Javier Rupérez
Ambassador of Spain
It was in November 2022, a few months after Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation invaded the territory of Ukraine in February of the same year, that my book From Helsinki to Kiev saw the light of day. The Destruction of the International Order. It contains a personal reflection, from my early days as a diplomat, to my considerations, in the light of those experiences, of what Russian aggression against Ukraine meant.
I have carefully reread the last fifty pages of the volume, devoted precisely to what such abuse meant for the international order that the world, with all its flaws and shortcomings, had known since the end of World War II in 1945 and the birth of the United Nations Charter, and I must confess my horror at the extent of the frustrated prophecy that my pages contained. They said, among other things: ‘Ukraine cannot cede territory to the aggressor. The aggressor can expect no other end to his actions than to proceed to the withdrawal of the occupying troops. The aggressor must make reparations for the physical and material damage caused in the attacked Ukraine. And those responsible for the disaster, starting with Putin himself, must be brought before the appropriate international courts.
The latter turned out to be partially true: it was on 17 March 2023 that the International Criminal Court, in accordance with Article 8 of the Rome Statute governing its powers, issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin as president of the Russian Federation and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Russian president’s office, arguing that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that each of the suspects bears criminal responsibility for the war crime of illegal deportation of population’. Unfortunately, the ensuing arrests have not taken place because the indictees have carefully avoided setting foot on the territory of any of the 123 states that are part of the Tribunal.
This explains why the incipient talks on Ukraine’s future are taking place in Saudi Arabia, which is not a party to the Rome agreement, and possibly continue in Russia or the United States, which are familiar with exactly the same situation. But the inevitable question, and beyond what might happen under the provisions of international justice, is: where does the global order stand as US President Donald Trump begins talks with the war criminal Putin to, by all indications, strike a deal that will guarantee reward to the aggressor and commercial and economic benefit to his new global partner?
Three years have passed since the Russian aggression against Ukraine began and we have been able to certify that, instead of the forecasts with which the Russian saw its intentions of occupation being achieved, a joint economic and military response from NATO and EU member states has frustrated the criminal intentions of the Kremlin oligarch and cast doubt on the scope of its intentions. The confrontation has already taken a terrible toll in the hundreds of thousands of dead and the incalculable material cost that the Russian adventure has inflicted on Ukrainian territory.
Are we contemplating a new paradigm of conduct in international relations from which everything other than business, power and the consequent refusal to respect anything that does not coincide with such objectives disappears? Is this the new national and international direction of the United States under the presidency of Donald J. Trump, whom Putin has received with quasi-messianic fervour? To which must be painfully added the refusal of the two new allies to prevent the aggrieved country and those other countries that have provided economic and military assistance to its defence from having any say in the process that might define the end of the aggression.
As history reminds us, the reward for the criminal always brings with it the continuation of his crimes: Hitler’s story in the Sudetenland in 1938 may be very similar to Putin’s in Ukraine in 2023. There, with the Nazi, were Chamberlain and Daladier. Here, with the self-confessed USSR nostalgic, is Donald J. Trump. The answers are not easy, oscillating between those offered by the pragmatists and those upheld by the defenders of a certain notion of peace and stability based on respect for the law, human rights and democracy. But the evidence and the responsibility today have an obvious and inescapable place: Western and democratic Europe. It only remains to hope and work for it and its members to restore the lost international order.
