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Category: Ukraine

  • Propaganda Does Not Change The War – The Ukraine Is Still Losing – Updated

    The U.S. has tried to use yesterday’s NATO and G-7 meeting to push the Europeans towards sanctioning Russian hydrocarbon exports. It also tried to attach China to Russia and to get the Europeans to sanction its biggest trading partner. Both attempts failed. There will be no additional sanctions on Russia. And while the NATO communique mentions China it only urges it to leave its neutral position. Everyone knows that that is not going to happen. The only thing NATO agreed on is the release of a new load of fresh propaganda.

    The post Propaganda Does Not Change The War – The Ukraine Is Still Losing – Updated appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Eat NATO For Breakfast: Abolish Frontex And Demilitarize Europe’s Borders

    As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, EU authorities are increasingly revealing their double standards in how they treat refugees. European countries have welcomed white Ukrainian refugees, quickly integrating them into the labor market and schools. Meanwhile, Black and Brown refugees from the Global South continue to experience Europe’s racist border regime.

    The post Eat NATO For Breakfast: Abolish Frontex And Demilitarize Europe’s Borders appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden Says Putin Cannot Win In Ukraine And “Cannot Remain In Power”


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?

    Ralph welcomes nuclear weapons expert, MIT professor Theodore Postol, to give us his insights into the possibility and the ultimate consequences of Vladimir Putin employing “tactical” nuclear weapons in the Russian conflict with Ukraine. And our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, weighs in on the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Plus, Ralph answers your questions about the latest Boeing crash and money in politics.


    This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nobel Laureates Call for End to Ukraine War and Rejection of Nuclear Weapons

    The Dalai Lama is among 16 Nobel Peace Prize laureates who jointly issued an open letter Saturday calling for the immediate end of the attack on Ukraine and an explicit vow from both Russia and NATO forces that nuclear weapons of any kind will not be used as part of this conflict or any other.

    “We reject war and nuclear weapons,” the letter declares. “We call on all our fellow citizens of the world to join us in protecting our planet, home for all of us, from those who threaten to destroy it.”

    Backed by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which won the Nobel in 1985, and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), awarded the prize for similar advocacy in 2017, the letter was also signed by ten other individual winners — including Jody Williams, Kailash Satyarthi, and Óscar Arias Sánchez — as well as the International Peace Bureau, which won the award in 1910, the American Friends Service Committee (1947), and the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (1995).

    “The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people,” the letter continues. “The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.”

    The open letter calls for an immediate ceasefire agreement and the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine. After over a month of fighting, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed, according to official figures, and millions of refugees have fled across the Ukraine border to neighboring countries while millions more have been displaced internally within the country.

    Concern over the possible use of nuclear weapons has been heightened throughout the conflict after Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 27 ordered his military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” — a move that was immediately condemned as “unacceptable and reckless” by the anti-nuclear group Global Zero.

    Since then there has been growing worry that Putin could resort to the use of so-called “tactical” nukes, lower-yield weapons that some have tried to justify as less dangerous or destructive than their larger counterparts. Such arguments, as Common Dreams reported earlier this week, have been roundly rejected.

    Anyone suggesting use of even a “small” nuclear weapon, wrote Ploughshares Fund president Joe Circionne this week has “lost touch with the reality of nuclear war. Even the smallest conceivable nuclear blast would be many times more powerful than the largest conventional bomb.”

    In addition to an end of the war and a vocal promise that nuclear weapons would not be used during the conflict in Ukraine, the open letter issued Saturday by the Nobel laureates calls for all countries of the world “to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.”

    The letter concludes, “It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.”

    The full text of the letter and the list of lead signatories — which can be endorsed by anyone on the Avaaz page — follows:

    We reject war and nuclear weapons. We call on all our fellow citizens of the world to join us in protecting our planet, home for all of us, from those who threaten to destroy it.

    The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people. The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.

    We call for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian military forces from Ukraine, and for all possible efforts at dialogue to prevent this ultimate disaster.

    We call on Russia and NATO to explicitly renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, and we call on all countries to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.

    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.

    It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.

    We reject governance through imposition and threats, and we advocate for dialogue, coexistence and justice.

    A world without nuclear weapons is necessary and possible, and together we will build it. It is urgent that we give peace a chance.

    ———————————-

    Signatories list of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates:

    His Holiness The Dalai Lama (1989)
    International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985)
    International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017)
    Juan Manuel Santos (2016)
    Kailash Satyarthi (2014)
    Leymah Gbowee (2011)
    Tawakkul Karman (2011)
    Muhammad Yunus (2006)
    David Trimble (1998)
    Jody Williams (1997)
    Jose Ramos-Horta (1996)
    Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (1995)
    Óscar Arias Sánchez (1987)
    Lech Walesa (1983)
    American Friends Service Committee (1947)
    International Peace Bureau (1910)

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Yes It’s A Proxy War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    To be clear, evidence is mounting that this is a proxy war deliberately instigated and perpetuated by the US empire with the goal of ousting Putin. Which means that, despite all the narrative window dressing and spin, this war is just more US regime change interventionism.

    Saddam Hussein was not a nice person, and he did bad things. This doesn’t change the fact that Bush’s regime change war was a tremendous evil which unleashed unforgivable horrors, and that it was done because Saddam became inconvenient for the US empire. The same is happening here.

    As a result of deliberately provoking this war, the US empire has:

    • Manufactured international consent for unprecedented economic warfare geared toward ousting Putin
    • Drawn Moscow into another Afghanistan-like military quagmire
    • Guaranteed immense profits for the war industry
    • Cut in on Russia’s fossil fuel business
    • Made Europe further subservient to US interests

    ❖

    People say “This is not a proxy war! How dare you call this a proxy war?”

    Pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is in fact the exact thing that a proxy war is. That is what those words mean.

    If the Ukraine war is not a proxy war, then there has never been a proxy war.

    ❖

    “So you think Ukraine should just GIVE Putin the Donbas and Crimea and neutrality, to end a war that Putin started??”

    No I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating Pop Tarts and tweeting.

    I definitely think every single Ukrainian man, woman and child should be sacrificed to this US proxy war for geostrategic dominance rather than yield some Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine who want to be part of Russia anyway. Only a Putin-loving monster would disagree.

    The only humanitarian position is to continue the US plan to flood the nation with just enough weapons to bleed Russia without actually winning for years to subvert Moscow in the grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths in Washington.

    Any Ukrainian mother who wouldn’t sacrifice her son for the remote chance of future NATO membership and control over Crimea just loves Putin and thinks Putin is awesome and is a Putler apologist.

    I don’t care how many Ukrainian lives must be thrown into the gears of the imperial war machine to accomplish this. Sacrifice every one of them down to the last screaming baby, because I #StandWithUkraine until the next stylish hashtag and profile pic filter come along.

    ❖

    There’d be a lot more credibility for the argument that Russia has no right to any “sphere of influence”—even over the presence of hostile military alliances directly on its border—if the US didn’t command a “sphere of influence” that looks like this:

    Image

    NATO is a “sphere of influence”. It’s an extension of US imperial power. One of many.

    You don’t get to unilaterally create a global dynamic and then cry when other countries respond accordingly. It’s like the US making international law meaningless by continually flouting it with zero consequences and then claiming another country violated international law.

    People who say “What so Russia should just get to dictate whether its neighbors can join NATO and the EU??” without addressing US hegemony are either truly ignorant of US hegemony, willfully ignorant of US hegemony, or supportive of US hegemony. There are no other options. And there really is no way to address it in a way that makes Russia’s position look unreasonable. It’s simply not legitimate to claim Moscow has no right to even the slightest degree of any sphere of influence while the US empire exerts a sphere of influence the size of Earth.

    ❖

    Very supportive of Biden’s not-deliberately-obliterating-all-terrestrial-life-in-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy but strongly opposed to his continually-escalating-cold-war-and-proxy-war-tensions-in-ways-that-could-easily-inadvertently-spark-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy.

    ❖

    ❖

    I still have less than zero respect for the claim that I need to spend more time criticizing Putin, as though the nonstop criticisms of every single one of the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world is not enough. I have no influence over Putin. What I do have some small degree of influence over is the western society that is cheerleading a proxy war which all evidence says is actively being prolonged by the western empire to bleed Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives.

    Saying “Well Putin could just end his war!” is about as useful a contribution to the conversation as saying “Well Ukrainians could just sprout wings and fly to another country!” We have the same amount of control over both those things. I focus my efforts where they can do most good.

    Demanding that we criticize Putin and the western powers who provoked and sustain this war equally, or anywhere near equally, is an absurd position. As badly as my empire loyalist detractors want it to be true, I don’t actually have an audience with Vladimir Putin. I have a western audience.

    ❖

    People are going to get poorer and see their quality of life diminishing as a result of the US empire’s economic war with Russia. Our civilization has an illness. We’re like a patient wasting away as cancer spreads throughout our body. And the US empire is the malignant tumor.

    _____________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Jiggery-wokery: the real obstacle to a united front on Ukraine | Rowan Moore

    Concern about a placename’s associations with slavery – unlike cosying up to oligarchs – doesn’t put anyone on Russia’s side

    Beware the journalistic use of the word “we”. It’s a slippery pronoun that can slide from meaning “we, the whole of humanity” to “we, the author and some like-minded friends” to “we, an ill-defined mass who uphold an imaginary consensus that the author wishes bravely to oppose”.

    It’s out in force in the persistent and evidence-free claims that “woke wars”, as the Daily Telegraph’s Sherelle Jacobs put it last week, have gravely undermined “our” ability to confront the evils of Vladimir Putin. In the cold war, she claims, conflict with the Soviet Union was “confidently framed” as one between “the enlightened forces of liberty and the darkness of communism”. Now, “we” are tearing ourselves apart with “squabbles over statues and gender pronouns”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Larry C. Johnson: “The Ukrainian Army Has Been Defeated. What’s Left Is Mop-Up”

    “Within the first 24 hours of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, all Ukrainian Ground Radar Intercept capabilities were wiped out. Without those radars, the Ukrainian Air Force lost its ability to do air to air intercept. In the intervening three weeks, Russia has established a de facto No Fly Zone over Ukraine. While still vulnerable to shoulder fired Surface to Air Missiles supplied by the U.S. and NATO to the Ukrainians, there is no evidence that Russia has had to curtail Combat Air Operations.”

    The post Larry C. Johnson: “The Ukrainian Army Has Been Defeated. What’s Left Is Mop-Up” appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine


    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Just Pay Attention to What Our Own Government Is Doing in Yemen’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Michigan State’s Shireen Al-Adeimi about Yemen and the Ukraine crisis for the March 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220318Al-Adeimi.mp3

     

    NBC: How coverage of the Ukraine-Russia conflict highlights a racist double standard

    NBC (3/1/22)

    Janine Jackson: It’s encouraging to see widespread recognition of the double standards of concern from media and politicians that we see reflected in the earnest attention to Ukraine, as compared to that devoted to other areas of crisis—like Yemen, seven years now under a Saudi-led war and blockade, enabled by weapons and technical assistance from the United States and others, that’s leaving hundreds of thousands of people in hunger and need.

    While we’re using that critical lens, we can also see that it’s only media framing, and its social media echoes, that insist that you quantify your compassion in the first place. And they’re mainly interested in how your concern shows up as consuming more media.

    So while acknowledgement of official double standards and hypocrisy is welcome, the point is lost if you come away seeing Yemen as a rhetorical device, rather than a country of 30 million people enduring a protracted cataclysm—in which this country, the United States, is playing a central role.

    Here to talk about Yemen in its own right is Shireen Al-Adeimi. She’s assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, and has been working for years to raise awareness on Yemen and human rights. She joins us now by phone from Lansing. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Shireen Al-Adeimi.

    Shireen Al-Adeimi: Thanks so much for having me back, Janine.

    UN: Humanitarian crisis in Yemen remains the worst in the world, warns UN

    UN News (2/14/19)

    JJ: We’ve seen the cold facts. Yemen war deaths, we’re told, will reach 377,000 by the end of the year, the UN says. The UN’s described it for years as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. It’s difficult to convey or to get your mind around a place where a child is dying of starvation every 75 seconds. So first, we just sit with that.

    But I wanted to actually start with where we’ve left off in our previous conversations, which is that when people see the suffering in Yemen, the message is not, “Please come and intervene and save us.” That’s not what people are asking for.

    SA: Yeah, actually, the numbers that you mentioned, those were 377,000 deaths at the end of last year, 2021. So these deaths have just been mounting ever since. And even that number, I’m afraid, is a large underestimate, really, of the humanitarian toll, and the loss that Yemenis have experienced and have continued to experience for the last seven years.

    But, absolutely, the ask here is not, “Oh, look at us, come save us from this big bad person, the Saudi Arabians and the UAE.” The ask here is to stop US intervention, to stop piling on to the invasion, the bombing, the starvation, this incredibly devastating war, an onslaught that Yemenis have undergone over the past seven years.

    And it’s just mind-boggling to me that that simple ask, really, to just pay attention to what our own government is doing in Yemen, and to call for an end to that, is somehow less worthy of attention then calls to, in fact, save us and give us money, right.

    I think it’s great that people are paying attention to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. We should never support invasions or attacks on sovereignty. And yet, it seems that the attention to that conflict, even though it’s much more demanding, I guess, seems to be more easily given than the conflict in Yemen, where Yemenis are asking the US to stop intervening in this conflict and making things worse.

    JJ: Biden came into office saying that the war on Yemen has to end. You had some questions about that early on, and I wonder how those have borne out. What sense do you make of the White House’s actions, not words but actions, on Yemen?

    ITT: Biden Says He’s Ending the Yemen War—But It's Too Soon to Celebrate

    In These Times (2/4/22)

    SA: This is the problem with the Biden administration, is when we had Trump in power, his actions were very much aligned with his words. And so he was saying that he wanted to continue bombing Yemen because it was great money for the US, because the Saudis paid in cash, right? It was a big business deal for the US to continue to support the Saudi Arabian military and the UAE military in Yemen.

    But with Biden, even though this war began under the Obama/Biden administration, there was a lot of talk on his campaign trail to end the war. Like he said, “This war must end,” “I will stop selling weapons,” “I will make them the pariah that they are,” “They’re going and killing innocent women and children.” And these are quotes from his presidential debate in 2019.

    And then his first foreign policy speech in February of 2021 was that he was going to put an end to this war. And he introduced this dichotomy that didn’t exist before, which is that he’s going to end “offensive operations,” and that he was going to review relevant arms sales.

    And that’s what Sarah Lazare and I in In These Times picked up on on the same day that he made the announcement on February 4, 2021, questioning what this means and whether he’s just introduced these loopholes to continue, in fact, supporting the Saudi-led coalition, but instead calling it defensive instead of offensive.

    And I’m sad to say that this is exactly what has panned out. The actions of the Biden administration are really no different than the actions of the Trump administration or the Obama administration. They continue to support the Saudi-led coalition. They continue to support with weapons and logistics and intelligence, but they’re just calling it defensive now, even though it makes absolutely no sense, and there have been no clarifications provided to Congress when they’ve asked. But it gives them this plausible deniability, I suppose, to say: “Well, we’re not actually involved in Yemen anymore. We’re just helping for defensive purposes.”

    JJ: Right. Well, it’s interesting even to rhetorically gesture; to say, “I’m going to move to end the war in Yemen” suggests US centrality, suggests a US role there, which in terms of news media is not always acknowledged. It’s always a “Saudi-led war,” a “Saudi-perpetrated war.” And it’s not that the US role is denied completely, but the fact that a president can say, “I’m going to move to end this war” shows that he could do something to end the war. I’m not sure that media really always placed the US in that way. We’re seen as, not bystanders, but helping in some way or the other, but not as central as in fact we are. You wouldn’t think that the US had the power, actually, to end the war.

    Shireen Al-Adeimi

    Shireen Al-Adeimi: “Every step of the way, the US is helping and facilitating and enabling this coalition to continue bombing Yemen.”

    SA: Absolutely. I mean, that statement is an admission of how involved the US is in this war. I just have to lay it out to the audience, in case they’re not aware: The Saudi and the UAE military, they are completely incompetent and entirely dependent on US support. And what I mean by that is they rely on US contracts with their militaries and air forces to train their pilots, to train their soldiers, to provide logistical support.

    Up until 2018, which was during the Trump administration, late 2018, the US was providing mid-air refueling to Saudi and Emirati jets. We supply them with all of their weaponry, because they don’t manufacture anything, and they import everything that they have from mostly the US, about 70% from the US, but then also countries like the UK, Canada and other Western countries—not from Russia and China, because those weapon systems are different. They rely on Western governments to supply them with arms. Then there’s the intelligence sharing, and there’s support in the command room, choosing targets for them.

    So every step of the way, the pilot who was flying a US-made plane has been trained by US personnel; his plane, after he dropped US bombs, ends up getting serviced, continues to get serviced, by US personnel. Spare parts are provided by the US. Those targets were chosen with the support of the US. So every step of the way, the US is helping and facilitating and enabling this coalition to continue bombing Yemen.

    And then, of course, we’re not even talking about things like diplomatic cover at the UN and support for the blockade and things like that. And so, without the US, this war really can’t go on, and at least can’t go on in the way that it has been for the last several years, not to this extent. It couldn’t cause as much damage to the Yemeni people without US support.

    And then, diplomatically, Biden can pick up the phone and speak to congresspeople who understand this; Biden can call up the Saudi crown prince and just say, “Listen, you need to end this war,” and the war will end, because the US has such leverage with the Saudis and the Emiratis.

    But the fact of the matter is that the US is really a party to the war, and they don’t want to end this war because they are a party to the war. They’re engaged in hostilities. And yet they’ve enjoyed this PR campaign, essentially, of it being called “the Saudi-led coalition” and not “the US-led war in Yemen.”

    FAIR: Saudi PR Pays Off at the Atlantic

    FAIR.org (3/10/22)

    JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, your work is about how people learn. And that brings us, I think, to news media in a way. And I think there’s an issue with just topic segregation. In other words, you can pick up a paper and see an empathetic story about Yemeni children, for example, about suffering. And then on a different page in the paper, you can find a story about MBS and how he’s a down-to-earth guy who loves dogs, about the Saudi leader. So there’s a separation in news media from things that might tug at heartstrings, might make you feel empathy, and then things that seem actionable, things that seem like something you can do.

    I know that the attention that the war on Ukraine is giving to Yemen is kind of backhanded attention, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use the spotlight when we have it. And so what can people be for right now? What are places to push, for listeners to do, at this moment, who are concerned about the US actions in Yemen?

    SA: And you know, I don’t blame the average person for feeling a certain way about Ukraine and not having that same empathy for Yemen, because, like you said, the media really manipulates the way we understand issues, and it decontextualizes so much of this stuff. And so somebody might be looking at this and not understanding that we are Putin in this case—we are, the Saudis are, like Putin, we are the aggressor, the US is the aggressor in this case, we are the people who are causing the starvation—because it’s so decontextualized. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time; we can pay attention to what’s going on in Ukraine and also not stall on our action toward Yemen, especially because, in this case, it’s not about different people fighting a war that we’re not involved in. We are central to the war, like we’ve discussed.

    And so, right now, there’s some movements in Congress. It’s been really difficult to get Democrats energized in the same way that they were energized during the Trump administration, because I think they were giving President Biden the benefit of the doubt, but they understand now that the US is just as involved as they were before.

    And there is a push by representatives Jayapal and DeFazio to introduce another war powers resolution. It wouldn’t end weapons sales, but it would force Biden to end US support for the war in Yemen. And I’m disappointed that it’s not getting as much attention, because, again, it seems like Ukraine is taking up a lot more attention. Again, we can pay attention to these things equally, given our role especially.

    But I would love for listeners to call their representatives and urge them to support the Yemen War Powers Resolution, to come on as cosponsors when the bill is introduced, to really make these public statements of support for an end to the US war in Yemen, to understand that this is our responsibility, as citizens of the US, to continue to push our elected officials, to demand, really, from them to take a stance on this humanitarian crisis that continues to be a stain on US history,

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. You can find her writing on Yemen and other issues, among other places, at InTheseTimes.org. Shireen Al-Adeimi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SA: Thanks for having me, Janine.

     

    The post ‘Just Pay Attention to What Our Own Government Is Doing in Yemen’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Russian authorities harass, detain journalists with independent news outlet Sota.Vision

    Paris, March 25, 2022 – Russian authorities should stop harassing journalists from the independent news website Sota.Vision, and allow all members of the press to work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

    Since March 7, authorities have detained at least seven journalists with Sota.Vision, including two who were sentenced to multiple days in prison, and also fined and harassed employees of the outlet, according to media reports and Sota.Vision editor Aleksey Obukhov, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

    “Russian authorities must stop their repeated harassment and detentions of journalists with Sota.Vision and other independent outlets,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “With independent Russian journalists fleeing abroad in droves to avoid being jailed for factual reporting on the war against Ukraine, the few that remain must be allowed to provide crucial information to the Russian people.”

    On March 7, authorities fined Sota.Vision correspondent Gleb Sokolov 20,000 rubles (US$200) for allegedly violating the establishes procedure for rallies after he covered an anti-war protest in Moscow on February 25, the outlet wrote on its Telegram channel.

    On March 17, law enforcement searched the home of Sota.Vision journalist Elena Izotova in the southwest city of Kazan and seized her technical equipment, according to Sota.Vision and Obukhov, who said that authorities have labeled her as a witness to an investigation into incitement to mass disorder, which he believed was a pretext to harass her.

    On March 18, authorities detained Sota.Vision journalists Pavel Ivanov, Ruslan Terekhov, Artyom Kriger, Nika Samusik, and Aleksandr Filippov in Moscow and St. Petersburg ahead of planned rallies in those cities supporting the Russian military, according to news reports and Obukhov.

    Kriger, Samusik, and Filippov were released later that day without charge, and Ivanov and Terekhov were charged and convicted of disobeying authorities, according to those sources, which said that Ivanov was sentenced to three days of administrative detention and Terekhov to 10 days.

    The Second Special Regiment, a special police unit designed to disperse rallies, alleged that Terekhov refused to show his camera cases for inspection to determine whether they contained explosives, according to Sota.Vision, which said he had appealed the conviction.

    On March 19, a police officer visited the home of Sota.Vision journalist Pyotr Ivanov in St. Petersburg in connection with the journalist’s detention at an unsanctioned rally on March 6, according to his outlet and Obukhov.

    “The visit was most likely an attempt to intimidate him” before he covered an anti-war rally, Obukhov told CPJ, saying that such a visit “makes you understand that you are ‘on the hook’ and will be detained if you show up at the rally, despite your press card, editorial assignment, [press] vest, and so on.”

    On March 23, Russian Investigative Committee operatives searched the home of Sota.Vision editor Darya Poryadina in the northwestern city of Arkhangelsk, according to multiple posts on Sota.Vision’s Telegram channel and media reports.

    After the search, authorities held Poryadina for more than 12 hours at the Investigative Committee’s Arkhangelsk office, and released her after she signed a non-disclosure agreement, according to those reports.

    During her detention, authorities interrogated Poryadina as a witness in a criminal case over opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s creation of an alleged “extremist community,” according to those reports. During the search, authorities seized her equipment and press card, as well as about 100,000 rubles in savings, according to Obukhov.

    “Darya had never been affiliated with any of Navalny’s organizations, but had covered protests in Arkhangelsk, including the January 21 return and arrest of Navalny,” Obukhov said.

    And on Friday, March 25, police briefly detained Sota.Vision freelance contributor Aleksandr Peskov, and released him after designating him as a suspect in an investigation for allegedly insulting law enforcement, according to Sota.Vision and Obukhov. If charged and convicted under Article 319 of the criminal code, he could face a fine of up to 40,000 rubles (US$400) or up to one year of corrective labor.

    CPJ was unable to contact the Russian Interior Ministry or Investigative Committee for comment, as their websites did not load.

    [Editors’ note: This article has been changed in its second paragraph to correct Obukhov’s title.]


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘We expect anything’: A Russian union leader vows to keep helping journalists facing state repression

    As journalists flee Russia fearing prosecution for their coverage of the invasion of Ukraine or their affiliation with outlets deemed “foreign agents,” the country’s Journalists’ and Media Workers’ Union (JMWU) is trying to help them. A non-governmental trade union with some 600 active members, the group defends labor rights, provides assistance to journalists, and stands up for freedom of the press in Russia.   

    Founded after a 2016 attack on local and foreign journalists in Russia’s North Caucasus, the organization is filling a vacuum in Russia where officials “do not want or do not dare to touch upon unpleasant topics and protect injured journalists,” according to its website. (Another union, the Russian Union of Journalists, has often taken pro-Kremlin stances, recently asking Russia’s media regulator to take action against YouTube for what it called censorship of Russian media.)   

    On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, February 24, the JMWU published a bold statement calling the war a “perfidious step” that would risk journalists’ lives and “lead to the death of many citizens of our countries and huge destruction.”

    CPJ spoke to co-chair of the union, Igor Yasin, about the group’s work to help Russian journalists in this precarious moment. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

    What do Russian journalists need most right now? And how are you helping them?

    Igor Yasin: We are in touch with many journalists, those who fled and are now abroad, in Istanbul, for example, and those who are still in Russia and are planning to go.

    The main need [for journalists who have fled or want to] is visa support but many are also looking for financial assistance. One of the biggest requests we receive from journalists and newsrooms is about digital security, about what to do during the searches of newsrooms, journalists’ apartments, or searches of their devices when they cross the border. They need trainings and consultations.

    But there are also journalists who don’t have plans to leave or cannot do so because they have elderly parents to take care of, or for other reasons. In Russia, there are many journalists who have become jobless, and are going to stay. It’ll be hard for them to find a new employment especially if they worked for media outlets labeled as “foreign agents” or “extremist.”

    The new legislation punishing the dissemination of “fake” information on the war with up to 15 years in prison has forced many journalists to flee in fear. How do you see that law, plus the ban on the use of words “war” and “invasion” to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine, impacting Russian journalists and foreign correspondents?

    The problem with laws in Russia is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to predict how they will be applied. If in the past, we tried, along with media lawyers, to analyze, look at precedents, the legal practice, to understand how new laws would be implemented, now, it is impossible to speak about the future with any clarity.

    The laws have often been applied selectively and for the convenience of those in power. So, with these new laws we can’t really predict the scale of the impact of the new law [on “fake” information]. Will it target individual journalists and media outlets, or will there be a blanket use? I cannot tell.

    But what is clear is that many journalists decided to flee as soon as they heard about the law or soon after the law was adopted. Just like that – packed up a few items in a suitcase and took off. Journalists with dual citizenship fled – journalists whom I know personally. Some who are Russian citizens but worked with reputable foreign news agencies also fled.

    Are you planning to go too?

    I wouldn’t like [to leave Russia]. I continue working as before, even more than before, with the new flood of requests for help. We haven’t faced pressure yet — maybe because we are not the most important organization that bothers [the authorities], maybe they think we are too insignificant, maybe it’s just not our turn yet. But we expect anything at any moment.

    Your February 24 statement was very brave, but not unusual given your organization’s history of standing up for journalists. Are you going to be more careful from now on?

    You are right, we have always had this kind of position. But if you recall, when [the war] started, there were many similar statements. We were not the only ones to condemn [the war]. But everything developed so fast. In a matter of days, the [new law on “fakes”] was initiated, adopted, signed into law, and went into force.

    So, when the law on “fakes” [was adopted on March 4], we discussed internally whether we should take the statement down, but we decided against it. We just removed signatures under the statement to protect people who signed it.

    What else changed in your work since the beginning of the war?

    I now have to use a VPN [virtual private network] for everything and safe messaging apps for phone calls and messaging. I had to learn how to navigate to stay safe digitally.

    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Gulnoza Said/ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator.

  • US Hawks Are Trying to Increase Military Budget — and Use Ukraine as Excuse

    US Hawks Are Trying to Increase Military Budget -- and Use Ukraine as Excuse

    With NATO countries recommitting themselves to the alliance and passing sweeping sanctions against Russia as punishment for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, is this the dawn of a new Cold War? We speak with foreign policy expert William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who warns that hawks in Washington are pushing for a massive increase in the U.S. military budget, which is already a record-high $800 billion a year. “There’s a danger that not only will this be a war in Ukraine, but the U.S. will use it as an excuse for a more aggressive policy around the world, arguing that it’s to counter Russia or China or Iran, or whoever the enemy of the moment is.” Hartung also speaks about the Saudi-led war in Yemen, where U.S. support has allowed the conflict to rage for years, killing about 400,000 people. Unlike in Ukraine, where the U.S. has more limited leverage, the Biden administration could “end that killing tomorrow,” Hartung says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue to look at the global fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re joined by William Hartung of the Quincy Institute, who closely follows the global arms industry and the U.S. military budget. He has just co-written an article for TomDispatch headlined “Washington Should Think Twice Before Launching a New Cold War.”

    Bill, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there? What is your assessment of what’s happening right now, and who most is profiting?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the hawks in Washington want to jack up the military budget and use Ukraine as an excuse. But if you look at the budget — and Biden is going to propose, according to press accounts, a military budget of over $800 billion on Monday. That’s more than was spent at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars. It’s $100 billion more than what was spent at the height of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. So, this notion that to provide some weapons to Ukraine, to send a few thousand additional troops to Europe requires increasing this enormous budget is only going to benefit weapons contractors and members of Congress who receive campaign contributions from them, who use the arguments to get themselves elected.

    So, you know, and then, overarching all this is this discussion of a new Cold War. And I think people don’t think about this — a lot of people think it’s like the United States spent the Soviet Union into the grave and brought democracy to Eastern Europe and so forth, but they don’t look at what happened all over the world in the name of fighting communism. They don’t look at the Vietnam War. They don’t look at the coups in Guatemala, Iran, Chile. They don’t look at arming of the so-called freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan, including the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom went on to help form al-Qaeda; including the Contras in Nicaragua, who committed unspeakable crimes; including the overthrow of the Allende elected government in Chile, when Henry Kissinger said, “You can’t let a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” acknowledging that they were overthrowing a democratic government. So I think there’s a danger that not only will this be a war in Ukraine, but the U.S. will use it as an excuse for a more aggressive policy around the world, arguing that it’s to counter Russia or China or Iran, or whoever the enemy of the moment is.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, about the recent op-ed that you wrote for Stripes, “US should use its leverage to end the war in Yemen,” I mean, what we’re seeing, perhaps in an unprecedented way right now, is the mainstream U.S. corporate media on the ground, there with the targets of war. And it is horrifying, and the whole world is mesmerized by this, what it means to be at the target end of war. We don’t see that similarly in Yemen — hosts of global shows standing with the Yemeni people, looking up and seeing planes flying overhead. Can you talk about what it would mean, what you mean by saying the U.S. should use this leverage to end the war in Yemen?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes. Well, I think, as you said, you know, the media has underscored the horrors of war by the way they’re covering Ukraine. And I think people should take that in. But they have not covered the horrors of war in Yemen. And if they did, people would understand that in the Saudi-UAE intervention there, of which today is the seventh anniversary, nearly 400,000 people have died, both through bombing, through a Saudi blockade that has kept important, necessary materials getting into the country, from bombing of hospitals, from bombing of a school bus, bombing of funerals, bombing of civilian neighborhoods.

    So, the United States is key to this, because through Obama and Trump and Biden, the U.S. has supplied tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to the Saudi and UAE regimes that have been used to fuel that war. And if the United States cut off weapons and also the spare parts and maintenance that keeps the Saudi war machine running, we could end that killing tomorrow, and we could force the Saudis to negotiate in good faith for a peace agreement to end that war.

    So, the contrast is stark. And, you know, in Ukraine, the United States’ leverage is more limited. It’s a complex problem. In Yemen, the people of the United States could force our government to end the killing in short order. So there’s more agency there. There’s more of an opportunity for people to make a difference. And there’s groups that have been doing so, including the Yemeni diaspora in the United States. And Representatives Peter DeFazio and Pramila Jayapal are going to bring a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-UAE war. So, I think this is an area where people can make a difference and where the international community for far too long has looked the other way.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill Hartung, I want to thank you so much for being with us, national security and foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’re going to link to all of your pieces at democracynow.org.

    Next up, we’ll speak to the Colombian environment activist Francia Márquez Mina, the new running mate of presidential front-runner Gustavo Petro, who could become Colombia’s first Black female vice president. Stay with us for this exclusive interview.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Decry “Climate-Wrecking” Biden Plan to Boost US Gas Exports to Europe

    President Joe Biden meets European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, Belgium, on March 25, 2022.

    Global climate advocates on Friday panned as “misguided and dangerous” the Biden administration’s newly announced effort to ramp up U.S. gas shipments to European Union countries as they look to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

    Under the new initiative, according to a White House fact sheet, the U.S. will help the E.U. secure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2022 “with expected increases going forward” — a set-up likely to benefit U.S. gas exporters.

    The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that “the U.S. aims to ship 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually through at least 2030… making up for about a third of the gas the E.U. receives from Russia.”

    “The E.U. imported a record 22 billion cubic meters of LNG from the U.S. last year,” the Journal noted. New gas projects are set to come online in 2025.

    While the Biden administration vowed to “undertake efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of all new LNG infrastructure and associated pipelines,” climate campaigners warned that the planned construction of new import facilities in Europe flies in the face of both U.S. and E.U. vows to slash planet-warming carbon emissions.

    “Europe already has enough capacity to import the amount of gas the U.S. intends to supply, and building new import terminals would mean locking in fossil gas imports for years to come, long after the E.U. needs to quit this climate-wrecking fuel for good,” Murray Worthy, the gas campaign leader at Global Witness, said in a statement.

    “Doubling down on gas is not the solution, whether it comes from Russia or the U.S.,” Worthy continued. “This announcement does not and must not be used to justify more fossil fuel projects in the U.S. New gas export terminals would take too long to build to help Europe now, would lead to huge climate-wrecking emissions and only help the fossil fuel industry.”

    “Instead of lining the pockets of American fracking companies,” he added, “Europe should focus its energy investments on lasting solutions such as improving building insulation, heat pumps, and renewable energy sources. More investment and reliance on fossil fuels is music to the ears of despots and warmongers all over the world who recognize this is an energy system that benefits them. If Europe truly wants to get off Russian gas, the only real option it has is phasing out gas altogether.”

    In response to Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine — now in its second month with no end in sight — the E.U. is looking to slash Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year and completely end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027.

    Before the Ukraine invasion, Europe got roughly 40% of its gas supply and 27% of its oil imports from Russia, an arrangement that led E.U. members — Germany in particular — to resist sanctions targeting the Russian fossil fuel industry.

    “We aim to reduce this dependence on Russian fossil fuels and get rid of it,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Friday.

    But Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, warned in a statement Friday that simply switching gas suppliers “won’t solve Europe’s current crisis” — and will surely make the climate emergency worse.

    “Pushing new toxic export facilities and decades more methane gas is a death sentence for those on the frontlines of the climate emergency,” Siegel said of the U.S. role in the new initiative. “President Biden must lead the world with a rapid buildout of renewable energy — not feed the fossil fuel beast that’s responsible for both petro-dictators and the climate crisis.”

    “Approving more export terminals, pipelines, and fossil fuel production,” Siegel added, “only throws fuel on the fire of our burning world.”

  • More Evidence That The US Is Trying To Prolong This War

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.

    “Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.

    So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to "bleed Putin". They don't care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw). https://t.co/NBOKvmT63K

    — Leonid Bershidskiy (@Bershidsky) March 22, 2022

    Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:

    “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

     

    I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.  It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.

    Earlier this month when The Intercept’s Ryan Grim was able to get a word in edgewise at a White House press briefing amid the throngs of mass media reporters demanding to know why Biden still hasn’t started World War 3, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a very revealing answer.

    “So, aside from the request for weapons, President Zelensky has also requested that the US be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?” asked Grim.

    “Well, one of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” Psaki answered, completely dodging the question of whether the US was actually doing anything to help negotiate peace.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz

    — Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022

    As we’ve discussed previously, the US government has a well-documented history of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires with the goal of preoccupying its military forces and draining its coffers. Former US officials are on record publicly boasting about having done so in both Afghanistan and Syria. This is an agenda geared toward sapping the Russian government, manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare designed (though perhaps ineptly) to crush the Russian economy, to foment discord and rebellion, and ultimately to effect regime change in Moscow.

    The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.

    I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.

    ___________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Russian activists sign open letter calling for end to war in Ukraine

    Campaigners write manifesto in broadest anti-war statement by Russian human rights community

    A group of veteran Russian human rights activists plan to publish an open letter calling on Russia to end its war in Ukraine, declaring it “our common duty” to “stop the war [and] protect the lives, rights and freedoms of all people, both Ukrainians and Russians”.

    The “manifesto”, signed by 11 prominent activists including Lev Ponomaryov, Oleg Orlov and Svetlana Gannushkina, announces the creation of a new anti-war council of Russian human rights defenders and is the broadest collective statement against the war by the Russian human rights community to date.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Will Poland’s good-guy status on Ukraine help its standing in the EU?

    Poland’s populist government has been under pressure over rights and democracy. Now it feels it has the moral high ground

    Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was a pivotal moment for Poland: proof positive it had been right about Russia all along, and the start of an immense national humanitarian effort. For its government, it is also an opportunity to score some points in Brussels.

    Poland has “never had such an excellent brand, all over the world”, its prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, declared last week. It is “in the right position in international politics”, he said, no longer behind a “wall of unfair isolation”. The US president, Joe Biden, is due to visit the country on Friday.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs To Stave Off War With Russia

    The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war. President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.” But pressure on the White House from Congress and the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.

    The post Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs To Stave Off War With Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists And CIA Cutouts

    Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries. The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.

    The post Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists And CIA Cutouts appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • U.S. Lied About Funding “Dangerous Pathogen” Research In Secret Ukrainian Biolabs, Newly Leaked Documents Reveal

    Leaked documents give new information about the Pentagon program in biolaboratories in Ukraine. According to internal documents, Pentagon contractors were given full access to all Ukrainian biolaboratories which handled dangerous pathogens, while independent experts were denied even a visit. The new revelations challenge the U.S. government statement that the Pentagon just funded biolaboratories in Ukraine but had nothing to do with them.

    The post U.S. Lied About Funding “Dangerous Pathogen” Research In Secret Ukrainian Biolabs, Newly Leaked Documents Reveal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Chomsky: Let’s Focus on Preventing Nuclear War, Rather Than Debating “Just War”

    A Ukrainian military tank is seen on a road in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 24, 2022.

    NATO leaders announced Wednesday that the alliance plans to reinforce its eastern front by deploying many more troops in countries like Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — including thousands of U.S. troops — and sending “equipment to help Ukraine defend itself against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.” And while the NATO alliance itself is not directly providing weapons to Ukraine, many of its member countries are pouring weapons into Ukraine, including missiles, rockets, machine guns and more.

    In all likelihood, Russian President Vladimir Putin believed that his military would overrun Ukraine within a matter of a few days on February 24, when he ordered an invasion into the neighboring country after a long and massive military buildup on Ukraine’s border.

    A month later, however, the war is still raging, and several Ukrainian cities have been devastated by Russian air attacks. Peace talks have stalled, and it is unclear whether Putin still wants to overthrow the government or is instead aiming now for a “neutral” Ukraine.

    In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident voice Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts and insights about the available options for an end to the war in Ukraine, and ponders the idea of “just” war and whether the war in Ukraine could potentially lead to the collapse of Putin’s regime.

    Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, we are already a month into the war in Ukraine and peace talks have stalled. In fact, Putin is turning up the volume on violence as the West increases military aid to Ukraine. In a previous interview, you compared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Is Putin’s strategy then straight out of Hitler’s playbook? Does he want to occupy all of Ukraine? Is he trying to rebuild the Russian empire? Is this why peace negotiations have stalled?

    Noam Chomsky: There is very little credible information about the negotiations. Some of the information leaking out sounds mildly optimistic. There is good reason to suppose that if the U.S. were to agree to participate seriously, with a constructive program, the possibilities for an end to the horror would be enhanced.

    What a constructive program would be, at least in general outline, is no secret. The primary element is commitment to neutrality for Ukraine: no membership in a hostile military alliance, no hosting of weapons aimed at Russia (even those misleadingly called “defensive”), no military maneuvers with hostile military forces.

    That would hardly be something new in world affairs, even where nothing formal exists. Everyone understands that Mexico cannot join a Chinese-run military alliance, emplace Chinese weapons aimed at the U.S., and carry out military maneuvers with the People’s Liberation Army.

    In brief, a constructive program would be about the opposite of the Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership signed by the White House on September 1, 2021. This document, which received little notice, forcefully declared that the door for Ukraine to join NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is wide open. It also “finalized a Strategic Defense Framework that creates a foundation for the enhancement of U.S.-Ukraine strategic defense and security cooperation” by providing Ukraine with advanced anti-tank and other weapons along with a “robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.”

    The statement was another purposeful exercise in poking the bear in the eye. It is another contribution to a process that NATO (meaning Washington) has been perfecting since Bill Clinton’s 1998 violation of George H.W. Bush’s firm pledge not to expand NATO to the East, a decision that elicited strong warnings from high-level diplomats from George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, (current CIA Director) William Burns and many others, and led Defense Secretary William Perry to come close to resigning in protest, joined by a long list of others with eyes open. That’s of course in addition to the aggressive actions that struck directly at Russia’s concerns (Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and lesser crimes), conducted in such a way as to maximize the humiliation.

    It doesn’t strain credulity to suspect that that the Joint Statement was a factor in inducing Putin and the narrowing circle of “hard men” around him to decide to step up their annual mobilization of forces on the Ukrainian border in an effort to gain some attention to their security concerns, in this case on to direct criminal aggression — which, indeed, we can compare with the Nazi invasion of Poland (in combination with Stalin).

    Neutralization of Ukraine is the main element of a constructive program, but there is more. There should be moves towards some kind of federal arrangement for Ukraine involving a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region, along the general lines of what remains of Minsk II. Again, that would be nothing new in world affairs. No two cases are identical, and no real example is anywhere near perfect, but federal structures exist in Switzerland and Belgium, among other cases — even the U.S. to an extent. Serious diplomatic efforts might find a solution to this problem, or at least contain the flames.

    And the flames are real. Estimates are that some 15,000 people have been killed in conflict in this region since 2014.

    That leaves Crimea. On Crimea, the West has two choices. One is to recognize that the Russian annexation is simply a fact of life for now, irreversible without actions that would destroy Ukraine and possibly far more. The other is to disregard the highly likely consequences and to strike heroic gestures about how the U.S. “will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea,” as the Joint Statement proclaims, accompanied by many eloquent pronouncements by others who are willing to consign Ukraine to utter catastrophe while advertising their bravery.

    Like it or not, those are the choices.

    Does Putin want to “occupy all of Ukraine and rebuild the Russian empire?” His announced goals (mainly neutralization) are quite different, including his statement that it would be madness to try to reconstruct the old Soviet Union, but he might have had something like this in mind. If so, it’s hard to imagine that he and his circle still do. For Russia to occupy Ukraine would make its experience in Afghanistan look like a picnic in the park. By now that’s abundantly clear.

    Putin does have the military capacity — and judging by Chechnya and other escapades, the moral capacity — to leave Ukraine in smoldering ruins. That would mean no occupation, no Russian empire, and no more Putin.

    Our eyes are rightly focused on the mounting horrors of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It would be a mistake, however, to forget that the Joint Statement is only one of the pleasures that the imperial mind is quietly conjuring up.

    A few weeks ago, we discussed President Biden’s National Defense Authorization Act, as little known as the Joint Statement. This brilliant document — again quoting Michael Klare — calls for “an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank” — meant to encircle China, including Taiwan, “ominously enough.”

    We might ask how China feels about the fact that the U.S. Indo-Pacific command is now reported to be planning to enhance the encirclement, doubling its spending in fiscal year 2022, in part to develop “a network of precision-strike missiles along the so-called first island chain.”

    For defense, of course, so the Chinese [government has] no reason for concern.

    There is little doubt that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine fails just war theory, and that NATO is also morally responsible for the crisis. But what about Ukraine arming civilians to fight against the invaders? Isn’t this morally justified on the same grounds that resistance against the Nazis was morally justified?

    Just war theory, regrettably, has about as much relevance to the real world as “humanitarian intervention,” “responsibility to protect” or “defending democracy.”

    On the surface, it seems a virtual truism that a people in arms have the right to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor. But as always in this sad world, questions arise when we think about it a little.

    Take the resistance against the Nazis. There could hardly have been a more noble cause.

    One can certainly understand and sympathize with the motives of Herschel Grynszpan when he assassinated a German diplomat in 1938; or the British-trained partisans who assassinated the Nazi murderer Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. And one can admire their courage and passion for justice, without qualification.

    That’s not the end, however. The first provided the Nazis with the pretext for the atrocities of Kristallnacht and impelled the Nazi program further toward its hideous outcomes. The second led to the shocking Lidice massacres.

    Events have consequences. The innocent suffer, perhaps terribly. Such questions cannot be avoided by people with a moral bone in their bodies. The questions cannot fail to arise when we consider whether and how to arm those courageously resisting murderous aggression.

    That’s the least of it. In the present case, we also have to ask what risks we are willing to take of a nuclear war, which will not only spell the end of Ukraine but far beyond, to the truly unthinkable.

    It is not encouraging that over a third of Americans favor “taking military action [in Ukraine] even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia,” perhaps inspired by commentators and political leaders who should think twice before doing their Winston Churchill impersonations.

    Perhaps ways can be found to provide needed arms to the defenders of Ukraine to repel the aggressors while avoiding dire consequences. But we should not delude ourselves into believing that it is a simple matter, to be settled by bold pronouncements.

    Do you anticipate dramatic political developments inside Russia if the war lasts much longer or if Ukrainians resist even after formal battles have ended? After all, Russia’s economy is already under siege and could end up with an economic collapse unparalleled in recent history.

    I don’t know enough about Russia even to hazard a guess. One person who does know enough at least to “speculate” — and only that, as he reminds us — is Anatol Lieven, whose insights have been a very useful guide all along. He regards “dramatic political developments” as highly unlikely because of the nature of the harsh kleptocracy that Putin has carefully constructed. Among the more optimistic guesses, “the most likely scenario,” Lieven writes, “is a sort of semi-coup, most of which will never become apparent in public, by which Putin and his immediate associates will step down ‘voluntarily’ in return for guarantees of their personal immunity from arrest and their family’s wealth. Who would succeed as president in these circumstances is a totally open question.”

    And not necessarily a pleasant question to consider.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Is Zelensky really a hero?

    Truth is often the first casualty of war, so it’s imperative that all those in power are still held to account during these times. Curtis Daly gives his opinion on troubling authoritarian moves by Volodymyr Zelensky. 

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Ukraine: War and the Challenge of Human Rights in the United States and Beyond

    Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.

    It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.

    The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.

    In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!

    Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.

    But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.

    These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.

    For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be,  just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.

    The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis

    The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.

    Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.

    The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.

    War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project

    The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.

    It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.

    In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.

    In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.

    The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.

    No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.

    This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:

    Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
    And another
    Inferior
    Is finally
    And permanently
    Discredited
    And abandoned
    Everywhere is war
    Me say war

    The post Ukraine: War and the Challenge of Human Rights in the United States and Beyond first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UK Wants to Incarcerate Asylum Seekers “Offshore” on Abandoned Oil Rigs

    A group of people thought to be migrants are guided up the beach after being brought in to Dungeness, Kent, onboard a lifeboat following an incident in the English Channel on March 24, 2022.

    Eighteen months ago, reports started to surface that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in the U.K. was planning to detain would-be asylum seekers in places as far away as the South Atlantic. Some sites, such as Ascension Island, are 4,000 miles from Britain.

    Johnson’s plan was actually a spinoff of a never-implemented idea put forward by the Labour government back in 2003 to “offshore” the country’s asylum process to “regional protection zones” in the vicinity of the conflicts and collapsing economies that were sending hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to the U.K. and other European countries. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his colleagues backed off of that idea after it received tremendous pushback from social justice and immigrant rights organizers, who averred that it would place large and unfair financial burdens on poor countries that had the geographic misfortune to be located on the periphery of war zones.

    Since those initial reports — with asylum seekers finding ever-more creative ways to cross over to England from the continent, either via boats or, in some instances, being smuggled through the Channel Tunnel — Home Secretary Priti Patel has increasingly looked to penalize asylum seekers, to render their actions criminal and to deny them the right to a fair hearing in the U.K. The British government is mirroring U.S. government actions taken during the Trump administration against would-be asylees attempting to traverse the southern border into the U.S., such as the Orwellian-named Migrant Protection Protocols.

    This past summer, Patel unveiled plans, contained in legislation called the Nationality and Borders Bill, to criminalize asylum seekers entering the country without the correct paperwork and to make it easier to deport them. The plans also sought to house asylum seekers in offshore facilities such as abandoned oil rigs, or on Ascension Island off the coast of southern Africa, while their cases slowly wend through the court system. This sort of offshore detention — a practice long utilized in Australia, and currently being proposed in Denmark — is one that immigrants’ rights groups view with deep suspicion. If implemented, it would also give the British home secretary unprecedented powers to revoke the citizenship of certain U.K. citizens deemed politically undesirable, a move that picked up steam in the wake of a number of high-profile cases of U.K. citizens operating within the ranks of ISIS.

    So desperate is Johnson’s government to deliver on its electoral promise to anti-immigrant voters of curtailing immigration that it has reportedly turned to a range of countries, from Norway to Rwanda to Albania to host its detention facilities. All, apparently, have turned down the U.K.’s overtures, leaving the remote Ascension Island, with its once-a-week flight to South Africa, as choice number one. If this tough-on-asylum proposal becomes law, it could end up costing the U.K. a fortune: A similar offshoring policy in Australia ultimately cost the Australians roughly 2 million pounds per person per year held at these remote detention sites, and helped shred the country’s human rights record in the process. In addition to the immorality of such a measure, as a deterrent system this sort of off-shoring policy is shockingly expensive to implement.

    Since the bill was first proposed, opposition parties, combined with a number of rebels from within Conservative ranks, have fought a rearguard action to try to prevent it being enacted into law.

    Now, with war raging once again on the European continent and displacing millions of people, and with tens of thousands of British families having signed up for a government program to host Ukrainian refugees in their homes, one might imagine that Prime Minister Johnson and Home Secretary Patel would use the moment as cover to back off of the more inflammatory of their anti-immigrant proposals.

    To the contrary, they have doubled down. Earlier this month, the government repeatedly made it clear that it was sticking by this bill, and sent the legislation over to parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, to be debated, amended and voted upon. But members of the House of Lords weren’t happy about the legislation, and in a series of hearings successfully defeated or amended many of its more contentious, more anti-democratic, provisions.

    Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the bill is dead. The House of Lords is, these days, more of an advisory chamber than an institution with veto powers over legislation. And, at this point, it’s looking as if Johnson’s government intends to try to steamroll the legislation through Parliament later this month, when members of Parliament once more debate the merits of the proposals.

    Yet, Johnson is, after months of political scandals, a wounded leader, and his hold on the Conservative Party is nowhere near as total as it was last year. In recent days, more than two dozen of his members of Parliament have indicated their discomfort with key parts of the legislation, including the part which refuses to grant asylum seekers temporary work permits while they are waiting for their cases to be heard.

    The war in Ukraine is rapidly shifting the dynamics around refugees and asylees. For years, a growing number of countries in Europe, pushed by electorates increasingly wary of large-scale migration, locked down against poor (mainly non-white) migrants seeking asylum. But Ukrainians, forced to flee suddenly before a staggeringly violent Russian onslaught, aren’t seeking asylum, a process that can take years of legal hearings to complete; rather they are heading west as refugees — into refugee camps in countries bordering Ukraine, and then westward into other countries in Europe. And, unlike with the victims of other conflicts in previous years, aid agencies in Europe are watching, somewhat amazed, as governments welcome these displaced Ukrainians with open arms. This treatment is far cry from how European countries’ response to the civil war in Syria — a year after a mass migration into Europe in 2015, one country after another began locking its borders down against the refugees — and the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

    In contrast, Ukrainians are being met with work permits, with free public transit passes and so on, despite the fact that these same European governments have steadily been turning away refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other non-European conflict zones in recent years after a populist backlash against the liberal entry policies of 2015.

    After a slow start denounced by opposition politicians as “shameful,” Britain has begun easing its rules-of-entry to allow for large numbers of Ukrainians to be temporarily resettled in the U.K. As a result, somewhere in the region of 200,000 Ukrainians could end up living in the country over the coming months and years — a number roughly equal to the number of EU nationals who left the U.K. in 2020 as Brexit’s provisions began to kick in, and one that might go a long way to fill the labor shortage in key sectors of the economy that Britain has repeatedly experienced post-Brexit.

    Some relief workers and experts argue that this is a moment for Europe to fundamentally rethink its obligations to those fleeing persecution and violence, finally bringing the continent more in line with the spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    But, at least in the short term, that seems an unlikely outcome. In Britain, the political tradeoff is, perhaps, most obvious. The home secretary, with Prime Minister Johnson’s backing, is continuing to push the noxious Nationality and Borders Bill in the same month that the government has been forced, by public opinion as much as by internal party dissent, to roll out a much larger welcome mat for Ukrainians than it had initially intended.

    The U.K. is rightly responding with generosity to the victims of Russia’s violence in Ukraine. But, unless the Conservative parliamentary rebels pick up more followers in the coming weeks, it will soon be going down an even nastier road than before in its responses to other displaced, traumatized people fleeing non-European conflicts, non-European economic collapse and non-European zones of despair.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Weaponizing Coal: Australia Gives Ukraine a Gift

    Few would forget the antics of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who, as Treasurer, entered Parliament with a lump of coal and proceeded to praise it with the enthusiasm of a fetish worshipper.  “Don’t be afraid,” he told fellow parliamentarians.  “Don’t be scared.”

    He has, with deep reluctance, conceded that climate change is taking place and, with even deeper reluctance, that human agency might be involved.  But under his leadership, the fossil fuel lobby of Australia has no reason to fear.  Denialism has simply become more covert.

    This month, Industry Minister Angus Taylor, the government’s premier ignoramus on climate change, promised AU$50.3 million to fossil fuel entities to guarantee Australia against “the devastating impacts of a gas supply shortfall, as seen recently in Europe.”  His government was “accelerating priority gas infrastructure projects that will protect Australia from potential energy shortages, keep pressure on prices and create jobs in regional Australia as part of our plan for a stronger future.”

    Indeed, the lobby has every reason to be delighted with that other recent announcement by Morrison to enlist Australian coal in Ukraine’s war effort.  With a shamelessness only he can muster, the Prime Minister has managed to make digging and exporting coal, even in small amounts at great cost, virtuous.  In an official statement, Morrison claimed that, “in response to a direct request from Ukraine, Australia will donate 70,000 tonnes of thermal coal.  This will help Ukraine’s power generators operating and supplying electricity to the power grid at this critical time.”

    Little by way of logistical or pricing detail was given.  We know who benefits the most from this.  A triumphalist Whitehaven Coal will supply it, and the cost to the Australian taxpayer will be in the order of AU$31 million.  Given that Whitehaven Coal has been a Liberal Party donor – AU$98,000 has been given over the last five years – the whiff of something rotten in the land of coal is strong.

    The company’s board would have been delighted by the recent spike in its share prices.  It also remains unclear whether the company offered a discount on the coal to the government.  One thing is beyond doubt: Canberra is offering to foot the transport bill.

    The coal, according to the Prime Minister, was needed “before the end of May and we have arranged the shipping for that to take place and are working with other countries to ensure it can get to Ukraine.”  With beaming delight, Morrison could say that “it’s our coal.  We dug it up.  We’ve arranged the ship. We’ve put it on the ship and we’re sending it there to Ukraine to help power up their resistance and to give that encouragement.”

    Richard Denniss, an economist based at the Australia Institute, is doubtful about the whole operation.  “Sending a ship load of coal to Ukraine via Poland is just conservative virtue signalling.”  If anything, the measure was insensible, given that Poland itself had “lots of coal.  If we really thought Ukraine needed coal (I doubt it) we could just give them some money to buy Polish coal.”

    The request is also slightly odd given that it was conveyed to Canberra from Poland itself. “It was made to me,” claimed Morrison, “through the Polish Prime Minister and we’re very pleased to be able to meet that need.”

    The amount of thermal coal is also raising eyebrows amongst those not inclined towards astrological numbers and fantasy projections.  Australia is sending a mere 10th of Ukraine thermal coal reserves, described by Resources Minister Keith Pitt as making “a real difference for the people of Ukraine by providing continued energy security, ensuring continued electricity supply  to homes and industry”.  With little justification, Morrison is also making the claim that a million Ukrainian homes will be powered, though left the duration of that effort in doubt.

    The answer to such a crisis is not coal nor, in fact, fossil fuel exports masquerading as humanitarian rescue.  Bernard Keane of Crikey makes a relevant observation: “the clear lesson of Putin’s aggression in energy terms is the need to get out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, removing the volatility and strategic weakness that reliance on global commodities brings.”

    Whether the coal will ever reach its intended recipients is a question worth asking.  If the coal transits through Poland, it will have to be transported via rail to Ukraine, which raises issues of viable infrastructure.  Sea access is also bound to be unlikely, and even if that is taken, one analyst pithily notes that a vessel “should be quite a sitting target if the Russians knew what it was and where it was coming from.”

    The Morrison government has made a habit of celebrating the announcement rather than the execution of detail.  Mendacity and incompetence are twinned in this government’s insignia, and Ukrainian officials best ready themselves for disappointment.

    The post Weaponizing Coal: Australia Gives Ukraine a Gift first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukrainian socialists condemn suspension of political parties

    Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh has denounced Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to temporarily suspend the activities of a number of Ukrainian political parties.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • They’re Enslaving Our Minds And Driving Us Toward Destruction

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross.

    The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don’t compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you’ve been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.

    But that is the basic reality. If you’ve already seen this, you won’t experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we’re seeing with Ukraine. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you’re being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.

    That’s just how we’re wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.

    Look at this picture:

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    3/2/2022- President Zelensky #UkraineUnderAttaсk #Zelensky #Zelenskyy #PresidentZelensky #russianinvasion https://t.co/qW8LL36nRq pic.twitter.com/klwqPp9PjH

    — Clay Bennett (@BennettCartoons) March 2, 2022

    If this picture was printed out and framed, and then used as a bludgeon to bash you in the face whenever you looked at an electronic screen, it would feel how all this Ukraine war propaganda feels when you haven’t swallowed the official narrative.

    People get outraged when I say we are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine, but this fact is not seriously in dispute. The mass media have been relatively straightforward about it, though of course they fail to mention their own role in the propaganda campaign.

    It seems like those who are new to the concept think that “propaganda” means making up fictional stories whole cloth, so they mistakenly assume that this is a claim that Russia never invaded and Ukrainians aren’t dying and suffering. But all it really means is that the narrative framing is manipulated. They’re not lying that there’s a war, they’re just manipulating the way people think about the war. How it’s happening, who’s to blame for it, whose agendas are served by getting it started and keeping it going, etc.

    No good liar lies all the time. The best liars very seldom tell full-blown lies, always preferring to lie by omission, by distortion, by half-truth, by disproportionate focus, and by uncritically reporting other people’s lies in a way that suggests they’re true.

    It’s all moving so fast now. Censorship and propaganda, the two arms of imperial narrative control, are escalating like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The doors on information control are being slammed and bolted shut all around the world as fast as the empire managers can get away with it.

    And of course Australia is on the front line of this war against mental sovereignty:

    Image

    And it’s because of all this intrusive perception management that we’re somehow simultaneously the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet still collectively focused more on talking about sports and celebrity gossip as though everything is fine and normal.

    This is something we could actually oppose, if enough of us had enough unpolluted information about what’s happening. This threat is not some inevitable force of nature that is happening to us, it’s something that is being done to us. By people. People with names and government offices.

    If the nukes do start flying and we find ourselves in our final moments, will we really feel okay about having done nothing about it? About failing to mobilize in favor of de-escalation and detente? About being the first species in history to go extinct due to psychological compartmentalization and a reluctance to annoy government officials?

    The only thing sadder than watching the world die would be watching it die without having done anything to try to save it.

    The saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism is directly related to people’s inability to imagine anything other than increasingly aggressive escalations between nuclear powers in the competition-based systems we live under. People literally cannot imagine any deviation from this power struggle between nations, even if continuing along this trajectory means our complete annihilation.

    And it really doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t cooperate with each other for the good of everyone without trying to dominate each other. There’s no good reason we can’t move from competition-based models of domination to collaboration-based models of human thriving.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    If the US empire truly believed its own role in this war was just, it wouldn't be unleashing unprecedented levels of censorship, blacking out Russian media, and propagandizing like it's already World War 3. https://t.co/BAbsGOFFyS

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 22, 2022

    Michael Parenti said years ago that the ultimate neocon plan (which today has become simply the mainstream orthodoxy on US foreign policy) is a confrontation with disobedient governments, the ultimate target being China, to ensure the supremacy of American global capitalism. There’s no good reason this needs to happen. There’s no good reason the defensive Russia-China tandem described years ago by Gilbert Doctorow needs to be targeted in the way it’s currently being targeted by this war that was deliberately provoked by western powers.

    They are lying to you. They are lying when they say they tried to prevent this war. They are lying when they say de-escalation is impossible. They are lying when they say World War 3 is inevitable, or is upon us already. Peace and detente are very possible. All that would need to happen is the dropping away of this notion that this planet of ours needs to be dominated by a single power structure. That’s all we’d need for the threat of nuclear armageddon to go away. That’s all we’d need to ensure humanity’s progress into the future.

    We can simply move from endless escalation to diplomacy, from diplomacy to de-escalation, from de-escalation to detente, from detente to true peace, and from true peace to collaboration and human thriving. The only thing stopping that from happening is this insane drive to dominate.

    Don’t believe the liars.

    ________________________

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  • Ukrainian Refugees Spare No Words On Zelensky Government

    Chisinau, Moldova – Nestled above the Black Sea, between the war zone in Ukraine and the eastern limits of NATO territory in Romania, sits the tiny, oft-forgotten landlocked nation of Moldova. Among the poorest countries in Europe by just about any relevant metric, it has been overwhelmed by Ukrainian refugees in the three weeks since the outset of what Russia calls its “special military operation” (спецоперация) in Ukraine.

    More than 359,000 people of the 3.38 million who have fled Ukraine since February 24 have passed in and out of the country, according to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees. Roman Macovenco of the Moldovan Consular Directorate confirmed at least 300,000 Ukrainians had crossed through Moldova.

    The post Ukrainian Refugees Spare No Words On Zelensky Government appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • NATO Is A Problem, Not The Solution

    While in no way excusing Russia’s criminal invasion, NATO expansion eastward increased its likelihood. Although we’ll never know if the war would not have happened under different circumstances, after a month of Russian violence against Ukraine the two countries’ negotiators have reportedly agreed that it will reject joining NATO as part of a peace pact.

    Russia has long objected to NATO’s eastward expansion, particularly Ukraine’s de facto incorporation into the alliance. It repeatedly raised objections to NATO encircling its territory in the months leading up to its illegal invasion.

    Last week the head of the European Union’s foreign policy, Josep Borrell, even admitted the push to expand NATO into Ukraine was an error.

    The post NATO Is A Problem, Not The Solution appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Sanctions Against Wealthy Russians Are Largely Symbolic and Won’t End the War

    People in Russia visit local bank branch

    Every day that passes in Russia’s war on Ukraine, another mall or theater or maternity hospital is vaporized. Cities are under siege. Each day inches closer to a breaking strain, a point that — once crossed — risks a plunge into global nuclear confrontation.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are deploying economic sanctions, hoping they will convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters that it is time to go home. By any metric, the sanctions that have been levied against Russia, Putin and the ruling oligarchs are massive. Nations, banks, businesses, whole currencies have been denied them across the board, and more are still in the offing if this thing grinds on.

    Before an emergency NATO summit in Brussels today, President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce a new round of sanctions, along with a tightening of the current ones. Meanwhile, a bipartisan clutch of senators is working with the Treasury Department to lock down more than $130 billion in Russian gold reserves.

    There are three main perils to levying such ruinous sanctions, two that are well known and a third hardly discussed. The first is the danger of Putin deciding the economic damage being done to his country amounts to an existential threat, which then motivates him to menace the world with his nuclear arsenal to make them stop. A NATO move to further stymie Russia’s petroleum industry could elicit such a response, which is why the issue is being handled like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.

    The second is the bitter harm done to the Russian people, who are largely innocent of Putin’s crime beyond some being duped into supporting it by his state media. Putin does not seem to care if Russians starve in the darkness he has brought down upon them; his yacht-hiding pals on speed-dial with 12 numbers to the left of the decimal on their bank accounts are his primary, secondary and tertiary concern.

    The wrenching effect of those sanctions must therefore be our concern, for they are deeply concerning. Are they having the desired effect? Are they putting pressure on Putin’s allies, or are they merely damaging broad swaths of the Russian population? “The experience of U.S. sanctions’ impacts around the world is important,” writes Khury Petersen-Smith for Truthout, “especially because Washington and other Western capitals hold up sanctions as an alternative to war. We should understand them instead, however, as a weapon of war. Their devastating impact results in widespread suffering that may be quieter or less visible to most in the U.S. than an invasion or airstrikes are, but that is no less deadly.”

    On paper, at least, Putin’s pals are taking it in the chops. The truth, however, brings us to the third peril: the fiction of economic hardship, which is playing out among Russia’s wealthy elite even now.

    “Let us first recall that the freezing of assets held by Putin and his relatives is already part of the arsenal of sanctions that have been tried for several years,” explains economist and author Thomas Piketty. “The problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people, and can be circumvented by using nominees, especially as nothing has been done to systematically measure and cross-reference the real estate and financial portfolios held by each of them.”

    It always seems to come back to real estate, to land. Once upon a time, land ownership granted one the right to vote. Later, real estate became the preferred playground for money laundering. Now, in the age of the kleptocratic oligarch, land serves to hide assets while allowing the asset-holder to dodge international sanctions levied against their home country.

    These sanctions are supposed to be cramping the style of Putin’s oligarchs to such a degree that they gather the will to drag him back from the abyss … but this tactic will only succeed if the oligarchs — and Putin, himself a billionaire many times over — are the ones who are truly impacted.

    This is not happening; ordinary people are suffering in their place, and that suffering only promises to grow. The solution, according to Piketty, is to deploy sanctions that are far more specifically targeted than those currently in use. It would be the difference between using a scalpel and using a broadsword.

    “To bring the Russian state to heel, we must focus sanctions on the thin social layer of multimillionaires upon which the regime relies: a group much larger than a few dozen people, but much narrower than the Russian population in general,” argues Piketty. “To give you an idea, one could target the people who hold over €10m ($11m) in real estate and financial assets, or about 20,000 people, according to the latest available data. This represents 0.02% of the Russian adult population (currently 110 million)…. To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a ‘global financial registry’ or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries.”

    Unfortunately, such measures will be exceedingly difficult to impose, and for one reason: Russia’s billionaires are sustained and protected by the same financial system that sustains and protects Western and Chinese billionaires. The latter group will not willingly abandon these self-serving rules of capitalism, even if it means allowing Putin and his allies to remain largely untouched amid the suffering of the people.

    Do these Western wealthy elites support Putin and his war? Perhaps, but not nearly as much as they support the mechanisms of capitalism that build their fortunes. If those mechanisms are dismantled in order to punish the Russians, they will no longer serve the billionaire class as a whole, and that is not to be tolerated, no matter how high the bodies pile up. “So why has no progress still not been made in this direction?” asks Piketty. “For one simple reason: western wealthy people fear that such transparency will ultimately harm them.”

    Wealth must be extracted, wealth must be protected: These are the only two laws that really matter to that sub-segment of the global populace. As Jacob Broom was once noted to say, “Control the coinage and the courts; let the rabble have the rest.”

    That all this plays out beneath the shroud of war is the cruelest of ironies, for what is war but capitalism at its most robust, the most lucrative of all human endeavors? Every war lines the pockets of those who peddle the weapons, and among the peddlers in this war are more than a few of Putin’s friends. Try to imagine convincing the Carlyle Group to make George W. Bush back down from his Iraq invasion. Never in hell would that happen; the money was too good.

    At the barest minimum, we need to do better than the current sanctions, and we need to do so now. Piketty offers a blueprint for that endeavor, but there are surely others to consider as well. We need to knock down the financial barricades that separate the billionaires from even the notion of justice. More than that, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the shameful use of mass sanctions and collective punishment. Every day that passes inches us closer to Armageddon, and not even an oligarch can survive a nuke. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.