The “American Service-Members’ Protection Act” that lets the US invade the Hague contravenes the Geneva Convention and international law, fuck off
I love how the trials Ukraine has conducted on Russian war criminals are legit and above board, but once you’re prosecuting Our Guys, all of a sudden we’re concerned about the procedure
Regardless of what Ukraine is doing the author’s allegation that the Donetsk trials violate the Geneva Conventions seems pretty clear cut. He might be an asshole but it doesn’t sound like he’s wrong. Accusing them of being mercenaries is spurious since they’re officially part of the Ukrainian military. Handing them over to Donetsk is a violation of Russia’s obligations under the laws of war.
So honestly I don’t really know anything about the laws of war and whatnot, but can Ukraine really just declare willy-nilly that random foreign nationals showing up are part of their military? What’s to stop them from doing that for genuine, fight-for-cash mercenaries?
Yeah. Why not? You can induct anyone you want in to the military. As far as I know they’re in regular military units, fighting with issued equipment, getting paid whatever the pay rate is, subject whatever Ukraine has for a military law code. The US has a lot of soldiers who aren’t US citizens. The French have the Foreign Legion. I’m sure other nations have other examples.
Honestly not sure what Russia is even going for with these trials. Why these random dudes? If they had a bunch of Azov guys covered in swastikas it’d make sense and fit in to their narrative, but idk why they’re bothering with rando brits and Moroccans. Is it to demonstrate that Russia views Donetsk as legitimate? Is it to discourage foreign fighters? Idk why you’d even bother to discourage foreign fighters, there’s such a small group of them relative to Ukrainians fighting.
Maybe someone will right a book about it some day.
It’s called sovreignity, but imperialists don’t understand such concept applying to elsewhwere, their brain pan is too affected by corn syrup you see.
It goes something like this:
Catch a foreigner in your land doing something you collectivily don’t like
Imprison them or worse, as long as most of your people is OK with it.
No. It’s just their land, their rules. It applies to all states and societies, no matter how horrible they might be.
Oh no, won’t somebody please do something to help protect those *checks notes* mercenaries who traveled into a warzone by choice in order to kill
Get fucked. Personally i would hope for DPR officials to suspend their death penalty and order them to help rebuild Mariupol for i dunno, like a decade or 2. Then they can have back the freedom they volunteered to abandon so they, again, could go kill people in another country
Then again, i didn’t spend the last 8 years getting shelled and tortured and hunted for sport by the nazi fucks these guys joined up with so i won’t judge the DPR too harshly if they just give em the wall. If the wall is good enough for billionaires (and it is) then it’s good enough for foreign mercs who chose to fight with azov
The wild thing is that at least the brits have been in the ukrainian army for years.
Honestly that makes it worse in my eyes
That means that they didn’t join up as a part of the recent hysteria to help save smol bean Ukraine from that mean ol bully Putler, they joined up to terrorize the people of Donbass for most likely ideological reasons
Yeah i know i’m just speculating and i’ll admit to not being very charitable here, but why tf else would somebody have joined then? Unless it really was just pure bloodlust.
Whatever, live by the sword die by the sword. Fuck pedantic rules lawyering, esp when the enforcement of those rules is so one sided and punishment is pretty much nonexistent for all the worst war crimes in modern history
Yeah, obviously you’d have to do like work gangs with a bunch of prisoners with armed guards, and that would be a pain in the ass to manage and probably could wind up backfiring. Labor will be needed to rebuild tho. Tough call
I kinda expect there might wind up being prisoner swaps that will make this whole debate moot, but who knows?
