今日，越来越没有存在感的联合国秘书长古特雷斯访问了俄罗斯并与普京会面。
安东尼奥·古特雷斯，1949年出生于葡萄牙首都里斯本，1974年4月，加入葡萄牙社会党。年轻时的他也是一个政坛极为活跃的人物。1995年10月，古特雷斯出任葡萄牙总理迎来他人生的高光时刻，直至2001年卸任。从2005年起他开始在联合国任联合国难民事务高级专员，直至2016年参选联合国秘书长。
为什么要特意介绍一下古特雷斯的简历，就是想说明一件往事：1999年3月24日，以美国为首的北约军事集团对主权国家南斯拉夫狂轰滥炸时，这个古特雷斯就是北约侵略者的成员国之一的总理。当年参与科索沃战争并直接参与轰炸的国家有美、英、法、德、意、加、荷、挪、比、土、葡、西、丹，投入飞机1200架，出动32000多架次对南联盟进行了为期78天的无差别轰炸，桥梁、汽车、大楼、公共汽车、列车……看到什么就炸什么，成百上千的平民，包括妇女、儿童与老人被炸死。可以说，他的双手也沾有南斯拉夫无辜平民的鲜血。
以美国为首的北约轰炸南斯拉夫这个联合国主权成员国，居然没有经过联合国授权或批准，公然违反了国际法的基本准则,，也严重削弱了联合国的作用，使联合国在国际事务中的主导地位受到严重挑战。
相信这段历史，时任葡萄牙总理的古特雷斯自然是心知肚明的。
23年后，俄罗斯以一己之力，动用武力以阻止北约不断东扩，而乌克兰则倚仗美欧的支持不断挑衅，导致这场战争的爆发。如今战争持续了两个月，美欧一方也没指望联合国能帮到什么忙，俄罗斯更没正眼看一下联合国。这回古特雷斯不知是受到压力还是受到刺激，决定到俄乌两国走一次，当然他也明知不会有什么结果。
隔着长桌，普京向古特雷斯提到了科索沃战争，并明确告诉老古，俄罗斯对顿巴斯两个共和国的承认完全参照科索沃模式。这里就不得不说普京确实是极具政治智慧的，他知道对方的软肋在哪。就像战争一开始美欧疯狂制裁，他却三两招就轻松化解。同样，也不提当年葡萄牙是如何参加轰炸的事，也不提当年国际法庭强行将南联盟肢解，只是告诉他：寇可往，吾亦可往。
在说到俄方在顿巴斯问题上的行动时，普京意味深长地提醒古特雷斯：联合国就科索沃问题作出过关于该领土有权（造成如今的分裂）在未经中央当局同意的情况下宣布主权的决定，许多西方国家承认科索沃是一个独立的国家，俄罗斯在顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克两个人民共和国做的是同样的事情。
这就相当尴尬了，无论你老古当时是“围攻光明顶”的凶手之一，还是你现在作为联合国秘书长身份，都无法回避这个尖锐的问题：没有联合国授权，凭什么对一个主权国家和人民进行围攻屠杀？你现在又有什么资格在我老普面前人五人六指点江山？我承认乌东独立怎么了，接下来还有好几个独立国家要承认呢！当然这话并不需要明着说，都是玩政治的。
小司机怒批老古，也是太拿自己当回事了，就像前不久他拒绝德国总统访乌、讽刺马克龙只会装十三一样，不知天高地厚。而老古同样也是太拿自己当回事了，美国犯下那么多的战争罪，何时把联合国放在眼里的？在全球设立几百个生物实验室，你联合国卫生组织敢吱一声了吗？普京估计也是看在他一把年纪还要来当和事佬的份儿上才和他见上一面。
这次老古来俄访问，还有一件事，就是为了马里乌波尔钢铁厂下面那群特殊的人。他提出联合国和国际红十字会参与从马里乌波尔亚速钢铁厂撤离平民的工作，对此老普心知肚明，但也表示原则上同意。看来那条大鱼还在网里。只是有一点：军事行动得不到的结果，在外交桌上永远不会得到。
事实上，北约轰炸和肢解南联盟完全是一种赤裸裸的侵略和扩张，而俄乌战争则是为求自保将战火拒于国门之外，两者既有相似之处，也有本质区别。而为人所津津乐道的是，当着古特雷斯的面将他的军，让这个秘书长确实相当地难堪和尴尬：北约可以放火，就不准普京点灯？
Daniel Kovalik: Why Russia's intervention in Ukraine is legal under international law
The argument can be made that Russia exercised its right for self-defense
Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is author of the recently-released No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.
==========================================
For many years, I have studied and given much thought to the UN Charter’s prohibition against aggressive war. No one can seriously doubt that the primary purpose of the document – drafted and agreed to on the heels of the horrors of WWII – was and is to prevent war and “to maintain international peace and security,” a phrase repeated throughout.
As the Justices at Nuremberg correctly concluded, “To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” That is, war is the paramount crime because all of the evils we so abhor – genocide, crimes against humanity, etc. – are the terrible fruits of the tree of war.
In light of the above, I have spent my entire adult life opposing war and foreign intervention. Of course, as an American, I have had ample occasion to do so given that the US is, as Martin Luther King stated, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Similarly, Jimmy Carter recently stated that the US is “the most war-like nation in the history of the world.” This is demonstrably true, of course. In my lifetime alone, the US has waged aggressive and unprovoked wars against countries such as Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia. And this doesn’t even count the numerous proxy wars the US has fought via surrogates (e.g., through the Contras in Nicaragua, various jihadist groups in Syria, and through Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the ongoing war against Yemen).
Indeed, through such wars, the US has done more, and intentionally so, than any nation on earth to undermine the legal pillars prohibiting war. It is in reaction to this, and with the express desire to try to salvage what is left of the UN Charter’s legal prohibitions against aggressive war, that a number of nations, including Russia and China, founded the Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter.
In short, for the US to complain about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law is, at best, the pot calling the kettle black. Still, the fact that the US is so obviously hypocritical in this regard does not necessarily mean Washington is automatically wrong. In the end, we must analyze Russia’s conduct on its own merits.
One must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in Kiev against the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass – a war which claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children, and displaced around 1.5 million more even before Russia’s military operation – has been arguably genocidal. That is, the government in Kiev, and especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these peoples with the intention of destroying, at least in part, the ethnic Russians precisely because of their ethnicity.
While the US government and media are trying hard to obscure these facts, they are undeniable, and were indeed reported by the mainstream Western press before it became inconvenient to do so. Thus, a commentary run by Reuters in 2018 clearly sets out how the neo-Nazis battalions have been integrated into the official Ukrainian military and police forces, and are thus state, or at least quasi-state, actors for which the Ukrainian government bears legal responsibility. As the piece relates, there are 30-some right-wing extremist groups operating in Ukraine, that “have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces,” and that “the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology... ”
That is, they possess and promote hatred towards ethnic Russians, the Roma peoples, and members of the LGBT community as well, and they act out this hatred by attacking, killing, and displacing these peoples. The piece cites the Western human rights group Freedom House for the proposition that “an increase in patriotic discourse supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia has coincided with an apparent increase in both public hate speech, sometimes by public officials and magnified by the media, as well as violence towards vulnerable groups such as the LGBT community.” And this has been accompanied by actual violence. For example, “Azov and other militias have attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students and Roma.”
As reported in Newsweek, Amnesty International had been reporting on these very same extremist hate groups and their accompanying violent activities as far back as 2014.
It is this very type of evidence – public hate speech combined with large-scale, systemic attacks on the targets of the speech – that has been used to convict individuals of genocide, for example in the Rwandan genocide case against Jean-Paul Akayesu.
To add to this, there are well over 500,000 residents of the Donbass region of Ukraine who are also Russian citizens. While that estimate was made in April 2021, after Vladimir Putin’s 2019 decree simplified the process of obtaining Russian citizenship for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, this means that Russian citizens were being subjected to racialized attack by neo-Nazi groups integrated into the government of Ukraine, and right on the border of Russia.
And lest Russia was uncertain about the Ukrainian government’s intentions regarding the Russian ethnics in the Donbass, the government in Kiev passed new language laws in 2019 which made it clear that Russian speakers were at best second-class citizens. Indeed, the usually pro-West Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed alarm about these laws. As the HRW explained in an early-2022 report which received nearly no coverage in the Western media, the government in Kiev passed legislation which “requires print media outlets registered in Ukraine to publish in Ukrainian. Publications in other languages must also be accompanied by a Ukrainian version, equivalent in content, volume, and method of printing. Additionally, places of distribution such as newsstands must have at least half their content in Ukrainian.”
And, according to the HRW, “Article 25, regarding print media outlets, makes exceptions for certain minority languages, English, and official EU languages, but not for Russian” (emphasis added), the justification for that being “the century of oppression of … Ukrainian in favor of Russian.” As the HRW explained, “[t]here are concerns about whether guarantees for minority languages are sufficient. The Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, said that several of the law’s articles, including article 25, ‘failed to strike a fair balance’ between promoting the Ukrainian language and safeguarding minorities’ linguistic rights.” Such legislation only underscored the Ukrainian government’s desire to destroy the culture, if not the very existence, of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
Moreover, as the Organization of World Peace reported in 2021, “according to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Decree no. 117/2021, Ukraine has committed to putting all options on the table to taking back control over the Russian annexed Crimea region. Signed on March 24th, President Zelensky has committed the country to pursue strategies that . . . ‘will prepare and implement measures to ensure the de-occupation and reintegration of the peninsula.’” Given that the residents of Crimea, most of whom are ethnic Russians, are quite happy with the current state of affairs under Russian governance – this, according to a 2020 Washington Post report – Zelensky’s threat in this regard was not only a threat against Russia itself but was also a threat of potentially massive bloodshed against a people who do not want to go back to Ukraine.
Without more, this situation represents a much more compelling case for justifying Russian intervention under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine which has been advocated by such Western ‘humanitarians’ as Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, and which was relied upon to justify the NATO interventions in countries like the former Yugoslavia and Libya. And moreover, none of the states involved in these interventions could possibly make any claims of self-defense. This is especially the case for the United States, which has been sending forces thousands of miles away to drop bombs on far-flung lands.
Indeed, this recalls to mind the words of the great Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, who opined years ago in his influential work, ‘Culture and Imperialism’, that it is simply unfair to try to compare the empire-building of Russia with that of the West. As Dr. Said explained, “Russia … acquired its imperial territories almost exclusively by adjacence. Unlike Britain and France, which jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to other continents, Russia moved to swallow whatever land or peoples stood next to its borders … but in the English and French cases, the sheer distance of attractive territories summoned the projection of far-flung interest ...” This observation is doubly applicable to the United States.
Still, there is more to consider regarding Russia’s claimed justifications for intervention. Thus, not only are there radical groups on its border attacking ethnic Russians, including Russian citizens, but also, these groups have reportedly been funded and trained by the United States with the very intention of destabilizing and undermining the territorial integrity of Russia itself.
As Yahoo News! explained in a January 2022 article:
“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.
The program has involved ‘very specific training on skills that would enhance’ the Ukrainians’ ‘ability to push back against the Russians,’ said the former senior intelligence official.
The training, which has included ‘tactical stuff,’ is ‘going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,’ said the former official.
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’”
To remove any doubt that the destabilization of Russia itself has been the goal of the US in these efforts, one should examine the very telling 2019 report of the Rand Corporation – a long-time defense contractor called upon to advise the US on how to carry out its policy goals. In this report, entitled, ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options’, one of the many tactics listed is “Providing lethal aid to Ukraine” in order to “exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability.”
In short, there is no doubt that Russia has been threatened, and in a quite profound way, with concrete destabilizing efforts by the US, NATO and their extremist surrogates in Ukraine. Russia has been so threatened for a full eight years. And Russia has witnessed what such destabilizing efforts have meant for other countries, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria to Libya – that is, nearly a total annihilation of the country as a functioning nation-state.
It is hard to conceive of a more pressing case for the need to act in defense of the nation. While the UN Charter prohibits unilateral acts of war, it also provides, in Article 51, that “[n]othing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense... ” And this right of self-defense has been interpreted to permit countries to respond, not only to actual armed attacks, but also to the threat of imminent attack.
In light of the above, it is my assessment that this right has been triggered in the instant case, and that Russia had a right to act in its own self-defense by intervening in Ukraine, which had become a proxy of the US and NATO for an assault – not only on Russian ethnics within Ukraine – but also upon Russia itself. A contrary conclusion would simply ignore the dire realities facing Russia.