On Tuesday, May 19th the Russian consulate in Damascus suffered another attack by NATO proxy forces trying to overthrow the government of Syria. The Russian Foreign Ministry responded with a statement condemning the attack as an act of “terrorism” and asked the “international community” to respond to the attack and urged “all parties enjoying influence on extremists in Syria to demand they immediately stop such actions.”

But was this an act of terrorism or an act of war? Let’s examine what an act of terrorism is. It is an attack on civilians by individuals or small groups with the objective of creating terror in the population in order to achieve political purposes. An attack on a military post or an attack on a military unit are not acts of terrorism, but are acts of war. The shelling of a foreign embassy by organised armed units engaged in a war is not an act of terrorism either. It is an attack on the foreign state itself and therefore is an act of war and meant as such.

And who is this mysterious “international community” they refer to? Well, everyone who is not blind, deaf and dumb knows it is the United States of America and its lieutenants in crime who are engaged in the war against Syria; Britain, France, Canada, Jordan, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. It is not a matter of these countries “enjoying influence” as the Foreign Ministry stated but a matter of their direct support and control of the forces that attacked the consulate.

This attack was not just the work of rogue “extremists”. Like the NATO attack on the Chinese embassy in its aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, it is an act of war and is meant as a message to Russia to give up its support of Syria or suffer worse.

The Russian government’s attempt to diminish the responsibility of the United States and its puppets is perhaps understandable in view of the greater objective, which is to avoid a direct conflict with the hegemonic power, but it is impossible to cover over the fact that this was a direct act of aggression against Russia just a few days after the Victory Parade in Moscow that was boycotted by NATO leaders and just after the American foreign secretary John Kerry met with President Putin in Sochi.

The meeting between President Putin and Mr. Kerry drew a lot of speculation that the Americans had recognised their “mistakes” in Ukraine, that they had realised their strategy had failed, and that there was a real division between the EU and their masters in Washington, all of which had brought the Americans to their senses. But the sharp words of the German Chancellor to President Putin when she went to Moscow to lay a wreath the day after the Victory Parade prove the opposite is true. There is no split between the Americans and their puppets. There is complete accord on the ultimate objective, the subjugation of Russia, There is disagreement on only two things in achieving this objective, strategy and timing.

Chancellor Merkel, arch hypocrite that she is, used her short time in Moscow after laying a wreath to the war dead, to attack President Putin at their press conference. She lied and accused Russia of committing “crimes” in Crimea and Ukraine and that, far from liberating Europe from Nazism, Russia had suppressed “democracy” in Eastern Europe. Her comments, downplayed in Russia but amplified in the American press, were a deep insult coming from the leader of the nation that had destroyed Russia in World War II and which supported fascist formations during the breakup of Yugoslavia and viciously bombed that country in 1999. They were also a distortion of history and the facts since socialist democracy in Eastern Europe has not been replaced by “freedom” and “liberty” but by the steadily increasing oppression and pauperisation of the citizenry that is characteristic of capitalist “democracy” in the west and its police state apparatus.

This is also the same woman who supported the putsch against President Yanukovich and who has continued to support the war crimes committed against the populations of east Ukraine by the Poroshenko junta in Kiev ever since. And let us not forget that German troops took part in the operations to illegally sever the Serbian province of Kosovo from the rest of Serbia, participated in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo and sat back and watched as countless Orthodox churches and cultural sites in the heart of Serbia were ruthlessly destroyed.

The timing of the shelling of the Russian embassy after these meetings cannot be merely coincidence coming right after them and coinciding with the Chinese-Russian naval drills in the Mediterranean and the attempt by the NATO pact to overthrow the government of Macedonia in order to disrupt the South Stream gas pipeline project. The insults go with the military and economic pressure.

But what is to be done about all this? The attack on the consulate is a violation of international law and constitutes an act of aggression under the Rome Statute which states that the crime of aggression includes,

Article 8bis(g) “The sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State….”

But there is no mechanism by which the state criminals behind these actions can be brought to justice. The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction and is a tool of the west in any event. The Security Council has been reduced to a carnival sideshow with the psychopathic ravings of the American ambassador the principal attraction.

The United States has remained silent so far on this bombing but we can expect the same hypocritical statement the State Department made regarding the attack on the Russian embassy in Damascus on November 28, 2013, and another attack in January of this year. It issued statements condemning the attacks while at the same time supporting those who carried them out. The Americans played the same game when the Russian embassy in Kiev was attacked on June 14, 2014 by a violent mob, including members of the Azov battalion and the Kiev foreign minister. They issued a statement condemning it but immediately turned around and excused the attack by accusing Russia of moving its forces into Ukraine.

Russia is necessarily proceeding with caution and circumspection but it is faced with antagonists who are set on forcing her to the wall and who are experts at provocation, subterfuge, chaos and killing. We must hope that Russia and China, with the BRIC countries at their side, can continue to develop another vision of the world in which concern for the other is a natural part of world diplomacy and that, in the meantime, what President Assad of Syria recently referred to as the Axis of Resistance becomes strong enough to defeat the aggression of the dark forces in the west that live only for power, profit and world domination.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.