By Bob Rae

November 21, 2025

A quotation I have turned to more than once is Blaise Pascal’s famous dictum that “Justice without enforcement is powerless, but power without justice is tyranny”.

Many critics argue that international law is not really law because it is powerless. The reality is that any kind of law is powerless if enforcement never happens.

The more complicated truth is that the enforcement of international law is slow, cumbersome, and depends on the willingness of nation states and their governments to move forward in either enforcing the law themselves or agreeing to create institutions that will have that kind of power.

Its growth since 1945 has depended on a common political will to create institutions, agreements and treaties whose implementation will begin to push back lawlessness and tyranny.

The current crisis in Ukraine, where the Zelensky government is weakened by a corruption scandal, and where two special envoys — Steve Witkoff of the United States and Kirill Dmitriev of Russia — have cooked up a 28-point peace plan, is about to face a critical moment of truth.

Is it really imaginable that Ukraine and the rest of the world would agree to give Russia control of about 20 percent of the landmass of the country, agree to prevent Ukraine from ever being able to join NATO and accept complete impunity for any war crimes committed, including the charges against Vladimir Putin currently being pressed by the International Criminal Court?

For Russia to get away with this invasion is a complete travesty, and for the U.S. to now be presenting itself as the ‘guarantor’ of Ukrainian territorial integrity is more than sad.

To describe this process as less-than-transparent would be a gross understatement. Treaty by stealth and intrigue is hardly new, but Molotov-Ribbentrop and Munich 1938 are hardly worth emulating.

The former had a “secret agreement” where the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to divide up Poland. The latter delayed World War II by a year and a half and saw the complete disappearance of Czechoslovakia in just a few months. Ukraine is being fed to the wolves in exactly the same way.

Neither Russia nor the United States are signatories to the Rome Statute, and both countries have been busy doing everything they can to destroy the International Criminal Court (Russia by a series of devastating cyber attacks and the US by draconian sanctions against judges and court officials doing their jobs).

Russia’s attempt to argue that its aggression against Ukraine was somehow justified by a Ukrainian “genocidal attack” on Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine was dismissed by the International Court of Justice as being without either evidence or substance. The Court ordered Russia to stop the war and respect international boundaries by pulling back its troops. Russia obviously thumbed its nose at the ICJ.

For Russia to get away with this invasion is a complete travesty, and for the U.S. to now be presenting itself as the “guarantor” of Ukrainian territorial integrity is more than sad. Public statements by Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance indicate complete purchase of Russia’s narrative, hook, line and sinker.

This truly is a moment where the world has been turned upside down, where truth and justice have been set aside as the basis for international policy.

It is often said that the devil is in the details; that is certainly true about this proposal. There is a smell of sulphur about the whole deal, and it will take an enormous rebuff from NATO to turn the tide on this wave of evil.

Bob Rae served as Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2020-25.