The Russian war in Ukraine has dragged on and is likely to continue even longer, amid questions about how Russia is managing the war, the effectiveness of its weapons, and the extent to which it has succeeded or failed in achieving its strategic objectives. At the same time, there are moves underway in the region that suggest an attempt to establish an alliance to confront Iran, with the aim of reducing the scale of the damage it has inflicted on the region over many years.
Al-Hal Net discussed many questions and issues related to politics, military strategy, and negotiations connected to the Russian-Ukrainian war, alongside questions about the prospects of forming an alliance against the danger of Iranian expansion in the region, with Colonel Dr. Ayman Salama in a special interview.
Ayman Salama, a retired colonel and former liaison officer at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and of the council of the Faculty of Al-Alsun at Egypt’s Ain Shams University. In 2001, he was also nominated to serve as a legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Salama’s professional and academic record includes many roles and assignments. Most notably, he worked as a legal adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva between 2018 and 2019, commenting on the ICRC experts’ commentary on the 1949 Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of detainees and prisoners of war. He is also a visiting professor of international law at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, as well as an honorary professor of international law at the Institute of Human Rights at DePaul University in Chicago, United States.
The need to develop international humanitarian law
In the context of the war underway in Ukraine, and regarding the need to develop the rules of international humanitarian law, Salama told Al-Hal Net in the special interview that the Russian-Ukrainian war has confirmed the urgent need to develop the rules of international humanitarian law governing international armed conflicts. Since the war began on February 24, 2022, it has demonstrated the scale of widespread destruction, heavy human losses, and humanitarian suffering affecting fighters and civilians alike.
According to Salama, despite the development of modern military technologies and their unprecedented use in armed conflicts, as reflected in the production of weapons, equipment, and tools of warfare, these technologies have not been limited to just one branch of the armed forces of the two parties to the conflict, but have extended across all branches. Yet all of this stands in stark contrast to a level of destruction not seen by humanity since World War II. Ukraine has become a testing ground for the latest weapons of both Russia and NATO. Therefore, the international community must make serious efforts to develop international legal instruments, especially those of international humanitarian law.
In his lengthy conversation with Al-Hal Net, Salama explained the concept of explosive weapons that raise humanitarian concern. He added that, as a result of the many military hostilities between the two warring states, Russia and Ukraine, populated areas have been targeted with many types of explosive weapons that raise humanitarian concerns when used in such areas. These weapons either affect a wide area or leave extensive effects and damage.
Salama noted: “Global media outlets, around the clock, show us the latest Russian weapons that had not previously been tested in the wars Russia fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria, as well as by its well-known proxy Wagner in Libya and the Central African Republic.” It is clear, Salama said, that belligerents in both international and non-international armed conflicts violate many rules of international humanitarian law, and the Russian-Ukrainian war is no exception in this regard.
According to Salama, international humanitarian law aims to humanize armed conflict. This principle reflects a fundamental legal reality: the purpose of armed conflict is to significantly weaken the enemy, not to annihilate it, as used to happen in earlier centuries when war was considered a legitimate means of settling international disputes before the Covenant of the League of Nations and later the Charter of the United Nations.
Salama said that international humanitarian law provides the legal framework applicable to modern weapons, laying down rules governing the means and methods of warfare in both treaty law and customary law. Most of the rules regulating modern weapons are found in Additional Protocol I, especially with regard to their review and legality during development, modernization, or manufacture, as well as their compliance with the Martens Clause, which is considered one of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
The prohibition or restriction of weapons carries a dual meaning. On the one hand, restriction means legally limiting the use of certain weapons by prohibiting specific methods of using them, which means they may still be used under certain conditions. On the other hand, prohibition means a complete legal ban on the use of certain weapons in all circumstances, regardless of the method or objective. Accordingly, under the secondary rules of state responsibility, states must take all measures to stop violations of international humanitarian law, provide appropriate means of reparation, and in many cases conduct investigations as a preliminary step in any action, according to Salama.
In concluding his remarks on the need to develop international humanitarian law, Salama pointed out that the Russian-Ukrainian war has exposed numerous grave violations of the principles and rules of international humanitarian law governing international armed conflicts. These violations, caused to a large extent by modern lethal weapons that do not distinguish between fighters and civilians, have sounded the alarm.
Therefore, it has become imperative for the international community, foremost among them the International Committee of the Red Cross, to work diligently to develop the applicable rules of international humanitarian law governing the use of modern weapons such as drones, as well as the methods and tools of modern warfare such as cyberattacks.
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No Russian-Ukrainian negotiations
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in response to Al-Hal Net’s question about the possibility and usefulness of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, Salama said that negotiations will not take place between Russia and Ukraine at present, or at least in the coming weeks, unless a major and dramatic development occurs on the battlefield, specifically in the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army, whether in southern or eastern Ukraine.
Therefore, the flow of Western military, economic, financial, and other forms of aid to Ukraine is unprecedented in the history of warfare. In other words, when Hitler’s Nazi forces reached the outskirts of Moscow and the German army besieged the city during World War II, inflicting many defeats on the Russian army, formerly the Soviet Red Army, the United States and its allies provided military support and established land, sea, and air supply lines to help the Soviet army withstand Hitler’s forces. Without that Western support, the Soviet Red Army would not have defeated Hitler’s German army at that time.
If some Western countries begin to waver because they see themselves as suffering economically as a result of the support provided to Ukraine, this will affect military operations between the Russians and Ukrainians and would in turn reduce Kyiv’s political weight, according to Salama.
Salama noted that if Ukraine’s political weight and influence vis-à-vis Russia decline, this may push Ukraine to go to the negotiating table and lower the ceiling of its demands, foremost among them Russia’s immediate withdrawal from all occupied territories, especially the Crimean Peninsula.
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The use of nuclear weapons and the course of the war
If Moscow resorts to using nuclear weapons, Western countries will respond, and they will also provide support to the Ukrainian government in the event of Russian escalation. In this context, Salama believes that no nuclear state in the coming decades is prepared to take the risk of using nuclear weapons again after the catastrophic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The rethinking required by the radical transformation in warfare caused by the invention of nuclear weapons must also take into account these horrific risks at the local level, because in today’s global age they have international repercussions. The raging war in Ukraine has seen repeated threats to resort to the nuclear option, and the world has, without exaggeration, come to the brink of a Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki scenario.
Salama added: “Russia—specifically President Vladimir Putin and his advisers—retreated after signs of Ukrainian victories began to appear on the horizon. Before these victories, particularly on the southern Ukrainian front, Russian forces withdrew from several areas and sectors. This came after the United States and European countries supplied Kyiv with highly advanced weapons, some of which may not yet have been used. As a result of the sudden Russian losses in recent weeks, Putin began threatening the use of nuclear weapons. Washington took these threats very seriously, and the American response was firm. As a result, Moscow backed away from its serious threats, and Putin later expressed strong willingness to return to the negotiating table, something he had not shown at the start of his invasion of Ukraine.”
As for Salama’s view of the course of the war in Ukraine, where it is heading, and what form the conflict between the West and Russia might take if there is any further development on the battlefield, he said it is difficult to predict the outcome of the war there. No one expected or imagined that Ukraine would withstand the Russian army for ten months, and no one expected Russia to suffer so many major defeats in the recent weeks of the war between Moscow and Kyiv.
However, despite Putin’s stubbornness, insistence, one-man management of political and strategic affairs, and unilateral decisions on even the smallest details of the war with Ukraine, Salama believes that the only thing that would make President Putin give up many of his demands and conditions at the negotiating table would be a dramatic qualitative escalation of the war.
Likewise, if Putin becomes convinced that the losses suffered by him and the Russian army in recent weeks are not the only source of pressure, and that Ukraine may open another front in the occupied territories in the coming year, then he will not want to lose more either on the battlefield or at the political negotiating table.
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A Western alliance against Iran?
Regarding the expansion of Iranian militias in the region and the proxy wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Salama does not believe there will be a Western move any time soon to counter and contain the threat posed by the expansion of Iranian militias, whether through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its experts and advisers or through Iranian forces present inside Syria. Salama attributed this to Western countries being preoccupied with the war in Ukraine.
As for the formation of a Western alliance against Iran, Salama said this is unlikely at present except in one case, which already exists in the Arabian Gulf, specifically in the Strait of Hormuz, in the form of naval alliances, whether under NATO or other Western countries, aimed at securing international navigation that is threatened from time to time by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
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