700K ukros
Algo pasa con la ofensiva rusa. Está atascada
lowfour
Started 2022-04-20
4339 posts
Parece que quieren parar esto cuanto antes
@lowfour (post #662) Este era mi punto de vista antes de la retirada de Kyiv (ceder Donetsk y Luhansk). Ahora no lo tengo tan claro: por un lado todos los reportes dicen que los ucranianos están a tope de moral y los rusos no, que los rusos están pagando carísimo el lento avance del este, y las sanciones no ayudan. Además, ahora los rusos querrán quedarse con Zaporizhzhia y Kherson... ¡por ahora! Porque a mí no me cabe ni la más mínima duda de que en menos de 10 años se rearmarán y volverán a por Mykolaiv y Odesa.
Si alguien se cree nada de lo que digan desde Rusia sobre querer negociar es que no se ha enterado de la vaina en el último trimestre.
Edited 2022-05-23
@lowfour (post #663) joder con el genocidame deluxe, están cada vez más histéricos (e histriónicos)
esto es como la pataleta esa del ahorcado, no va a ninguna parte
@lowfour (post #662)
yo creo que lo que quieren es ir desgastando a los rusos hasta que puedan echarlos sin una sola baja (o algo así)
no se van a enfrentar a lo loco a las líneas rusas
mira lo de jarkov, si quieren, les barren
si intentan cruzar el río donets, les follan
pero no van a recuperar popasna, no tienen prisa por recuperar izium...
es como si eligieran sus objetivos en base a parámetros que no son exactamente la de recuperar territorio por recuperarlo
recuerda un poco al catenaccio en fútbol, defienden las posiciones a saco, y cuando ven que tienen cierta ventaja ofensiva la aprovechan, pero sin descuidar su portería
Zelensky dice que tienen unas 100 bajas ucras al dia. Unos 3000 al mes. O 36000 al año. Es insostenible, muchísimo. Si, tienen 700.000 movilizados, pero más de la mitad bastante tendrá con no pegarse un tiro en el pie.
He visto varios vídeos y varios reportes en los últimos días en los que se ve claramente a Ukros siendo volatilizados por artillería rusa e incluso combate muy cercano. Debe ser igual en el otro lado, pero ya no es ese apocalípsis NLAW de hace dos meses. No han llegado todas las armas al frente, pero Zelensky ya pide más.
Al parecer Francia quiere forzar una tregua (o eso he leido en el otro foro) mientras que Polonia dice que solo Ucrania decidirá cuando y cómo negocia.
Del NYT
Grueling battles on Ukraine’s eastern front fail to shift the war’s momentum.
DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — Two fighter jets flew low over Ukrainian positions in the eastern part of the country on Sunday afternoon, dropping flares, then sweeping around in an arc and disappearing. Ukrainian soldiers crouched low, watching and waiting, unsure if the jets were friendly or enemy aircraft.
Half an hour later, the sounds of incoming mortar fire whistled further along the hillside.
After failing to secure a quick victory in northern Ukraine early in the war and retreating from areas around the capital, Russian forces have shifted focus and firepower to the east.
Russian troops are pushing south from the city of Izium and from positions to the east in an attempt to encircle the Ukrainians and seize the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, which consists of Donetsk and its neighboring province, Luhansk.
The battles have been bloody, but neither side has been able to move the frontline substantially in their favor throughout the chaotic battlefield, a landscape dominated by farmland and small mining towns and villages that are mostly deserted.
For weeks, Ukrainian and Russian troops have been engaged in a grueling war of attrition, often fighting fiercely over small areas, as one village falls into Russian hands on one day only to be retaken by the Ukrainians a few days later.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces had attacked several locations along the front line in the east. In an assessment of the war published early Sunday evening, it described intensive artillery bombardments on mostly deserted towns and villages.
To the north of the city of Sloviansk in Donetsk, which Russian forces have been seeking to capture, Russian artillery bombarded Ukrainian positions and staged probing attacks that were rebuffed, the Ukrainian military’s report said.
Farther to the east, Russian forces attacked two frontline villages — Prudnovka and Aleksandrovka — with mortar and artillery fire but also failed to advance, according to the assessment.
“They are trying bit by bit, all the time,” said Oleh, 56, the commander of a unit of volunteers manning positions south of Izium, a Russian-controlled city that Russia is using as a staging ground for its offensive in Donbas. He asked that his surname and the location of specific frontline positions not be identified, according to military protocol.
Frontline positions were under persistent artillery fire, he said, “but we are holding.”
Ukraine has released few details about military casualties, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that “from 50 to 100” soldiers are dying each day in eastern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian media.
Oleh, the commander, said that Ukrainian troops had held their positions for two months and that he was confident they could stave off further attacks — as long as Western military assistance keeps coming.
“We are ready for anything,” he said, “but we need more heavy weapons, and on this we rely on our allies.”
Otro video interesante de SKY de hace unos días. Se descojonan del "Terminator" ruso.
@lowfour (post #668)
entonces por esto que me parece que los ucros no tienen prisas por lanzar contra-ofensivas, es que están sufriendo muchas bajas también
intentan estabilizar el frente con las menos bajas posibles y cuando el orco se pone a tiro disparan, pero ir a por ellos a pecho descubierto ya es otra cosa, te fríen
los rusos deben de estar movilizando reservas (y reservistas) a saco para no caer en la humillación suprema, pero fijo que no van a darle la vuelta a la tortilla por mucho que macron quiera pacificar y llevarse bien con putin como antes
@lowfour (post #668) Sobre esto creo que ya lo habías puesto: la orografía del norte es más favorable a emboscadas, NLAWs, etc. Pero el sur es básicamente un trigal, en el que no hay forma de acercarse a un tanque/batería sin que te vean desde 20 km de distancia. Ahí solo manda la artillería.
Edited 2022-05-23
La CNN relata un interesante testimonio de un militar ruso que a la semana dijo que iba a invadir Ucrania su puta madre, que le daba vergüenza. También que los primeros días fueron BRUTALES por parte de Ucrania, que los vaporizaron. Está de vuelta en casa y esperando a ver si le juzgan.
@LurkerIII (post #672)
Es que aquello es un páramo total... eso ya se vio en la guerra a partir del 2014, peladeros con los tanques avanzando por el barro y los campos.
Como están las cabecitas rusas. Molt malament.
Translation:
This war, guys, just so you understand; this war is not for Ukraine. Not for gas, not for oil, not for
@lowfour (post #675) Yo escucho el twitch de Facu Díaz. Como buen commie, se ha puesto de lado en todo este asunto, criticando la invasión un par de veces (viva la paz y tal), pero lo que le vas a escuchar prácticamente todos los días es 1) reírse de Zelenskyy y 2) recordarnos que el batallón Azov es de nazis. Jamás ha hecho ni una mención a Ucrania o Rusia sin soltar los dos mantras. De los comentarios, mejor ni hablamos.
Aún falta el día que le haya escuchado mencionar al Grupo Wagner, o que haya hecho la más mínima mención a los planes imperialistas rusos, esos de llegar hasta Lisboa y convertirNOS a los no-eslavos en sus criados (probablemente liquidar a todo hombre menor de 70 años y violar a las mujeres).
El combo anti-OTAN + commie te hace caer en el bando de los auténticos herederos de los nazis sin mayor duda.
Edited 2022-05-23
@LurkerIII (post #677)
Nazis? Nazis??? Me suena esta palabra.
Es que vivimos en el mundo de la postverdad. Los que se llaman antinazis son nazis de verdad, los progres son carcas represores y los derechuzos liberales viven de subvenciones del Estado.
Aquí el que no corre vuela.
Edited 2022-05-23
Este youtuber es un poco tonto pero ha estado en Ucrania durante la guerra. Parece interesante. Imágenes de cuando la gente tuvo que asaltar el supermercado para comer... un dramón.
Lazis y Nazis
https://elpais.com/opinion/2022-05-23/rusia-y-puigdemont.html
Rusia y Puigdemont
La cúpula independentista debe explicar sus relaciones con emisarios rusos en los mismos días de la declaración unilateral de 2017
Las explicaciones que ha ofrecido al juez Víctor Terradellas, exresponsable de relaciones internacionales de Convergència y amigo personal de Carles Puigdemont, ofrecen novedades significativas sobre las relaciones del expresident con Rusia. Emplazan los contactos en 2017 entre la Generalitat y Putin en un escenario que exige explicaciones públicas y claras por parte de los responsables de la suspendida declaración unilateral de independencia de octubre de 2017. Según Terradellas, la tarde del día 26 de octubre, en la que Puigdemont renunciaba a convocar elecciones autonómicas como salida del callejón en el que había metido a Cataluña, tuvo lugar en su residencia oficial un encuentro entre el president, el propio Terradellas y dos emisarios próximos a Putin. Uno de ellos era el exdiplomático Nikolái Sadovnikov, recién llegado esa misma tarde a Barcelona y con quien se había entrevistado Terradellas en Moscú en la víspera del referéndum del 1-O. Los rusos se interesaron por la firmeza del plan de independencia de Puigdemont y ofrecieron apoyo financiero, energético, militar (10.000 soldados) y hasta una videollamada con Putin, una vez culminada la secesión. A cambio, aspiraban a una legislación favorable a las criptomonedas. En esa reunión, o quizá en una anterior, estuvo presente la entonces estrecha colaboradora de Puigdemont Elsa Artadi, quien acaba de dejar la política “sin fuerzas para continuar”. En las tres horas de declaración ante el juez, Terradellas puntualizó que el hoy eurodiputado Puigdemont no dio crédito a la oferta rusa pero el Parlamento Europeo tiene abierta desde este mes de marzo una investigación sobre esos contactos y la posible injerencia rusa en Cataluña, en el marco de los habituales intentos desestabilizadores en Europa del Kremlin.
Hasta aquí la versión del único personaje que ha hablado, y ese es precisamente el problema. La respuesta de Puigdemont, a través de una portavoz en Waterloo, sobre la incredulidad que le despertó la oferta y la inviabilidad de los planes rusos es rotundamente insuficiente. El entonces president de la Generalitat pasó durante la mañana del día 26 de octubre de 2017 de la decisión conocida a primera hora de convocar elecciones a la rectificación por la tarde y la apuesta por la declaración unilateral de independencia. Esa misma tarde del día 26 de su rectificación se reunió con los emisarios rusos, sin que a día de hoy haya ninguna explicación. Queda en el aire la sospecha de una inquietante temeridad política y democrática, más allá de la que encarna la misma DUI improvisada a lo largo del mediodía. Rebajar la gravedad de ese encuentro, en esos días y horas cruciales, solo refuerza las razones de la alarma que tensó a la sociedad catalana y española hasta el extremo.
La reacción solidaria con los independentistas espiados por la presunta vulneración de los derechos democráticos funciona también en la defensa de las instituciones y su rechazo a acuerdos, apoyos o complicidades secretas con Rusia. Despachar la explicación con el comunicado de una portavoz refuerza una incertidumbre que Puigdemont y quienes asistieron con él a esas reuniones están obligados a disipar cuanto antes. Subrayar hoy la peligrosidad de un régimen autocrático como el de Putin está de más, a la vista de la invasión de Ucrania. Pero ya entonces suponía un intento de injerencia de una gravedad extraordinaria por parte de un régimen abiertamente interesado en la desestabilización de la UE en las vísperas de una declaración unilateral de independencia en territorio europeo.
Y teníamos a toda la progresía equiparando el referendum catanazi a democracia. Así, tan tranquilos.
Golpe y actividad subversiva de primer orden.
Y va el Psycho-ken y los indulta. Poca verguenza es poca.
Edited 2022-05-23
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/ukraine-russia-war-return-conquest
The Return of Conquest?
Why the Future of Global Order Hinges on Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long declared that Ukraine has never existed as an independent country. The former Soviet republic is “not even a state,” he said as early as 2008. In a speech on February 21 of this year, he elaborated, arguing that “modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia.” Days later, he ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. As Russian tanks streamed across the Ukrainian border, Putin seemed to be acting on a sinister, long-held goal: to erase Ukraine from the map of the world.
What made Russia’s invasion so shocking was its anachronistic nature. For decades, this kind of territorial conquest had seemed to be a thing of the past. It had been more than 30 years since one country had tried to conquer another internationally recognized country outright (when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990). This restraint formed the basis of the international system: borders were, by and large, sacrosanct.
Compliance with the norms of state sovereignty—including the notion that a country gets to control what happens in its own territory—has never been perfect. But states have generally tried to observe the sanctity of borders or at least maintain the appearance of doing so. Countries could rest assured that of all the threats they faced, an invasion to redraw their borders was unlikely to be one of them. With a main cause of war largely consigned to history, this particular brand of conflict became less common.
Now, with Russia’s invasion, the norm against territorial conquest has been tested in the most threatening and vivid way since the end of World War II. The war in Ukraine is reminiscent of a previous, more violent era. If the global community allows Russia to subsume Ukraine, states may more frequently use force to challenge borders, and wars may break out, former empires may be reinstated, and more countries may be brought to the edge of extinction.
However disturbing Russia’s attack may be, the rest of the world can still protect the norm that Moscow has challenged. The global community can use sanctions and international courts to impose costs on Russia for its blatant and illegal aggression. It can press for reforms at the UN so that Security Council members, Russia included, cannot veto a referral to the International Criminal Court and thus hamstring that institution’s ability to mete out justice. Such a response will require cooperation and sacrifices, but it is well worth the effort. At stake is one of the bedrock principles of international law: the territorial integrity of states.
Border Patrol
“State death,” as I have called the phenomenon, is a state’s formal loss of control over foreign policy to another state. In other words, when a country concedes that it can no longer act independently on the world stage, it effectively ceases to be its own state. At the beginning of the era of the modern state, one cause of state death predominated: blunt force trauma. From 1816 to 1945, a state disappeared from the map of the world every three years, on average—a fact all the more alarming given that there were about a third as many states back then as there are now. In that period, about a quarter of all states suffered a violent death at one point or another. Their capitals were sacked by enemy armies, their territory was annexed, and they could no longer act independently on the world stage.
Countries located between rivals were especially susceptible to being taken over. From 1772 to 1795, Poland was carved up by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Poland disappeared from the map of Europe completely for over a century. Paraguay suffered a similar fate in 1870, when it lost a war against Argentina and Brazil. Early in the twentieth century, Japan annexed Korea after a series of peninsular wars with China and Russia.
Besides having an unfortunate location, the lack of strong diplomatic ties with colonial powers was another harbinger of danger for vulnerable states. Trade relations were not enough. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African and Asian countries that had inked commercial deals with imperial powers such as France and the United Kingdom were more likely to die than countries in Latin America and the Middle East that, having stronger and more formal ties, hosted consulates and embassies from these same colonial powers. There was, in other words, a hierarchy of recognition that signaled which states were seen as legitimate conquests and which were not. The United Kingdom, for example, signed treaties with precolonial Indian states from Sindh to Nagpur to Punjab that many Indian leaders viewed as a recognition of statehood. But the British never took the next step of establishing diplomatic missions in these states—a slight that was often a prelude to invasion.
Slowly but surely, some leaders started pushing back against the practice of conquest. In the early twentieth century, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson emerged as a proponent of territorial integrity. The last of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, unveiled as World War I came to a close, referred specifically to protections for states belonging to the League of Nations, which Wilson thought could offer “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” To be sure, Wilson’s commitment to self-determination was limited to European nations; he favored independence for the Poles but was unresponsive to pleas for support from the Egyptians and the Indians. Moreover, his defense of territorial integrity was made easier by the fact that by the time Wilson became president, the United States had completed its own territorial conquests, including its march west and the accompanying capture of Native American lands; it no longer had clear ambitions to acquire additional territory. Nonetheless, Wilson did help the norm against territorial conquest take root.
The war in Ukraine may lead to more states using force to subsume other countries.
Wilson’s successors continued the tradition of opposing territorial grabs. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, expressed strong opposition to Italy’s takeover of Ethiopia and was even willing to delay allying with the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II because Moscow demanded that its subjugation of the Baltic states be recognized as legitimate. Yet Roosevelt’s commitment to the norm, like Wilson’s, was not absolute; Roosevelt previously was willing, for example, to recognize Germany’s conquest of Austria if it would limit war in Europe.
The end of World War II heralded a new era. In the ensuing decades, the practice of territorial conquest did not go completely extinct; witness North Vietnam’s takeover of South Vietnam in 1975; Israel’s occupation of parts of its neighbors; Argentina’s attempt to take over the Falkland Islands; and Iraq’s thwarted invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But generally speaking, countries interfered in other states without attempting to redraw their boundaries. And they were especially unlikely to absorb other internationally recognized states wholesale. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, the aim was to prevent the Eastern European country from leaving the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets installed a new, more friendly regime in Budapest but did not lay claim to Hungarian territory. Similarly, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, it installed a puppet government but did not claim territory beyond a cluster of contested islands in the Gulf of Thailand.
Certain occupations, such as those following the United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, qualify as violent state deaths. But the United States did not have designs on those countries’ territory; it sought to topple regimes, but it maintained the integrity of borders. The absence of territorial aims does not make one type of violation of sovereignty better or worse than another, but it does represent an important difference. The maps, by and large, stayed the same.
A Norm Takes Root
Why the sudden drop-off in territorial conquest after World War II? The answer can be found in a powerful force in international relations: norms. As the political scientists Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink have defined the term, a norm is “a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity”—in this case, states. The leaders who developed the norm against territorial conquest recognized that most conflicts, including World War II, were fought over land. Establishing a norm against one state taking another’s territory by force was therefore part of a broader project to promote peace. By helping enshrine it in the UN Charter, the United States was determined that the norm would stick. Having emerged from the war much stronger than its allies, the United States viewed enforcing the norm against territorial conquest as a key element of preserving global stability. Newly independent states made similar commitments in the founding documents of regional organizations, such as the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity. Building on earlier attempts to enshrine the concept of territorial integrity in such treaties as the Covenant of the League of Nations, in 1919, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in 1928, a bona fide norm emerged.
States and leaders adhere to norms for various reasons. Whereas some norms—say, that against genocide—are grounded in humanitarian concerns, the norm against conquest has more strategic, self-interested roots. Some states honor the norm because they have no territorial ambitions. Others have internalized it so deeply that violating it has become inconceivable. Some—even powerful states—obey it because they know that territorial disputes have been a major cause of wars, and they view the stability of the international system as being in their interest. Still others follow it for fear of punishment if they violate it.
For all its benefits, the norm against territorial conquest has also had unintended consequences. One is the hardening of interstate boundaries in ways that create conditions ripe for state failure and collapse. As the political scientist Boaz Atzili has shown, “border fixity” has freed the leaders of weak states from having to direct their attention to protecting their own borders against external predation. Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was able to focus his efforts on extracting resources for personal gain in part because he did not need a strong military to defend his country’s borders. And as the sociologist Ann Hironaka has shown, the norm against territorial conquest also has contributed to the growth of “never-ending wars.” Rather than settling differences over political control by attempting to take over territory, opportunistic leaders have intervened in civil wars in weak states to prolong conflict and further weaken unstable governments—as South Africa did in Angola in the 1980s, for example.
It is not an accident that the norm against conquest emerged after World War II.
It is not an accident that the norm against territorial conquest emerged after World War II. The horrors of that conflict, combined with the dawn ofthe nuclear age, incentivized the great powers to avoid future wars. The era of bipolarity between the United States and the Soviet Union allowed for both regime change and the preservation of international borders. Globalization also reduced the economic benefits of territorial conquest: increased trade meant that countries could access other states’ resources without resorting to force.
Not only were borders secure; statehood itself became an increasingly valuable commodity, in part because the postwar leaders of newly independent countries could be confident that the norm against territorial conquest would hold and their fledgling states would be safe. But it is precisely the citizens of those new states, many of which are located in the post-Soviet space, who are rightly most concerned today about their countries’ futures.
A taxonomy of dangers
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shining a light on the precariousness of the norm against territorial conquest. The good news is that the outrage has been swift and broad, with a variety of actors worried that Putin’s attack could undermine the stability of borders globally. Even those who did not participate in the drawing of today’s national borders have spoken out passionately. “We agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited,” Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the UN, said at a February 22 Security Council meeting. “We chose to follow the rules of the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations Charter,” he went on, “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.” Leaders of countries from Albania to Argentina have condemned the Russian invasion on similar grounds.
In part, the fate of the norm against territorial conquest depends on the extent to which Putin violates it in Ukraine. If Putin ends up replacing the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and installing a puppet regime in Ukraine, he would be engaging in blatant regime change and dealing a grave blow to the Ukrainian people. But he would not be challenging the norm against territorial conquest per se. The country would be under indirect, rather than direct, Russian control.
Likewise, if Putin attempts to absorb Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—areas he has long claimed as Russian territory—and the rest of the world acquiesces, it would weaken but not completely overturn the norm guarding a state’s territorial integrity, because most of Ukraine would remain intact. Even so, the acceptance of a limited violation of the norm might do more damage in the long run than a rejection of a major violation of it. After all, it is likely that the West’s relatively weak response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea emboldened Putin.
There is reason to fear that Putin’s ambitions go well beyond these goals. As his remarks questioning the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent country suggest, Putin seems interested in much more than merely putting a crony in charge of a former Soviet republic or carving out parts of the country; he may be contemplating redrawing the map of Europe to hark back to imperial Russia. If Russia were to take over the entirety of Ukraine, Putin would drive a stake into the heart of the norm against territorial conquest.
Norms are nourished by enforcement.
If Putin went that far, then the fate of the norm would depend largely on how the rest of the world reacted. Norms are nourished by enforcement. In 2013, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad clearly violated the norm against the use of chemical weapons (and international law) when he fired sarin-filled rockets at the Damascus suburbs. Even though U.S. President Barack Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a redline, the response to this violation was so tepid that one can be forgiven for asking whether the taboo against chemical weapons still holds.
Fortunately, much of the world’s response to the Russian invasion indicates that countries are largely united in their determination to protect the norm. Unprecedented sanctions on Russia, combined with donations of humanitarian aid and weapons for Ukraine, are applying pressure on Putin while offering (admittedly limited) relief to Zelensky. If that international resolve were to ebb, however, countries that neighbor Ukraine, such as Moldova, Poland, and Romania, would rightly become nervous about their sovereignty. Indeed, they already are. It is notable that the international community has not banded together to repel Russia’s incursion the way a U.S.-led global alliance turned back Iraq’s attempted annexation of Kuwait. That move not only restored Kuwaiti independence but also reinforced the norm against conquest. (Russia, of course, is far more powerful than Iraq ever was and possesses nuclear weapons to boot.)
At the same time, enforcing the norm against territorial conquest comes with tradeoffs, about which everyone should be clear-eyed. Protecting Ukrainian sovereignty is likely not worth a third world war—especially one that could go nuclear. The world should not pay the ultimate price just to support the norm against territorial conquest. But the bloody costs that come with that choice cannot be ignored. The West is currently walking a difficult line, seeking to respond to Russia’s invasion with strength but without escalating the conflict.
To preserve the norm against territorial conquest, the global community should keep up the pressure on Russia, even if Putin’s goal is to annex only Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. The Western alliance, for example, should not fully lift sanctions on Russia until and unless Putin recognizes Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. International jurists should take Ukraine’s various suits against Russia seriously, not just in the context of this specific conflict but also with an eye to any precedents their decisions might set. Along these lines, it is worth paying attention to how the accusations that Russia has committed the crime of aggression play out. The fact that Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, can veto a referral for the crime of aggression to the International Criminal Court exposes a troubling vulnerability of the norm against territorial conquest. It is hard to maintain norms when great powers are determined to break them.
Norms don’t always last forever.
If the global community fails to enforce the norm against territorial conquest, the states bordering great powers will face the highest risk of extinction. Among the most concerning aspects of a return to a world of violent state death are the effects invasions have on civilians. Annexationists frequently engage in indiscriminate targeting, similar to what is happening today in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol, to quell and even depopulate areas. In other words, the demise of the norm against territorial conquest could see an increase in not only the incidence but also the brutality of war.
Even if the global community does not rally behind the norm in the face of a Russian attempt to reinstate imperial boundaries, hope for Ukraine will not be lost. About half of all the states that died violently since 1816 were later resurrected. An important predictor of resurrection is nationalist resistance to being swallowed up. The extent of the resistance can be difficult for invaders to predict. Putin’s expectations certainly seem to have been way off the mark: the widespread and sophisticated Ukrainian resistance strongly suggests that Russia will find it nearly impossible to control Ukraine. Few occupations in history have ended up achieving their long-term political aims.
If the Ukrainians are left to resurrect their own country, the end result will be good for Ukrainians but not particularly encouraging for the norm against territorial conquest. For norms to remain strong, violations must be punished. A resurrected Ukraine might deter future would-be conquerors from attacking the country. But globally, aspiring invaders would draw a clear lesson: it is possible to get away with territorial conquest.
Recommitting to bright lines
It might be more comforting to believe that once established, a norm is permanent, but norms don’t always last forever. Think about how many have slipped away. People no longer settle fights via ritual dueling. Governments rarely issue formal declarations of war; the last time the United States did so was in 1942, even though the country has fought many wars since then. The public assassination of state leaders, which was a regular feature of international politics in Machiavelli’s time, was viewed as abhorrent by the seventeenth century (although covert assassinations continued). If the prohibition against territorial conquest ends up in the graveyard of norms, then history will turn backward, and the world will revisit the brutal era of violent state death. This is not to say that the norm ushered in world peace. There have been plenty of wars since 1945. But a certain kind of war—wars between states over unresolved territorial claims—did decline. Should that style of conflict return, civilians around the world will bear the consequences.
Consider the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes today. Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Sudan has challenged its border with Ethiopia in the southeast and South Sudan in the south. In the East China and South China Seas, China and its neighbors, including Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, disagree over the sovereignty of a series of islands. Taiwan’s fate is of particular concern. Putin’s arguments about the legitimacy of Ukraine’s statehood echo China’s claim that Taiwan and China are already one country. If it suddenly seems acceptable to take territory by force, leaders of states with long-unresolved territorial claims could attempt to subsume sovereign nations.
Existing norms and legal structures have helped stop recent territorial conflicts from escalating, offering nonviolent paths to their management and resolution. The International Court of Justice resolved a case between El Salvador and Honduras in 1986, for example. The United Nations and the Organization of American States resolved a brief conflict between Ecuador and Peru in 1998. Several years later, the ICJ resolved a long-standing militarized territorial dispute between Bahrain and Qatar; subsequently, the two states invested in what will be the world’s longest bridge. This mediation allowed states to settle their differences without significant bloodshed.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is about much more than Russia and Ukraine. Allowing the norm against territorial conquest to wither away would mean taking the lid off territorial disputes around the globe and making millions of civilians more vulnerable to indiscriminate targeting. Right now, the immediate effects of the war are largely contained to Ukraine, Russia, and the countries taking in Ukrainian refugees. But further down the road, if the norm against territorial conquest ends up as another casualty of this war, states would be wise to carefully tend to their borders.
@lowfour (post #673)
al menos parece que no todos los rusos son orcos
joder, no habrá más como este?? yo hubiera dicho que sí, pero debe de ser muy duro aquello, porque este igual se puede permitir que lo juzguen o algo así, pero no todos pueden
@lowfour (post #675) metes ahí "soros" y ya lo tienes, discurso de burbuja info
@lowfour (post #676) esto llega como 3 meses tarde
joder, yo abrí hilo diciendo que putin era cadáver el 24 de febrero, y estos empiezan a renunciar ahora?? no sé...
la buena noticia es que parece que el "reich" está implosionando, posiblemente esto sea el inicio de un "sálvese quien pueda" que no hay nadie al timón y nos hundimos
si no lo hicieron antes igual ha sido porque esperaban alguna clase de golpe palaciego o algo así, pero no llega y la decadencia en el kremlin (y la impotencia) debe de ser tal, que ahora sale a cuenta saltar del barco
@lowfour (post #681)
joder, pero el psycho igual nos ha hecho un favorcito con el indulto, eh?
por lo pronto, ha dividido a los indepes (aunque estaban ya a la gresca) y les ha jodido el discurso "madrit ens roba y encarcela"
además, por mucho que nos joda que no se coman 12 años en la trena, se han comido 3 y estaban atrincherándose en el victimismo, yo creo que les ha jodido más salir de prisión que habiéndose quedado presos
che, si hasta daban conferencias y hacian lo que les salia el nardo estando dentro
han quedado como los privilegiados del pruses, para los que hay indultos, igual que los de waterloo están quedando como los pijos que huyen con el botin para que otros paguen los platos rotos
@lowfour (post #687)
un general pilotando un su-25??
no sé, parece un poco raro, no?
@elarquitecto (post #688)
AMO A VE HAMIJO, tu te sorprenderías de algo viniendo de Rusia? Yo sinceramente no.
OJOOOORRRRRR JARRRRLL
Ukrainska Pravda — MONDAY, 23 MAY 2022, 13:59
Kyrylo Budanov, the Head of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine says that there was an attempt on the life of Russian President Vladimir Putin after the start of the war against Ukraine.
Source: Kyrylo Budanov in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda
Quote: "There was an attempt to assassinate Putin… He was even attacked, it is said, by representatives of the Caucasus, not so long ago. This is non-public information. [It was an] Absolutely unsuccessful attempt, but it really happened… It was about 2 months ago.
I repeat, this attempt was unsuccessful. There was no publicity about this event, but it took place."
Details: Read the full version of the conversation with the head of military intelligence soon on Ukrainska Pravda.
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