US President Donald Trump shakes hand with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a press conference after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. Photo / AP
The war in Ukraine has hit the 1000-day mark.
On February 24, 2022 – Russia invaded Ukraine – since then, hundreds of thousands of people have died, many more have been injured, and millions are displaced.
It’s been called the largest and deadliest in Europe since World War II.
Waikato University international law professor Alexander Gillespie told The Front Page thus far Russia’s Vladimir Putin has shown no willingness to negotiate.
US President-elect Donald Trump touted his good working relationship with Putin on his campaign trail and has pledged he’ll put an end to the war in Ukraine.
“It’s easy to make a deal within 24 hours about what you want peace to look like. The difficulty is whether the belligerents on the ground are willing to accept those terms,” Gillespie said.
“If you allow an annexed territory to be removed you may have a chance at a type of peace. The problem you’ve then got is that to allow this, you’ve got to override the United Nations Charter, you’ve got to ignore the International Court of Justice, and you’ve got to put the International Criminal Court to one side.
“There’d be no discussion of war crimes, territorial sovereignty, international law ... What we have then is a concern with precedent value.
“If you allow one country to annex territory by a military and violent means, but not one area, it could spread. And so, other countries in the world right now which are interested in this debate, like Israel, will be following it very closely.
“All you have got to do is hold out for long enough ... You can’t annex someone else’s territory – this principle has been clear since WWII. If you’re going to have peace, you can’t allow one country to take someone else’s territory, force them to negotiate, and then acquire it because that becomes instability and the global order will disintegrate.”
This week, US President Joe Biden gave the green light for Ukraine to strike Russia with US-made, long-range missiles.
It comes just nine weeks before Trump takes office.
Gillespie said the missiles in question have a range of 200 to 300km so they would not reach Moscow or St Petersburg.
“The targets are likely to be places where there are troop concentrations, where there are fuel stockpiles or command bunkers. This will not alter the flow of the war, and will not stop Russia.
“But, it will escalate the war and the risk here is that Putin sees this as an egregious act which is directly threatening Russia itself with weapons made in the West.
“So, we can expect a response from Putin but we don’t know what that response will be.”
One of those responses could be to utilise the thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to Russia.
“Right now, intelligence suggests they are present and they are prepared, but they’ve not yet been deployed,” Gillespie said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about whether there’s any end in sight for the Ukraine conflict.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Putin signed a decree that enables nuclear weapon use against non-nuclear states.