“When are we at war?” former Bundestag MP and CDU defense spokesman Willy Wimmer asks in a comment for the NachDenkSeiten news website on the Sept. 23-27 referenda in eastern and southeastern Ukraine and the Lugansk and Donetsk republics about whether to become part of the Russian Federation. “So far, the answer to this question depends on the Russian Federation’s assessment in light of the West’s approach to Ukraine….
“Each side would do well to provide a legally clean argument for its own actions according to the accepted rules of international law, including the lessons learned from NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, which violated international law. In the process, an allegedly existing ‘right to protection’ outside one’s own national territory was postulated. This also applies to the question of when one is at war according to one’s own perception. The Scientific Service of the Bundestag presented groundbreaking statements on this issue months ago [https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/892384/d9b4c174ae0e0af275b8f42b143b2308/WD-2-019-22-pdf-data.pdf] …. It is advisable to place these principles next to the actual development that is now taking place.
“As a result of the possible referenda in certain areas, there could be decisions in the Russian Federation which, in the Russian understanding of the state, would mean a shift of the Russian state border at least 200 km to the west. All NATO activities would then not take place in a civil war area of Ukraine, but, in the Russian view, [would then be] directed against Russia. In view of the actual assessments, the abovementioned report of the Scientific Service turns support activities on behalf of Ukraine in a civil war area into a military action of NATO against the Russian Federation. This opens the door directly to global war. President Putin’s speech on Sept. 21, 2022 made this unmistakably clear. NATO will then no longer need to declare an alliance emergency, because it is the alliance that will lead the attack.” (Emphasis added.)
Readers should note Wimmer’s accurate characterization of the 1999 “right to protect” doctrine first put forward by Britain’s Tony Blair at the Economic Club of Chicago, as a violation of international law. It was characterized as “the end of the Treaty of Westphalia” which had ended the Thirty Years War, but was the doctrine that governed Blair and the Anglosphere’s 2003 Iraq Preventive War against the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” (efi, dhs)
