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The start of this whole loathsome story was with the US trying to bring Ukraine into NATO back in 2008, which was vehemently opposed by France and Germany, the principal European countries. Eventually they got the US to water it down into 'when, not if, not now'. The US was the one providing lethal military aid to Ukraine pre-war, 90% of all aid pre-war.
Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission? We can meddle in the internal workings of other countries in ways that make Russiagate look like even more of a joke (looking at you Yeltsin). But as long as there are no annexations, it's fine?
This is like saying you can march into someone's house, shoot the owner, take their property, re-educate their children, give the property to nearby friends, squat on it indefinitely - but as long as you don't write your name down on the deed it's OK. No sane person would stand by this principle. Anyway, if Russia said 'oh we're not going to annex Ukraine, just conduct regime change', there would be no difference in the reaction from the West. Annexation is clearly not the issue here.
Besides, where is it written in the UN charter that countries can't be annexed or that invasions are illegal? The UN charter says nothing about 'no annexations', the Security Council is the highest authority on these matters. Whatever the Security Council decides is binding. If the Security Council can't make up its mind, then there is nothing left to say.
The whole of Ukraine, including Crimea, is officially targeted for NATO integration and has been for years. For example, in 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership affirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine and its ownership of Crimea. It said that Ukraine was going to get 'full integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions' which means NATO and EU. The US was helping Ukraine finish the necessary reforms and so on. It's just putting two and two together: full integration into Euro-Atlantic, full recognition of pre-2014 borders, plus weapons = the military support is to retake everything: Luhansk, Crimea and so on. Now maybe the US doesn't quite want to go that far in real terms, yet that's what they're formally saying, that's what is written down in treaties and in their rhetoric.
Sure and the US has been egging them on all the way. There's a haunting Biden clip from the early 2000s where, when Putin says that he'll work more with China because the US is overbearing, Biden says something like 'good luck with that - there is no replacement for the US, ultimately you have to come to the table whether you like it or not'. There were opportunities to work with Russia in the war on terror but the US just squandered them, pulling out of the ABM treaty for instance. What is that if not a giant red flag?
Yes. Wars of annexation materially strengthen aggressors and incentivize further war, they are a sort of geopolitical positive feedback loop. In the modern era going to war makes you weaker and poorer, less capable of waging war rather than more. Sometimes countries are willing to do it anyway, and of course there is gaming of the boundaries, but keeping the feedback loop negative rather than positive helps stop this getting too out of hand. How harmful (or beneficial) the war is to the country being invaded isn't really relevant to that, the important thing is that it be harmful to the aggressor. For instance the invasion of Iraq imposed a cost rather than a benefit on the U.S. (as even most of its proponents knew it would) so it didn't result in a series of more U.S. invasions, but the Russian invasion of Crimea was sufficiently beneficial that it chain-reacted into the invasion of the rest of Ukraine.
Wars must have no winners, only losers, and to ensure this continues to remain the case countries are willing to take losses themselves so that attempted wars of annexation leave the aggressor indisputably worse-off. Complaining that countries are "irrationally" willing to harm themselves for the sake of deterrence is deeply silly, it's basic game-theory and central to the logic of modern war. If Russia thought countries wouldn't really be willing to harm themselves for no benefit besides vague principles of game-theoretic value, that's just another way that Russia's status as a low-trust society has made them weaker.
Did they know that? I remember that time well and I recall many, many hours of debate with advocates of the Iraq war who spent a great deal of time telling me about the many benefits of victory in the Iraq war.
Sometimes I wish I had kept in touch with some of the more passionate voices. I'd be interested in hearing their perspective now.
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But they weren't saying this. Nobody in the US was saying officially that the Iraq war was going to weaken America but that they should do it anyway. The opponents of the Iraq war were saying this would be a quagmire, cause all kinds of problems. The proponents were saying 'let's get rid of Saddam it'll be easy and stabilize the Middle East, spread democracy, make new allies...'. Now the proponents weren't exactly honest about their true goals and were not aligned with US national interests... But anyway, if you march into a country and turn it into a vassal, it's supposed to strengthen your alliance bloc since they then can contribute to further wars.
Helping Iraqis and the Middle East doesn't significantly materially strengthen the U.S., it's expending U.S. resources and power for the sake of charity. This is inherently self-limiting, the U.S. has resources to waste on things like this but in the end it is left with less capability to wage war than it started with. Having Iraq as an ally or vassal was never going to be valuable enough to be worth a war, even if it was as easy as proponents thought it would be, and proponents of the war instead justified the war in terms of humanitarian (Saddam, democracy) or threat-reduction (WMDs) concerns. And the U.S. didn't even really turn Iraq into a vassal, it's a democracy that has been at times vocally critical of the U.S. and there is no guarantee that U.S./Iraq relations won't worsen further in the future. It would have been far easier to turn it into an ally in some other way, like buddying up to Saddam or replacing him with some other dictator. Proponents of the Iraq war didn't say they would turn Iraq into a vassal, they said they would turn it into a democracy, and that is indeed what they did. It was the opponents of the Iraq war who said the U.S. would materially benefit, the "No blood for oil" people, but that was never remotely realistic and the proponents didn't say it was.
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The actual principle is that the United States can do what it wants because of its military capacity. There are many fig leaves layered over the top of this, but the reality is that the principle that governs the difference between the United States and Russia is that those that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. American diplomats and politicians claim otherwise, often with sweet language about democracy and such, but the reality is quite apparent.
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