Invasion: the definition of the term

Here is what the Wikipedia gives for a definition:

“An invasion is a military offensive in which large numbers of combatants of one geopolitical entity enter territory owned by another such entity, generally with the objective of either: conquering; liberating or re-establishing control or authority over a territory; forcing the partition of a country; altering the established government or gaining concessions from said government; or a combination thereof. An invasion can be the cause of a war, be a part of a larger strategy to end a war, or it can constitute an entire war in itself. Due to the large scale of the operations associated with invasions, they are usually strategic in planning and execution.”

As we see, “invasion” implies aggression on the part of somebody who began the hostilities. This is not the case with a special military operation:

“I take a longue durée approach to understanding the current war. I decline the temptation to identify the date of February 24, 2022, as its beginning, no matter the shock and drama of the all-out Russian assault on Ukraine, for the simple reason that the war began eight years earlier, on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament.” [Plokhiy, 2023: xxi]

The quotation from Plokhiy runs smoothly and correlates with facts until he specifies the beginning of the war as the seizure of the Crimean parliament by “Russian armed forces” on February 27, 2014. Plokhiy is correct in his allegation that the war started 8 years before February 24, 2022. Still, he is wrong in claiming that the war began with the seizure of the Crimean parliament. The war began a bit earlier with the violent coup that took place in Kiev – the seizure of the Crimean parliament was just a response to it.

“In some ways, Putin’s invasion on February 24, 2022, wasn’t an invasion as such. More accurately, it was an escalation. Or, as Biden put it, a further invasion. Some kind of qualification was needed: full-scale, bigger, avowed. Russia’s war had begun in spring 2014. The 2022 version was a dramatic scaling up of an ongoing shoot-out, in which fourteen thousand people lay dead.”
 [Harding, 2022: 206; underlined by me – V. O.]

The quotation contradicts the author’s laconic treatment of the event in the title of his book (“Invasion”) as if Luke Harding tries to demolish his own qualification of blood-shedding. “Escalation” or “a further invasion” are more precise terms than “invasion”, because they suggest that February 24, 2022 must not be treated as the starting point of the bloody Ukrainian conflict.

Still, the dominant trend in Western discourse treats the Russian response to Kiev’s war of terror against its own citizens in the Donbass as “invasion” and resistance to the “invasion” as a “good war”:

“It was the first “good war” since the global conflict of 1939 – 45, in which it was clear from the start who was the aggressor and who the victim, who the villain and who the hero, and whose side one wanted to be on.” [Plokhiy, 2023: 294]

Silencing the context of the February 24, 2024 leaves many questions relevant to the understanding of the upsurge of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine effectively eliminated:

1) Why are the chilling testimonies to the Ukrainian war crimes (like that of journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel) hushed-up?

2) Why does the Western narrative avoid looking into Angela Merkel’s scandalous admission about the deception that the West resorted to in order to prevent the implementation of the Minsk Agreement?

3) How come that the West failed to condemn and prevent the systematic bombing of Donbass by its own government?

4) How come that the West failed to denounce the Ukrainian government for cutting off the electricity and water supply to the people of Crimea?

5) Why is the West satisfied with bad decisions of Kiev under the pretext that they serve a good cause? Is it not the variant of “the end justifies the means’? Is the West ready to forget its own values?

[Baud, 2024: 259]

Indeed, the war began 8 years earlier, but the fact is silenced by Western governments and mass media.