In a video address on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a on Ukraine after months of denials by Kremlin officials that such an invasion was planned.
“In this connection, in accordance with Article 51 of Part 7 of the U.N. Charter … I have decided to conduct a special military operation. Its purpose is to protect people who have been subjected to scorn and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years. And for this purpose, we will strive to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
of the U.N. Charter states the right to self-defense when a U.N. member state is under armed attack.
Except that nobody attacked Russia, and Putin’s invocation of the charter is sheer disinformation to support a pretext for what has been widely condemned as violation of international law.
Article 51 Part 7 reads:
News of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine broke while Russia’s representative to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya, was presiding at an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council in New York.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.N., , spoke to Nebenzya directly, demanding that he “call Putin” to stop the war against his country. “There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador," Kyslytsya said.
In his announcement, Putin claimed the invasion was not meant to “cause harm to the interests of Ukraine and Ukrainian people” but instead to “protect the people.” He asked Ukrainians to “understand that and cooperate.
Addressing the Ukrainian military, using the communist greeting “Tovarischi,” or “comrades,” he warned them “not to obey the orders of the Nazis’ junta that usurped the power in Ukraine.”
Less than 24 hours into the war, Ukrainian officials and others reported at leastkilled and 169 more wounded, including civilians, from Russian strikes that simultaneously more than dozen cities.
Hundreds of thousands Ukrainian civilians are to the neighboring countries in Europe, leaving behind all their possessions and even pets, signaling the beginning of what could become Europe’s biggest-ever refugee crisis, .
“To clarify, what is under way is a full-scale and comprehensive military assault throughout Ukraine,” Senator , chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said on Twitter shortly after Putin’s announcement.
“Russia isn’t just focused on seizing eastern Ukraine. Russian military forces are working towards isolating Kyiv at this very moment,” with a goal to “decapitate Ukrainian government” and “establish superiority” over the Ukrainian territory, Rubio said.
Putin’s references to the “Nazi usurpation” and the need for Ukraine’s “denazification” are based on falsehoods, part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign that dates to the 2014 ouster, amid fierce protests and rioting, of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, an outcome Putin never accepted.
Putin responded by sending occupying forces into Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and inciting a deadly separatist war in the eastern Ukraine provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. To justify this new invasion, Putin unilaterally declared the provinces independent and cited their appeal for protection from Ukraine.
But Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not “usurping the power” of the Ukrainian people. Voters elected him with a 73% of the vote in 2019. Russia’s claims of election violations in Ukraine at the time have been thoroughly , and independent international observers the elections as transparent, competitive and free.
Zelenskyy is . His great-grandfather and three great-uncles were killed in the Nazi Holocaust during WWII.
For their part, Ukrainian Jews are outraged by Putin’s use of “denazification” to try justifying sending troops into Ukraine, the Israeli newspaper reported on the day of the invasion. Locals in Kyiv told the paper that “the Jews of Ukraine are an integral part of Ukrainian society, and we never faced Nazism here, or fascism, and we feel safe in Ukraine.”
The “Nazi” narrative has been a key part of the Russian disinformation campaign to justify the invasion. Putin, along with the top government official and state-controlled media, has been pushing the false narrative that Ukraine is “occupied by Nazis” ever since Russia took Crimea.
The Russian propaganda exaggerated and misrepresented the role neo-Nazi groups play in the Ukrainian military and government. In fact, it was mainly Russia’s 2014 invasion that gave rise to ultranationalist groups whose vigilante members vow to defend Ukraine against Russia, reported in 2018.