On Ukraine, the West Sidesteps a Fraught Term

On Ukraine, the West Sidesteps a Fraught Term

By Andrew Higgins. The New York Times

4 September 2014

Whether on the streets of Budapest in 1956, the mountains of Afghanistan in 1979 and again in 2001 or in the swampy forests of Grenada in 1983, invasions have tended to be noisy, unmistakable affairs that screamed their purpose from the start.

After four months of conflict in eastern Ukraine, however, few have chosen to use the “I” word to define the slow-burning war fed by a steady flow of Russian weapons and soldiers across the border.

“I do not want to define it right now, but you can call it what you want,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told a news conference last weekend in Brussels, where European Union leaders agreed that Russia had increased the “inflows of fighters and weapons” to Ukraine and mounted “aggression” but made no mention of any invasion.

President Obama has been equally circumspect, opting initially for the term “incursion” before denouncing Russia’s “brazen assault” on Ukraine during a speech on Wednesday in Estonia.

Amid mounting evidence that Russia has sent tanks, artillery pieces and troops into eastern Ukraine, such terminological fudges highlight the success of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in blurring the conventional boundaries between war and peace.

Western leaders who have avoided the word say terminology does not matter but apparently worry that calling the conflict an invasion would raise pressure for, and on Ukraine’s part the hope of, Western weapons and even military intervention. Declaring it an invasion is also seen as leaving Mr. Putin less room to change course should he want to do so.

Nevertheless, that reluctance also reveals a gulf in perceptions and calculations among Western allies, who gathered on Thursday in Newport, Wales, for a NATO summit meeting focused on how to respond to a conflict whose precise nature the 28 member states still have trouble defining with a common voice.

If one dividing line is clear, those pushing for a stronger response to the Russian whatchamacallit, notably the three Baltic States and Ukraine itself, tend to define the conflict up, while the more cautious define it down.

“We should clearly name what is going on. Aggression is also a good word, but this is clearly an invasion,” the foreign minister of Lithuania, Linus Linkevicius, said in a telephone interview. “There is an illegal presence of foreign troops on a sovereign territory. What else do you call it?”

Mr. Linkevicius said the West needed to avoid being distracted by quarrels over terminology but cautioned, “If you call something less than an invasion, you can feel that you don’t have to react.”

Ukrainians complain that the terminological evasions of the West’s major powers hide a desire to avoid responding robustly to Russian assaults that President Petro O. Poroshenko warned European leaders over the weekend would, if left unchecked, ultimately endanger their own security.

“Of course this is an invasion. If it is not, I don’t know what an invasion is,” said Dmytro Tymchuk, a Ukrainian former military officer who is now director of the Center of Military and Political Research, a research group in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

“There is a political schizophrenia in the West,” he added. “Leaders say they understand what is happening, but at the same time they don’t want to burn their bridges with Moscow. They still hope that Putin will come to his senses. This is not going to happen. It is self-deception.”

Moscow, insisting it is a mere bystander in the conflict, denies sending troops or weaponry to Ukraine, a claim few take seriously outside Russia.

What exactly to call what Russia is doing has taken on special force in Washington, where the issue has become part of the larger debate over Mr. Obama’s response and a newfound symbol for Republicans who argue that he has not taken the situation seriously enough. “This is not an incursion,” Senator John McCain of Arizona said on CBS last weekend. “This is an invasion.”

Jen Psaki, the top State Department spokeswoman, said: “In our view it doesn’t matter what we call it. We’re calling it an illegal incursion. We’re saying they’re violating the sovereignty of Ukraine.” Instead, she said, “what we’re going to do about it is more important than what we call it.”

Experts in international law say they are mystified by the wariness of using the word “invasion,” as the term has no special legal significance.

“Invasion is a colloquial term which legally doesn’t carry any connotations one way or the other,” said Harold H. Koh, a Yale University law professor who has served as the State Department legal adviser under Mr. Obama and as an assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

Sharon Korman, an Australian lawyer and author of “The Right of Conquest: the Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice,” agreed but added that it is a “massive term emotionally and politically” that conjures up images of World War II and could presage a possible armed response by the West.

Australia, she noted, has called Russia’s actions an invasion, “but that is because nobody expects Australia to do anything in response.” If America or Germany were to do the same, she added, “this would trigger expectations of a military response” from countries “that have no intention of engaging militarily.”

The word invasion, said Guglielmo Verdirame, professor of international law at King’s College in London, “is not an automatic trigger for obligations for other countries” but has “come to suggest an aim to occupy or annex the territory of another country,” as was the case with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He added that while there was a clear case against Russia for violating a prohibition on the “use of force” enshrined in the 1945 United Nations Charter, there was so far scant evidence of any Russian intent to occupy or annex eastern Ukraine, as it did Crimea in March. “You don’t need an invasion to violate international law, just a use of force in breach of the charter.”

Russia, according to NATO and individual leaders like Ms. Merkel, has sharply stepped up its role in Ukraine in recent weeks. NATO last week released satellite images of tanks and artillery positions to corroborate accusations that more than 1,000 Russian forces were actively involved in the Ukrainian fighting.

But Russia has so far shown little desire to actually occupy Ukrainian territory with its own army, preferring to leave this task to its local proxies.

In Novoazovsk, a small town along the coastal road from the Russian border to the industrial port city of Mariupol, a shopkeeper told a reporter that the first troops in the town were clearly Russian, but that within a day they had ceded checkpoint and patrol duties to local men.

With the cease-fire talks getting underway between Moscow and Kiev, the apparent presence of Russian soldiers has instead suggested an effort to force Ukraine to negotiate with the separatists, not a push to occupy ground using Russian regular troops.

This would fit with Mr. Obama’s assertion that Russia has escalated its strategy of bolstering the rebels, rather than crossing a threshold of “invasion.”

Yet in another instance, the Russian military’s actions looked far more like a classic “invasion.” By early last week, the Russian advance with tanks and artillery rolling across the fields had pushed the Ukrainian Army off a 75-mile stretch of highway from Donetsk south to the Sea of Azov, quickly turning the tide of the battle around the city of Donetsk.

If Ms. Merkel, too, has skirted the term, in Europe, particularly Germany, the term invasion is freighted with the historical baggage of World War II, and leaders are deeply reluctant to use a term that draws an implicit parallel between the actions of Mr. Putin and those of Hitler.

The German word for invasion, einmarsch, recalls the Nazi attack on Poland 75 years ago last weekend, when Hitler sent hundreds of thousands of troops east, beginning a catastrophic war that so far bears no comparison to what has been a relatively contained and incremental conflict in Ukraine.

“Of course, everyone gets a knot in their stomachs when the word is invasion,” Stefan Meister, who directs programs on former Soviet bloc lands for the German Council on Foreign Relations, said. Reluctance to use the term, he added, reflected the overall desire, particularly in Germany, to reach a settlement with Russia over Ukraine.