New lows in the Russo-Ukrainian War

It never occurred to me that I could be shot randomly on the street. While I’m riding my bicycle to work, or after buying a bag of potatoes at my supermarket. The dead men on the photos of the Bucha massacre apparently couldn’t imagine this either. I saw those photos of Ukrainians lying dead next to their bicycles and their groceries. They are just some of the victims of the Russian military which didn’t have the luxury of ending up in a mass grave. This enraged me.

It doesn’t really come a surprise, after all the news that the Russians are regularly shelling hospitals and childcare centers. After the news of looting and the rape of Ukrainian minors. The Russians aren’t liberators, but a pillaging band of savages. They are far from liberating the Ukrainians from a Nazi regime, they are behaving like the Nazis themselves.

While the Russian war crimes anger me, so does the Western reluctance to come to the aid of Ukraine. It’s astounding that there still isn’t a ban on buying Russian gas, oil and coal. Yes, especially Germany could be hit hard by a ban on Russian gas. There might be discussion on how hard, whether it’s manageable or crushing, but I’m sure it’s incomparable to the devastation Ukraine has suffered. Ukraine sustained $100 billion in damages just to infrastructure in less than a month after the Russian invasion. That’s more than half of Ukraine’s GDP. We have to be willing to share in the economic pain in this war. That ban should have already been in place weeks ago because the dependence on Russian gas is holding us back from serious aid to Ukraine. With serious aid I don’t mean sanctions and supplying arms to Ukraine while we stand by and look on.

We supposedly live in a world order in which we solve conflicts peacefully and denounce wars of aggression. The first article of the Charter of the United Nations reads as follows:

The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

The UN has failed terribly in this regard. Russia was able to invade Ukraine under international protest, but only the Western UN members have enacted serious sanctions against Russia. If the UN doesn’t enforce its Charter, if it does nothing to stop this blatant war of aggression and the war crimes, it’s obvious that aggressors can just ignore the UN.

The UN should be reformed to be more effective. Obviously the UN Security Council with its veto powers needs to be abolished. If we take the UN Charter seriously any war of aggression should result in an automatic declaration of war by all UN members on the aggressor. Somewhat similar to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which is the basis of NATO. I know this is problematic because there have been precedents. The USA ignored the UN as well when it started the Iraq War, for example. Of course the non-aggression principle should apply to everyone, including the West. Perhaps only the UN should be able to authorize invasions in special cases such as genocide, as it happened in Rwanda or Yugoslavia for example.

The UN doesn’t do its job and NATO isn’t able to intervene because Ukraine is not a NATO member. The individual states of the West and the USA in particular is our last hope. If a world order based on non-aggression isn’t worth defending, then what is? We shouldn’t be waiting for more destruction in Ukraine before we intervene. The fact that Russia invaded Ukraine without any provocation is sufficient reason for Western military intervention on behalf of Ukraine. Anything else is cowardice and selfishness. Russian threats of using nuclear weapons should not be an excuse for non-intervention; we are lost if Russia can get away with everything under threats of deploying them. We have nuclear weapons too. We should not rest until we have routed all of those filthy Russian child murderers from Ukrainian soil and the country is restored to its pre-2014 borders.

Now that we are discussing arms shipments to Ukraine, can we also send them some cruise missiles? I’d love to see them used against the 19 kilometers long Crimean Bridge, which was built by the Russians after their annexation of the Crimea. It cost the Russians $3.7 billion to construct, so it would settle the score somewhat regarding the damages to infrastructure and would be a blow to Russian prestige. Just give some advance warning so no one gets hurt when they pass over the bridge.