APRIL FOOL! Putin to withdraw all Russian troops from Ukraine, following religious epiphany

Original column on Aril 1, 2025

Today, April 1, 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in a nationally-televised speech that he was withdrawing all Russian troops from Ukraine.

He explained that after he went to church to pray for Donald Trump, following the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13, 2024, he had begun to think of his own mortality and of his relationship with God.

Over the course of many months and conversations with Patriarch Kirill and other high prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church, he had slowly come to understand that to kill innocent civilians in Ukraine was wrong and a major sin against God’s will.

A leader with such sins on his conscience, if not forgiven, would not be admitted to Heaven, he came to believe.

Putin began to earnestly study the Bible, including the New Testament and the Ten Commandments. He had not studied these texts since before he joined the KGB after his university studies.

A lawyer by training, Putin began to review the texts of the U.N. Charter and human rights and international humanitarian law treaties to which Russia was a party. He had not read these texts either, if ever, since before joining the KGB.

In these texts he found that the bedrock principle upon which the United Nations was founded was the prohibition in Article 2 paragraph 4

of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The Soviet Union had not only ratified the Charter, but had also played a key role in the establishment of the United Nations in 1945.

Putin also learned that Russia is a party to a number of U.N. human rights treaties or conventions.

These include:

–U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1967j
–U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1985)
–U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990)
–U.N. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict (2001)

In the area of International Humanitarian Law (the Law of War) Putin found that Russia was a party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Protocols, among other treaties.

These have been summarized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as follows:

ICRC, “Summary of the Geneva Conventions
of 1949 and Their Additional Protocols,” 2011.

Putin, in an epiphany reminiscent of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascas, has decided to seek forgiveness for his sins and to follow the path of God.

As a first step, he has ordered the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine as defined by its internationally-recognized borders of 1991.

***

James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and professor of international law at other universities.

He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.

At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Recent Books by the Author

James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (2024). Available on Amazon, and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.

James P. Rowles, Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024). Available on Amazon,and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.

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