Did Russia violate International Law? Part II

A Draft Paper Contributing to the Present Debate

The Soviet submarine B-59 (Project 641) during the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 (Photo: National Security Archive).

5. The Cuban Missile Crisis: when the UN-Charter is in conflict with itself.

When the Soviet Union began deploying missiles in Cuba, this was stopped by the United States through an act of war, a blockade. The United States attacked Soviet vessels. The U.S. military leadership also believed that it was fully entitled to carry out a full-scale military attack on Cuba. This was stopped by President Kennedy. Moscow gave in and withdrew its missiles from Cuba after Kennedy had approached Moscow and promised the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey (and Italy).

At that time, there was room for a certain pragmatism. A Russian retreat was achieved. But what is unequivocal is that the U.S. perceived the Soviet missiles in Cuba as a definitive “threat to peace” (UN Charter Art. 1). This “threat” was compared to “an armed attack”, which came to legitimize a U.S. attack in “self-defense” against Cuba and the Soviet Union (despite the fact that the U.S. did not then explicitly refer to UN Charter Art. 51), or to quote John F Kennedy:

“Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change of their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.”

According to U.S. lawyers, threatening weapons deployments near U.S. territory gave the United States the right to use force in “self-defense” in accordance with Art. 51 of the UN Charter, including outside U.S. own territory. Kennedy argued that such an attack in “self-defense” against the threatening party was legitimate and in accordance with international law because a threatening deployment of weapons was contrary to the spirit of the UN Charter: a “threat to the peace” (Art. 1). It was an existential threat to the U.S. This, in turn, paved the way for the doctrine of “pre-emptive self-defense” (Murphy 2005). In the era of nuclear weapons, according to Kennedy, international law must not only consider “the actual firing of weapons” but also provocative weapons deployments as a “threat to the peace” and a violation of international law. The UN Charter’s prohibition against the use of a “threat” against any state (Art. 2.4) can, according to Kennedy, take precedence (primacy) over a prohibition of “the use of force” (including an invasion), if these two prohibitions are in conflict with each other.

However, such wording can obviously also be misused. One state could argue that another state is “a threat to the peace” to justify an attack. Rather, what is of vital importance is to respect the other’s fundamental requirements for security. The Soviet Union should have respected the U.S. requirements for the security, while the U.S. should have respected Russian requirements for the security by not enlarging NATO. Individual states should have the right to deploy weapons or accept any alliance affiliation, but not if they directly threaten a neighboring state. The security of an individual state cannot be established at the expense of the security of another state. This was stressed by the Palme Commission on “Common Security” in 1982 and by the OSCE and its “Charter of Paris for a New Europe”, a document signed by all the relevant states (1990). Europe should develop “without dividing lines” (NATO-Russia Founding Act 1997). “The Charter of Paris” writes: “Security is indivisible, and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others. We therefore pledge to co-operate in strengthening confidence and security among us and in promoting arms control and disarmament.” Every country has the “freedom of choice”, the Charter states, but not the freedom of choosing an alliance affiliation or a weapons deployment that threatens the peace and security of another state.

The claim that the offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba were “a definitive threat to peace” emanated from a “broader” definition of international law. This should apply to Russia today to an even higher degree than to the United States in 1962, firstly because the distance from Ukraine to Moscow is only one-third of the distance from Cuba to Washington, and secondly because the weapons are now faster and more precise than in 1962. The distance from Ukraine to Moscow is certainly too short for Russia to be able to defend itself. Threatening deployments are therefore as serious as any invasion. They are accordingly “acts of aggression” (Art. 1).

A “narrow” definition of international law that reduces the UN Charter to a ban on invading other countries, places the entire blame on Russia for its attack on Ukraine, while a “broader” interpretation gives Russia the right to “self-defense”, a right to deny U.S. deployments of weapons systems in Ukraine, weapons that could be described as a “threat to the peace”. We may argue that this interpretation is right or wrong, but according to a school of international law, this interpretation is legitimate. There is no consensus within the interpretation of international law.

A common European view is that a violation of international law occurs when an aggressor fire weapons across a border or tanks and troops cross that border. This is a “red line”. There is a prohibition against invading others, but “equally absolute is the prohibition against threatening with the use of force”. The UN Charter Art. 24 (1) states that “Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security”. But if the threatening party, as in this case, can use its veto in the Security Council, the threatened party would have to act on its own and, if possible, obtain approval from the Security Council at a later stage. We are faced with a dilemma, of which the Cuban Missile Crisis is an example. If one state’s alliance affiliation threatens a neighbor or if weapons deployments of the first state threaten its neighbor’s capital, the threatened party will be faced with the choice of risking being knocked out by a devastating attack or strike preemptively on its own.

The first part and the second part of the sentence in Article 1(1) and in Article 2(4) are here in conflict with each other, and the more serious the threat from a threatening state is and the closer this threat is placed in relation to the capital and the vital interests of the other, the stronger are the arguments for letting the first part of the sentence (“the threat” of force) take precedence over the second part (the actual “use of force”). If, for example, such a conflict concerns nuclear-armed powers, this does not just become a matter between these powers. This was President Kennedy’s conclusion at the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Let's take a closer look at what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 27, 1962. Soviet submarines had at the time permission to launch a nuclear torpedo if attacked. When the Soviet submarine B-59 was hunted by four U.S. aircraft and 14 American Naval vessels (incl. an aircraft carrier) and was attacked with grenades and depth charges, the captain of the submarine, Valentin Savitsky, assumed that the war with the United States had already started. He gave orders to prepare for the launch of a nuclear torpedo. But one of B-59’s highest-ranking officers, Vasily Arkhipov, convinced Savitsky that they would be able to survive without the use of force. If Arkhipov, on the other hand, had arrived at a different conclusion, the US response would have been to strike back with nuclear weapons. The carrier had nuclear weapons, but the conflict could easily have escalated, and at the time, there was only one U.S. plan in response to a hostile nuclear attack, SIOP-62 (Single Integrated Operational Plan): a full-scale nuclear attack against the Soviet Union and China. It would have killed up to estimated 285 million people in one night. After some time, the radioactivity would kill many more, even in other countries.

The United States was never forced to respond to a nuclear attack, but what constitutes “a threat to the peace” and thus a violation of the UN Charter cannot, in such cases, in the case of nuclear-armed powers, be reduced to a question of whether someone has crossed a border into another state. The doctrine of “preemptive self-defense” is an expression of this. This does not mean that we should accept this doctrine, but a European “narrow” definition of international law does not consider the seriousness of the threat to peace inherent in modern weapons systems. One must weigh one side against the other, and we must recognize that a military build-up near the capital of the other major power could be fatal to that power. One cannot let one side deploy nuclear weapons near the very center of the other side. That would be an unbearable threat, much more serious than some tanks crossing the border in a peripheral part of that country. In December 2021, President Putin said that U.S. “Mk 41 launchers” already exist in Romania and soon in Poland. They can fire missiles that will reach Moscow in 10 and 9 minutes, while the missiles from Cuba in 1962 would have reached Washington in 12 minutes.

Today, many people say that nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction are only meant for deterrence and that “everyone” knows that they are not going to be launched because the destruction would be too serious for both sides. But if we presuppose that nuclear weapons are never going to be launched, they will have no deterrent effect. It is the very uncertainty of their use that gives them a deterrent effect. And the more one argues that they will never be used, the more likely it is that they actually will be used. It is this paradox that has been characteristic of nuclear deterrence. The new Western elite that has had its politically formative years after the Cold War during the crisis of Rwanda and Bosnia discusses what happens in Ukraine as if these weapons did not exist. They have started to use long range weaponry in Ukraine, claiming that Putin’s “red lines” are just a bluff. In a debate between the International Relations scholar John Mearsheimer and the Swedish former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, Bildt said that the Western countries should not give in for “nuclear blackmail”. One should accordingly act as if nuclear weapons did not exist. This is serious. Yeltsin’s and Putin’s former presidential advisor, Sergey Karaganov argued in June 2023 that the Western states are playing a dangerous game: “The fear of atomic escalation must be restored. Otherwise, humanity is doomed,” he says. If the West continues to escalate the conflict, we may have to go for a “nuclear strike [not in Ukraine, but] in countries directly supporting the Kiev regime […] to prevent a slide into a global thermonuclear war”. He argues that the West has to be reminded of its own vulnerability.

Left: State Secretary Colin Powell showing a model vial of anthrax during his presentation before the United Nations Security Council 5 February 2003, where he claimed to have proof for Iraqi chemical and biological weapons (Photo: Wikipedia Public Domain). Right: Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on 8 March 2022. She claimed that “Ukraine has biological research facilities [that should not fall] into the hands of Russian forces”.

6. Weapons of mass destruction in violation of International Law: Iraq and Ukraine

We have several examples where weapons deployments have been described as a violation of international law in order to legitimize a military operation. A more dubious case is the U.S. claim in 2003 that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, which, according to President George W. Bush, were a “threat to the peace”. His words show that he intended to give legitimacy to the coming war against Iraq in the UN Charter. According to him, these Iraqi weapons would give the United States the right to disarm Iraq, because such weapons could be brought to the United States and destroy that country or any country. Now it turned out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. The United States went on bombing and destroying Iraq killing hundreds of thousands of people without there being any basis for the US claims. But while Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, Ukraine did.

There is no dispute that Ukraine, before February 2022, had dozens of biolaboratories. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD, 2022) confirmed U.S. funding of up to 46 such labs in Ukraine. The disagreement concerns whether these labs were military or civilian. But they were funded by DoD (by Defense Threat Reduction Agency) and several labs were studying more or less deadly viruses and bacteria like cholera, tularemia, plague, anthrax, Congo-Crimean fever, and African Swine fever. A report from the inspection of the microbial strain collection at the Odessa Lab from 2018 wrote about a “total number of microbial strains in the national collection is 654, including pathogens of anthrax –32 strains, brucellosis – 11 strains, tularemia – 189 strains, cholera – 422 strains. [… with containers with] viral pathogens, including tick-borne encephalitis viruses well as unidentified arthroviruses, of a total number of 596 items. […] There were 66 containers with 497 cholera agents’ storage units, 149 tularemia agents’ storage units, 279 brucellosis agents’ storage units, 32 anthrax agents’ storage units at the storage facility.”

In 2020, Kazakh Deputy Defense Minister Amirbek Togusov described corresponding US-Kazakh laboratories as “dual use” (military-civilian). Documents showed that US civilians and military officers ran these projects. They were “removed from national control and operate in a secret regime”. They were “veiled military bases born in response to the ban on biological weapons and bypassing the biological weapons convention”, he said. “We are like experimental monkeys, and our territory has become a natural testing ground for the Pentagon to test new viruses. Labs operate in covert mode, free from state oversight”, he said. The Prime Minister of Ukraine until 2014, Mykola Azarov, said that Ukrainian authorities, as in Kazakhstan, were denied access: “these were labs of the American military”. The 2014 coup was a direct response to the Ukraine Government’s formal decision to close these laboratories in 2013, Azarov said.

11 US Department of Defense (DoD) financed laboratories as presented by the Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva at Arms Watch 2019. DoD later confirmed that they had financed not 11 but 46 biological laboratories, and these laboratories had, according to US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, such military significance that they should absolutely not fall “into the hands of Russian forces”.

As of April 2023, Russian authorities claim to have found a total of 240 pathogens (more or less lethal types of bacteria or viruses) that Ukraine and U.S. experts have studied or developed in these laboratories. On March 11, 2022, shortly after the war had started, U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told Congress under oath: “Ukraine has biological research facilities which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of. So, we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials [bacteria and viruses] from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

This is an American confirmation. These viruses and bacteria were not only funded by the U.S. military. They were also more or less lethal, highly classified biological materials of vital military significance. They must thus be defined as biological weapons.

The Americans were also interested in biological weapons that could be genetically modified to attack specific genotypes (Russians or Chinese), i.e., they wanted to develop specific viruses to be able to take out specific groups of people, as described in a document of the Project for the New American Century (year 2000) with Victoria Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan. From 2005-10, but even more from 2020, there was something of an archipelago of virology laboratories in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. Some labs were also experimenting with “carriers” (birds, insects, and drones) to be used for spreading these viruses to other countries. Russia faced a significant “military-virology complex”, about which Russia knew little more than that it stored a wide range of biological weapons. Drawing a parallel to the U.S. argument on weapons of mass destruction prior to the Iraq War, this would give Russia the “right to disarm” Ukraine.

There are two obvious reasons for why the U.S. has deployed such biological laboratories in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia near the borders of Russia, and in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam near the borders of China. Firstly, it enables the U.S. to experiment on humans and to study dangerous viruses and bacteria that for safety reasons would be difficult to handle in the U.S. or Europe. One has supposedly also used the population for lethal experiments in these countries. Secondly, by deploying laboratories in countries bordering Russia and China, it will facilitate the U.S. use of biological weapons against its enemies. There is suspicion, for example, that the U.S. from 2019 had used drones to spread African swine fever to attack Chinese pig farms killing off 300-350 million pigs as a part of its economic warfare. Proposals for such warfare was raised already from the 1990s by Robert Kadlec, then Biological Warfare advisor for the U.S. Special Forces, and later for U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for the White House and for the Senate Intelligence Committee. Under the COVID-19 pandemic, he was the Assistant Secretary of Health for Preparedness and Response. He wrote in 1998:

“[T]he twenty-first century will be a century of economic warfare [… The] emergence of economic competition […] raises the possibility of a new form of warfare. This includes the development and use of biological warfare (BW) against economic targets. Using BW to attack livestock, crops, or ecosystems offers an adversary the means to wage a potentially subtle yet devastating form of warfare, one which would impact the political, social, and economic sectors of a society and potentially of national survival itself. […Bacteria and viruses] that incapacitate or kill humans, animals, or plants have an unsettling value in waging economic warfare.”

In the Air Force War College Report "Battlefield of the Future" (1998), Lt Col Robert Kadlec has one chapter on “Twenty-First Century Germ Warfare” and another chapter on “Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare”. Both underline the revolution in biotechnology and the vital role for bioweapons for the 21st century, particularly as a covert weapon of mass destruction.

Kadlec argues that bioweapons are in many ways more favorable than nuclear weapons. They are much cheaper and they are more useful because they may give you “plausible deniability”. He continues writing:

“In the context of a deliberate act of BW, a nation could select from several native occurring or endemic pests. Selective management and breeding could develop a “super” pest, [which] could be highly specific for a particular crop that an economic competitor or regional adversary relies on for economic prosperity or national survival. To provide better cover for a clandestine or covert BW attack, pests endemic to the target nation could be similarly obtained and could enhance its resistance through such laboratory manipulation […U]sing BW may inflict a grave blow to that nation’s economy or society and possibly result in some political impact. History has recorded the chaos and instability created by such natural catastrophes as famines and epidemics. Using BW in this fashion would have applications to waging low-intensity warfare with strategic outcomes.”

To deploy weapons of mass destruction in such a way at the border of the adversary is, to quote President Kennedy, “a definite threat to peace”. It pushes the other part to strike pre-emptively. If one accepts only a “narrow” definition of international law, this is a matter of provocations, not a violation of international law. However, if we apply a “broader” interpretation with “threats to the peace” as a violation of international law, it turns out that the U.S. argument on weapons of mass destruction was not valid for Iraq in 2003, because no such weapons were ever found in that country after the disarmament had taken place in the 1990s, but that the argument on the other hand is valid for Ukraine and thus would legitimize a Russian invasion of Ukraine and justify Russia’s ambition to disarm Ukraine.

It is also doubtful that the U.S. would be able to justify the right to “self-defense” by disarming a country because of weapons of mass destruction when that country is located on the other side of the globe. When it comes to nuclear deterrence, we accept that such weapons are deployed in such a manner. But there is no consensus when it comes to forward deployments, and Kennedy argued that these deployments were “a definite threat to peace”, and accordingly a violation of the UN Charter. When, in this case, biological weapons are found stored near the border to Russia, this could, if we follow Kennedy’s definition of “self-defense”, give Russia the right to use force against Ukraine and the right to disarm Ukraine.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq, the Russian invasion of Ukraine could thus be defended as legitimate. One could say that any military attack is in itself a violation of international law, but if it is done in self-defense to prevent a “definitive threat to peace”, this would, according to Kennedy, mean that it is legitimate even under the UN Charter. This does not make the war more bearable. And the moral justification of this war is perhaps primarily determined by the malice and seriousness of the U.S. “military-virology complex” and by the seriousness of the threats posed by a U.S. military presence in Ukraine and Central Europe. From this point of view, the war is not about Western provocations that had triggered the Russian invasion as a “violation of international law”, but rather about the U.S. and Ukraine’s “violation of international law” that have prompted Russia to use force in “self-defense”, perhaps in accordance with the UN Charter.

Left: The 2019 RAND Report “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” that discusses U.S. interests in profiting from Russian weaknesses, for example to limit Russia’s ability to export gas to Europe. Right: Photo from the Russian pipelaying vessel laying the pipe for Nord Stream 2 between Russia and Germany. (Photo: Gazprom)

7. Mass killings, the Security Council and Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

The 2019 RAND Reports “Extending Russia” and “Overextending and Unbalancing 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 has the right to decide about sanctions or other measures. 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. As we will see below, to replace European dependency on Russian gas with U.S. gas, the United States would have to trigger a war, to make a war between Russia and Germany/Europe unavoidable.

Since 1981, central figures in the U.S. Administration (incl. Director Central Intelligence 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 the 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 that Russia was described as alien power, but almost certainly the initiation of a European-Russian War to make the Germans turn against the Russians. To start such a war was almost certainly a precondition for a European decoupling from Russia, for cutting off the Russian gas supplies, but the above RAND Reports do not say that explicitly.

However, a third RAND Report, “Weakening Germany, Strengthening the U.S.” (25 January 2022) has turned out to be remarkably correct. It is allegedly an “Executive summary” of a leaked “confidential” RAND report. RAND has been described as a falsification, but every leak of a classified document is as a matter of policy described as a “falsification”. It may be a “falsified copy” of an authentic report. Whatever it is, all its central points have been confirmed to be correct. The U.S. policy is not just about exploiting Russian vulnerabilities to “weaken Russia”, as the first RAND reports stated, but also about “weakening Germany” by cutting its energy supplies. The “German economic model is based on two pillars”, the report states: cheap Russian gas and cheap French electric energy from its nuclear power plants. The “importance of the first factor is considerably higher”. The “Executive summary” concludes that the “only feasible way to guarantee Germany’s rejection of Russian energy supplies is to involve both sides in a military conflict in Ukraine”, and obviously the U.S. “further actions in this country [Ukraine] will inevitably lead to a military response from Russia. […] That would make it possible to declare Russia an aggressor and apply to it the entire package of sanctions prepared in beforehand.” Furthermore, the U.S. will have to use the “unstable situation in the Sahel” to make Niger turn against France to cut French uranium import from Niger. This “would make French energy sector critically dependent on Australian and Canadian fuel” and in practical terms dependent on the U.S. “The damage to the EU countries will be quite comparable to the one to the Russians, and in some countries - primarily Germany - it will be higher”. This will have a “disastrous outcomes for German industry” and “the total losses could reach 200-300 billion euros”. A “sharp drop in living standards […] will entail the exodus of skilled labor and well-educated young people. There are literally no other destination for such migration other than the United States.” Advanced German companies will have to move to the U.S., and this economic injection will “serve to strengthen the national financial condition [and] consolidate the American society”, the “Executive summary” states. All these claims in the report are already confirmed by the events after January 2022. However, the report also states that the “prerequisite for Germany to fall into this trap is the leading role of the Green parties”. In both the case of Ukraine War and in cutting German energy supplies as well as in the case of Niger, Victoria Nuland has played an important role.

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 from 2014 and for the West-Ukrainian elite in general, it became necessary to make eastern Ukraine cut its industrial and cultural ties to 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. and UK 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 these intelligence services? 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, and they may have overestimated the U.S. military force. 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 an autonomy for Donbass that 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 and 19, 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 finally push Russia into the war in Ukraine to preempt a future Ukraine nuclear capability.

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. The U.S. had then just left the catastrophic Vietnam War, and the Vietnam War was on everybody’s mind. 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 24 December 1979, the CIA started to support the Islamist Mujahideen groups to destabilize the pro-Soviet regime in order to “increase the likelihood” of a Soviet invasion. The U.S. national security advisor in 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told Le Nouvel Observateur: “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’”. The U.S. support for the Islamists 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.

Left: The Ukrainian plans for attacks as presented by the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics in early 2022 (from Consortium News, 21 February 2022). Right: The OSCE’s presentation of ceasefire violations on 18 February with primarily Ukrainian artillery fire into the border areas of the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as preparation for the upcoming military offensive (OSCE 2022).

The U.S. wanted to trigger an “Afghanistan War 2.0”. In 1979, the United States wanted to “breakup of the Soviet empire”, something some people in the CIA and then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney were pushing for in 1990-91. Now, from 2014 and particularly in 2021-22, Cheney’s protégé Victoria Nuland seems to have continued 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 dependent on our assessment of the “military-virology 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 much more legitimate than, for example, the U.S. 2003 war against Iraq and 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 thus was 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. This 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 to use 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 war. She was able to outmaneuver Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and in collaboration with the French and the British, she was able to close all negotiations and bring in Qatari forces to be used as “NATO ground forces”.

In 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 in its Libya Report in 2016. There were no such Libyan mass killings or plans for mass killings. There had been no attacks on civilians. There was some dramatic rhetoric of Gaddafi against the armed Islamists rebellion, and he tried to convince the young people not to arm themselves, but it was no threat against the people of Benghazi or against people of any other city. The only mass killings that took place were carried out by the Islamist opposition forces that killed black Africans in black communities as Tawergha. The claim that Muammar Gaddafi wanted to kill people was merely a pretext for the opposition’s and not least the Islamist 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 og Lugansk and to Crimea. The Kyiv regime was forced to use several extreme rightwing militias (the Azov Battalion, Aidar and the Right Sector) in its war with the two republics. The UN concluded that more than 14,000 had died in the fighting between local Donbass forces and Ukraine militias and military forces. 3,000-4,000 primarily Russian-speaking civilians were killed, 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 led to 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 and as the January 2022 “RAND Report” had said to be “inevitable” . after U.S. “further actions” in Ukraine. In January 2022, the Donetsk leader Denis Pushilin told that “120,000 Ukrainian troops [had] amassed at Donbas contact line”. On 17 February, Kyiv had 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. There was a massive mobilization. The next day, Ukraine started its offensive with artillery fire. The two republics turned to Moscow for support. Russia entered the war a week later. In this planned Ukrainian invasion, which 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.