In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”
Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.
Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”
Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.
“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”
“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”
Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”
“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.
A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine. I appreciate your engagement but, given the complexity of this, let’s keep it civil. I choose peace every time, until the things that we said would never again happen, happen.
When I called Velshi a fucking lunatic for expressing these views (to my mind the only sane response to such madness), he argued that going to war with Russia for Ukraine would not necessarily lead to nuclear war, claiming that “A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine.”
These are not sane or acceptable things for mainstream pundits to be telling people. Directly attacking the Russian military would indeed risk unleashing a chain of rapid escalations that could easily lead to full-scale nuclear war; there would be far too many small, moving parts for this to be anywhere remotely close to predictable or controllable. A no-fly zone over Ukraine would immediately put NATO powers in direct hot war with Russia, which is in fact completely different from shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.
The fact that a nuclear superpower cannot be regarded in the same way as a nation without nukes has been basic, common sense orthodoxy for all major powers since Stalin got the bomb. This is not some kind of advanced esoteric understanding that you can only grasp if you’ve been studying this stuff for years; as far as I know children are still learning about the history of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction in grade school. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, much less influential mainstream news media pundits.
But it’s becoming more and more common. The line that we’re already in World War 3 and need to begin acting accordingly is showing up more and more often. The idea that NATO powers might be able to get away with attacking the Russian military in Ukraine without sparking a nuclear exchange is fast becoming its own genre of western foreign policy punditry, and that trend looks to accelerate with the latest (arguably pretty dubious) claims of Russian atrocities in this war.
Already we’ve got Velshi’s cries for World War 3 joined by the likes of Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, who apparently spent so long training to beat a machine that he turned into one:
You’ve also got opinion makers in outlets like The New York Times telling people that “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons — not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”
There’s also the galling White House press conferences in which ambitious reporters aggressively demand to know why the Biden administration isn’t doing more to escalate against Russia, as clear an illustration as you could ask for of the fact that the mainstream press are only allowed to be pushy and confrontational with US government officials when they’re demanding more bloodshed.
As we’ve discussed previously, even if these increasingly loud calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers don’t immediately succeed, what they do is push the Overton window of mainstream discourse all the way over toward the most warmongering extreme possible so that calls for more escalation seem moderate and calls for de-escalation look like extremist apologia for Vladimir Putin. In the very best-case scenario they leave people far more open to consenting to far more nuclear brinkmanship than any thinking person should ever consent to.
This is not okay. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to normalize the idea of escalations that could easily end humankind. That is the most insane position that any person could possibly take. More insane than Nazism, or any other extremist ideology you could think of. Supporting actions that may lead to human extinction makes these people enemies of our entire species.
Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for “direct military involvement” against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.
You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.
__________________________
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It does not pay to be too moralistic in politics. Self-elevation can lead to tripping up. Sermonising even as your stable needs cleaning can enfeeble the argument. But Bidenism, this gaffe-prone ideology currently doing the rounds in a barely breathing administration, has identified the simplest of binaries to work with.
In his State of the Union address, US President Joe Biden took the slicer to the world of politics and placed them into two tidy camps in a tradition that would have impressed the Bolshevik ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov. “In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”
In this supposed morality tale and cartoon strip, the wicked Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin does battle with the heroic democracy that is Ukraine, all simplified into roles where virtue combats satanic vice. There is no room for debate, for contrast, for history. Awkward realities are never allowed to intrude.
Putin, Biden insisted, “sought to shake the foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways.” The President, in contrast, had been busily building “a coalition of freedom-loving nations” across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa to oppose that man in the Kremlin. Like a student proffering a glowing report card, Biden spoke of spending “countless hours unifying our European allies.”
This child-in-cradle view of the world was not going to go down well with other powers. Leaving aside Putin as the feted gargoyle of tyranny, such talk about autocracy and democracy jars in a good number of countries. A few see themselves as US allies. It would have made the eyes of Egypt’s strongman President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, roll. It would have caused members of the House of Saud more than a bit of irritation, even if Biden has failed to make good an election promise to reassess Washington’s relationship with the bone saw butchers in Riyadh.
In Warsaw, on March 26, the US President was at it again, adding a few more streaky remarks about this “dictator bent on rebuilding an empire”. This time, he went just that bit further. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” When stated in a country increasingly gagging to get at Russia in whatever way it can short of total war, this was imprudent. Biden may well have said one thing, but he was also telling Poland, a NATO ally, that it could not ship MiG-29 jets to the Ukrainians.
A sweat might have also broken across the brows of those in the Pentagon. The US military is confident that Putin, if placed in a situation of being directly threatened, might resort to the nuclear option. It did not impress French President Emmanuel Macron, who stated in response that, “We want to stop the war that Russia launched in Ukraine, without waging war and without escalation.” Biden’s coalition of freedom lovers suddenly seemed rocky.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was left with the task of qualifying and unscrambling. No, the United States did not, he claimed in a press conference on March 27, “have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else, for that matter. In this case, as in any case, it’s up to the people of the country of question. It’s up to the Russian people.”
This astonishing analysis, so separated from the truth of US foreign policy over the years, glossed over the invasion of Afghanistan to oust the now returned Taliban (that regime change went so well); the open endorsement of Juan Guaidó’s leadership credentials in Venezuela against the established government; military assistance to rebel factions in Libya and, as a consequence, the public mauling and murder of long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi and his country’s de facto partition; and that real treat of an effort: the invasion of Iraq and the eventual capture and execution of Saddam Hussein.
Blinken’s summation is particularly rich given Washington’s own meddling in Ukrainian-Russian affairs. Such conduct seemed animated by a notion held by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: democracy is only good for a country so long as it returns the right candidate. Falling short, Washington should provide a correcting hand.
One happy to offer that helping hand was Victoria Nuland, famed for her “Fuck the EU” call with US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, in February 2014. It is telling that she is currently Biden’s Undersecretary for Political Affairs. As Assistant Secretary of State, Nuland shamelessly contemplated Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Washington’s replacement for the elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Three weeks later, the pro-Russian Yanukovych was ousted.
Umbrage was also taken with the European Union’s partiality towards former heavyweight boxer Vitaly Klitschko as prime ministerial material. “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government,” a snootily dismissive Nuland told Pyatt. “I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
With such machinations exposed, US officials can be safely saddled with responsibility for overthrowing an elected government (democracy, but just the wrong sort) and aiding to precipitate a civil war that saw the deaths of 13,000 people, impoverished a country, and laid the seeds of sorrow that are now returning a terrible harvest.
Troublingly, Biden’s amnesiac coverage of the issues has found an audience. The reaction to his Warsaw gaffe in some quarters was far from negative. It took only a few days for the New York Times to feature a letter from one Tomasz Kitlinski of Lublin in Poland, who was delighted at the suggestion of ridding the world of Putin. The President “was absolutely correct and doesn’t need diplomatic sophistries to defend his discourse.”
Another letter in the same column showed the danger of such rhetoric, the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is school of thinking. “President Biden states that Vladimir Putin ‘cannot remain in power’,” writes Richard Kooris of Austin, Texas, “and yet he refuses to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or allow Poland to make MiG-29 fighter jets available to Ukraine, ostensibly out of fear of igniting a wider (or nuclear) conflict.”
The general tone of the readership, at least those pruned from the email stash sent to the Gray Lady, suggested that Biden was merely uttering the truth, gaffe or otherwise. Edward Luce, in the Financial Times, suggested that the Warsaw stumble was revealing, in so far as it was “hard to picture the circumstances in which the US would reincorporate Russia into the global economy while Putin is still there.” The only question remains how far Washington will go to make matters worse, scuttling the prospects of a durable, realistic peace between Kyiv and Moscow.
Ukrainian officials on Sunday accused Russian forces of carrying out a “deliberate massacre” in Bucha as images of what appear to be dead civilians littering the city’s streets sparked global outrage.
Evidence of the apparent atrocities came after Russian forces retreated from areas around Kyiv, including Bucha, which sits just northwest of the capital.
Agence France-Pressereported Saturday that its journalists saw “at least 20 bodies on a single street” in Bucha. All of the corpses were in civilian clothes, the agency reported, and at least one had his hands tied behind his back with a piece of white cloth.
According to Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.”
“How many more such cases are happening right now in the occupied territories?” he asked.
Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk claimed to Reuters Saturday that those left on the streets “were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here.”
Zelenskyy spokesperson Sergey Nikiforov toldBBC’s “Sunday Morning” that authorities found in Bucha and other areas where Russian troops have departed had “mass graves filled with civilians.”
“We found people with hands and legs tied and bullet holes in the back of their heads,” he said, “and half-burned bodies as if somebody tried to hide their crimes.”
“I have to be careful with my wording,” he said, but “it looks exactly like war crimes.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Sunday, “Bucha massacre was deliberate,”
In a statement, Kuleba called on the International Criminal Court to “thoroughly collect all evidence of Russian war crimes” in Bucha and other Kyiv-area towns retaken by Ukrainian forces.
European officials also expressed condemnation Sunday over the alleged acts in Bucha.
Appalled by reports of unspeakable horrors in areas from which Russia is withdrawing.
An independent investigation is urgently needed.
Perpetrators of war crimes will be held accountable.
“Shocked by haunting images of atrocities committed by Russian army in Kyiv liberated region,” tweeted European Council President Charles Michel, adding the hashtag #BuchaMassacre.
The E.U., said Michel, is also readying further sanctions targeting Russia.
Russian authorities, for their part, denied the reports regarding Bucha as “fake” and suggested Ukrainians created the mass grave.
Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.
These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?
Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.
Sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, for instance, has used the West’s “wealth defense industry” to shift formal ownership of major chunks of his $18.4-billion personal fortune beyond the reach of sanction orders. Tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, notes Transparency International UK’s Steve Goodrich, “have long been a destination of choice for Kremlin cronies and kleptocrats.”
“Complex networks of secretive shell companies in these jurisdictions,” Goodrich adds, “means the UK government is attempting to enforce these sanctions with one arm tied behind its back.”
Minimal U.S. disclosure requirements, Global Financial Integrity policy director Lakshmi Kumar points out, are also easing the way for sanction-skirting Russian oligarchs. Billionaire-friendly legal fine print, she toldBloomberg earlier this week, is letting tainted money “rebrand itself, essentially.”
The United States, agrees Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, “has become one of the easiest places in the world for corrupt kleptocrats around the world to hide money.”
“The difficulties of applying sanctions in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” sums up the Tax Justice Network’s Alex Cobham, “have highlighted the abject failure of current standards of financial transparency.”
The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile upever granderfortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,”saysPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.
The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” theNew York Timesjustreported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.
But the damage the wealth defense industry has wreaked upon the Western world — indeed the whole planet — goes beyond undermining the sanction squeeze on Russia’s oligarchs. These defenders of grand private fortune appear to have placed somewhere between $5 trillion and $8 trillion worldwide beyond the reach of tax collectors. Tax havens, as Annette Alstadsaeter of Norway’s Centre for Tax Researchtoldthe Washington Post last fall, have become “a contagion.”
And no nation has done more to spread this contagion than the United States. Anonymous American companies, one World Bank survey hasfound, played key roles in 85 percent of the over 150 cases of grand corruption that World Bank analysts examined.
New variants of this contagion typically originate in the United States as well. South Dakota has had a particularly consequential impact. At the end of the 20th century, the state’s political high command worked hand-in-glove with wealth defense industry lawyers and lobbyists to turned the “trust” from a tool for circumventing inheritance rulesinto a global“go-to vehicle for tax avoidance.” By 2010, deep pocketshad amassed$57 billion in South Dakota trusts. By 2020, that total had hit $367 billion.
The evolution of the trust instrument, notes Columbia Law School’s Katharina Pistor,illustrateshow today’s national legal systems “have become items on an international menu of options.” The super rich choose from this menu “the laws by which they wish to be governed.”
“The privileged few can decide how much to pay in taxes and which regulations to endure,” she continues. “And if legal obstacles cannot be overcome quite that easily, lawyers from leading global law firms will draft legislation to make a country compliant with the ‘best practices’ of global finance.”
We can’t literally see our wealth defenders at work. But we can feel their impact. Average-income people in rich countries,noteinequality researchers Joseph Stiglitz, Todd Tucker, and Gabriel Zucman, “now pay far higher taxes than major corporations.” These corporations and the rich who run them are basically enjoying a “free-ride on the rest of society,” and their tax avoidance “means less investment in infrastructure, education, and research.”
What can we do? We can fight back, and, at the global level, some reformers — like the University of Virginia Law School’s Ruth Mason — are even feeling optimistic about the struggles ahead.
For much of the last century, Masonnotes, a small club of rich nations working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, set international tax policy. The system they created rested on bilateral tax treaties designed to make sure that corporations doing business outside their home nation wouldn’t be taxed twice on the same income, once by their home country and once by their host.
In the resulting global tax order, nations “set their tax rates independently from each other,” and Mason’s research details how major corporations like Apple became adept at gaming the system. They moved “valuable intellectual property to low-tax jurisdictions,” then charged their related corporate entities in high-tax jurisdictions “artificially high licensing fees,” a maneuver that gained their entities in high-tax jurisdictions large tax deductions and their fee-charging entities a bargain-basement tax rate on their fee income.
In tax dork circles, tax-avoidance games like these go by the acronym of BEPS, short for “domestic tax base erosion and profit shifting.” The tricks of the BEPS trade, the OECD nowestimates, cost governments worldwide as much as a quarter-trillion dollars annually in lost revenue.
Policymakers in the 20th century, Mason notes, either saw corporate tax avoidance as “unproblematic” or “regarded the costs of curbing it as too high.” But that hands-off mindset, Mason argues, “ended abruptly with the 2008 financial crisis.” The resulting job losses and budget shortfalls led to a “new intolerance of corporate tax dodging” as one legislative hearing after anothermade widely publicastounding examples of corporate tax arrogance. One hearing in the UK disclosed that Amazon, source of the one of the world’s largest personal fortunes, had paid a miniscule £1 million in tax the previous year on £4 billion in sales. A U.S. Senate hearing revealed that Apple had subsidiaries that “filed full tax returns nowhere on earth.”
Amid the resulting furor, the major nations that make up the G20 realized they “needed to do something — or at least appear to do something — about corporate tax avoidance.” They delegated that task to the OECD, and that led to a “BEPS Project” that has had, Mason believes, a “profound effect” on international tax norms and institutions. The BEPS effort, she explains, has shifted the global tax discourse from preventing “double taxation” to ensuring “full taxation,” a phrasing that encompasses closing tax loopholes and preventing abusive tax planning.
Other tax reformers have a distinctly less sanguine take on evolving international tax norms. Yes,notetax scholars Stiglitz, Tucker, and Zucman, the global tax deal that emerged from the BEPS negotiations does move a fair-tax agenda forward, by, for instance, making it harder for multinationals “to exploit tax havens by establishing a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent on corporate profits.” But this tax rate remains “much lower than what working-class and middle-class people typically pay in high-income countries” — and “far lower” than the 40 to 50 percent rate that U.S. corporations faced “for all but four years from 1942 to 1987.”
Other critics see in the G20-backed effort an absence of the political will necessary to truly take on global oligarchic power. Many of these criticsare pushingfor a United Nations convention on tax issues, an idea the Tax Justice Network feels “is developing what may prove to be an unstoppable momentum.” Earlier this month, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and Eurodad, a network of 60 civil society organizations from 29 European countries, released a draft of what a UN tax convention could be.
“Repeated efforts to stop international tax dodging,” notes the draft author Tove Maria Ryding, “have resulted in only sticky plaster solutions, additional complexities, and rules that continue to be biased in favor of the rich.”
The groups behind the new UN convention draft, sheadds, hope the proposals in it “will help to kickstart a discussion about the fundamental reforms that we really need.”
That discussion has also begun within the United States. Early last year, before the Biden inauguration, Congress overturned a Trump veto and enacted legislation that, theAmerican Prospectapplauds, “requires the owners of all financial assets to disclose their true identity to regulatory agencies and the IRS.” The Biden Justice Department, meanwhile, haslauncheda new kleptocracy task force, focused on Russian oligarchs, that could serve as a model for broader anti-oligarch offensives.
But much more remans to be done. One example: The ENABLERS Act now pending before Congress targets a hole in the already existing Bank Secrecy Act that lets agents for oligarchs park their ill-gotten gains almost wherever in the United States they please.
“If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate, and accounting firms to look the other way,”saysRep. Tom Malinowski, the bill’s lead sponsor, “that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through.”
Advocates for a bold pushback against the wealth defense industry are calling for much more ambitious steps as well, from outlawing abusive trusts to investing big-time in tax enforcement — and substantially hiking overall tax rates on our most awesomely affluent.
State and local governments are also getting involved. In Vermont, New Jersey, and other states — and in cities like Los Angeles and San Jose — activists arepushing beyondnew disclosure rules and demanding extra taxes on mansions and penalties on the secretive deep pockets who spend mega-millions buying up condos as investments and then let them sit vacant, moves that distort the housing market at the expense of ordinary households.
The Ukraine war could end up activating still more advocacy against oligarchy. But the conventional political wisdom is already fixating on the notion that the defense industry will prove to be the war’s biggest long-term winner. Mainstream pundits are predicting big increases in military spending throughout the Western world.
If that outcome turns out to be the Ukraine war’s most lasting legacy, oligarchy — worldwide — will have triumphed.
Dozens of progressive lawmakers in the United States and Japan are urging President Joe Biden to make a “sensible” shift and commit the U.S. to a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons “at any time or under any circumstances.”
The demand, which is also directed at Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, came in a letter dated Friday.
The effort was led by lawmakers including Congressional Progressive Caucus chair U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as well as Progressive Caucus of Japan chair and Diet House of Representatives member Masaharu Nakagawa.
The group’s call comes as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has escalated fears of atomic warfare, especially as Russian President Vladimir Putin has waved a “nuclear saber” with recent declarations.
Biden last month signed off on his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, a policy which, to the disappointment of nonproliferation advocates, walks back his 2020 campaign promise of no-first-use. The NPR, according to U.S. officials, instead leaves open the possible use of nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear warfare.
But, the lawmakers stressed in their letter, “it is never too late to commit to a no-first-use policy.”
Addressing the “nuclear umbrella” security alliance between the two nations, the letter states: “A no-first-use policy would not weaken the U.S. ability to protect Japan and itself from a nuclear attack. That protection is based on the promise of U.S. nuclear retaliation, not on the ability to strike first. In fact, a no-first-use policy would increase protection against a nuclear attack by reducing doubt, miscalculation, and the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch.”
Additionally, “a U.S. declaration stating that it would never start a nuclear war, supported by Japan, would breathe new life into international efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate the danger of nuclear war,” the lawmakers assert. “This is especially important at a time when tensions between the nuclear-weapons-possessing states, especially between the United States and China, are increasing.”
As The Associated Pressreported Saturday, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has added new fears of a nuclear exchange.
“For U.S. officials and world leaders, discussions of how to respond to a limited nuclear attack are no longer theoretical,” AP reported.
“One overarching concern is that by casting some nuclear weapons as tactical weapons to be used in battle, Russia could break the nearly eight-decade global taboo against using a nuclear weapon against another country.” Yet, AP added, “even comparatively small tactical nuclear weapons approach the strength of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.”
The demand to the U.S. and Japanese leaders came a week after 16 Nobel Peace Prize winners released an open letter calling for an immediate end to the assault of Ukraine and the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
“The time to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons is now. It is the only way to guarantee that the inhabitants of the planet will be safe from this existential threat,” they wrote.
“It is either the end of nuclear weapons,” they said, “or the end of us.”
Few events in recent years have proved to be as transformative of international relations as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting imposition of sanctions on the Russian economy. The war and sanctions have sundered or sharply curtailed most remaining trade and diplomatic relations between Russia and the West, forcing Western firms to suspend their operations in Russia and plan for a world divided into highly segmented trade blocs.
Every major industry will be battered by these seismic shifts, but none more so than energy: Prior to the invasion, Russia was Europe’s principal supplier of imported oil and natural gas, so European efforts to replace those imports with supplies acquired elsewhere will have a powerful impact on the global trade in both commodities.
This impact has already been evident in the petroleum realm, where increased European demand for non-Russian supplies has contributed to rising gasoline prices everywhere, including the United States. Its greatest long-term effect, however, is likely to be seen in the market for liquefied natural gas (LNG), once a relatively minor factor in the global energy equation that is gaining ever-increasing prominence. As Europe turns away from Russian gas, it will become increasingly reliant on LNG imports to satisfy its needs — and this, in turn, will result in new trading partnerships and an accompanying transformation of global energy geopolitics.
All this has come about because European leaders, over the course of many decades, chose to rely on the mammoth oil and gas reserves of Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union) to supply their countries with affordable energy for industry, home heating and electricity generation. Russian gas imports have become especially important in recent years as the European Union (EU) has sought to reduce its reliance on coal (because of its high carbon content) and nuclear power (out of a fear of accidents). By 2020, Europe obtained about 30 percent of its imported oil from Russia and a whopping 57 percent of its imported natural gas.
Prior to Russia’s invasion, plans were in place to further increase Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas, largely through construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Nord Stream 1, opened in 2011, runs under the Baltic Sea from Vyborg in northwestern Russia to Lubmin in Germany; a parallel conduit, Nord Stream 2, was begun in 2018 and completed in late 2021. Many prominent figures in the U.S. and Europe had protested construction of Nord Stream 2 on the grounds that it would increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and thereby give Moscow greater sway over European decision making in a crisis. German officials were still debating whether to give it their final approval in early February when Vladimir Putin began amassing forces for the invasion, at which point the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, suspended the certification process.
The cancellation of Nord Stream 2, and other measures being undertaken to wean Europe off Russian oil and gas, will severely disrupt the energy equation in Europe and force it to find alternative sources for both primary fuels. The Europeans are, of course, also trying to increase their reliance on renewable sources of energy, and some — like France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom — plan to renew their reliance on nuclear power. But their economies have long been structured around access to abundant inputs of oil and gas, and it will not be easy for them to eliminate their thirst for them any time soon. Searching elsewhere for additional supplies of these resources will, therefore, constitute a major policy priority in the months and years ahead.
Securing additional imports of oil and natural gas will be no easy task. Finding more oil will be tough enough — the major suppliers are now producing at near-maximum capacity — but acquiring more gas will prove even more difficult. Petroleum has the advantage of being a liquid, and so can readily be transported by tanker ship from suppliers located anywhere on the planet. Europe possesses many ports and refineries for unloading and processing crude oil, so even if it will be forced to pay higher prices to compete with consumers in Asia and elsewhere, it should be able to obtain adequate supplies to meet its basic needs in the months ahead.
Obtaining additional gas imports, however, will pose a greater challenge. Natural gas can be delivered by pipeline, but most of Europe’s piped gas comes from Russia, and the construction of alternative conduits, say from North Africa or the Caspian Sea area, will take many years. Gas can also be delivered by sea in the form of LNG, but that requires an elaborate infrastructure for liquefication on the supplier’s part and for regasification at the receiving end — infrastructure that is only available in certain parts of the world. Europe now possesses 28 large-scale LNG import facilities and is building more, but will need a much larger number if it is to increase its reliance on LNG. On the other side of the equation, it faces stiff competition for access to the relatively small number of gas producers with the liquefication facilities needed to export LNG.
These challenges were brought into sharp relief on March 28 when President Joe Biden and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyden, announced a joint plan to eliminate the EU’s reliance on Russian gas entirely by 2027. To achieve this ambitious goal, the U.S. pledged to double its LNG shipments to Europe, from about 25 to 50 billion cubic meters per year, while the EU agreed to acquire additional amounts from other sources and to build dozens of new regasification facilities. With Russia playing a diminished role in supplying Europe’s energy, the handful of major LNG suppliers are thus set to enjoy increased geopolitical clout.
A comparison of the top five oil and natural gas producers is useful in highlighting this power shift. To begin with, the LNG trade is highly concentrated: While the top five exporters of oil (in rank order) — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — account for approximately 50 percent of global exports, the top five suppliers of LNG — Qatar, Australia, the U.S., Russia and Malaysia — account for 70 percent of such exports. Expand these groups to the top 10, and the extent of concentration is even more pronounced: While the leading oil exporters command 70 percent of the global marketplace, the leading LNG suppliers control an astounding 89 percent.
The comparison between oil and LNG exporters is revealing in another sense. While rosters of the top 10 in each category include several overlaps, including Nigeria, Russia and the United States, there are many discrepancies. Saudi Arabia, long considered the epicenter of global oil production and the dominant force in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), doesn’t appear on the LNG list, which is led by its arch-rival Qatar. Similarly, Australia, never before thought of as an energy superpower, occupies a prominent place on the LNG list.
As Europe comes to rely on LNG for an ever-increasing share of its natural gas, those few major exporters of this resource are bound to acquire greater clout in world affairs, just as the major oil producers have long exercised disproportionate influence. With this in mind, it is worth looking more closely at some of the leading LNG exporters.
Qatar
Occupying a small peninsular attached to Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast, Qatar possesses the world’s third-largest reserves of natural gas (most of it found in offshore areas) and is the world’s leading exporter of LNG. It is a member, along with neighboring oil-producing states, of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a multilateral military arrangement backed by the United States. But Qatar’s rulers have sought to pursue a more independent stance than its fellow GCC members, supporting rebel groups in Libya and Syria that were opposed by Saudi Arabia, and retaining cordial relations with Iran. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and denied its planes access to their airspace; relations were only restored in 2021, after Qatar contributed troops to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. Despite these squabbles with its neighbors, Qatar has come to play a singular role in the Gulf region, hosting the Al Jazeera media network and hosting delicate negotiations, such as the peace talks between the Taliban and the United States. With Qatar likely to remain the world’s leading supplier of exportable gas, it is poised to play an even more pivotal role in the years ahead.
Australia
Often thought of as an outlier in global politics — noted in particular for its loyalty to the U.K. and well-established military ties with the U.S. — Australia has begun to play a more autonomous and muscular role in world affairs. The country has, of course, long been a major exporter of vital resources, including iron ore, bauxite and coal. It was not known, however, as an oil supplier, and it is only recently, with the development of mammoth fields discovered off the country’s northwest coast, that it has emerged as the world’s second leading supplier of LNG. Most of this gas now goes to China, Japan and South Korea; in fact, Australia is China’s leading supplier of LNG. But as China has begun to play a more assertive role in the Asia-Pacific region — for example, by militarizing small islands in the South China Sea — Australia has become leery of overreliance on the Chinese market. To afford itself greater autonomy, Australian leaders have increased their military spending and drawn closer to the United States, a move given formal substance with the recent signing of the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) security pact and the acquisition of nuclear submarine technology from the United States. With its increased income from LNG exports, Australia will be able to further enhance its military capabilities and play a more prominent role on the world stage.
The United States
For decades, the U.S.’s energy politics have largely been governed by its dependence on fossil fuel imports, not exports. Up until the onset of the 21st century, the U.S. was highly reliant on imported petroleum, and this dependency played a significant role in shaping its foreign policy, particularly toward the Middle East. But the introduction of advanced drilling technologies — notably hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — has allowed the U.S. to exploit its vast shale reserves and largely eliminate its reliance on imported oil. Moreover, fracking has resulted in an explosion in natural gas production, permitting both the replacement of domestic coal plants with gas facilities and, for the first time, the large-scale export of gas. Whereas the U.S. possessed no functioning LNG export terminals as recently as 2015, it now has seven in operation, with a dozen more awaiting government approval and financing. Under the joint U.S.-EU plan announced on March 28, the Biden administration will speed up the approval process for these added facilities and otherwise help Europe to wean itself from Russian gas. This move is being welcomed by those on both sides of the Atlantic who seek to terminate Russia’s dominance of the gas trade, but has raised concern among those who fear it will perpetuate Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels and so slow the transition to a green energy future.
These few vignettes demonstrate how the world’s growing reliance on LNG — now being accelerated by Europe’s drive to reduce its reliance on Russian gas — is upending the global energy equation and enabling new actors to assume leading roles. How all this will play out in the years ahead remains to be seen, but it is already evident that political analysts’ tendency to equate “energy geopolitics” with a certain lineup of familiar players now needs to be reconsidered, allowing for the incorporation of major LNG exporters into our calculations.
The Biden administration’s decision to admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, announced last week in the wake of the president’s European tour, is a huge step in the rebuilding of the U.S.’s once-vaunted refugee program after years in which the Trump administration all but neutralized it. However, the program must expand further if the U.S. plans to attempt to accommodate the steep increase in refugees that the coming year will likely bring.
At the urging of Stephen Miller, Trump’s mastermind of all things nasty when it came to making life miserable for immigrants, Donald Trump drastically reduced the numbers of refugees admitted yearly. By the time he signed off on his final presidential finding on the issue in the fall of 2020, he had set a refugee cap of 15,000 per year. It was a shockingly low number, barely one-sixth of the number admitted in Barack Obama’s final year in office, and a mere fraction of the 231,000 admitted in 1980; and — since refugee resettlement agencies receive much of their funding based on the numbers they are expected to resettle — it led to an evisceration of the U.S.’s resettlement programs.
The horrendous notion of massively constricting the numbers admitted was made even worse by a series of travel bans, largely targeting Muslim-majority countries, that made it nearly impossible for refugees from Yemen, Syria, Sudan, and several other countries experiencing widespread violence to enter the United States. In other words, the U.S. actively shut out refugees from places where the need was greatest.
Trump was determined to batten down the hatches against what he — and the far right in Europe — viewed as a tsunami of refuge seekers: In 2015-16, the period immediately before Trump’s election, more than 5 million asylum seekers and refugees from conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa headed to Europe to try to escape bloodshed and economic collapse. Trump slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel for making a “very catastrophic mistake” in liberalizing Germany’s asylum policies, and said that more migrants were going to Europe as a result. And Trump determined that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to go down the same road.
Biden came into office promising to increase the refugee cap to 125,000. He then ran into a buzzsaw of criticism when, already attacked from the right for being “weak” on immigration because of the surging number of asylum seekers crossing the southern border, he appeared to walk back this pledge in early 2021. Faced with a revolt from within Democratic ranks at this campaign promise betrayal, he reversed course again, initially raising the cap to 62,500, and then, in fall 2021, finally increasing it again, to the long-promised 125,000.
Yet, with the Afghanistan and now Ukraine crises upending the lives of millions, even that aspirational number may prove inadequate to meet the vast refugee resettlement challenges of the moment.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the country’s rapid collapse back into brutal Taliban rule, the U.S. airlifted more than 130,000 people out of Afghanistan; by the late autumn, officials were estimating that about 50,000 had already arrived, or would soon do so, in the United States. Now, barely seven months later, Russia’s assault on Ukraine has unleashed the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, with nearly 4 million refugees having crossed over to other countries, and millions more internally displaced in Ukraine in barely a month of fighting.
That the U.S. is opening its doors to large numbers of refugees, some of whom will be granted permanent residency under the refugee resettlement program, many of whom will be given temporary status under the “humanitarian parole” program once they arrive, is a huge step in the right direction for U.S. refugee policy.
But, for many aid agency workers, the unthawing of the refugee resettlement program is coming at far too slow a pace. Most Afghans were admitted under the humanitarian parole program rather than the refugee resettlement program, meaning that they aren’t on a pathway to permanent residency, and it looks like most Ukrainians will be admitted this way as well. For while the refugee cap was, indeed, raised to 125,000, that’s more a long-term goal than a reflection of on-the-ground realities. Indeed, so far this year, according to State Department data, a mere sliver of that total number, only about 8,000 refugees, has actually been admitted. The processing of refugees continues to be bogged down by staffing shortages and a denuded infrastructure — the legacy of Trump’s four years of unrelenting hostility to refugee resettlement.
The Ukrainian catastrophe, coming so fast on the heels of Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban, has shown just how vital — and also how fragile — refugee resettlement infrastructure is. U.S. efforts to isolate the Taliban, through freezing Afghanistan’s central bank assets, as Biden has done, have had ripple effects on civilians, further plunging the state into economic crisis and further fueling the exodus of desperate, hungry people.
In an era of massive population upheavals, due to wars, climate change, disease and the rise of brutal narco-states in parts of the world, wealthy democracies have a particular obligation to shoulder their share of the weight in resettling those displaced. President Biden is on the right track, both in raising the refugee cap and in announcing that large number of Ukrainians will be eligible for entry into the U.S. Now, he needs to find ways to increase the numbers admitted via the traditional refugee resettlement program route, and to rapidly channel funding into programs that have too often in recent years been forced to make destructive cuts.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden ordered the largest release ever from the US emergency oil reserve in a futile attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared to record levels following the Russo-Ukraine War. Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), amounting to 180 million barrels in total, which is equivalent to only two days of the global demand.
Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine. “This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families. It’s also a moment of patriotism,” Biden said at an event at the White House.
The US announcement came a day before the International Energy Agency member countries were set to meet on Friday to discuss a further emergency oil release that would follow their March 1 agreement to release about 60 million barrels that would cover only two-third of a single day’s oil demand, as the global net oil consumption per day is over 90 million barrels. With over 10 million barrels daily oil production capacity, Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is the world’s largest oil producer accounting for providing over 10% of the world’s crude oil demand.
As far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons more or less equals the military power of the United States. But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia seems to have no answer following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties and consequent dismantling of the once-thriving communist bloc, spanning Eastern Europe, Latin America and many socialist states in Asia and Africa in the sixties.
The current global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its West European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Historically, any state, particularly those inclined to pursue socialist policies, that dared to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies was internationally isolated and its national economy went bankrupt over a period of time. But for once, it appears Washington might shoot itself in the foot by going overboard in its relentless efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.
On March 17, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted to travel to the United Kingdom. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.
The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signaled that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal was also reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 5 million barrels oil production capacity to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.
Last month, Venezuela similarly released two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.
Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need for economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, didn’t even make any such request to China.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration until Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to November 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported last month the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.
“‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’
“But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”
To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.
The United States and Britain were ramping up pressure on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil and join efforts to isolate Russia, while Riyadh had shown little readiness to respond and had revived a threat to ditch dollars in its oil sales to China, Reuters reported last month.
“If Saudi Arabia does that, it will change the dynamics of the forex market,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, adding that such a move—which the source said Beijing had long requested and which Riyadh threatened as far back as 2018—might prompt other buyers to follow.
Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible that in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.
In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, over half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.
In many ways, the current oil crunch caused by Washington’s unilateral decision to impose economic sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector is similar to the oil crisis of 1973. The 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West following the Arab-Israel War lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs dubbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable for nurturing terrorism.
It’s noteworthy that $750 billion was only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of the oil-rich U.A.E, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in the economies of North America and Western Europe.
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia.
The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the book Rage.
President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
“I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: “He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.
“And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” Trump noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British Empire stirred uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War, as the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany during the war.
After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the war, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his violent insurgency against Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, because the latter was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabian peninsula, including the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a bribe for stabbing the Ottoman Empire in the back during the First World War.
Consequently, the Western powers abandoned the Sharifs of Mecca, though the scions of the family were rewarded with kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, imposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to the nomadic Sauds of Najd.
King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the financial and military support of the British Empire. However, by then the tide of the British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former territorial possessions of the British Empire.
At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.
Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.
In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.
Currently, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include sprawling al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.
Around lunchtime on 12 March, Oleh Baturin, a Ukrainian journalist in the occupied region of Kherson, received a phone call from an unknown number. It was the activist Serhiy Tsygipa. “I really need to see you, I’m ready to get to Kakhovka,” he said calmly. They agreed to meet at 5pm at the city’s bus station.
Having warned his family where he was going and who he was meeting, Baturin, 43, who works at the independent newspaper Novyi Den (New Day), left his ID and phone at home and went to the meeting place. But Tsygipa was not there. It was a trap. As he turned to go home, he heard a van door slam and the clatter of feet heading towards him.
The European Union (EU) and China are planning to hold a virtual summit on 1 April 2022, in an attempt to diffuse growing tensions between the two. This was the assessment given to the media by European Commission Vice-President and EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis.
The meeting will be attended by both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang and European Union representatives Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, presidents of the European Council and European Commission, respectively, as reported by POLITICO, a political journalism company based in the US.
The summit comes in the wake of the Ukraine-Russian war, that was largely provoked – though not justified – by the west, led by the United States and NATO. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was immediately followed with a barrage of western sanctions against Russia – sanctions which, when properly analyzed, hurt the west, mainly Europe, much more than they hurt Russia.
On 3 March 2022, in a historic Emergency UN General Assembly vote, 141 nations of the 193 UN member countries, reprimanded Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, demanding withdrawal of forces.
China, India and South Africa were among the 35 countries that abstained, while just five – Eritrea, North Korea, Syria, Belarus and, of course, Russia – voted against it.
China’s abstention, a close ally of Russia, is not only an anti-war vote, but it was also a for-peace signal to the world. Likewise, China has excellent relations with Ukraine. Since 2008, the two countries have built strong trade ties. China has become Ukraine’s largest trading partner, with a trade turnover in 2020 of 15.4 billion US dollar equivalent.
China would be well-poised to play a mediating role in the conflict, precisely what China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Wang Yi, had suggested to Ukraine and Russia, presuming that the EU has an intrinsic interest in Peace in Europe.
Given the halting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, currently ongoing in Istanbul, Turkey, the upcoming EU-China summit would be an excellent opportunity for Europe to bring fresh wind into the negotiations, by inviting China as mediator. Considering Russia’s and Ukraine’s friendly relations with China, such a move may bring positive results.
In addition to renewing and easing their currently tense relations with China, the EU might, for example, entering into trade talks with China, that may lead to new trade agreements.
Such treaties might be particularly welcome for Europe, as the current war and the preceding covid pandemic have caused interrupted supply chains, food shortages – potential famine even in Europe. China could be an excellent partner to repair supply chains – and fulfill food and other essential requirements – technological goods – while western countries suffer themselves under the weight of their sanctions imposed on Russia and to some extent also on China.
The summit might be an opportunity to rethinking “sanctions”- as sanctions have never resolved any political differences. To the contrary. They increase the level of hostilities. Not only are they unethical, but they are also in the purest sense of the word, illegal. Under international law, economic “sanctions”, punishment by forestalling economic progress of a sovereign nation by external financial, trading and economic pressure, is illegal.
Lifting of “sanctions” would be by themselves a move towards peace and peaceful relations between Europe and China.
The upcoming summit is also an opportunity for Europe to look eastwards – to renew a history-old geopolitical and trade relation with Eurasia, and especially with China and beyond. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), created in 2001 and headed by China, is a strategic block of some nine countries, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran, as well as another nine observer and dialogue partners.
The SCO comprises close to 50% of the world population and more than 30% of the globe’s GDP – a potentially highly attractive partnership for the EU. It would allow Europe to regain her hundreds of year-old autonomy. Europe may become free again to trade with east and west, according to comparative advantages. Since economic relationships forge political relations – comparative-advantage trading means win-win trading – leading to peaceful cohabitation.
In general, Eurasia is a logical market for Europe, a contiguous landmass of 55 million km2, comprising some 70% of the world’s population and accounting for about two thirds of the world’s GDP. Historically, Europe has been an integral part of Eurasia. A vivid example is the 2,100-year-old original Silk Road, a trading route, of which Europe was an essential link.
Finally, Europe may be interested in joining the New Silk Road, President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative which was launched in 2013. BRI is a transcontinental long-term policy and investment program which aims at infrastructure development and accelerating the economic integration of countries, while preserving each country’s sovereignty. The Belt and Road is patterned along the principles of the historic Silk Road.
More generally, the BRI aims at promoting the connectivity of Asian, European and African continents and their adjacent seas, and eventually reaching to the Americas. It strives to establish and strengthen partnerships among the countries along the Belt and Road, set up all-dimensional, multi-tiered and composite connectivity networks, and realize diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable development in these countries.
A few EU countries, like Greece, Italy, France and Germany, have already links to BRI. A large-scale connection with BRI would offer Europe another series of unique opportunities for trade, as well as cooperation in the fields of technology and research – a true potential economic relief in times of shortages due to supply chain interruptions.
The April 1, 2022 summit will offer Europe and China a myriad of opportunities to reconnecting in a friendly and mutually fruitful, new win-win relation.
• This paper was first published by the “Chongyang Institute” in China’s Global Times in Chinese on 31 March 2022.
Russia has been accused by Ukraine of using children as “human shields” while regrouping its forces, as the first horrifying witness accounts from the newly liberated town of Bucha, near Kyiv, emerge.
Ukraine’s attorney general is gathering a dossier of claims about the Russian use of local children to avoid fire when in retreat from around Ukraine’s capital and elsewhere.
Most of the debate and coverage of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war in Australia and the Western world is decidedly banal. It is characterized by the simplification of an extremely complex situation to generate a narrative that can be summarized as Putin and Russia are evil and Ukraine is good. This gross simplification is not helpful in either understanding the causes of the war, the nature of the war, its broader implications and most importantly of all, how it can be ended with the least number of additional deaths and injuries and damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure.
“I mean what I say when I say it!” Those words were spoken by president elect Joe Biden in December 2020 during a meeting with a group described as “civil rights leaders.” Video of the meeting was leaked and Biden’s insulting and dismissive attitude towards Black people was clear even to those who ignored this tendency he has shown throughout his 50 years of public life.
Biden did us a favor by revealing himself and by telling us to pay attention when he speaks. That advice should be followed no matter how strange his words may seem. Even in his bad tempered confusion, Biden always reveals what he is doing.
He recently made news for all the wrong reasons during his recent trip to Europe where he attended a combination G7 summit and NATO meeting in Brussels followed by a trip to Poland.
Here is my analysis of what’s going on in Ukraine after one month. It may not prove acceptable to many. Certainly not liberals, the ruling elite in Washington, or even some left liberal and socialist left. But I’ve always spoken my mind and will continue to do so, with no allegiances to any political forces or organizations. So here goes:
First, this is a proxy war engineered by US neocons and political elites, that has its origins going back as far as 1999, when the neocons began to gain greater control over US foreign policy. The dress rehearsal for the current conflict originates with the Clinton administration. Once Clinton could not keep his zipper shut and the radical right used the opportunity to exact whatever concessions they wanted from him in his final two years in office, the shift in US foreign policy began and has gained momentum ever since.
On March 31, dock workers of the Italian port of Genoa observed a 24-hour strike protesting the usage of the port for the transit of arms which are likely to be used in deadly imperialist wars going across the world. The call of the strike was given by USB Italia trade union. Activists from various left, anti-war groups including Potere al Popolo participated in the blockade held at the Ethiopia crossing at the Genoa port and an assembly of workers at Cap in via Albertazzi. During the protest, workers raised a banner which read “Not a penny, a rifle or a soldier for war“ and also stated that Italian ports and airstrips must not be used to make arms deliveries for imperialist war. The protesting workers also resolved for a greater participation in national mobilization of Italian workers on April 22 in Rome against the anti-worker policies of the Mario Draghi government.
On 16 March 2022, as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered its second month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned his people that ‘uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing’. A week later, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a brief study on the immense shock that will be felt around the world due to this war. ‘Soaring food and fuel prices will have an immediate effect on the most vulnerable in developing countries, resulting in hunger and hardship for households who spend the highest share of their income on food’, the study noted. South of Kazakhstan, in the Kyrgyz Republic, the poorest households already spent 65% of their income on food before these current price hikes; as food inflation rises by 10%, the impact will be catastrophic for the Kyrgyz people.
For African and other colonized people on the receiving end of the U.S. and Western self-centered and opportunist policies, illusions about the real intentions of the White West have usually proven to be deadly. This is even more true in the current crisis of legitimacy and generalized decline of the Western colonial/imperial project. The proclivity of Western imperialism to resort to naked, direct violence to advance its interests and to use anyone and everyone, the possibility that the U.S. would allow extremist right-wing white nationalists and neo-Nazis real-world training, combat experience and networking represents an existential threat.
On a warm Thursday in March, Firouza, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, is sitting in front of her shop in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa, a section of Brighton Beach. It’s home to more than 35,000 people, many of them born in the eastern European countries that once comprised the Soviet Union.
Firouza is methodically cutting pieces of blue and yellow ribbon while sitting on a chair in the store’s entryway. After she amasses a small pile, she ties the strips into a bow and adds a safety pin. A dollar buys one and business is brisk as diverse customers stop by to purchase this small token of solidarity with their Ukrainian neighbors.
Firouza also sells Ukrainian flags and the multicolored flowered shawls and scarves that are popular in Ukraine.
She has been doing this, she says, since the third day of Vladimir Putin’s war.
“I don’t know anyone in Ukraine and have never been there,” she tells Truthout. “But the war made me depressed. Everyone in this neighborhood is stressed out. We can’t sleep. Children and women are dying. Bombs are falling. I had to do something to raise money to help.”
Firouza is not the only local business owner to express this sentiment. In fact, dozens of restaurants and stores along Brighton Beach Avenue, the community’s commercial strip, are flying the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine and many windows bear messages calling for peace that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. A few shops are also collecting money and supplies for shipment abroad, including antibacterial wipes, aspirin, bandages, batteries, diapers, headlamps, Ibuprofen, ready-to-eat packaged food and meal bars, tape, tourniquets, underwear, socks, T-shirts and hats.
Shopkeeper after shopkeeper reports that such expressions of solidarity are happening throughout the U.S., wherever large concentrations of Ukrainians live or have ties.
Manhattan’s East Village, for example, once boasted a large Ukrainian population, and while gentrification has pushed out most of those who came here in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, several Ukrainian businesses, a credit union and two Ukrainian churches are still located in the area. Signs with the words “Slava Ukraini” — Glory to Ukraine — appear in many shop windows. Lampposts on every corner of busy Second Avenue are covered in anti-Putin posters, ads for an April 16th “Comics for Ukraine” fundraiser, and pictures of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Colorful posters on doors urge residents to donate goods and money to ongoing relief efforts.
Veselka Restaurant, the oldest Ukrainian business in the borough, raised $250,000 during the first two weeks of the war and is donating 100 percent of its borscht sales to refugee aid.
Jason Birchard, the third-generation owner of the eatery, told Truthout that the outpouring of support has been tremendous. “Most people recognize that Ukrainians are being mistreated, and when they see the atrocities on the news night after night, they want to do something to show their outrage and support the people who are being driven from their homes.” The restaurant has partnered with St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, Birchard says, and materials and money are being sent to Poland. From there, he explains, resources are going to established social welfare organizations and pop-up sites that are providing immediate assistance to the people coming into the country.
“We will do this indefinitely,” Birchard says, “as long as the need exists.”
Veselka, Manhattan’s oldest Ukrainian business, has raised more than $250,000 for refugees fleeing Ukraine.Hillary ExterVeselka’s windows are painted with messages of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.Hillary Exter
As we talk, Birchard points to the long line outside the restaurant door and tells Truthout that he is staggered by the increase in business, up 75 percent since the war began. He also expresses surprise at the enormous offers of solidarity, from efforts by individuals like Firouza, to the mountain of donated materials he and other businesspeople have collected.
Nonetheless, he knows that many Russian-owned businesses — including the nearly century-old Russian Tea Room and the newer Tzarevna restaurant in Manhattan — have floundered as backlash against all things Russian has ramped up in response to the conflict. This is true, he says, even when these businesses are overtly opposed to Putin’s regime and supportive of Ukraine. In fact, a worldwide boycott of Russian products has been promoted with the #BoycottRussia hashtag, and many companies have responded by posting pro-Ukraine messages on their websites; others have completely removed all references to their country of origin.
Stolichnaya Vodka, for one, will now be marketed as Stoli, exiled Russian-born businessman Yuri Shefler told the press in early March, in “direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” This, despite the fact that Stoli is produced in Latvia.
“I see a trend toward hating all Russians,” Nastya, a Russian immigrant living in Colorado, told Truthout. “The media needs to do a better job of explaining why hatred should not be against all Russians but should be directed toward Putin’s political regime.” Since the war began, she says, “many of us in the Russian community have felt insecure, as if we are somehow responsible or to blame for what’s happening. We feel this even though we are appalled by Putin.” At the same time, she worries that because she speaks with an accent, she will be the target of random animosity or violence.
Her fears are not unfounded. Nastya says that she is disheartened by reports of vandalism at Russian restaurants in Washington, D.C. and Denver, Colorado, and at Russian Orthodox churches in Canada and New Zealand.
Many individuals have also reported online harassment and taunts, as well as disparaging comments from strangers after being heard speaking Russian when out in public. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, fear of backlash has prompted some restaurants to remove references to Russian foods on their menus, instead labeling them as “European.”
Other examples abound. A restaurant in the German city of Bietigheim-Bissingen posted a sign alerting potential patrons that it would not serve people with Russian passports, a decision that it reversed after protests.
In Milan, Italy, Bicocca University announced that it intended to cancel a class on Fyodor Dostoevsky, a decision that the institution quickly withdrew after outraged students demonstrated their opposition.
The arts have also indicated their antipathy to Russia and the Russian people. As has been widely reported, Alexander Malofeev, a 20-year-old pianist scheduled to play with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Vancouver Recital Society, had his performances canceled despite the fact that he openly condemns the war. Similarly, the U.K.’s Royal Opera House canceled appearances by the Royal Moscow Ballet, and the Edinburgh Playhouse canceled the Ballet of Siberia. Meanwhile, New York’s Carnegie Hall replaced Russian-born conductor Valery Gergiev with a Canadian, and piano soloist Denis Matsuev with a South Korean.
In addition, the Hermitage Amsterdam, “the official outpost of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,” shuttered an exhibit featuring Russian Avant Garde artists; Netflix halted all incoming Russian-language series; and the Glasgow Film Festival pulled two films from its roster. Not to be outdone, Reddit has blocked all websites ending in .RU.
What’s more, academics at the Centre for Combating Corruption (a private organization funded by donations from people in the U.S., Ukraine, and throughout the European Union) are demanding that scholars drop their affiliations with groups including the Moscow-headquartered Gorchakov Fund; Berlin’s Dialogue of Civilizations Institute; and the Paris-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, entities the group charges promote “Kremlin propaganda.” They are also demanding that colleges and universities sever their financial ties to Russian oligarchs and remove these donors’ names from campus buildings.
Jordan Gans-Morse, faculty director of the Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies program at Northwestern University, told Truthout that many scholars find Putin’s regime so repugnant that they also want to end all collaborative work with Russian researchers and educators.
But should all Russian arts, artists and intellectuals be punished for the actions of their autocratic president?
Ernece B. Kelly, a retired City College of New York professor and longtime peace activist, says no. “It’s one thing to contact our politicians to encourage them to weigh in on stopping indiscriminate bombings and incursions, and a different matter to encourage boycotts of consumer goods which degrade the lives of ordinary Russians,” she told Truthout. “Banning Russian books and other cultural or educational events does nothing to further Russia’s lethal aggression and, in fact, may eat away at the heart and soul of people who have the potential to remove Putin and his allies.”
Firouza, the Brighton Beach ribbon seller, agrees, arguing against blanket condemnations of all Russians and stresses that she and her neighbors have been careful not to tar the entire Russian community for Putin’s war crimes. “Most Russians are good people,” she says. “This is true in New York City and it was true in Uzbekistan.”
Twelve-year-old Denis, standing in line for a table at Veselka, is similarly circumspect. “I was born here, but my parents come from Ukraine. We don’t blame the Russian people for this. We blame the Russian government. We don’t hate Russians. We eat Russian food. We shop in Russian stores,” he says, noting the intertwined relationships between the two peoples.
Nonetheless, Russophobia persists and is reminiscent of anti-Japanese bigotry during World War II, anti-Muslim bigotry following 9/11, and ongoing anti-Chinese bigotry that worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic.
For some, this is a reminder of the hurtful Cold War-era antipathy between the U.S. and Russia that lasted from approximately 1946 until 1991. But as the Norwegian Center for Humanitarian Studies reminds us, “Russophobia is a form of injustice and creates the conditions for long-term animosity and hate that will complicate future social and political relations. Making all Russians a universal target of global blame is, simply put, short-sighted and immoral.”
Whatever our differences, beliefs and prejudices we can all agree that peace is a good thing, can’t we, don’t we? All rational decent human beings would, I’m sure, nod enthusiastically, and who among us would admit to not being rational or decent…..even the despots believe they are – rational, just misunderstood. So why are human beings in constant conflict, why are there wars and the like at all, whether it’s in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan etc., etc.?
Fighting, violent conflict, heated arguments, all bad, harmony and peace good; it’s simple, obvious, right? Up to the point when someone somewhere attacks the rational decent men/women, in some way. Insults their family, belittles their religion or political ideology, criticizes or denigrates their country, burns their flag. At that moment, while peace is, theoretically at least, still cherished, it is forgotten, laid asunder, trampled underfoot. Heads locked, anger and rage unleashed, escalation is swift, intransigence immediate, forgiveness unthinkable. And, in a world of quick judgments and rabid tribalism, to not fight implies cowardice, moral weakness, leaving one open to abuse and exploitation.
Humanity is at war, not just with rival groups or nations, but within relationships, with the planet and with ourselves. Conditioned: psychologically and sociological conditioned, into war, into nationalism, into isms of all kinds, into competition and selfishness. And from this conditioned center action proceeds, action that is fragmented, ridden with desire and self-serving motives. The inevitable result is the world around us, chaos, violence, destruction and division. A harmonious peaceful world rests upon humankind being in harmony with itself; violence abounds because violence sits within the content of human consciousness like a cancer, a cancer which is being constantly inflamed by systems and values that are designed to be divisive.
Some will argue that human beings are innately violent (in the same way they say that man is born to compete); we’d like to be peaceful and kind, but, they claim, we just can’t help ourselves. By this fatalistic and false logic the men of war – the politicians, generals, terrorists, criminals and lovers of violence everywhere (including Putin) – could propose that some uncontrollable instinct forces them to fight, torture and kill; an ancient instinct rooted in tribalism, self-protection and fear, a dark shadow of man’s ancient past when right and wrong were unknown and survival was all.
Well, laying aside such spurious, albeit convenient nonsense, we can all agree that war is forever wrong, abhorrent and ugly on all levels, including the attack on Ukraine (ditto US attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam etc); a brutal act of aggression taking place within a historical and geo-political context, which, whilst not in any way justifying the attack, is relevant. Repeatedly laid out by commentators and analysts in recent weeks, including John Mearsheimer in his interview with The New Yorker, this context includes NATO expansionism, in spite of US commitments to Russia that no such expansion would take place; the US/West arming Ukraine and supporting the overthrow of the government in 2014, and in the months leading up to Russia invading, agitating, virtually demanding a war. Constantly prodding The Russian Bear, egging him on, daring him to attack with various threats – ‘there will be serious consequences’ and so on. Mainstream/corporate media functioned as the megaphone of political agitation and aggression.
Putin would probably have attacked anyway, but the constant screaming from the touchline certainly wasn’t designed to deter an invasion and foster peace, tolerance and understanding.
Western leaders, particularly the bumbling fumbling Johnson (desperate to be seen to be relevant), and bewildered Biden, repeatedly praise Ukrainian heroism and armed resistance. President Zelenskiy echoed Churchill in his address to the UK parliament, declaring that the people of Ukraine would battle on relentlessly, “We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets.” For this fighting spirit and steadfast ‘leadership’, which the media lap up, Zelenskiy is praised, hailed as a hero. It’s an approach that suits The West well, particularly the (US-dominated) arms industry; but by encouraging people to fight he is condemning more Ukrainians to death, because, having committed himself and his troops this far, Putin will not withdraw, on the contrary the bombardments will only intensify, causing more suffering and destruction until a deal is agreed.
Stop fighting and reduce the carnage; never surrender, resist fiercely and consistently, but stop fighting and allow the Russians to do the same. The Stop Fighting Keep Resisting approach, is not pacifism or weakness and does not imply giving up, acquiescing; non-violent resistance is a powerful force against aggression and injustice of all kinds. It is also the method recommended by enlightened teachers throughout the ages. Christ, for example, in His inspired Sermon on the Mount, said: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28), and taught that if “someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Luke 6:29). He, Christ, is not suggesting a passive, weak-kneed response to a cruel bully, but a resolute one – defiantly standing one’s ground with pride, but not reverting to violence and hate.
This compassionate non-violent response was also taught by the Buddha 600 years prior to Christ; in fact, Buddhism, like Jainism, rejects any type of violence to all forms of life. And within the Upanishad (the oldest philosophical text known, and basis of Hinduism) a similar approach is found: ‘Non-injury’ as the Hindu might term it.
Not responding to violence with violence weakens the forces of hate and fear that impels and empowers the aggressor; as Dr. Martin Luther King said, “returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” In this materialistic cynical world such statements, and they are statements of truth, are totally disregarded, laughed at.
Love, whilst superficially cherished, has been reduced to crass sentimentality, to a warm comforting ‘feeling’; replaced by desire, distorted and corrupted. To even suggest that the demonstration of love, which is a dynamic creative energy inspiring all that is good, might be a solution to conflict, a requirement and facilitator of peace, is to be dismissed as a deluded dreamer. As, then, is Christ, whilst still being worshipped (something He never wanted or asked for incidentally), ditto the Buddha, the Ancient Rishis of India and others. It matters not it seems what the source of such wise advice and guidance is: no matter how enlightened, humanity ignores and laughs at it; labels the speaker as naive, someone ‘not living in the real world’.
But, in order to live peacefully together, love and the qualities of goodness that flow from it are essential. Not romantic love, weak idealism or religious rhetoric, but love as a living force animating our actions, influencing the design of socio-economic-political systems and institutions, inspiring social justice; love shaping values and behavior and purifying, quietening thought, unifying communities and peoples, allowing peace to naturally come about.
Although there are (decent) people living ‘good’ wholesome lives in every corner of the globe, this common-sense image, which I’m guessing all would applaud and many long for, is a long way from the current world in which we live, a utopian fantasy almost. Competition, nationalism and selfishness dominate world affairs and many personal relationships, and form the structure of the socio-economic Ideology of Greed and Division; conformity, noise and intolerance abound; short-term pleasure sold in place of lasting happiness.
These are the methodologies and values underpinning an approach to life that has poisoned the planet, created societies of unhealthy men and women and fed an atmosphere of conflict and violence. It is an ugly cynical way of living based on false conclusions and ignorance that has denied all wonder and mystery while strengthening reductive self-centred constructs (rooted in a belief in separation) about who and what we are. It is an approach to life that, if we are to save the planet and create peaceful societies made up of contented, healthy men and women, indeed if we are to survive at all, must be rejected totally.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine began with a rather small force of some 150.000+ men against a much larger (including reservist and territorial forces) Ukrainian force of some 400.000. The Russian force used maneuver warfare to fix the larger Ukrainian forces into place. It attacked on a large front and threatened major population concentrations, i.e. cities.
The Russian operations started with the destruction of the Ukrainian command and control network. Over the last four weeks the Ukrainian navy, its airforce, its radars and air defenses and a huge number of its armored vehicles were destroyed. Throughout the last week fuel depots all over the Ukraine were attacked and destroyed over night. Ukraine’s large ammunition depots are gone. Military production and repair facilities have likewise been destroyed.
On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia welcomed Ukraine’s written proposals on a potential peace deal but cautioned that there is still a long way to go to end the fighting.
Peskov said that he hasn’t seen anything too promising and that there are no signs of a breakthrough between the two sides. Ukraine put forward its proposal during talks in Turkey on Tuesday.
The Ukrainian proposal includes a pledge not to join NATO, but Kyiv wants security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5, which outlines the alliance’s mutual defense agreement. Ukraine wants these guarantees from several NATO countries, including the US, which is likely a non-starter for Russia.
War crimes, according to the Guardian, can be summarised as “wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering, extensive destruction, and appropriation of property, as well as intentionally targeting civilian population or objects”. While crimes against humanity can be summarised as including murder “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”.
One would think that both definitions apply to the atrocities committed over past weeks by the Russian military against the Ukrainian population. And that prosecutions should follow.
However, the chances of Russian president Vladimir Putin being tried for war crimes by, say, the International Criminal Court (ICC) look slim, if not impossible. That’s partly because of the way the ICC works. But it may also have something to do with the fact that several other world leaders have committed war crimes with impunity.
ICC commences investigations
Nevertheless, the ICC is proceeding to put a case together.
On 28 February, it was reported that president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had awarded the ICC jurisdiction for Ukraine territory. Since then, a total of 38 countries have formally requested the ICC to commence investigations into what’s happening in Ukraine.
On 2 March, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan QC announced those investigations had commenced.
my Office has established a dedicated portal through which any person that may hold information relevant to the Ukraine situation can contact our investigators. I encourage all those with relevant information to come forward and contact our Team through this platform
Khan added:
that if attacks are intentionally directed against the civilian population: that is a crime. If attacks are intentionally directed against civilian objects: that is a crime. I strongly urge parties to the conflict to avoid the use of heavy explosive weapons in populated areas.
But there’s a problem
The BBCpointed out that the ICC “investigates and prosecutes individual war criminals who are not before the courts of individual states”. If Putin is to be charged with instigating war crimes – assuming he remains in power – he can only be arrested if he travels to a country that’s an ICC member.
Furthermore, gathering evidence is not that simple, as retired West Point law professor Gary Solis explained to Slate:
Films and photographs of hospitals getting bombed or civilians being killed on humanitarian corridors—that’s not evidence. It’s evidence that war crimes were committed. But it doesn’t pin the charge on anybody, except maybe the field commander of the unit that dropped that bomb. To get the guys on top—and I’m speaking as an international lawyer—you need memos, orders, records of conversations. Did Putin write anything down? Would one of his confidants turn on him?
Alternatively, instead of prosecuting Putin with war crimes, the ICC could always charge a country – Russia – for “a crime of an unjustified invasion or conflict”. However, as Russia is not an ICC member, that course of action is not practical either.
A third route could see a role for the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It rules on disputes between countries but does not prosecute individuals. Should the ICJ rule against Russia, the UN security council can enforce that ruling. Though that won’t work as Russia is a member of that council and will simply veto any sanctions imposed.
A fourth route
There is, however, another legal route that could be pursued. This is known as universal jurisdiction, which is:
the principle that every country has an interest in bringing to justice the perpetrators of grave crimes, no matter where the crime was committed, and regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators or their victims.
One example of the application of universal jurisdiction is:
when Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, was arrested for “crimes against humanity” while in a hospital in Britain. The warrant to arrest him had been signed by a judge in Spain. Pinochet was held prisoner in Britain for 503 days, and a British judge ruled that he could be extradited to Spain for trial—until British Home Secretary Jack Straw, citing Pinochet’s poor health, let him go home.
Universal jurisdiction also enabled Israel to prosecute Aldolf Eichmann for his part in the Holocaust.
The legal basis for universal jurisdiction, explains Human Rights Watch, lies with:
the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1973 Convention against Apartheid, the 1984 Convention against Torture, and the 2006 Convention against Enforced Disappearance (not yet in force).
The Charter of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, the Statutes of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court all confirm that courts can exercise jurisdiction over the crimes (as grave crimes under international law) regardless of the official capacity of the accused at the time of the crime or later, be it a head of state, head or member of government, member of parliament or other elected or governmental capacity.
In short, in the unlikely possibility that Putin finds himself in a country that recognises universal jurisdiction, he could be arrested and face trial. Though what would happen next would depend on the politics of the Kremlin and the Russian people.
War crimes – a case study
Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in Ukraine continue, with evidence of great destruction in the city of Mariupol. This drone footage gives some idea of the devastation in that city:
Indeed, on arriving in Athens from Ukraine, on Sunday 20 March Greek general consul Manolis Androulakis told reporters: “What I saw in Mariupol, I hope no one will ever see”. He added that the city now ranks with similarly destroyed cities, such as “Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny”.
As for Russia’s apparent bombing of Mariupol’s theatre, it’s now reported that at least 300 people are feared dead as a consequence of that attack. That’s despite the word ‘children’ that was written in the Russian language in huge letters on the outside of the building.
More devastation
This ‘before and after’ – not just for Mariupol – provides a visual montage of the degree of destruction taking place:
Thriving cities reduced to rubble, homes obliterated, hospitals targeted and flattened.
On 4 March, it was reported that Russian forces attacked Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant:
it is almost certain that this operation violated Article 56 [of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977].
As of 18 March, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded65 confirmed cases and one probable case of attacks by Russia on Ukrainian health facilities. And Amnesty International has reported that so-called “dumb bombs” – unguided aerial bombs – were used against the city of Chernihiv, leaving 47 civilians dead.
Human Rights Watch has claimed that on 28 February Russia deployed 9M55K Smerch cluster munition rockets against residential areas of Kharkiv. Such cluster munitions:
open in the air and disperse dozens, or even hundreds, of small submunitions over a large area. They often fail to explode on initial impact, leaving unexploded submunition duds that act like landmines if they are touched.
There are also claims that cluster bombs were used on 7, 11 and 13 March against the city of Mykolaiv.
It’s claimed too by the UK Ministry of Defence that thermobaric bombs have been deployed by Russia. According to the BBC, if a country uses them:
to target civilian populations in built-up areas, schools or hospitals, then it could be convicted of a war crime under the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.
Russia has used such weapons before in Chechnya. They’ve also been used by the US against Al-Qaeda and Daesh (Isis/Isil).
Real justice
The Russian military has ruthlessly targeted civilians on a massive scale in their invasion of Ukraine. And the atrocities committed under Putin’s leadership on the people of Ukraine are undoubtedly war crimes.
In an ideal world Putin should be prosecuted for those crimes. But that may prove problematic given that some of the world leaders who accuse Putin of committing war crimes are themselves leaders of countries that have blood on their hands.
For example, there were multiple allegations of torture by US and UK forces in Iraq. And there were more allegations of torture carried out by US forces in Afghanistan. More recently there’s the UK’s role in the provision of arms to Saudi Arabia, that ensures the war waged in Yemen persists to this day.
But one can only hope that at some point in time real justice is metered out to Putin by the Russian people themselves, as well as other war criminals that have escaped justice.
On 16 March 2022, as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered its second month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned his people that ‘uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing’. A week later, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a brief study on the immense shock that will be felt around the world due to this war. ‘Soaring food and fuel prices will have an immediate effect on the most vulnerable in developing countries, resulting in hunger and hardship for households who spend the highest share of their income on food’, the study noted. South of Kazakhstan, in the Kyrgyz Republic, the poorest households already spent 65% of their income on food before these current price hikes; as food inflation rises by 10%, the impact will be catastrophic for the Kyrgyz people.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, immense pressure was brought to bear on the countries of the Global South to disband their food security and food sovereignty projects and to integrate their production and consumption of food into global markets. In his recent address, President Tokayev announced that the Kazakh government was now going ‘to oversee the production of agricultural equipment, fertilisers, fuel, and the stocks of seeds’.
While 22% of world cereal production crosses international borders, Big Agriculture controls both the inputs for cereal production and the prices of cereals. Four corporations – Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, and Limagrain – control more than half of the world’s seed production, while four other corporations – Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus – effectively set global food prices.
Very few countries in the world have been able to develop a food system that is immune from the turbulence of market liberalisation (read our Red Alert no. 12 for more). Modest domestic policies – such as banning food exports during a drought or keeping high import duties to protect farmers’ livelihoods – are now punished by the World Bank and other multilateral agencies. President Tokayev’s statement indicates an appetite in the poorer nations to rethink the liberalisation of the food markets.
In July 2020, a statement titled ‘A New Cold War against China is against the interests of humanity’, was widely circulated and endorsed. No Cold War, the campaign which drafted the statement, has held a number of important webinars over the past two years to amplify discussions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe on the impact of this US-imposed pressure campaign against China, and on the racism that this has inflamed in the West. Part of No Cold War’s analysis is that these manoeuvres by the United States are intended to discourage other countries from commercially engaging with China, and also Russia. US firms find themselves at a disadvantage compared to Chinese firms, and Russian energy exports to Europe are vastly cheaper than US exports. The US has responded to this economic competition, not on a purely commercial basis, but treated it as a threat to its national security and to world peace. Instead of dividing the world in this manner, No Cold War calls for relations between the United States and China and Russia based on ‘mutual dialogue’ centred ‘on the common issues which unite humanity’.
During this war on Ukraine, No Cold War has launched a new publication called Briefings, which will be factual texts on matters of global concern. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will share these periodic briefings in this newsletter (you can also find them here). For its first issue, No Cold War has produced the following Briefing, World hunger and the war in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine, along with sanctions imposed by the United States and Western countries against Russia, have caused global food, fertiliser, and fuel prices to ‘skyrocket’ and endanger the world food supply. This conflict is exacerbating the existing crisis of global hunger and imperils the living standards and well-being of billions of people – particularly in the Global South.
War in the ‘breadbasket of the world’
Russia and Ukraine together produce nearly 30 percent of the world’s wheat and roughly 12 percent of its total calories. Over the past five years, they have accounted for 17 percent of the world’s corn, 32 percent of barley (a critical source of animal feed), and 75 percent of sunflower oil (an important cooking oil in many countries). On top of this, Russia is the world’s largest supplier of fertilisers and natural gas (a key component in fertiliser production), accounting for 15 percent of the global trade of nitrogenous fertilisers, 17 percent of potash fertilisers, 20 percent of natural gas.
The current crisis threatens to cause a global food shortage. The United Nations has estimated that up to 30 percent of Ukrainian farmland could become a warzone; in addition, due to sanctions, Russia has been severely restricted in exporting food, fertiliser, and fuel. This has caused global prices to surge. Since the war began, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent, and some fertilisers by 40 percent.
The Global South is ‘getting pummelled’
The painful impact of this shock is being felt by people around the world, but most sharply in the Global South. ‘In a word, developing countries are getting pummelled,’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently remarked.
According to the UN, 45 African and ‘least developed’ countries import at least a third of their wheat from these two Russia or Ukraine – 18 of those countries import at least 50 percent. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, obtains over 70 percent of its imports from Russia and Ukraine, while Turkey obtains over 80 percent.
Countries of the Global South are already facing severe price shocks and shortages, impacting both consumption and production. In Kenya, bread prices have risen by 40 percent in some areas and, in Lebanon, by 70 percent. Meanwhile, Brazil, the world’s largest producer of soybeans, is facing a major reduction in crop yields. The country purchases close to half of its potash fertiliser from Russia and neighbouring Belarus (which is also being sanctioned) – it has only a three month supply remaining with farmers being instructed to ration.
‘The United States has sanctioned the whole world’
The situation is being directly exacerbated by U.S. and Western sanctions against Russia. Although sanctions have been justified as targeting Russian government leaders and elites, such measures hurt all people, particularly vulnerable groups, and are having global ramifications.
Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, director of an Afghan import company, made the following diagnosis: ‘The United States thinks it has only sanctioned Russia and its banks. But the United States has sanctioned the whole world.’
‘A catastrophe on top of a catastrophe’
The war in Ukraine and associated sanctions are exacerbating the already existing crisis of world hunger. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation found that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020.’ In recent years, the situation has worsened as food prices have risen due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and related disruptions.
‘Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,’ said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the UN World Food Program. ‘There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.’
‘If you think we’ve got hell on earth now, you just get ready,’ Beasley warned.
Regardless of the different opinions on Ukraine, it is clear that billions of people around the world will suffer from this hunger crisis until the war and sanctions come to an end.
Stanisław Osostowicz (Poland), Antifascist Demonstration (1932-1933).
In 1962, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote ‘Starvation Camp Near Jasło’. Located in south-east Poland not far from the Ukraine-Poland border, Jasło was the site of a Nazi death camp, where thousands of people – mainly Jews – were caged and left to die of starvation. How does one write about such immense violence? Szymborska offered the following reflection:
Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper; they weren’t given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It’s a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don’t know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the ranks …
Each death is an abomination; including the 300 children who die of malnutrition every hour of every day.
Amid overwhelming evidence that Russian forces have committed war crimes during an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, Ukrainian officials were confronted this week with video that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting captive Russian soldiers in the legs.
Although Ukraine’s senior military leader and its domestic intelligence agency both insisted that the video posted on social networks on Sunday was “a fake” produced by Russia, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised that the government would investigate and punish those responsible if the incident did take place.
On Monday, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, Yuri Butusov, published graphic video showing the charred remains of three men he identified as Russian soldiers killed as Ukrainian forces recaptured the town of Malaya Rohan, outside Kharkiv, over the weekend.
Although Butusov made no mention of the video of the alleged war crime, a visual analysis of his footage shows that it was clearly filmed in the same location as the video of the prisoners being shot, some time after that incident.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES. Multiple visual clues reveal that video posted online Sunday, which appeared to show the abuse of captive Russian soldiers, was recorded at the same location as a second clip posted online Monday, said to show the burned bodies of three Russian soldiers.
I am inclined to think that this video was shot from about 49.939219, 36.477301 If so, it took place in Malaya Rohan, Kharkiv, which was reportedly recently liberated. I think the shelter to the south was erected more recently than imagery I have seen. Thoughts? https://t.co/J9MTeROua0pic.twitter.com/5znAv3BepY
Multiple visual clues in Butusov’s video show that he discovered the burned bodies in precisely the same part of the dairy plant’s courtyard where, in the prior video, at least eight captives were filmed bleeding on the pavement, several with their hands bound behind their backs and bags over their heads.
According to Butusov, the editor of the Ukrainian news site Censor.net, he arrived in Malaya Rohan “a few hours after the battle” there. By that time, his footage shows, several of the buildings at the dairy factory had been partially destroyed by explosions or fire. Those same structures had not yet been damaged when the video showing the prisoners being shot was recorded.
The exact chronology of the battle for Malaya Rohan remains unclear. One Ukrainian commander, Sergey Melnik, claimed in a Facebook post on Friday that his forces had taken the village back that day. Other military sources told Agence France-Presse journalists who reported from the village on Monday that the effort to root out Russian soldiers had continued through the weekend.
Nothing in Butusov’s video proves how the men died, and the fact that their bodies were badly burned makes it impossible to say from the visual evidence if they were among the captive Russian soldiers seen in the earlier video. But the fact that these bodies were discovered in the same location where the video of the apparent war crime was recorded adds to the pressure on Ukraine’s civilian government to say whether its investigation has concluded that the incident did take place, and, if so, whether some of the captive Russian soldiers seen on video being tortured were also killed.
A screenshot from video said to show the abuse of Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian soldiers.
How Ukraine deals with this video, which, if verified, would be evidence that Ukrainian forces in Malaya Rohan committed war crimes, could be a decisive moment for the country’s civilian leadership. Internal divisions between civilian leaders and career military and intelligence officers appeared almost immediately after the video generated a wave of anger on Russian social media channels.
On Sunday, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Lt. Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, wrote on Facebook: “the enemy films and distributes staged videos showing inhuman treatment by alleged ‘Ukrainian soldiers’ of ‘Russian prisoners.’”
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U., a successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., insisted that video of the Ukrainian military “allegedly abusing prisoners” had been fabricated by their counterparts in Russian intelligence. “Russian fakes are similar to Russian TV series: cheap vulgar predictable and with poor acting,” the S.B.U. said in a statement. “Staged videos appear on anonymous Telegram channels: either about alleged ill-treatment of captured invaders or about injuring and even murdering the occupiers.”
“Such accusations are outright lies,” said the agency.
But in an interview on Sunday posted on his YouTube channel, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Zelenskyy, told the Russian opposition figure Mark Feygin: “The government is taking this very seriously, and there will be an immediate investigation. We are a European army, and we do not mistreat our prisoners. If this turns out to be real, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior.”
“I would like to remind all our military civilian and defense forces once again that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” Arestovych said in a televised briefing on Sunday. “I remind everyone that we are the European army of a European country. We treat prisoners according to the Geneva Convention, no matter what your personal emotional motives.”
“This is the right thing for any government to do: if allegations of war crimes emerge, at once investigate the incident and remind your forces of the laws of war,” Andrew Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch observed. “Let me know when the Kremlin says it’s taking the many allegations of war crimes by Russian forces ‘very seriously’ and announces investigations into them.”
Another adviser to the Ukrainian president, the former investigative journalist Sergii Leshchenko, has been providing a daily briefing to the public debunking “Russian propaganda fakes” that spread online. Given the statements from Ukraine’s intelligence service and the country’s senior military commander, it seems worth noting that Leshchenko has not claimed, during his televised briefings this week, that the video of the alleged war crimes in Malaya Rohan is one of those fakes.
Now that four days have passed since the video recorded in Malaya Rohan first appeared, it seems likely that the government should already have a sense of whether or not the incident took place, and yet there has been no public statement on the results of the inquiry.
Spokespersons for Ukraine’s defense ministry, the general staff of its armed forces and the president’s chief of staff all declined to comment on the progress of the investigation into the video or to say if Sergey Melnik, the commander who announced the liberation of Malaya Rohan on Friday, had been questioned. Melnik is the head of the Military Law Institute of the Yaroslav the Wise National Law University in Kharkiv.
If a genuine investigation has been conducted, and the country wants to abandon the post-Soviet path chosen by Russia — of constantly lying about transgressions by its armed forces and intelligence services — this seems like a decisive moment for Ukraine’s elected civilian government.
Meanwhile, each day brings more evidence that Russian forces have committed war crimes during the unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine launched by President Vladimir Putin last month.
One of the journalists asked me what was the worst thing I saw in this war. Children's shoes scattered from the explosion in this kindergarten. pic.twitter.com/EmfoPaf1gk
Two images showing the area around Mariupol Theatre taken by @planet on March 21st (left) and March 30th (right). The level of destruction is extremely clear. It's hard to find a building that isn't damaged or completely destroyed. pic.twitter.com/FHGSS5o1PO
Given the far greater amount of evidence that Russian forces have been guilty of war crimes, and the understandable fear of amplifying video that appeared on social media without a clear source, many news outlets have been wary of reporting on the video that appears to show Russian soldiers being abused. For instance, the last line of a CNN report on Ukraine’s pledge to investigate the video was: “CNN is not showing the video.”
Julian Röpcke, a senior journalist at the German news organization Bild who has been analyzing social media video of Russian abuses, told viewers on Monday that, “unfortunately,” he also had to show them video of the alleged war crimes at Malaya Rohan. Nonetheless, Röpcke, whose current pinned tweet is a selfie in front of Ukraine’s flag with the phrase “Glory to Ukraine” in Ukrainian, scolded followers who refused to accept that the video appeared to be genuine.
While there appears to be no definitive proof in the video of the prisoners being tortured that it is real, there is also no evidence that it is fake either. Meanwhile, a supposedly leaked document that has circulated widely on social networks, allegedly showing that a senior Russian general had instructed Russian soldiers to fabricate evidence of Ukrainian war crimes, appears to be a forgery.
No doubt appalled by the media focus on the video of the alleged war crime by Ukrainian forces, many supporters of the country were quick to seize on obviously fabricated evidence that the viral clip was fake. One obviously false claim shared by Ukrainian activists was that some of the video of Russian soldiers being kneecapped was “a rehearsal” — with the supposed proof being a soundtrack from a film that was clumsily added to the clip.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Stirling who has tracked the impact of Russian disinformation in Syria, responded to that viral clip with the observation: “Ukraine is facing a war of aggression, so it’s a moral imperative to stand in solidarity with its people and defenders. But we can do this without turning into a mirror image of the Kremlin’s apologists.”
“Beyond the important moral question of whether someone deserves the abuse or not, there are also tactical and strategic questions to consider. Tactically, such abuse is bad, because it exposes your own comrades who get captured to similar abuse,” Idrees Ahmad added. “Strategically its a bad because it can create hesitancy among western states who are currently arming Ukraine. It happened in Syria. It can happen in Ukraine.”
Using the pretext of Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky banned several political parties and undermined labour and trade union rights, reports Federico Fuentes.
While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.
In a bizarre turn of events Tuesday, Russian and Ukrainian delegations taking part in peace negotiations in Istanbul appeared to have reached a breakthrough. But following a tepid response by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, contemptuously dismissing Russian peace overtures as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention,” head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky walked back the earlier optimistic remarks, saying “a gradual military de-escalation does not necessarily mean an immediate ceasefire.”
Hours later on Tuesday evening, in what appeared to be either a coincidence or a sabotage attempt, an ammunition depot across the Ukraine border in Russia “mysteriously exploded,” sending thick plumes of smoke into air, visible in videos posted on social media, injuring four Russian soldiers, and effectively pouring cold water over the optimism generated by the likelihood of the success of the peace process between Ukraine and Russia.
A Ukrainian missile appeared to have hit a temporary Russian military encampment outside Belgorod, in Russia’s village of Krasny Oktyabr, about 40 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, said the Russian state-run news agency Tass. The strike would only be the second that struck a military target inside Russia and wounded soldiers. Last week, Tass reported two men were hurt when a shell from Ukraine exploded in the same area.
The generous Russian offer scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, isn’t the first time the Kremlin extended the hand of friendship to Kyiv. Last week, Russia made a similar peace gesture that wasn’t even dignified with a response by Western policymakers and went almost unheeded in the establishment-controlled media.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the offer to scale back military operations was a confidence building step for the ongoing negotiations with Ukrainian officials in Istanbul. “In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister leading the Russian peace delegation told reporters.
Ukrainian negotiators said that under their proposals, Kyiv would agree not to join alliances or host bases of foreign troops, but would have security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5, the collective defense clause of the transatlantic NATO military alliance.
The proposals, which would require a referendum in Ukraine, mentioned a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014. The fate of the southeastern Donbas region, which Russia demands Ukraine cede to separatists, would be discussed by the Ukrainian and Russian leaders.
Kyiv’s proposals also included one that Moscow would not oppose Ukraine joining the European Union, Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said. Russia has previously opposed Ukrainian membership of the EU and especially of the NATO military alliance. Medinsky said Russia’s delegation would study and present the proposals to President Vladimir Putin.
Welcoming the Russian peace initiative, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday the signals from peace talks with Russia “could be called positive” but added that Ukraine would not slacken its defensive efforts until it noticed “concrete actions.”
It would be prudent, however, of the Ukrainian leader to get rid of the duplicitous NATO interlocutors and try reaching a political settlement to the conflict with Russia bilaterally if he wishes peace and stability to prevail in the embattled country, because opportunistic NATO leaders have their own axe to grind by taking advantage of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine.
The Biden administration doesn’t seem particularly enamored of Russian peace proposal that could bring much-needed relief to the war-ravaged country because, as the seasoned American politician and peace activist Ron Paul aptly observed, Washington’s policy appeared to be “fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian.”
While on a whirlwind Middle East trip in Morocco, Antony Blinken, the charismatic secretary of state idolized by diplomatic community for wavy salt-and-pepper hair and suave Parisian etiquette who has childishly refused to diplomatically engage with his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov since the start of the conflict on February 24, derisively mocked the diplomatic breakthrough achieved in Istanbul as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention.”
Paranoidly echoing the secretary of state’s imagined apprehensions, the Pentagon said Russia had started moving very small numbers of troops away from positions around Kyiv, describing the move as more of a “repositioning” than a withdrawal. “We all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing. “It does not mean that the threat to Kyiv is over.”
Not to be left behind in the collective Russophobic hysteria inflicting Western policymaking circles and the mainstream media alike, Britain’s defense ministry said Moscow was being “forced to pull out troops” from the vicinity of Kyiv to Russia and Belarus, to resupply and reorganize after “taking heavy losses,” adding that Russia was likely to compensate for its reduced ground maneuver capability through “mass artillery and missile strikes.”
“The combat potential of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been significantly reduced, which allows us to focus our main attention and efforts on achieving the main goal—the liberation of Donbas,” Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proudly boasted Tuesday. He added that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.
It’s worth recalling that the Russian special military operation, dubbed “Operation Z” by Vladimir Putin, wasn’t a full-scale war. It was a calculated military incursion having well-defined security objectives: the liberation of Donbas and denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.
Those military objectives have already been achieved in large measure, as not only the Russian-majority Donbas including Kherson and Mariupol have been liberated but the battles are ongoing in the adjacent areas in the northeast, Kharkiv and Sumy, that will hopefully fall soon.
Sergey Shoigu has already proved through facts and figures how the country has been demilitarized with the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces significantly reduced. As for denazification, Donbas was the hub of neo-Nazi Azov, Right Sector, Dnipro 1 and 2, Aidar and myriad of other ultra-nationalist militias funded, armed and trained by the CIA since the 2014 Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia. With the liberation of Donbas and deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces, neo-Nazi militias wouldn’t find a foothold, at least, in east Ukraine bordering Russia’s vulnerable western flank.
As for the “40-mile-long” convoy of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belorussia in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital, that was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s cunning military strategists to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine, where real battles for territory were actually fought, and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.
Except in the early days of the war when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to reduce the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.
What further lends credence to the indisputable fact that the Russian assault on Kyiv was meant simply as a show of force rather than actual military objective to occupy the capital is the factor that Belarusian troops didn’t take part in the battle despite staging military exercises alongside Russian forces before the invasion and despite the fact that Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko is a dependable ally of the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin.
Although Russia lost the lives of 1,351 soldiers during the war, as candidly admitted by the Russian defense ministry, the myth of countless charred Russian tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces littering the streets of Ukraine’s towns and cities is a downright fabrication peddled by the corporate media as a psychological warfare tactic to insidiously portray the losing side in the conflict as a winning side.
Besides the handful neo-Nazi militias and foreign mercenaries fighting pitched battles against Russian forces in Donbas, the much-touted “resistance” was nowhere to be found in the rest of Ukraine. As soon as the war began last month, the “valiant resistance” fled across the border to the safety of Poland, Romania and neighboring countries.
The opportunistic militant leaders of the virtually nonexistent “resistance” are reaping windfalls by reportedly selling caches of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions provided by NATO countries in the thriving arms markets of Eastern Europe and buying opulent mansions in southern France and Italy.
In the 2001 census, nearly a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.
Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian together belong to the East Slavic family of languages and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. Thus, Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians are one nation and one country whose shared history and culture goes all the way back to the golden period of the 10th century Kyivan Rus’.
In addition, Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history can be traced back to the Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself Pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
In comparison, what do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.
While addressing a meeting on socioeconomic support for the constituent entities of the Russian Federation on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly elucidated the salient reasons for pre-emptively mounting a military intervention in Ukraine in order to forestall NATO’s encroachment upon Russia’s security interests. Here are a few trenchant excerpts from the lucid and eloquent speech:
We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions.
It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native Russian language, and to bring up their children as they want.
Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it … Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time … Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.
Just like in the 1990s and the early 2000s, they want to try again to finish us off, to reduce us to nothing by turning us into a weak and dependent country, destroying our territorial integrity and dismembering Russia as they see fit. The failed then and they will fail this time … Yes, of course, they will back the so-called fifth column, national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and live not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Such portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda.
The implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense. If one believes that Putin is a “madman,” the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation.
If Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Yet another implication is that if Putin’s defects made Russia’s invasion unavoidable, then regime change may be necessary to resolve the conflict.
‘Increasingly insane’
Western media have for years been debating whether Putin is insane (Extra!, 5/14; FAIR.org, 2/12/15) or merely pretending to be—speculation that has only intensified in recent weeks:
Guardian (2/24/22): “Decision to Invade Ukraine Raises Questions Over Putin’s ‘Sense of Reality’”
Daily Beast (3/1/22): “The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane”
Vanity Fair (3/1/22): “Report: An ‘Increasingly Frustrated’ Putin, a Madman With Nuclear Weapons, Is Lashing Out at His Inner Circle”
New York (3/4/22): “Putin’s War Looks Increasingly Insane”
Guardian (2/24/22) : “A member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping told France Inter radio…he thought Putin had gone mad.”
The Guardian report (2/24/22) cited concerns raised in European official circles about Putin’s mental state:
They worry about a 69-year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.
Even when other media analysts argued that Putin’s alleged mental illness was merely a ruse to wrest concessions from the west, this was not presented as a rationale for negotiating with him, but rather as a reason to reject de-escalation and diplomacy. Forbes (3/1/22) claimed that although Putin is “obviously capable of massive errors in judgment,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that “he’s lost his marbles,” as Putin has only “gotten this far by being calculating and cunning.” Forbes‘ Michael Krepon went on to explain that the “mad man theory only works when the threatener is convincingly mad,” and that Western countries should proceed to call Putin’s bluff: “Help Ukrainians with military, economic and humanitarian assistance,” he urged, rather than pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Russia.
‘Detached from reality’
Daily Beast (3/1/22): There is a lot of talk in the West about Russian President Vladimir Putin being mentally unhinged.”
In the Daily Beast (3/1/22), Amy Knight, a historian of Russia and the USSR, displayed a remarkable ability to read Putin’s mind, discerning the real motivations of someone she describes as possibly “detached from reality.” She attributed Putin’s decision to invade to a feeling of insecurity over his “hold on power,” because he “knows that he was not democratically elected to the presidency in 2018, or even in 2012, because serious contenders were barred from participating.”
This alleged feeling of “insecurity” has apparently driven Putin to hate “democratic states on his country’s border,” because he doesn’t “want his people to get ideas.” Knight claimed that all Putin’s rhetoric about “the West destroying Russian values and NATO threatening Russia with nuclear weapons” merely “camouflages his intense fear of democratic aspirations in his own country.” Strangely, although Knight speculates about Putin’s possible insanity, she also provides largely rational explanations for Putin’s actions, because if a leader is afraid they weren’t legitimately elected, they might opt to launch a war to generate a “rally ’round the flag” effect, as George W. Bush did. This undermines the suggestion that Putin is an irrational actor.
Knight suggested that Putin was more dangerous than Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev or Joseph Stalin, or even Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Khrushchev, she wrote, was someone who wasn’t “consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials,” and “had to consider the views of fellow Politburo members” instead of making key decisions on his own, like Putin allegedly does.
One of Khrushchev’s decisions, jointly made or otherwise, was launching the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which kept that country in the Warsaw Pact at the cost of several thousand lives. That invasion does not seem obviously different in kind from Putin’s attempt to keep Ukraine from leaving what Russia considers to be its sphere of influence.
‘Reason is not going to work’
Other Western media headlines offered quite specific, though varying, evaluations of Putin’s mental state from a distance. (This sometimes also happens with domestic figures like former President Donald Trump.) A few instances:
Independent (2/1/15): “President Putin Is a Dangerous Psychopath—Reason Is Not Going to Work With Him”
USA Today (2/4/15): “Pentagon 2008 Study Claims Putin Has Asperger’s Syndrome”
Sun (2/28/22): “Vladimir Putin Is Egocentric, Narcissistic & Exhibits Key Traits of a Psychopath”
Fox News (3/2/22): “Russian President Vladimir Putin Has Features of a Psychopath: Expert”
These diagnoses from afar have been going on for a long time. In 2014, psychotherapist Joseph Burgo (Atlantic, 4/15/14) argued that “Putin may or may not be a clinical narcissist,” because it’s “impossible actually to diagnose the man at a distance.” Nevertheless, Burgo encouraged the US foreign policy establishment to assume he is a narcissist, in order to help “mitigate risk in the ways it deals with him.”
USA Today (2/4/15) quoted a Pentagon report: “Project neurologists confirm this research project’s earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex.”
In 2015, USA Today (2/4/15) reported on a 2008 study from a Pentagon think tank that theorized that Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, an “autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions.” It speculated that Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy,” although the report acknowledged that it couldn’t prove the theory because they weren’t able to conduct a brain scan on the Russian president.
The 2008 study was based on “movement pattern analysis,” essentially watching videos of Putin’s body movements to gain clues on how he makes decisions and reacts to events. Further reporting on the study (Guardian, 2/5/15) noted that the authors don’t claim to make a diagnosis, because that would be impossible based on so little evidence. The work was primarily inspired by Brenda Connors, a former State Department official, professional dancer and “movement patterns analysis” expert at the US Naval War College.
Psychologist Pete Etchells (Guardian, 2/7/15) mocked the Pentagon study because the methodology of using movement pattern analysis to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome is “so generic as to be meaningless,” and that trying to “figure out someone’s state of mind based solely on how they move is a hugely subjective endeavor, easily prone to misinterpretation.” He also noted that it is not possible to diagnose whether people are on the autism spectrum with brain scans.
Some writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as “Putinology”—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives. It is a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99).
‘Violation of ethical rules’
Some contemporary attempts to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by psychoanalyzing Putin make sweeping judgments about his mental state, even while insisting that a professional diagnosis would be necessary to confirm their speculative perceptions of him.
Fox News‘ expert (3/2/22) is not violating ethical rules because when he refers to Putin as a “psychopath,” he’s not “diagnos[ing] a public figure who he has not personally examined,” but rather “assess[ing] Putin’s actions in the framework of a personality type.”
Fox News (3/2/22; reposted by Yahoo!, 3/2/22) cited forensic psychiatrist Dr. Ziv Cohen, who averred it would be a “violation of his profession’s ethical rules to diagnose a public figure he has not personally examined.” He went on to seemingly violate those ethics by opining that diplomatic negotiations with a “psychopath” like Putin were pointless:
“He’s not crazy,” Cohen said. “He’s charming, calculated and manipulative. With psychopaths, you cannot develop a common understanding. You cannot have agreements with them. They really only respond to superior power, to a credible threat of force.”
Fox actually cited one other source, Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer for Russia, who noted that “other psychiatrists have evaluated Putin’s mental stability and concluded he is a typical authoritarian with no anomalies,” and that Putin’s actions “reflect Russian cultural norms and standards of behavior.” Koffler argued that the comparisons being made between Putin and figures like Stalin and Hitler are exaggerated, yet Fox only included Dr. Cohen’s pathologized opinion in its headline: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has Features of a Psychopath: Expert.”
Psychologist Emma Kenny claimed for the British tabloid Sun (2/26/22) that although she’s “unable to bring him to the consulting room for assessment,” she nevertheless feels comfortable making declarations like:
Putin continues to manufacture an “alpha male” persona. He is incredibly egocentric, and has a confidence and arrogance he does not try to hide…. Emotions such as guilt and shame do not seem to register with him—another key example of a potentially psychopathic nature.
As of this writing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hasn’t attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon, likely due to the US sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainian government. This silence on both the diplomatic and military fronts risks further escalation instead of a quick negotiated end to the war.
The Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22). Recent negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul were hailed by both parties as constructive, with Russia vowing to reduce military activity around Kyiv and northern Ukraine as a result (NPR, 3/29/22). It’s important not to let US officials subvert peace negotiations between the two parties on the evidence-free grounds that negotiations with Russia are pointless.
As the U.S. says it will welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion, immigration officials say they’re preparing for a surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as it ends the Trump-era pandemic restriction Title 42 in response to humanitarian outcry. We speak with Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance about how Haitian refugees are treated, and with award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa about the Haitians she met in a migrant caravan. Jozef says President Biden’s pledge to welcome Ukrainian refugees, while necessary, is a painful display of the double standard faced by Haitian immigrants and other people of color seeking humanitarian relief in the United States. “Why is it that when it comes to people of color, Black and Brown people, we must continue to push and beg to validate our humanity?” asks Jozef. Hinojosa has been reporting on migration for her podcast series “The Moving Border” and says the Biden administration is “appeasing” anti-immigrant forces in the U.S. by continuing rejections, deportations and detentions at the southern border. “What we are seeing is … white supremacy in the context of refugees and desperate people,” says Hinojosa.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Immigration officials say they’re preparing to detain a surge of people traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek humanitarian relief. In response to pressure from human rights advocates, today theCDCis expected to end the Trump-era pandemic border restriction called Title 42 that allowed authorities to deport asylum seekers without due process or reviewing their claims. Just six months ago, the world was shocked by images of mounted Border Patrol agents chasing, grabbing, whipping Haitian asylum seekers held back at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas as they were blocked under the pretext of Title 42, under the pretext of the pandemic.
A newreportby the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and the Haitian Bridge Alliance documents the full scope of the abuses Haitians faced while they were held in a makeshift camp near the border under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. They describe being subjected to violence, racial slurs and intimidation and denied sufficient access to food, water and medical care.
This comes as the United States has just announced it will welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. When President Biden visited with Ukrainian refugees in Poland this past weekend, he was shown embracing a Ukrainian child. Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, tweeted this in response: “The amount of pain that comes with seeing this beautiful picture is unbearable. The well-deserved love, kindness, dignity, compassion, protection that is given to this little girl is never afforded to little black Haitian girls at POTUS’s doorsteps. Trump said it, Biden proved it!” Guerline wrote.
Guerline Jozef now joins us, along with award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa. They’ve both worked closely with Haitian migrants at what Maria calls the “moving border.”
We welcome you both back toDemocracy Now!Guerline Jozef, let’s begin with you and that tweet, the comparison of how Ukrainian refugees are beautifully welcomed around the world, and now in the United States, and what’s happening with Haitians and others on the U.S.-Mexico border trying to come in.
GUERLINEJOZEF:Good morning. Thank you so much, Amy, for having us and for highlighting the realities and contrast between how people are being received along borders, whether at the U.S.-Mexico border or in Ukraine.
We all saw, when it just happened, how Black people who were trying to escape Ukraine, as well, were pushed back in, not afforded protection. So, really, I want to make it clear that we stand 100% with the people of Ukraine, and we are 100% with the president and the administration for welcoming the people of Ukraine. We want to make sure that they are protected. But what we are saying is: Why is it that when it comes for people of color, Black and Brown people, we must continue to push and beg to validate our humanity?
And as I mentioned, Amy, in that post, the picture really warmed my heart to see how the president was holding that little girl, smiling. At the same time, I couldn’t pass the fact that they are really chasing and whipping and turning away little Black girls and little Black boys at the U.S.-Mexico border. So, really calling for us to welcome all people with dignity, regardless of our skin color, where we are from, because the same care and compassion and love that is afforded to this beautiful little girl must be afforded to those beautiful little kids that are also of Haitian descent or Mexican descent who are fleeing extreme conditions in their home countries.
And I can tell you today there are deportations happening to Haiti, and we are seeing continued expulsion and deportations to Haiti, a country that we all know are dealing with extreme condition, political turmoil. Yesterday, you know, the vice president — the prime minister in Haiti calling for help, because they cannot even control what they are dealing with, still dealing with the assassination of the president, the aftermath of the earthquake, the following storm, climate change, really forcing people to leave home.
So, what we are asking and what we are saying is, for our little Black girls, little Black boys, who are in search of safety, literally fleeing the same conditions that the Ukrainian people are fleeing from home — may not be a war from Russia, but a war within their own country. So we are asking for the same welcoming to be given to those who are in search of protection.
And as you mentioned from the report, we have 43 people describing the extreme cruelty and abuse that they witnessed and also were victim of. People, most of them, have been deported or expelled, and some of them were also pushed back to Haiti, including the young men we saw being grabbed by the officer in uniform, really mistreating and abusing them. And today close to 21,000 people have been deported by President Biden to Haiti.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And I’d like to bring Maria Hinojosa into the conversation. Maria, I wanted to ask you if you could talk about your experiences in reporting on the continuing — now several years of reporting on the problems at the U.S. border, but also this — not only the racial aspect of U.S. policy when it comes to asylum seekers, but there’s also a political aspect. As we know, for instance, during the 1980s, Nicaraguans were welcomed, granted asylum, while Salvadorans and Guatemalans were denied asylum by the United States, because the United States wanted to expose and condemn the Nicaraguan — the Sandinistas at the time. I’m wondering your sense of how this is playing out, both the racial aspects and the political aspects now.
MARIAHINOJOSA:So, Juan, it’s great to be with you, and Amy and Guerline, as well.
Look, Juan, it hasn’t been years that I’ve been covering this. As you, I’ve been covering this for decades. Decades. And, you know, when I think about everything that Guerline just talked about, the point is, is that this country, the United States, has a narrative, that it lives by, that says that we are an immigrant-loving country and that we love and accept refugees. And what we are saying — journalists, activists on the ground — is that that narrative is not true. And what we are seeing is, in fact — it’s ugly to say it, but — white supremacy in the context of refugees and desperate people.
So, what did I see, Juan, when I was down, in December, in Mexico and then in Colombia on the border with Panama? Juan, you know, I have reported about this, again, for decades, but I had never had the chance to be on a caravan. And when I got to the caravan — you know, the United States, the mainstream media, our colleagues, talk about the caravan as this scary, frightful thing. In fact, Donald Trump raised this whole specter of the caravan. But how many U.S. government officials, human rights officials have been with a caravan so that they can see what I saw? It is a caravan of love. It is a caravan of solidarity. It is the place, when you are traveling through Mexico, if you are Black, as increasingly the migrants and refugees are — the caravan is the only place that you will feel safe. These immigrants, migrants and refugees are the smartest people when they decide to join a caravan. The fact that the United States mainstream media and the government has chosen to portray the caravans as filled with scary, terrible people who are going to force their way onto the border, it’s not true. That’s not what they’re doing. They are exactly as the Ukrainian refugees are right now. They are desperate, and they are looking to a country that says that they will accept them.
Now, just very quickly, last night I was finally able to get in touch with Udi, who is from Nigeria. And he left me a message last night. I said, “Just bring the up to date.” He did finally make it into the United States, but he was held for four months in a detention camp. This is a young man who, when I saw him in the jungle, he was like, “I got this. We’re going to do this. I’m going to” — you know, the message he left me said, “I don’t even want to think about what I’ve been through. It has been so terrible, so horrific.” And the worst part of his travels has been being in the United States in an immigrant detention camp and the disrespect that he had to feel.
And finally, as Guerline was saying, what this government is doing — a government that says that it appreciates refugees, that has a president that will hug a little Ukrainian girl — what they did to the Familia Felix, in our story, was that they lied to them. And the U.S. government, Border Patrol andICE, told them that they were going to be taken to Miami. And when the doors of the plane opened, they had been lied to. They were sent back to Haiti, a country they haven’t lived in for over a decade.
So, the pleas that we have — you know, people say, “Oh, Maria, you’re so obsessed with migrants and refugees. That’s because you’re an immigrant yourself. You’re so Mexican.” It’s like, no, I’m obsessed with the capacity that this country has for inhumanity, and specifically watching how that inhumanity is being thrust on people who are Black and simply seeking refuge.
AMYGOODMAN:Maria, I mean, the fact that you gave a voice to people is what the mainstream media is doing right now with Ukrainians. It is a model of how all refugees should be treated. So I wanted to go to your reports for the series you did where you met this Haitian family, the family Felix, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca as they made their way north with a migrant caravan. The Felix family, as you said, fled Haiti over a decade ago after the horrendous earthquake that killed some 300,000 people. They resettled in Brazil, ’til they were once again forced to flee, this time to the U.S.-Mexico border. So, this is a clip fromLatinoUSAcalled “The Moving Border: Even Further South,” where the family tells you about their experience crossing through the Darién Gap, a notoriously dangerous, dense jungle that stretches across the Colombian and Panamanian border.
MARIAHINOJOSA:The Felixes’ children tell me they saw dead bodies in the jungle, people who looked like them. But they had to keep going. Eventually, they were detained by Panamanian police and sent back to Colombia. So they had to do the unthinkable: start all over again and cross back into the Darién jungle.
AMYGOODMAN:So, in January, over two months after you said goodbye to the Felix family in Oaxaca, you received a message from the mother asking you to call her.
MARIAHINOJOSA:Widelene and her entire family is now in Haiti. Ten years after she escaped the devastation of an earthquake that destroyed everything that she had worked for, after birthing her two youngest children in the Dominican Republic, after living in South America for years, after crossing the Darién jungle twice, she and her family made it to the U.S., but 15 days later, the Biden administration deported them back to Haiti.
AMYGOODMAN:That’s Maria Hinojosa’sreportcalled “The Moving Border.” It is so moving, Maria. And if you can talk about what the actions have meant? Because as you talk about this caravan of hope and of love, it’s the immigrant rights movement that has forced this action that’s expected to be announced today, ending Title 42, which has used the pandemic as a way to prevent so many immigrants — we certainly haven’t heard this in the case of Ukraine — but coming into the United States, or being detained once they do.
MARIAHINOJOSA:You know, Amy, what I’m hoping, but I have not so much of it — this was a perfect opportunity, in fact, for the Biden administration to completely switch everything up. This is a moment where the Biden administration could say, “We’re changing everything now, because we are going to be committed to what we say we are.” This is a moment where the Biden administration could not only get rid of Title 42, stopMPP, reorganize the Border Patrol, because we all saw with our own eyes Border Patrol officials on horses with whips on Black people. So we cannot be gaslit upon what we are living. Sadly, you know, it looks like the Biden administration is more interested in appeasing to people who are afraid of migrants and refugees and Black people. And our job as journalists is to say, “Look at the treatment of Ukrainian refugees. Look at the treatment of Honduran, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, African migrants and refugees. And there has to be one way to treat all humanity.”
So I’m feeling quite desperate. You know, Widelene and I are in touch. She’s desperate to get help. She says that now that she’s in Haiti, she’s terrified for her two young girls because it’s so unsafe. So, you know, Amy, for me, personally, as a human being, this is ripping into my heart. As a journalist, you know, I’m just like, “I’m going to keep at it. I’m not going to stop. And I’m going to demand accountability,” because what we are seeing is not just the suffering of Ukrainian refugees but people on our side of the continent. And they need love, and they need that hug from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both of them, to say, “We welcome you. We see you, and we welcome you.” And thank you, Amy and Juan, for recognizing the journalism and for allowing me to get a little emotional, because, hey, if you lose all your emotion, then what good are we as journalists?
AMYGOODMAN:Juan, we aren’t able to hear you. Juan?
JUANGONZÁLEZ:Sorry about that. Guerline, I wanted to ask you — this mistreatment not only of Haitians, but you’ve been noticing also of Cameroon migrants who are seeking asylum in the United States, I’m wondering if you could talk about that, as well.
GUERLINEJOZEF:Thank you so much, Juan. And thank you so much, Maria, for really bringing the reality of what’s happening.
Looking into the continued contrast and parallel when it comes to the different treatment of Black migrants and European migrants, frankly, we have been fighting for over two years to getTPSfor Cameroon, a country that has been into five armed conflicts, and really seeing how — the mistreatment of Cameroonians in immigration prison. We were literally forced to create the first Black Immigrants Bail Fund because we had a $50,000 bail to pay for a Cameroonian young man who fled Cameroon to come here. And we’ve been asking forTPSfor two years. And we’ve been begging President Biden and Vice President Harris, Susan Rice to please allowTPSfor Cameroon so that they can be free, at least be protected from deportation. And they have refused. And we see, within a week,TPSwas provided for Ukraine. That is why we continue to push and ask forTPSfor Cameroon. We cannot wait any longer to make sure that equity is a part of our immigration system, that people from Cameroon are receivingTPSas soon as possible. And we commend the administration for highlighting and validating the lives of Ukrainians and the lives of our Afghan community, but it is past due forTPSto be provided for Cameroon. What we say is protection delayed is protection denied. And we again see right now how we have allowed exemption for Ukrainians and Russians that are coming at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Juan and Amy, I was there last Monday really trying to highlight the damage of Title 42. And I clearly remember in 2020, April 2020, when the Haitian Bridge Alliance sent the first letters starting a campaign to ask then-President Trump to end Title 42 because it did not bear any, any water as to why they will really put Title 42 in place simply to block asylum seekers from getting protection. And today we are hoping and really pushing and demanding, as a community, as a movement, for President Biden and theCDCto put an end to Title 42 and make sure it’s never used against people at the U.S.-Mexico border, specifically Black and Brown people, because we clearly see that we are allowing Ukrainians and other Europeans to access the process at the U.S.-Mexico border, while at the same time making sure that Haitians are not afforded the same protection. So, we really are calling on President Biden to highlight the fact that, yes, President Trump then called — said that he did not want people from s—hole countries, such as Haiti and many African countries, but he will welcome people from Europe. And we see clearly that the things that President Trump said, President Biden is proving to us as a people that is the reality: We are willing and able and ready to welcome immigrants, as long as they are not Black and Brown.
AMYGOODMAN:Guerline —
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And I wanted to ask Maria this — you mentioned earlier you’re a proud Mexican American. Oh, I’m sorry, Maria has dropped. Well, let me go back to Guerline. Guerline, in terms of what you believe the Biden administration needs to do immediately, beyond what’s happening now with Title 42, what are the next steps that you think the administration needs to take?
GUERLINEJOZEF:The next step is really to look into how do we provide access and safety to all people in search of freedom. We, as a movement, service providers, advocates on the ground at the U.S.-Mexico border, we are ready and willing to help and support and work with the President Biden and the entire administration to put in place ways for people to access safety. And we want to make sure that we really look into our immigration system in an equity lens. How do we make sure that what we are seeing right now is never repeated? And we want President Biden to understand that we, on the ground, we are serving the community. We are the people in need of protection, making sure that we create a system that will be afforded to all people to be able to get that protection.
And we are also asking them to stop pushing the border. Right now we are seeing border not only at the U.S.-Mexico border, but going all the way to Panama, as Maria mentioned earlier. We are seeing, because of policies that are being put in place to completely continue to dismantle any avenues for people seeking safety. We need to change the system. And what I say is that if the system doesn’t serve the people, what is the point of it?
AMYGOODMAN:Guerline —
GUERLINEJOZEF:Our goal is to make —
AMYGOODMAN:I just wanted to thank you so much for being with us, because in our next segment, we’re going to go global with this. As you talk about Cameroonian refugees, as we hear about Nigerian refugees, the same thing, by the way, has happened to those students who were in Ukraine fleeing with all the other Ukrainians, the millions of Ukrainians, and some of them were detained in places like Poland and Estonia as their white compatriots in Ukraine were celebrated in each of these countries. Guerline Jozef, I want to thank you so much for being with us, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and Maria Hinojosa, award-winning journalist and host ofLatinoUSA. We’re going to link to Maria’sseries, “The Moving Border: Even Further South,” and of course continue to look at this issue.
Next up, we look at the conditions African migrants face trying to reach Europe, inside Libyan detention centers. Stay with us.
