The following guest post comes from Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati, Duke Law School. Let’s begin with a point of agreement: Ukraine’s financial condition is bad. Its currency is in free fall, its foreign hard currency reserves have collapsed, its economy is shrinking, and it is fighting a war. Absent a big IMF-EU bailout soon, Ukraine […]

My former student Matthew Parish, an expert on the conflict in Yugoslavia, points out the parallels in a very good article. Does the West’s intervention in the Yugoslav civil war provide a basis for a more muscular intervention in Ukraine, or the opposite? That intervention, though late and halfhearted, ultimately restored peace, but it also […]

Here. (Already overtaken by events as Ukraine descends into civil war.)

Ukraine has asked the ICC to investigate whether the government of President Viktor Yanukovich committed crimes against humanity from November 2013 until the collapse of his government in February. Although Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute (and may indeed not be permitted to under its constitutional law), it has take advantage of a provision of […]

First, attack Syria (?): It is time to change Putin’s calculations, and Syria is the place to do it…. Equally important, shots fired by the US in Syria will echo loudly in Russia. The great irony is that Putin is now seeking to do in Ukraine exactly what Assad has done so successfully: portray a legitimate political […]

From Bloomberg: “Blood was spilled once again in Ukraine,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Facebook today. “There’s a sense in the country that a civil war could break out.” Putin “is getting many requests” from eastern Ukraine “to intervene in one way or another,” his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters yesterday. It’s significant that Medvedev invokes […]

Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom, has explained that the reason for raising gas prices for Ukraine is in part that Ukraine no longer is entitled to discounts that it received in return for leasing the Black Sea fleet base. According to Bloomberg: In Kharkiv in 2010, Ukraine agreed to extend Russia’s lease to the Black Sea […]

I mean doomed to lose its autonomy as a nation-state, whether or not its borders remain formally in place. Here are some reasons for thinking that it is: 1. Russia has placed 40,000 troops along its borders. The West has made clear that Ukraine is not worth a war. In the president’s words: Of course, […]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited a huge nuclear arsenal, which it subsequently gave up. In return it received assurances from Russia,  the United States, and the United Kingdom that its territorial integrity would be respected. These assurances were embodied in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. While the United States and the […]

Mitu Gulati, the world’s expert on the odious debt doctrine, writes in: It is a treat to guest post here at ericposner.com.  It is an even bigger treat to be invited to disagree with Eric on the pages of his own blog! Eric has been blogging about the Ukraine situation, but has yet to engage […]

The Crimean parliament has scheduled a referendum for March 16 asking whether Crimea should secede from Ukraine and join Russia. From the standpoint of international law (Ukrainian law may be different), it is not illegal for a territory of a country to attempt to break away and form a new state. But there is a […]

1. Douglas Cox discusses the Panama analogy. Consent was a central U.S. justification for intervention in Panama that was just as, if not more, thin than the paper on which Yanukovych’s invitation to Putin is written. The U.S. position was that it had never recognized the Noriega regime as the legitimate government in Panama and, […]

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, apparently cited a 1997 treaty between Russia and Ukraine as a source of authority for Russian troop movements in the Crimea: We have an agreement with Ukraine on the presence of the Russian Black Sea fleet with a base in Sevastopol, and we are acting within the framework of that agreement. The […]

Sending troops into a foreign country does not violate international law if that country gave its consent. Is this Russia’s legal justification for its incursion on Ukrainian territory?  According to Bloomberg: Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, said today the crisis is creating serious risks to Russian security and to the safety of […]

Peter Spiro (and/or someone else operating the Opinio Juris twitter account) accuses me of “gloating” about the military intervention in Ukraine, being a “realist,” committing something called the “perfect compliance fallacy,” and believing that “international law is a chimera.” These accusations are false. Julian Ku and Erik Voeten have already provided partial rebuttals. For the record, […]

Erik Voeten writes in The Monkey Cage that “international law and institutions look pretty weak now, but they will matter a lot down the road.” Let’s take a look at some of these institutions. The Council of Europe and The European Court of Human Rights. If Russia commits human rights violations in Ukraine, the victims can […]

So far, Russia has not (as far I have been able to find) made an official legal argument to justify its incursion in Ukraine. As I explained in exhaustive detail yesterday, it doesn’t have an argument, at least not a good argument. But that won’t stop it from making the best argument it can; what […]

The international law commentariat has been pretty quiet about the most important geopolitical event so far this year. Hello? Anyone want to offer an opinion? Let me fill in the silence: 1. Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine violates international law. 2. No one is going to do anything about it.