Should the international laws be amended to consider state-led cyber attacks an act of war in additional to traditional aggression? Seems like UN Security Council should deal with these matters.
It's the sort of organizing the US used to be good at, and is presently failing at miserably (for obvious reasons). Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around.
In the case of Britain we've had a disastrous handling of the pandemic which is still on going (both the illness and the handling of it) on top of Brexit and incredibly poor leadership.
It'll be a decade before we return to something like normality and even then it will be in a new reality.
Leaving the EU lost us our ability to stand up to the US or China in any meaningful way - for them we are just another Tuesday.
I am not Russian, and have nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine or whatever (I am Brazillian, of Iberian descent).
Still, Crimea was not a "invasion" or "conquest".
Long story short:
Russia invaded Crimea in 1700s, taking it from Tartars.
When a Ukranian became leader of URSS, he "gave" Crimea to Ukraine, it was only nominal, nothing changed in Crimea itself, the place still was basically a navy base for Russia.
When URSS broke up, because of previous decision, it was decided Crimea was Ukranian, except most of population there is Russian (including a huge amount of Russian military), and their only warmwater seaport deep enough for the good warships Russia had, was still there, to make this work, Russia "rented" the place from Ukraine.
When Ukraine most recent revolution happened, do you think all the Russian military personel families that live there since 1700s would want to leave?
Now... if you want to claim what is happening in Donbass is a invasion, then that is more plausible.
Edit: it’s an alternate spelling. I had not heard that before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URSS
There's a reason no country gives much of a second thought to international law. In the end it's purely about the optics and the optics are written by each superpower for whoever cares to listen to them. Case in point:
- Wage an asymmetric proxy war, invade a sovereign country, and annex one of their territories - Not OK.
- Find even a demonstrably false reason to wage declared war, invade a sovereign country, kill and torture combatants and civilians alike during the war and subsequent occupation - OK.
International law is a guideline and every country will interpret their own acts as righteous heroism and other countries' acts as barbaric violations of the law.
https://pics.me.me/their-barbarous-wastes-our-blessed-homela...
They can veto anything.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_...
It’s the kind of stuff that wouldn’t pass the smell test with security engineers here.
Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...
I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything.
Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
We just have to replace them again.
Even a large number of people in Taiwan today do not want to be associated with the RoC. There is a growing sentiment to express a distinctly Taiwanese identity.
They were also the "China" entity that was the founding member of the UN. It was only a few years after the UN's founding that the Communist Party won the civil war and formed a new country (the People's Republic of China), yet it took several decades for the UN to officially recognize them as the representative of "China".
The argument to make isn't that they should have a mandate to rule mainland China, nor even that they should be mainland China's representative of the UN. But rather that they should be their own representative at the UN, and have claim to the permanent seat of the Security Council that mainland China currently holds, since it was originally theirs to begin with.
It's a nuclear strategy that'd cause all hell to break loose if that were ever attempted, but is a plausible enough argument that it could likely be forced through if enough parties truly wanted to strip China of their veto power.
In this case, the Republic of China did have a seat, and continues to exist although the landmass they control has shrunk primarily to just the island of Taiwan. They didn't found a new country and call it Taiwan, they're just called that by others for political convenience because calling them by the Republic of China (their original and still official) name unnecessarily provokes the PRC.
The Communist Party officially established a brand new country (the People's Republic of China) once they won the civil war and had control over the mainland. Due to controlling the majority of the landmass originally controlled by the ROC, they were eventually after several decades recognized by the UN as the government body allowed to represent China at the UN (and therefore the permanent seat on the security council held by that position).
But the entity that originally held that seat has never ceased to exist, even if the land they control has shrunk drastically since the UN's original formation. Which is why you could plausibly argue that they have claim to the permanent seat on the security council, rather than the representative of the PRC.
But like I said, that's likely to cause all hell to break loose. As the most direct way for the PRC to respond to that maneuver would be to militaristically assert their claimed sovereignty over the island of Taiwan, and fully dismantle the remnants of the POC that govern it so that it does cease to exist and the above premise no longer holds true. Which would escalate horrifically as other UN member states step in to prevent that. Hence why it's a nuclear option, and not one that is likely to ever happen unless China sufficiently provokes the international community to the point where they see that as an inevitability, and just want to maneuver into a position where they can respond to it from a seemingly unified position without the inconveniences that would present if the PRC still had veto power on the Security Council.
The US has the better navy but china has a crap tonne of anti-ship missiles (because of the US having the better navy) and that's before the risk of it going nuclear.
I wonder how far the US would actually go to protect Taiwan, would they risk someone tossing a nuke or the situation getting spectacularly out of hand.
What does it do but exclude them from any dialog to make force and violence more likely alternatives?
But what are you going to do about it? Start shooting in China's general direction?
People are constantly claiming to be attacked by nation states to hide their incompetence (nobody ever gets blamed that they failed to deter "China")