The Ukrainian conflict with regard to the responsibility of the rulers

The first anniversary of the East-West military confrontation in Ukraine was an opportunity for the West to convince its people that they were "on the right side of history" and that their victory was "inevitable."

None of this is surprising. It is normal for governments to communicate about their activities. Except that here the information is lies by omission and the comments are propaganda. This is such a reversal of reality that one wonders whether the defeated of the Second World War have not come to power in Kiev today.

"Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war

All Western interventions claim that we condemn the "illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war of Russia" [1]. This is factually wrong.

Let’s leave aside the qualification of "unjustifiable". It refers to an indecent moral position. No war is just. Every war is the acknowledgement, not of a fault, but of a failure. Let us examine the qualifier "unprovoked".

According to Russian diplomacy, the problem began with the 2014 US-Canadian operation and the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and thus the UN Charter. There is no denying that Washington was instrumental in this so-called "revolution of dignity": the then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, posted herself at the head of the coup plotters.

According to Chinese diplomacy, which has just published two documents on the subject, one should not stop at this operation, but go back to the "Orange Revolution" of 2004, also organized by the United States, to see the first violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. Obviously, if Russia does not mention it, it is because it also played a role in it, which it did not do in 2014.

The Western public is so shocked by the ease with which the United States manipulates mobs and overthrows governments that it is no longer aware of the seriousness of these events. From the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the overthrow of Serge Sarkissian in Armenia in 2018, it has become accustomed to forced regime changes. Whether the deposed leaders were good or bad should not matter. What is unbearable and inadmissible is that a foreign state organized their overthrow by masking its action behind a few national opponents. These are acts of war, without military intervention.

Facts are stubborn. The war in Ukraine was caused by the violations of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2004 and 2014. These violations were followed by an eight-year civil war.

Nor is war illegal under international law. The UN Charter does not prohibit the use of war. The Security Council even has the possibility of declaring war (articles 39 to 51). This time the particularity is that it opposes permanent members of the Council.

Russia co-signed the Minsk Agreements to end the civil war. However, not having been born yesterday, it understood from the start that the West did not want peace, but war. So she had the Minsk Agreements endorsed by Security Council Resolution 2202, five days after their conclusion, and then forced the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev to withdraw his men from the Ukrainian Donbass. It attached to the resolution a statement by the presidents of France, Ukraine and Russia, as well as the German chancellor, guaranteeing the implementation of these texts. These four signatories committed their countries.

– Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared in the following days that there was no question of giving anything up, but rather of punishing the inhabitants of Donbass.
– Former Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit [2] that she only wanted to buy time so that NATO could arm the authorities in Kiev. She unknowingly clarified her statement in a discussion with a provocateur she believed to be former President Poroshenko.
– Former President Francois Hollande confirmed in Kyiv Independent the words of Mrs. Merkel [3].
– That left Russia, which implemented a special military operation on February 24, 2022 under its "responsibility to protect". To say that its intervention is illegal is to say, for example, that France’s intervention during the genocide in Rwanda was also illegal and that the massacre should have been allowed to continue.

Emails from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special adviser Vladislav Surkov, which have just been revealed by the Ukrainian side, only confirm this process. In the years that followed, Russia helped the Ukrainian republics of Donbass prepare intellectually for independence. This interference was illegal. It was in response to the equally illegal interference of the United States, which armed not Ukraine but the Ukrainian "integral nationalists. The war had already begun, but Ukrainians exclusively conducted it. It resulted in 20,000 deaths in 8 years. The West and Russia intervened only indirectly.

It is important to understand that by pretending to negotiate peace, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have committed the worst of crimes. Indeed, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, "crimes against peace" are even more serious than those "against humanity". They are not the cause of this or that massacre, but of the war itself. This is why the chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has called for the convening of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to try Angela Merkel and François Hollande [4]. The Western press has not relayed this call, which shows us the gulf between the two perceptions of the conflict.

The order of the International Court of Justice of March 16, 2022 stated, as a precautionary measure, that "the Russian Federation must immediately suspend the military operations which it began on February 24, 2022 on the territory of Ukraine" (ref: A/77/4, paragraphs 189 to 197). Moscow did not comply, considering that the Court had been asked about the requirement of genocide perpetrated by Kiev against its own population and not about the military operation to protect the Ukrainian population.

For its part, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted several resolutions, the latest of which is A/ES-11/L.7, of February 23, 2023. The text "Reiterates its demand that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all its military forces from Ukrainian territory within the internationally recognized borders of the country, and calls for a cessation of hostilities.

Neither of these texts declares the Russian intervention "illegal. They order or demand that the Russian army withdraw. 141 of 193 states consider that Russia should stop its intervention. Some of them think it is illegal, but most of them think it is "no longer necessary" and is causing unnecessary suffering. This is not the same thing at all.

States have a different point of view than jurists. International law can only sanction what exists. States must protect their citizens from the conflicts that are brewing, before it is too late to respond. That is why the Kremlin did not comply with the UN General Assembly. It did not withdraw from the battlefield. Indeed, it has watched for eight years as NATO has armed Ukraine and prepared for this war. It knows that the Pentagon is preparing a second round in Transnistria [5] and must protect its population from this second operation. Just as it chose the date of its intervention in Ukraine on the basis of information indicating an imminent attack by Kiev on the Donbass, which was only confirmed later [6], so ot is deciding today to liberate the whole of Novorossia, including Odessa. This is legally unacceptable as long as the proof of the Western shenanigans is not provided, but it is already necessary from the point of view of its responsibility.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking have not escaped the notice of observers. Judging that Russian intervention is no longer necessary must be distinguished from supporting the West. That is why only 39 out of 191 states participate in Western sanctions and send weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine is a "democracy"

The second message from Western leaders is that Ukraine is a "democracy". Apart from the fact that this word has no meaning at a time when the middle classes are disappearing and income disparities have become greater than at any other time in human history, moving away from the egalitarian ideal, Ukraine is anything but a "democracy.

Its constitution is the only racist one in the world. It states in Article 16 that "Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state", a passage written by Slava Stetsko, the widow of the Ukrainian Nazi prime minister.

This is the subject that makes people angry. At least since 1994, "full nationalists" (not to be confused with "nationalists"), i.e., people who claim to follow the ideology of Dmytro Dontsov and the work of Stepan Bandera, have held high positions in the Ukrainian state [7]. In fact, this ideology has become more radical over time. It did not have the same meaning during the First World War as during the Second. Nevertheless, Dmytro Dontsov was, from 1942 on, one of the designers of the "final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy questions". He was the administrator of the organ of the Third Reich in charge of murdering millions of people because of their ethnic origin, the Reinhard Heydrich Institute in Prague. Stepan Bandera was the military leader of the Ukrainian Nazis. He commanded numerous pogroms and massacres. Contrary to what his successors claim, he was never interned in a concentration camp, but under house arrest in the suburbs of Berlin, at the headquarters of the concentration camp administration. He ended the war leading the Ukrainian troops under the direct orders of the Führer Adolf Hitler.

One year after the beginning of the Russian military intervention, full nationalist and Nazi symbols are visible everywhere in Ukraine. Forward journalist Lev Golinkin, who has started an inventory of all monuments to criminals involved in Nazi crimes all over the world, has compiled an amazing list of such monuments in Ukraine [8]. According to him, almost all of them are after the 2014 coup. Therefore, it must be admitted that the coup authorities do claim to be "integral nationalism", not simply "nationalism". And for those who doubt that the Jewish President Zelensky celebrates the Nazis, two weeks ago he awarded the "Edelweiss title of honor" to the 10th separate mountain assault brigade in reference to the Nazi 1st mountain division that "liberated" (sic) Kiev, Stalino, the Dnieper crossings and Kharkov [9].

Few Western personalities have agreed with the words of President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on this subject [10]. However, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his Defense Minister, General Benny Gantz, have repeatedly stated that Ukraine must comply with Moscow’s injunctions at least on this point: Kiev must destroy all Nazi symbols it displays. It is because Kiev refuses to do so that Israel does not deliver weapons to it: no Israeli weapons will be handed over to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews. This position may of course change with the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu, himself an heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s "revisionist Zionists" who formed an alliance with the "integral nationalists" against the Soviets.

The current policy of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky is incomprehensible. On the one hand, the democratic institutions are functioning, on the other hand, not only are the integral nationalists being celebrated everywhere, but the opposition political parties and the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate have been banned; millions of books have been destroyed because they were written or printed in Russia; 6 million Ukrainians have been declared "collaborators of the Russian invader" and the personalities who support them are being assassinated.