“We are not part of this conflict, and we have a responsibility to ensure it does not escalate and spread beyond Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that the 30-country alliance will not impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, warning that such a step would draw NATO forces into direct conflict with Russia and potentially spark “a full-fledged war in Europe.”
“We are not part of this conflict, and we have a responsibility to ensure it does not escalate and spread beyond Ukraine because that would be even more devastating and more dangerous, with even more human suffering,” Stoltenberg said during a press conference following a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.
Stoltenberg told reporters that while the Ukrainian leadership’s call for a no-fly zone was mentioned during Friday’s meeting, NATO members ultimately agreed that the alliance shouldn’t have “planes operating over Ukrainian airspace or NATO troops on Ukrainian territory.”
“NATO is not seeking a war with Russia,” said Stoltenberg, who condemned Russia’s assault on Ukraine as an unlawful act of aggression and demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin order the immediate withdrawal of all troops.
Watch Stoltenberg’s press conference:
NATO’s rejection of a no-fly zone came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his push for a no-fly zone over the besieged country.
“I hope the sky will be shut down,” Zelenskyy said during a press conference on Thursday.
But many world leaders, progressive lawmakers, and anti-war campaigners have warned that because a no-fly zone must be enforced militarily, the imposition of such an airspace ban would dramatically increase the risk of broadening the deadly conflict in Ukraine.
Last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said U.S. President Joe Biden has no intention of supporting a no-fly zone, warning that it could bring the United States into “a war with Russia, which is something we are not planning to be a part of.”
The prime minister of Lithuania, a NATO member, similarly rejected calls for a no-fly zone during a news conference on Friday.
“I believe that all encouragements for NATO to get involved in the military conflict now are irresponsible,” said Ingrida Simonyte.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.
Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates his version of the history?
Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine.
Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland.
It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.
The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?
During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea.
Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.
Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?
When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable.
A New York Times story on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?
Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and even in puffy pants permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.
History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.
This article has been updated to reflect the correct ethnic and linguistic character of the villages in the Donbas during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They were Ukrainian.
The ICC prosecutor, who is following the invasion “with increasing concern,” signals the court may launch an investigation.
Amnesty International declared Friday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has been marked by indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and strikes on protected objects such as hospitals” that may amount to war crimes.
“The Russian military has shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives.”
The human rights group’s Crisis Evidence Lab analyzed photos, videos, and satellite imagery of three attacks—in the Ukrainian cities Vuhledar, Kharkiv, and Uman—carried out in the early hours of the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin announcedbefore dawn on Thursday.
“The Russian military has shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, in a statement.
“Some of these attacks may be war crimes,” she continued. “The Russian government, which falsely claims to use only precision-guided weapons, should take responsibility for these acts.”
Callamard added that “the Russian troops should immediately stop carrying out indiscriminate attacks in violation of the laws of war. The continuation of the use of ballistic missiles and other inaccurate explosive weapons causing civilian deaths and injuries is inexcusable.”
Amnesty’s researchers believe the trio of analyzed attacks killed at least six civilians and injured at least a dozen others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Thursday that the overall death toll had topped 130 and more than 300 people were wounded on the first day of the assault.
Though the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss Putin’s widely condemned invasion, Russia is one of the five permanent members—along with China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—meaning it has veto power over resolutions.
Russia also currently leads the 15-member UNSC—though Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, suggested during a meeting earlier this week that his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya, should relinquish the rotating presidency, which is set to shift to the United Arab Emirates in March.
That meeting concluded with Kyslytsya telling Nebenzya that “there is no purgatory for war criminals; they go straight to hell, ambassador,” to which the Russian responded that “we are not carrying out aggression against the Ukrainian people—this is against that junta, that seized power in Kyiv.”
'There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell' — As the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in full force, Ukraine's UN ambassador called out his Russian counterpart in a fiery speech pic.twitter.com/CYqOtUsnxN
Given the current limitations of the UNSC, Amnesty International is calling for an emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly. As Callamard put it: “If the Security Council is paralyzed through veto, it is up to the entire membership to step up.”
Warning that the “lives, safety, and well-being” of millions of Ukrainians are at stake, she urged the General Assembly to adopt a resolution denouncing Russia’s “unlawful attack and calling for an end to all violations of humanitarian law and human rights.”
Amnesty was far from alone in sounding the alarm about Russia violating international law.
A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said Friday that “we are gravely concerned about developments” in Ukraine and “we are receiving increasing reports of civilian casualties.”
“Civilians are terrified of further escalation, with many attempting to flee their homes and others taking shelter where possible,” added the spokesperson. “As the high commissioner has warned, the military action by the Russian Federation clearly violates international law. It puts at risk countless lives and it must be immediately halted.”
International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan similarly said Friday that “I have been closely following recent developments in and around Ukraine with increasing concern.”
The International Criminal Court prosecutor reminds the warring parties in Ukraine (including Russian forces) that the court has jurisdiction over any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed there, pursuant to a declaration filed by the Ukrainian government in 2015. https://t.co/Spn1SyTjvH
Though neither Ukraine nor Russia is a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC, Khan pointed out that due to a 2015 declaration following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, “my office may exercise its jurisdiction over and investigate any act of genocide, crime against humanity, or war crime committed within the territory of Ukraine” since February 20, 2014.
“Any person who commits such crimes, including by ordering, inciting, or contributing in another manner to the commission of these crimes, may be liable to prosecution before the court, with full respect for the principle of complementarity,” he said. “It is imperative that all parties to the conflict respect their obligations under international humanitarian law.”
The ICC also investigates crimes of aggression, but Khan explained that because neither involved nation is party to the Rome Statute, “the court cannot exercise jurisdiction over this alleged crime in this situation.”
The prosecutor—who is on mission in Bangladesh but plans to release a fuller statement upon returning to The Hague—vowed that his office “will continue to closely monitor the situation” and “remains fully committed to the prevention of atrocity crimes and to ensuring that anyone responsible for such crimes is held accountable.”
After reports that Russia attacked a kindergarten and orphanage in the city of Okhtyrka, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Friday that officials are collecting evidence of “war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute” that will be sent to The Hague.
Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute. Together with the General Prosecutor’s Office we are collecting this and other facts, which we will immediately send to the Hague. Responsibility is inevitable.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Friday, Russian forces also have been accused of using cluster munitions in the ongoing assault of Ukraine, leading an international coalition to call for “an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
