Clarissa's Blog

Here are some questions to consider. How will “the people who live in Donbas and Crimea” make their will known “under UN supervision”? Currently, Russian soldiers go house to house and shoot people in the head if they refuse to vote for Russia. Is Musk proposing to send in the UN troops? And have them shoot back at the Russians? That’s a great recipe for de-escalation. Or will the UN supervise remotely in cities and towns with no running water and destroyed infrastructure?

Now let’s try to define “the people who live” there. Do the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had to escape from these regions count? Do they get a vote? Do the Russians who were brought in to substitute the refugees get to vote? Technically, they are living there. If they came in two days ago, do they get a vote? Are they more entitled to decide than somebody who lived there for 60 years and was forced to become a war refugee?

How about the many people in these regions who are hiding from the forced Russian draft? Do they get to vote? My cousin’s husband in Donetsk is one of them. He hasn’t been out of his apartment since February 24. He sends his little boy out to get water and food. Every time he’s terrified the kid won’t come back and he can’t go out to look for him. How is he going to vote?

Now let’s think about the beautiful precedent this brilliant plan sets in terms of international law. It’s now OK to invade a country, kill half of the population, make the rest flee or hide, ship in your own citizens and make them “vote” for annexation. This is a mockery of sovereignty and of the very concept of the nation-state.

It is, of course, possible that Musk is this stupid. It’s also possible that he’s channeling Russian propaganda. Yesterday, every Russian news channel led with Musk’s brilliant proposal that, unsurprisingly, Russia loved. The important thing to notice, though, is that the transnational oligarchy is congenitally incapable of understanding what the nation-state is. Be they politically on the left or on the right, they hate sovereignty. They can never be on our side because for them the nation is nothing.