Ukraine Invasion: Part 27

[MagicFox]

27th thread, thanks for the continued company and analysis all

UK providing legal assistance to Ukraine/ICC on war crime investigations.

"Lord chancellor Dominic Raab has announced a second package of support for the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged war crimes in Ukraine, including an offer of seven lawyers with international criminal law experience.

The government is offering ‘a specialist legal and support team’ to assist the ICC’s ongoing investigation, which will be in addition to £1m in funding provided earlier this year.

This will include a Metropolitan Police liaison officer based in the Hague to provide the court with ‘swift access to further British police and military expertise’, as well as seven UK lawyers ‘to help uncover evidence and prosecute those responsible for war crimes’.

The Ministry of Justice is also ‘accelerating conversations with City law firms and barristers to prepare for deployment at the appropriate stage of the investigation’, the department said."

www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/uk-provides-more-support-to-ukraine-war-crimes-investigation/5112691.article

The evidence is likely to be harrowing. My greatest respect to the UK police and lawyers who work on this.

City law firms do get involved in death row cases on a pro bono basis but investigating war crimes in Ukraine must be on a different level of horror quite unlike the intense well-paying and somewhat dry work City lawyers are used to.

I imagine they'll be human-rights lawyers rather than conveyancing lawyers, and even in the UK some absolutely appalling stuff goes on. Ukraine will be another level of awful partly because of the quantity, but they won't be completely unprepared.

@blueshoes es · Today 14:34
UK providing legal assistance to Ukraine/ICC on war crime investigations.

That is good news.

These will be lawyers with experience in this area, not just some random city lawyers. I’d imagine the best of the best. What’s going on in Ukraine is horrible but it isn’t novel and it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, it’s been happening across the globe forever and even now is ongoing in places other than Ukraine.

My point being they will have seen it all before.

@Ijsbear Japan’s ongoing (never ending!) territory dispute with Russia has definitely upped their motivation to help Ukraine in this conflict. I was surprised at the amount they were able to give too, which is a good sign for how well equipped/financed the Japanese self defense forces are. Good news considering China’s attitude to Taiwan, and North Korea’s nuclear readiness attempts into the Japan sea.

And not only are Japan supporting Ukraine, Russia invading Ukraine has pushed Japan into a more hardline stance on their own disputed (with Russia) territory. They’ve gone from refusing to comment, to outwardly stating the southern Kuril Islands are illegally occupied by Russia. That’s a striking change.

from Wikipedia:

“On March 7, 2022, Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida declared that the southern Kurils are "a territory peculiar to Japan, a territory in which Japan has sovereignty."[65] On March 8, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi described the four islands as an "integral part" of Japan.[66] This was in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[66] The Japanese leadership had been reluctant to use language that could be seen as provocative by Russia when discussing the islands in recent years. When Shinzo Abe was asked if he considered the islands to be an integral part of Japan in 2019, he declined to respond so as not to damage negotiations with Russia, however, following the outbreak of Russia's war against Ukraine and the implication of sanctions against Russia, the Japanese government has returned to a more hardline stance on the islands as shown by Kishida's statement.[67]

On March 21, 2022, Russia announced its withdrawal from peace treaty talks with Japan and freeze of joint economic projects related to the disputed Kuril islands due to sanctions imposed by Japan over Ukraine.[68]

On March 25, Russia started a military drill with over 3,000 troops and hundreds of vehicles on the Kuril islands, including the disputed islands.[69]

On March 31, Japan redesignated the disputed islands as being under an "illegal occupation" in a draft for the 2022 Diplomatic Bluebook.[70]“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute

(Apologies. Dh is Japanese so I get a lot of the Japan perspective on this war!)

Thanks goodness for human rights lawyers. So grateful to people who put their mental health at risk to right the awfulness that humans have been doing to each other time and time again. Such a depressing thought.

Random city lawyers would be pretty useless.

I think it was linked to before but if you haven’t I would definitely read Dr. Sue Black’s book. She covers within it her work following the war in Kosovo and it’s both fascinating and incredibly humbling. she talks on pretty explicit detail about identifying human remains on mass graves and her work to return them to their families. I’m sure she talks about the greatest gift she can give to a person is to return their identity.

Just more evidence of the inherent goodness of most human beings.

Along the same vein I was thinking the other day about just how sad it is that a new set of trials is being opened just as the Rwandan and Yugoslavian criminal tribunals are being wrapped up.

@BewareTheLibrarians thank you for the info on Japan. I knew some of it but not all - they were the first and I think only Far Eastern country to roundly defeat Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, iirc?

Does your husband think that Japan might try to take the Kurils back by force? (leading question, eh)

100,000 are believed to have never left. Some who had gone to Russia have been told to return or they will lose their property. People are doing this, unbelievably. They don't necessarily know how bad it is in Mariupol. Then there are Russians who are moving there and taking Ukrainian houses (some of those who have returned from Russia have got there only to find that there is someone else living in their home and they are told that they no longer live in their own home). So three groups - stayers, returners and occupiers.

Re comparisons with Wales, it is important to note the Welsh border has remained static for a considerable length of time. The Ukrainian border has been more fluid in multiple directions so there is some dispute over this but I do think its being massively overstated in whats said by a whenwillwegetthereholly.

The Soviet Union did blur the concept of national identity but it doesn't change what Ukraine was / is in terms of its land. It blurred it by making it possible to be Ukrainian and say accurately you've never left your country and yet technically by todays understanding have lived in multiple countries as we would understand them in 2022. Russian was the language that united these countries, despite multiple languages being spoken across the Soviet Union.

However since Ukrainian independence, I don't think you can say any area is Russian any more than you could do about Finland, Lithuania, Estonia or Latvia. Yes people have moved freely over the border in both directions and have settled either side and have intermarried but you either believe in international law or you don't. If you don't, then you believe in a policy of actively seeking conflict and oppression. The problem here is precisely Ukrainian independence - Russians don't like the concept of self determination. The Moscow elite hold power over its separate regions in a imperial colonialist fashion even today and they believe they have the right to continue to do this (Hence the current war and previous wars in Chechnya and Georgia). Kamil Galeev's reflections on this do it justice better than I do. This is why Ukrainian nationalism has arisen in the first place and is mirrored in the Baltic States who declared Independence in the 1990s and managed to free themselves from Moscow. Belarus, by contrast, is an example of a country which never fully shifted it (There are others). Russia sees this as US interference because it refuses to give credibility to the concept of self determination - it must be the enemy of US, rather than those who were Soviets actively rejecting Moscow. To acknowledge the concept of self determination is dangerous to the imperialistic self interest of Moscow. It cant say 'yeah crack on there being independent and successful' because it opens the possibility of other regions doing the same due to mismanagement and corruption. Its a sign of the weakness of Russia as it stands and the generational issue where there isn't an obvious successor class to Putin and his Allies. When they die, the risk of the country having separatist movements shoots up. Putin is in a sense battling this. He wants a legacy to be one of ongoing Russia reminiscent of the Soviet Era rather than being the 'last Tsar'. (If course you can have a whole argument about the influence of the war on what happens next).

I'm also not getting this shit about Russian land being given to Ukraine. The whole concept is Russian propaganda that needs to be knocked on the head. Its a lame justification for braking international law. I think there is an argument about Crimea to a point - it was given to Ukraine in 1954, but beyond that?

International law isnt purely a western concept - it is universally observed by dictators across the world, and existed before the US was born...

See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ukraine-growth.png

If you can explain to be, how exactly 40% of Ukrainian land is somehow Russian and Russia has an argument to claim it because of self determination, then please can you crack on with it, with reference to the above map as I'd be delighted to hear this baloney.

Ukraine NOW
@UkraineNowMedia
·
7m
‼️The occupation authorities of Mariupol begin to close the city for quarantine. The adviser to the mayor of Mariupol Petro Andriushchenko reported this.

According to him, some information starts to arrive that there is cholera in the city.

They have been warning of this for several weeks and planning for it, as far as is possible.

@Ijsbear Dh doesn’t think Japan would try to take the Kuril Islands by force as I think they’re still quite constricted to only self defense, (mentally as well as legally, he says) and the larger islands are relatively well defended by the Russians, with the larger islands having a Russian-identifying population who iirc prefer Russia in charge. Having said that, one of the islands that Japan claims ownership of is majority ethnic Ukrainian so some kind of uprising there would be interesting!

What complicates things though for Russia is the US-Japan security alliance, where the USA has agreed to defend Japan in exchange for keeping a large military presence in and around Japan. If Russia targeted Japan, the USA would defend, which holds Russia in check. And makes them very angry.

There’s not much in the way of Japanese population (about 10,000 google tells me!) in the Kuril Islands, so I’m not sure there’s much there for Russia to target on a large scale. I guess the question is if Russia targeted Japanese citizens in the islands, or in the fishing waters around the islands, would that be seen as enough provocation (or even as an attack on Japanese soil) for Japan/Japan + USA to attack Russia? I really don’t know the answer to that.

I do remember recently the Kremlin complaining that they were being attacked on both their western and eastern fronts, and I wonder if this statement of ownership was what triggered that particular meltdown?

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/06/ukrainian-partisan-attacks-surge-russia?CMP=share_btn_tw

Thought-provoking article on escalation: warontherocks.com/2022/06/western-leaders-ought-to-take-escalation-over-ukraine-seriously/

"Doing all they can to end the conflict is the virtuous choice, and we are certainly not arguing against a robust Western response. We are, however, concerned with calls to seek total victory without a realistic analysis of the costs and risks involved. A call to do more without thinking about the risks leaves the door open for “virtuous escalation.” We want to underscore the unpredictability and danger of this path. If this conflict does escalate, if Russia decides reducing cities to rubble is its only path to victory, or if NATO countries decide to intervene directly, the potential for catastrophe is far higher than most people realize, and vastly too high for comfort."

Trying to make out more about the Donbas region following on from RedToothBrush’s post, today 15:17 I found this:

Most people in separatist-held areas of Donbas prefer reintegration with Ukraine – new survey

Gwendolyn Sasse, University of Oxford

Published: October 14, 2019 9.46am BST

Link
Most people in separatist-held areas of Donbas prefer reintegration with Ukraine – new survey

theconversation.com/most-people-in-separatist-held-areas-of-donbas-prefer-reintegration-with-ukraine-new-survey-124849

I do remember recently the Kremlin complaining that they were being attacked on both their western and eastern fronts, and I wonder if this statement of ownership was what triggered that particular meltdown?

seems likely, given just how Russia takes anything including a change in the wind to shout that they are being attacked!

@MagicFox MagicFox · Today 16:59

Thought-provoking article on escalation:

warontherocks.com/2022/06/western-leaders-ought-to-take-escalation-over-ukraine-seriously/

Thank you MagicFox. I have just read that and it certainly is worrying.

This invasion seems to be an escalation of what Russia started earlier in east Ukraine. So if there were a peace based on a return to February 24th, I wonder how long it would be before the process began again, with more force? It seems very difficult to know what real de-escalation would be.

I suspect that if Ukraine manages to force Russian troops back then the Russian govt will become more dangerous. Some escalation might well happen. But there are degrees of escalation and it won't be from 0 - 100 in one go. It'll be incremental and as well as escalation there could very well be times of de-escalation until in the end peace is achieved.

I think the West has to hold its nerve because of the pattern of Putin's life. If you give in, he takes what he can get, regroups and comes back for even more.

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

(but)

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"

I agree that the West must hold its nerve.

The West is not just being 'virtuous' as the article seems to suggest. It is in the West's interest to stop further territory grabs by Putin.

The article equates the size of wars to the height of buildings and assumes that each war and each building is standalone. It really isn't. That is visual reductionism that is overly simplistic. A small war leads to a bigger war and then an even bigger one. This is where we are now with Putin. It is not as if the West is sleepwalking into escalation. There had been a lot of foot dragging, empty promises and disunity even now. There are lots of clever people in the West calibrating the risks. We are not moving too quickly.

I fundamentally disagree with the article. I would consider the writer a 'worm in the bud', an expression I learnt from previous threads.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime that's either Kipling or Housman ...? :)

One by Housman that my honorary grandfather loved, a man of considerable experience and principle as long as it didn't involve women:

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
By A. E. Housman
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

I know there is Wagner but some mercenaries fight for ethical employers, I'm told.

Ijsbear
that's either Kipling or Housman ...? :)

Kipling; it's called "Dane-geld (A.D. 980-1016)".

Housman's Army of Mercenaries were the ‘Old Contemptibles’, the British Expeditionary Force, the professional army that was sent to France in 1914; the German propaganda was very rude about them and said they were mercenaries, but they weren't really, any more than any national army is. Well, they were paid soldiers; the German army were conscripts... So Housman made a point of it. I like Housman. But then, I like Masefield, and Charles Causley, and Rupert Brooke, and other unfashionable people who wrote in rhyme and tried to say what they meant, so I am clearly past praying for.

("I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And he's been dead since 1936.")

(His brother Laurence wrote wonderful fairy-stories for children, all original and all worth having read, I think my mother got them for me when I was a child, and they are with me still. The stuff of dreams, but by no means all he did: he was also a propagandist for the suffrage movement -- from his and his sister's Suffrage Atelier studio.

(But this is not about Ukraine, so I shall shut up.)

Ignore the blasted crossing-out, which was not intended.