原题：丹尼尔·科瓦利克：为什么说俄罗斯对乌克兰的干预在国际法下是合法的

多年来，我对《联合国宪章》禁止侵略战争的规定进行了深入研究和思考。没有人会严重怀疑该文件的主要目的——在二战的恐怖之后起草并达成一致——过去和现在都是为了防止战争和“维护国际和平与安全”，这句话贯穿始终。

正如纽伦堡大法官¹得出的正确结论，“发动侵略战争……不仅是国际罪行；它是最高的国际罪行，与其他战争罪行的不同之处在于，它本身包含了整体累积的邪恶。”也就是说，战争是最大的罪行，因为我们憎恶的所有罪恶——种族灭绝、反人类罪等——都是战争之树的可怕果实。

我一生都在反对战争和外国干预。当然，作为一名美国人，我有充分的机会这样做，因为正如马丁·路德·金所说，美国是“世界上最大的暴力提供者”。同样，吉米·卡特（1977年-1981年美国总统）最近表示，美国是“世界历史上最喜欢战争的国家”。这显然是正确的。仅在我一生中，美国就对越南、格林纳达、巴拿马、前南斯拉夫、伊拉克（两次）、阿富汗、利比亚和索马里等国家发动了侵略性的无端战争。这还没有包括美国通过代理人进行的众多代理人战争（例如，通过尼加拉瓜反抗军、叙利亚的各种圣战组织，以及通过沙特阿拉伯和阿联酋对也门的持续战争）。

事实上，通过这样的战争，美国破坏了禁止战争的法律支柱，这样的行为比世界上任何国家都多，而且是有意的。出于对这一点的反应，以及试图挽救《联合国宪章》对侵略战争的法律禁令的剩余部分，包括俄罗斯和中国在内的一些国家成立了“捍卫《联合国宪章》之友小组”。

简而言之，美国抱怨俄罗斯入侵乌克兰违反国际法，恐怕是五十步笑百步。尽管如此，美国在这方面表现出如此明显的虚伪并不一定意味着华盛顿自然就错了。归根结底，我们必须根据俄罗斯的自身情况来分析俄罗斯的行为。

人们必须首先接受这样一个事实，即在 2022 年 2 月俄罗斯对乌军事行动之前的八年里，乌克兰已经发生了一场战争。这场战争是基辅政府对顿巴斯讲俄语的人民发动的——夺去了大约 14,000 人的生命，其中许多人是儿童，甚至在俄罗斯的军事行动之前，还有大约 150 万人流离失所——这可以说是种族灭绝。也就是说，基辅政府，特别是其新纳粹营，对这些民族进行了攻击，目的是至少部分地摧毁俄罗斯民族，仅仅出于民族原因。

虽然美国政府和媒体都在努力掩盖这些事实，但这些事实是不可否认的，并且确实在“不便”报道之前就被西方主流媒体报道过了。例如，路透社在 2018 年发表的一篇评论清楚地阐述了新纳粹营是如何融入乌克兰官方军队和警察部队，从而成为乌克兰政府负有法律责任的国家或至少准国家行为者。正如文章所述，有 30 多个右翼极端主义团体在乌克兰活动，“已正式融入乌克兰武装部队”，“这些团体中更极端的团体宣扬不宽容和僵化的意识形态......”也就是说，他们宣扬对俄罗斯族、罗姆人以及 LGBT 群体的仇恨，并通过攻击、杀害和驱逐这些人来表现这种仇恨。这篇文章引用了西方人权组织自由之家(Freedom House)的主张，即“在支持乌克兰与俄罗斯发生冲突的爱国言论增多的同时，公众仇恨言论（有时由公职人员发表，并被媒体放大）以及针对LGBT等弱势群体的暴力行为明显增多。”这伴随着实际的暴力。例如，“亚速营²和其他民兵组织袭击了反法西斯示威活动、市议会会议活动、媒体、艺术展览、外国学生和罗姆人。”

除此之外，乌克兰顿巴斯地区有超过 500,000 名居民也是俄罗斯公民。虽然这一估计是在 2021 年 4 月做出的，但在弗拉基米尔·普京 2019 年的法令简化了顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克人民共和国居民获得俄罗斯公民身份的程序之后，这意味着俄罗斯公民正受到融入乌克兰政府的新纳粹团体的种族攻击，就发生在俄罗斯边境。

唯恐俄罗斯不确定乌克兰政府对顿巴斯的俄罗斯族裔的意图，乌克兰政府在 2019 年通过了新的语言法，明确规定说俄语的人充其量只是二等公民。正如人权观察组织(Human Rights Watch)在 2022 年初的一份报告（西方媒体几乎没有报道）中解释的那样，基辅政府通过了立法，“要求在乌克兰注册的印刷媒体必须以乌克兰语发布。其他语言的出版物还必须附有乌克兰语版本，在内容、数量和印刷方法上相当。此外，诸如报摊之类的发行场所必须至少有一半的内容是乌克兰语。”

而且，根据人权观察，“关于印刷媒体的第 25 条，对某些少数民族语言、英语和欧盟官方语言做出了例外规定，但对俄语没有例外”，其理由是“压迫乌克兰人以支持俄罗斯人的世纪”。“有人担心对少数民族语言的保证是否足够。欧洲委员会宪法事务最高咨询机构威尼斯委员会表示，该法的一些条款，包括第 25 条，未能在促进乌克兰语和维护少数群体的语言权利之间取得公平的平衡”。这样的立法表明了乌克兰政府想要摧毁在乌克兰俄罗斯人的文化，甚至是他们的存在。

此外，世界和平组织(Organization of World Peace)在 2021 年的一份报告中称，“根据乌克兰国家安全和国防委员会第117/2021号法令”，乌克兰已承诺将所有选项都摆到桌面上，以收回对俄罗斯吞并的克里米亚地区的控制权。泽连斯基总统于 3 月 24 日签署，已承诺该国将采取相关战略，“将准备并实施措施，确保克里米亚半岛的解除占领和重新融入。”鉴于克里米亚居民（其中大多数是俄罗斯人）对俄罗斯治理下的现状感到非常满意——据此，根据2020 年《华盛顿邮报》的一篇报道——泽连斯基在这方面的威胁不仅是对俄罗斯本身的威胁，也是对不想回到乌克兰的人民潜在的大规模流血威胁。

因此这足以说明，俄罗斯在“国家保护责任”(Responsibility to Protect, R2P)³下进行军事干预是正当的。R2P正是由希拉里·克林顿（Hillary Clinton)⁴、萨曼莎·鲍尔(Samantha Power)⁵和苏珊·赖斯(Susan Rice)⁶等西方“人道主义者”所倡导的，并被用来为北约对前南斯拉夫和利比亚等国家的干预作辩护。而且，参与这些干预的任何国家都不可能以自卫为由为自己辩护。对美国来说尤其如此，它一直在千里之外派遣军队向遥远的土地投掷炸弹。

这不禁让人想起伟大的巴勒斯坦知识分子爱德华·赛义德(Edward Said)的说过的话，他多年前在其有影响力的著作《文化与帝国主义》(Culture and Imperialism)中认为，试图将俄罗斯的帝国建设与西方进行比较是不公平的。正如赛义德博士所解释的那样，“俄罗斯……几乎完全通过毗邻获得其帝国领土。与跨越数千英里到达其他大陆的英法两国不同，俄罗斯吞并的是靠近其边界的任何土地或人民……但在英国和法国的情况下，那诱人领土的距离之远仍能激起广泛的兴趣……”这一观点对美国具有双重适用性。

不过，关于俄罗斯声称的干预理由，还有更多需要考虑的地方。比如，俄罗斯不仅在其边境上存在激进团体攻击包括俄罗斯公民在内的俄罗斯族人，而且据报道，这些团体受到美国的资助和训练，其目的正是为了破坏俄罗斯本身的领土完整。

雅虎新闻在 2022 年 1 月的一篇文章中是这样解释的：“根据熟悉相关情况的五名前情报局和国家安全局官员的说法，中央情报局（CIA）正在美国监督一项针对乌克兰精锐特种作战部队和其他情报人员的秘密强化培训计划。据其中一些官员称，该计划于 2015 年开始，位于美国南部一个未公开的场所中。一位前高级情报官员说，“该计划涉及“非常具体的技能培训，以增强‘乌克兰人’‘反击俄罗斯人的能力’”。“‘如果俄罗斯人入侵乌克兰，这项包括‘战术内容’的训练‘将开始显得非常具有攻击性’”。一位熟悉该计划的人士说得更直白。“美国正在训练叛乱分子，”并补充说，该计划教会了乌克兰人如何‘杀死俄罗斯人’”。

俄罗斯本身的不稳定一直是美国所做种种努力的目标，如果你对此有任何怀疑，只需查看一下兰德公司*2019 年的报告——兰德公司是一家长期的国防承包商，会就如何实现美国的政策目标而提供建议。在这份题为“过度扩张和失衡的俄罗斯，评估高成本方案的影响”的报告中，列出的众多策略之一是“向乌克兰提供致命援助”，以“利用俄罗斯最大的外部脆弱点”。

简而言之，毫无疑问，俄罗斯受到了美国、北约及其在乌克兰的极端主义代理人的具体破坏行动的威胁，而且相当深刻。整整八年，俄罗斯一直受到如此威胁。俄罗斯目睹了这种破坏稳定的行动对其他国家意味着什么。从伊拉克到阿富汗，从叙利亚到利比亚，曾经正常运转的民族国家几乎被彻底摧毁。

很难想象是否还有更紧迫的情况才需要采取行动保卫国家。虽然《联合国宪章》禁止单方面的战争行为，但它还在第 51 条中规定，“本宪章不得损害个人或集体自卫的固有权利……”这种自卫权被解释为，允许各国不仅对实际的武装袭击作出反应，而且对即将发生的袭击的威胁作出反应。

综上所述，我认为自卫权在当前局势下已被触发，俄罗斯有权通过干预乌克兰进行自卫，乌克兰已成为美国和北约进行攻击的代理人——不仅针对乌克兰境内的俄罗斯族裔，还针对俄罗斯本身。若得出相反的结论，则定是忽略了俄罗斯面临的可怕现实。

==========================================

原文及链接：

https://thepressunited.com/updates/daniel-kovalik-why-russias-intervention-in-ukraine-is-legal-under-international-law/

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.