Most recent Putin rants including a revised threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia as well as the total elimination of Ukraine as a country and in tandem the use of ICBMs on Ukrainian territory should be alarming for the global community. The world cannot simply stand by and do little if nothing. Clearly the message here is that negotiations with Putin are not an option. One way or another Putin has to be taken out before any negotiations can begin.
Three recent events have been highly instrumental in emboldening the Russian strongman. The BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia was bad enough with the participation of more than thirty countries and an expansion of membership. The worst part was that United Nations’ Secretary General Antonio Gutierres attended.
He spoke with no mention that the Summit’s host was under a UN criminal arrest warrant and failed to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine which has been the subject of several UN General Assembly resolutions since the aggression on Feb. 24, 2022. Gutierres has to account for this “diplomatic mishap.”
If the UN’s highest functionary does not respect a UN ICC arrest warrant and UNGA resolutions, then where are we with international rule of law or respect for any international bodies?
Gutierres has not been asked to account for his behavior even by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, its Permanent Mission to the UN. He certainly will not do so on his own.
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently reached out to Putin by telephone, thus breaching a Western consensus to isolate the Russian dictator. The subject and tone of the official communication is not relevant. Perhaps the German Chancellor felt that he was doing nothing wrong because former American president Donald J. Trump during his presidential hiatus reached out to Putin seven times.
Following the example of Donald Trump is not justification, firstly because Trump has no moral compass, is a political primitive, and was not the president of the United States at the time. Chancellor Scholz was publicly reprimanded by Ukraine’s President, but not by any other world leader.
Finally, the Russia-North Korea alliance with some 11,000 North Koreans soldiers on Russian soil fighting the Ukrainians and about to be deployed onto Ukrainian territory has been reprimanded by the global community tangentially.
The alliance is a blatant affront to the international community. Russia should be stripped of its membership in the UN (Russia is not really a member of the UN), the G20, the WTO and other international institutions, but nothing of substance has transpired in this regard. Aside from the President of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry and its UN Mission and elsewhere have been asleep.
The only alleged exception to this typical practice of rhetoric with no substance was President Biden. The American president used this as misplaced motivation to permit Ukraine’s use of ATACMs deep into Russian territory. This was merely an opportunity for Biden to correct his dilatory behavior as Ukraine has begged for this license a long time. Biden has certainly sullied his legacy by being dilatory and feckless on aid to Ukraine.
“Ukraine fatigue” is a term employed by insensitive primitives who fail to understand that Ukraine fatigue is really freedom fatigue and international rule of law fatigue. International law and its institutions – such as the UN, the European Court on Human Rights, the International Court of Justice and the ICC – have not evolved because of the lack of resolve on the part of global leaders.
On the subject of Russia’s recent use of an ICBM on Ukrainian territory and some of the other Russian transgressions, Peter Stano, a spokesman for the European Union recently stated:
“We are, of course, following reports that Russia has used an intercontinental ballistic missile against a target or targets in Ukraine... It’s obvious that such an attack or attacks could mark another clear escalation from the side of Putin...He [Putin] is playing yet again a nuclear gamble with the recently updated nuclear doctrine of Russia. He enlisted North Korean soldiers to come to European soil. So these are all clear signs of the will to escalate, not the will to find paths to peace. So, indeed, if they [the Russians] used an intercontinental missile, that would be yet another quantitative and qualitative change in this approach and a clear mark of escalation.”
This was yet another example of rhetoric with no substance.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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