When waking up on 24 February, a glance at the news made it clear that our worst fears have been realized: Russia is waging an aggressive war against Ukraine. On the same day, we spoke with Lauri M\u00e4lksoo about Russian aggression, attempts by the Kremlin to justify its illegal violence, and the “civilizational turn” in Russian politics of international law. Lauri M\u00e4lksoo, professor of international law at the University of Tartu (Estonia), is considered one of the most distinguished experts on Russian approaches to international law. His much-received book with this very title was published with OUP in 2015.<\/p>\n
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Dear Lauri, against the background of your many years of academic research on Russian politics of international law: to what extent did the Russian decision to invade Ukraine surprise you? <\/strong><\/p>\n There was a game-changer in the current Russian decision to invade Ukraine: the tactic of steady high-level pre-warnings that the US and other leading Western States gave before it, based on their intelligence, namely that Russia was about to militarily attack Ukraine. For example, in 2014, Russia managed to catch Ukraine and the rest of the world by surprise, using its already existing military bases in Crimea, with the camouflage of its forces, organizing a snap referendum, etc. Now in 2022 the Western pre-warnings made such a covert tactic of takeover difficult to implement. The Western tactic also made it harder to create convincingly a so-called false flag operation a la Soviet \u2018shots of Mainila\u2019 against Finland in 1939. The recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk \u2018People\u2019s Republics\u2019 by Moscow would not in itself have been so surprising as Russia already used this technique in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008. But a large-scale and overt Russian war against Ukraine as a country as it was unleashed on 24 February 2022 still surprised me. Our generation has been raised and trained in the spirit that Article 2 para 4 of the UN Charter is the most important legal norm of international relations. Any overt violation of this norm remains shocking.<\/p>\n The Russian invasion is a crystal-clear aggression. Nevertheless, Vladimir Putin invoked international law in his televised <\/strong>speech<\/strong><\/a> on 24 February to justify his own violence as \u2018self-defence\u2019. What does Putin\u2019s justification of war tell us about current Russian politics of international law?<\/strong><\/p>\n In the same televised speech, Putin also said that many international norms have in the meantime been violated and become obsolete. He also referred to the principle of the balance of power of which I wrote critically in the Crimean context in an EJIL essay in 2019<\/a>. Moreover, beside referring to international law, Putin referred to truth and justice, essentially suggesting to his Russian audience that these were on Russia\u2019s side in this war, whatever else would be said. President Putin knows enough about international law to know that Russia has had a relatively restrictive concept of self-defence and has been a constant criticizer of US attempts \u2013 for example during the Presidency of George W. Bush \u2013 to extend the right to self-defence to pre-emptive situations, i.e., not only \u2018if an armed attack occurs\u2019 (Art 51 of the Charter). At the same time, Russia\u2019s military doctrine mentions that Russia is entitled to use force for the defence of its citizens abroad. For me, the decision to invade Ukraine has nothing to do with genuine right to self-defence as we know it in international law since 1945; it is a risky decision to attempt to change the course of world order. Putin invoked in his speech Russia\u2019s necessity on a global scale: if Russia retreats further geopolitically, it will no longer have an independent future, etc. However, we should keep in mind that this precisely is how Adolf Hitler argued, from Nazi Germany\u2019s perspective, about the Soviet Union in 1941; namely, that pre-emptive strike was necessary for certain higher reasons. Such a thinking is not compatible with international law and States\u2019 rights as we know them.<\/p>\n In your book <\/strong>Russian Approaches to International Law <\/em><\/strong>(2015)<\/strong><\/a> you wrote about a \u2018civilizational turn\u2019 in Russian rhetoric. What exactly do you mean by this?<\/strong><\/p>\n Russia has since at least the 19th century had a permanent internal argument about the question whether it is a European country or not. The civilizational rhetoric emphasizes Russia\u2019s differences from Europe and the West and portrays the West \u2013 currently especially the US \u2013 as immense civilizational danger. Seeing the world in terms of civilizational conflicts makes having universal international law quite difficult, perhaps impossible as \u2018thick\u2019 international law. Thus, Article 2 para 4 may be a universal norm in the UN Charter but a \u2018country-civilization\u2019 may still not want to respect it in its geopolitical backyard if it feels that a dependent nation is illegitimately (from civilizational perspective) drifting away from its Grossraum<\/em>. It seems to me that President Putin\u2019s core accusations against Ukraine are also of this kind: accusing them of betraying one\u2019s genuine civilization (being by fate in the same Grossraum <\/em>with Russia). Another area of international law in which the civilizational rhetoric has come to play an important role is human rights. Already in the Orthodox Declaration of Human Rights (2006)<\/a> which was initiated by the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, is expressed a civilizational critique of \u2018Western\u2019 human rights.<\/p>\n To what extent does the recent Russian aggression prove this \u2018civilizational turn\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n At the surface, the main justification about the Russian invasion in Ukraine may be geopolitical and military such as stopping NATO\u2019s further enlargement. But it also has strong civilizational components, e.g. President Putin\u2019s previous articles arguing that Russia and Ukraine are essentially one and the same nation. Putin would not argue such a thing about the Baltic States, for example. But about Ukraine, Putin argues essentially that the country is or must remain a \u2018Russian state\u2019. (Historically, the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 had a chapter on \u2018Russia and the Russian States\u2019.) In such \u2018civilizational\u2019 cases, treaties too acquire a different meaning than foreseen in universal international law. For example, Russia ratified its border treaty with Ukraine in 2003 in which Moscow recognized as Ukrainian Crimea, Donbass and everything else based on the borders at the time of the dissolution of the USSR. But for Moscow, there was an unwritten assumption in these treaties: Ukraine would remain part of the geopolitical family, part of the Russkyi mir<\/em>. When this assumption was about to change in what the Ukrainians call the revolution of dignity, previous treaties with Ukraine lost their validity for Moscow. I would say that the civilizational (re-)turn in Russia has not been a single event but a process which has lasted already more than 10 years now. Already in the case of Georgia in 2008 I think that Moscow\u2019s thinking was not only influenced by purely military and geopolitical ideas (NATO, etc) but also civilizational ones. To simplify, there should be no other supreme master than Moscow in the Christian Orthodox world.<\/p>\n