Trump threatens to do to Iran what Putin did to Ukraine = war crimes.

Like Putin did in Ukraine, Trump is trying to destabilize Iran, make it surrender. Putin weaponized the cold, Trump threatens to weaponize drinking water. International laws and norms – ha. ha. ha.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

Let’s get something clear: when the U.S. President this week threatened that “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”, he is threatening to commit a war crime.

No ifs or buts. A war crime.

The aim of bombing Iran’s desalination plants is obviously to deprive civilians of drinkable water - which would create suffering, displacement, chaos, and refugees.

“Desalination facilities are necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” concludes Human Rights Watch.

International humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, explicitly prohibits targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities.

And the U.N., the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and many others have, many times, as late as this week, stated very clearly that “war on essential infrastructure is war on civilians,” and that “water is life, it is health, it is dignity, and it is survival.”

And just before any war-happy-clappy MAGAs counter with ‘but Trump is only threatening to cut off the Iranians water supply’ - nope, folks - according to the International Court of Justice, the ‘mere’ “threat to use such force will likewise be illegal.”

So, now we know: The U.S. President is threatening to commit a blatant war crime.

The immediate question on the mind of any sane person when reading this fact would be: How and where on Earth did the U.S. President get the idea that committing war crimes is okay? (Never mind advertizing them on social media.)

The answer is: From his good friend, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s inspiration

The parallels between what the U.S. President is threatening to do in Iran and what the Russian dictator has been doing in Ukraine are uncanny, in several ways:

• Uncanny, because, in both cases, we are talking about obvious war crimes, committed in broad daylight with the whole world watching. Are Americans aware that their president is now learning - from a former KGB agent, now dictator - how to inflict maximum pain on innocent civilians?

  I don’t hear any protests?

• Uncanny, because both Putin and Trump are ‘weaponizing’ natural circumstances - in Ukraine the winter cold, in Iran the lack of drinkable water.

  All winter, the Russians were bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure - heating, gas, and electricity - in order to make Ukraine ‘unliveable’ and make the Ukrainians surrender or flee. Trump is now threatening to annihilate drinking water infrastructure (as well as electricity) in Iran - in order to foment chaos and the regime change he demands.

• Uncanny, because of the extreme cynicism in both cases - pinpointed, operational violence. Putin was mainly bombing the frontline cities of Ukraine (but far from only those), to make the population there flee - so his army could roll in and occupy the areas of East and Southern Ukraine that he has tried to take for four years, without luck and with enormous loses in personnel. His colleague Donald Trump is now specifically gunning for Iran’s desalination plants - because it is primarily the population in the fresh water scarce regions along the Arab Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz that is dependent on such desalination plants for their daily lives. You get my drift?

  A coercive escalation strategy - forcing the Iranian regime to reopen the Strait - or the U.S. will cripple your daily life and industrial capacity - what military planners call ‘the civilian choke point.’

• Uncanny, because both Putin and Trump are using/threatening to make the state and society of their enemy ungovernable. One thing is to show the enemy that with our bombs, ‘we can ruin your army or even your economy’ - it is quite another and much more potent threat to declare ‘we will make your population suffer.’

  As Ukraine’s Deputy Energy Minister Mykola Kolisnyk told ABC News in the middle of the winter, after months of Russia-inflicted bombings, cold and darkness - “the enemy’s plan is social instability through total blackout.”

The UN and the EU refer to Russia having committed 200,000 war crimes in Ukraine.

Joe Biden directly called Vladimir Putin “a war criminal” - while even the most thorough of Google searches does not bring up one single quote by Donald Trump containing the words ‘Russia’ and ‘war crimes’ in the same sentence. Not one single one.

Instead, President Trump paid tribute to the Russian dictator and war criminal by hanging a picture of him in the White House - in January this year, four years into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Try imagining President Biden doing that.

All of a sudden, Trump fawning over Putin makes sense

Few would call the U.S. President consistent.

But, in fact, when it comes to minimizing and normalizing Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, Donald J. Trump has, indeed, been very consistent.

Exhibit one:

In early March last year, Trump suddenly paused U.S. intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians. He did this to punish Ukraine for Zelensky showing up in the Oval Office without a suit, not being thankful enough and - the real reason - not being willing to sign a lucrative deal with Trump’s emissaries, a.k.a. his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his golf buddy Steve Witkoff. According to TIME magazine, the U.S. halt in intelligence sharing “cost hundreds of Ukrainian dead”, as Russia intensified its attacks, as they knew that the Ukrainians basically were fighting blind, no longer able to follow the Russians’ movement and prepare themselves.

When asked about the fact that Vladimir Putin had taken advantage of the punishment that he, Donald Trump, had inflicted on the Ukrainians, to intensify the Russian attacks, and that it had cost many Ukrainian lives, Trump shrugged his shoulders and stated that “he (Putin) is only doing what anyone would do.”

Please read that again, because it is one of the clues to what Trump is doing now in Iran: utter callousness.

The tone of both Trump himself, but also his secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, during the past month of war against Iran - their brazen tone and style, as if they wee playing game boy and not killing real people, including 165 school girls - lies on the same spectrum, that same style, now just with quite a bit of typical U.S. war chest beating added. ‘Operation Epic Fury’, indeed.

Trump excusing Putin’s war crimes

Exhibit two:

Easter 2025, Russian missiles hit the central square in Sumy in North-East Ukraine, killing 34 people and injuring 117, many of them on their way to church or to see their families for Easter celebrations.

I will spare you the gruesome photos and videos.

President Trump did, initially, call the missile attack, “horrible,” but immediately – in the second half of the very same sentence, so nobody should be in any doubt - he excused it as a “mistake.”

He then went straight on to accuse the Ukrainian President for having started the war; “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”

Let’s take that one again: The question to the U.S. President was what was his reaction to the killing of dozens of innocent Ukrainians - his answer could be summed as: ‘bad, sure, but it was just a mistake (again), and, anyway, it is all Ukraine’s fault.’

The week before, April 5, 2025, Russian Iskander missiles had struck a residential neighborhood in the city of Kryvyi Rih, including a busy playground: 20 people were killed, among them nine children, 75 people were injured.

Vladimir Putin specifically chose the city of Kryvyi Rih – because it is the hometown of Ukrainian President Zelensky. Basically, Putin wanted to send his counterpart a personal message - and a dictator doesn’t care about killing 20 innocent people.

Last Spring, after a number of such Russian attacks - and Trump’s excusing them or simply shrugging them off - I asked an expert on Russian warfare and technology, Michael Clemmesen, a retired Danish brigadier-general, to explain the mechanics of the Russian attacks.

Could such attacks be a mistake, as Trump had claimed?, I asked him. Clemmesen laughed out bitterly, “no, of course not.”

“Russia is operating totally outside any international laws for warfare,” Putin is waging pure terror warfare,” Clemmensen said.

“The missiles the Russian use are very accurate, down to about 6 metres.”

“What they hit is the target they want to hit, there is no doubt about that.”

The main difference seems to be that Trump goes on social media to advertise his strategy/war crimes before - Putin doesn’t have Twitter.

Trump’s world view

“Russia is operating totally outside any international laws for warfare,” said the Danish warfare expert. Trump is now threatening to do exactly the same.

The U.N. can scream as much as they want about ‘war crimes’ and ‘international law’. But as we all know, Donald Trump has nothing but contempt for the U.N. and its principles. The U.S. President has often called the ICC (International Criminal Court) “illegitimate”, “without foundation”, “powerless.”

It was both fascinating and deeply disturbing to watch Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Gary Sick, for many decades a leading academic and analyst of U.S. diplomacy on Iran. Sick, now 91, concludes that Donald Trump had no ‘legal excuse’ to go to war against Iran, because there was not (as international law demands) any ‘imminent threat’ against the U.S., only invented ones. Exactly as we saw four years ago when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

For God’s sake, Donald Trump is even using the same jargon as Putin, justifying his attack because he wants to help and liberate the people of Iran from the mullahs - regime change. When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian dictator promised the Ukrainians to liberate them from Zelensky’s neo-nazi regime.

Countless and continued threats from the U.S. President to invade or annex (or versions thereof) long-term allies such as Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, illustrates Trump’s simplified world view - might equals right. Not to mention when Trump tore up pretty much all international trade treaties and slapped tariffs on pretty much the whole world. Although - unsurprisingly - not on Russia.

It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that Donald J. Trump has read too much Thucydides, the Greek general and historian - often called ‘the father of the theory of political realism and self-interest’.

The U.S. President is notoriously, as one former assistant told me, “totally unbriefable.” But his world view is, nevertheless, very close to the one the Greek philosopher identified 2,400 years ago:

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

For four years, the western world has criticized and protested against the war crimes of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. It seems that while we were busy protesting - to no avail - Donald Trump and his henchmen were simply busy studying and learning from the Russian dictator.