Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the immensely destructive Ukraine War lies in the fact that it could have been averted.
The most obvious way was for the Russian government to abandon its plan for the military conquest of Ukraine.
The problem on this score, though, was that Vladimir Putin was determined to revive Russia’s “great power” status. Although his predecessors had signed the UN Charter (which prohibits the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”), as well as the Budapest Memorandum and the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership (both of which specifically committed the Russian government to respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity), Putin was an ambitious ruler, determined to restore what he considered Russia’s imperial grandeur.
This approach led not only to Russian military intervention in Middle Eastern and African nations, but to retaking control of nations previously dominated by Russia. These nations included Ukraine, which Putin regarded, contrary to history and international agreements, as “Russian land.”
As a result, what began in 2014 as the Russian military seizure of Crimea and the arming of a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine gradually evolved into the full-scale invasion of February 2022―the largest, most devastating military operation in Europe since World War II.
The official justifications for these acts of aggression, trumpeted by the Kremlin and its apologists, were quite flimsy. Prominent among them was the claim that Ukraine’s accession to NATO posed an existential danger to Russia. In fact, though, in 2014―or even in 2022―Ukraine was unlikely to join NATO because key NATO members opposed its admission. Also, NATO, founded in 1949, had never started a war with Russia and had never shown any intention of doing so.
The reality was that, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq nearly two decades before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was out of line with both international law and the imperatives of national security. It was a war of choice organized by a power-hungry ruler.
On a deeper level, the war was avoidable because the United Nations, established to guarantee peace and international security, did not take the action necessary to stop the war from occurring or to end it.
Admittedly, the United Nations did repeatedly condemn the Russian invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine. On March 27, 2014, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by a vote of 100 nations to 11 (with 58 abstentions), denouncing the Russian military seizure and annexation of Crimea. On March 2, 2022, by a vote of 141 nations to 5 (with 35 abstentions), it called for the immediate and complete withdrawal of Russian military forces from Ukraine. In a ruling on the legality of the Russian invasion, the International Court of Justice, by a vote of 13 to 2, proclaimed that Russia should immediately suspend its invasion of Ukraine. That fall, when Russia began annexing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, the UN Secretary-General denounced that action as flouting “the purposes and principles of the United Nations,” while the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 143 nations to 5 (with 35 abstentions), called on all countries to refuse to recognize Russia’s “illegal annexation” of Ukrainian land.
Tragically, this principled defense of international law was not accompanied by measures to enforce it. At meetings of the UN Security Council, the UN entity tasked with maintaining peace, the Russian government simply vetoed UN action. Nor did the UN General Assembly circumvent the Security Council’s paralysis by acting on its own. Instead, the United Nations showed itself well-meaning but ineffectual.
This weakness on matters of international security was not accidental. Nations―and particularly powerful nations―had long preferred to keep international organizations weak, for the creation of stronger international institutions would curb their own influence. Naturally, then, they saw to it that the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, could act on international security issues only by a unanimous vote of its membership. And even this constricted authority proved too much for the U.S. government, which refused to join the League. Similarly, when the United Nations was formed, the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council were given to five great powers, each of which could, and often did, veto its resolutions.
During the Ukraine War, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky publicly lamented this inability of the United Nations to enforce its mandate. “The wars of the past have prompted our predecessors to create institutions that should protect us from war,” he remarked in March 2022, “but they unfortunately don’t work.” In this context, he called for the creation of “a union of responsible countries . . . to stop conflicts” and to “keep the peace.”
The need to strengthen the United Nations and, thereby, enable it to keep the peace, has been widely recognized. To secure this goal, proposals have been made over the years to emphasize UN preventive diplomacy and to reform the UN Security Council. More recently, UN reformers have championed deploying UN staff (including senior mediators) rapidly to conflict zones, expanding the Security Council, and drawing upon the General Assembly for action when the Security Council fails to act. These and other reform measures could be addressed by the world organization’s Summit for the Future, planned for 2024.
In the meantime, it remains possible that the Ukraine War might come to an end through related action. One possibility is that the Russian government will conclude that its military conquest of Ukraine has become too costly in terms of lives, resources, and internal stability to continue. Another is that the countries of the world, fed up with disastrous wars, will finally empower the United Nations to safeguard international peace and security. Either or both would be welcomed by people in Ukraine and around the globe.
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5 Comments
The content of this article is consistent with the general corporate media propaganda: such as Russia’s imperial ambitions, NATO is no threat to Russia.
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is obvious, and there is no excuse for it. At the same time, the United States is also courting Ukraine and Taiwan. The United States and its allies say their interest is to weaken Russia and act to block the peace talks. They also say that the previous agreement in Ukraine was just to buy time to strengthen Ukraine.
As for the second point, strengthening the UN resolutions, if it refers to acting in accordance with the rules of the United States, it only allows the European and American empires to control the United Nations. But if it means acting in accordance with the UN Convention, then this is a very good proposal, although the United States and its allies will jump out first: after all, the United States is the bloodiest empire
I will definitely agree with you with most of your points which the article ignores.
Point 1 and 3 may be questionable for accuracy but also have some merit.
I also find all 4 parties (US,EU,Russia and Ukraine) guilty for not avoiding this disaster as you pointed out.
The world is in such a terrible shape and trillions of dollars are wasted on wars and weapons instead of improving living conditions. We have terrible leadership who are pawns of big corporate interests, military, pharma, oil etc. who themselves are too stupid and ignorant to see that their grand children will eventually have the same faith in the future as everyone’s grand children. Shame on all.
Dear Mr Wittner, Thank you for your thoughts on this issue. I agree with you that war should always be avoided at any cost, and I also think Putin is monster and a dictator, but you’ve left a few questions unanswered:
1. If Putin had decided to not react, could he have stayed in power, or would he have been overthrown by the army for being a traitor who refuses to protect his country ?
2. Whose responsibility is it to protect the Russian speaking minorities in Donbass who were killed by the thousands for 8 years starting in 2014? Any concrete suggestion on how to do that without engaging in war?
3. If Russia hadn’t reacted, wouldn’t that have increased the likelihood of the US using Ukraine to attack Russia and dismantle it in the long term into smaller countries ? wouldn’t that result in so much more death and suffering ? wouldn’t that increase the likelihood of nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US ?
4. If Ukraine had refused to play along with the US, and instead declared that it wants to have peaceful relations with both Russia, Europe and the US, wouldn’t that have prevented this war ?
5. If the US had decided that it doesn’t need to keep antagonizing Russia, and decided instead to pursue a less confrontational approach to Russia, wouldn’t that have prevented this war ?
I’d appreciate your feedback on these, thanks !
I will definitely agree with you with most of your points which the article ignores.
Point 1 and 3 may be questionable for accuracy but also have some merit.
I also find all 4 parties (US,EU,Russia and Ukraine) guilty for not avoiding this disaster as you pointed out.
The world is in such a terrible shape and trillions of dollars are wasted on wars and weapons instead of improving living conditions. We have terrible leadership who are pawns of big corporate interests, military, pharma, oil etc. who themselves are too stupid and ignorant to see that their grand children will eventually have the same faith in the future as everyone’s grand children. Shame on all.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda…The photo that opens this article is devastating. Not on person in the photo, implicit, it says everything. We shudder when Hitler, Stalin, death camps, Pol Pot, Vietnam bombing, and so forth are mentioned. How do we respond today about this war? We all must come to feel invested in its outcome, negotiations, and ending. If we are not feeling something…what does that say about all of us?