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In October 2022, by which point Russia's “special military operation” had already escalated into a full-scale bloody war, Putin delivered another keynote speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club. In this talk, he justified Russia’s invasion in terms of the losers rebelling against the winners. Russia, Putin explained, had broken the “rules”, which were essentially just a moral smokescreen for Western arbitrariness. Law, therefore, is always a point of temporary balance between real existing forces. The fake “international law”, whose true origins — the military, political, and economic superiority of one geopolitical pole over the rest of the world — are hypocritically concealed, must be opposed by what Putin has called “democracy in international affairs”. Such “democracy”, in turn, represents not a formal (and therefore fictitious) equality between the strong and the weak, but recognition of the right of those who possess power to defend their interests by any means available. According to Putin, this is precisely the essence of the war against Ukraine: a rebellion of life against the dry letter of law. In other words, international law is not metaphysical in nature, but is redefined creatively by those who have the strength and resolve to apply it.
Ilya Budraitskis writes for various left-wing media outlets and is the author of the book “Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics, and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia”. Until recently, he taught at the School of Social and Economic Sciences and the Institute of Temporary Art in Moscow.
There is no doubt that the war in Ukraine — and Russia’s ultimate transformation into a totalitarian dictatorship after 2022 — was the culmination of a long process. At the dawn of his rule, Putin presented himself as a post-ideological pragmatist, ready to integrate the country into international institutions. Moreover, in 2001, Putin enthusiastically supported the American “war on terror” in Afghanistan and attempted to link it to his punitive military operation in Chechnya. It was precisely the logic of the concentration of personal power, the political expropriation of Russian big business, and the perception of the entire post-Soviet space as a natural sphere of Russian dominance that gradually transformed Putin’s worldview, turning him from a cynic and opportunist into an ideological imperialist. Such imperialism has not only an economic but also a political dimension (their complex interplay has been analysed repeatedly in the past). In this sense, neither Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nor the US attack on Iran can be viewed solely as the pursuit of rational collective interests of capital. Rather, the capitalist logic of relentless expansion in such decisions is carried over into international politics, which also begins to be regarded as an arena of ruthless competition where only the strongest survive.
International law is an Illusion
It has been four years since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Putin’s Nietzschean revolt against “imposed rules” has indeed created a new norm. Obviously, this principle is not codified in any international policy documents or formal institutions. Rather, it constitutes an informal standard of conduct for every nuclear power, which may disregard any universal “rules” and act solely according to its subjective interpretation of its national interests and security threats. Thus, the 2022 invasion was justified by the Kremlin as a pre-emptive measure to avert a supposed threat from Ukraine. The same logic was employed by Israel, whose aggressive operations on the territory of neighbouring countries were invariably presented as acts of self-defence and the Jewish state’s struggle for its very existence. Today, after American attacks on Venezuela and Iran, it is difficult to say that anyone is trying to hypocritically cover up their military superiority with references to international law. If Putin has, as a military leader, not yet succeeded in breaking Ukraine, he has certainly won as an ideologue.
International law is dead — it has no guns or armies, no missiles or drones. No one needs to prove anymore that it is a lie and an illusion. Of course, diplomatic rhetoric may still refer to it, but only as an argument in the ongoing dialogue among members of the nuclear club. Thus, in January of this year, following Maduro’s kidnapping, Putin stated the need to “demand that all members of the international community comply with international law”. Recently Russia condemned the attack on Iran as a “violation of international law” and an act of “aggression”, while at almost the same time Putin offered Donald Trump his services as a mediator, and their phone conversation, according to the Russian side, was “frank and constructive”.
Shared interests instead of shared values
It was a respectful dialogue in a world that has become more “democratic”, where violators of international law are no longer pariahs but potential partners in a “deal”. In essence, a multipolar world in its ideal form looks like a global system of “deals” in which there are no moral principles or permanent friends, but rather constant interests and unlimited sovereignty. Thus, the US and Israeli aggression in the Middle East has certainly affected Russia’s “friend”, but at the same time has strengthened its importance as an oil exporter and, therefore, its real weight in world politics. A multipolar world, unbound by shared values (most importantly, the non-escalation of nuclear conflict), is built on “weak ties”: unlike the Soviet Union, that for decades constructed its international counter-hegemony through ideological anti-colonialism and a model of socialist economy, Putin’s Russia is not attempting to create a solid anti-Western bloc. It is clear that mutual obligations within such a bloc (for example, as part of BRICS) would limit the “sovereignty” of Putin’s Russia. Thus, the “spirit of Anchorage" constantly praised by Minister Lavrov — that is, the bilateral meeting between Putin and Trump in Alaska last summer, where the partition of Ukraine’s territories was discussed without the participation of Ukraine — clearly contradicts any notions of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. At the same time, Russian propaganda in African and Latin American countries keeps using anti-colonial language and references to international law—which has supposedly been violated by the hypocritical West.
In his recent remarkable speech in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of international law as an ideological illusion to which small and medium-sized countries clung until the last. Lacking real military power, such countries have become accustomed to believing that their independence is protected by legal norms and the lessons of history. It is necessary to abandon this chimera and accept the reality in which smaller countries must unite their military efforts and create “fortresses” in a world where rules no longer exist. A similar view was recently expressed by the Ukrainian president's adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak: we are already living in a state of global lawlessness, a de facto world war of all against all. And the only hope is that this global war, like previous ones, will ultimately result in the emergence of a new international legal order.
So what was this failed international law — nothing more than a reflection of the hegemony of a few nations, a short-lived ideological fog, or an attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to establish a moral norm founded not on force but on reason? The future of the planet today depends on the answer to this question — the ever-present question of perpetual peace.
It would be naive to deny the fact that international law has been used for decades to justify domination, neocolonialism, and inequality. However, reducing it to a simple tool of power is fundamentally flawed logic, whose consequences have become particularly evident in the present day. In this sense, international law has always had a dual nature: on the one hand, it effectively consolidates the current balance of forces, but on the other, it refers to a moral norm, a horizon of a better, more just and humane world than the one we live in today.
We must admit that in recent years, the left has been too quick to abandon the utopian and emancipatory potential of international law, accepting the geopolitical language of realism.
Immanuel Kant clearly contrasted this norm with national sovereignty: the goal of rational people is to recognize one another as equals, to regard human life as an absolute value rather than a price that can be paid for the supremacy of certain states above others. The idea of unconditional sovereignty, which is so important to Putin or Trump, on the other hand, is based on the notion that any law not backed by force is an abstraction, and that every kind of morality is relative and instrumental. From this point of view, a “perpetual peace” is nothing more than a utopia that, as Kant aptly wrote, is only possible in the cemetery.
Nevertheless, moral norms have never been reduced to pure metaphysics and have always had a material dimension. They are extremely real and material because they represent the power of the powerless and make visible to sovereign predators those who are invisible and ephemeral: small countries, minorities, migrants, and refugees. The fact that at some point the world powers came to use moral and normative language to assert their own hegemony was in many ways an achievement of liberation movements (just think of the confirmation of the “national self-determination” principle in international law after World War I or the influence of nuclear disarmament campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s).
We must admit that in recent years, the left has been too quick to abandon the utopian and emancipatory potential of international law, accepting the geopolitical language of “realism”. This trend largely explains the confusion of the international left in the face of the current crisis. Undoubtedly, we as socialists live and act in the real world and have to take into account the limits of what is possible. But they alone are responsible for turning ideas into material force, representing the unrepresented, and defending the language of moral norms in the face of nihilistic imperialism.
