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Thanks to John Bing for posting these discussions on Ukraine. I certainly respect the opinions expressed by my fellow Alums. They have all given me new perspectives to ponder and certainly differ from the talking heads on TV on both the right and left. If only our politicians could discuss such topics in a rational way.

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Part II

As for the conflict of principles, it is surely true that the UN statement of these principles are placed in the context of other principles, which one of the responders was kind enough to list. These include, among others, the responsibility of all signatories to refrain from the use of force in pursuing their ends, which clearly Russia violated with respect to Ukraine. The problem is that if the principles have meaning and import, they must apply to all signatories equally, and the rest of us in making judgments about relevant cases cannot apply them differently to different cases either. Russia has clearly violated the principle of non-violence in relations with other countries, as has the US, the UK, NATO, China, and a number of other countries in recent years. NATO and the EU continue to defend the bombing of Serbia, which included civilian infrastructure – I saw one of the bridges over the Danube in Nowy Sad collapsed in the river – and support the forced secession of Kosovo that resulted. I fully agree that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not justified, and on the same grounds neither was the NATO bombing of Serbia. If it is illegitimate for Russia to endorse the secession of Crimea and the Donbas because they were violently enabled, then it is equally illegitimate for NATO and the US to endorse the secession of Kosovo form Serbia because it, too, was violently enabled. We are not entitled to have it both ways. Something similar applies to the many other regions that have attempted to secede from the countries of which they were a part – Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan, Turkish Cyprus from Greek Cyprus, South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, the relation between Taiwan and the PRC, the mess that is Israel and Palestine, among others.

The important point was made by one of the readers that it is not clear how the UN-endorsed right of self-determination can be calibrated. Presumably it would not be expected to apply to Northern California, but what about Texas? If not, why not? The principles enshrined in UN documents had their origin in the years in which colonies were being liberated, or were liberating themselves, from their colonial masters – English, French, Portuguese, Belgian, etc. These colonies were not states at the time, so the principle of the right of self-determination, which was meant to apply to them, could not have been meant to apply only to existing states. And the US and NATO use the preeminent value of self-determination to justify the Albanian population’s desire to be independent of Serbia’s control despite the fact that Kosovo has been part of Serbia for a very long time. It is not at all clear where the line can be drawn, but it is clear that as far as currently powerful states are concerned, it is not meant to be drawn to include only existing states. In that case, there is no good reason on the face of it to say that independence is legitimate for Kosovo or Nagorno-Karabakh, but not Crimea, Donetsk, and Lugansk.

This is the reason we face the conflict between the inviolability of borders and the self-determination of peoples. When all is said and done, it still seems to me that as important as respect for borders is, and it is indeed important, and as important as it is to avoid violent intervention, it remains the case that the wishes of the people of Crimea and the Donbas deserve to be respected. For the most part, they regard themselves to be Russian. They were fine with the way things were going in Ukraine before the coup, and the Donbas problem at least could have been worked out through the Minsk Accords. All of that has been rendered moot by Western intransigence and the Russian invasion. The question now is whether to insist on Ukraine returning to its pre-coup borders in defiance of the expressed will of the people of Crimea and the Donbas, or to honor their preferences and respect their secession and annexation to the Russian Federation. A respect for people and the self-determination suggests the latter.

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(Apparently, my comment is too long for the system, so I will sent it in parts)

Part I

I would like to thank John for posting my thoughts on these matters, and those readers who took the time to respond. These are difficult and complicated issues, and would require more than any of us can offer in these short comments. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss it all with you sometime over a couple pints. Meanwhile, I will offer just a few more thoughts.

Two sets of comments have been made, one dealing with aspects of the Russian and Ukrainian situations, and one that concerns the question of how to apply the principles of the inviolability of borders and the self-determination of peoples. I’ll consider each in turn.

First, on Russia and Ukraine. The claim was made that to object to Ukrainians using cluster bombs is unreasonable because it would be analogous to objecting to pushing an old lady out of the way of a bus. The problem is that the analogy doesn’t work. Surely it is improper to push an old lady in front of a bus, but proper to push here out of the way. The difference is that the first push puts her in harm’s way, while the second push saves her from harm. The two “pushes” are not morally equivalent. In the case of cluster bombs, however, there is no such difference between Russians using them and Ukrainians using them. In both cases, the moral objection is that they leave unexploded ordnance that will threaten innocent civilians for years after the conflict ends. They are morally equivalent uses. The fact that Ukraine uses them in defense against an invasion no more justifies their use than Syria using them in defense against an insurrection was justified. The US government, by giving these weapons to Ukraine after morally condemning Russia (and Syria) for using them is egregious moral duplicity

The point was made that it is inappropriate to consider the 2014 overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president a coup, in part on the grounds that this is how Putin describes it. On that point, we do not want to commit the “fallacy of poisoning the well.” That Putin thinks x is by itself not evidence of the truth or falsity of x, and so is irrelevant. The people in Maidan in February 2014 (unlike, by the way, the people who demonstrated against the president there a few months before), were ultra-nationalist Ukrainians, many organized into militias not unlike the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, though far more violent and well-armed. These nationalist groups for the most part represented, and still represent, a political view with its home in central and northwestern Ukraine. President Yanukovych, by contrast, was from the Party of the Regions, which had its political roots in the east and south of Ukraine, which are the parts of the country that have been for a very long time culturally and linguistically Russian. From the point of view of a good many of the people in Crimea and the Donbas, it was their president, duly and properly elected, who was being overthrown, and they had no intention therefore of subjecting themselves to the rule of the Ukrainian nationalists who would assume power. As far as I can tell, there is every good reason to refer to this event as an illegal coup, and to consider the people who wanted no part of it to be within their rights to secede.

The point was also made that Ukrainians do everything they can to avoid harming civilians, while Russians deliberately target them. As far as I know, the jury is out on whether Russians deliberately target civilians. I have access to no special information on this point one way or the other. Russians do target infrastructure, though they claim that it is of military relevance. The Ukrainians, however, have been targeting civilians, rather haphazardly, since 2014 with their periodic shelling of the Donbas, primarily the city of Donetsk. This shelling has continued since the February 2022 Russian invasion. In fact, to try to put a stop to this bombardment of civilian targets in Donetsk is one of the justifications the Russians give for the invasion.

Another quick point about Crimea specifically, since one of the commentators referred to the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. There was no invasion of the peninsula in 2014. There had been Russian troops there all along, enabled by the agreement between Russia and Ukraine to share the naval base in Sevastopol. That port city had been the home of the Russian, and then Soviet, Black Sea fleet since the mid-18th century when Catherine the Great’s favorite Prince Potemkin led the Russian forces that drove the Ottomans out of the northern littoral of the Black Sea. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the two new states – Ukraine and the Russian Federation – agreed to share the port. That agreement worked for all involved, which I saw myself when I was there in 2005, until it became clear that the 2014 coup would give NATO and the US access to the port and the Russian fleet would be driven out. No Russian leader could or would allow that to happen. The Russian government, then, had two reasons to accept the Crimean vote to join the Russian Federation. One was to preserve Sevastopol as the home of the Black Sea fleet, and the second was the recognition that the bulk of the Crimean people regarded themselves to be Russian, a point of view I encountered directly in unsolicited discussions with cab drivers and other Crimeans nearly 20 years ago.

Part of the problem we all have in dealing with Russia is that impressions we have of it have been and continue to be skewed by those who convey them. In the mainstream US and UK media, there are only three kinds of stories that are or even can be written about Russia: 1) its leadership is wicked and evil, 2) its administrative bodies at all levels are stupid and incompetent, and 3) its society is in every possible respect dysfunctional – economics, finance, education, social relations, demography, transportation, industry, military, technology, science and research, etc. I do not recall seeing or hearing for many years any story about Russia that was not one or another version or combination of these three themes. And, which I suppose should not surprise us, the consumers of the information accept it and take it as the point of departure for much of our understanding of anything having to do with Russia.

I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to live and work in Russia, on and off and in several capacities, for nearly 40 years. I am now retired, and spend 4-5 months each year there. As it happens, I have just this week signed a contract to teach a graduate course on American Philosophy at Moscow State University in the coming semester. None of this means that everything I think about Russia is true, or even that anything I think about Russia is true, but it does give me access, unusual for an American, to the Russian perspective on things. I watch and read Russian news, I work with Russians, I know many people professionally and on a personal level, some of whom oppose the government and many of its policies, and many of whom do not. This familiarity with Russia, its society and its people, allows me to recognize nonsense about the country when I see it, and unfortunately, I see a good deal of it coming from the US press, government, and academia. This is one of the reasons that American policy so often stumbles with respect to Russia. Sanctions were supposed to “reduce the ruble to rubble”, as President Biden put it, which did not happen because the Russian financial system and mechanisms are far healthier and more sophisticated that the US government thought. Our government is responding to its own delusions about Russia, which is a very dangerous position to be in. We would all be better off with more reliable and truthful accounts.

Russian media, to be sure, is guilty of similar excesses, which in their case we refer to not as news but as propaganda. And it is of course true that Russia is not a liberal democracy, and does not pretend to be. From that fact, however, nothing follows about the legitimacy of this or that Russian policy.

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