Ill Tidings: Russian Media Discusses the Kremlin's 'War Against the West' while the US-led bloc ramps up its efforts to escalate the conflict

Legally speaking, training Ukrainian soldiers to use Western arms is a casus belli…

For those paying attention to the Ukrainian quagmire (see this piece about the RAND Corp.’s role), it has been quite obvious that the collective US-led West is at a crossroads. For some, like Paul Craig Roberts—who’s even more of a pessimist than I am—the entirety of ‘Western Civilization is in its Final Years’ (his weblog is highly recommended), and taken together, it does appear that something is going terribly wrong, not merely since late February 2022.

For background, please refer to my posting from early March 2022:

Notes from the Upside-Down I: NATO's 'War', Geopolitics, and the Folly of EUrocrats

Yet, I’d argue that it’s even worse today, with autumn soon turning into winter on the eastern front.

US and Britain Cajole NATO and its ‘Partners’ towards War vs. Russia (and China)

To those who pay attention to what goes on in the Donbass—we note, in passing, that just a few days ago, Western legacy media outlet and member of the Trusted News Initiative BBC ‘reported’ the following (bold emphasis in the original, Italics mine):

Thirteen people have been killed and others wounded in a series of explosions in the separatist-run city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, according to its Russian-backed mayor.

Alexei Kulemzin blamed ‘punitive’ Ukrainian shellfire for the deaths. There is no comment from Ukrainian officials.

Donetsk has been controlled by Russia’s proxy authorities since 2014.

They have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of targeting the city.

Independent confirmation is hard to come by on the ground in separatist-held areas of the east. However, local authorities said nine 150mm shells were fired at the Kuibyshevsky district of Donetsk, from a village to the west of the city.

Local leader Denis Pushilin accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting civilians at a bus-stop, a shop and a bank.

Although Russian forces have seized areas of the Donetsk region further south since the invasion began in February, they have struggled to push the Ukrainian army back from the outskirts of the city itself.

You see, while it’s ‘journalistic integrity’ (or whatever) to state that ‘independent confirmation is hard to come by on the ground in separatist-held areas’, it’s laughable. Even the BBC admits that ‘Donetsk has been controlled by Russia’s proxy authorities since 2014’, it’s not a gigantic cognitive leap to conclude, with reasonable certainty, that

• Shells that explode in downtown Donetsk—or other ‘separatist-held areas’, for that matter—are unlikely to originate with Russian and/or separatist forces;

• Thus, the most likely, and indeed all-but certain, origin of the artillery shells that hit Donetsk the other day would have to be Ukrainian;

• Hence the only question here, really, is whether or not these shells were fired by regular Ukrainian troops under the command of the Defence (War) Ministry or by some paramilitary Azov formations replete with Neo-Nazi goons and extremist loonies from all over the globe.

Note that the website Donbass Insider mentioned, on 17 Sept. 2022, that the above-related shelling has been carried out ‘with Caesar self-propelled guns and French 155mm TRF1 guns’ while also citing one controversial French journalist/analyst by the name of Adrien Bocquet who claimed that the shells ‘were American 155mm [ammunition]’.

Now, I don’t know whether any of the content reported above is factually true—beyond the above bullet-points, so, let’s move on, shall we?

Russian TV Vesti Comments: Russia is at War vs. US, UK

If you’d watch Russian TV, however, I’d recommend the recent comment by Vesti7, you’d see the below caption (if you do read German or use machine translation, please head over to Thomas Röper’s website who provided a transcript of the entire comment.)

Here’s the presenter’s comments (my emphases):

It is obvious that the situation in Ukraine has changed fundamentally since the end of February. The West has ‘committed’ itself to the Kiev regime. This did not happen during the Russian-Georgian war in 2008. There was no such thing during the reunification of Crimea with Russia. Now, this time is different. We have launched a special military operation. In return, the West is waging a war in Ukraine. What kind of war? Very simple. Here, a French TV station quotes our programme and at the bottom the headline reads: ‘War against Russia’.

In all other languages of unfriendly countries, it is the same, without exception: war against Russia.

Special military operation means that from the very beginning we have imposed voluntary self-restrictions on where we shoot and where we don’t shoot, what weapons we use and what weapons we don’t use. We have self-restrictions on the scope of action, the nature, the speed, the treatment of prisoners, humanitarian aid and the truth of information.

War, on the other hand, is when you act with all your might and without inhibitions. Yes, the West—NATO—is waging a war against Russia in Ukraine right now, literally ramping up all the ingredients: funding, arms and ammunition supplies, training of soldiers, level of brutality, boldness in planning and conducting operations on the battlefield and information-psychological operations. At the same time, the Ukrainian army, together with the territorial defence, was increased to 700,000 men. Yes, not all of them have the necessary qualifications yet. But there are thousands of foreign mercenaries in the Ukrainian army—trainers and reconnaissance officers.

Training is also going on like an assembly line. Britain has already trained 5,000 Ukrainian fighters. The instructors in the British training schools come from a variety of countries, from their own country, of course, but also from Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and even New Zealand. That is what is known.

In Germany, the Americans have set up training centres for the Ukrainian armed forces on their bases. They train specialists to use the Western equipment supplied to Kiev—from tanks and howitzers to drones and radars. In Poland, they are training ground troops. In the US, Ukrainian military pilots and aircraft technicians are being trained. This means that they are planning to supply fighter aircraft to Kiev.

I’ll interrupt the flow here for a reason: is this a problem?

I mean, after all, it could be argued that all the training going on is ‘just’ a way of ‘helping Ukraine’ or #standingwith the Kyiv gov’t.

Germany’s Bundestag: Military Training = Co-Belligerency

Yet, once one considers the provisions of international law, this is highly problematic—as explained in a 12-page expertise written by the academic-scientific staffers of the German Bundestag almost half a year ago.

Entitled, ‘Legal questions of military support for Ukraine by NATO countries between neutrality and conflict participation’, here’s the gist of it (emphases mine, references omitted; p. 4):

In the current war between Russia and Ukraine, NATO countries are walking a tightrope by, on the one hand, supporting Ukraine militarily without, on the other hand, intervening as an active party in the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine (so-called ‘third-party intervention’). Third-party intervention in an armed conflict entails serious legal and military consequences—from a geographical expansion of the conflict area to the potential for (nuclear) escalation.

Vehemently discussed by the media, the question as to when a state that militarily supports a party to a conflict becomes a party to the conflict itself, cannot, however, be easily answered in the answered in the abstract and certainly not precisely on the basis of clear ‘red lines’. In many cases there are grey areas that have to be legally examined and only allow an answer to the question posed in the only in specific individual cases.

So, are the above-listed countries party to the conflict because they supply military hardware to Ukraine? (The below quote is on p. 4)

It can be considered certain under international law that military support for a particular party to a conflict in the form of arms deliveries, the provision of military equipment, etc. does not yet cross the line into participation in the conflict.

Well, I’m glad we’ve got this one solved.

So, what about training combatants on one’s soil?

Here, the expertise takes a detour via the (still-valid) Briand-Kellog Pact of 1928, which introduced the notion of ‘non-belligerence’ into international law, referenced also by the Bundestag’s expertise (p. 4).

The law of neutrality is to a certain extent superimposed on the general prohibition of the use of force and the system of collective security created by Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Neutrality has been replaced by a new legal status of non-belligerence.

Citing legal scholar Stefan Talmond (U Bonn, Professor of International and Constitutional Law; bio here), in particular his blog posting from 9 March 2022, the Bundestag’s expertise explains (p. 5):

The term ‘non-warfare’ or ‘non-belligerent’ had been chosen at the 38th session of the Association for International Law in Budapest in September 1934 by the Swedish international law expert and later judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice, Åke Hammarskjöld, to be distinguished from to the classical concept of neutrality. As such, it describes the legal position of the parties to the War Powers Pact who oppose the aggressor without themselves taking an active part in hostilities. Although the Budapest Declaration of Interpretation of the [Kellog-Briand Pact] was not uncontroversial, especially in international law scholarship, it was taken up by several states in the following years. [line break mine]

As early as April 1935, former US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson referred to the Budapest Interpretive Declaration in a speech to the American Society of International Law when he declared that a violation of the [Kellog-Briand Pact] constituted a breach of international law against all contracting parties and entitled them to deny the aggressor the classical rights of neutrality.

Rendered into plain English, the question before us is this: are individual (Western) countries, by supplying arms and training, able to claim ‘non-belligerent’ status?

Back to the Bundestag’s expertise (p. 6; emphasis in the original):

In the case of support on the basis of non-belligerency, the scope of arms deliveries, but also the question of whether they are ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’ weapons, remains legally irrelevant. Only when, in addition to the supply of weapons, the conflict party receives training in the use of such weapons, one would be leaving the secured area of non-warfare.

When and how would one leave the ‘non-warfare’ realm? Here’s the answer (p. 7; my emphases):

Intervention with one’s own armed forces, i.e., direct participation in the conflict with military ‘man power’, undoubtedly makes a supporting state a belligerent party to the conflict (‘co-belligerent’)…

Participation in the conflict would not come into being once the proverbial ‘boots [are put] on the ground’, but already with military surveillance and enforcement of a ‘no-fly zone’ (against Russian fighter jets) in Ukrainian airspace.

The Bundestags’s expertise goes on explaining hypotheticals, including NATO’s infamous Art. 5, but I’ll spare you these considerations right now.

Bottom Lines

Speaking from the point of international law, the conflict is some pretty tricky business. It’s a fact that the list of countries that materially support Ukraine consists of some 40+ states by now, with the US, the EU, and leading Western nations firmly on top of the list:

The question confronting the Kremlin is certainly how to respond to the increasing number and quality of Western commitments, esp. as the consequences of actually treating ‘unfriendly’ countries as co-belligerents comes with mindbogglingly dangerous implications, such as full-blown World War III vs. NATO and its worldwide allies and the spectre of nuclear escalation.

I also mentioned the business side—and here, the calculus from the US side of things is a bit more clear: once its allies (vassals) have emptied most of their disposable stockpiles of arms and ammunition, guess where NATO countries will go to buy more war materials? Yep, US arms producers, which allows consideration of the notion that this entire shitshow is actually a gigantic economic stimulus program for the US, i.e., military Keynesianism running wild.

Now, if I can perceive these implications, here’s my question for the day: why, for the love of God, cannot European politicians grasp the realities of this? Already, Germany will spend 100 billion euros on military hardware and rearmament, most of which will flow to US manufacturers, i.e., another form of tribute to the imperial masters in D.C. It is expected that most NATO allies will follow this example.

Almost as an aside, with the scale and scope of arms deliveries and bespoke training ramping up, the mention in the Vesti7 comment of the potential of US-supplied rockets that could reach the Russian naval base at Sevastopol—it’s a mere 300 km as the crow flies from Odessa—indicates that things will quite likely get worse before too long.

Let us hope cooler heads prevail, but remember: like in the ancient tale of Pandora’s Box, hope is probably, and quite literally so, the last straw we have.