Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The situation in Ukraine is complex and the outcome is unknowable, but potentially world-changing for free nations and the world itself...
Unsurprisingly, alleged serial rapist and career criminal Donald Trump has come out in support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"I went in yesterday and there was a television screen," Trump told a rightwing talk show, "and I said, 'This is genius.' Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine - of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper."
Donald Trump, you'll remember, was first impeached because the very day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy turned down his demand to manufacture dirt on candidate Joe Biden, the White House Office of Management and Budget moved to block hundreds of millions in defensive military aid to Ukraine.
Trump's enthusiasm for the collapse of Ukraine notwithstanding, the most basic element of all law down through the ages is the right of bodily autonomy: the right not to have your body invaded.
When it's done physically it's called assault; when sexually, it's rape. As the 1920s Temperance Movement saying goes, "Your right to swing your arm ends where the other man's nose begins."
The core principle of international law is similar. No nation has the right to violate the territorial integrity of another, except in self-defense. That principle has been, the western world asserts, violated by Russia with their invasion of Ukraine.
As Senator Bernie Sanders said yesterday, "Vladimir Putin's latest invasion of Ukraine is an indefensible violation of international law, regardless of whatever false pretext he offers."
That said, the Biden administration finds itself in an awkward position when lecturing Russia about invading other countries without justification. We did just that in 2003 when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney intentionally and deliberately lied us into a war with Iraq to try a neoliberal experiment with their economy and "liberate" that nation's oil.
Ironically, Russia - which formed closer security bonds with the US after 9/11 - was among the countries pointing out that Bush's invasion of Iraq was both illegal and would damage the standing of America in the world's eyes, as their invasion of Afghanistan generations earlier had taught them.
As Russian political analyst Aleksandr Tsipko noted, "The war in Iraq " had a significant effect on the psychological and political climate in Russia " [and] has boosted Putin's stature as a statesman who cares about the dignity of his country."
Ukraine is neither a member of NATO or the European Union, and we have no explicit defensive treaty or agreement with them. But they are a democracy - a vanishing breed in the world since the Bush years - and a full member of the United Nations.
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