TAIPEI, Taiwan – Chinese firms supporting Russia are presenting themselves as if they are from Taiwan not only to avoid sanctions but also to discredit the self-ruled island, said a Ukrainian activist.
Vadym Labas initially accused the Taiwanese company Taiwan Rung Cherng Suspenparts, or TRC, of modifying and producing servomechanisms for Russia’s deadly glide bombs, citing a transaction document between TRC and a Russian firm.
However, Labas later clarified that further investigation revealed the TRC name in the document was actually a front for a Chinese company seeking to evade international sanctions, not the Taiwanese company.
“We also discovered a double operation, which consisted not only of a new scheme to circumvent sanctions, but also an operation to discredit the Taiwanese manufacturer, which had been repeatedly carried out by the parties concerned,” Labas wrote on his Facebook on Monday.
Labas added that the Chinese company KST Digital Technology Limited supplied servomotors to Russia through a network of intermediaries, including a firm called Kaifeng Zhendaqian Technology. These products were eventually rebranded as those of the Taiwanese firm TRC, whose name was used without authorization.
Servomotors are crucial for glide bombs as they control the bomb’s aerodynamic surfaces, such as fins or wings, enabling precise maneuvering and guidance.
“Taiwan has been unjustly implicated. The actual culprits are Chinese manufacturers exploiting TRC’s name for camouflage,” he added.
Radio Free Asia was not able to contact KST Digital Technology Limited or Kaifeng Zhendaqian Technology for comment.
Chen Shu-Mei, TRC’s deputy general manager, dismissed any suggestion of a business connection with Russia, saying the firm may take legal action to protect its reputation.
“It was a totally unfounded claim,” said Chen, adding that the company primarily produces automotive chassis components and parts for vehicle suspension systems.
While not as advanced as Western precision-guided munitions, Russian glide bombs have become a key part of its air strategy in Ukraine. Military analysts estimate they contribute 20% of Russia’s operational advantage in the conflict.
Ukrainian intelligence reports that Russia has greatly increased its use of such bombs. In May 2023, Russian forces were using about 25 glide bombs daily, but that number has since climbed to at least 60 per day, sometimes exceeding 100.
Edited by Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.
As land forces demand ever-more connectivity over increasingly larger areas, might UAV-based ‘data mules’ emerge as an efficient complement to tactical trunk communications? Land forces rely on a relatively simple ways of communicating. Take a squad of dismounted infantry. Each soldier will be equipped with a Personal Role Radio (PRR). The PRR will connect squad […]
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Russian and North Korean forces “lost up to a battalion of infantry” in two days of battles near the village of Makhnovka in Russia’s Kursk region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, estimating total North Korean casualties at about 3,800.
Up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers are in Russia to support its war efforts against Ukraine in Kursk, Ukraine and the U.S. say, but neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have acknowledged their deployment.
“In battles today and yesterday near just one village – Makhnovka in the Kursk region – the Russian army lost up to a battalion of infantry, including North Korean soldiers and Russian paratroopers. And that’s tangible,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Saturday.
The size of a battalion can vary from a few hundred soldiers to up to about 1,000.
Zelenskyy did not specify if he meant the soldiers “lost” in the fighting at the village were killed or killed and wounded but he estimated that 3,800 North Koreans had been killed or wounded in the fighting in Kursk.
“North Korea. Just look at this example, 12,000 have arrived. Today 3,800 killed or wounded. They can bring more, 30-40 thousand, or maybe 500. They can bring many people. Why? Because they have order, autocracy and everything,” he said in an interview with American podcaster Lex Fridman on Sunday.
Ukraine previously reported more than 3,000 casualties among the North Korean while South Korea estimates at least 1,100 North Koreans have been killed or wounded.
“We do not want any war. We want to stop the Russians. And they invite … North Korean soldiers. Invited. Their faces are burned. They themselves burn their faces. Those who cannot escape, injured or killed,” the Ukrainian president added.
Zelenskyy was referring to his previous assertion that Russian forces were burning the faces of North Korean soldiers killed in assaults on Ukrainian positions to conceal their identities and keep secret their deployment to help Russia in its war.
He cited a video as evidence but Radio Free Asia has not been able to independently verify the clip.
Zelenskyy’s remarks came after reports that a senior North Korean military officer had been sent to Kursk to investigate the cause of the massive loss of troops.
The high-ranking officer’s visit resulted in a brief suspension of the North Koreans’ participation in combat but it later resumed, Ukraine’s Evocation reported on Thursday.
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, or DIU, said the morale of North Koreans in Kursk was declining.
“The soldiers’ morale is falling. And they are receiving constant propaganda from the Russian army with the message that the North Korean army’s participation in the war with Ukraine is ‘very important.’,” the DIU said on its official Telegram channel.
“Junior Russian commanders are deliberately underreporting casualty figures to their superiors,” it added.
A Ukrainian special operations sergeant told RFA on Dec. 27 that North Korean soldiers were fighting with outdated weapons, no food and poor medical kits. .
“They have no military food in their bags. They have some grenades but it’s not even the Soviet type,” said Mykhailo Makaruk of the 8th Special Operations Regiment. “It’s bullshit grenades. And they have lower level military medicine kits.”
There have been no signs of an additional deployment of soldiers from North Korea, despite the recent high casualty numbers, the Pentagon’s Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters in Washington last week.
“Can’t say that we’re seeing more being sent, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t send more in the future,” she said.
Edited by RFA Staff.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.
In 2023 the situation in Ukraine had developed into what looked like a stalemate. But 2024 proved that bigger things had been in the making. In 2024, after taking Avdivka, the Russian forces began to deliberate and steadily move forward.
The introduction of FAB bombs, precision ammunition delivered from airplanes flying outside Ukrainian air defenses, broke the Ukrainian defense fortifications. Russian infantry, covered by ample artillery and with the help drones, infiltrated and overwhelmed Ukrainian lines. An ever increasing shortage of Ukrainian troops helped to increase the tempo of progress.
Russian missile and drone attacks are continuing across Ukraine as the country already faces a cold, dark winter after Russia’s strikes destroyed about half of the country’s energy infrastructure. This comes as Russia and Ukraine completed a prisoner swap, repatriating more than 300 prisoners of war in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates ahead of the new year. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has approved billions more in military and economic assistance to Ukraine before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office with a pledge to curtail aid and end the war. Since Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago, Congress has approved $175 billion in total assistance to Ukraine. “Putin doesn’t want peace,” says Oleksandra Matviichuk, a leading Ukrainian human rights lawyer, who says Russia’s goal is to restore its empire by force. “Russian occupation means torture, rapes, enforced disappearances, denial of your own identity, forcible adoption of your children, filtration camps and mass graves,” she says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
In recent months, even across the collective West’s media, growing admissions are being made about both Russia and China’s superior military industrial capacity. With Russia’s first use of the intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, it is admitted that Russia (and likely China) possess formidable military capabilities the collective West currently lacks.
Despite the collective efforts of NATO in arming, training, and backing Ukraine, Ukrainian forces continue to give ground at an accelerated rate across the entire line of contact amid the ongoing Russian Special Military Operation (SMO).
The last year has been one big real-time case study in how corporate media outlets loyally obsess over the crimes of Western enemies while underplaying or ignoring those of Western allies. But important new book Worthy and Unworthy delves into this blatant media bias. And via deep analysis, it reveals how the propaganda model of Western media works.
The Canary spoke to the book’s author Devan Hawkins. And our second article on the book focuses in particular on how the corporate media obsesses over Russia’s crimes while underplaying similar crimes from Western allies. This clear media bias places Russia on a pedestal of evil for many people in the West, grooming them to support possible military action against the superpower in the future.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent previously argued that corporate media outlets split victims of violence or injustice into two groups – ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. And this designation determines how, and how much, the media reports on these people’s struggles. In Worthy and Unworthy, Hawkins tested the theory, finding it even more relevant today than when Chomsky and Herman first put it forward.
‘Going along with the government line’
In his book, Hawkins focused on analysing the coverage of the New York Times. He said he doesn’t see himself as a critic of the paper, because he recognises “journalism is hard work”. But overall, he insisted that the paper of record “goes along with the government line on official state enemies”, providing clearly more negative coverage of countries like Russia and China. Likewise, regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the paper has faced accusations of favouring Israel and downplaying the war crimes that internationalcourts, human rights groups, and other experts have condemned. Regarding both official allies and enemies, Hawkins said in the book’s introduction, there is “general uniformity in political perspectives about foreign affairs” among Democratic and Republican elites in the US, and that “is reflected in media coverage” too.
Hawkins told the Canary that the New York Times may go along with the state line for a number of reasons. It could be “availability of sources”, in that it’s “easier to go to government sources”; the power of advertising money, and the fear of losing it; or the influence of thinktanks, many of which get funding from the military industrial complex or from controversial US government groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which journalist and author Matt Kennard has called “an overt CIA”. Hawkins explained that “we have conflicts of interest that need to be disclosed”, and would like to research the reasons for bias even more. “It’s so important to be documenting this and paying attention to it,” he stressed.
Unevenly covering the bombings in Syria and Yemen
One of the cases studies Hawkins did to analyse the uneven coverage of similar issues was the Russian and Saudi Arabian interventions in the Syrian and Yemeni conflicts. And he explained that:
In both cases, there was fairly extensive coverage. But I only look at one month, basically… in the case of the Russian intervention, and compared it to 2 months total for the Saudi intervention. Overall, the shorter time period got more attention for the Russian intervention, and the Saudi intervention got less attention both in the specific months that were considered and during the overall time period.
Having looked at the scale of the interventions, he said:
the number of bombings, and the also the number of kills, would all suggest that the initial period of the Saudi intervention was much bigger scale than Russia’s intervention.
Explaining why Russia’s intervention received more coverage, he said it was:
Both because of the fact that Russia is again like an official State enemy, and they were supporting a government that… the US has an antagonistic relation with – the Assad government, and at the same time obviously Saudi Arabia being one of the US’s closest geopolitical allies in the region, and because their intervention was against a movement, the Houthis, which are seen as being very closely aligned with Iran. So I think all those work together. And I should note that in this case there’s a direct involvement of the US. Because that intervention would not have been possible without the millions in arms sales like from the US to Saudi Arabia.
The nature of the coverage, meanwhile, was also different. “There was some critical coverage of the Saudi intervention”, he said, but nothing like the coverage of Russia’s, which was “universally negative”.
Worthy and unworthy dissidents
“One of the most informative” chapters, Hawkins told us, was one looking at the treatment of dissidents. In particular, he covered Russia’s persecution of Alexei Navalny, and compared it to Spain’s persecution of Catalan independence politicians whose initial sentences were “greater than the sentencing that went to Alexei Navalny”.
The Catalan figures had a “wide base of support” and there were “massive protests against their arrest” that were “much bigger in scale than the protests that happened in response to the arrest and sentencing of Alexei Navalny”. Nonetheless, Hawkins insisted, the dissident of an “official state enemy, Russia” (i.e. Navalny), got “much more attention than many more dissidents in a friendlier country, Spain”. Talking about the Catalan independence issue, he added:
I was really surprised about how, universally, there seemed to be almost no sympathy.
In a similar way, Hawkins looked at musical dissidents. He analysed coverage of protests from punk-rockers Pussy Riot in Russia, and of the arrest and trial of Catalan rapper Pablo Hasél. In the case of Hasél, there was “almost nothing that was mentioned about him, even though there were pretty large protests”. But the New York Times gave Pussy Riot “much, much more attention”.
Yet more examples in Worthy and Unworthy
There are undoubtedly countless more examples of the media highlighting Russia’s crimes at the expense of Western-backed crimes. But Hawkins also took a brief look at two cases close to Russia, in Ukraine and Belarus – both historically aligned with Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. And this analysis adds some extra colour to the picture of Western media bias.
Another issue Hawkins evaluated was coverage of the Euromaidan protest in Ukraine from 2013 to 2014 – an important precursor to Russia’s current war in the country. And he pointed out that “a lot of the nuance was missing”, such as “the fact that Ukraine was a highly divided society” and that “there were legitimate questions about what was a better economic deal for the country” between Europe’s and Russia’s. “Any role that the US was playing,” he stressed, “didn’t get much attention”. Finally, he noted the difference between coverage treating some protesters as “pro-Russian” but others as “Ukrainian”, even though the former were also Ukrainians.
Finally, he reflected on the critical coverage of the grounding of a Belarusian dissident’s plane in comparison to the grounding of Bolivian president Evo Morales’s plane, which was thought to be also transporting US dissident Edward Snowden. There was “very little attention” on or criticism of the latter when Hawkins compared it to the former. And as he said:
Imagine if Russia reported to some countries that Alexei Navalny was on a plane, and those countries shut off their airspace on a plane that was carrying a head of state to force it to land in those countries.
The Canary will be releasing more articles on the comparisons Hawkins made in his book in the coming weeks. You can see the first article in the series here.
RFA Insider closes out the year with two gigantic stories concerning North Korean soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war and allegations of overseas Chinese espionage and influence.
Off Beat
In early October, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) revealed that thousands of North Korean troops were being deployed to Russia’s Far East to undergo training and eventually fight alongside Russian soldiers against Ukraine. More details emerged in the following days: Russia would pay a monthly $2,000 per soldier, though observers believed that the majority would be pocketed by the North Korean government. While Russia and North Korea both initially denied the deployment, the allies later adopted a more ambiguous stance, saying that such an act would conform to the strategic partnership they had signed.
This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy released a disturbing video of what he claimed were Russian forces burning the faces of North Korean soldiers killed in battle in order to keep their deployment a secret. Reporter Jaewoo Park from RFA Korean spoke with a Ukrainian soldier who is a member of a unit that encountered the North Korean troops, and joins today’s episode to unpack the plight of these dispatched soldiers.
Podcast Free Asia
A listener comment griping about their father-in-law’s devotion to Thich Minh Tue allows for an update on the “unofficial” monk from Vietnam. Tue, who is not officially a monk in Vietnam’s state-backed Buddhist system, went viral after videos of his humble barefoot pilgrimages were shared online. However, his growing popularity prompted Vietnamese authorities to stop him in his tracks.
Buddhist monk Thich Minh Tue, center, stands with local residents in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province on May 17, 2024. (AFP Photo)(AFP)
Now, Tue is embarking on another pilgrimage from Vietnam to India, and he’s already crossed into Laos.
Double Off Beat
A business advisor to Prince Andrew has been identified as the latest Chinese national to be accused of covertly advancing Beijing’s interests overseas. Director of RFA’s Investigative team Boer Deng returns to the podcast to explain how RFA was able to name the business advisor, known only as “H6” in court documents, as businessman Yang Tengbo.
Britain’s Prince Andrew, right, stands with Yang Tengbo in an image shown at the “Most Accomplished Chinese Award” ceremony in 2019, where Yang received the “Outstanding Chinese Award.”(Most Accomplished Chinese Award)
Yang was banned from the U.K. in 2021 following an investigation into suspicious activity by a foreign state. During the search, officials uncovered alarming messages revealing the deep level of trust that the Duke of York had placed in the businessman. Yang appealed the ban, which was ultimately upheld by the court on December 12 of this year. Following RFA’s exclusive report, Yang Tengbo asked that the court reveal his name, claiming that he had nothing to hide and rather, had fallen victim to changing political tides.
Igor Kirillov, a senior general in charge of Russia’s nuclear defence forces, was killed on Tuesday in a bomb blast in Moscow.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), talking to Al Jazeera, has claimed responsibility for the bombing.
During the early hours of Tuesday, Kirillov was killed by a bomb hidden in an electric scooter outside an apartment building on Ryazansky Prospekt, Russia’s investigative committee said in a statement. The attack site was 7km (4 miles) southeast of the Kremlin.
The explosive device “had a capacity of some 300 grams in TNT equivalent”, Russia’s TASS news agency reported, quoting a law enforcement official.
Russian media reported that the bomb was remotely operated.
The organizers of the Vietnam International Defense Expo 2024 announced that Russia will present the amphibious BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) and the RB-504P-E anti-UAV system. The defense expo will take place from 19th till 22nd December at Gia Lam airport in Hanoi. Russia positions the BMP-3 as a combat-proven combat vehicle that can […]
President-elect Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of “escalating this war” in Ukraine and “making it worse” by allowing U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired from Ukraine deep into Russia.
“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview published on Thursday. He said:
“Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they’re doing not only missiles, but they’re doing other types of weapons. And I think that’s a very big mistake, very big mistake.”
Less than two weeks after a surprise rebel offensive began to retake areas of Syria for the first time in nearly a decade, the Assad regime fell on December 8. Once seen as entrenched and immovable, the government’s collapse came 53 years since Assad family rule began in Syria and nearly 14 years after the start of an uprising that called for its overthrow. The rebel takeover was rapid…
“We needed to turn this page. … We’ve been under this inhuman condition for 54 years.” Following a lightning 12-day offensive, armed opposition groups have overthrown President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his family’s five-decade rule in Syria. Assad has fled to Russia, where he has been granted asylum, while tens of thousands of political prisoners have been freed. The uprising was led by Hayat…
Bashar al-Assad has finally fledSyria. Since 2011, he had dug in as a proxy war developed against him. But 2024 was the year when his luck ran out. And it’s a big victory for the US empire and its junior partner in Israel.
NATO’s second-biggest army, however, isn’t too happy about the situation. So Syria is unlikely to have a lasting peace any time soon.
Assad falls amid Israel’s Middle-East rampage and Russia’s quagmire in Ukraine
Russia cared about Syria mainly because of its two bases in the country. That’s why it helped Assad to fight back against his opponents from 2015 onwards. But in 2024, Russia’s priority is Ukraine, where another proxy war has it bogged down and left it unable to invest enough resources into protecting Assad.
Israel, meanwhile, took advantage of the complete impunity the US empire has given it during its genocide in Gaza to go further afield. It has killed Iranians and dealt severe blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both Iran and Hezbollah were on the back foot. And that meant these two allies of Assad weren’t in a position to come to his aid either in the last week.
As Sky News defence analyst Michael Clarke said, Russia and Iran were only helping Assad with “very low-cost operations”, and they’d have to either “commit much more, or they were going to have to pull out”. In the end, he stressed:
Both of them decided they would throw Syria under the bus and pull out.
The US empire smiles over Syria today
Israel has always been an outpost, a station, a proxy, a tool, and a defender of the US empire’s interests in the Middle East. In particular, it helped to separate Arab territories that may well have united if there hadn’t been a divisive force between them. And specifically, that helped to ensure that a chunk of the region’s precious natural resources remained in friendly hands, and those that didn’t could become the target of covert or overt hostility.
The Assad dynasty in Syria was in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, and then Russia’s. It also showed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, which put Washington’s junior imperialist partner in Israel at risk. All of that made it a target for US meddling. It wasn’t the fact that the Assads were bastards, because plenty of US allies are. It was the fact that they weren’t under the control of the US empire.
What is happening is certainly to the benefit of the Israeli military, of the Israeli government… They are getting what they have said they have wanted all along: weaker neighbours, so that they can push their regional agenda.
So although it’s an Al-Qaeda jihadist group the US considers to be terrorists which has led the final offensive against Assad’s regime, the empire is happy today.
NATO superpower Turkey, however, always cared more about crushing Kurds than Assad
Wars that don’t end in negotiations tend to go on for a long time, until conditions lead to one side clearly having the upper hand. And NATO superpower Turkey has its own war going on – but not against Assad.
The left-wing, Kurdish-led Rojava revolution emerged in northern Syria at the start of country’s conflict. Assad’s forces had retreated, and the local multi-ethnic (but largely-Kurdish) communities had to defend themselves from jihadist attacks. Turkey had long repressed its own Kurdish population, so it couldn’t accept an independent Kurdish-led revolution on its border. It thus ended its own negotiations and restarted its anti-Kurdish war, increasing its efforts to suppress the movement at home and abroad. In doing so, it committed numerous war crimes.
Turkey has long sought to demonise its opponents by calling them terrorists, but the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) has actually been the victim of a Turkish terror campaign that has caused a humanitarian crisis there. This was part of a long campaign of ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation in northern Syria.
And it very much seems that Turkey isn’t going to stop its anti-Kurdish war in northern Syria any time soon:
Well there you have it. Without a miraculous change in Turkish priorities, the first act of the creation of the new Syria may be Efrîn-style ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish cities and communities that remain. https://t.co/Gd7HkTTHHq
There is collective amnesia about what Turkey's been doing in Syria. TR took over the FSA (SNA now), put nationalist Turkmen in charge, ethnically cleansed Afrin, invaded Tel Abyad/Ras al-Ain, sent SNA to Libya and Karabakh. Is still fighting SDF.
A jihadist victory against Assad is like replacing one ill for another. The AANES, on the other hand, is the closest thing to a left-wing government in the entire Middle East. And if there was any cause the international left should now get behind, especially in Syria, that would be it.
Peace campaigners from across the country are taking part in actions this Saturday 7 December calling on the British government to step back from the nuclear brink and withdraw its use of Storm Shadow missiles from Ukraine.
This follows weeks of escalation by NATO and Russia, which has led to an increased nuclear threat in Europe.
Protest calling on Ukraine, NATO, and Russia to step back
Protests, rallies, vigils and street stalls are being organised in Bath, Birmingham, Manchester, Plymouth, Brighton, Newcastle and London.
The protests are part of an emergency day of action called by CND and Stop the War Coalition. In London, a rally will take place from 2:30pm on the green space next to the Ministry of Defence, opposite Downing Street.
Protestors will be wearing Keir Starmer masks and brandishing Storm Shadow ‘missiles’.
CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt said:
“The British government is playing a reckless game, risking the lives of even more Ukrainians, Russians as well as populations in Europe and Britain. Giving Ukraine the use of its long-range missiles to fire into Russia will not make any difference to the outcome of the conflict. Instead, Starmer risks dragging Britain into an all-out war with nuclear-armed NATO and Russia.
“Starmer’s government argues it needs to increase military spending to defend us against a more insecure world, but British military actions are worsening this insecurity, not resolving it. Britain needs to withdraw the missiles and get behind peace talks now.”
Stop the War Coalition Convenor Lindsey German said:
“NATO expansion has made eastern Europe more dangerous and for the Labour government to endorse Volodymyr Zelensky’s view, in his desperate efforts to get a favourable deal with incoming US president Donald Trump, that NATO membership is the way to end the war, is foolish and cynical. He knows one reason for the conflict was precisely this.
“Zelensky is also having to deal with the growing unpopularity of the war among the population and the discontent among troops, with desertions growing rapidly. We desperately need peace negotiations but, just as in Tony Blair’s time, our government, given a choice between international law, morality and common decency, will always come down on the side of war. Starmer, Lammy and the rest must be stopped.”
In mid-November, the Biden administration (given his diminished mental capacity, whoever is now in charge) authorized the Kyiv regime to launch Lockheed Martin produced Army Tactical Missile Systems or ATACMS to hit targets 190 miles inside Russia. In response, an ICBM was fired in wartime for the first time when the Oreshnik (“Hazelnut Tree), an intermdiate range, nuclear capable missile, took only 5 minutes to hit Dinipro, Ukraine. The Kremlin gave Washington a 30 minute warning before the launch. Putin called the U.S./NATO bluff and he promised that future retaliation could target “decision making centers” in Kyiv.
This new Russian weapon can reach Warsaw in 1 minute 1 second; Berlin, 2 minutes 55 seconds; and London 6 minutes 56 seconds. Europe has no defence system that can intercept it. Putin said recently that when several Oreshniks are used simutaneously, “the resulting impact is comparable in power to that of a nuclear weapon.” Despite Russian warnings about escalating the conflict, the U.S. continues to blow past all red lines and on November 23 and 25, the Kiev regime fired a dozen more ATACMS into Russian territory.
Here it’s imperative to briefly recall how the US imperialist strategy toward Russia got us into this dire situation. Contrary to the official narrative, the war in Ukraine did not begin with an “unprovoked” Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 27, 2022. Rather, as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote, “In fact the war was provoked by the United States in ways that leading U.S. diplomats had anticipated for decades leading up to the war, which means that the war could have been avoided and should be stopped through negotiations.” (Common Dreams, 5/23/23). VIrtually all policy experts and Russian leaders warned that NATO expansion was, in the words of CIA Director William Burns, the “brightest of all red lines for the Russian elites (not just Putin) of whom would see it as a direct challenge to Russian interests.” George Kennan, architect of U.S. containment policy, called it “a tragic mistake.”
In spite of these warnings, at the June 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO leaders pronounced that “Ukraine will become a NATO member” and at the Brussels meeting on June 14, 2021, NATO reiterated that “Ukraine will be a member of NATO.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov countered, “The key to everything is that NATO will not expand eastward.” In truth, given all the U.S./NATO arms and military training flowing to the Kyiv regime it’s apparent that Ukraine was already a de facto NATO member.
Anyone with a scintllla of working brain matter understood that no government in Moscow would tolerate the decision to bring Ukraine into NATO. Russia viewed NATO expansion on its border as an existential threat and legitimately feared that the US, under the giuise of NATO, would place missiles 317 miles or 5 minutes flying time from decapitating the Kremlin. What would Washington’s response be if Russia or China struck a “defensive” alliance with Canada or Mexico and began placing missiles on the U.S. border? Or, think of the Monroe Doctrine.
In short, the war hawk neocons who prevail in Washington were fully aware of the above but wanted to provoke a proxy war to be fought to the last Ukrainian. They expected the conflict would depower Russia — and perhaps even precipitate a regime change — so the US could move along to the Strait of Taiwan and a likely confrontation with China, the primary peer challenger to US global domination.
Since 2002, the U.S. has squandered $174 billion of aid and military assistance on Ukraine, money that’s desperately needed for addressing the cost of living, health care, housing, education and health care for the working class here at home. Further, there have been more than half a million Ukrainian and Russians killed on the battlefield in a war that that could have been avoided had the U.S. given up the idea of Ukraine joining NATO.
According to the AP (11/29/2024), as many 200,000 soldiers may have deserted from the Ukrainian army. In response, Blinken is pressuring Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 which could add 350,000 in meat for the grinder. My sense is that Blinken & Co. are attempting to prolong the war as long as possible so that when the inevitable defeat does occur, we will hear the refrain, “Trump lost Ukraine.”
In spite of all the official disinformation and propaganda on behalf of the war, a majority of Ukrainians no longer support it (Gallup,19 November 2024) and Americans now oppose more military aid for Ukraine. In our recent presidential election voters registered a strong mandate to end the “endless wars.” Here in Pennsylvania, a majority believe the US is “too involved” in foreign affairs. (CATO/YouGov/9/9/24).Over the past three years, Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine and during his debate with Kamala Harris, he said “I want this war to stop.” In his November 5 victory speech, Trump declared “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to end them.” We’ll soon see if the unpredictable and erratic Trump adheres to his promise. Given Deep State opposition and some of Trump’s appointees, I’m not optimistic.
In the meantime, no sane person can wish the current situation to unfold into a global thermonuclear exchange and the annihilation of the earth’s people. I’m old enough to recall how the U.S. responded when Russia attempted to put missiles in Cuba and I suspect we are now closer to World War III than we were during those 13 fateful days in October 1962.
Be careful who you condemn and ostracise. They just might be supplying you with a special need. While the United States security establishment deems Russia the devil incarnate helped along by aspiring, mischief-making China, that devil continues supplying the US energy market with enriched uranium.
This dependency has irked the self-sufficiency patriots in Washington, especially those keen to break Russia’s firm hold in this field. That, more than any bleeding-heart sentimentality for Ukrainian suffering at the hands of the Russian Army, has taken precedence. For that reason, US lawmakers sought a ban on Russian uranium that would come into effect by January 1, 2028, by which time domestic uranium enrichment and conversion is meant to have reached sustainable levels.
The May 2024 Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, signed by President Joe Biden as law H.R.1042, specifically bans unirradiated low-enriched uranium produced in Russia or by any Russian entity from being imported into the US. It also bars the importation of unirradiated low-enriched uranium that has been swapped for the banned uranium or otherwise obtained in circumstances designed to bypass the restrictions.
At the time, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm struck a note of hollering triumphalism. “Our nation’s clean energy future will not rely on Russian imports,” she declared. “We are making investments to build out a secure nuclear fuel supply chain here in the United States. That means American jobs supporting the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to a clean, safe, and secure energy economy.”
This does not get away from current circumstances, which see Russia’s provision of some 27% of enrichment service purchases for US utilities. The Russian state-owned company Rosatom is alone responsible for arranging imports of low-enriched uranium into the US market at some 3 million SWU (Separative Work Units) annually. Alexander Uranov, who heads the Russian analytical service Atominfo Center, puts this figure into perspective: that amount would be the equivalent of the annual uranium consumption rate of 20 large reactors.
Given this reliance, some legroom has been given to those in the industry by means of import waivers. H.R.1042 grants the Department of Energy the power to waive the ban in cases where there is no alternative viable source of low-enriched uranium available to enable the continued operation of a nuclear reactor or US nuclear energy company and in cases where importing the uranium would be in the national interest.
The utility Constellation, which is the largest operator of US nuclear reactors, along with the US enrichment trader, Centrus, have received waivers. The latter also has on its book of supply, the Russian state-owned company Tenex, its largest provider of low-enriched uranium as part of a 2011 contract.
No doubt knowing such a state of play, Moscow announced this month that it would temporarily ban the export of low-enriched uranium to the US as an amendment to Government Decree No 313 (March 9, 2022). The decree covers imports “to the United States or under foreign trade contracts concluded with persons registered in the jurisdiction of the United States.”
According to the Russian government, such a decision was made “on the instructions of the President in response to the restriction imposed by the United States for 2024-2027, and from 2028 – a ban on the import of Russian uranium products.” Vladimir Putin had accordingly given instructions in September “to analyse the possibility of restricting supplies to foreign markets of strategic raw materials”. The Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom confirmed that the ban was a “tit-for-tat response to actions of the US authorities” and would not affect the delivery of Russian uranium to other countries.
In a Russian government post on Telegram, the ban is qualified. To make matters less severe, there will be, for instance, one-time licenses issued by the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control. This is of cold comfort to the likes of Centrus, given that most of its revenue is derived from importing the enriched uranium before then reselling it. On being notified by Tenex that its general license to export the uranium to the US had been rescinded, the scramble was on to seek a specific export license for remaining shipments in 2024 and those scheduled to take place in 2025.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Centrus warned that any failure by Tenex “to secure export licences for our pending or future orders […] would affect our ability to meet our delivery obligations to our customers and would have a material adverse effect on our business, results in operations, and competitive position.” While Tenex had contacted Centrus of its plans to secure the required export licenses in a timely manner, a sense of pessimism was hard to dispel as “there is no certainty whether such licenses will be issued by the Russian authorities and if issued, whether they will be issued in a timely manner.” The sheer, sweet irony of it all.
BANGKOK, JAKARTA and HONIARA – Oil producers including Russia and Saudi Arabia have slowed negotiations for a plastic pollution treaty to a crawl, dimming chances that an agreement to tackle a burgeoning environmental and health threat can be reached this year.
Negotiators from dozens of countries are meeting in Busan, South Korea, this week for what critics of the plastics industry hope will be the final negotiations for a treaty that paves the way for limits on plastics production.
However, oil states appeared intent on blocking or delaying progress. Most plastics are derivatives of crude oil and natural gas.
Convenient and cheap, plastics are produced in ever growing volumes and found in every nook and cranny of daily life – from the flimsy stools at street food stalls in Southeast Asia to the componentry of sophisticated smartphones and the hundreds of billions of water bottles and plastic bags discarded worldwide every year after just seconds of use.
Mostly unrecycled, plastic waste has a lifespan of centuries and is exacting an increasing toll on the environment including in the oceans where it injures and kills marine life.
A growing body of researchlinks plastics and their additives, which provide properties such as flexibility and color, to health problems including cancers, birth defects, reduced immunity to disease and hormonal disorders.
Climate activists march on a street to demand stronger global commitments to fight plastic waste at the upcoming fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in Busan, South Korea, Nov. 23, 2024
Campaigners say an effective treaty should address the source of plastic pollution and not only management of the swelling amount of plastic waste.
That approach involves reducing the production and use of plastic through steps such as banning particular pernicious types, redesigning packaging and other measures. There are also calls to mandate the phasing out of chemicals linked to health problems.
After two years of negotiations led by the United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, some activists say the risk is that only a toothless agreement is produced.
The UNEP had touted the Busan meeting as the final round of negotiations but Russia, Saudi Arabia, as the representative of a block of 22 Arab states, and India, which is a net oil importer but has aligned itself with the oil producers, are insisting on unanimity for every substantive issue.
At the opening session of this week’s negotiations, the Russian and Saudi Arabian envoys warned other delegates against invoking a rule that would allow a vote on the treaty if consensus isn’t reached.
Russian representative Dmitry Kornilov and Saudi Arabia’s Eyad Aljubran threatened to mire the negotiations in procedural issues if their demands were ignored.
“We would like to again remind you that all decisions on substantive issues within the framework of the meeting must be taken by consensus,” Kornilov told the hundreds of conference delegates.
“Now, if any of the delegates decides to reopen [this issue], we reserve the right to revisit the rules of procedure,” he said.
Climate activists march on a street to demand stronger global commitments to fight plastic waste at the upcoming fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in Busan, South Korea, Nov. 23, 2024.
Russia and Arab nations also rejected a draft treaty text put forward by the chairman of the negotiations as a circuit breaker. Negotiators have been working with a 70-page document that contains nearly 1,900 sets of brackets encapsulating all of its disputed words and sentences, which Russia and its supporters want to remain the basis for negotiations.
The threats are part bluster “backed up by the ability to waste time because they have no desire to see an actual treaty,” said Melissa Blue Sky, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law and observer at the negotiations.
‘Huge distances’
International Energy Agency forecasts for crude oil demand suggest that plastics will become more financially crucial to petrochemical companies and oil-exporting nations as increased adoption of electric and hybrid cars reduces demand for fuels.
At the second round of treaty negotiations in mid-2023 in Paris, the petro states managed to derail negotiations for several days by talking about procedural issues. The delaying tactics have continued during the closed door sessions of the current negotiations, Blue Sky told Radio Free Asia.
“There’s still huge distances between what most countries want and what the least ambitious countries want. And so the question is, are the majority of countries willing to stand up for a treaty that has substantial provisions and obligations,” she said.
“If the majority of countries who want an actual treaty, not just a voluntary waste management cooperation agreement, if they are not willing to stand up for certain provisions, then the treaty we end up with is a treaty that even the least ambitious countries can agree to, and it will do very little.”
This undated November 2023 photo shows volunteers from Indonesian community organization Trash Hero sorting through discarded plastic in Lapangan Banteng, Jakarta
On Wednesday, the chair of the negotiations, Luis Vayas, said after three days there had been only “limited” progress toward a treaty and time was running out to conclude an agreement.
Colombia’s vice minister of environment, Mauricio Cabrera Leal, said a number of countries were acting in bad faith and deliberately stalling the negotiations. He did not specify which countries.
Representatives of India, Russia and Iran said a shortage of time for negotiations should not be a reason to force through an agreement without consensus.
At least 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, according to recent industry data, a more than 200-fold increase since the early 1950s. Based on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates, about three quarters of it becomes waste and nearly a fifth is so-called mismanaged waste – burned, discarded on land and in waterways or left in open dumps and substandard landfills.
The burden of dealing with the profusion of plastic is greatest in lower income countries with little or inadequate infrastructure for processing garbage.
‘Unbearable’
In the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara in the South Pacific, a reporter this week documented discarded plastic clogging its shoreline and countless plastic bottles filling its waterways.
The ubiquity of the waste is despite a government ban, announced in 2023, on single-use plastics such as shopping bags, straws, polystyrene takeaway containers and water bottles smaller than 1.5 liters.
Discarded plastic bottles are pictured on Nov. 27, 2024 clogging the shoreline of the Solomon Islands capital Honiara despite a government ban on single-use plastics.
In Cimahi, a city of half a million people in Indonesia’s West Java province, resident Saifal said problems stemming from plastic pollution occur on a near daily basis.
“Single-use plastics end up in drains, causing constant flooding and leaving garbage scattered on the streets during heavy rain,” said Saifal, who goes by one name.
“At night, neighbors often burn trash that contains plastic. The smell is unbearable,” he told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news organization.
Indonesia, which is one of the largest sources of plastic pollution in the ocean, has been intensifying its efforts to control plastic waste but challenges remain, said Vinda Damayanti, director of waste reduction at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
A ministerial regulation requires producers in industries such as manufacturing, hospitality and retail to reduce waste by redesigning packaging, reusing materials and enhancing recycling, Damayanti said.
Discarded plastic bottles are pictured on Nov. 27, 2024 overflowing a drain in the Solomon Islands capital Honiara despite a government ban on single-use plastics.
The ministry is also advocating for a nationwide ban or fees for single-use plastic bags after success there with such measures.
Indonesia wants an international framework on plastic waste to ensure that developing countries have access to funding and technology that will help deal with the problems, according to Damayanti.
“Many people don’t understand the environmental damage caused by plastic waste,” she said.
“This is a global problem that requires a global solution.”
Edited by Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA, Pizaro Gozali Idrus and Charley Piringi for Benar News.
New York, November 27, 2024—Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a Wednesday press briefing that German journalists Frank Aischmann and Sven Feller were “ordered to hand in their accreditation” and leave Russian territory “in due time.” Zakharova said the move was a “symmetrical measure” to German authorities’ ban “on the presence and work” of journalists with Russian state-run TV broadcaster Pervyi Kanal (Channel One).
“The Kremlin’s tit-for-tat expulsion of German journalists Frank Aischmann and Sven Feller is yet another act to further restrict independent reporting in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Journalists should not be used as political pawns, and Russia should allow Aischmann, Feller, and all other foreign journalists to work in Russia without fear of reprisal.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Pervyi Kanal announced that German authorities were closing its German bureau, and requiring its correspondent Ivan Blagoy and camera operator Dmitry Volkov to leave the country by mid-December.
Berlin’s migration authorities confirmed the journalists’ residence permits were denied in connection with European Union sanctions imposed on Pervyi Kanal in December 2022. German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner denied that German federal authorities were behind the decision.
German public broadcaster ARD, which employs the two German journalists, said in a statement that their expulsion “marks a new low point in relations with Russia.” Jörg Schönenborn, an ARD representative, called the move “a drastic step” and said, “It will once again limit our ability to report from Moscow.”
CPJ’s email to the Russian Foreign Ministry requesting comment did not receive a response.
Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters. In June, Russian authorities revoked the accreditation of Maria Knips-Witting, a journalist with the Moscow bureau of public broadcaster Austrian Radio and Television (ORF), as a response to Austrian authorities’ expulsion of Ivan Popov, a Vienna-based correspondent of the Russian state news agency TASS.
Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Spanish journalist Xavier Colás, Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.
New York, November 26, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention of journalist Ediye Muslimova, in Simferopol, the capital of the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and calls on the authorities to stop harassing Crimean journalists.
“Ediye Muslimova’s detention is deeply concerning in light of the continuouscrackdown on journalists in Ukraine’s Crimea,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities controlling Crimea must stop harassing Crimean journalists, who should be able to work safely and without fear of reprisal.”
On November 21, witnesses saw three men put Muslimova, the editor-in-chief of the Crimean Tatar language children’s magazine Armanchyk, into a van near her home, according to a local journalist who spoke under condition of anonymity with CPJ and Crimean Solidarity, a human rights group. Muslimova’s whereabouts were unknown for more than a day, with both her personal and work phones disconnected. Her relatives filed a statement with the police.
The following day, Muslimova posted on her Facebook page that she had been released after being detained for 36 hours by Russia’s special services,
“There were a lot of questions about my work, about the magazine,” Muslimova said in her post. Armanchyk, a monthly magazine published since 2011 in Crimea, publishes poems, crosswords, fairy tales, and other children’s content.
“Given that she was not engaged in anything criminal or illegal besides her work as an editor and journalist, […] I don’t think that her detention is linked to anything else other than her activities in the interest of the Crimean Tatar people,” a local journalist who spoke under condition of anonymity told CPJ.
Since Russia’s 2015 crackdown on independent media in Crimea, several Crimean Tatar journalists have been persecuted in connection with their reporting on the rights of the predominantly Muslim indigenous ethnic group.
CPJ called the Simferopol police for comment, but nobody answered the phone.
We are experiencing times of global transition. Where we have been is self-evident. Where the world is headed remains obscure. Some states are implacably resisting that transition; others strive to foster a modified international system that conforms to emerging realities. The actions of governments in the two categories are reinforcing each other’s commitments to pursuing these incompatible tacks. There’s the rub.
This is the context for the major crises over Ukraine, in the Middle East, and over Taiwan. Ongoing war in the first two carries the potential for escalation with dire, far-reaching consequences. Each is at once symptomatic of the systemic changes occurring in world affairs and the cause for a raising of the stakes in how that transition is handled or mishandled.
Dilemma 1 USA
There is a lot of talk about how Donald Trump will move quickly to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Maybe not within the advertised 24 hours – but supposedly he sees the pointlessness of an open-ended war with Russia. So, he is expected to get in touch with Putin, personally and/or via a designated envoy, to make a deal. We have heard hints of what the ingredients could be: a ceasefire, the lure of reduced sanctions, some recognition of a special Russian association with the four oblasts Moscow has annexed, Crimea ceded, the remainder of Ukraine autonomous with links to the EU if not NATO. The sequencing, the specifics, ancillary trade-offs are cloudy. To the minds of the more optimistic commentators, an eventual agreement is likely since Trump wants to be unburdened of the Ukraine albatross, since he is not a fan of NATO expansion or NATO itself, since he wants to concentrate on dismantling the federal government while pressing ahead with the rest of the MAGA agenda. Relations with Russia, as with every other foreign power, will be treated in terms of bilateral dealing wherein the U.S, focuses on the trade-offs, i.e. how much it gains as opposed to how much it gives.
It is by no means clear that this approach could achieve the stated goal of ending the war in Ukraine and easing the tense confrontation with Russia. For the Kremlin has set stipulations for a peaceful resolution that could only be met by a broader accord than is visualized in the horse trading anticipated by the Trump entourage and like-minded think tankers. Russia will not stop the fighting until a firm agreement has been reached. That is one. It will not accept any ambiguity as to the future status of the Russophile territories in question. That’s two. It will not tolerate leaving in place a Kiev government controlled by the rabid anti-Russian nationalists who have run it since 2014. That’s three. It will demand a treaty that formally neutralizes Ukraine on the model of post-war Austria. That’s four. It will press hard for the constitution of a pan-European security architecture which accords Russia a legitimate place. That’s five.1
The implication is that the prospects are dim for a quick, short-term deal that leaves these sensitive issues indeterminate and open to the vagaries of politics in Washington and European capitals. It appears unrealistic that Trump will have the discretionary power, the political will or the strategic vision to design and to implement a multifaceted plan as required to weave together the varied strands of the European security fabric. It is one thing to intimidate the Europeans into taking on a fuller responsibility for their own security by threatening to leave them to their own devices. It is something far more demanding to recast the American relationship with its European allies, with Russia, with other interested, neighboring parties. For meeting that wider challenge has as its precondition a comprehensive redrawing by the United States of the imprinted mental map of the world system. For it is being transformed in basic ways which are at variance with the deep-seated American presumptions of dominance, control and privilege.
Trump is not the man to man to replace the prevailing strategic vision and America’s paramount position in the world with something more refined and in correspondence to the emerging multi-nodule system. Although instinctively he is more of an America firster than a hegemonic imperialist, his actions will be piecemeal and disjointed rather than pieces of an artful new pattern. Even in regard to specific matters like Ukraine or Taiwan it is impossible simply to snap one’s fingers and on impulse shift course. A carefully thought through design and the crafting of a subtle diplomacy is the prerequisite. Donald Trump, incontrovertibly, has no plan, no strategy, no design for any area of public policy. He is incapable of doing so; for he lacks the necessary mental concentration and organized knowledge. The same holds for dealing with China.
[The focal shift from Russia in Europe to China in Asia is less a mechanism for coping with defeat in Ukraine than the pathological reaction of a country that, feeling a gnawing sense of diminishing prowess, can manage to do nothing more than try one final throw of the dice in a vain attempt at proving to itself that it still has the right stuff – since living without that exalted sense of self is intolerable.]
Were Trump to take a series of purely tactical actions that have the net effect of lowering American presence globally, he would be running against the grain of fundamental national beliefs. Belief in the country’s birth under a Providential star to lead the world along the path of enlightenment, belief in American exceptionalism, belief in American superiority (the last jeopardized by signs of losing a battle with a superior armed Russia, by signs of losing an economic battle with a technologically superior China). Moreover, many Americans’ faith in these national myths is bound closely to their own individual sense of self-esteem that already is felt to be under threat in this age of anxiety. Trump is hardly the one to guide them to a mature appreciation of what America is and who they are.2
Dilemma 2 Russia & China
These two great powers, who are the principal obstacles to the United States’ retention of its dominant global position, face a quite different dilemma. Put simply, it is how to deal with an America that remains blind in vision and impervious in policy to the epochal changes reshaping the configuration of the world system. To the extent that Washington does feel the vibrations from this tectonic shift, political leaders are seen as reacting impulsively to deny its practical consequences in striving to assert an endangered supremacy. That compulsion leads American policymakers to set ever more arduous challenges to prove that nothing fundamental has changed. Hence, the drive to overturn a strategic commitment made half a century ago by pressing by every means for Taiwan’s autonomy. Hence, its strenuous efforts to prevent Russia from assuming a place in European (and Middle Eastern) affairs commensurate with its national interests, its strength and its geography.
[The minimalist aim has been to sever its ties to the Europe of the EU – thereby marginalizing it as a peripheral, inconsequential state. The maximalist aim has been to provoke regime change producing of a weaker, Western-friendly provider of cheap natural resources and open to predatory Western finance. A sharecropper on the West’s global plantation – as one Russian diplomatic bluntly put it. Project Ukraine was to be the spearhead].
From this perspective, Moscow and Beijing face a dilemma of a singular nature. They must devise elaborate strategies to stymie American plans to perpetuate its dominance by undermining the growing political, economic and – derivatively diplomatic – strength of these perceived rivals. Containment both in broadly security terms and in terms of their impressive national achievements – the latter that diminishes the American (Western) claim to representing to representing the one true path to political stability and economic sell-being. Resistance to those plans by the Russians and Chinese has become the overriding strategic imperative in both capitals as manifest in their intensifying collaboration in all spheres. As they see the situation, that momentous move is dictated by the reckless conduct of a fading, flailing superpower still in possession of an enormous strength to disrupt and to destroy.
Still, when it comes to direct confrontations with Washington over Ukraine or Taiwan, they are obliged to temper their actions so as to avoid provoking an unwanted crisis with an America they view as unpredictable and unstable. That concern applies to a Trump presidency as much as it does to the outgoing Biden presidency. Striking the correct balance is a daunting challenge.
The upshot is that Putin and Xi tread carefully in treating with their feckless Western counterparts who disregard the elementary precepts of diplomacy. We are fortunate in the temper of Chinese and Russian leadership. Xi and Putin are rare leaders. They are sober, rational, intelligent, very well informed, capable of broad vision, they do not harbor imperial ambitions, and while dedicated to securing their national interests are not bellicose. Moreover, they have long tenures as heads of state and are secure in power. They have the political capital to invest in projects of magnitude whose prospective payoffs will be well into the future.
Dilemma 3. THE EUROPEANS
European political and foreign policy elites are even less self-aware of their untenable circumstances than the Americans. The latter are as one in their blunt conviction that the United States could and should continue to play the dominant role in world affairs. The former have made no considered judgment of their own other than it is imperative to frame their conceptions and strategies to accord with what their superior partner thinks and does. Therein lies the heart of their dilemma.
For the past 75 years, the Europeans have lived in a state of near total strategic dependence on the United States. That has had profound lasting effects. They extend beyond practical calculations of security needs. Now, more than 30 years after European leaders were relieved from any meaningful military threat, they remain politically and psychologically unable to exercise the prerogatives and responsibility of sovereignty – individually or collectively. They are locked into a classic dominant-subordination relationship with America. So deeply rooted, is has become second nature to political elites.
[The extremity of the prerogatives granted the United States to act in disregard for European autonomy and interests was demonstrated in Washington’s destruction of the Baltic gas pipeline. That extraordinary episode punctuated the unqualified Europeans’ commitment to serve as an America satrap in its all-out campaign to prevent China as well Russia from challenging its hegemony. Securing the obedience of the European economic power bloc undeniability represents a major strategic success for the United States. So does cutting off Russia’s access to capital investment, technology and rich markets to the West. The heaviest costs are being paid, though, by the Europeans. In effect, they have mortgaged their economic future for the sake of participating in the ill-thought through severing all connection with what now is an implacably antagonist Russia whose abundant energy and agricultural resources have been a prime element in their prosperity and political stability.]
Under that unnatural condition, European governments have inflicted serious damage on themselves. Moreover, they have jeopardized their strategic and economic future. By following Washington’s lead in the campaign to neutralize Russia as a presence in continental affairs – dating from 2008, they have cut themselves off from their natural partner in natural resource trade, technological development and investment. They have institutionalized a hostile relationship with a neighbor who is a major world power. They have made themselves the residual custodians of a bankrupt, corrupt Ukrainian rump state which carries heavy financial cost. Furthermore, in the process they have undermined the legitimacy of their democratic institutions in ways that open the door to radical Far Right movements. These deleterious consequences are reinforced by the Europeans signing on to the no-holds-barred American economic cum political war against China. This latter misguided action reverses the EU’s eminently sensible prior policy of deepening economic ties with the world’s rising superpower.
The net effect of this unthinking relegation of European countries to becoming a de facto American vassals is a distancing themselves from the world beyond the trans-Atlantic community. When we add to the tilting scales the alienation of global opinion disgusted by Western enthusiastic support for the Palestinian genocide, we discern an historic retrenchment. The once proud rulers of the globe are circling-the-wagons in a defensive posture against forces they barely understand and have no plan for engaging.
Europe’s feeble response to this formidable challenge is a series of schematic plans that are little more than placebos mislabeled as potent medication. The EU’s proposed answer to its acute energy predicament is a vaguely sketched strategy whose central element is a diversification of suppliers alongside acceleration of green energy projects. Various initiatives in this direction taken over the past two years give reason for skepticism. The main substitute for Russian natural gas has been LNG from the United States; attempts to form preferential arrangements with other suppliers (like Qatar) have come up short. Relying on the U.S. has its drawbacks. American LNG is 3 to 4 times more costly than pipeline Russian gas. Trump’s declaration that limiting exports will dampen inflationary pressures raises doubts about that supposed reliability. Most telling is the disconcerting fact that European countries clandestinely have somewhat eased their energy penury by buying Russian oil and gas on the very large grey market. Indeed, there is statistical data indicating that the EU states, at one point this year, were importing more Russian sourced LNG than American LNG!
In the security realm, there is much talk in Brussels about building a purely European security apparatus – linked to NATO while capable of acting independently of the United States. This is an updated and upgraded revival of an idea from the late 1990s that birthed the now moribund Common Security and Defense Policy. This commotion could be taken as just play-acting given that there is no concrete threat to European security outside the fevered imaginations of a political class inflamed by loud American alarums that Putin is bent on restoring the Soviet Empire and dreams of washing his boots in the English channel – if not the Irish Sea. Moreover, there are the provocative Russian actions in relentlessly moving its border closer to NATO military installations.
The likelihood of the current blue-skying will produce anything substantial is slim. Europe lacks the money in its current stressed financial condition, it lacks the industrial base to equip modern armed forces, and it most certainly lacks the political will. Yes, we hear a lot of bombast issuing from Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte and their fellow dreamers of a federal European Union. The truth is captured in a saying that we have here in Texas: “All hat and no cattle!”
The glaring omission is any cogent, realistic diplomatic strategy that corresponds to the present configuration of forces in the world. Instead, we see a heightening of anti-Russian rhetoric, solemn pledges to accompany Ukraine on its path to ultimate victory, and joining Washington in ever harsher measures against China cast as an economic predator and security threat.
1 President Trump’s policies toward Russia were no different in nature than Bush/Obama/Biden’s: sanctions, arming Ukraine. The seeming difference in attitude toward Putin the man derives from Trump’s abiding faith in and relishing of deal-making. To do so with somebody as formidable as Putin serves his voracious narcissistic ego.
2 There is one trait in Trump’s malign make-up that offers some small consolation. He is a coward – a blustering bully who evades any direct encounter with an opponent who will stand up to him (even running away from a second debate with Kamala Harris who roughed him up in the first one). Trump has neither the stomach nor the mental strength for a serious brawl/war. Small blessing!
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Brenner.
