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The present book was published in late September, 2022, about 7 months after Russia invaded Ukraine. As I was a slow writer, I was surprised to see myself complete a book in such a short time. There were two motivations that drove me to write the book. First, the Russian invasion is an attempt to destroy the foundations of the international law and order. As a legal philosopher who advocated the constraints of justice upon war in my earlier book Sekai Seigiron [A Theory of Global Justice] (Chikuma Shobo, 2012), I cannot sit idly looking on the outrageous Russian atrocity. Second, and more importantly, there were quite a few public intellectuals in the Western bloc who exercised their influence by circulating a perverted view that the responsibility for the Russian invasion should be ascribed to the Western-bloc countries and Ukraine that sought a membership in this bloc. I thought it was my urgent task to disprove the view and to show that the Russian invasion is not only legally but also morally and politically inexcusable.
 
The book consists of three chapters. The first chapter investigates and illuminates the nature and causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The second chapter discusses how the Ukrainian war can and should be ended. The third chapter explicates lessons and tasks for Japan that this war requires Japanese people to face squarely.
 
In the first chapter I started my discussion by brushing away the blatantly groundless Russian propaganda, such as “the liberation of the Ukrainian people from Neo-Nazi government” and “the exercise of collective self-defense rights of Russia and Russian political puppets in Eastern Ukraine,” and grappled with a more important narrative for shifting responsibility onto the Western bloc and Ukraine that is presented by the so-called realist-school in international politics and has a non-negligible influence in the Western nations. This is the view that NATO’s advances on the former Eastern bloc countries after the end of the Cold War threatened Russian sense of security and geopolitical interests and pressurized Putin to launch a counterattack by invading Ukraine that sought NATO membership. The advocates of this view claim that they are “realists,” but I rejected their view by revealing that they failed to see the fundamental changes of the reality of international politics after the collapse of the structure of the Cold War, that are shown in the following points: (1) the transformations of the regimes of both Nato and Russia and the developing rapprochement between the two, (2) the Western military non-interventionist stance toward Russian military interventions into its alleged sphere of influence including the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimean Peninsula, and (3) the weakening of NATO generated by the divisions between the U.S. and European allies that have been deepened from the 2003 Iraq War until the Trump Administration shouting the “America First” policy.

In place of the misguided realist view there have emerged what might be called the “Eurasianist” view in the Wester bloc, according to which Putin invaded Ukraine because he was converted to the Eurasianist credo that it is Russia’s sacrosanct civilizational mission to conquer and rule the Eurasian Continent based on the values of Russian Orthodoxy. This view regards the Russian invasion as an aggressive attempt of the revived Russian imperialism rather than the Russian defensive reaction against NATO’s expansion.
 
I have argued that Eurasianism is utilized by Putin just as an ideological tool for rationalizing the Russian invasion and that hist true aim of this invasion is his political self-protection. During the two-decade domination over Russia Putin’s regime became a sheer despotism under the disguise of democracy and a corruption-pervading kleptocracy. He oppressively silenced the mounting dissenting voices, but he was aware of the need to enhance the popular support. He utilized the Ukrainian invasion to enhance the nationalist passions of Russian people, to divert their attention from the corruption of Putin’s regime to the dangers of external enemies, to rationalize oppressions of dissenters by denouncing them as enemies’ spies, to urge the need to strengthen the solidarity and loyalty of Russian people and, by all these means, to solidify and reinforce his power basis.
 
The second chapter scrutinizes the Pro-Russian appeasement policy that claims that the Westen support for Ukraine should be cut down so that Ukraine is pressurized to make territorial concessions in favor of Russia for cease-fire agreement. This appeasement policy is rejected as self-defeating because it enhances invasive incentives (not only of Russia but also of all the other potential invaders) by rewarding, rather than punishing, invaders for their lawless rogue actions. I argued for the following approach. Since the true cause of the Russian invasion is Putin’s political self-protection, he would not stop the invasion unless he realizes that Russian people’s discontents and grievances would be so much accumulated as to endanger his power basis. To pressurize Putin to be aware that he is reaching this critical point, it is certainly necessary for the international society to maintain and reinforce sanctions against Russia and military and economic assistance for Ukraine. But it is also indispensable to develop counter information strategy to awaken Russian people from their misperception of the reality generated by the governmental control, forgery and fabrication of their cognitive world.
 
In the third and last chapter I criticized Japan’s failure to face its own serious problems aggravated by the Ukrainian war. Japan joined in what might be called “the Western common front against Russia,” thereby heightening the tensions of its national security environment. But Japan lacks a serious sense of crisis. This is revealed by the fact that the unconcealable contradiction between the Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan and Jieitai (the Self-Defense Forces) is left unresolved. This escape from the inconvenient truth is very dangerous and irresponsible because it generates the situation in which Japan does not, and cannot, have any constitutional norms that controls military power even though its Self-Defense Forces are one of the greatest military powers in the world. I revealed this problem and advocated constitutional reforms necessary to solve it in my many earlier works. I reiterated my view and argued that the Ukrainian war is aggravating the danger for Japan and Japan’s danger for the world that is generated by Japan’s irresponsible escape from the problem.
 

(Written by INOUE Tatsuo, Professor Emeritus, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics / 2024)

Related Info

*All the following contents are presented in Japanese.
 
Book Reviews:
Taira Nishi, “Reviewing Tatsuo Inoue’s Facing the Ukrainian War,” in Law and Philosophy, Vol. 10, pp. 293-311  June 30, 2024)

 
Shingo Usui, “Lessons from One Year of the Ukrainian War,” in Sankei Shimbun, March 5, p. 8  March 5, 2023)


Dialogues with the Author on the Book:
<Publication>
Yoshinori Kobayashi and Tatsuo Inoue, “Japan Afflicted by the Nightmare Generated by Putin’s War and the Spell of the Article 9 of the Constitution,” Yoshinori Kobayashi  (On the Ukrainian War, Part 2, Fusosha, pp. 92-132  March 14, 2023)

 
<Videos on Website>
Rintaro Kuramochi and Tatsuo Inoue, “The Ukrainian War and ‘Justice’,” in Kono Kuso-Subarasiki Sekai presented by 8bitNEWS  (8bitNews <Jun Hori> | YouTube   Distributed on October 12, 2022)

 
Tsutomu Hashimoto and Tatsuo Inoue, “What Is the Nature of the Ukrainian War?”   (in Synodus Talk Lounge  Distributed on April 26, 2023)

 
The Author’s Subsequent Articles Following up the Book:
Tatsuo Inoue, “How to Sail on the Wild Sea of Our World: Beyond the Revanchism Mad on War Crimes and the Appeasement Policy Supporting Invaders,”  (in Law and Philosophy, Vol. 10, pp. 1-45  June 30, 2024)

 
Tatsuo Inoue, “The Ukrainian War Reinvestigated: You Can’t Realize a Sustainable Peace by Rewarding the Invader,” (in Law and Philosophy, Vol. 9, pp. 1-36  June 30, 2023)

 

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