Earthling: Russian infrastructure strikes and the laws of war

Plus: Trilateral Commission resurfaces!, DOJ v. monkey business, Hakeem Jeffries and Ron DeSantis: Blob brothers, and more!

Over the past two months, Russia has targeted Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure in what has been called (in Foreign Policy) a “terror campaign” and (by the president of the EU) “war crimes” and (by the White House) an attempt “to increase the suffering and death of Ukrainian men, women, and children” that doesn’t seem to have “any military purpose.” This week on Twitter, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group shared a satellite image that vividly illustrated the scope of the attacks. “That dark land mass above the Black Sea shows Ukraine on Nov. 23,” Bremmer wrote. “No electricity brought to you by war criminal Vladimir Putin.”

Meanwhile, over on “Russian Twitter” people were asking how different these Russian tactics are from tactics used by the US-led NATO forces that in 1999 attacked Serbia on behalf of Albanian-speaking separatists in Serbia’s Kosovo region. Russians With Attitude, the Twitter account for the podcast of the same name, pointed to a 1999 Press Conference in which NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea commented on NATO’s attacks on Serbia’s infrastructure. When a Norwegian journalist said NATO was “depriving 70 percent of the country of not only electricity, but also water supply,” Shea responded:

Yes, I’m afraid electricity also drives command and control systems. If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he doesn’t do so we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces. If that has civilian consequences, it’s for him to deal with…

Writing in Lawfire, Duke Law professor Charlie Dunlap explored the legality of attacking civilian infrastructure that is also used by military forces. While Dunlap condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was reluctant to apply the “war crimes” label to the recent strikes. We should be wary, he wrote, of establishing “new legal interpretations and precedents that might handicap US and allied forces in a future conflict against another shamefully malevolent yet powerful adversary.”

An alternative perspective: We should have been wary back in 1999 of using military tactics that we would decry if others used them. Building norms is a two-way street.

As many Russians and few Americans know, the parallels between Kosovo in 1999 and Ukraine in 2022 go beyond military tactics. The 1999 NATO intervention was a violation of international law—an attack on a sovereign country that hadn’t attacked another country. (This episode isn’t to be confused with NATO’s 1995 Bosnia intervention, which came in response to the wholesale slaughter of unarmed Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs—and which, having been approved by the UN Security Council, was legal.)

Building respect for international law, like building norms, is a two-way street. In fact, respect for international law is a norm—a norm that will have to be nurtured by powerful countries if international law is ever to become a binding force in human affairs.

Robocops are coming to San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors voted to let city police use remote-controlled killer robots in emergencies. Progressive groups strongly opposed the measure. San Francisco police already have a dozen crime-fighting robots that perform non-lethal tasks like assessing bombs, but now for the first time they can be equipped with bombs. In 2016, Dallas police used a robot to kill a holed-up sniper—the first such incident in the US.

This week several Chinese cities loosened Covid lockdown rules, apparently in response to protests against China’s oppressive zero-Covid strategy. But at the same time China launched a multi-pronged effort to suppress further protests—which in some cases had ventured beyond Covid policy to target censorship and even call for Xi Jinping to step down as China’s leader.

Some protesters have been identified by the government via facial recognition technology, and others, apparently, via cell phone tracking; some people said they were contacted by police even though they had only walked by protests and not participated in them. “We have no idea how exactly they did this,” said Chinese lawyer Wang Shengsheng.

Less exotic techniques are also used. Police have searched citizens’ phones on subways, looking for foreign apps like Telegram that have been used to organize protests.

In principle, the government could remotely manipulate cell phones to keep people away from protests. Chinese citizens are assigned a Covid health status—green, yellow, or red—that is recorded on their phones. By switching a person’s status to red, the government could keep them from boarding taxis, buses, and subways. Some Chinese suspect this is already being done as part of the crackdown on protests.

The Trilateral Commission–which for half a century has convened politicians, academics, and businesspeople from the US, Europe, and Asia—is a favorite target of conspiracy theorists, who accuse it of everything from secretly building a world government to complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

It’s a natural target—a bunch of global elites who generally hold their meetings behind closed doors. But this year the commission opened the deliberations of its Asia Pacific Group to three reporters from Nikkei Asia.

Why the new transparency? Apparently the idea was to send a message to the White House. Masahisa Ikeda, a Japanese member of the group, said: