BY air, land, and sea, Putin-led Russia has launched attacks on Ukraine. Since the first strike, Russian forces have continued to bomb city centres — causing civilian fatalities and prompting a mass exodus of refugees.

According to a BBC report, President Vladimir Putin had for months denied he would invade his neighbour, but then “he tore up a peace deal and unleashed what Germany calls ‘Putin’s war’, pouring forces into Ukraine’s north, east and south.”

As the number of dead climbs, the Russian leader stands accused of shattering peace in Europe.

According to the BBC, Putin declared in a pre-dawn TV address on February 24 that Russia could not feel “safe, develop and exist” because of what he claimed was a constant threat from modern Ukraine.

Russia’s stated aim is to free Ukraine from oppression and to be “cleansed of the Nazis”. However, Russia has long resisted Ukraine’s move towards the European Union (EU) and the military alliance that is Nato.

Putin has accused Nato of threatening Russia’s “future as a nation”.

Russia isn’t the first country to feel threatened by its neighbour.

In 1956, Israel similarly felt threatened and launched attacks against Egypt. If in 2022 it is ‘Putin’s war’, in 1956 it was the ‘Sinai war’.

The book Striking First: Pre-emptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (Rand Corporation 2006) gives the following account:

“In July 1952, a group of Egyptian military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the country’s monarchy, leading to a radical shift in Egypt’s domestic and foreign policies.

“Israeli decisionmakers viewed Nasser’s new regime — committed to socialism at home and anti-imperialism abroad — with alarm.

“Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in particular, believed Nasser to be the primary threat facing the young Israeli state, seeing in him a potential combination of Saladin and Ataturk, able both to unite and to lead the Arabs.

“In 1954, after conducting a three-month study of Israel’s security picture, Ben-Gurion concluded that the Arabs would be ready for war in terms of equipment, training, and unity of command some time in 1956.

“Fuelling these concerns, both Egypt and Israel had embarked on concerted efforts to increase the quantity and quality of their military arsenals through purchases from the Western powers.

“This search for external armaments helped lead France, the UK, and the US to conclude a ‘Tripartite Agreement’ to monitor and control weapons sales to the region.

“Frustrated with its inability to secure sufficient purchases from these suppliers, Egypt broke with the regime in 1955 and turned to the Soviet Union for weapons.

“Israel viewed the resulting Czech arms deal — so named to disguise the Soviet source of the weapons — as a watershed development in its relations with Egypt, and a clear threat to the region’s delicate military balance.”

On October 29, 1956, Israel — like Russia on February 22, 2022 — launched attacks against Egypt. Paratroopers landed deep inside Sinai — thus the ‘Sinar war’ — to give the appearance of a threat to the Suez Canal, which Nasser had nationalised in July 1956, having earlier closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping — while ground forces drove across the peninsula.

The next day, the US sponsored a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for an immediate Israeli withdrawal.

The UK and France vetoed the resolution. Russia did the same on February 25, vetoing the UNSC resolution deploring its severe and illegal breach of the UN Charter, threatening global peace and security, and calling for an immediate ceasefire and a peaceful resolution.

In 1956, having vetoed the UNSC resolution, both the UK and France suggested establishing a 10-mile (16km) wide buffer along both sides of the Canal, ostensibly to separate the two sides’ forces.

The two European powers subsequently issued an ultimatum, masked as an appeal to both Egypt and Israel, to keep that distance.

Nasser predictably refused. According to David A. Nichols, author of Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis — Suez and The Brink of War 2011:

“Nasser refused, informing the British ambassador… that ‘since the Israelis were the aggressors… the British and French stand, consisting of the ultimatum and imminent occupation, was an act of aggression against Egyptian rights and dignity and against the Charter of the United Nations’.”

British and French forces, nonetheless, launched carrier- and land-based air strikes against Egypt on October 31, followed by an amphibious invasion on November 5.

According to Nichols, the strikes were simultaneously to orchestrate a regime change in Cairo.

The war was over two days later — that’s a nine-day war — when US coercive pressure compelled the British, and consequently the French and Israelis, to halt their offensive, and consent to a ceasefire and eventual withdrawal of their forces from Egypt.

The war was coined as a ‘preventive war’ to legitimate the use of force in striking first in self-defence. It was a joint Israeli-British-French war against Egypt, but might does not make right.

Accordingly, Prof Pnina Lahav wrote that it “would be hard to argue that this was a war of self-defence, and therefore legitimate under the Charter of the United Nations.”

Russia is not the first to strike first and not the first to veto a UNSC resolution against such acts of aggression and violence, but it is State terrorism, no less.

Acts of violence against individuals or groups outside of an armed conflict are terrorism. Terrorism by a state is still terrorism. – March 3, 2022.

* Hafiz Hassan reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.