But, given that China has long regarded this issue as sacrosanct, it cannot sit on the fence for long. So far, China has avoided any talk of Russian aggression or Ukrainian territorial integrity. Does Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “no limits” friendship with Putin mean that China will abandon territorial integrity as one of its core principles? To take that step would powerfully undermine its demand that the rest of the world continue recognising Taiwan as part of China. How China responds is of particular importance. And even Russia’s satellite regime in neighbouring Belarus is certain to balk at recognising the Donbas statelets. Kazakhstan has already made clear that it will not recognise the DPR and LPR as independent states. Having formally recognised the statelets that it set up in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), Russia clearly intends to absorb these occupied parts of Ukraine, thus continuing its dismemberment of an independent UN member state.īut the only other countries to recognise the Donbas statelets have been North Korea and Syria, and that will likely remain the case, because even countries that are otherwise close to Russia have little interest in following it down this road. Aggression is still the supreme international crime. In any case, the world did not accept Hitler’s effort to eliminate Poland or Saddam’s attempt to wipe out Kuwait, and nor should it recognise any other modern attempt to change borders by force. But, other than these two cases, I can think of no other close examples in recent history. Another is Saddam Hussein’s attempt in 1990 to eliminate Kuwait and make it part of Iraq. One obvious comparison is to Hitler, who aimed to eliminate Poland when he launched his war of aggression in 1939, forging an agreement with Stalin to partition the country between them. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said so openly and explicitly.Īs such, Russia’s war is unusual in modern history. But Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is different, because its express purpose is to subjugate, dismantle and eventually eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state. The United States has intervened in other countries within its own hemisphere the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan during the Cold War and China sent its forces into Vietnam in 1979. True, Russia is not the first power to commit the crime of aggression, or even the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to do so. Viewing Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine as an act of aggression, the resolution demands that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders”. In a resolution adopted on March 2 of this year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned Russia for committing precisely this offence. To challenge this core principle with a violent act of aggression, the supreme international crime, is to put the entire world at risk of sinking into disorder, chaos and war. The Nuremberg Tribunal’s judgement was very clear on this point: “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.” Since then, the international order has rested on the territorial integrity of states. Hearings held in Nuremberg and Tokyo established that aggression is the “supreme international crime”, one for which leaders from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were sentenced to death. A major part of that project was to refine the international legal order by establishing tribunals to prosecute war crimes. STOCKHOLM - After World War II, global diplomatic efforts sought to create a new international order that would prevent the world from descending into war, chaos and anarchy again.
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