Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is threatening nuclear attack should the occupied regions be attacked by the Ukrainian military.
Disaffection
There are reports of more than 3,000 mostly young men fleeing Russia via the border with Mongolia. Other destinations include Belarus, Armenia and Georgia. However, Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis urged Russians fleeing their country to stay and fight against Putin and to liberate Russia. But president of the European Council Charles Michel asks that European countries offer refuge to those fleeing conscription. There is now a proposed law in Russia that would see deserters jailed for up to 10 years.
This disaffection is not a recent phenomena. In May the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) claimed that:
More than 300,000 people have now left Russia because of the repression, refusal to support the war or be conscripted into the armed forces.
Further, there are reports of women in the Dagestan and Yakutia regions staging protests against the war.
Attacks on military targets
There are also several reports of attacks by disaffected citizens on military targets.
On 22 September CrimethInc tweeted news of Molotov cocktail attacks on military recruitment offices by anarchists:
According to news reports, on the first night of Putin's new mobilization, anti-war partisans used Molotov cocktails to attack military recruiting offices in Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Kyra, and Gay, as well as the city administration of Tolyatti.https://t.co/mi74ZFTg6Phttps://t.co/e8HIdOUYFipic.twitter.com/lgCNLEvJQf
Also on 22 September the Daily Mirror reported that in the city of Ust-Ilimsk a man fired a gun at local military recruiter Aleksandr Yeliseyev. According to Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the officer died:
Mobilized man killed a drafting office commander in Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk region, Russia.
Alexandr Yeliseev, the commander, was shot four times almost point blank.
The murderer is Ruslan Zinin, born in 1997, "partially mobilized". He decided jail is better than death in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/s0IvHJZJBO
According to Mediazona’s calculations, 54 military enlistment offices and administrative buildings have been set on fire since the start of the war, 17 of these cases happened in the last five days after the announcement of the “partial” mobilisation.
In particular, a military enlistment office caught fire in Mordovia’s town of Ruzaevka after two Molotov cocktails had been thrown in through the window on 25 September. On the same day, it was reported that an administrative building caught fire under the town of Gatchina in the Saint Petersburg region after two Molotov cocktail bottles had been thrown into the building. The area of fire was 50 square metres, no one was hurt.
Back in April The Moscow Times (TMT) reported that local residents used Molotov cocktails to cause damage to enlistment offices in the Ivanovo, Voronezh, and Sverdlovsk regions. Also an enlistment office in the regional town of Lukhovitsy was set on fire.
In May TMT also reported that seven Molotovs were thrown through a window of a military recruitment office in Nizhnevartovsk.
Sabotage
There have been further acts of sabotage. Earlier in the year there were reports of sabotage by BOAK (Combat Organisation of Anarcho-Communists) to railway lines north-east of Moscow. There were other actions by the group: again on a railway line, as well as an attack on a mobile phone tower in Belgorod. BOAK are inspired by the New Revolutionary Alternative (NRA), which in the late 1990s bombed military targets.
On 22 September CrimethIncpublished an interview with BOAK (also known as the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organisation). A representative of the organisation explained they consider themselves:
to be the successors of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RPAU) [the forces associated with Nestor Makhno, also known as the Black Army] and the anarchists of the underground who, during the [Russian] Civil War, opposed the reactionary and Bolshevik dictatorship with arms in their hands.
Mutinies
A report by the ACG provided examples of some of the many mutinies that have taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
Sixty paratroopers from Pskov sent to Belarus as part of the invasion force refused to fight in Ukraine and mutinied, after which they were sent back to Russia. Some have been dismissed whilst others face court martials with the chance of prison sentences. There were also reports of mutinies in elite forces in Khakassia in the Caucasus. Also in the Caucasus, troops from South Ossetia, the unofficial Putin-backed breakaway from Georgia, refused to fight in the Ukraine.
In March, it was reported by the Guardian that mutinous troops ran over a colonel of the 37th separate guards motor rifle brigade by a tank. The claim was made by Ukrainian journalist, Roman Tsymbaliuk, who said that the brigade had lost around about 50% of their personnel in fighting west of Kyiv.
In June a former US special forces officer reported claims of an incident where Russian troops refused to obey orders. During the same incident it was claimed that a Russian general, Valeriy Solodchuk, commander of the 36th Army, was nearly blown up amidst an exchange of words.
Protests continue
In February the Canary reported on mass protests in Russian cities by people opposed to the war on Ukraine. They included St Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, and Volgograd.
The May ACG report included many examples of protests across Russia in the days and weeks following the invasion. For example, “between 24th and 28th of February, more than 6,440 people were arrested at anti-war actions”. Also, “In the first month of the anti-war protests, a total of 15,000 people were arrested”.
Now with mobilisation announced by Putin and the threat of military call-up of citizens, the protests have returned, as these videos show:
And here we see the Moscow police rushing to respond.
All around the world, militarization and repression are two aspects of a single project: concentrating state power. War and oppression are inherently interlinked.
BOAK has warned in no uncertain terms what would happen should Russia be allowed to win in its war against Ukraine – but also of very different consequence if it fails:
The defeat of Ukraine will bring about the triumph of the most reactionary forces in Russia—finalizing its transformation into a neo-Stalinist concentration camp, with unlimited power concentrated in the FSB [the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB] and a totalitarian Orthodox imperial ideology… On the other hand, if Russia is defeated, there will inevitably be a crisis for Putin’s power and a prospect of revolution. For anarchists, the choice between these alternatives seems clear.
These are dangerous times. Though the disaffections, mutinies and sabotage incidents, as well as the continuing protests (despite threat of arrests) are encouraging. They indicate a resistance, which extends over months and possibly far longer.
That resistance seeks a real revolution from the authoritarian tyranny that still persists from the Soviet era.
Earlier this week an incident occurred that represents a new and alarming threat to peace in the world. I am referring of course to the attack upon two Russian pipelines that occurred in the Baltic Sea. The pipelines, named Nord Stream I and II were designed to bring Russian gas to the European market. Nord Stream II was currently inoperable, its German recipient having made the decision (or was it made for them?) to not accept the gas that it bought.
There has been intense speculation online about who was responsible for what can only be described as a terrorist attack. The names of countries most frequently mentioned in this context are Russia, Poland, Ukraine and the United States. Russia can be ruled out, notwithstanding the somewhat desperate attempts of some media outlets to point the finger at them. Russia has absolutely no motive to cause the damage. If they wished to deny gas to Europe, all they had to do was turn the switch to “off” for that to be achieved.
Ukraine can be ruled out because it lacks the means to achieve this act of sabotage.
The operation was actually quite complex, obviously involving the use of ships in the vicinity to carry the saboteurs. It is extremely doubtful if the Ukrainians have the technical expertise to carry out the operation, much less able to put the naval vehicles in the vicinity to carry out that operation
Poland has both the manpower and the motivation to carry out the attack. It is extremely doubtful, however, whether they have the political will to carry out such an attack, at least on their own. That leaves the Americans and here much evidence can be mustered on behalf of their being the culprit.
Let us examine that option in terms of the three classic elements used in determining potential culpability: means, motive and opportunity. Means is hardly an issue. The Americans have plenty of people trained specifically in this type of warfare. It would be a simple matter from their perspective to put together a team able to conduct such an operation.
Let’s look at motive. Here there is no shortage of evidence. In February of this year the United States president, Joe Biden, issued a specific threat against Russia should they ever develop the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline and use it to supply gas to Germany. The pipeline was certainly developed and had it not been for the Germans’ capitulation to United States pressure it would have been supplying gas to Germany months ago.
Did the United States fear that Germany would recover its nerve and agree to the pipeline becoming operational, despite the United States pressure? That was certainly a possibility. Although it has not been reported in the western media, there has, in fact, been massive protests in Germany in recent weeks. The deprivation of gas to Germany has not only seen the Germans facing the prospect of a very cold winter but more importantly there has been a large-scale closure of German businesses, and with it a loss of jobs, as firms have reacted to the rapidly diminishing supply of gas that is essential to keep the factories operating. That unrest was placing growing pressure on the German government, some resiling from their earlier reluctance to resist United States pressure was a growing possibility.
That leaves the United States as a prime candidate for being responsible for the sabotage. It marks a wholly new level of irresponsibility by the Americans. Not only have they been prepared to see the collapse of Europe’s strongest economy, it marks a degree of carelessness and indifference to political responses not witnessed in living memory by the United States political class.
Why have they been prepared to adopt such an extreme and risky policy? To answer that question, one has to look wider than Europe. The last several years have seen the steady rise of the Chinese to the point where they are now, in parity progression terms, the world’s strongest economy. The rise in Chinese economic power has been matched by the progressive outgunning of the Americans in a range of social and economic issues. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, including the development of a range of economic groupings that have proved enormously attractive to an ever-growing number of countries in the world. This includes the Belt and Road Initiative which now has more than 145 members, or three quarters of all countries in the world.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is another grouping which currently welcomed Iran as its eighth full member, but has also attracted membership bids from a number of other countries, including, of particular significance, Turkey, which remains for the time being at least, still a member of NATO for whom moves by the SCO remain anathema to them.
The BRICS is a further grouping that has also shown recent signs of expanding its membership from the current five members, drawn from the world’s great continents. None of these developments have been well received by the Americans who see their previous hegemony around the world progressively declining in both power and influence.
It is not a position the Americans accept with any equanimity. The attack upon Russian infrastructure may be interpreted as a desperate attempt to recover its initial primacy. It demonstrates, however, that it is losing the ability to influence the rest of the world. The desperate attempt by a fading empire to regain its military relevance. The world has had enough of United States bullying and the attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2 will be interpreted in that light. That they should choose to demonstrate that fading relevance by an attack on a major civilian target will properly be interpreted as a sign of weakness. The attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2 may be seen by many as just enough to tip the remaining doubters from one camp to another.
even suggesting that Russia may have blown up its own pipeline, the NYT is killing its last vestige of credibility.
You know exactly this is a lie.
The only force that has a vital interest in doing so is the US/NATO conglomerate — to make sure there is no way Germany could change its mind and go back on its decision to let its people freeze to death this winter, and to economically destroy Germany, THE economic force and leader of Europe.
You, and your analysts know that.
Unfortunately, there is no common people’s influence on our reporting. There are stronger forces that have bought into your mind-bending journalism.
Still, once a supporter of the NYT, I feel I want to tell you.
Here too, these are not “proxy” Russians who signed a “sham petition” to be annexed to Russia. You know it very well.
These are real Russians, living in the far Eastern part of Ukraine, the Donbass area, mostly who have been discriminated against ever since the US-instigated Maidan coup on 22 February 2014 when a neo-Nazi government was installed that let the Nazi Asov Battalions literally slaughter Ukraine’s own people in Donbass — at least 14,000 were reported killed about half of them children — in the eight years since the “Victoria Nuland” (“Fuck Europe”) coup.
We are talking about the same Asov Battalions that helped Hitler during WWII fight against the Soviet Union.
Already in 2014/2015 the Donbass districts wanted to join Russia. President Putin did not allow it because at that time he still believed in the Minsk Agreements, sponsored by France and Germany.
These agreements were principally meant to protect the Donbass people as well as to demilitarize – de-Nazify – Ukraine, and to keep NATO out of Ukraine. None of the conditions of the Minsk Agreements (September 2014 and April 2015) were ever adhered to.
If truth-seeking geopolitical analysts around the globe know the real background, you, Editor-in-chief of the NYT, and your journalists, know the real story too. Still, you report lies and half-truths to further influence and promote people’s opinion against Russia.
The New York Times has become weaponized against Russia and China by your mere reporting.
Don’t you think that this will eventually backfire?
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern continued her crusade for the expansion of internet censorship during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, this time using the war in Ukraine.
“Whether it’s climate, trade, health crises or seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict, New Zealand has always been a believer in multilateral tools,” Ardern told the assembly, adding that “without reform, we risk irrelevancy.”
“There is perhaps no greater example of this than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ardern said. “Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal. It is immoral. It is a direct attack on the UN charter, and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for. Putin’s suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate? This war is based on a lie.”
Later in her speech, Ardern returns to the theme that Russia’s war is “based on a lie” to argue for the censorship of online speech which supports the idea that Russia is fighting for legitimate reasons in Ukraine.
Using the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack as a segue to talk about the perils of online radicalization, Ardern then smoothly transitions to the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet.
“This will also be important in understanding more about mis- and disinformation online: a challenge that we must as leaders address,” Ardern said.
“As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” Ardern added, an acknowledgement of the grave human rights concerns inherent in having ‘leaders’ participate in the regulation of public speech. “But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”
Then it gets even creepier.
“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” asks the prime minister. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology? The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same. To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves. To disband communities. To collapse the collective strength of countries who work together. But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.”
This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it's the mindset of tyrants everywhere:
This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow: https://t.co/kmG4zTgPwh
Ardern’s remarks are currently getting a lot of criticism in right-wing circles due largely to her suggestion that online discourse about climate change needs to be regulated so that the issue can be properly addressed. And to be sure that is an absolutely insane thing for her to say; I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic and I find the idea of silencing people who disagree with me about that unthinkably nightmarish. This is a line of thinking that can only arise from a profoundly tyrannical mind.
But what isn’t getting enough attention at this time is the fact that Ardern is calling for an increase in the already outrageous amount of online censorship we are seeing with regard to the war in Ukraine. She explicitly said the war is “based on a lie”, and then went on to argue that people need to be stopped from circulating speech which lends credibility to that lie, even if such freakishly authoritarian measures may be “misinterpreted” as being hostile to free speech.
Ardern argues that online speech claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is legal and noble makes it harder to attain peace, but of course she doesn’t really believe that, and neither does anyone else. The idea that free speech about the war could somehow hamper peace negotiations between governments is self-evidently absurd and completely nonsensical.
'Russian Propaganda' Is The Latest Excuse To Expand Censorship
"This isn't about RT, it's about the the agenda to continually expand and normalize the censorship of unauthorized speech."https://t.co/vpBRz0Id0w
In reality, this war is just the latest in a string of excuses we’ve been given by the western political/media class to censor the internet, with earlier justifications including Covid-19, election security, domestic extremism, and Russian propaganda again after the 2016 US election. But asserting that it’s important to stop people from thinking wrong thoughts about a war is a major escalation from all those other justifications, because they’re no longer pretending that it’s being done for our own good. Our wrongthink is the justification, in and of itself.
This notion that it is the job of “leaders” to involve themselves in regulating the ideas and information we’re allowed to share with each other online needs to be stomped out, dissolved in acid, and flushed down the toilet. That’s not their place. They shouldn’t even be looking in that direction, much less talking amongst themselves at the United Nations about how best they can go about doing it. It’s a profoundly dangerous notion that needs to be rejected with unadulterated aggression.
Free speech is not a “weapon of war”. It’s free speech. Either let us have it or stop pretending you value it.
______________
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The war in Ukraine has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Putting to rest his own ludicrous claim that the invasion of Ukraine constitutes a “special military operation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a military call-up and staged “referendums” — votes to join Russia — have been conducted in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, there are calls for more weapons from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and even demands that Russia be removed from the United Nations Security Council. The political and military ramifications of these developments are profoundly disturbing, says Noam Chomsky in an exclusive interview for Truthout. They indicate “a plan for a long-drawn-out war of attrition.” Chomsky urges that the U.S. join the rest of the world in calling for negotiations, not because Putin can be trusted, but because negotiations are our best hope for averting disaster. There’s no certainty as to whether this process would result in peace, but as Chomsky says, “There is one and only one way to find out: Try.”
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: Seven months after Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, the war has reached a turning point. It has come home to Russia with Putin’s call for “partial mobilization,” and annexation referendums have been staged. What does the bolstering of Russian forces in Ukraine mean for Russia and Ukraine? Are Putin’s orders for military call-up an admission that Russia is no longer conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: What has come home to Russia is unclear. There are reports of protests and forced conscription, alongside of appeals to defend Mother Russia from yet another Western invasion, which, like those [going] back to Napoleon, will be crushed. Such appeals might have resonance. Historical memories may be deep. What the outcome will be we can only guess.
From the first day, it was a criminal invasion, never a “special military operation,” but the pretense in the Kremlin is still maintained. The mobilization is unlikely to have much effect on the war for some time to come, and what kind of effect is unclear. The failures and incompetence of the Russian military have been a continuing surprise to most well-placed analysts. That may well extend to mobilization, training and supply of equipment. Any meaningful bolstering of Russian forces from these efforts is likely to be well ahead, probably after the winter months. I suppose Russia could move forces from other regions, but whether the leadership has the capability or will to do that, I don’t know.
The mobilization and referenda seem to indicate a plan for a long, drawn-out war of attrition. If the mobilization does succeed in shifting the tide of the war, that increases the risks of inducing the West to up the ante with more advanced weapons, perhaps reaching to Russia itself as President Zelenskyy has requested, so far rebuffed. It’s not hard to envision scenarios that lead on to catastrophic consequences.
That’s just the beginning. The impact of the war goes far beyond: to the millions facing starvation with the curtailing of grain and fertilizer exports, now partially relieved though there is little information about how much; and most important of all and least discussed, the sharp reversal of the limited international efforts to address the looming climate crisis, a colossal crime against humanity.
While huge resources are being wasted in destruction and the fossil fuel industries are gleefully celebrating the opening up of new fields for exploitation to poison the atmosphere even more, scientists are regularly informing us that their dire warnings have been far too conservative. Thus we have recently learned that the Middle East region, not far away from embattled Ukraine, is heating almost twice as fast as the rest of the world, with an estimated 9ºF rise by the end of the century, and that sea levels in the Eastern Mediterranean are expected to rise a meter by mid-century and up to 2.5 meters by 2100. Of course it doesn’t stop there. The consequences are almost impossible to envision.
Meanwhile the region continues to be the global center for heating the world to the brink of survivability and soon beyond. And while Israel and Lebanon may soon be sinking into the sea, they are squabbling about which will have the honor of virtually destroying both of them by producing the fossil fuels at their maritime borders, acts of lunacy duplicated around the world. Escalating the war in Ukraine in the face of such realities reaches levels of imbecility that are hard to capture in words.
Russia hopes to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine with staged referendums. Russia used this tactic before, in 2014, with the Crimean status referendum, although the two situations may be quite different. The voting in the Russian-held Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine is clearly illegal under international law, but I suppose this hardly matters to a power that has launched a criminal invasion against an independent country. What does Russia hope to achieve with the “referendums”? And what happens next, especially since Russia has had a difficult time so far establishing order in the occupied territories?
The referenda in this case lack any credibility. It was different in the case of the Crimea referendum in 2014. For one thing, the Russian takeover of Crimea didn’t happen in a vacuum. For another, there’s reason to suppose that Crimeans looked to Russia more than to Ukraine. Though the referenda were not internationally accepted, it was recognized by many that the results were not very surprising. That’s not the case with the current referenda.
Like the mobilization, the staged referenda indicate Russian plans for long-time occupation and a war of attrition. Though they clearly pose another impediment for negotiations over the fate of the regions where they take place, they may not completely close the window, as Anatol Lieven discusses.
It’s true that international law means as little to Russia as to the other great powers that launch criminal invasions against independent countries, the U.S. well in the lead. With impunity, thanks to its power.
What does Russia hope to achieve? As we’ve discussed, there are two ways to approach this question.
One way is to explore the depths of Putin’s mind, as George W. Bush did when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his “soul,” and pronounced it good. And as many amateur psychologists do today, with supreme confidence.
A second way is to look at what Putin and his associates are saying. As in the case of other leaders, this may or may not reflect their hidden intentions. What matters, however, is that what they say can be a basis for negotiations if there is any interest in bringing the horrors to an end before they get even worse. That’s how diplomacy works.
The second way suggests that what Russia hopes to achieve is primarily neutralization of Ukraine and “demilitarization and denazification.” The former means cancellation of the programs of the past years to integrate Ukraine de facto within NATO. That approaches President Zelenskyy’s proposals as recently as last March for neutralization with security guarantees. The latter would be a topic for discussion in serious negotiations. It might be spelled out as an agreement to refrain from placing heavy weapons aimed at Russia in Ukraine, no further joint military maneuvers, etc. In short, a status rather like Mexico.
Those are topics for negotiations — if, of course, there is a serious interest in ending the conflict.
We might recall that most of the world, including a large majority of Germans and much of the rest of Europe, is calling for negotiations now, while the U.S. insists that priority must be to severely weaken Russia, hence no negotiations.
There are other issues to be settled, primarily Crimea and the Donbass region. An optimal solution would be internationally sponsored referenda on the various options that have been proposed. That is presumably not possible now, but a serious effort on negotiations might improve the prospects. Recall that we have good evidence that as recently as last April there were serious Ukraine-Russia negotiations under Turkish auspices and that the U.S.-U.K. opposed them.
As to what happens next, that will depend on choices made by those involved, primarily Ukraine and Russia of course, but we can hardly pretend to be merely observers from afar. See again Lieven’s commentary, just cited.
Lieven is not the only informed analyst who regards peaceful diplomatic settlement as a diminishing but still live option. Another is John Quigley, who has been deeply involved in these issues since the early ‘90s, when he was the U.S. State Department representative in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] efforts to resolve contested issues in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR, particularly the status of Crimea and Donbass, his special concern. We have already discussed some of his current thinking, as of June 2022.
Quigley recognizes that though negotiations are currently stalled, “At some point, however, hopefully sooner than later, there will be a negotiated settlement that will need to deal with the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine” as well as Crimea. On Crimea, he recommends pursuing Zelenskyy’s suggestion that perhaps “the two sides could arrange a process of discussion about Crimea, a process that he said could last 15 years.” On Donbass, Quigley writes that “if Ukraine does anything even close to implementing the Minsk agreement [the 2015 Ukraine-Russia agreement under French-German sponsorship which called for a degree of autonomy for Donbass within a federal Ukraine], Russia could say that the aim of its invasion has been accomplished,” and a settlement could be reached.
Only a few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been more closely involved in current negotiation efforts than any other figure, expressed somewhat similar views on CNN. In his opinion, at the time of Zelenskyy’s election in 2019, a settlement favorable to Ukraine could have been reached along the lines of the Minsk agreement. He also feels that options for diplomacy remain open.
Whether such assessments are accurate, we do not know. There is one and only one way to find out: Try. That won’t happen, Quigley concludes, if “the U.S. goal is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian” — a “reasonable” assessment he reluctantly comments.
That is the one factor in the mix that we can hope to influence, something that cannot be emphasized too strongly.
President Zelenskyy urged the United Nations (UN) to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine by stripping it of its security council veto vote. Just a few days ago, the EU president made similar calls. While, technically speaking, a country can be expelled from the UN for “persistent violation” of the principles of the Charter, isn’t this a misguided proposal? Isn’t it also true that the argument that Russia may not even be a member of the UN is invalid on account of the fact that the continuation of the USSR’s membership by the Russian Federation, which Ukraine itself accepted in 1991, is in line with long established procedures within the UN?
One can easily appreciate President Zelenskyy’s sentiments, but whatever the technicalities may be, the very fact that the proposal is being seriously considered is enlightening. Did anyone consider punishing the U.S. in this manner when it invaded Iraq, to take only one example of its “persistent violation” of the core principle of the Charter that bars “the threat or use of force” in international affairs (with exceptions irrelevant here)? These violations that are not just persistent but extremely serious, matters we need not review even though they are virtually unspeakable in the U.S. mainstream.
We should, I think, keep our minds focused on what should be the central issue for us: U.S. policy. Should we accept the official U.S. position of fighting the war to severely weaken Russia, precluding diplomatic settlement? Or should we press the U.S. government to join most of the world, including Germans and other Europeans, in seeking a way to end the horrors before they bring further tragedy, not only to Ukraine but also far beyond?
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy. With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history.
“In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threat and call-up of reservists, it was reassuring for the leader of the free world to be unflinching,” writes the article’s author Kori Schake, who then adds, “Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in numerous other ways that Putin’s threats have constrained support for Ukraine.”
As though the possibility of nuclear war should not constrain US proxy warfare in that country. As though the crazy thing is not the US government’s insane nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, but its reluctance to go further.
“The gap between what the administration is claiming as their foreign policy objectives, and what it is actually willing to do, is a serious problem for American security, for Russia and beyond,” writes @KoriSchake. https://t.co/SX32lJKNgM
Schake criticizes the fact that while Biden has been saying a PRC attack on Taiwan would mean a direct US hot war with China, the US military would need far more funding and far greater expansion to be able to win such a war, so it should definitely do those things instead of simply not rushing into World War Three.
“But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the United States could indeed defend Taiwan,” Schake writes. “The ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capability. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed that the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 is ‘acute,’ yet the defense budget is not geared to providing improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More broadly, the Biden administration isn’t funding an American military that can adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Department of Defense budget request, a measure of just how inadequate the Biden budget is.”
As Shchake discusses the urgent need to explode the US military budget in order to defend Taiwan, The New York Times neglects to inform us that Schake’s employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been caught accepting a small fortune from Taiwan’s de facto embassy while churning out materials urging the US government to go to greater lengths to arm Taiwan. In a 2013 article titled “The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute,” The Nation’s Eli Clifton reports that, thanks to a filing error by AEI, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office was found to have been one of the think tank’s top donors in 2009. Had that filing error not been made, we never would have learned this important information about AEI’s glaring conflict of interest in its Taiwan commentary.
Schake herself is as intimately interwoven with the military-industrial complex as anyone can possibly be without actually being a literal Raytheon munition. Her resume is a perfect illustration of the life of a revolving door swamp monster, from a stint at the Pentagon, to the university circuit, to the National Security Council, to the US Military Academy, to the State Department, to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, to the Hoover Institution, to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, to her current gig as director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her entire career is the story of a woman doing everything she can to help get more people killed in military mass slaughter, and being rewarded with wealth and prestige for doing so.
And now here she is being granted space in The New York Times, a news media outlet of unrivaled influence where enemies of US militarism and imperialism are consistently denied a platform, to tell us all that the Biden administration is endangering us not with its insanely reckless hawkishness, but by being too “cautious”.
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being trained to freak out all the time about Russian propaganda, which barely exists in the west, even as we are hammered every day with extreme aggression by the immensely influential propaganda of the US-centralized empire. You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.
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When Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that 300,000 reservists would be called up to bolster the war effort, spontaneous protests and planned actions took place in more than 30 cities across the country, reports Dick Nichols.
After the August 20 car-bomb assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian ultranationalist political philosopher, US media outlets quickly branded the 29-year-old as an agent in Russia’s “disinformation war.” Rather than treating her as a member of the civilian press, they seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.
CNN (8/27/22) used Darya Dugina’s assassination to talk about “Russia’s vast disinformation machine”—citing Dugina’s website, which was the 945,284th most popular site in the world in July.
CNN (8/27/22) ran an article to this effect, failing to characterize her murder as an assassination, instead stating Dugina was “on the front lines” of Russia’s war effort, linking her to “Russia’s vast disinformation machine.” NPR (8/24/22) reported that Dugina was a “Russian propagandist” whose killing signaled the war was coming to Russian elites in their own territory. Foreign Policy (8/26/22) called Dugina a “dead propagandist” whose “martyrdom” did more to achieve her goals in death than she could have hoped for in life.
It is certainly true that during her life, Dugina, who espoused the philosophy of Russian Eurasianism, an expansionist political doctrine veiled as an objective analysis of Russian interests, had very little impact on Western audiences. This is true of most Russian journalists, despite the frequent warnings in US corporate media about the threat posed by Russian media messages. For instance, RT, often considered the foremost Russian outlet in the West, accounted for only 0.04% of Britain’s total viewing audience in 2017 (New Statesman, 2/25/22), and reached about 0.6% of the UK’s online population from February 2021 to the start of 2022—and this was before Western media platforms sharply restricted access to RT and other pro-Moscow outlets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
Far more prevalent for Western viewers is the constant barrage of pro-NATO, pro-Western propaganda that vastly overstates the significance of Russian disinformation. Such was the case when CNN noted that Dugina ran a “disguised English-language online platform that pushed a pro-Kremlin worldview to Western readers.” By “disguised,” CNN is suggesting that the site she worked for, United World International, engaged in outright deception by not disclosing its Russian origins—much like CNN does not describe itself as a US-based outlet, but rather as a “world leader in online news and information.”
Whether UWI is purposefully misleading or not, CNN‘s underlying assumption is that Western audiences are so fickle that the most minimal exposure to pro-Kremlin viewpoints represents a threat to national security. It’s this stance that turns journalists with foreign ideologies into the equivalent of enemy combatants.
If CNN thinks disclosure is what separates journalism from propaganda, it might have disclosed the biases of the sources it used to contextualize Dugina’s murder. The article mostly relied on information from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Center for European Policy Analysis, both of which are “used to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America” (Transcend.org, 9/5/22) and are fundedby the US government, European allied nations and weapons manufacturers.
‘An appropriate target’
CNN personalities were fervent defenders of the US invasion of Iraq and the lies that justified it. Did that put them “on the front lines” of the war effort, negating their civilian status?
Whether or not one agrees with what they are saying, journalists of every nationality deserve protection from those who would use violence to silence them. So when CNN or other Western media downplay the assassination of Dugina on the grounds that she spread Russian propaganda, or even disinformation, that supported a war of aggression and other war crimes, they are setting a standard that puts their own colleagues at risk. (The exceptionalism that holds that US institutions can avoid the consequences faced by others is, of course, a central pillar of US propaganda.)
US corporate media have a long track record of advocating for illegal US aggression while knowingly parroting their government’s false pretenses. The New York Times, for instance, hasn’t opposed a US war since its tacit disapproval of Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 (FAIR.org, 8/23/17). The Times advocated for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (8/8/01, 2/12/03); the CIA’s attempted regime change in Syria (8/26/13); and US drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (2/6/13). With the body count from these conflicts far surpassing that of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, how would the assassination of a New York Times editorial board member differ from Dugina’s murder? Aside, of course, from the fact that Dugina supported Washington’s geopolitical adversary.
This isn’t the first time US journalists have been less than sympathetic about the targeting of journalists from nations adversarial to the US. During the Iraq War, human rights groups condemned the US bombing of Iraqi TV in Baghdad, emphasizing that it is not permissible to bomb a news outlet “simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda” (Amnesty International, 3/26/03). But prior to the bombing, Fox News‘s Bill O’Reilly argued, ““I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television.” His colleague John Gibson wondered: “Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?” (Extra!, 5–6/03). After the bombing, New York Times reporter Michael Gordon said on CNN (3/25/03):
Personally, I think the television, based on what I’ve seen of Iraqi television, with Saddam Hussein presenting propaganda to his people and showing off the Apache helicopter and claiming a farmer shot it down, and trying to persuade his own public that he was really in charge, when we’re trying to send the exact opposite message, I think was an appropriate target.
On the very same day in 1999 that NATO bombed Radio TV Serbia, killing 20 journalists and other civilians (Extra!, 7–8/99), Thomas Friedman argued in the New York Times (4/23/99):
Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are “cleansing” Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.
Just a few weeks earlier, columnist Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post (4/8/99) had cheered that NATO was “finally…hitting targets—power plants, fuel depots, bridges, airports, television transmitters—that may indeed kill the enemy and civilians nearby.” Do such abhorrent, pro–war crimes arguments turn these columnists from journalists into “propagandists,” unworthy of protection from assassination?
CNN reported that Dugina’s death “has shone a light” on the inner workings of a Russian media sphere that unquestioningly parrots Kremlin talking points as if they were true. But, lacking in self-awareness, CNN and other US outlets relied heavily on Western government sources, exposing their own eagerness to toe the state line.
When US media report on Russia’s disinformation apparatus, they are implicitly claiming that something similar does not exist in the US. But if you’re interested in how US reporting advances Washington’s “soft power” objectives, the turning of a murdered journalist into an object lesson for “Russia’s vast disinformation machine” is a fine example.
Seven months on, the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase. Ukrainian forces are running a counteroffensive in the east and south regions of the country while Russia is still bent on annexation plans. Meanwhile, the West, with the U.S. at the forefront, continues with its explicitly stated strategy of weakening Russia to the point of regime collapse, thereby leaving no room for negotiations. All these developments indicate that peace remains distant in Ukraine and that the war may in fact be poised to become even more violent. Worse, argues Noam Chomsky below in an exclusive interview for Truthout, congressional hawks are increasing the risk of terminal war with the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, which was just recently approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and appears to be modeled on programs from prior to the Russian attack that were turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member.
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, after seven months of conflict, Russia and Ukraine find themselves in a situation that is hard to get out of. Russia is suffering great losses, and a recent Ukrainian counteroffensive has recaptured dozens of towns and villages in the northeast of the country. Under these circumstances, it seems that neither side is eager to pursue a peace settlement. Firstly, are you surprised by Russia’s problems on the battlefield, and, secondly, do you agree with the statement made recently by the minister in charge of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office that Moscow still has a major advantage over Kyiv and that it can declare victory whenever it wants?
Noam Chomsky: First, let me make it clear that I have nothing original to say about the military situation, and have no expert knowledge in this area. What I know is what’s reported, almost entirely from Western sources.
The general picture is that Russia has suffered a devastating defeat, demonstrating the utter incompetence of the Russian military and the remarkable capacities of the Ukrainian army provided with advanced U.S. armaments and detailed intelligence information about the disposition of Russian forces, a tribute to the courage of the Ukrainian fighters and to the intensive U.S. training, organization and supply of the Ukrainian army for almost a decade.
There’s plenty of evidence to support this interpretation, which is close to exceptionless apart from detail. A useful rule of thumb whenever there is virtual unanimity on complex and murky issues is to ask whether something is perhaps omitted. Keeping to mainstream Western sources, we can indeed find more that perhaps merits attention.
Reuters reports a “western official” whose assessment is that:
There’s an ongoing debate about the nature of the Russian drawdown, however it’s likely that in strict military terms, this was a withdrawal, ordered and sanctioned by the general staff, rather than an outright collapse…. Obviously, it looks really dramatic. It’s a vast area of land. But we have to factor in the Russians have made some good decisions in terms of shortening their lines and making them more defensible, and sacrificing territory in order to do so.
There are varying interpretations of the equipment losses in the Russian flight/withdrawal. There is no need to review the familiar picture. A more nuanced version is given by Washington Post journalists on the scene, who report scattered and ambiguous evidence. They also review online video and satellite imagery indicating that the destroyed and abandoned military vehicles may have been at an equipment hub. Examining the videos, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, concludes that the destruction was mostly at a staging area where “Russian forces stopped for fuel or were waiting for a mission when they fled,” the total amounting to a tank company that typically has about 10 or 11 tanks.
As one expects in a war zone, there is ample ambiguity, but little doubt that it was a major victory for Ukraine and its U.S.-NATO backers. I don’t think that Putin could simply “declare victory” after this humiliating setback, as the Hungarian prime minister suggests. On the prospects for a peace settlement, so little is reported or discussed that there is little to say.
Little, but not nothing. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the major establishment journal, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent — highly regarded policy analysts with close government connections — report that:
According to multiple former senior US officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement. The terms of that settlement would have been for Russia to withdraw to the positions it held before launching the invasion on February 24. In exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
On dubious evidence, Hill and Stent blame the failure of these efforts on the Russians, but do not mention that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at once flew to Kyiv with the message that Ukraine’s Western backers would not support the diplomatic initiative, followed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who reiterated the official U.S. position that Washington’s goal in the war is to “weaken” Russia, meaning that negotiations are off the table.
Suppose that negotiations fail or are not even contemplated. What then? The general expert consensus seems to be that there will be a protracted war, with all of its tragic consequences. General Austin and other U.S. officials have held that Ukraine can drive Russia out of all of Ukraine, presumably including Crimea. Suppose the prospect arises.
Then follows the crucial question: Will Putin pack up his bags and slink away silently to obscurity or worse? Or will he use the conventional weapons that all agree he has to escalate the attack on Ukraine? The U.S. is gambling on the former but is not unaware of the nature of this gamble with the lives of Ukrainians, and well beyond. The New York Times reports that:
Some American officials express concern that the most dangerous moments are yet to come, even as Mr. Putin has avoided escalating the war in ways that have, at times, baffled Western officials. He has made only limited attempts to destroy critical infrastructure or to target Ukrainian government buildings. He has not attacked the supply hubs outside Ukraine. While he has directed low-level cyberattacks against Ukrainian targets every week, they have been relatively unsophisticated, especially when compared to capabilities that Russia has shown it has, including in the SolarWinds attack on American government and commercial systems that was discovered just before Mr. Biden took office.
The same report cites Putin’s warning that, “If the situation continues to develop in this way — referring to U.S. participation in the recent Ukrainian counter-offensive — the answer will be more serious.” To illustrate, Putin “described recent Russian cruise missile attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure as ‘warning strikes.’”
The Ukrainian military understands the warning very well. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Valery Zaluzhny had written that Russian cruise missiles “could strike across the country with ‘impunity,’” adding that “limited nuclear war cannot be ruled out.”
As we all know, the escalation ladder from limited to terminal nuclear war is all too easy to climb.
To put it simply, the U.S. position that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia, blocking negotiations, is based on a quite remarkable assumption: that facing defeat, Putin will pack his bags and slink away to a bitter fate. He will not do what he easily can: strike across Ukraine with impunity using Russia’s conventional weapons, destroying critical infrastructure and Ukrainian government buildings, attacking the supply hubs outside Ukraine, moving on to sophisticated cyberattacks against Ukrainian targets. All of this is easily within Russia’s conventional capacity, as U.S. government and the Ukrainian military command acknowledge — with the possibility of escalation to nuclear war in the not remote background.
The assumption is worth contemplating. It is too quickly evaded.
Also worth contemplating is the fact that “Mr. Putin has avoided escalating the war in ways that have, at times, baffled Western officials.” The same puzzlement has been expressed before. The U.S. and U.K. were baffled by the Russian offensive, severely underestimating its scale from the start. “We assumed they would invade a country the way we would have invaded a country,” as one British official put it.
When the U.S.-U.K. invade a country, they go for the jugular, destroying communications, transportation, energy systems, anything needed to keep the country going. To the surprise of the U.S.-U.K. planners, Putin didn’t do that. The press reports that, “In Kyiv and much of the western part of the country, prewar life has largely returned for civilians. People eat in restaurants, drink in bars, dance and enjoy lazy summer days in parks.”
The gamble with the lives of Ukrainians, and far beyond, remains as well, eliciting little attention. Something else that merits contemplation.
It’s also useful finally to reiterate a familiar word of warning. Propaganda never ceases and rises to peaks of intensity at moments of crisis. Triumphant claims are always worth inspection. To take one example, much has been made of India’s alleged break with Russia over the war, based on a few words by Prime Minister Modi at a Samarkand meeting with Putin. The quoted words are “I know that today’s era is not of war.” Omitted is that Modi went on to stress that, “The relationship between India and Russia has deepened manifold. We also value this relationship because we have been such friends who have been with each other every moment for the last several decades and the whole world also knows how Russia’s relationship with India has been and how India’s relationship with Russia has been and therefore the world also knows that it is an unbreakable friendship.”
The Ukrainian government is pursuing backroom negotiations for the delivery of advanced American-made weapons, according to some reports. In addition, President Zelenskyy and his government have put forward a document of long-term security guarantees from the West which would link Ukraine’s future security directly to the presence of NATO forces in the country. Unexpectedly enough, Moscow immediately shut down the proposal and the vice president of the Russian Security Council called it “a prologue to the third world war.” Is the so-called Kyiv Security Treaty a path toward a peace settlement or a sure way not only to keep the conflict going on indefinitely but also to escalate it to a higher level?
It is hard to imagine that any Russian government would tolerate NATO forces in Ukraine. That has been understood for 30 years by high-level U.S. officials who have any knowledge of the region, and it’s even more unlikely now. What Russia might tolerate is a weakened version of this demand: long-term security guarantees with what’s called in diplomacy “strategic ambiguity,” coupled with termination of the plans for NATO membership for Ukraine. In the past, Zelenskyy has suggested something like that. Whether that remains an option, we of course cannot know until an effort is undertaken to reach a diplomatic settlement, as apparently it was by Ukraine and Russia as recently as last April.
The Biden administration, the Pentagon particularly, has been careful not to escalate its participation in the war so rapidly as to elicit the Russian reaction that hasn’t occurred, baffling Washington and London. Congress is another matter. It seems hell-bent on hurtling to disaster. Calls for no-fly zones and other very dangerous initiatives have been blocked by the Pentagon, but plenty of saber-rattling continues. That extends to China, or to keep to the rules, what we should call the “Indo-Pacific area of the North Atlantic” in the light of the decisions at the recent NATO summit.
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was reckless enough, but congressional hawks, a bipartisan collective, are determined to raise the possibility of terminal nuclear war even higher.
A major step in this direction was taken on September 14, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, cosponsored by Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
The act calls for Taiwan to be designated as a “major non-NATO ally.” Taiwan is to be provided with $4.5 billion in security assistance over the next four years, part of establishing “a comprehensive training program with the Government of Taiwan.” The act also seeks “more interoperability between the US and Taiwanese militaries [along with] joint US-Taiwan contingency tabletop exercises, war games and what the bill calls ‘robust, operationally relevant, or full-scale’ military exercises,” Asia Times reports.
Furthermore, the act declares U.S. government policy to be “to provide the people of Taiwan with de facto diplomatic treatment equivalent to foreign countries, nations, states, governments, or similar entities” and to remove “any undue restrictions” on the ability of U.S. officials at any level “to interact directly and routinely with their counterparts in the Government of Taiwan.”
Former Australian defense official Mike Scrafton observes that “The Chinese cannot but regard this as a provocative de facto recognition of Taiwan’s independence.” Under international law, which regards Taiwan as part of China, it is “a patent infringement of China’s sovereignty and a fundamental weakening of the one-China policy.” Once again, the U.S. “rules-based order,” in defiance of international law, is seen to be nothing other “than preservation of US hegemony.” If passed, “The Act would be a game-changer and reflects the American preparedness to engage in a war that would be disastrous for the region and the world.” It should lead Australia to rethink its commitment to the U.S.-dominated regional system.
The wording of the act seems to be modelled on the programs prior to the Russian invasion that were turning Ukraine into a “de facto NATO member,” in the words of the U.S. military, matters we have discussed elsewhere.
The Biden administration opposes the measure, as it did Pelosi’s action. Even more than that exercise in self-promotion, the Menendez-Graham measure would be a serious blow to the “strategic ambiguity” of the One-China policy that has kept the peace in a volatile region for half a century.
The European Union is pressuring China and India to support the idea of a price cap on Russian oil. Russia, of course, has said that it will not sell oil to countries that impose a price limit, so the question here is twofold: first, how likely is it that China and India will go along with the EU’s suggestion, especially since both countries have not only increased their Russian oil purchases since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine but are buying at discounted prices, and, second, what would be the political ramifications in the event that they succumbed to pressure and did go along?
All of this is part of the reconfiguration of global order that has been going on for some time and was spurred onward by Putin’s criminal aggression. A side consequence was to deliver Europe into Washington’s hands. This most welcome gift was provided free of charge by Vladimir Putin when he rejected French President Macron’s last-minute efforts to avert an invasion, at the end with undisguised contempt, a major contribution to Washington’s Atlanticist project of global hegemony.
The core issue at stake, I think, is unipolarity-multipolarity. Since the U.S. took over the reins from Britain 80 years ago, reaching far beyond Britain’s dreams, it has sought a unipolar world, and to a substantial extent it has realized that goal, in ways we need not review. There has always been resistance.
In many ways the most significant, and least discussed, form of resistance has been the effort of former colonies to find a place in the international order: UNCTAD, the New International Economic Order, the New International Information Order, and many other initiatives. These were crushed by imperial power, sometimes reaching the level of assassination (the very important case of Patrice Lumumba) if other means did not suffice. Some elements survive, like BRICS [the economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. Most significantly in the modern global scene, rising China leads the effort to develop a multipolar order.
Right now, the long-term conflict is manifested in many concrete ways. One is the intense U.S. effort to impede China’s technological development and to “encircle” it with a ring of heavily armed U.S. satellites. Another is the NATO-based U.S.-run Atlanticist project, now given a shot in the arm by Putin’s criminality, and recently extended formally to the Indo-Pacific region. The major competing element is China’s huge development and investment project, the Belt and Road initiative backed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, encompassing Central Asia and by now reaching well beyond. At an ideological level, the confrontation sets the UN-based international order against the rules-based international order (with the U.S. setting the rules). The latter is adopted with little controversy or even notice in the U.S.
The important specific issues raised in the question find their place within this broader framework. Their resolution depends on how the broad process of reorganization of the international order develops. A highly uncertain matter, one of great portent.
Not in the distant background is a more fundamental matter, which cannot be put aside. Unless the great powers find ways to accommodate to confront the most important threats that have arisen in human history — environmental destruction and nuclear war — nothing else will matter.
Mass arrests and protests have followed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and his order to mobilise military reserves. The resistance comes after Putin gave a fiery speech pledging that any incursion into Russian territory would be met with massive force.
Referendums in contested Russia-held territory have also been promised. The suggestion seems to be that those territories would be included under the new nuclear umbrella.
The new orders follow major Ukrainian advances into areas occupied by Russia since the invasion.
Nuclear threats
In a major speech on Wednesday 21 September, Putin condemned the west for supplying arms to Ukraine and said of alleged western nuclear threat against Russia:
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have.
He added:
In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
Mobilisations
Putin’s decree that reserves be mobilised included an order that reservists would be paid the same as regular troops and enjoy the same conditions.
The period of mobilisation was not specified and the precise numbers were not stated. The decree did also mention exemptions for age and illness.
There were reports that within hours flights out of Russia and some other countries liable for reserve service were sold out within minutes, with prices skyrocketing:
Flights departing Moscow and St. Petersburg today. The @AP is reporting international flights departing Russia have either sold out or skyrocketed in price after Putin announced a mobilization of reservists.
Also within hours of the decree, arrests were being reported across Russia with 100 each in Moscow and St Petersburg. This appears to be a response to dissent and organising against the war, and against mobilisation:
at least 364 arrests of anti-war/anti-mobilization protesters across russia, including almost 100 each in st. petersburg & moscow. and, since this tweet, a mass arrest of 60ish in st. petersburg (I believe, not counted here) was reported. https://t.co/RVD2dHYHHb
Some reports suggest that arrests at anti-war demonstrations across Russia were as high as 1700. And there are claims that some were badly injured by police as they were taken into custody:
>1,746 people arrested at anti-war protests in Russia. Now activists begin a long night of searching police stations for missing & injured people, the girl whose head was dragged on the asphalt, the guy whose contact lens was punched into his eye, etc @AvtozakLIVE@OvdInfopic.twitter.com/rJa7bppUBW
Planned referendums in contested and occupied regions are set to go ahead. The thinking seems to be that the votes, derided as illegitimate by the Ukrainian foreign minister on Tuesday, will allow Putin’s Russia to integrate the areas into Russian territory.
The rationale, according to pro-Ukrainian figures like former BBC correspondent John Simpson, is that these territories will then form a red line in terms of Putin’s nuclear threat:
This is a very dangerous moment. Phoney referendums in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine will mean Russia can claim that Donbas etc is actually part of Russia. If Ukraine continues to advance there, Putin will threaten to use nukes to defend Russian territory. WW3 would beckon.
It is tempting to look at Putin’s decrees as evidence of a regime in crisis and this may well be accurate. But once again the Ukrainian war makes the global risks apparent. Driving the Russian regime to the point of pressing reserves into service, and making threats of this kind, is nothing to crow about.
Rather, it highlights the risk of enduring nuclear capability. There’s also the need for a settlement through dialogue and the kind of serious program of global disarmament which the end of the Cold War failed to deliver.
Global non-proliferation campaigners said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest threat to use nuclear weapons—and insistence that he isn’t bluffing — represents a dangerous escalation of the Ukraine war and provides further evidence that the status quo of nuclear posturing and brinkmanship risks calamity.
In a televised address — a full transcript of which can be read here — Putin warned that if his nation’s “territorial integrity” is threatened as Moscow continues its assault on Ukraine and attempts to seize large swaths of the nation’s land, “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”
Accusing the West of “nuclear blackmail” and threats, Putin said that he “would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries,” a clear reference to Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), responded with alarm to Putin’s remarks, which the Nobel Prize-winning group characterized as his most aggressive to date.
“As long as nuclear weapons exist, the fate of the world rests on men like President Putin [choosing] not to use them,” ICAN tweeted. “Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons have heightened tensions, reduced the threshold for use, and greatly increased the risk of nuclear conflict and global catastrophe.”
“A single nuclear detonation would likely kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and injure many more; radioactive fallout could contaminate large areas across multiple countries. Widespread panic would trigger mass movements of people and severe economic disruption,” the group added. “The international community must strongly condemn nuclear threats, work to reduce the risks of nuclear weapons being used, and reverse the trend towards normalization of use.”
Watch Putin’s speech:
Beatrice Fihn, ICAN’s executive director, said Putin’s nuclear comments are “very worrying” and shouldn’t be downplayed as mere rhetoric.
“You’ll probably see some analysts saying, ‘Cool down, don’t worry, it is a bluff,’” Fihn wrote. “In one way, sure, nuclear threats and nuclear deterrence is always a bluff. Until it isn’t. And none of us know when he’ll go from bluffing to doing it.”
“This is how the world inches our way closer to the line where using nuclear weapons will be crossed,” Fihn continued. “We need to show strong global unity against nuclear use and nuclear threats. All countries, international organizations, and people around the world need to condemn, stigmatize and delegitimize the threats, use, and possession of these nuclear weapons.”
Putin’s remarks came as he announced that Russia’s military will be calling up reserves to bolster its attack on Ukraine amid a major counteroffensive by Kyiv that — with the help of a massive influx of weapons from the U.S. and other western powers — has forced Moscow to pull its forces back from parts of northeastern Ukraine.
Following Putin’s announcement, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a televised address that 300,000 Russian reservists would be called up to serve in the “partial mobilization.”
“We’re at war with the collective West,” Shoigu declared.
Putin and Shoigu’s remarks came as four Moscow-controlled regions of eastern and southern Ukraine are set to hold votes this week on whether to become parts of Russia.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denounced the planned votes as “an act of desperation for Russia, but it is not going to help them.”
Analysts warned that Putin’s “territorial integrity” comments Wednesday indicate that the Russian president will consider any attempts by Kyiv to retake Ukrainian regions as an assault on Russia itself, setting the stage for possible nuclear escalation.
“Unlike the generic nuclear threat issued at the start of his attack on Ukraine in February, this threat is explicitly linked to the military situation in Ukraine,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project.
Kristensen noted that Putin’s new stance appears to go beyond Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, which authorizes the use of atomic weapons in response to a nuclear attack or a conventional attack that “threatens the very existence of the state.”
“This sounds like another round of chest-thumping, but it is clearly the most explicit nuclear threat Putin has made so far,” Kristensen argued. “As before, it is essential that NATO does not take the bait and fuel his false narrative by explicitly threatening nuclear retaliation.”
The Rojava revolution, which broke out with the onset of the Syrian Civil War brought freedom to millions of local Kurds, Arabs, and minorities, and hope to many more people across the globe. But it also showed that the Western left could not be trusted. In the UK and elsewhere, many comrades failed to stand in solidarity with the revolutionary element in that terrible conflict.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, the same sections of the left are repeating the same cruel, cynical slogans. As in Syria, we must listen to local leftists who are taking a principled, democratic stand in the face of the onslaught of imperialist violence by Putin’s Russia.
A failure of solidarity with Rojava
In the course of the Syrian conflict, we learned the hard way that the British left can struggle to take a stance on issues which should be trivially obvious. Some elements of the left struggled to condemn ISIS, framing their rise as the sole result of Western intervention in the region. The authoritarian left struggled to condemn the Assad regime, responsible for mass butchery and the bulk of war crimes committed in the country.
On the other hand, leftists of all stripes found reasons to condemn the Kurdish-led Rojava revolution. Some attacked the direct-democratic political project in North and East Syria (NES) for working alongside US airstrikes to defeat ISIS. Some attacked it for coordinating with the Assad regime to ensure continued supply of basic essentials to civilians in the region under its control.
Neither side stopped to look at the other and realise that the situation in NES was far too complicated to fit their black-and-white narratives. Meanwhile, comrades on the ground were sacrificing their lives, and making whatever tough compromises were necessary, to keep their people alive.
I once heard the region’s top political figure Ilham Ahmed tell a roomful of conservative sheikhs who had happily worked with ISIS but were now complaining about Rojava coordinating with the Syrian government in Damascus:
I know how brutal the regime is. They have tortured and killed my friends. But I will sit down and negotiate with anyone who isn’t actually trying to cut my head off.
No one can claim this is not a courageous or principled position. It is easy for Western leftists to sneer at comrades overseas, to wallow in purity politics which get them off the hook from actually doing anything. It’s difficult to do what Ilham and her comrades are doing. Our job is to stand alongside them and support them.
Standing with comrades on the ground
The conflicts in Syria and Ukraine are linked. Each forms a part of the ongoing contest between hard Russian imperialism and the USA’s subtler attempts to remain the dominant force on the global stage. The USA keeps troops in Syria not only because of the region’s paltry oilfields but in order to maintain a beachhead disrupting the Russian-Iranian axis of influence in the Middle East, while the Ukraine war has drawn previously recalcitrant European powers closer to a US-defined regional policy. Meanwhile, Russia’s naked aggression has darkened the skies in both Ukraine and Syria.
There is not an obvious revolutionary third line in Ukraine, as there is in NES. Nonetheless, we must recognise Russia’s invasion for what it is – the bloody and destructive expansion of a capitalist regime. We do not need to think NATO or the Ukrainian government are worthy of support in and of themselves to recognise the need to stand with Ukrainian people.
As such, we must support comrades working to stop or mitigate the brutal invasion – on both sides of the frontline. Like our comrades in the Rojava revolution, Ukrainian socialists and anarchists are not only risking their lives, but setting aside their own ideological disagreements with the Ukrainian state to fight for what is self-evidently right.
Even if they are not willing to listen to comrades from the region when they call on the Western left to avoid “leftist Westsplaining” and ‘moral relativizing’, anyone who sits in their bedroom in the UK and praises Assad or Putin in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’ need only count the bodies.
Resist Russia in Ukraine and the West at home
We live in a world of uneven but multiple imperial capitalist poles, of which the USA is the richest, most powerful, and all-pervasive, and Russia the most brutal on the battlefield. In the Syrian conflict, Russia and its allies have been by far the most brutal on the battlefield, bearing responsibility for the majority of civilian deaths outside of the Syrian regime itself. Meanwhile post-Iraq the USA has adopted a subtler military doctrine of proxy warfare and power projection. Each must be resisted in their own way. Supporting the resistance against Russia does not diminish our efforts to challenge Western capitalist hegemony at home.
In different ways, both the Ukranians and the Kurds have felt the sting of Western indifference, exceptionalism, and – in the Kurds’ case – orientalism. At the same time, the Rojava revolution reawakened a spirit of socialist internationalism in this country and elsewhere. In this spirit, we must stand alongside our comrades making tough choices in Syria, Ukraine, and across the globe.
Featured image via the author, courtesy of the Internationalist Commune of Rojava
It’s hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can’t generate a profit. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very shitty fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the fuck alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments.
Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.
How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.
The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising etc.
It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re limiting ourselves with the profit motive model.
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A lot of the “Great Reset” environmental chatter comes from the capitalist class flailing around trying to reconcile impossible contradictions baked into capitalism like the premise of infinite growth on a finite world and the fact that there’s no way for saving the environment to be profitable. So they’re planning all these new models which won’t do anything to save the environment, but will yield massive profits.
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Anyone accusing you of “repeating Russian talking points” is just saying you criticize the foreign policy of the US and its allies. That is always what they truly mean by that once you really drill down on what they’re saying and why they are saying it. The argument is that because Russia criticizes the foreign policy of the US-centralized empire, you never should. Which is self-evidently extremely moronic.
It’s literally impossible to be an aggressive critic of US foreign policy with a sizeable audience and not be accused of repeating Russian taking points. Literally every single high-profile person who does so gets accused of Kremlin loyalty, without a single, solitary exception.
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Those who tell you to “move to Russia” when you criticize the foreign policy of the western empire are the same people pushing for internet censorship and the silencing of unauthorised media and demanding retractions from any western outlet that forgets to parrot the official line.
“Move to Russia!” No, you move to Russia. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire of all time. You don’t belong here.
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Hello we’re the westerners, we’re awesome because we live in free democracies with a free press where everyone is equal. Also, let’s spend weeks crying over a dead monarch at the urging of the news media because her blood makes her better than normal people.
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One of the many consequences of learning about how fucked things are is a growing frustration over wanting things to change while they only get worse. In my experience, which you may of course take or leave, the answer to this dilemma is contained in the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” A more secular version might read, “Make peace with what you can’t change in this moment, bravely make whatever changes can be made in this moment in your surroundings and in yourself, and learn to distinguish between the two.”
You’re only one human in a chaotic, confusing cacophony of eight billion, and there’s very little you can do to single-handedly effect the massive changes our species needs no matter how clever you are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. You can do little things to help make this planet a slightly gentler place every day, you can work to spread awareness of what’s true, and you can contribute in your own small way to the expansion of human consciousness (both in yourself and in the world).
Act to whatever reasonable extent you can act, then let go and relax into this beautiful existence. Make peace with what you cannot change in this moment, make what small changes you can, and learn to tell the two apart. The more you learn about our current plight the more necessary it becomes to learn how to do this.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?
It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.
Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.
The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.
In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.
People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.
In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.
It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.
Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Brian Stelter went from a mainstream media gig to a gig at Harvard. Jen Psaki went from a gig in the Biden administration to a gig in the mainstream media. Mike Pompeo went from a gig in the Trump administration to a gig with a DC think tank. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
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I’m actually less disdainful of the British royal family than I am of all the sniveling sycophants who are worshipping them right now. The royals were born into this ridiculous charade; these losers are choosing it.
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Brits who lived their whole lives thinking it was their free choice to have a royal family have been getting a rude awakening these last few days:
NEW: The 22-year old woman who was arrested after holding up this anti-monarchy placard at St Giles' Cathedral has now been CHARGED “in connection with a breach of the peace", @PoliceScotland confirm. Will appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court at a later date. pic.twitter.com/gFdBkoISB6
Just went to Parliament Square & held up a blank piece of paper. Officer came & asked for my details. He confirmed that if I wrote “Not My King” on it, he would arrest me under the Public Order Act because someone might be offended.
The Australian Football League was going to have a moment of silence for the queen but cancelled it when they realized it was the AFLW Indigenous round, meant to honor Indigenous Australians. Which actually tells you everything you need to know about the queen, and Australia.
“Oh wait it’s the Indigenous round, we probably shouldn’t celebrate Her Majesty.”
“Oh yeah why not?”
“Well you know, on account of all the genocide and killing and stealing and oppression and brutality.”
“Wait, so you’re saying it would have been okay honor people who did those things any other time?”
“Sure, yeah.”
It’s like saying we were going to have a moment of silence for the Hitler family, but then we realized it’s Yom Kippur and we didn’t want to be disrespectful to Jews who might find honoring Hitler offensive on that particular day.
From 2016-2019, mainstream liberals were indoctrinated with hatred of Russia using a conspiracy theory born of the US intelligence cartel that the White House had been infiltrated by the Kremlin. Now a deliberately provoked, totally unrelated war leverages that hate.
Hmm.
Spinmeisters now act like the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative never happened; this narrative which monopolized the news media and greatly altered public perception of Moscow on totally baseless grounds has been memory holed while its propaganda effects live on. We’re looking at a war in Ukraine that was knowingly provoked, by the very same empire whose propaganda engine just spent years manipulating the public into hating Russia for reasons that were (A) false and (B) completely unrelated to Ukraine. And now those very same liberals who spent years insisting that Trump’s entire family and cabinet were moments away from being dragged from the White House in chains are all waving blue and yellow flags and shouting “Slava Ukraini!”
It would have taken a pretty strong propaganda push to shift mainstream liberals from the position they were at just a few years ago:
Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm.
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If we were being told the truth about this war they wouldn’t be banning Russian media, we wouldn’t be hearing propagandistic messaging like “unprovoked invasion” at every mention of Ukraine, and those expressing skepticism about all this wouldn’t be swarmed by astroturf empire trolls.
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My critics are like, “You’re not a REAL anti-imperialist, if you were you’d be assisting the propaganda campaigns of the most powerful empire that has ever existed to help it subvert and conquer the nations who disobey its commands.”
I will not mitigate my criticisms of the empire I live in by equating them with the lesser crimes of other countries. Why would you even want me to do that? The only honest reason I can think of is that you want me to go easy on your cognitive dissonance. No. Fuck off. Face it. Turn and face the horror our empire inflicts on the world.
Of course it would be easier to shake my fist at foreigners rather than demand change in the empire that my country is a part of. Duh. That’s why you do it. I will not.
People want me to equate the full magnitude of the murderous butchery and weaponized starvation that our western empire is engaged in with these piddling crimes of other countries so they don’t feel bad. Fuck that. Feel bad. Feeling bad means you’ll need/want to change it.
In 2019, the Rand Corp., the brain of US militarism, published a report with nearly six pages on how the US could stoke conflict in the Caucasus — esp. between Armenia and Azerbaijan — to help weaken Russia’s influence. Last night, Azerbaijan invaded Armenia. When does it stop? pic.twitter.com/sdQIYGpOIu
People defend capitalism on the grounds that it creates abundance, and in a sense they’re right: capitalism is an effective way to drive up production and consumption. The problem is there’s no wisdom guiding it, so the world is being choked with garbage while people go hungry.
Haves exploiting the labor of have-nots will indeed get the gears of industry creating lots of stuff. But now we’re creating too much stuff, so much that it’s killing our biosphere, even as vast inequalities remain and far too many go without the basic necessities in life. The “invisible hand” of the free market is worshipped as a sentient deity who always knows what’s best, but in reality it’s completely bereft of wisdom and intelligence and cannot move in harmony with the real needs of the real world. It’s a mindless force that is driving us to disaster.
This isn’t a problem you can just ignore. You can’t keep waxing on about how much stuff capitalism has been able to create while that stuff is destroying our ecosystem and making this planet uninhabitable. It’s a problem that urgently needs solving, and capitalism can’t solve it.
Capitalism offers no solution to the problems of ecocide and inequality. As long as exploitation remains profitable, exploitation will remain. As long as ecocide remains profitable, ecocide will continue. Human behavior cannot remain driven by profit. We need something new.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world.
But while disastrous for the global poor — millions of whom are living on the brink of famine — the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year.
“The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloombergreported Friday, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”
“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added. “Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley.”
Though the prices of wheat and other food staples have fallen from their peak in recent months, they remain significantly elevated compared to last year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, leaving millions vulnerable to hunger and starvation.
The World Food Program estimates that “as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night” and “the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019.”
Energy prices have also eased but remain high, contributing to cost-of-living crises throughout Europe and other parts of the globe.
“People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted in response to Bloomberg’s reporting. “How do you reform this?”
Wall Street banks have not just benefited from the commodity price increases — they’ve actively helped fuel them, experts say.
“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, toldMongabay in July.
“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”
“It’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up,” Greenberger added. “My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency is calling for a safety and security protection zone to be immediately set up around the facility in order to avoid a nuclear disaster at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. This week it released a long-awaited report urging Russia and Ukraine to create a demilitarized zone around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, after visiting it last week. “Their warnings are pretty clear: Unless the fighting stops, unless the shelling around and on the plant site stops, … then the plant is really skating on thin ice,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We also go to Kyiv to speak with Olexi Pasyuk, deputy director of Ukrainian environmental group Ecoaction, who says the IAEA report will have limited impact on the fighting but helps raise awareness of the risks. “This is what Ukraine wanted to hear … that the only way to have it safe is to demilitarize the area,” says Pasyuk.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Ukraine, where residents near the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are being urged to evacuate as fighting continues in the area. The International Atomic Energy Agency is calling for a safety and security protection zone to be immediately set up around the facility in order to avoid a nuclear disaster at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. The IAEA issued a report Tuesday on the dire conditions at the plant, after investigators visited the site last week. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of attacking the plant, which has been controlled by Russia since March. The IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi spoke Tuesday.
RAFAELGROSSI: The physical attack, wittingly or unwittingly, the hits that this facility has received and that I could personally see and assess, together with my experts, is simply unacceptable. We are playing with fire, and something very, very catastrophic could take place. … A specific recommendation in my report that the operator should be allowed to return to its clear and routine line of responsibilities and authorities and that an appropriate work environment must be reestablished, including with proper family support for the staff.
AMYGOODMAN: Ukraine is now considering shutting down the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station over safety concerns.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Olexi Pasyuk is with us, deputy director of the Ukrainian NGO Ecoaction, where his focus is on energy and nuclear energy. And Edwin Lyman is joining us, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, co-author of the book Fukushima: The story of a Nuclear Disaster. He recently wrote an article headlined “Can the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Avoid a Major Disaster?”
We welcome you both to Democracy Now!, from D.C. and Kyiv. Let’s go to Washington, D.C., first. Edwin Lyman, your assessment of the IAEA report? How dire is the situation? Can a nuclear disaster be averted?
EDWINLYMAN: Well, Amy, the IAEA doesn’t usually use such strong language, so I think it’s important to take notice when they do. And their warnings are pretty clear: Unless the fighting stops, unless the shelling around and on the plant site stops and it allows workers to be able to restore the backup power systems that are now all disabled, then the plant is really skating on thin ice and is very unstable. So there is a great concern here.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Olexi, could you respond to the IAEA report? Your response to their assessment of the situation at the nuclear power plant?
OLEXIPASYUK: Yeah. Hello. Well, first of all, I think we need to understand the nature of the International Atomic Energy Agency. I think there are a lot of expectation from organization, and which has a pretty limited impact. I mean, they were designed, basically, to promote nuclear, while also trying to prevent spread of the radioactive materials. So, I personally didn’t expect much from their visit to the power plant, because the [inaudible] just the fact that the Russian army is enough to bring this concern, because they intervened, basically, in safety processes which are on the plant. So, this is what Ukraine wanted to hear, to get the confirmation news that Russia basically intervened in the safety, and the idea that the only way to have it safe is to demilitarize the area.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Can you give us some background here? I mean, Russia occupied this plant in March, very soon after their invasion of Ukraine. Why do you think they occupied the plant? I mean, this plant provides something like 20% of all of Ukraine’s electric supply.
OLEXIPASYUK: Well, I think we must stress, really, this fact that the sole fact that they attacked a power plant was, in a way, already breaking Geneva Convention protocol, which says this kind of site shouldn’t be attacked. It comes to the nuclear or to big dams. And it’s actually in violation of a couple of decisions made by International Atomic Energy Agency member states.
Why they did it? Well, first of all, as you try to cover the area and there is a nuclear power plant, basically, it’s on your way you go to there. But, indeed, it’s the biggest power plant in the region — I mean, in Europe. And this is the nature of nuclear power, unfortunately, that you have these major power plants where the generation is very much concentrated. So, once you’re in control of the plant, you are in control of the big chunk of electricity production. But also, I think Russia at this moment uses the power plant as a kind of a safe base, because Ukrainians is obviously very limited in the amount of military attack they can put on the military which is now on the site. And Russia is using the site of nuclear power plant to basically attack Ukraine over the river with artillery.
AMYGOODMAN: Olexi Pasyuk, can you explain the military situation around Zaporizhzhia? I mean, extremely significant. You have both Russia and Ukraine accusing the other of the shelling. What do you understand is happening, and how the plant is being used? And how many of the plants themselves — what? — there are six there; this is the largest station in Europe — have been shut down already?
OLEXIPASYUK: Look, let me start from the last one. I think this is one of the discussions which is happening as to why, out of six units, there were recently like two units working. It’s even on the — right after attack, when Russia occupied the station, when they were shooting on the site, there were two units which were operating. They were shut down, but then they were restarted again. This is because the power plant is important as electricity source for the region, both for occupied territories, where Russia wants also to have electricity supply, and the Ukrainian-controlled territories.
So, in terms of military, that area is under Russian control, in general, but there is something which we cannot really have details about what is happening all around, because there was shooting from different sides, which is difficult to estimate. We have some evidence when there were Ukrainians were attacking — there is this footage — on some of the Russian, like, soldiers, basically, on the camp just outside the power plant. But as to the attacks on site, it’s difficult indeed to say who does it, because there is also this question that there are like four electricity lines going out of the power plant, and there could be different interests to put them down.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Edwin Lyman, I mean, one of the things that the IAEA report concluded is that there’s no indication, at least at the moment, of elevated radiation levels at the plant, though the Ukrainian nuclear state company has said that radiation-monitoring sensors have been damaged, and so it’s not really possible to measure radiation levels so accurately and elevation in radiation levels. Could you comment on that and what you think is going on?
EDWINLYMAN: Yes. Well, by all accounts, there haven’t been any — enough damage to any of the safety systems to compromise the nuclear reactor safety or the safety of spent fuel. There was damage to a building that houses low-level radioactive waste, and that could have led to some release of contamination, but probably nothing that you would detect far from the site. But it’s also important to know that it is very possible to measure very, very low levels of radioactivity far away from the actual release. So, if there were a larger release of radioactivity, it could be detected in Western Europe and other stations around the world. So there’s no way that it could be concealed for very long if there were a severe event at the plant.
However, the situation is unstable. Right now there’s apparently no offsite power going to the plant. And my understanding is only one reactor is operating, at very low power, and it’s only operating to power itself and the other reactors which are shut down. And so, this one reactor is holding itself up by its bootstraps. That’s an unusual and unstable configuration for a nuclear power plant, and that’s, again, a great concern. Unless the offsite power is restored rapidly, then this plant should be shut down.
AMYGOODMAN: Can you respond, Edwin Lyman, to the European Union set to donate five-and-a-half million potassium iodide tablets to Ukraine, this to deal with the possibility of radiation around Zaporizhzhia? Explain what that means.
EDWINLYMAN: Yes. Well, in a nuclear reactor accident, one of the major releases of radioactivity is a radioactive isotope of iodine. And because the thyroid takes up iodine preferentially, that radioactive iodine can concentrate in the thyroid and deliver radiation to a small area and significantly increase the risk of cancer. And after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, one of the most obvious consequences was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among children, ordinarily a very unusual disease. So, there were many thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of thyroid cancers associated with that accident. If you take stable iodine within six hours of exposure, it will prevent the uptake of the radioactive iodine. So that’s one measure for addressing that one consequence of a nuclear accident. But a nuclear reactor is a soup of hundreds of different isotopes, and they all interact with the body in different ways. And radioactive — or, stable iodine can only address one of those pathways.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Edwin Lyman, you know, one of the issues that the IAEA report raised is the situation for workers at the plant, who have been working now, of course, for several months under conditions of extreme stress, on top of which some of the operating staff at the facility don’t have unrestricted access to some areas. That is, no staff have access to some areas in the facility. So, could you talk about that, the concerns about workers being exhausted and working under stressful conditions, and also what it means that — what the risks are of workers not being granted access, unrestricted access, to certain areas of the plant?
EDWINLYMAN: Yes, you can’t really understate the importance of the personnel in the operation of a nuclear power plant, both under normal conditions and under emergency conditions. My understanding is that the staffing at the plant is perhaps less than half it was before the invasion. That itself is a concern, putting undue burden on those that are left. But you compound that with the pressure that the Russian military is putting on the staff, that may influence their ability to carry out their activities in an unrestricted fashion. And it’s also important to have clear lines of command, as IAEA Director General Grossi pointed out. If there is an accident, you have to know who’s in charge. And there may only be a matter of a few hours to respond before preventing a meltdown. So, it’s very important that the staff be well rested, not be under stress, know who’s in command, and be able to do what they need to do and go where they need to go. And if they can’t, if there’s any indication of those restrictions, then it raises questions about the ability of the personnel to respond effectively to an accident.
Another issue is the fire brigade. A fire in a nuclear power plant is a very severe event and could lead to widespread damage to safety systems and lead to multiple meltdowns. However, the fire brigade at the Zaporizhzhia had to be relocated because shelling damaged the fire station on the site. That means they’re going to have a longer time to respond if something does happen in the plant. So, all these are of great concern.
AMYGOODMAN: Edwin, I wanted to ask you about the nuclear power plants, not only in Ukraine but all over, related to climate change, this catastrophe that’s being experienced around the world. When we were at the U.N. climate summit in Katowice a few years ago, afterwards I flew to Ukraine. And in so many towns and cities, there are monuments to those who died at Chernobyl. That was a different situation, but explain the crisis of climate change and nuclear power, when water levels go down that cool the fuel rods.
EDWINLYMAN: Yes. Well, nuclear power plants are often touted as a solution to climate change, because when they operate, they don’t release greenhouse gases. But you have to consider that in the context of their risks compared to renewable energy sources that don’t have the potential for a catastrophic accident.
And what you’re referring to is the impact of climate change on nuclear power and the fact that nuclear power plants, at least current-generation plants, require a consistent, steady supply of cool water to remove heat from the cores when they’re operating. So, if climate change stresses nuclear power plants by droughts, by reducing water levels in lakes and rivers, and by increasing temperature, that puts constraints on the operation of nuclear plants, because they can’t — they can’t operate if the cooling water they have access to is too warm, so that when you see heat waves — and we’ve seen this in France, but also occasionally in the United States, when water levels — when water temperatures get too high, the plants have to derate or even shut down. So, that’s certainly something you have to keep in mind when you think about increasing the use of nuclear power as a climate mitigation option.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Edwin, you’ve raised concerns also about what the impact of this might be on agricultural lands around the plant and well beyond it. You know, Ukraine is considered one of the breadbaskets of the world. What do you think — what are your concerns about that? And did you have similar concerns also — you’ve co-authored a book on Fukushima — what happened following that disaster, as well as Chernobyl?
EDWINLYMAN: When you consider all the impacts of a large release of radioactivity from a nuclear plant accident, you have to consider both the direct impacts of exposure on the public, but also you have to look at the contamination of water supplies and the contamination of agricultural lands. And certainly, in Fukushima prefecture, there was widespread radiological contamination that not only led to the need to sample and occasionally interdict food supplies, both agricultural products and, of course, fish, because the fishing industry in that prefecture was critical, but even when the detected radiation levels were lower, there was still the psychological stigma associated with foodstuffs that come from the vicinity of the accident.
But in the case of Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia is located near these very fertile agricultural lands. And even if a radiological release didn’t travel that far, for instance, across the international borders, it could still have a big impact on agriculture there and potentially taint the exports that are so important to the rest of the world.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, Edwin Lyman, we want to thank you for being with us, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, co-author of Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster. And we’ll link to your piece, “Can the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Avoid a Major Disaster?” And we want to thank Olexi Pasyuk in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the Ukrainian NGO Ecoaction.
Next up, Somalia is facing a looming famine. We’ll go to Mogadishu to speak with the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, and we’ll go to Ethiopia, where drought is devastating East Africa. Stay with us.
On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.
“Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said. “It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”
“Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.”
Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent half a year mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the actions of western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?
Because, as Chomsky notes, that is indeed the case. A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that “the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”
Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia’s reasons for the war), but that’s silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.
This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv’s sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin’s final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).
Instead it knowingly chose the opposite course: continuing to float the possibility of formal NATO membership for Ukraine while pouring weapons into the nation and making it more and more of a de facto NATO member with closer and closer intimacy with the US war machine, and then either ordering, encouraging or tolerating Ukraine’s aggressive assault on Donbas separatists.
Why did the empire opt for provocation over peace? Congressman Adam Schiff gave a pretty good answer to that question in January of 2020 as the road to war was being paved: “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” If you relinquish the infantile idea that the US empire is helping its good friend Ukraine because it loves the Ukrainian people and wants them to have freedom and democracy, it’s not hard to see that the US sparked a convenient proxy war because it was in its geostrategic interests to do so, and because it wouldn’t be their lives and property getting laid to waste.
Brian Berletic put out a good video a few days ago about a Pentagon-funded 2019 Rand Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The US Army-commissioned paper details how the empire can use proxy warfare, economic warfare and other cold war tactics to push its longtime geopolitical foe to the brink without costing American lives or sparking a nuclear conflict. It mentions Ukraine hundreds of times, and it explicitly discusses the same economic warfare tactics we’re seeing today like sanctions and attacking Russia’s energy interests in Europe (the latter of which Berletic points out is also being used to bolster US dominance over its vassals in the EU).
The paper even explicitly advocates continuing to threaten NATO membership with Ukraine to draw out an aggressive response from Moscow, saying, “While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington’s pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”
President Biden has made calls for regime change in Moscow that can’t even really be called thinly disguised, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has openly said that the plan is to use this war to “weaken” Russia, which other US officials have told the press is indeed the policy. Comments from the Biden administration continually make it clear that the US alliance is buckling down to keep this war going for years to come, which would fit in nicely with Washington’s known track record of deliberately drawing Russia into military quagmires against US proxies in both Afghanistan and Syria.
So make no mistake, behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, the US-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict. It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of US interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states, and all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.
Which is why when it looked like peace was at risk of breaking out in the early days of the conflict, the empire sent in Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky that even if he is ready for the war to end, his partners to the west were not.
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Russia and Ukraine agreed to a negotiated settlement to end the war in April, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to stop the peace deal.
The US and EU instead escalated the proxy war, as the Biden admin admitted, to try to "weaken" Moscowhttps://t.co/xsCvovq8Km
So as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fart-brained fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing. If China had backed a coup in Mexico and now had a loyal vassal in Mexico City who was letting Beijing distribute weapons along the US border while continually shelling English-speaking separatists in Baja California who are seeking US annexation, there’s no question that Washington would consider this a provocation and would respond accordingly. You can tell me that’s not true, but we’d both know you’re lying.
But as Chomsky said, the press are still spouting this “unprovoked” nonsense anyway.
“Russia is widely believed to have been taken aback by the West’s assertive and unified response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” reads a CNBC article published just minutes prior to this writing.
“The diplomatic visit underlines the importance of the Russian relationship for China, even in the face of international blow back against Moscow after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year,” reads a new report from CNN hot off the presses.
“It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country,” a source is quoted as saying in another CNN article published a few hours ago.
It is, as Chomsky observed, really freaky how hard they’ve been hitting us with this line every time the invasion of Ukraine is mentioned. It seems like every time it comes up they’re obligated to say it, like how Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.
In the mass media you’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. And you have to do it while saying the word “unprovoked” at every opportunity.
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NATO chief admits that NATO allies have been training and arming Ukraine since 2014.
Something to remember whenever Western media refers to an "unprovoked" invasion. pic.twitter.com/SGHF46yayz
Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.
We’re all guilty of doing the things we knowingly choose to do. If I choose to provoke someone into doing something bad, then they’re guilty of choosing to do the bad thing, but I am also guilty of provoking them. I’m not saying anything new here; this is the plot behind any movie or show with a sneaky or manipulative villain, and it’s been a part of our storytelling since ancient times. Nobody has ever walked out of Shakespeare’s Othello thinking that maybe Iago was just an innocent bystander who was trying to help out his friends.
Most of us learn that provocation is real as children with siblings, kicking the other under the table or whatever to provoke a loud outburst, and we’ve understood it ever since. But in 2022 everyone’s pretending that this extremely basic, kindergarten-level concept is some kind of bizarre, alien gibberish. It’s intensely stupid, and it needs to stop.
Empire apologists will also argue that saying Russia was provoked into invading by the US empire is like saying a rape victim provoked her rapist by wearing a tight skirt, or a battered wife provoked her abuser by disobeying him. And as a survivor of multiple rapes and an abusive relationship I must say I find it extremely offensive when people compare blaming the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its well-documented aggressions to blaming victims of rape and domestic violence. The poor widdle globe-spanning empire is not comparable to a rape victim, and if you find yourself thinking that it is it’s time to re-think your entire worldview.
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in September of 2022 and still say the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. You’ve got a brain between your ears and an entire internet of information at your fingertips. Use them.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
India has emerged as the frontrunner for a Malaysian requirement of light combat aircraft, with a package deal that would include maintenance and spares for the nation’s Russian origin Su-30 fighter aircraft. According to Indian media, the Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) Tejas light combat aircraft has emerged as the top choice for Malaysia as the nation […]
Peace talks in Turkey, March 2022. Photo credit: Murat Cetin Muhurdar / Turkish Presidential Press Service / AFP
Six months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States, NATO and the European Union (EU) wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag, shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian sanctions intended to severely punish Russia for its aggression.
Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine. Wars do not follow scripts, and Russia, Ukraine, the United States, NATO and the European Union have all encountered unexpected setbacks.
Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict.
For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the framework and the political will were there.
Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.
The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on self-determination for the people of those regions. The future security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its territory.
On March 27, President Zelenskyy told a national TV audience, “Our goal is obvious—peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.” He laid out his “red lines” for the negotiations on TV to reassure his people he would not concede too much, and he promised them a referendum on the neutrality agreement before it would take effect.
Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise to conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each month that a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes entrenched and positions harden.
The abandonment of that early peace initiative stands as one of the great tragedies of this conflict, and the full scale of that tragedy will only become clear over time as the war rages on and its dreadful consequences accumulate.
Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the U.K. and U.S. governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace. During U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “surprise visit” to Kyiv on April 9th, he reportedly told Prime Minister Zelenskyy that the U.K. was “in it for the long run,” that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that the “collective West” saw a chance to “press” Russia and was determined to make the most of it.
The same message was reiterated by U.S. Defense Secretary Austin, who followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25 and made it clear that the U.S. and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but were now committed to using the war to “weaken” Russia. Turkish diplomats told retired British diplomat Craig Murray that these messages from the United States and United Kingdom killed their otherwise promising efforts to mediate a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution.
In response to the invasion, much of the public in Western countries accepted the moral imperative of supporting Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression. But the decision by the U.S. and British governments to kill peace talks and prolong the war, with all the horror, pain and misery that entails for the people of Ukraine, has neither been explained to the public, nor endorsed by a consensus of NATO countries. Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but in May, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy all made public statements that contradicted his claim.
Addressing the European Parliament on May 9, French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “We are not at war with Russia,” and that Europe’s duty was “to stand with Ukraine to achieve the cease-fire, then build peace.”
Meeting with President Biden at the White House on May 10, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told reporters, “People… want to think about the possibility of bringing a cease-fire and starting again some credible negotiations. That’s the situation right now. I think that we have to think deeply about how to address this.”
After speaking by phone with President Putin on May 13, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted that he told Putin, “There must be a cease-fire in Ukraine as quickly as possible”
But American and British officials continued to pour cold water on talk of renewed peace negotiations. The policy shift in April appears to have involved a commitment by Zelenskyy that Ukraine, like the U.K. and U.S., was “in it for the long run” and would fight on, possibly for many years, in exchange for the promise of tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons shipments, military training, satellite intelligence and Western covert operations.
As the implications of this fateful agreement became clearer, dissent began to emerge, even within the U.S. business and media establishment. On May 19, the very day that Congress appropriated $40 billion for Ukraine, including $19 billion for new weapons shipments, with not a single dissenting Democratic vote, the New York Times editorial board penned a lead editorial titled, “The war in Ukraine is getting complicated, and America isn’t ready.”
The Times asked serious unanswered questions about U.S. goals in Ukraine, and tried to reel back unrealistic expectations built up by three months of one-sided Western propaganda, not least from its own pages. The board acknowledged, “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.… Unrealistic expectations could draw [the United States and NATO] ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war.”
More recently, warhawk Henry Kissinger, of all people, publicly questioned the entire U.S. policy of reviving its Cold War with Russia and China and the absence of a clear purpose or endgame short of World War III. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger toldTheWall Street Journal.
U.S. leaders have inflated the danger that Russia poses to its neighbors and the West, deliberately treating it as an enemy with whom diplomacy or cooperation would be futile, rather than as a neighbor raising understandable defensive concerns over NATO expansion and its gradual encirclement by U.S. and allied military forces.
Far from aiming to deter Russia from dangerous or destabilizing actions, successive administrations of both parties have sought every means available to “overextend and unbalance” Russia, all the while misleading the American public into supporting an ever-escalating and unthinkably dangerous conflict between our two countries, which together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.
After six months of a U.S. and NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, we are at a crossroads. Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each day that passes.
The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end, find reasonable political solutions to Ukraine’s political divisions, and seek a peaceful framework for the underlying geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia and China.
Campaigns to demonize, threaten and pressure our enemies can only serve to cement hostility and set the stage for war. People of good will can bridge even the most entrenched divisions and overcome existential dangers, as long as they are willing to talk — and listen — to their adversaries.
Forget about the fact these Pharma Felons have a long rap sheet going way back on the injuries and deaths created by their so-called approved products. They can’t even get vials of their bioweapon off the assembly line without metal bits in millions of batches.
That’s Pfizer and the billionaire CEO, the Greek Jewish, boosted up twice after mRNA double jab, who is now hot with SARS-CoV2, and he is happy to have the oral drug his company produced. What to believe?
Plaxlovid.
Pfizer and vaccine maker Moderna, which also makes a two-shot mRNA vaccine, are updating their drug formulas to provide protection against newer versions of the virus as part of a fall booster campaign.
Paxlovid, a pill that is available by prescription after infection, helps patients avoid serious illness when it is administered shortly after the onset of symptoms.
I got the SARS-CoV2 a week ago, maybe from Trader Joe’s up in Corvallis. Nah, a summer flu? Nah, not acting like a natural pathogen in me. I have had malaria, dengue fever, a truck load of gut diseases, and slew of bug and jellyfish stings and bites. This bug does things that are not natural. Tied to HIV? Some see that it is a venom-like hit to the body.
I have heard person after person — young athletic people — tell me about being double vaxxed and getting SARS-CoV2 for nine days or two weeks, with pneumonia. And then, getting hit twice or three times with the bioweapon. I am talking about a surfer who is also an arborist — thin, super fit, and active.
And, we are not to talk about these stories, not put them out there on Facebook or Twitter, not supposed to talk about the patterns, anecdotal evidence which IS valid. RJK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense now has been deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter, so we know more and more information gathering by us, the people, will be scrubbed.
Kennedy’s Facebook page, with more than 300,000 followers, was still active at the time of publication. The company spokesperson said there were no plans to take down that page “at this time.”
In a statement Thursday, provided by Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit group that he chairs, Kennedy pushed back at the assertion that his posts were false and accused Facebook of “censorship.”
Lois Gibbs of Love Canal fame would have been deplatformed in today’s messed up censorious world:
Love Canal is an aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River about four miles south of Niagara Falls. It is also the name of a fifteen-acre, working-class neighborhood of around 800 single-family homes built directly adjacent to the canal. From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, with government sanction, began using the partially dug canal as a chemical waste dump. At the end of this period, the contents of the canal consisted of around 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve that are known carcinogens (halogenated organics, chlorobenzenes, and dioxin among them). Hooker capped the 16-acre hazardous waste landfill in clay and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board, attempting to absolve itself of any future liability by including a warning in the property deed.
Public awareness of the disaster unfolded in the late 1970s when investigative newspaper coverage and grassroots door-to-door health surveys began to reveal a series of inexplicable illnesses—epilepsy, asthma, migraines, and nephrosis—and abnormally high rates of birth defects and miscarriages in the Love Canal neighborhood. As it turns out, consecutive wet winters in the late 1970s raised the water table and caused the chemicals to leach (via underground swales and a sewer system that drained into nearby creeks) into the basements and yards of neighborhood residents, as well as into the playground of the elementary school built directly over the canal. After a series of frustrating encounters with apathetic NYS officials, who were slow to act but quick to dismiss the activists (most of whom were working-class women who lived in the neighborhood) as a collection of hysterical housewives, President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency in 1978 and had the federal government relocate 239 families. This left 700 families who federal officials viewed as being at insufficient risk to warrant relocation, even though tests conducted by the NYS Department of Health revealed that toxic substances were leaching into their homes. After another hard battle, activists forced Carter to declare a second state of emergency in 1981, during which the remaining families were relocated. The total cost for relocation of all the families was $17 million. (source)
Then, how can any group of activists like RFK Jr.’s CHD coalesce in this messed up Google-Facebook-Twitter-Instagram world. What a bioweapon, no? SARS-CoV2!
Michael Carroll’s Lab 257 also documents a Nazi connection to the original establishment of a U.S. laboratory on Plum Island. According to the book, Erich Traub, a scientist who worked for the Third Reich doing biological warfare, was the force behind its founding.
During World War II, “as lab chief of Insel Riemsa secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island in the Baltic Sea, Traub worked for Adolph Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials,” states Lab 257.
The mission was to develop biological warfare to be directed against animals in the Soviet Union. This included infecting cattle and reindeer with foot-and-mouth disease.
“Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war,” says “Lab 257.” While in the U.S. in the 1930s, too, relates the book, Traub was a member of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund which was involved in pro-Nazi rallies held weekly in Yaphank on Long Island.
With the end of the war, Traub came back to the United States under Project Paperclip, a U.S. program under which Nazi scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, were brought to America.
“Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems” given to officials at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, and to the CIA, “laid the groundwater for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island,” says “Lab 257.” “Traub was a founding father.” And Plum Island’s purpose, says the book, became what Insel Riems had been: to develop biological warfare to be directed against animals in the Soviet Union now that the Cold War and conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had begun.
The Long Island daily newspaper Newsday earlier documented this biological warfare mission of Plum Island. In a lead story on November 21, 1993, Newsday investigative reporter John McDonald wrote: “A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island laboratory, now-declassified Army records reveal.” A facsimile of one of the records, dated 1951, covered the front page of that issue of Newsday. (source)
Oh, the nefarious work of former Nazi’s, and Lyme DIsease now! Pfizer working on that vaccine.
And we trust this multibillionaire, Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla: Pfizer has been a “habitual offender,” persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results. Since 2002 the company and its subsidiaries have been assessed $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards.
I have a CPA in Tucson, from my mom’s days, and she wondered what my gmail signature block image was about:
I was asked to send her sources, since she is stuck in Mainstream Stenographer Media, and I asked her if she has Ukraine roots, and she said her husband’s family did. Both are Jewish.
Scott Ritter analyzes the situation at the nuclear power plant, Russia’s non-response, the situation on the ground, and Ukraine attacks Crimea. And a prediction on how all this will end. Here.
NATO ready to attack a Nuclear plant to ethnically cleanse Russians from Ukraine – George Eliason
I am not sure how much bandwidth she has for this stuff, but I warned her that if she really went through some of these sources, she will come out the other end depressed, ashamed, maybe. But who knows. I have daily people with TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and they have no grounding on anything that ties both the country’s manure pile parties into war, finance, lies, scams, hatred of the people. Here, a bunch of other sources from me to the CPA, Stephen Cohen, RIP.
This article is the fourth in a series of articles I have written covering the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. While this civil war in Ukraine actually began 8 years ago in 2014, the Western media narrative has portrayed this conflict as an unprovoked invasion by Russia that began on February 24, 2022. The 8 year civil war in the Donbass Region is a direct result of the US backed coup and color revolution known as the Maidan Revolution, that ousted the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installed an ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian, Nazi government.
The article goes on to explain that the majority of ethnic Russians in east and south Ukraine rejected the coup government. Crimea also voted to secede and was annexed into Russia. Then, unreported in MSM, Donetsk and Lugansk became breakaway provinces thus leaving Ukraine, but were soon invaded by Ukrainian Nazis who refused to give up the region. Western media rarely acknowledged the huge civilian death toll in eastern Ukraine. Then, Minsk Agreement accepted and afterwards not followed.
Following that, last year the Biden Administration sent more weapons and gave special forces training to Ukrainian Nazi paramilitaries. With those proxy events, in April 2021, Zelensky said he was not going to honor the Minsk 2 Agreement and was planning to retake the breakaway regions and Crimea by force. The US created this war by preparing Ukrainian forces for the invasion.
Did Russia underestimate how fiercely the Ukrainians would fight? Perhaps so. Did they make mistakes and lose soldiers and generals? Absolutely. Are they losing on the battlefield? Absolutely not and this is becoming more apparent to Western media that hasn’t wanted to outright admit it. It has downplayed the fact that Russia has taken much territory including Mariupol, Kherson and now 95% of Lugansk has been liberated from Ukrainian control. Western media outlets, such as Bloomberg News, are finally acknowledging the Russian victories in this region of the Donbass and that Ukrainian troops are now at risk of encirclement by Russian forces.
I continue to help people read beyond the propaganda lines deployed by the Nulands and Kagans and Zeleskys of the world.
What is worthy of praise is the pushback by independent journalists and media outlets against the lies reported daily in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the BBC, NPR, etc. The well researched information coming from independent media and journalists, such as The Grayzone, Consortium News, The World Socialist Website, The Dive with Jackson Hinkle, Scott Ritter, Regis Tremblay shines a bright light on what the establishment media is distorting and ignoring. War reporters, Patrick Lancaster (USA), Eva K. Bartlett (Canada), Alejandro Kirk (HispanTV – Latin America) have exposed the Western media lies that Russia is responsible for the carnage and that civilians support Ukraine’s military. All Ukrainian civilians interviewed blame Ukraine for the deaths, injuries and destruction. Russians often bring in food and humanitarian aid.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut Western audiences off from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek‘s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly untrue”—a determination that did more to confirm the ideological strictures of US media than to debunk them.
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was removed from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 3/1/22) Google News (Reuters, 3/1/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 3/2/22) in the United States and/or Europe. RT and Sputnik (another Russian state–funded network) were removed from the Apple app store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).
CNN (3/1/22): “The actions taken by television providers and technology companies against RT have…reduc[ed] the Kremlin’s ability to peddle its narrative at a pivotal time.”
Microsoft banned RT from the Windows app store, and deranked RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 3/1/22). Google (Reuters, 3/1/22), Meta (Reuters2/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22) barred RT from receiving any ad revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).
Motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances,” in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the US had to close down their production completely (Washington Post, 3/3/22).
PayPal has recently frozen the accounts of independent news outlets such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances around PayPal’s actions are less clear than with the actions against RT. The editor-in-chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, said he didn’t know why PayPal froze its account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “purveying misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).
One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of commentary by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges (who formerly worked for the New York Times and NPR) because it was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!,4/1/22).
In May, the US announced new sanctions against Russian television networks Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from US advertisers.
‘A kind of totalitarian culture’
Newsweek (7/26/22): “There are no justified parallels to be drawn between the Soviet Russia media landscape and that of the US today.”
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and a renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by the “information war” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with actor Russell Brand (YouTube, 7/22/22):
Take the United States today; it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.
Chomsky’s comments were “factchecked” recently by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:
While the BBC and Radio Free America did broadcast in Russia post-WWII and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access that the Russian public did have was gained in spite of, not thanks to, their government’s efforts.
The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments made by Chomsky, concluding:
To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens in Soviet Russia is therefore, not only clearly untrue, but an argument that neglects the sacrifices and perils that journalists have endured to deliver accurate news about the country, and continue to endure to this day.
The official ruling of Newsweek declared Chomsky’s comments false:
By all accounts, Americans are able to access news from Russia despite many Western journalists having fled the country, and Russia having blocked its public’s access to most Western social media and news platforms.
‘A ubiquitous phenomenon’
BBC (3/23/11): “Listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.”
One of the articles used to support the certification of falsehood was a New York Times article (5/26/87) from 1987 that reported “Russia had begun broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years.” A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.
Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’” And similarly, from the same BBC article cited by Newsweek:
However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.
Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the factchecker, it seems that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is fairly consistent with Chomsky’s comments: “Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.”
Newsweek reached out to Chomsky for comment, who responded:
I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it with pre-Perestroika Russia when Russians were getting their news from BBC and VoA, according to US studies.
A mass Soviet audience
Cold War Broadcasting (CEU Press, 2010): “Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s.”
A collection of studies were published in 2010 in the book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former research fellow at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (US-funded media), and R. Eugene Parta, also a former director of RFE and a contributor to the Hoover Institution. The studies corroborate the claim that people in the Soviet Union were frequently listening to Western media.
In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT put VoA weekly listenership reaching highs of 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC topping out at 11%. “Study results showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the USSR urban population listened to foreign broadcasting more or less regularly,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.
Out of curiosity, what do the US studies have to say about the 1980s?
Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s. That was approximately half of VoA’s global audience at the time.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan apparently did not stop people from listening to Western broadcasts. In 1984, 40% of the urban population received information on the war in Afghanistan from Western radio, and in 1987 it was 45%.
In the contemporary United States, however, this is not permitted. We cannot have people listening to the enemy in times of war.
Cold War Broadcasting noted that
the size of Western radio stations’ audience grew gradually from the beginning of broadcasting in the early post-war period to reach more than 50% of the Soviet urban population in the early 1980s.
In other words, Western radio stations had a mass audience in the former USSR. The number of regular listeners was as high as 20–25%.
Soviet listeners appeared to use their access to news from multiple perspectives to get a more comprehensive picture of events:
Despite a relatively high level of trust in Western radio stations, most listeners did not totally accept all the information they heard. The Soviet audience took a more deliberate approach to understanding information that was based on a comparison of information obtained from Soviet mass media with that from foreign radio programs.
So Western outlets and US studies seem to agree with Chomsky: Despite jamming, people had access and often listened to Western sources in the Soviet Union and were critically engaged with the news at the time, especially during the ’70s.
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FEATURED IMAGE: Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! (12/7/21).
The war in Ukraine continues unabated. There are no visible signs of a conclusion to this tragedy, although it’s hard to imagine the current situation remaining unchanged for much longer. The war has exposed dramatic weaknesses in Russia’s armed forces, while Ukrainian resistance has surprised even military experts. In the meantime, it is more than obvious that the U.S. is fighting a “proxy” war in Ukraine, as Noam Chomsky underlines in the exclusive interview for Truthout, thus making it extremely difficult for Russia’s military planners to make major advances.
From day one, Noam Chomsky established himself as one of the most important voices on the war in Ukraine. He condemned Russia’s invasion as a criminal aggression while analyzing the subtle political and historical context surrounding Putin’s decision to launch an attack on Russia’s neighbor. In the interview that follows, Chomsky reiterates his condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests that the situation over peace talks inevitably recalls the “Afghan trap,” and talks about the exceptional form of censorship that is taking place in the U.S. through a systematic suppression of unpopular ideas over the war in Ukraine.
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: It’s been six months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet there is no end to the war in sight. Putin’s strategy has backfired in a huge way, as it not only failed to take down Kyiv but also revived the western alliance while Finland and Sweden ended decades of neutrality by joining NATO. The war has also caused a massive humanitarian crisis, brought higher energy prices, and made Russia into a pariah state. From day one, you described the invasion as a criminal act of aggression and compared it to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland, in spite of the fact that Russia felt threatened from NATO’s expansion to the east. I reckon that you still hold this view, but do you think that Putin would have had second thoughts about an invasion if he knew that this military adventure of his would end up in a prolonged war?
Noam Chomsky: Reading Putin’s mind has become a cottage industry, notable for the extreme confidence of those who interpret the scanty tea leaves. I have some guesses, but they are not based on better evidence than others have, so they have low credibility.
My guess is that Russian intelligence agreed with the announced U.S. government expectations that conquest of Kyiv and installation of a puppet government would be an easy task, not the debacle it turned out to be. I suppose that if Putin had had better information about the Ukrainian will and capacity to resist, and the incompetence of the Russian military, his plans would have been different. Perhaps the plans would have been what many informed analysts had expected, what Russia now seems to have turned to a Plan B: trying to establish firmer control over Crimea and the passage to Russia and to take over the Donbas region.
Possibly, benefiting from better intelligence, Putin might have had the wisdom to respond seriously to the tentative initiatives of Macron for a negotiated settlement that would have avoided the war, and might have even proceeded to Europe-Russia accommodation along the lines of proposals by de Gaulle and Gorbachev. All we know is that the initiatives were dismissed with contempt, at great cost, not least to Russia. Instead, Putin launched a murderous war of aggression which, indeed, ranks with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland.
That Russia felt threatened by NATO expansion to the East, in violation of firm and unambiguous promises to Gorbachev, has been stressed by virtually every high-level U.S. diplomat with any familiarity with Russia for 30 years, well before Putin. To take just one of a rich array of examples, in 2008 when he was Ambassador to Russia and Bush II recklessly invited Ukraine to join NATO, current CIA director William Burns warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He added that “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” More generally, Burns called NATO expansion into Eastern Europe “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And if the expansion reached Ukraine, Burns warned, “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Burns was merely reiterating common understanding at the highest level of government, back to the early ‘90s. Bush II’s own Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recognized that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching, … recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”
The warnings from informed government sources were strong and explicit. They were rejected by Washington from Clinton on. In fact, on to the present moment. That conclusion is confirmed by the recent comprehensive Washington Post study of the background to the invasion. Reviewing the study, George Beebe and Anatol Lieven observe that “the Biden administration’s efforts to avert the war altogether come across as quite lacking. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it during the weeks preceding the invasion, for Russia `the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.’ But nowhere in Post’s account is there any mention that the White House considered offering concrete compromises regarding Ukraine’s future admission into NATO.” Rather, as the State Department had already conceded, “the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO.”
In brief, provocations continued to the last minute. They were not confined to undermining negotiations but included expansion of the project of integrating Ukraine into the NATO military command, turning it into a “de facto” member of NATO, as U.S. military journals put it.
The glaringly obvious record of provocation is, presumably, the reason for the tacit rule that the Russian assault must be called “unprovoked,” a term otherwise scarcely if ever used but required in this case in polite society. Psychologists should have no problem explaining the curious behavior.
Though the provocations were consistent and conscious over many years, despite the warnings, they of course in no way justify Putin’s resort to “the supreme international crime” of aggression. Though it may help explain a crime, provocation provides no justification for it.
As for Russia’s becoming a “pariah state,” I think some qualifications are in order. It is surely becoming a pariah state in Europe and the Anglosphere, to an extent that has amazed even seasoned cold warriors. Graham Fuller, one of the top figures in U.S. intelligence for many years, recently commented that:
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen—in my entire life—such a dominant American media blitz as what we’re seeing regarding Ukraine today. The U.S. isn’t only pressing its interpretation of events — the U.S. is also engaging in full-scale demonization of Russia as a state, as a society, and as a culture. The bias is extraordinary — I never saw anything like this when I was involved in Russian affairs during the Cold War.
Picking up those tea leaves again, one might perhaps surmise that as in the required reference to the “unprovoked” invasion, some guilt feelings are not too well concealed.
That is the stance of the U.S. and to varying degrees its close allies. Most of the world, however, continues to stand aloof, condemning the aggression but maintaining normal relations with Russia, just as western critics of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq maintained normal relations with the (entirely unprovoked) aggressors. There is also considerable ridicule of the pious proclamations on human rights, democracy, and “sanctity of borders” issued by the world champions in violence and subversion — matters the Global South knows about well from ample experience.
Russia claims that the U.S. is directly involved in the Ukraine war. Is the U.S. fighting a “proxy war” in Ukraine?
That the U.S. is heavily involved in the war, and proudly so, is not in question. That it is fighting a proxy war is widely held outside of the Europe-Anglosphere domain. It is not hard to see why. Official U.S. policy, open and public, is that the war must go on until Russia is so severely weakened that it cannot undertake further aggression. The policy is justified by exalted proclamations about a cosmic struggle between democracy, freedom, and all good things vs. ultimate evil bent on global conquest. The fevered rhetoric is not new. The fairy tale style reached comical heights in the major Cold War document NSC 68 and is commonly found elsewhere.
Taken literally, official policy entails that Russia must be subjected to harsher punishment than Germany was at Versailles in 1919. Those targeted are likely to take explicit policy literally, with obvious consequences as to how they may react.
The assessment that the U.S. is dedicated to a proxy war is reinforced by common Western discourse. While there is extensive discussion of how to fight Russian aggression more effectively, one finds hardly a word about how to bring the horrors to an end — horrors that go far beyond Ukraine. Those who dare to raise the question are usually vilified, even such revered figures as Henry Kissinger — though, interestingly, calls for a diplomatic settlement pass without the usual demonization when they appear in the major establishment journal.
Whatever terminology one prefers to use, the basic facts about U.S. policy and plans are clear enough. To me, “proxy war” seems a fair term, but what matters are the policies and plans.
As was to be expected, the invasion has also led to a prolonged propaganda war on the part of all sides involved. On that note, you said recently that, with the banning of RT and other Russian media venues, Americans have less access to the official adversary than Soviets had in the 1970s. Can you elaborate a bit on this, especially since your statement about censorship in the U.S. over the war in Ukraine was totally distorted, leaving readers to think that what you implied is that censorship in the U.S. today is worse than it was under communism in Russia?
On the Russian side, the domestic propaganda war is extreme. On the U.S. side, while there are no official bans, it’s hard to deny Graham Fuller’s observations.
Literal censorship in the U.S. and other western societies is rare. But as George Orwell wrote in 1945 in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm, the “sinister fact” about free societies is that censorship is “largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” generally a more effective means of thought control than overt force.
Orwell was referring to England, but the practice goes far beyond, in revealing ways. To take a current example, the highly respected Middle East scholar Alain Gresh was censored by French TV because of his critical comments on Israel’s latest terrorist crimes in occupied Gaza.
Gresh observed that “this form of censorship is exceptional. On the question of Palestine, it is rarely presented in such an obvious manner.” A more effective form of censorship is exercised by careful selection of commentators. They are acceptable, Gresh concludes, if they “regret the violence” while adding that Israel has “the right to defend itself” and stress “the need to “fight extremists on both sides,” but “it seems there is no room for those who radically criticise Israel’s occupation and apartheid.”
In the United States, such means of silencing unpopular ideas and keeping inconvenient facts dark have been honed to a high art, as one would expect in an unusually free society. By now there are literally thousands of pages documenting the practices in close detail. Fine organizations of media critique like FAIR in the U.S. and Media Lens in England pour out more on a regular basis.
There is also extensive discussion in print about the advantages of western models of indoctrination over the crude and transparent measures of totalitarian states. The more sophisticated devices of free society instill doctrines by presupposition, not assertion, as in the case Gresh describes. The rules are never heard, just tacitly assumed. Debate is allowed, even encouraged, but within bounds, which are unexpressed and rigid. They become internalized. As Orwell puts it, those subjected to subtle indoctrination, with a good education for example, have instilled into them the understanding that there are certain things “it wouldn’t do to say” — or even to think.
The modes of indoctrination need not be conscious. Those who implement them already have internalized the understanding that there are certain things “it wouldn’t do to say” — or even to think.
Such devices are particularly effective in a highly insular culture like that of the U.S., where few would dream of seeking foreign sources, particularly those of a reviled enemy, and where the appearance of limitless freedom offers no incentive to go beyond the established framework.
It’s in this general context that I mentioned the case of banning of Russian sources such as RT — “exceptional” as Gresh pointed out. Though there was no time to elaborate in a few brief remarks in a long interview on other topics, the direct banning brought to mind an interesting topic I had written about 30 years ago. Like much other work, the article reviewed many cases of the usual modes of silencing unpopular ideas and suppressing unwanted facts in free societies, but it also reported government-academic studies seeking to determine where Russians were getting their news in the ‘70s: the late Soviet period, pre-Gorbachev. The results indicated that despite the rigid censorship, a remarkably high percentage of Russians were accessing such sources as BBC, even illegal Samizdat, and may well have been better informed than Americans.
I checked at the time with Russian émigrés who related their own experiences of evading the intrusive but not very efficient censorship. They basically confirmed the picture, though they felt that the numbers reported were too high, possibly because the samples might have been skewed to Leningrad and Moscow.
Direct banning of the publications of adversaries is not only illegitimate but also harmful. Thus, it would be important for Americans to have been aware that immediately before the invasion, the Russian Foreign Minister was emphasizing that “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward” to Ukraine — the firm redline for decades. Had there been any concern to avoid horrible crimes and to move to a better world, this could have been an opening to explore.
The same is true of Russian government pronouncements when the invasion was already underway, for example, Lavrov’s statement on May 29 that:
We have goals: to demilitarise Ukraine (there should be no weapons threatening Russia on its territory); to restore the rights of the Russian people in line with the Constitution of Ukraine (the Kiev regime violated it by adopting anti-Russia laws) and the conventions (in which Ukraine takes part); and to denazify Ukraine. Nazi and neo-Nazi theory and practice have deeply permeated daily life in Ukraine and are codified in its laws.
It might be useful for Americans to have access to such words by a flip of the switch on TV, at least those Americans with some interest in ending the horrors rather than plunging into the apocalyptic battle conjured up from the tea leaves to cage the rampaging bear before it devours all of us.
Peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine have stagnated since early spring. Apparently, Russia wants to enforce peace on its own terms, while Ukraine seems to have adopted the position that there can be no negotiations until Russia’s prospects on the battlefield become dim. Do you see an end to this conflict any time soon? Is negotiating to end the war an appeasement, as those who oppose peace talks claim?
What’s happening is obscure. It brings to mind the “Afghan trap” that we discussed earlier, when the U.S. was fighting a proxy war with Russia “to the last Afghan,” as Cordovez and Harrison put it in their definitive study of how the UN managed to arrange for a Russian withdrawal despite U.S. efforts to prevent a diplomatic settlement. That was the period when Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who claimed credit for instigating the Russian invasion, applauded the outcome even though it came at the cost of some “agitated Muslims.”
Are we witnessing something similar today? Perhaps.
No doubt Russia wants to enforce peace on its own terms. A negotiated diplomatic settlement is one that each side tolerates while relinquishing some of its own demands. There’s only one way to find out whether Russia is serious about negotiations: Try. Nothing is lost.
On the battlefield prospects, there are confident and sharply conflicting claims by military experts. I have no such credentials; I think it’s fair to conclude from the spectacle that the fog of war has not lifted. We do know what the U.S. position is, or at least was last April at the Ramstein Air Base conference of NATO powers and other military leaders that the U.S. organized: “Ukraine clearly believes it can win and so does everyone here.” Whether it was actually believed then, or is now, I don’t know, and know of no way to find out.
For what it’s worth, I personally respect the words of Jeremy Corbyn published on the day after the Ramstein war conference opened, words that contributed to his being virtually expelled from the Labour Party: “There must be an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine followed by a Russian troop withdrawal and agreement between Russia and Ukraine on future security arrangements. All wars end in a negotiation of some sort—so why not now?”
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.
Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.
Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.
Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.
Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.
The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.
US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.
It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.
In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.
It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.
Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.
Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.
Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.
This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.
Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.
This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.
The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.
Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.
Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.
The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.
The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.
Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.
It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.
The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.
This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.
The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.
The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.
Navdanya notes:
With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.
‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.
We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.
The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.
The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.
The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.
Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.
The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.
It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.
And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.
Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.
As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.
For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.
Ottawa is hellbent on supporting the US empire’s drive for global domination even if it increases the odds of war and undermines the cooperation required to overcome the climate crisis. Canada’s defence minister is boasting about the navy’s continued support for Washington’s bid to stoke tensions with China 8,000 kilometers from this country’s shores.
On Monday Anita Anand tweeted, “Canada is a Pacific nation and believes in the importance of the Indo-Pacific region to global stability and prosperity. Today, we announce that HMCS Vancouver and Winnipeg will remain deployed in the Indo-Pacific until December 2022.” Canada’s defence minister linked to a press release on the deployment noting, “the two frigates sailed across the Pacific together to Hawaii, and are now proceeding independently, with HMCS Winnipeg to South East Asia and HMCS Vancouver to North East Asia. They will also sail in the international waters of the East and South China Seas, both independently and as part of cooperative deployments with allied and partner nations.”
Canadian vessels and aircraft are increasingly present near China’s territorial waters and airspace. Canadian vessels have been running belligerent “freedom of navigation” exercises through international waters Beijing claims in the South China Sea as well as the Taiwan Strait.
It’s pathological to stoke conflict at a time when cooperation between the two greatest greenhouse gas emitting nations is essential to mitigate the climate crisis. And when we are already involved in a proxy war with Russia.
A recent Canadian Press story complained that the RCN doesn’t have enough ships and sailors to simultaneously target Russia and China. “For the first time in eight years,” reported CP, “Canadian warships are not involved in either of two NATO naval task forces charged with patrolling European waters and defending against Russian threats.”
No Canadian frigate is participating in the NATO task forces as a result of the China focused deployments and Ottawa sending an additional warship to eastern Europe immediately after Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine. Still, “two smaller Kingston-class coastal defence vessels”, CP revealed halfway through the article, have been deployed on a NATO mission in Eastern Europe for “finding and clearing enemy mines.”
While Russia and China are in the RCN’s crosshairs today, the Canadian Navy has long enforced empire. Established in 1910, the RCN took over British Royal Navy bases in Esquimalt and Halifax. During the 1910–17 Mexican Revolution Canadian vessels were dispatched to protect British interests on the Pacific Coast and to El Salvador in 1932 to support a month-old military coup government that brutally suppressed a peasant and indigenous rebellion in El Salvador. Alongside US and UK vessels, Ottawa sent a ship to China in 1949 as Mao’s Communists were on the verge of victory in the country’s civil war. During the early 1950s Korean War the RCN bombed North Korean and Chinese troops. More recently Canadian naval vessels were deployed to wars in Libya, Yugoslavia and Iraq (1991 and 2003). While not officially part of US President George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” that invaded in 2003, Canadian naval vessels led the maritime interdiction efforts off the coast of Iraq and as a result Ottawa actually had legal opinion suggesting it was technically at war with that country.
The Canadian government is currently spending huge sums to expand the RCN’s capacity to scare China, Russia, Iran and whoever is the enemy of the day. They are purchasing 15 surface combatants for a whopping $100 billion ($300 billion over their life cycle). The surface combatants look set to be equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles capable of striking land targets up to 1,700 kilometres away and with radar systems that will allow US officials to launch the weapons. Designed to fight in US and NATO led wars, the new vessels will increase the navy’s capability to project power anywhere on the planet, the very same planet that is in desperate need of cooperation to reduce the threat of global warming and other environmental disasters.
Anti-war activists and environmentalists must come together to oppose this expansion and move to abolish a Royal Canadian Navy that will entangle us in US conflicts and distract the world’s people from our most important battle, mitigating climate change.
Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without sufficient knowledge of Russian history.
— Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, p 268
The conflict among nations in Ukraine and the breakaway Donbass oblasts/republics has been magnified in western monopoly media since Russia backed up its security demands. To the extent that people want to ascertain the verisimilitude of media information, people ought to become familiar with the region, its peoples, and the history. With this intention and with an open mind to a viewpoint counter to my orientation (I am decidedly of a socialist orientation, but, I trust, with allegiance to verifiable evidence), I read The Story of Russia (Metropolitan Books, 2022) by the bourgeois historian Orlando Figes.
Thus, it did not surprise me that on page 1, Figes opines, “Vladimir Putin… managed to look bored. He seemed to want the ceremony to be done as soon as possible.” On page 2, “Putin looked uncomfortable.” In the introduction more bias is evident; Figes writes of “the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea,” (p 2) “the ‘putsch’ in Kiev, as the Kremlin called the Maidan uprising,” (p 4) “history writing in Russia, since its beginning in medieval chronicles, has been intertwined in mythical ideas,” (p 5) and Putin’s “authoritarian regime.” (p 6) In contemporary understanding, regime is pejorative for a totalitarian/autocratic government.
In the second chapter, “Origins,” Figes says that Putin asserts “the old imperial myth that the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarussians were historically one people.” In succeeding chapters, The Story of Russia runs through the intercourse between myriad groups of peoples, the Vikings, Finns, Mongols, Khazars, Turks, Arabs, Germans, French, etc that have intermixed knowledge, languages, cultures, religious beliefs, and commerce with Slavs. Russia has been conquered and has conquered others many times.
Figes lays out an eminently comprehensible historical sequence that led to rule by a revered tsardom with its concomitant corruption along with an exploited and impoverished peasant class. Traditionally, tsarist Russia leaned favorably toward western Europe which did not have the same favorable inclination toward Russia. This changed with Catherine the Great who envisioned Russian greatness stemming from a southern orientation. (p 127)
Serfdom would be identified as holding Russia back in wars and competition with the West. (p 154) The tsar would, when forced, in due course relinquish some powers, such as the establishment of zemstvos (self-government in Russian provinces), but eventually the corruption of the autocratic tsarist class would lead to a revolution that violently deposed the Romanovs. (For a dramatization of the history, see the Netflix series The Last Czars.)
Post-revolution, the Bolsheviks (Majoritarians) emerged victorious over the Mensheviks (Minoritarians). Figes writes that the tsar continued afterwards in “Soviet cults of the Leader.” (p 191)
Whereas Lenin, in his cult, appeared as a human god or saint, a sacred guide for the Party orphaned by his death, the cult of Stalin portrayed him as a tsar, the ‘little-father tsar’ or tsar-batiushka of folklore … (p 225)
Unfortunately, The Story of Russia suffers from being replete with many unsubstantiated claims, rumors, and opinions. One would expect that a book written by a professor of history who specializes in Russia would source most pertinent information, especially information that is debatable. For example, Figes writes of “Nikolai Yezhov, an unscrupulous henchman, who fed Stalin’s paranoid fears.” (p 229) Maybe this is so, but what is his source for a scrupulous reader to scrutinize in order to confirm or deny this? During the Great Terror, Figes writes that in 1937, “1,500 Soviet citizens were shot on average every day…” (p 232) Elsewhere, he relates that the Gulag population reached 2 million prisoners in 1952. (p 250) There is no sourcing to evaluate this information.
Figes is derisory of Joseph Stalin and Russian militarism during World War II:
There was almost no limit to the number of lives that the Stalinist regime was willing to expend to achieve its military goals…. Only by this ruthless disregard for human life can we explain the shocking losses of the Red Army — around 12 million soldiers killed between 1941 and 1945…
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev fares no better in Figes’ estimation:
Khrushchev’s erratic leadership, his tendency to act on intuition and then attack his critics, his meddling in affairs where he lacked expertise, and his dangerous confrontation with the USA in the Cuban Missile Crisis …
It is written as if the confrontation was entirely provoked from the Soviet side, that the John Kennedy administration was not dangerously confronting the Soviet Union. Unmentioned is that, since 1959, the US had had nuclear missiles deployed in Turkiye which bordered the USSR.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was “a grey and mediocre functionary” (p 253) who “had more practical than intellectual capacities.” (p 254)
The Soviet Union would collapse on President Mikhail Gorbachev’s watch. Boris Yeltsin’s ascent to the Russian presidency would coincide with the political demise of Gorbachev; however, Yeltsin would personify the Peter Principle. He was completely out-of-his-depth. Figes asks, “How can we explain the failure of democracy under Yeltsin, and the reemergence of dictatorship under Putin’s leadership?” (p 268) Figes explains that under Yeltsin, the people called the system a “shitocracy.” (p 270) Was this solely due to Russian incompetence? There is scant attribution to the role played by western nations and institutions such as the IMF that advised Yeltsin’s team to apply the shock therapy of neoliberalism (a “social disaster” says Figes, p 269) that helped precipitate the downfall of Yeltsin and pave the way for a new face and new direction.
Figes writes that Vladimir Putin became the successor to Yeltsin by agreeing to protect Yeltsin and his family from their corruption. (p 271) Putin is also accused of corruption; Figes footnotes harsh Putin critic Masha Gessen’s book The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) as substantiation. As testament to her analytical prowess, Gessen predicted in her book’s epilogue, “Putin’s bubble will burst.” Yet in July 2022, Putin still enjoys immense popularity in Russia.
Figes likens Putin to a grand prince where Russian oligarchs are “totally dependent on his will” much as the boyar clans were reliant upon the royal court in Russia. (p 54)
According to Figes, Putin’s Russia is a managed democracy where electoral results are determined beforehand.
The author criticizes laws he identifies as protecting an ahistorical image of Russia; for example, a law requiring foreign-funded NGOs to register as a “Foreign Agent.” (p 278) Not mentioned is that the US has its own Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (FIRA in Canada) and that NGOs are cited as instigators behind so-called color revolutions.
Figes further criticizes Putin for weaponizing the memory of war against foreign powers. Here a bias of Figes stands out by referring to a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany (commonly referred to as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. (p 279) Is Figes unaware that the West collaborated with Nazi Germany? In his book The Myth of the Good War, historian Jacques Pauwels told of European elitists’s support for fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism, (p 42, 47) which was also true in the US. (p 53)
Figes also takes issue with Putin for comparing “Ukraine’s nationalists to collaborators with the Nazis in the war.” (p 279) The evidence of Nazism in Ukraine is so prolific that one must be either ignorant or purposefully blind:
Azov Battalion fighters with Nazi flag (WikiCommons)
Not being a professional historian, I will focus on Figes’s rendering of contemporary history, which seems particularly disputable on factual and logical grounds.
1. As stated, Figes pooh poohs the “Ukraine-Nazi myth” (p 298): “The Kremlin’s Russian media outlets consistently referred to the interim Ukrainian government as a ‘junta’, backed by ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘fascists’, an obvious propaganda tactic …. They [the Kremlin] staged protests against the new authorities in Kiev…” (p 290)
The background and implications of the 2014 far-right coup in Kiev, which overthrew the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, is critical for understanding the current Ukraine-Russia war. This coup was openly supported by US and European imperialism and implemented primarily by far-right shock troops such as the Right Sector and the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party.
When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a tantrum.
Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.
2. “the Kremlin launched a new Crimean War…. At the end of February [2014], Russian special forces occupied the peninsula, … oversaw a hurried referendum … in which 97 per cent of the people voted for reunion with Russia.” (p 290-291)
Figes paints the expression of self-determinism in sinister language, but Figes doth protest too much, as he admits, “Even with a properly conducted plebiscite [in Crimea] the same decision would have been reached with a large majority.” (p 291) Since the Russians were so welcomed by Crimeans, this basically refutes Figes’s claim of a military occupation.
3. “The warring parties failed to find agreement on the Minsk II Accords…” (p 291)
Separatist’s leaders Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky
Swiss diplomat and OSCE representative Heidi Tagliavini
Former president of Ukraine and Ukrainian representative Leonid Kuchma
Russian Ambassador to Ukraine and Russian representative Mikhail Zurabov
4. Regarding Putin’s identification of NATO bases in Ukraine as a security threat, Figes writes, “From a western point of view this seemed mad and paranoid. NATO, after all, was a defensive alliance and had no reason to attack Russia.” (p 293)
To paint NATO, after all, as a purely “defensive alliance” is disingenuous. Did NATO attack ex-Yugoslavia in self-defense? Guised as a European-Canada-US alliance was Libya a threat to NATO? With all due respect to the people of Afghanistan, was a country largely populated by sandal-wearing goat herders with a Kalashnikov rifle strapped over one shoulder a threat to NATO?
Conversely, does the history of myriad western interventions not point to a potential threat for Russia?
5. Figes claims the invasion of Ukraine has revealed that the “Russian army, it turned out, was not as good as people thought.” (p 296) “Putin, it was said, was hoping to announce a victory … on 9 May, Victory Day…” (p 297) It was said? Who said this? Figes applies his military analysis and reaches the same conclusion as another non-professional military analyst Noam Chomsky. They both equate the prowess of the Russian military to the duration of the military engagement.
6. Figes writes of a mass-based opposition led by Alexei Navalny. (p 299) Yet this “mass-based opposition” leader, as Figes describes Navalny, is without any party members in the Russian State Duma.
7. “The Russians carried out a number of atrocities in towns such as Bucha…” (p 296)
Concerning the massacre in Bucha, Drago Bosnic, an independent geopolitical and military analyst, wrote:
The Ukrainian side claims Russian troops killed at least 412 people, while so-called ‘independent’ sources state there were 50 victims. The peculiar claims were completely unsupported by any actual official investigation by any neutral side. The Kiev regime and their Western sponsors flatly refused to allow an international investigation, while any claims contrary to the official narrative were immediately suppressed.
Why prevent an investigation that one claims should reveal war crimes perpetrated by the enemy? (Yes, US president Biden in a televised message tells Russian citizens: “You are not our enemy.” Biden expresses his scorn for the “war killer” Putin.)
Former US Marines intelligence officer Scott Ritter — who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — names the culprit behind the Bucha massacre: Ukrainian national police murdered Ukrainians.
Without exception, without exception all of the data points to the Ukrainian national police carrying out a cleansing operation on April 1st that targeted pro-Russian collaborators and what they called saboteurs. And when we say cleansing operation, it means killing them. There is a video where a member of this national police unit asked permission to shoot people who aren’t wearing the blue armband, and he was given permission to fire.”
The US has the satellite images of this says Ritter, who emphatically states:
The US knows exactly what happened, but the US is not in the business of telling the truth. They are in the business of promulgating Ukrainian lies, and this lie was to create a narrative of Russia as a genocidal state trying to massacre innocent Ukrainian civilians. That is not what happened. The evidence is clear. If we took this to trial today Judge, I could guarantee you that I’d be able to make a very strong circumstantial case that this crime was committed by the Ukrainian national police and that they’d have nothing to defend with.
All the forensic data points to the absolute incontrovertible fact that Ukrainian security services carried out crimes against pro-Russian elements of the population of Bucha in late March, early April of 2022…. I will debate anybody, anytime, anywhere, on any platform, hell, I’ll travel to Ukraine to do it in front of the Ukrainian parliament if they want. I am not running away from these facts.
Ritter has thrown down a figurative glove. Will Figes pick it up? Ritter looks at the evidence, does his research, and applies logic in reaching a conclusion. Too often, when evidence is demanded, Figes comes up wanting.
Figes has made many claims and predictions, if the presence of Nazis breaks through the monopoly media censorship and propaganda, if Russia defeats Ukraine (and it already has according to Ritter), then what does that signify about Figes and his historical scholarship?
Given all this, it is argued that The Story of Russia is, more accurately, A Story of Russia, a story according to Orlando Figes. As for what the history of Russia is, that is something to be discovered by curious and discerning readers and researchers.
Published in the May/June 2022 Issue – Russian military capability is likely to suffer as its war in Ukraine continues. Increasing economic and industrial pressure through growing international sanctions will mean that sources of key components that are needed for the manufacture of complex weapons and platforms are increasingly harder to source. While many major […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s recent tour in Africa was meant to be a game changer, not only in terms of Russia’s relations with the continent, but in the global power struggle involving the US, Europe, China, India, Turkey and others.
Many media reports and analyses placed Lavrov’s visit to Egypt, the Republic of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia within the obvious political context of the Russia-Ukraine war. The British Guardian’s Jason Burka summed up Lavrov’s visit in these words: “Lavrov is seeking to convince African leaders and, to a much lesser extent, ordinary people that Moscow cannot be blamed either for the conflict or the food crisis.”
Though true, there is more at stake.
Africa’s importance to the geostrategic tug of war is not a new phenomenon. Western governments, think tanks and media reports have, for long, allocated much attention to Africa due to China’s and Russia’s successes in altering the foreign policy map of many African countries. For years, the West has been playing catch up, but with limited success.
The Economistdiscussed ‘the new scramble for Africa’ in a May 2019 article, which reported on “governments and businesses from all around the world” who are “rushing” to the continent in search of “vast opportunities” awaiting them there. Between 2010 and 2016, 320 foreign embassies were opened in Africa which, according to the magazine, is “probably the biggest embassy-building boom, anywhere, ever.”
Though China has often been portrayed as a country seeking economic opportunities only, the nature and evolution of Beijing’s relations with Africa prove otherwise. Beijing is reportedly the biggest supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa, and its defense technology permeates almost the entire continent. In 2017, China established its first military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.
Russia’s military influence in Africa is also growing exponentially, and Moscow’s power is challenging that of France, the US and others in various strategic spaces, mainly in the East Africa regions.
But, unlike the US and other western states, countries like China, Russia and India have been cautious as they attempt to strike the perfect balance between military engagement, economic development and political language.
‘Quartz Africa’ reported that trade between Africa and China “rose to a record high” in 2021. The jump was massive: 35% between 2020 and 2021, reaching a total of $254 billion.
Now that Covid-19 restrictions have been largely lifted, trade between Africa and China is likely to soar at astronomical levels in the coming years. Keeping in mind the economic slump and potential recession in the West, Beijing’s economic expansion is unlikely to slow down, despite the obvious frustration of Washington, London and Brussels. It ought to be said that China is already Africa’s largest trade partner, and by far.
Russia-China-Africa’s strong ties are paying dividends on the international stage. Nearly half of the abstentions in the vote on United Nations Resolution ES-11/1 on March 2, condemning Russia’s military action in Ukraine, came from Africa alone. Eritrea voted against it. This attests to Russia’s ability to foster new alliances on the continent. It also demonstrates the influence of China – Russia’s main ally in the current geopolitical tussle – as well.
Yet, there is more to Africa’s position than mere interest in military hardware and trade expansion. History is most critical.
In the first ‘scramble for Africa’, Europe sliced up and divided the continent into colonies and areas of influence. The exploitation and brutalization that followed remains one of the most sordid chapters in modern human history.
What the Economist refers to as the ‘second scramble for Africa’ during the Cold War era was the Soviet Union’s attempt to demolish the existing colonial and neo-colonial paradigms established by western countries throughout the centuries.
The collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago changed this dynamic, resulting in an inevitable Russian retreat and the return to the uncontested western dominance. That status quo did not last for long, however, as China and, eventually, Russia, India, Turkey, Arab countries and others began challenging western supremacy.
Lavrov and his African counterparts fully understand this context. Though Russia is no longer a Communist state, Lavrov was keen on referencing the Soviet era, thus the unique rapport Moscow has with Africa, in his speeches. For example, ahead of his visit to Congo, Lavrov said in an interview that Russia had “long-standing good relations with Africa since the days of the Soviet Union.”
Such language cannot be simply designated as opportunistic or merely compelled by political urgency. It is part of a complex discourse and rooted superstructure, indicating that Moscow – along with Beijing – is preparing for a long-term geopolitical confrontation in Africa.
Considering the West’s harrowing colonial past, and Russia’s historic association with various liberation movements on the continent, many African states, intelligentsias and ordinary people are eager to break free from the grip of western hegemony.
The human rights organization Amnesty International released a report Thursday showing that “Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals.”
Amnesty International’s findings corroborate an earlier report by the United Nations which also provided evidence that the Ukrainian army has been using civilians as human shields in the conflict. Both of these recent reports come on top of extensive documentation of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army and its neo-fascist paramilitary forces, particularly against Russian prisoners of war.
Written in cautious language, Amnesty International’s report is a damning exposure of the criminal character of the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine in which the civilian population is but a pawn for the imperialist powers and their lackeys in the Ukrainian oligarchy and military.
https://t.co/mi74ZFTg6P https://t.co/e8HIdOUYFi pic.twitter.com/lgCNLEvJQf
