Russia will take Ukraine and the world will not stop it

By Stephen Santos

Despite the fact that we are talking about one of the most flagrant violations of international public and humanitarian law since the end of the Second World War, Vladimir Putin and his pharaonic desires to reintegrate all the territories that were once part of the USSR will continue without the West preventing it militarily. It will do so because the international system is broken, because the United Nations through its security council simply cannot do anything since Russia (as a member of the G5) has a permanent seat and veto power over any resolution.

Additional to this, Putin will also not be able to be tried for the war crimes he is committing because his country is not a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and therefore the court would have neither jurisdiction nor competence to do so.

For its part, the hegemonic empire of the United States has not yet finished digesting the catastrophe of its withdrawal from Afghanistan and its European partners and NATO members, they have as a great common agreement to focus on the imposition of trade sanctions as a hope of antidote to an armed confrontation that they want to avoid at all costs. I thus summarize my explanation of the reason for the title of this comment, clarifying that I yearn with all my might to be profoundly wrong and that this is nothing more than a tabloid headline which I would gladly retract if this is the case.

Our country will soon be left without one of its main export markets for flowers, although it will benefit from a historic rise in oil prices that no one knows how long it will last. I applaud and I am glad that President Guillermo Lasso is on the right side of history and has emphatically condemned this aberrant invasion, which has already claimed the lives of hundreds of people, threatens to claim many more innocent lives and which has ended one of the longest periods of peace, stability and harmonious growth in Europe.

In 1994, Ukraine handed over 1,500 atomic bombs to Russia, in return Moscow promised to respect its territorial and political integrity. Today surely Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Baltic countries and Poland will be taking deep note. Pragmatism in international relations can never be above human values.

For this, from all the spaces that we can, It is our duty and obligation to demand the immediate cessation of the Russian military occupation and seek a negotiated solution, always protected within the framework of unrestricted respect for international law. public and humanitarian, something that with the passing of days sounds more like a chimera or an entelechy. Again, I hope I am deeply mistaken. (I)

Esteban Santos is a lawyer, internationalist and professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of the Americas (UDLA).