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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

It was always a bit confusing how RIPE got around the Crimea switchover in 2014. They must have found a way to reallocate the system over to Russian companies as Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region, but how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep extensive paperwork.

I asked about it on SE, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptanc..., and there doesn't seem to be a way that this could have been legally accomplished without at the least rescinding recognition of Ukranian sovereignty over Crimea.

Which would imply, since all UN countries recognize RIPE NCC as the final and exclusive authority on internet allocation matters in the European region, that the world has stopped recognizing Crimea as Ukrainian, via one degree of separation.

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The reality that people don't want to admit in all these things is that the laws, etc, get pushed aside to acknowledge the "reality" in the end - might makes right and possession is 9/10ths of the law always triumphs.

And those involved often know not to push things too far when it's "working" - something like "we'll let the Russians route these IPs as long as they don't crow about routing these IPs".

This reminds me of the Chinese revolution, where after the Communists took control of everything except Taiwan, many international organizations continued to insist that Taiwan was the actual representative of China, and Taiwan held the Chinese vote at the UN until 1971. So that's about 22 years of pretending.

I'm no fan of either communism or the chinese revolution, but I always thought that was ridiculous, that a country so big as China had no UN representation except via Taiwan, and that Taiwan held a permanent member UN security council seat.

If, for example, Russia conquers all of Ukraine, then how long will some guy sitting in London keep pretending to be the Government of Ukraine? At some point, all the social media accounts, internet registries, country codes, etc -- they have to be updated to reflect reality.

That actually happens - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_in_exile is the term of art - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_diplomatic_service_in_... is an example of basically exactly that with regards to Latvia.

The oldest one would probably be the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic [1] which went into exile in 1919 and unlike similar bodies from other ex-Soviet republics remained apart after 1991.

1. https://www.radabnr.org/english

What about six years until the country gets liberated again?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_government-in-e...

Yes, and I understand waiting until the war ends. And even waiting for a few years after. But at some point, you do need to accept realities. The Golan Heights, for example, has Israeli registries, phone numbers, etc. If, in the future, Syria recaptures it, they can make another adjustment.

I don't follow the logic that RIPE has to acknowledge Russia's claim on Crimea as legit to do this.

As far as I can tell, the following statements are true independent of who you think rightly owns Crimea:

1. RIPE is the ultimate authority over IP address assignments in Europe as recognized by the relevant governments here

2. The Crimea region became served by different ISPs than before (for whatever reason)

3. RIPE exercised its authority to transfer Crimea's IP address assignments to the company(s) currently serving the region

I agree with you. The GP's argument is like saying I mailed a letter addressed to "Crimea, Russia" and the post office delivered it, therefor the US (or NATO as their claim makes a few jumps) recognizes Russia's claim to Crimea.

RIPE doesn't have the authority to make that decision. Just as the friendly person at the post office making sure my letter gets where I meant it to, doesn't either.

As far as I know most countries do or at least did in fact refuse to deliver mail addressed to "Crimea, Russia". In order for it to get through, you either need someone to bounce it within Russia or to disguise it from your national post office but not from the Russian post office (no doubt this is easy: just omitting "Crimea" or using the Cyrillic alphabet would probably work).

In the same way, they refuse to accept a Russian passport issued to someone in connection with Crimea. These are not recognised as purely domestic matters; the statehood is intimately connected with the territory it controls.

Well there are a couple of contradictions, though they don't imply that Russia's claim is recognized, just that Ukraine's claim is no longer recognized.

For example, their accounting department is likely accepting money from companies that have no legal basis under Ukrainian law for activities in Crimea. Unless they've waived all fees.

Companies here in the US do things that are illegal all the time. That doesn't mean they don't recognize the US government.

All companies in the US presumably have some legal basis in US law even if not all of them are complying 100% of the time.

The equivalent situation would be if a Canadian or Mexican company simply started doing business with physical premises in Alaska or Nevada without bothering to file a single page of paperwork to any US authority.

Since this is a commonly understood difference the comment seems like it was made in bad faith.

That analogy is so bad I honestly wonder if _you're_ commenting in bad faith:

1. RIPE has basis in Ukrainian law: they supply all the IPs the Ukrainian ISPs use too.

2. You're acting like RIPE moved into Crimea after the annexation, while in reality they were operating there prior to it.

3. RIPE does not (to the best of my knowledge) have any official presence in either Ukraine or Crimea.

A better analogy would be something along the lines of "A business had customers in both the north and south US. Then, the US Civil war happened and the Union made it illegal to do business with the Confederacy. The business continued to have customers in the Union and Confederacy, in violation of US law."

I wasn't discussing what the legal basis of RIPE is anywhere. Nor does anyone else appear to be.

> how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep extensive paperwork.

that's it. they just did what needed to be done and kept quiet about the political implications.

Why do you assume that Ukrainian ISP IP addresses have been transferred to Russian entities during the Crimean occupation?

This seems like a weird assumption unless you know more about the subject than I do.

This kind of absolutist thinking has little to do with reality.

One one side the situation is technically very different and might not have involved RIPE.

One the other hand just because one company does something unlawful and is in general recognized doesn't at all imply that countries changed the recognizing of boarder, like at all. Governments sometimes "accidentally overlooking" or delaying some problem is a pretty common diplomatic tool. For example most US tech companies would have had to stop providing anything involving server data storage to the EU years ago due bad interactions between GDPR and Cloud Act.

National law is not code. It's not meant to be as ridged as code. That would be an catastrophe.

Geopolitics are in some way even less ridged then national law.

>Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region

Maybe that's the reason?

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