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Articles 106 and 107 of the UN Charter grant Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR, the right to take all measures, including military, against Germany, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Ukraine for attempts to revive Nazism. Strangely enough, the main allies of the Nazis, Italy and Japan, are missing from the list. In fact, it is another crude attempt to push a justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine by falsely quoting and manipulatively interpreting several post-WWII treaties and documents.
NEWS: “UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was surprised to learn from Vladimir Putin that there was an article in the UN Charter allowing a Russian special operation in Ukraine. At the UN Security Council in December 2021, Putin tried to obtain the condemnation of Nazism in eastern Ukraine and thus, had the United Nations endorsed that as a fact, the invasion could have been stopped. The Western member countries did not vote on the resolution, which was instead endorsed by China and India. Vladimir Putin then invoked the UN Charter, but no one knew what he was referring to.
[...]
If all the articles cited in the UN Charter and the Declaration of the Four Nations are put together, then Russia, being the legal successor of the USSR, can also use force against states that want to revise the Yalta-Potsdam system in Europe”.
NARRATIVES: 1. The UN Charter allows Russia to invade Ukraine in order to combat Nazism. 2. The war in Ukraine broke out because the West blocked the condemnation of Nazism at the UN Security Council.
CONTEXT/LOCAL ETHOS: The narrative appeared in an online publication and on the website of a well-known far-right anti-Semitic nationalist, former RCP secretary at the University of Bucharest and collaborator of the Foreign Intelligence Center of the communist political police (Securitate). It is not the first time that the UN has been invoked in relation to the war in Ukraine. At the beginning of the Russian invasion, fake news circulated about the UN not recognizing the current borders of Ukraine , followed by the statement of the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, that Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have the right to self-determination , according to the UN Charter.
PURPOSE: To justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine through pieces of international law
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The Moscow Declarations of 1943 invoked by the author make absolutely no reference to the UN Charter, since the latter was only signed in 1945 , nor to the Nuremberg Tribunal, also established in 1945. In fact, the chapter in that declaration referring to Nazis says that the Germans guilty of atrocities and war crimes were to be arrested and sent to the states where they had committed the crimes, and tried by the peoples they had oppressed. As regards the Germans whose crimes could not be located geographically, they had to be tried and sentenced under a joint decision of the Allied governments.
In developing the theory, the author of the article also states that the Institute for the Study of WAR (ISW) commented that articles 106 and 107 of the UN Charter give the right to any of the winning allies of the world conflagration (USA, UK, USSR, France and China) to invade any other country declared defeated, if it aims to review the results of the Second World War. The link inserted in the article, however, leads only to the page on which an analysis of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is made, and where there is no comment by the institute's specialists regarding the UN Charter or Russia’s right to invade any of the countries mentioned in the article. “For this, it is sufficient to announce the other three winning countries, but not to get their approval”, the article also states. In fact, Article 106 clearly stipulates that “the parties shall (...) consult with one another and as occasion requires with other Members of the United Nations with a view to such joint action on behalf of the Organization as may be necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.”
Article 107 indeed reads that “nothing in the present Charter shall invalidate or preclude action, in relation to any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory to the present Charter, taken or authorized as a result of that war by the Governments having responsibility for such action”, but it refers to a situation existing at that time, with the allied troops present on the territory of the defeated states. In a broader interpretation, it refers to actions against states allied to Hitler’s Germany that dispute through diplomatic means or through armed actions the treaties concluded in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the present situation, though, Ukraine did not dispute anything, especially since, at that time, it was part of the USSR , so it was practically in the winners’ camp.
As for the resolution blocked by the West in the UN Security Council, there was indeed a resolution on “Combating Glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other Practices that Contribute to Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance”, but it was proposed to the UN General Assembly. The United States, Ukraine and Palau voted against the resolution, while the Western allies of Washington and Kyiv abstained. The US explained that, although it condemned Nazism and all forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance, did not vote for the UNGA resolution for its thinly veiled attempts to legitimize Russian disinformation camapaigns denigrating neighboring nations and promoting the distorted Soviet narrative of much of contemporary European history, using the cynical guise of halting Nazi glorification”.
In fact, just a few months after the vote on the resolution - which was adopted by the UN General Assembly - Russia invaded Ukraine using precisely the pretext of “its denazification”. Moscow's claims about the Nazi takeover of Ukraine have been repeatedly debunked - even though there are far-right groups and parties in Ukraine (as in most European states), they have never been part of the government and didn’t even get enough votes to reach Parliament in the latest elections.
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