no borders. Ukraine came up.

In 1994, the Hutu majority tribe of Rwanda decided that the minority, but ruling Tutsi tribe, should cease to be. Over the space of four months between five hundred thousand and one million Tutsis and Twa tribesmen were killed by their Hutu neighbours. I once worked with a Tutsi woman and, while not willing to go into details, she informed me that she watched as her father was hacked to death. Bill Clinton has stated that the biggest regret in his presidency was that he did not send in troops to stop the killing.

But under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, was he even allowed to send troops into another sovereign country? Isn’t what one country wants to do within its borders, the business of that country? Reportedly China has one million Uighurs and nobody knows how many Falun Gong practitioners locked in concentration camps and being used as unwilling organ donors. Why don’t we go in and stop this? Well… China is a sovereign country and what they do inside their borders is up to them.

Back to Ukraine.

In 2014, Ukraine experienced a coup d’etat when the duly elected, according to The Guardian newspaper, President Viktor Yanukovych was chased out of the country. The precipitating issue was a decision by Mr. Yanukovych to turn down a financial offer from the EU of $838 million in loans over ten years. Instead he accepted Mr. Putin’s alternative offer of $15 billion in loans available immediately. But President Yanukovych’s removal was a decision by the Ukrainian people. Many wondered about American interference given the intercepted phone conversations from Victoria Nuland of the US State Department, but majority rules and Viktor was gone.

Immediately following the Euromaidan protests and the Sochi Olympics, the mostly ethnic Russian people of Crimea, voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. “Unfair!” we in the West screamed but it was very reminiscent of the vote, orchestrated by NATO, to allow the Kosovars to separate from Serbia.

To protest the removal of Mr. Yanukovych, unhappy dissidents from the predominantly Russian eastern oblasts (or provinces) of Donetsk and Lugansk decided to follow Crimea and separate from Ukraine. From 2014 until early 2022 an estimated 14,000 Ukrainian citizens from the rebellious, Russian speaking oblasts were killed by the shelling of civilian infrastructure from the entrenched Ukrainian army. What happens in Ukraine stays in Ukraine.

Talks to end the shelling in 2014 and in 2015 resulted in the signing of the Minsk agreements. Signatories to these agreements were the parties fighting in Ukraine as well as Germany, France, and Russia. In the last month, both François Hollande of France and Angela Merkel of Germany admitted that the Minsk Agreements were intended to give “Ukraine time” presumably to be armed and trained for war. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky, who was elected on a campaign of rapprochement with Russia, said that he never had any intention of following the Minsk Agreements. We have the “world order” bit but seem to be missing the thing about “rules”.

My position about the war has been that Mr. Putin had no legal or moral basis to invade Ukraine in February of 2022 regardless of whether he thought the Ukrainian army was about to precipitate a genocide in the eastern oblasts. I was also not happy with American and EU interference in Ukraine as they pushed the absurd notion that Ukraine should join NATO. That wasn’t going to be acceptable in Moscow any more than Russian interference in Cuba wasn’t acceptable in Washington. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the two sides were not so far apart that an agreement couldn’t be reached.

But what is the legal status of Russia’s participation in the Ukraine war? Maybe my Westphalian instincts need a readjustment. Mr. Putin went to great lengths to define his incursion adventure as a “special military operation” that was legal under Article 51 of the United Nations charter. The SMO, I suppose, is a dodge to avoid the implications of a declaration of war, and the nuances of which, I am sure, are of small consolation to the Ukrainian citizens who are losing homes and life in the crossfire. But what of Article 51? The article deals with the inherent right of self-defense and it has been interpreted by British legal expert, Sir Daniel Bethlehem, QC, to allow pre-emptive force in the event of an imminent attack.

It is therefore the Government’s view that international law permits the use of force in self-defence against an imminent attack but does not authorise the use of force to mount a pre-emptive strike against a threat that is more remote.

The question then becomes,

“Was a Ukrainian attack on the eastern Donbas imminent and was Russia authorized to participate in the pre-emptive strike?”

Given the rather significant support given to Ukraine by Western countries, the second question is moot. Russia was invited to give its support to the Donbas regions and by crossing the border it declared war in a justified (to Russia) pre-emptive strike. Only time will tell whether information about the imminence of a Ukrainian attack validated the need for a pre-emptive incursion.

It can be fairly argued, then, that when Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana was killed in an airplane crash and violence broke out, Mr. Clinton had sufficient justification for pre-emptively sending troops into Rwanda with a subsequent notification to the United Nations.

In the past couple of weeks, we have learned more about the war in Ukraine. Last week, Mr. Bennet, the Prime Minister of Israel said that in March 2022 he had an agreement from both Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin for peace terms, but the Americans balked at ending the war. Mr. Bennet has since walked back his comments stating the Americans stopped only the negotiations and that an agreement had not, in fact, been reached.

Also, this past week, Mr. Seymour Hirsch, a highly respected and credible independent journalist, wrote explosively and in detail about how the US and Norwegian governments planted bombs on the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines in June 2022 and then initiated them remotely in September 2022. The Biden government has pushed back vigorously at this story. If Mr. Hirsch’s reporting is right, the United States can be accused of declaring war on Germany and Russia, partners in the pipelines.

In the past six months the Ukrainian army has driven the Russians back by a few kilometers as shown by the narrow, dark pink strip on the map. This was done at a cost of over 150,000 soldiers and I submit that this is not what winning looks like. In fact, it looks more like the battle of Stamford Bridge and Hastings both in 1066. Russia has control of the air and fires ten shells for every Ukrainian shell. Russian factories are working twenty-four hours per day on munitions production. This week Mr. Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, admitted that the munitions that Ukraine is expending in a day is what the EU produces in a month. Russia has called up over 300,000 reserve soldiers who are fully trained. Ukraine is taking men up to sixty years of age and there are disputed reports of teenagers as young as sixteen being sent to the front. Tanks or no tanks, even the latest RAND report walks back its enthusiasm for a Ukraine victory.

I qualify the situation in Ukraine as FUBAR in a way that is perhaps unique in the history of the world. Even the duplicity of Otto von Bismarck in causing the Franco-Prussian War as a pretext for the unification of Germany doesn’t rise to the evil foolishness of continuing the present Ukrainian war. Consider this. Mr. Zelensky only learned to speak Ukrainian when he won the presidential election a few years ago. This means that the Ukrainians elected, as president, someone who didn’t speak their language. Did Ukrainians hate the Russians so much? So who is pushing this war? Is there an offramp or must it be escalated? What is the game plan? Will Mr. Putin and Russia be crushed or will Ukraine continue to be destroyed?

Here is one man’s opinion and he is not alone. There are a number of ex-US military officers saying the same things. I encourage you to listen to Colonel MacGregor’s alternative views because the legacy media will not cover them. Then you will have more information to decide for yourselves what is really going on.

I am a big fan of the US when it adheres to its constitution. Neither the Washington Republicans nor the Democrats seem interested in doing that and their self-interested devotion to the Brzeziński doctrine, as it relates to Russia, could land us all in a world of hurt. Will they turn to nuclear weapons when the futility of their Ukrainian adventure is obvious to voters?

The Thirty Years War was based on much of the same egotistic stupidity and entrenched and toxic pride that is on display today. Northern Germany was devastated, up to eight million people were killed and nothing was accomplished.

For the sake of the hopes and dreams of my new Ukrainian friends, certainly, and my grandchildren, perhaps, this madness must end.

I am persuadable so let me know what this conflict looks like from where you sit. And please share with others.