Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has sparked debate among military experts on the future of the responsibility to protect principle, and how R2P can be misused by regimes seeking justification for political violence.
Already, the principle is mired in scepticism – with regimes frightened of international intervention under humanitarian pretences, while others (mainly China and Russia) accused the framework of being a smokescreen for Western unilateralism.
According to John Reid, US Air Force Officer and Staff Judge Advocate for Special Operations Command Europe, in War on the Rocks this week Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine closely reflected the arguments typically employed by R2P advocates, threatening the ongoing viability of the principle to justify humanitarian intervention in the future.
Indeed, according to Reid, the suggestion from the Kremlin of the existence of a genocide in Ukraine “was the culmination of an almost decade-long Russian argument utilizing the supposed humanitarian plight of ethnic minorities in Ukraine, namely ethnic-speaking Russians, to justify military aggression”.
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