The goal of international law is to formulate a set of norms governing international relations. This includes humanitarian law, but also the rights of peoples. Humanitarian law is that part of international law which brings together the norms limiting in particular the effects of armed conflicts on civilian populations. It concerns violations of the law targeting individuals. The right of peoples is the part of international law that takes into account their collective rights. It refers to all the norms governing the relations that a people maintain with other peoples, and aiming in particular to liberate peoples from foreign domination. This aspect of international law makes it possible to contextualize the history of an armed conflict.
Some only consider international law from the perspective of humanitarian law. In this respect, very different conflicts can be compared and judged to be similar because they are the scene of similar humanitarian crises. Our empathy towards the targeted populations is the same. In both cases, civilians die following armed action, an initiator of the war is identified, war crimes are committed, as well as crimes against humanity. Whether it is the displacement of populations, ethnic cleansing, disproportionate reprisals, assassinations of civilians or the killing of prisoners of war, these are human rights violations. They all pertain to international humanitarian law.
However, if we limited ourselves to the dead and the injured, taken in isolation, we would be obliged to condemn all parties in all conflicts, because they all cause suffering. This would result in purely moral positions or paradoxical evaluations. For example, the Allies in World War II would be as guilty as the Axis, an obviously absurd position because the intentions, policies and goals were very different. It is only if the general situation is taken into consideration that the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the use of force can be determined.
For conflicts to be understood and compared, they must be placed in their historical and political context. That requires bringing into play this other dimension of international law, namely the rights of peoples. By taking them into account, we are intellectually better equipped and enabled to call on an enlightened feeling of empathy. The fundamental difference between the war in Ukraine and the war being waged by the Israeli state in Gaza becomes clearer.
A belligerent Israeli aggression
Under international law, Israel’s occupation of the territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal. It illegally colonizes the West Bank and imposes a blockade on the Gaza Strip since 2007. In doing so, it violates the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. These facts have long been recognized by the international community. But since July 19, 2024, these are facts legally established by the International Court of Justice, which is the highest international court in the world. Since 1967, Israel has contravened to the fourth Geneva Convention and it has done so in two ways. Under this Convention, the occupation of a territory can only be temporary. Also under this Convention, settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are illegal. It took 57 years before these conclusions were legally recognized.
Every year, a resolution is also adopted at the United Nations by the vast majority of countries recognizing the 1967 borders. In addition, 145 states have recognized the State of Palestine. However, Israel ignores this fact. Israel also goes against Security Council resolutions. It does not even recognize the Nakba and, therefore, also does not recognize the right of return of Palestinian refugees from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. It is also in this context that it has always opposed UNRWA, a UN organization of 33,000 people responsible for taking care of Palestinian refugees. So, Israel is not only committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. It attacks the collective rights of the Palestinian people. On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that the accusation of genocide in Gaza made by South Africa against Israel was sufficiently plausible to be warrant a full scale trial.
This genocidal enterprise is the culmination of Zionist ideology, based on the elimination of the Palestinian people from their own country. The issue is now highlighted by Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the conclusions of the International Court of Justice in July 2024: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital, Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historic homeland. » This declaration once again vividly reveals the frontal collision of the Zionist project with international law.
An occupying power has no right of “self-defense.” Its occupation is an illegal and violent act; it must put an end to it, not pose as a victim. The populations it subjects to its occupation have the right to use appropriate means, including armed struggle, to free themselves. We salute the European resistance fighters and their feats of arms against the German occupiers during the Second World War. It would be hypocritical not to do the same for all cases of occupation.
Russia’s special military operation
Understanding the Ukrainian conflict requires that we also take into account the rights of peoples. The issue cannot be approached solely from the angle of humanitarian empathy, because at that level, it is clear that the main victim is none other than the Ukrainian population. By staying within this perspective, the temptation can then be great to compare the situation of the Ukrainian people and that of the Palestinian people, both enduring military offensives.
Empathy towards the Ukrainian people must certainly not be ignored, but it must be enlightened and not serve as the sole guide for the adoption of a normative position. From the perspective of the rights of peoples and relations between states, it is necessary to take into account the security needs of all peoples, and that includes not only the Ukrainian people, but also the Russian people. The right to security of all peoples must be recognized, including peoples whose political systems we may, rightly or wrongly, dislike. This point is very important because it is suppressed by propaganda onslaughts that single out and demonize foreign leaders and regimes in order to divert attention from international law and enable aggression against their countries.
It is also important to be aware that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is not a charitable organization. It is even an offensive military organization, and not just a defensive one. In reality, it never defended much but it has attacked a lot. Among other instances, the 1999 war against Serbia, launched in defiance of the UN and in complete violation of international law, illustrates this fact. NATO members later accompanied the United States in their aggressive expeditions against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. NATO is an alliance that acts as the military arm of the United States, which now wants to use it against China. The North Atlantic would extend to the Asia-Pacific!
Leaping from 16 participating states in 1999 to 32 in 2023, NATO has gradually encircled Russia. Military bases have been deployed on the territories of all countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The largest NATO base in Europe (Camp Bondsteel) was established at the supposedly liberated Kosovo. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) in 2002 so that anti-missile shields could be installed in Poland and Romania. Blocking Russian responses makes possible US “first strikes” against Russia. Furthermore, the Americans supervised, financed and supported the Maidan coup d’état in 2014, hijacking through violence what, initially, began as a democratic protest.
The leadership of the Ukrainian state was then taken over by the United States ad placed under the tutelage of Vice President Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland, which for the Ukrainian state amounted to the loss of its political independence. In fact, the United States determined how key positions in the Ukrainian administration would be attributed: prime minister, ministers from the Freedom Party and mayor of Kiev. They placed an American in charge of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and a collaborator of the United States as governor of the Odessa oblast. Joe Biden’s son sat on the board of directors of the company Burisma, pocketing huge fees despite his incompetence in energy matters but in return for his relationship with his father, vice president of the United States. As for Joe Biden, he visited Ukraine a dozen times and even had the attorney general who was notably responsible for investigating the actions of the former Burisma head fired. As of 2008, NATO planned to make Ukraine a member. This enlargement would threaten all of southern Russia and put Moscow within minutes of US missile range. Russia reiterated for years that its security and vital interests would be compromised and called on NATO not to carry out this dangerous plan. In other words, not to use the territory of Ukraine against Russia.
A legitimate intervention?
It is in the context of repeated provocations and deafness to Russian security demands formulated by all Russian leaders, even before Putin, that Russia felt obliged to intervene. The national security of a country which has experienced major aggressions in the past, engraved in the memories of all its citizens, was at stake. Russia subscribed to the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015. They ensured the autonomy of the Russian-speaking oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, preserved their linguistic rights and restored old-age pensions to their citizens. Russia saw a clear advantage in maintaining these oblasts within Ukraine, because Russian speakers living there could help influence the country politically. In particular, they could help elect representatives that would maintain a certain neutrality by Ukraine and prevent it from joining NATO. Following the admissions of Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Petro Poroshenko, we now know that the Minsk agreements only served to buy time in order to prepare Ukraine for war.
It must never be forgotten that NATO is a military organization hostile to Russia. Since 2014, NATO members (United States, Great Britain, Canada) have trained the Ukrainian army to prepare it for war. In 2021, the Ukrainian army was equipped and trained, and its positions in Donbass were fortified. It was ready for action and the country was increasingly subordinated to NATO dictates. The United States then exploited the election of Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 to steer him in a direction opposite to that which brought him to power. Instead of carrying out a mandate oriented around promises to restore peace, Zelensky led the country on a warpath.
It is in the context of an imminent and documented intervention by the Ukrainian army in the Donbass that Russian leaders proposed two documents in December 2021 intended to ensure the security of all European countries. Faced with the American refusal to negotiate an agreement guaranteeing the security of all, Russians felt that they had to ensure their own security. It was never a question of conquering or of annexing Ukraine – a nightmare to avoid – but rather of exerting pressure on the Ukrainian state so that it would abandon its anti-Russian orientation, renounce joining NATO and adopt a position of neutrality. Russia chose to carry out a special military operation with only 150,000 men, a number clearly insufficient for a conquest or occupation of the country as a whole. To claim that this was a failed attempt to conquer all of Ukraine is to misunderstand or misrepresent Russia’s true goals. These were related to the security of Russia. If Putin had wanted to invade Ukraine, he would have had to mobilize ten to twenty times more soldiers and launch an all-out military assault.
Still, was it not a military intervention carried out in violation of international law? Intervention is not illegal under international law when it is made following the request of the host country. From a legal point of view, the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk had become de facto sovereign states and Russian intervention responded to the call of these two Donbass states. This is why, in the days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia recognized the sovereignty of these two states. Its intervention was therefore made in accordance with international law.
It must be said, however, that Russia was not content with intervening in Donbass. It did so in the north and south of Ukraine, in Kharkiv and Kherson. As such, was it not breaching the right of peoples to their territorial integrity? One might be tempted to respond that the right to territorial integrity is a modality of the right to self-determination and that Ukraine had forfeited its self-determination since 2014, when it was placed under the tutelage of the United States. But there is more.
The special military operation can be justified as preventive war. To be justified, a preventive war must of course in principle get the consent of the Security Council. However, it is certain that Russia could never have obtained this consent, because the American state, a member of the Security Council and holding a right of veto, was openly involved in the conflict. Failing to get legal recognition stricto sensu, was the Russian intervention nevertheless legitimate?
After all, the United States reiterated in 2021 its desire to integrate Ukraine into NATO. This threat was all the more plausible since Ukraine was already a de facto member. By making it a de jure member, it would be able to install intermediate-range nuclear missiles, since it had withdrawn from the IMF Treaty in 2019. This would be added to the anti-missile shields of Poland and Romania that can be quickly transformed into offensive missile systems. Zelensky also openly expressed in 2021 his wish to recover nuclear weapons. Overflights of US bombers and violent clashes between NATO and Russian forces on the Russian coasts of the Black Sea had increased sharply in 2021. To add insult to injury, Biden, who had promised not to install nuclear missiles on Ukrainian territory in December 2021, withdrew this promise at the following meeting in January 2022.
Contrary to the idea spread by Western politicians, media and “experts”, the war in Ukraine did not start suddenly out of the blue in February 2022, as the result of a sudden decision by Putin. Its history dates back at least to the Maidan coup of 2014 and NATO was its initiator. In fact, Russia found itself in a situation similar to that of a person at whom a gun is pointed. Would that person be wrong to act first? Should it wait until it is attacked and suffer losses before attempting to neutralize the source of the threat? Is the aggressor the one who shoots first or the one who threatens first?
International law must be able to adapt and take into account certain new scenarios. In this case, the Russian intervention follows multiple prior warnings concerning the extension of NATO to its borders, warnings that were heard but never heeded. It also followed the non-implementation of the Minsk agreements and the rejection of a treaty aimed at ensuring the security of all countries. Some may believe that everything had not yet been tried, but there comes a time when it is no longer responsible to leave the fate of one’s population at the mercy of its adversaries/enemies.
Deconstructing simplistic interpretations
The proposed caricature of Vladimir Putin having imperialist ambitions and wanting to reconquer the former republics as well as the countries that were under Soviet control in Eastern Europe cannot be supported in reality. It does not hold water and is confronted with several intractable facts which contradict it.
Putin certainly recalled in July 2021 and February 2022 the fact that for hundreds of years the population of Ukraine and that of Russia formed one and the same people. He did not hesitate to criticize Lenin who wanted to recognize the autonomy and the right of secession of the republics making up the Soviet Union. But he also showed himself to be realistic and willing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. It is difficult to use these few historical and identity-related remarks to interpret the deep motivations of a foreign policy justifying military intervention.
Once the military operation began, Russia quickly wanted to put an end to it through negotiations which, in fact, were fruitful in March-April 2022. The 14-page document specifying the content of this agreement was published in 2024 by Die Welt, then translated and published by the Figaro. It was only in spring 2024 that the New York Times reported on it, as did the periodical Foreign Affairs. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett admitted that the interruption of the negotiations was due to NATO leaders. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, acting on behalf of the United States, had rushed to Kiev to force Zelensky to renounce the agreement and continue the war with the promise of NATO support. The goal was, and continues to be, to try to bleed Russia by using Ukrainians, in the hope of causing its collapse, a regime change and a Western takeover of Russia. Who exactly wants peace and who provokes war?
After NATO succeeded in derailing the peace process, Putin did not hasten to increase Russia’s military involvement. He waited almost six months before committing more soldiers to combat. He long tried not to harm Ukraine’s infrastructure, except for the electrical grids that provided power for the movement of trains transporting weapons shipped by NATO. He also chose to wage a war of attrition and not a war of movement and territorial conquest. All this fits poorly with a presumed desire to conquer the whole of Ukraine
But we now know that the war was knowingly provoked and made inevitable by the American desire to drag Russia into an escalation. The Rand Corporation’s 2019 paper (“Extending Russia”) provided the strategy to weaken Russia. It was a road map that the United States has not only followed to the letter, but has followed despite Rand’s warnings that it would lead to an escalation of the conflict that could have damaging consequences for Ukraine. The United States acted with full knowledge of the facts. We must therefore conclude that it wanted this escalation to take place and that it did not take into account the fate of Ukraine.
Who showed more empathy towards the Ukrainian people? Was it the Americans or was it those who wanted the Americans to stop the escalation?
Deep-rooted prejudices
Why do some persist in imagining the situation as an unprovoked aggression by Russia against Ukraine? First of all, there is a Russophobic feeling sustained by the US political oligarchy and the assumption admitted without critical questioning that we are the good guys and that the bad guys are the others. There is also this optical illusion which represents American military interventions as a set of actions carried out by a global (self-appointed) policeman responsible to ensure respect for freedom and democracy. These are tenacious myths that the Americans need in order to impose their economic hegemony by force.
The confusion between the domestic and foreign policies of countries is also the cause of the closure to criticism made against the United States and NATO. This confusion is in fact at work in the idea according to which any criticism of the West’s foreign policies amounts to confining oneself to a “campist” posture which gives pride of place to the regimes of the Global South. (As if unthinking approval of US policy is not “campist”!). Opposition to the expansionist foreign policy of the United States is immediately interpreted as being closely linked to an apology for the internal regimes of the countries targeted by the United States. The assimilation of these two dimensions is one of the most harmful mental confusions of our time. It makes it impossible to understand that one can criticize both the foreign policy of the United States and the domestic policy of Russia or any other country. It blinds to US imperialism those who may have objections to this or that aspect of another country. Naturally Western propaganda plays this card for all it is worth in order to obscure US expansionism.
Criticisms formulated against the foreign policy of the United States carried out in Ukraine is not adherence to a “campist” position defending what is described as authoritarian and autocratic regimes. Although they may be criticized for the policies they adopt internally, their countries have legitimate security claims. Conversely, countries that proclaim themselves to be internally democratic can behave externally like true rogue states. Such was the case of Great Britain and has been the case of the United States more recently.
There is no doubt that ideological bludgeoning, incessant propaganda by mainstream media and exclusion of approaches appealing to intelligence have a pernicious effect on the minds of people who end up repeating what they hear. But what has fueled most the adherence of the Western public to the official narratives on the proxy war that the United States is waging against Russia is, first of all, the humanitarian reflex of empathy which ignores geopolitical analysis of the historical context. Given that the confusion between the two components of international law favors humanitarian law by obliterating the historical context and the rights of peoples, the feeling of empathy is not informed by history and aggression is seen where what is going on is rather a matter of legitimate armed self-defense. Such empathy is unfortunately blind and should not serve as a guide in the development of an acceptable normative posture. There is much to learn from the drama of the war in Ukraine, especially since the same scenario could repeat itself in Taiwan, this time against China.
Conclusion
By not ignoring geopolitical issues, our empathy can be enlightened. The culprit is perhaps not the one who, at first glance, appears to be the aggressor, but rather the one who, through multiple repeated provocations, made the aggression inevitable.
It is at that level that the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine can be compared. The Americans and Israelis are the real initiators. The first put increasing military pressure on Russia (“constantly poked the Russian bear in the eye”), while the second locked up the Gazans in a concentration camp, relentlessly colonized the rest of Palestine and imposed apartheid against the Palestinians. This was all done for years with the complicity of mainstream media. The pot finally exploded on February 24, 2022 in Ukraine and on October 7, 2023 in Gaza.
These facts can be admitted without losing our feelings of empathy towards all the victims, the greatest in number being Palestinians and Ukrainians. It is, in fact, empathy with the Ukrainian people which prompts to point the finger at the real aggressor responsible for the conflict, the United States. They are the ones who used the Ukrainians as cannon fodder and led them to the slaughterhouse in order to satisfy the geostrategic objective of weakening Russia. Today, they are passing on to the Europeans the disaster for which they are responsible in Ukraine in order to turn to Asia and trigger a new one.
In short, many have their noses glued to events and react without a historical context. They focus on individual victims without knowing or considering the root causes of conflicts and the role played by the states, whether American or Israeli, that provoked them. By reducing international law to its humanitarian component, they ultimately risk locking themselves into a truncated version of reality and expressing a form of empathy that can only be misguided. Compassion can in no way replace lucidity and analysis.