On March 29, 2022, I participated in an online round table discussion on “Humanitarian Intervention, foreign fighters and war refugees: Old questions – new answers” as part of King’s College’s War Crimes Research Group Seminar, at the invitation of Maria Varaki. I talked briefly about the Nazi concept of “co-national intervention”, which was really a “thing” in Nazi international law theory of the 1930s and 40s (until Nazi international law theory stopped being a “thing” in 1945, though some elements of these theories continued to be in use after WWII). It is really quite bizarre that Russia would follow the example of Nazi international law theory (I’ll admit, they probably don’t know about this, but the similarities aren’t just similarities, this really provides the theoretical backbone to Putin’s outlandish claims) as a means to legitimize their “de-Nazification”-attack on Ukraine. Of course, this has in part to do with the ahistoric use of the term “Nazi” in Russian historiography, itself a product of Soviet propaganda of “The Great Patriotic War”. A fascinating subject, were its real life consequences not so deadly and dramatic.
