My Latest Thoughts on the Russian Federation

It's Tuesday evening at 5:31 PM Eastern. I have been absorbed in politics on my smartphone since Sunday evening, and I am only now getting back to my desktop for some blogging. My brain works differently on the smartphone than it does at the desktop. As far as the Russian Federation is concerned, it looks like I haven't written about it in any direct way since 10 May 2025. Moving forward, I guess I will need a project label titled "Russian Federation" under my World Citizenship role/Area of Responsibility. Here is what is on my mind at the moment:

• Russia responds to Trump's new Ukraine ceasefire deadline 
• Jeffrey Sachs: Death of Democracy & Prelude to World War 3 
• Opinion | Negotiating a Lasting Peace in Ukraine | Common Dreams

Territorial concessions by Ukraine are a central premise of the Sachs peace formula. But there is a problem with this. The concessions would not be legally endorsable by the UN Security Council short of a revision to the UN Charter (cf. Legal Limits for UNSC Action on Peace in Ukraine | EJIL: Talk!). This seems true even if Yanukovich was unlawfully deposed by less than 3/4 of the Verkhovna Rada in 2014 as Russia became protector of the endangered Ukrainian head of state. Whether the UN Charter should be revised to permit exceptional cases of preventive, self-determined, remedial, and defensive annexation, and whether international law is in some sense broken until such a revision takes place, is a weighty philosophical question. If agreeing to Russian annexation of five districts in Ukraine is the only way to prevent World War 3 - perhaps because the Russians are suffering from a national delusional disorder - is it not legally incumbent on the relatively less deluded nations of the UN to agree with the Russian ultimatum, on the way to net zero 2050, a nuclear weapons-free world, and reconciliation with future Russian generations? Is it really more lawful to destroy all of human civilization in a fight to get Russia completely out of Ukraine, thereby upholding the letter of the UN Charter in a narrow technical sense, but missing the spirit of the Charter's bigger harm-reduction picture?