Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 9 – Vladimir Putin’s
acknowledgement that he personally decided upon and conducted a special operation
to seize Crimea “opens a unique and limited-time window of opportunities” for
the West to bring real pressure on him, divide his regime and force Moscow to
change course, according to Slava Rabinovich.
The Russian economist and blogger
says that Putin’s admission of responsibility along with his efforts to hide
the role of his regime in the murder of Boris Nemtsov should lead the West to
recognize and declare that Putin is “an international criinal and political
terrorist” (nv.ua/opinion/rabinovich/kogda-putina-obyavyat-prestupnikom-i-politicheskim-terroristom-38085.html).
If Western governments did so,
Rabinovich argues, then Putin would be find himself on the list of those
subject to arrest and dispatch to the international court, something that would
not only limit his travel options but would also have a serious impact on the
political pyramid in Moscow.
As the commentator says, this step
would lead to “a legally and politically interesting collision” given that it
is far from clear to anyone how anyone should act in a situation “where one is talking
about a dictator who has established his unconstitutional dictatorship over one
eighth of the earth’s surface and has in his possession nuclear arms.”
But Putin has opened the way for
just such charges by his admission that the Anschluss of Crimea was a special
operation he ordered rather than a free expression of the will of the residents
of that Ukrainian peninsula as he and his minions have insisted on a regular
basis over the last year. Indeed, he has “called down fire on himself” by his
latest statement.
Were Western governments to take
this step, Rabinovich continues, the upper reaches of the Putin regime would
divide ever more clearly “into two camps: those who cannot avoid responsibility”
for what Putin ordered “under any circumstances and those who have a chance to
deny their involvement” up to and including by organizing “a palace coup.”
These two groups, he suggests, could
be called “the twin towers of the Kremlin,” and they would seem to be completely
unequal in strength. Putin might appear to have the military in his corner, but
it is a principle of international law that “military personnel are not
required to obey the criminal orders of their commanders.”
Consequently, were Putin charged with war crimes,
Rabinovich continues, “the two towers of the Kremlin” would come into serious
conflict because both would be interested “in the literal sense of the word” in
protecting their own skins. And in
conclusions he adds the following observation:
This
could have in the near term but perhaps not long a positive set of consequences
because “one of the towers knows better than the other that politically and economically
precisely now there is a window of opportunities” that may soon close if Putin
moves Russia in the direction of “complete geopolitical and domestic economic chaos.”
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