So, my explicit position on "legality" is: Bring all alleged perpetrators and crimes to the table of justice when it's built-in order, with Putin behind Bush, Obama, et. al, and Ukraine behind Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc. Until then, shut up with your hypocrisy.
Furthermore, beyond the question of legality, any answer to the question of ethico-political legitimacy depends on the frame of reference in which it is posed. Does it address the Ukraine operation as an isolated action, or as a battle within the larger war of which it is a part?
It makes a difference. The Allies relentlessly attacked occupied France (and "independent" Vichy) during WWII. They bombed 1,570 French towns, killing more than 68,000 civilians-men, women, and children, including 2,700 in one raid on one town-and injured more than 100,000.
Was it justified?
Depends on what "it" is, doesn't it?
That's not a snarky point. It's a real, constant conundrum. In any war, terrible, "unjustified" things, which break rightfully valued laws and principles and that everyone should, and I do, abhor, will be done by both sides. No one gets out with clean hands.
I see what's happening in Ukraine now as part of a war that didn't start last week and is not about Ukraine. It's about whether the US will continue to control the world-including the Western Hemisphere, in every way, with impunity. It's a war that goes back at least to the 1990s and Yugoslavia. Ukraine was recruited into it in 2014, as a pawn for the U.S. to open a new front against Russia.
The aggressor in that war is the United States, which has not hesitated to use military force however it deems fit, and remains "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." The prime targets of that aggression are countries like Russia and China, who are threatening to break that absolute American hegemony, and are insisting on being treated as respected partners, not rebellious children to be preached to and disciplined. Russia-because it's threatened by NATO encirclement and because its attempts at diplomatic "partnership" were ignored for decades-has made the unprecedented and risky decision to challenge that immediate threat and, ipso facto, that wider hegemony, with military force.
It's a war, and it will be settled by force and the threat of force, in ways that already have and will continue to break laws and kill innocent people. No one's getting out of this with clean hands.
I understand the Russian operation in Ukraine in that governing framework, where the principal issue is the difference between weakened vs. strengthened U.S. unipolar hegemony. If you understand it in some other primary frame, where the principal issue is something else-Ukrainian independence, defense of democracy, Putin's madness-so be it. There's no referee. And no clean hands.
As a marxist and socialist, I have no brief for either of the principal actors in this conflict, but I can't escape the principal contradiction they are fighting about.
The Russian military is not the Red Army, but the forces opposing it are inclusive of a revanchist army of Hitlerian fascism. The principal actors in this conflict are, on the one side, a rising oligarchic capitalist state trying to create a multipolar world in which it and other rising (including self-identified socialist) countries can act and grow unconstrained by the hegemon, and, on the other, an oligarchic capitalist and hegemonic imperialist state, plus Nazis. I'm not a fan of either of them, but I know whom I don't want to win.
And so does China. And Venezuela. And Nicaragua. And Cuba.
If there's a way out, it's with them.
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