Russia’s Aggression: A Hybrid of Conventional and Unconventional Violations

Russia’s invasion began with strikes on military installations—airfields, command centers, and border defenses—echoing the conventional nature of Pearl Harbor as a first strike on armed forces. However, it rapidly devolved into systematic violations of warfare norms, surpassing Pearl Harbor’s military focus and aligning more closely with the Hamas attack’s civilian targeting. By September 2025, over 1,310 days into the war, Russian forces have committed extensive war crimes, including deliberate drone strikes on civilians classified as crimes against humanity by the UN Commission of Inquiry. These attacks, escalating since January 2025, have killed and injured more civilians than in the prior year, targeting residential areas, hospitals, and infrastructure in cities like Chernihiv and Kyiv. Tactics mirror Hamas’s barbarity: summary executions, torture of POWs, forced deportations (including children), and destruction of civilian objects, as documented by Human Rights Watch and the International Criminal Court. Unlike Japan’s 1941 strike, which avoided deliberate civilian massacres, Russia’s campaign includes “filtration” camps in occupied territories for ideological vetting and Russification, violating Geneva Conventions on protected persons.

Philosophically, this breaches jus in bello’s discrimination principle, treating civilians as tools for terror and attrition, much like Hamas’s festival and kibbutz assaults. Legally, it contravenes Additional Protocol I’s bans on indiscriminate attacks, rendering Russia’s “special military operation” a crime of aggression under the Rome Statute. As of September 2025, Russian offensives have gained modest territory (206 square miles in late August to September) at enormous cost, but with no strategic breakthroughs, underscoring the invasion’s failure as a just cause.