After World War II, the international community created a global management system called the United Nations. Its goal was to prevent nuclear wars; the first committee the main players established was the “Nuclear Commission.” Both the victorious and the losing nations jointly and happily celebrated the establishment of the Commission of Human Rights. Nations would solve their conflicts without resorting to war. They would respect the rights of innocent civilians thanks to the Bill of Human Rights.
Armies would kill armies; noncombatants would be spared from the calamities of war. The date was 1946.
I wonder if anyone who was killed at the train station in Kramatorsk Raion in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine had felt safe since Feb. 24, 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded their country and started that criminal war? Did anybody try to inspire his family members by saying that the Bill of Human Rights would guaranty their safe passage with a ride on the train that was about to embark?
That document, which sought to end disagreements between governments without harming the innocent civilians, was breached by its very creators right after its publication. Not counting the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Chinese Civil War, the British and French war against the Vietnamese communists and the Iran civil war that pitted the U.S. and the British armies against the Soviet Union after World War II but before the Bill of Human Rights, nations started killing civilians right after 1946. The Greek Civil War, the U.S. involvement in the Philippines rebellion and the Korean uprisings, and finally the First Indochina War between the Soviet Union, China, East Germany and Poland and France, Britain and the U.S. should have convinced humanity that nothing would change: Armies would kill innocent civilians whenever they could in war.
The Ukrainians and the Russian minority in the Donbass area as well as in and around Crimea knew they would be paying the bill of yet another international conflict with their homes, gardens, cars and possibly with their lives. That is why 11 million of them fled Ukraine. Millions of people must have learned, in 285 distinct armed conflicts since 1946, that there was no such a thing as a war limited to the armies, and that the U.N. in its present form and shape could not help governments to make peace without resorting to violence.
Now, 76 years after the adoption of that human rights charter and 75 years after the Cold War started, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised speech before the U.N. Security Council last week that states do not rely on international institutions and international law, asking for the dissolution of the U.N.
Historians do not seem to agree on the starting date of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and the USSR and their respective allies, but the period known as the Cold War is generally considered to begin with the Truman Doctrine (American foreign policy to contain Soviet expansion) and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1947-1991). Mr. Zelenskyy should know that international institutions and their laws do not protect innocent civilians from the evils of war, but the craftsmanship of their leaders has saved people from disasters. In the bipolar world of the Cold War Era, the third world war was prevented by the fear of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Humanity assumed that the U.S. and the USSR had enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other, and if one side attempted a first strike on the other, itself would also be destroyed. Under this really mad umbrella, even children knew nations could be destroyed by non-nuclear weapons.
Mr. Zelenskyy should take heed of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. When the U.S. or Soviet troops retreated from these countries, the world learned of the horrors inflicted on their civilians, as we are now witnessing in Ukraine. A master politician would, in the first place, not allow the Russian occupation to start. A skillful politician would not become a pawn in the big chess game that the West set up to dismember the Russian Federation. A seasoned statesman would see the virtue of Swiss-like neutrality to ensure external security and promote peace. A weathered politician would craftily wrestle the Donbass region and Crimea away from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On the other hand, a prudent Russian leader should also know that the neocon redesigners of the global map have not swarmed the White House for nothing. That leader would also know that formal NATO membership is not required to ensure a stockpile of 10 anti-tank missiles for each Russian tank he obtusely rams into Ukraine.
It’s really time for peace. If someone could talk some sense into NATO’s bosses, the U.S. and the U.K., so that they see that Russia is not going to be dismembered easily and each part of it is not going to revolt against the Kremlin's rule, they may, at least, postpone their global remapping plan for now. Otherwise, there will be no country left to rebuild after Russian troops pull back.
On April 4, the two countries were closer to a summit talk than they are today. After a senseless massacre in Bucha and the missile attack at the train station in Kramatorsk, which killed at least 39 people – one of the missiles did not explode so that we could see the message in Russian “Za detei,” meaning for or on behalf of the children, had been carelessly written on it – the prospect of peace has been left to the mercy of NATO.
Yes, the U.N. system failed the Ukrainian people; but it was not the first time. In Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, Yemen and Myanmar, the U.N., its charters, and its peacekeeping forces did not protect the people. In July 1995, right after the Rwandan genocide, Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic murdered 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica right under the eyes of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers. But the U.N. is not the only system to achieve peace now.
Zelenskyy and Putin may still sit down and talk. The Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state. Ukraine officials seem ready to declare that they will never join the NATO military bloc.
Russian officials should not be encouraged to assume that they would weather the U.S.-led embargoes out somehow. They need to come back to the peace table.
