Sometimes I’m not sure what presents a greater threat to humanity, nuclear war or the colossal stupidity that has made it possible.
Due to the skyrocketing risk of a world-ending confrontation between the United States and Russia, World Socialist Website is re-releasing a series of interviews it conducted in 2017 with experts on the subject of nuclear war. One of them is with a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility named Steven Starr, which WSWS has titled “Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war”.
Starr discusses the research which has shown that in addition to the unthinkable horrors of flattened cities and nuclear fallout we’ve all been told about, “a war fought with existing US and Russian nuclear arsenals is predicted to make agriculture impossible for a decade or longer, dooming most people to die from a nuclear famine.”
Starr says a false narrative has been spun that the science behind nuclear winter theory is weak, a narrative I’ve had parroted at me from time to time in my commentary on this subject. He says the science is in fact peer-reviewed and robust, and actually makes very conservative estimates of the environmental havoc that would be unleashed by black carbon soot thrown into the stratosphere by a large nuclear exchange. But this science has been actively suppressed and marginalized by a junk science smear campaign and the slashing of research funding.
"there is no discussion of the existential threat of nuclear war … If we have the best scientists in the world telling us that a nuclear war would wipe out most of the human race, that should be our primary concern"#WW3#worldwar3#worldwariii#WWIIIhttps://t.co/A0D5gePl77
— Socialist Equality Party (Australia) (@SEP_Australia) March 15, 2022
“After the success of the smear campaign against nuclear winter, most people eventually accepted this narrative and funding for new research dried up,” Starr said. “This had a big impact on the public, who got the impression that the nuclear winter theory had been disproven. As a result, this issue is hardly ever talked about now in the mainstream media.”
“One of the reasons for this is that over the years, trillions of dollars have been spent on nuclear weapons,” Starr adds. “If the conclusions of the nuclear winter research—that nuclear war is suicide for all peoples and nations—had gained widespread acceptance and understanding, it is likely that the whole nuclear weapons industry would have been shut down.”
Indeed, when you’re talking about the movement of trillions of dollars (Obama committed $1 trillion to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal for the explicit purpose of better confronting Russia), you’re talking about the kind of money that any amount of underhanded gangster tactics would be employed to secure.
But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.
If people truly understood that their life and the lives of everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.
When I was growing up Americans were proud of fighting Nazis and afraid of a Nuclear War.
Now Americans are proud of arming Nazis and want to risk a Nuclear War.
So I think we’re seeing a broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed: because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to happen.
A responsible news media would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.
This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.
These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life. There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses they themselves don’t understand.
The Single Most Important Question In The World Right Now
"Is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?"https://t.co/EJk9ErQ2xj
In the aforementioned interview Starr also touches on the ease with which a nuclear war could be set off by a technical malfunction, and what the earliest moments of a nuclear war will likely look like:
If the US early warning systems detect a missile launch, the President can order a launch of retaliatory nuclear strike before incoming nuclear warheads take out communication systems and weapons. Of course, if this is a false warning of attack, then the “retaliatory” strike becomes a first-strike and a nuclear war has started.
Moreover, if somebody has launched a nuclear strike against the silos in which your nuclear weapons are housed in, you don’t retaliate by targeting their empty silos. You target their cities. Russia only has about 230 cities with a population greater than 100,000 and the US has 312. So it’s not that hard to wipe out a couple hundred cities in an initial salvo.
Starr also discusses the insane belief that Russia will probably back down when threatened with the possibility of nuclear war, a line of thinking that’s becoming so common today that it’s almost its own genre of natsec punditry:
The strategists often say, “Oh, well, Russia will back down.” What if they don’t? And why would they back down on their own border? Any US/NATO-Russian direct military conflict will very likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war.
In another 2017 World Socialist Website interview, this one with Los Alamos Study Group secretary and executive director Greg Mello, we get some more insight into the reality of the nuclear threat:
To a first approximation, in a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die. Some people in the southern hemisphere might survive, but probably not even them.
…
The imagination cannot encompass nuclear war. Nuclear war means nuclear winter. It means the collapse of very fragile electronic, financial, governmental, administrative systems that keep everyone alive. We’d be lucky to reboot in the early 19th century. And if enough weapons are detonated, the collapse of the Earth’s ozone layer would mean that every form of life that has eyes could be blinded. The combined effects of a US-Russian nuclear war would mean that pretty much every terrestrial mammal, and many plants, would become extinct. There would be a dramatic biological thinning.
The gulf between these expert analyses and what people are consuming in the news could not possibly be wider. People simply don’t understand what’s being done with their lives by powerful people who care only about imperial domination, and the powerful intend to keep it that way.
It doesn’t need to be like this. There’s no reason our planet needs to be dominated by any one single power structure, especially if doing so means risking complete annihilation. We should all be pushing for de-escalation, diplomacy and detente, and for the nations and peoples of this world to begin working together for the good of everyone.
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The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.
The US has poured weapons, military advisors, and political operatives into Ukraine for years. It has long coveted Ukraine for NATO. So in 2014 the US arranged a coup, with neo-nazi help, against the democratically elected president. The people in the Donbas region in the east resisted that coup and formed the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in self-defense. The illegitimate government in Kiev attacked them, aided by their neo-nazi militias and supported by the US. By the end of 2021 the war had cost 14,000 lives; 11,000 had been Ukrainians opposing the coup.
These Ukrainians resisted Kiev’s ban on their mother tongue, Russian; they resisted Kiev’s ethnic cleansing policies against Russophones; they resisted Kiev’s neoliberal, US-aligned politics.
Last week, Reuters/Ipsos reported on a poll that found some 74% of Americans said the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine. This was a surprising result, because there was strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to such an action. Typically, public opinion―especially on foreign policy―tends to reflect the prevailing political consensus.
The method of testing wastewater to detect virus levels within a whole population has been around since the days of polio, but it took a March 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 in Austria to turn the technique into a mainstay in the pandemic fight. In the U.S., where the last president fled even the idea of mass COVID testing for fear of harming his reelection campaign, wastewater testing has become one of the best and only ways to track viral trends among broad swaths of the population.
That’s the good news. The bad news? The numbers are inching up, again. “A wastewater network that monitors for Covid-19 trends is warning that cases are once again rising in many parts of the U.S., according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data,” reportsBloomberg News. “More than a third of the CDC’s wastewater sample sites across the U.S. showed rising Covid-19 trends in the period ending March 1 to March 10, though reported cases have stayed near a recent low.”
This brings to bear a number of disturbing possibilities. Scientists have been watching the BA.2 subvariant with growing levels of concern; it is already making a strong showing in China and parts of Europe. It is entirely possible BA.2 is already present here in the U.S., and is at least partially responsible for the rise in cases across the country. If so, the damage done by Delta and Omicron will be instructive in the weeks and months to come.
It has been wisely said, however, that one should not think of zebras upon hearing hoofbeats. Occam’s Razor suggests an exhausted nation is shedding its personal COVID protections on the gossamer promise that a corner has been turned. Mask mandates are all but gone except in a few key and continually contentious arenas, such as school districts and commercial airlines. Thus, the current rise in cases could be due to a segment of the populace letting down its defenses because the TV said, “Everything’s cool now, y’all, come on out and be capitalists again.”
The news may tell you we’re returning to “normalcy,” but 8,000 dead a week tells a different story; if this uptick continues, it runs the risk of taxing our already-battered health care infrastructure if/when BA.2 does come knocking.
The new COVID outbreak in China, on the other hand, has the potential to rattle the entire world. The Chinese government has instituted a full-scale lockdown in several regions, which is directly impacting tech giants like Foxconn, Tencent and Huawei. Any significant disruption could further undermine the global supply chain, and risks exacerbating growing inflationary pressures. Foxconn, whose client list includes Apple, informedCNN upon query that the “date of factory resumption is to be advised by the local government.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s bloody war in Ukraine is having a ruinous effect on another global supply chain, this one involving food. “At least 50 countries depend on Russia and Ukraine for 30 percent or more of their wheat supply,” reports the Guardian, “and many developing countries in northern Africa, Asia and the near east are among the most reliant. Poor countries are bearing the brunt of the price increases. Many of the poorest countries were already struggling financially, with some facing debt crises, amid the pandemic.”
War, famine, pestilence… three horsemen of the apocalypse as devised by John of Patmos. The fourth? “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
I’ve never been the praying type, so let’s keep it simple and bring it all back to the wastewater: We’re in deep shit, friends.
An employee of a Russian television station who went missing after she protested the government’s war with Ukraine on the air has been found, her lawyers indicated on Tuesday.
On Monday, Marina Ovsyannikova, who worked as an editor for the state-run Channel 1 station in Russia, interrupted a live broadcast of the country’s most-watched news program by holding up a sign with anti-war language and yelling “Stop the War” over the words of the station’s anchor.
Her sign included the words “No War,” and “Don’t believe the propaganda, they’re lying to you here.”
The show quickly cut from filming the anchor to stock footage, and Ovsyannikova was immediately detained. Following her arrest, her lawyers released a video statement explaining why she felt compelled to take action; in it, Ovsyannikova explained that she is “deeply ashamed” to have worked for the station, as it produced “Kremlin propaganda” that she disagreed with.
A female employee of a Russian television channel protests no to war live on air
A spokesperson for the Russian government later tried to downplay Ovsyannikova’s protest as “hooliganism.” But on Tuesday, it appeared that the Kremlin was taking her supposed offense seriously, as Ovsyannikova briefly went missing, according to her lawyers, who said they could not locate their client.
Later on Tuesday, Ovsyannikova and one of her lawyers, Anton Gashinsky, showed that she was no longer missing by sharing a photo of themselves in a Moscow court on social media.
Ovsyannikova’s arrest highlights the dangers that Russian residents face in standing up to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There is currently a growing anti-war movement within the country, with protests springing up in dozens of Russian cities over the past three weeks.
Kremlin authorities have responded to these protests by arresting and detaining people. At the start of this month, the Russian government criminalized protests against its invasion of Ukraine; individuals who are found guilty of illegally protesting the war — or independently reporting on it — face up to 15 years in prison.
As of last week, around 13,000 Russians had been arrested by the country’s police for speaking out against the invasion.
On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan held seven-hour talks in Rome with Yang Jiechi, one of China’s top foreign policy officials. According to the White House, the two officials had a “substantial discussion” on Russia and Ukraine.
In recent years, China and Russia have grown closer together as they both have faced similar pressure from the US and its allies. A Biden administration official told reporters that the US has “deep concerns about China’s alignment with Russia at this time” and said Sullivan warned China of potential “consequences” for certain actions.
“What we have conveyed — and what was conveyed by our national security adviser in this meeting — is that, should they provide military or other assistance that of course violates sanctions or supports the war effort, that there will be significant consequences,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
The mayor of Kyiv has declared a 36-hour curfew after a series of Russian missile strikes hit residential areas of the capital of Ukraine on Tuesday. Meanwhile, talks are resuming today between Ukraine and Russia, and the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia are traveling to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We get an update from outside of Kyiv from Peter Zalmayev, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, on the Russian invasion. “They’re not having any military successes, so they’re just bent on revenge and anger that they’re venting on civilians,” says Zalmayev. He says if Russian attacks continue on the same trend, Ukraine could see up to 50,000 civilians killed in the war, and that any agreement between the two countries will be flawed, as “the Russian side has shown that they cannot be trusted.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: The mayor of Kyiv has declared a 35-hour curfew after a series of Russian missile strikes hit residential areas of Ukraine’s capital. At least two people died when a Russian missile hit a 16-story apartment complex. This comes as the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to meet with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Talks are also resuming today between Ukraine and Russia. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for an immediate end to the war.
SECRETARY–GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Ukraine is on fire. The country is being decimated before the eyes of the world. The impact on civilians is reaching terrifying proportions. Countless innocent people, including women and children, have been killed. After being hit by Russian forces, roads, airports and schools lie in ruins. According to the World Health Organization, at least 24 health facilities have suffered attacks. Hundreds of thousands of people are without water or electricity. And with each passing hour, two things are increasingly clear. First, it keeps getting worse. Second, whatever the outcome, this war will have no winners, only losers.
AMYGOODMAN: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. We go now to Ukraine, where we’re joined by Peter Zalmayev, the director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, joining us from outside of Kyiv.
Peter, welcome to Democracy Now!
PETERZALMAYEV: Thank you. Thank you, Amy.
AMYGOODMAN: You have this emergency curfew that has just been imposed. What is it? Thirty-five, 36 hours. Can you describe what you’re experiencing right now in your community?
PETERZALMAYEV: Well, the curfew being imposed by the mayor is definitely — is clearly designed to prevent from any provocations inside. You know, we now have information that weeks prior to the invasion, Russians have sent their diversionary groups, so these clandestine cells, to infiltrate the Ukrainian cities, particularly Kyiv. There have been a few dozen identified during the first phase of the war when there was an attack on Kyiv, an attempt to take Kyiv by force. Several of these, numbering in the hundreds, were neutralized, by which I mean destroyed. But the fear is that there’s still a lot of them there, and they will try to attack from the inside.
And so, Kyiv is living relatively — you know, considering that we have two, three rocket attacks per day now, it’s already getting normalized, the idea that the capital of Ukraine is getting rocket attacks on it, a few people die every day. It’s still not on the scale, thank god, of Mariupol, where there are thousands reported dead. So, overall, I would say that the situation is — there’s no panic necessarily. The steady flow of evacuees is always proceeding. But about a half of the prewar population of Kyiv remains, which is about 2 million people.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter, you were predicting that Putin would invade in early February, when most people were saying he wouldn’t dare do this at this extensive level of the whole country. Why did you think this? And talk about what exactly this means for the population of Ukraine. Of course, he expected, like Rumsfeld did when the U.S. invaded Iraq, to be met with flowers and applause. To say the least, this not only has happened, but it’s brought together perhaps a very fractured society.
PETERZALMAYEV: Well, indeed, you know, Vladimir Putin’s miscalculation is pretty glaring. You know, he constantly is trying to poke America in the eyes with what he claims is its hypocrisy, such as going into Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 and then building unrealistic expectations, like you said, about how they would be greeted, such as greeted as liberators. Putin is — you know, whatever he claims about the U.S. misadventures in the Middle East, he’s repeating — he seems to be repeating the same mistakes. You know, he miscalculated the strength of the resistance, the morass that he would sink into and the willingness of Ukrainians to greet Russians as liberators. That has not panned out like that.
So, when I was saying in February that the invasion was coming, it was obviously clear that for Vladimir Putin to back down after having amassed 200,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine would have been political suicide, just as much as it is for him now to sort of roll back his troops is tantamount to, you know, political and also physical suicide almost, I would say. That’s why you hear this talk about the need to find an off-ramp for Vladimir Putin, so he can announce victory. That’s a separate subject for conversation, whether that should be happening.
When you talk about the — if you ask me about Ukrainian society, what it has done to the Ukrainian society, well, first of all, almost 3 million people have fled Ukraine. But just judging from what I’m seeing driving around — I’ve driven hundreds of miles around Ukraine in the last two, three weeks — I have not seen that level of national consciousness ever in my life. I mean, the only precedent for that would be the war of the World War II in 1940s. I mean, this is as black and white an issue for Ukrainians as it’s ever been, no shades of gray here. This is a war for liberation. It’s a war for freedom. I mean, normally in peaceful times, I would sort of shy away from these terms as too lofty, maybe almost cheesy, you know, if you’ll allow me. But, I mean, these are the terms in which we think right now. We look at the invading hordes, we call them “Orcs,” sort of like in the Tolkien language. We call Russia “Mordor.” It’s actually now accepted — I mean, you hear it from Russia, from Ukrainian TV presenters. This is sort of the semi-official way to describe what we’re seeing and the barbarity to which Vladimir Putin’s troops have resorted in bombing our city centers, our infrastructure. The damage is estimated upwards of $100 billion already. It is clear that they’re not having any military successes, so they’re just really — they’re just bent on revenge and anger that they’re venting on civilians.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter Zalmayev, you actually are from Donetsk. Can you talk about what’s happening there?
PETERZALMAYEV: You know, it was kind of quiet for a while, because — simply because the frontline there, having existed in place since 2014, was the most fortified. That’s why you see this incredible battle for Mariupol. I mean, I wouldn’t be at liberty to venture a guess how many fighters are still there, but the invading force that has encircled Mariupol is infinitely bigger, and yet they are not having — I mean, they’re killing civilians, but they’re not achieving their goal. They have yet to take a major population center anywhere in Ukraine, with the exception of Kherson, which every day you have sporadic pro-Ukrainian rallies there, and they can’t put them down.
So, coming back to Donetsk, it was relatively quiet, and then the quiet was shattered yesterday when a rocket apparently was blown off the skies and landed right smack in the center of the city, next to one of my apartments. I own several apartments, which have been sitting empty there this whole time. And one of them blew out all the windows in the apartment. The person who’s been watching over the apartments just called me and told me that, you know, it’s looking pretty bad. It was large devastation. And as many — we’re hearing as many as 20 people were killed. We’re not sure which rocket it was. A true fog of war situation. And so, here you go.
AMYGOODMAN: We’re hearing numbers as high as 20,000 dead in Mariupol, in the south. Is that possible?
PETERZALMAYEV: Yes, I heard this, as well. I would doubt that figure. We’re talking definitely several thousand. The last I heard was 2,000 to 3,000. Twenty thousand may be an exaggeration, even though — you know, that’s shaky ground when you’re trying to question the figures by people who are there. So, I don’t believe it’s 20,000, but we’re definitely talking 3,000 or so. And if that is the case, and if the situation — if the trend sort of continues the same way, we are going to see the worst-case scenario that was actually mentioned by a German tabloid, Bild, right before the war, which actually, I’ll be honest with you, outraged me. I could not believe that this would be our reality, but actually it predicted as many as 50,000 civilians deaths. So far, I can’t tell you the — you know, we’re talking maybe up to 5,000 civilians deaths in the country. But considering that Vladimir Putin has not shown any decrease in appetite bombing us, I mean, you know, just God knows how much more casualties we will suffer.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter Zalmayev, you mentioned the off-ramp for Putin. What do you see that could be? And what would be acceptable to the people of Ukraine?
PETERZALMAYEV: Well, an off-ramp, obviously, he’s seeking — at least on paper, he’s seeking for — he’s seeking that Ukraine declare a neutral status, a sort of Finlandization — that’s sort of been bandied about, this term — and an official decision to stop pursuing NATO membership. I think those are very doable. I do not believe they’re really what have been motivating Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. I think it’s a very old-school, 19th century war of subjugation, war of land conquest, that we’re seeing from Vladimir Putin, the guy who does not use internet and is very much mired in his own kind of old-school thinking of military glory and conquest. But at least on paper, their official displeasure has been NATO expansion, as you know, all along. That is something Ukraine has already sent signs it’s willing to compromise on, and I think it is willing to announce it will be neutral and, you know, basically move away from NATO membership process.
But, once again, whether that will satisfy Vladimir Putin, I’m not sure, because also connected with it are security guarantees that Ukraine needs to get from Russia in return. In 1994, Budapest Memorandum was signed, according to which Ukraine would turn over its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. Well, we’re seeing now how much worth that paper was worth that it was written on, the Budapest Memorandum. So, what kind of security guarantees will Ukraine receive this time? Vladimir Putin wants to establish a new status quo, get more of Ukraine’s territory. Ideally, he wants to cut Ukraine off from all access to the sea and then start negotiating. Well, that’s not a viable construct for Ukraine. I do not think so. And Vladimir Putin, once again, keep in mind, whatever paper you sign, whatever agreement you reach, the Russian side has shown that it cannot be trusted.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter, you are a television host, and I’m wondering if you can talk about the meaning of what just happened in Moscow. You have the state TV employee, a longtime producer there, who stood up behind the presenter and held a “no war” sign, in English and Russian. She had issued, also had prepared in advance — her name is Marina Ovsyannikova — a statement where she was wearing a necklace that is red and white and blue, and blue and yellow, for the Ukraine and Russian colors. And she has disappeared. It seems that she has been arrested. It is not clear. People have not been in touch with her. The significance of this protest, and also of the mass Russian antiwar protests? What does that mean to you as a Ukrainian?
PETERZALMAYEV: Well, it means quite a bit. You know, we are definitely worried about this lady, a journalist, our colleague. Keep in mind, Russia has just passed this draconian law that envisions 15 years in a prison term for just such actions as you mentioned by this reporter, 15 years in jail for daring to criticize the government and its conduct in Ukraine. Even calling it a war may land you in prison, simply because the Russian side refuses to call it what it is, and the official term for it is “special operation.”
I am doubtful as to this having necessarily a domino effect, even though since then we’ve heard one very well-known anchor on another channel has stepped down since. But as far as leading to a domino effect and also trying to overcome this informational blockade that Vladimir Putin has imposed on Russia, that is doubtful. That is a one-off, I think. And it actually led, in Ukraine, to suspicions about the motivation of this and who the owner of the channel is and how maybe they are trying to position themselves to win an indulgence in the West, to be able to flee to the West, to not have sanctions placed against them, you know, to point to this lady and say, “Well, see? This is what we did.” I mean, all kind of cynicism about this. I want to take this at its face value, and I would just say that what this lady did is really hard to understand for anyone who is not in Russia.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter Zalmayev, I want to thank you for being with us, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative. Finally, we have just 10 seconds, but the significance of the prime ministers of Poland, Slovenia, as well as Czech Republic, coming to meet with Zelensky in Ukraine’s capital, where you are, in Kyiv?
PETERZALMAYEV: An incredible vote of confidence in Kyiv, in Ukraine, in the ability of Ukrainians to hold their capital, to defend it, a show of support. We need as much of that as we can.
AMYGOODMAN: Peter Zalmayev, thank you so much for being with us, hosting a television program in Ukraine, based just outside of Kyiv.
Coming up, Joshua Yaffa is with us, of The New Yorker. He has just left Ukraine. His latest piece, “What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine.” He’ll take us on his journey. Stay with us.
[break]
AMYGOODMAN: “The Willow Board,” a Ukrainian folk song performed by Ukrainian violinists sheltering from the war in basement shelters around Ukraine, and they are joined on Zoom by professional violinists from around the world, each with their little flag of their country. The collaboration included these videos sent by 94 violinists from 29 countries in just 48 hours. For our radio listeners, go to democracynow.org and check it out.
The head of the United Nations warned Monday that Russia’s assault on Ukraine is pushing the global food system to the brink of disaster as wheat prices skyrocket and key supply chains are thrown into chaos, threatening a hunger crisis in Europe and well beyond.
“Russia and Ukraine represent more than half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil and about 30% of the world’s wheat,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in remarks to the press in New York City. “Ukraine alone provides more than half of the World Food Programme’s wheat supply… All of this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.”
Oxfam International sounded the alarm Tuesday over the impact that Russia’s war on Ukraine could have on the already hunger-stricken people of Syria, a country that relies heavily on imports from Russia.
Guterres noted in his statement that, weeks into Russia’s invasion, “grain prices have already exceeded those at the start of the Arab Spring and the food riots of 2007-2008” and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) global food prices index is now “at its highest level ever.”
“Forty-five African and least-developed countries import at least one-third of their wheat from Ukraine [or] Russia — 18 of those countries import at least 50%,” Guterres continued. “This includes countries like Burkina Faso, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. We must do everything possible to avert a hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system.”
Guterres also warned that Russia’s invasion of its neighbor and President Vladimir Putin’s alarming rhetoric has brought the prospect of a full-blown nuclear war “back within the realm of possibility.”
“Further escalation of the war, whether by accident or design, threatens all of humanity. Raising the alert of Russian nuclear forces is a bone-chilling development,” Guterres said. “It’s time to stop the horror unleashed on the people of Ukraine and get on the path of diplomacy and peace.”
The U.N. chief’s urgent appeal for a halt to the conflict came as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators prepared for another round of talks Tuesday amid Russia’s continued military onslaught. According to the Associated Press, “Russia’s relentless bombardment of Ukraine edged closer to central Kyiv on Tuesday, with a series of strikes hitting a residential neighborhood.”
“Shortly before dawn, large explosions thundered across Kyiv from what Ukrainian authorities said [were] artillery strikes,” AP reported. “The shelling ignited a huge fire and a frantic rescue effort in a 15-story apartment building. At least one person was killed and others remain trapped inside.”
Russia’s intensifying attacks on the Ukrainian capital came as the leaders of Slovenia, Poland, and the Czech Republic announced they would visit Kyiv on Tuesday to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a show of support.
In an address Monday night, Zelenskyy — who is demanding an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian troops — sounded a note of cautious optimism following the latest round of diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine’s delegations, saying the discussions went “pretty well.”
(Reuters) -Britain will pay people to open their homes to Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion as the government moves to deflect anger over its response to the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War Two.
The new scheme called “Homes for Ukraine” will let refugees from the war come to Britain even if they do not have family ties, the government said on Sunday.
Britain will pay people 350 pounds ($456) a month if they can offer refugees a spare room or property for a minimum period of six months.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to portray Britain as helping lead the global response to the Russian invasion – which Moscow calls a “special operation” – but his government has faced criticism over delays in accepting refugees.
Lawmakers from all the main political parties have attacked the government’s insistence that Ukrainians seek visas and biometric tests before arriving in Britain, saying this prioritised bureaucracy over the welfare of those fleeing war.
Under the new scheme, members of the public, charities, businesses and community groups should be able to offer accommodation via a web page by the end of next week, the government said.
“The UK stands behind Ukraine in their darkest hour and the British public understand the need to get as many people to safety as quickly as we can,” Michael Gove, the minister for housing, said in a statement.
“I urge people across the country to join the national effort and offer support to our Ukrainian friends. Together we can give a safe home to those who so desperately need it.”
Anyone offering a room or home will have to show that the accommodation meets standards and they may have to undergo criminal record checks.
In an interview on Sky News, Gove estimated tens of thousands of Ukrainians could come to Britain via this route, with the first arrivals likely in around a week’s time.
Gove said local authorities would be given just over 10,000 pounds per Ukrainian to help fund the additional demands on public services, with extra funding for school-age children.
The number of refugees fleeing Ukraine could rise to more than 4 million, double the current estimates of about 2 million, the UN’s Refugee Agency said last week. Britain has so far issued visas to around 3,000 Ukrainians.
Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to a drug dealer who managed to hook western nations on Russian supplies of oil and gas, ahead of a trip to the Middle East in an attempt to diversify the sources of Britain’s energy imports.
The UK prime minister urged European countries to “get ourselves off that addiction” and said he wanted support from “the widest possible coalition” to help offset the pressures caused by spiralling oil and gas prices.
Nineteen years ago, in March 2003, I resigned as a U.S. diplomat in opposition to the President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. I joined two other U.S diplomats, Brady Kiesling and John Brown, who had resigned in weeks previous to my resignation. We heard from fellow U.S. diplomats assigned to U.S. embassies around the world that they too believed that the decision of the Bush administration would have long term negative consequences for the U.S. and the world, but for a variety of reasons, no one joined us in resignation until later. Several initial critics of our resignations later told us they were wrong and they agreed that the decision of the U.S. government to wage war on Iraq was disastrous.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” This simple yet profound statement is attributed to many, including Hiram Johnson in a speech in the U.S. Senate in 1918, during the “war to end all wars.” Hiram Johnson was a progressive Republican who had been elected to the Senate from California that very year. He remained in the Senate until he died of old age on August 6, 1945, the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan.
The Baltimore Sun quoted Senator Johnson more fully in 1929, during a Senate debate on an international agreement called the “General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy” (also known as the Kellogg-Briand Treaty):
“The first casualty when war comes is truth, and whenever there is a war, and whenever an individual nation seeks to coerce by force of arms another, it always acts and always insists that it acts under self-defense.”
The shooting death of U.S. reporter Brent Renaud in Irpin, outside Kyiv, on Sunday, March 13, underscored the extraordinary dangers facing journalists covering Russia’s war in Ukraine.
As the invasion continued into its third week, four journalists spoke with CPJ about the physical and emotional toll of covering the conflict.
CPJ emailed the Russian defense ministry for comment about the military firing on journalists and emailed the Ukrainian military for comment about press access but received no responses.
Antoine Boddaert, documentary filmmaker with France’s Hikari Media, reporting for European public service channel ARTE
I’ve been working in the Lviv area. We made one little documentary about the information war between Russia and Ukraine. We wanted to show how Ukrainians are confronting Russian propaganda and how they cover the war. Our second documentary is about a small Ukrainian village of fewer than 200 inhabitants. [In other media] we have seen almost exclusively stories set in cities, and we wanted to show Ukrainian life in small villages and rural areas. We met almost exclusively women, children, and old men as the [other] men were mobilized [in the Ukrainian forces]. We met a family with nine children and the mother was home schooling them. My goal is to tell the story of the war through a different lens, to tell the stories that other journalists don’t because they are obsessed with being near the frontline.
The main difficulty we confronted was that people suspected that we were spies, which is understandable in wartime. Building good relationships with our subjects wasn’t easy at first, but as they began to get comfortable with us, their testimonies were really precious. We also faced problems accessing certain areas from [Ukrainian] police, but once they saw our press cards, our passports, and our mission letters [from the news organization] they let us work. Military [press] accreditation is really difficult to obtain. I think it can help you a lot on the ground but it’s not essential – we were able to work without it.
Benas Gerdziunas, reporting for Lithuania’s National Radio and Television (LRT)
[Covering this war] is a repeat of the experience I have had in the Donbas area [in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed rebels] the last seven years — if you don’t have personal contacts, you get nothing. This time, after coordinating an embed with one [Ukrainian] military unit and spending two days waiting – during which we had two meetings, including with the commander, discussing all the possible ways of working together — they backtracked and refused to take us along. The military simply does not provide access. As you can probably see from the pictures in the media, most of the fighting has been captured as an “aftermath” story. Importantly, when access is denied, journalists take risks. Most of the teams I know have worked on a “Let’s go and see” basis. For me, in the last few years in Donbas, this has led to dangerous situations – I was fired upon more than once, including one time when our vehicle was almost hit by an anti-tank missile. At present, it seems that many media crews are forced to operate this way – arriving onsite, interviewing people, capturing the footage that they need, and leaving [rather than coordinating with the Ukrainian army].
I work with Ukrainian and foreign media. I started working as a photographer covering the military during the Revolution of Dignity [the Maidan Revolution of 2014 when protesters ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych], and later I took photographs in eastern Ukraine. When the first explosions took place over Kyiv on February 24, I did not sleep. I realized what had started. Those first two weeks of real war, I had so many different internal reactions — panic, fear, danger, [the need for] security and protection, pain, anger, love. War exacerbates many feelings. So far, I have not faced any significant obstacles from the Ukrainian authorities in filming. With experience, you understand where you can take pictures and when you can’t, when to remove the camera and hide it. So far, my experience as a military photographer is limited to my country, which makes it twice as hard and painful. Surprisingly, some foreign correspondents sometimes behave too cynically [about the toll of the war]. During [my first two weeks of coverage], several shells flew nearby. Despite the fact that my colleagues and I were wearing clothing marked “PRESS,” once Russian troops fired at us near the destroyed bridge to Irpin [a city in northern Ukraine that has seen heavy Russian attacks]. I have a small scratch on my leg from a shell fragment and a hole in my pants. Civilians died at the same place.
Adam Bihari, reporting for Hungarian news site HVG.hu
This war has been totally unpredictable from the start. [After arriving in Kyiv on February 23] I was planning to go to the frontline [in eastern Ukraine] on the 24th, but instead, the frontline came to me. It is absolutely different from my experiences during the contained local war in the Donbas [between Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine]. [Now] every corner could be the next frontline, there are barely any safe areas in Ukraine. I knew the sound of constant sirens from [covering] war in Israel, but I felt much, much less safe in Kyiv, without an Iron Dome [Israel’s missile defense system] and with one of the largest armies in the world [Russia] against the city.
I have witnessed three floors of a residential building blown to pieces by a rocket in Kyiv, thousands of innocent civilians living underground. I saw human remains after a fierce fight at the Beresteiska metro station [in Kyiv]. And I have experienced the mental state of being under constant siege for a week. Yet, I have also witnessed the determination of civilians, soldiers, and volunteers across the city.
Even though my two colleagues and I are from Hungary, and our government is close with Russian leadership, we never heard even the slightest slur against us and everyone was super helpful. [Now back in Hungary] I work as a volunteer to help [Ukrainian] refugees.
Today when working as a volunteer, I met an elderly woman at the railway station in Budapest, who is a refugee from Kyiv. She didn’t speak English — I showed her a photo I took at a residential building that was blown up in a rocket attack near Boryspil [airport]. She said through an interpreter who suddenly appeared that her friend’s son lived in that building. We looked at each other for just one second, with no common language — at that moment, we didn’t need any.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Natalie Gryvnyak/CPJ Ukraine consultant.
Patrick Lancaster is an American video-journalist and U.S. Navy veteran fluent in Russian who has reported from the Donbass since 2014. His latest video posted on March 10 shows how people living on the edge of Donetsk, one kilometer from the Ukrainian position in Peski, have been subjected to constant shelling by the Ukrainian military over the last eight years and have had to survive living underground in bomb shelters.
The Russophobic campaign straddles the entire western political spectrum, and it is fully endorsed by western liberals and cultural elites. The political credulity of the majority of the populations of the US and Western Europe has always been shocking to me. Ever since I arrived in the US to attend university in 1982, I could not believe how gullible my American peers of all races were in their unshakable belief that whatever their government or corporate media said, especially about other countries, was the absolute truth.
Oh, you can pull a million images and a million news briefs from the Internet to illustrate the powerful and their stupidity and their absolute disdain for the rest of us.
She laughs when asked about refugees, this time, from Ukraine. She is laughing about being in either the west or east flank in Poland. She doesn’t know for sure. This is the blunt end of a hammer. They all may be woke and full of civet-feces coffee and gourmet bacon-laced canopies, but they are still blunt ends of the stick. Look, she’s a multimillionaire, so they have a million and one excuses to go with their greenbacks. (Here, one source, RT, banned, on her “gaffs”!)
They all are — those old policy makers, those politicians, those diplomats — mulimillionaires. They are the blunt end of the protection rackets for the super rich and billionaire class. However, even multimillionaires can, with a pronouncement, a flip of the hand, jigger of the computer mouse, they can say, “We deem all Russian things off limits.” Imagine the power, and then those countries like China, so-called all powerful, accepting some of the sanctions, for now. USA is one tough hombre.
This is serious stuff — read Whitney’s, “Twice in a Century: Russia Faces a War of Annihilation”!
So, then, the $5.5 a gallon for gasoline. Again, the multimillionaires, the Greta “I Am Aspergers” Thornberg’s, they can all applaud the hurt locker their leaders are unleashing on the common folk (Russians), and we know Greta’s parents are, well, they are Swedish millionaires (with a small “m”). Actors! Whew!
Wheat prices, doubling? Electricity, doubling? Food shortages and food tripling? That is, doubling and tripling of the price of these items. When you are a multimillionaire like Biden or Harris, Nuland or Kagen (even DoD Generals are millionaires), and when your pay is a taxpayer-dredged paycheck, and when you have an all-expenses-paid suite of benefits, and when you have insider trader information, and when you have full-spectrum health care, and when you have accountants, CPAs, financial advisors in the backrooms assisting you, this doubling of foodstuffs, this dollar or two/three more for a gallon of gasoline, well, that’s a laughing matter. . . for THEM. I’ve heard many a multimillionaire Mainstream Media Press Hoaxes telling you and telling me and telling all those home health workers and slave wage workers that we have to suck it up, that is, this is the small small price to pay in order to liberate (send billions in terrorist-headed small and large arms) Ukraine for capitalism, well, they call it PayDay Democracy with a big “d” for Dollar. When you are making these funny jokes and imbecilic comments, as we hear from Harris on down the line of Georgetown-Harvard-Stanford-Yale grads, and yet there still will be no pitchforks and gallows for you, and, alas, that small price to pay for mainstreet USA and pensioner USA, well, well, they can still have a very fine and fun life in their multimillionaire dollar homes . . . . It is the sacrifice they take, letting us know, we should sacrifice, and yet we will consume their junk, gobble up their celebrity feces, wait with bated breath for their words and deeds to be announced on MDM, as they continue with their fun lives, no matter if the gallon goes to $5 or $7 or $10 a gallon.
But, then, think of granny. Think of her meds going up-up-up! The foodstuffs going up-up-up. And if she has a leak under her sink, or if she has a puddle of mud outside the door along the pathway out gushing into her basement . . . and if she has a car that needs some new used tires and spark plugs . . . and if she needs to visit friends once in a while one-way in that vehicle, say, 120 miles one way (she lives in a rural abode) . . . and if she has a cat that needs teeth pulled . . . and if she dares thinks about seeing an ailing sister across the country via a plane, oh, well, let’s laugh at the pain she is now under. You know how much a plane ticket is? That’s the laughing break-point for granny. From podunk town Oregon to Virginia, or Florida: do the math on what a Roundtrip ticket sets granny back. But then these left/right politicians and woke/woodern corporate leaders can say, “Suck it up. It’s only $5 a gallon for gas. Look what those blonde and blue eyed ones in the Ukraine are suffering. Suck it up for a Ukraine refugee” (recall: eat all those spuds and green beans cuz a kid in China is starving . . . .!)
Let’s have a great laughing circle jerk as sanctions kill, and lies and mass incompetence murder people, and massive war profiteering wounds both humanity and townships, and where massive Covid-19 profiteering creates lingering death and long-term mental instability. As massive stock trading on those futures and those offensive weapons companies grow grow grow, while the Kamala Harrises of the world, really, get into the cackling mood on any number of topics for which she knows nothing, we are the sufferers. All those multimillionaire laughing hyenas, and I see Hillary and Bill are at it again with their continuing criminal enterprise, the Clinton Foundation!
Let’s hear about Elon Musk’s latest creepy surrogate childbirth. Let’s hear about this $1 million here and that $20 million there shoved down some redneck university football coach’s mouth while the college students are under another load of debt.
Let’s laugh it all off, the reality of this war, or that incursion, this sanction/that sanction, or that weaponized economic movement toward more of the gilded laughing class, that Hyena Laughing Multimillionaire Chorus. We can have Stephen Colbert help us laugh. Where’s Jon Leibowitz Stewart and Sean Penn when we need them? We need their multimillionaire advice, ASAP, and their laughs! “It’s only a few bucks more for a gallon of gas . . . deal with it,” old Colbert chortled.
Imagine, all those months and years The Putin warned against all that EU-Nato-UK-USA aggressive shit coming to Russia’s borders. All those times he petitioned, nyet, nyet, nyet!
Shifting now to make an analogy — Now, interestingly, I have been involved in a SWAT killing, that is, one of our clients — homeless veteran — had a suicidal moment alone, in his truck, with a handgun. Roads cordoned off. Everything around the Portland Salvation Army’s facility lock-downed. News at Six and Headlines at Ten there. Massive police armed presence. Armored trucks and gun turret vehicle, and then, of course, all guns drawn and three nifty SEAL trained snipers.
They gave him two and a half hours to get his shit together, and then, bam, 13 shots, seven to the body. He was handcuffed and lived. He was by himself. Suicide Not By Cops.
Another two-hour standoff. And, then, bullets to the head. Imagine that. I have been around cops most of my life, and I was a city and rural reporter, newspapers, that is, and covered the cop beats — local, feds, military, county. I have interviewed FBI, and I have been in some K9 units for both city and military cops. The bottom line is — there is absolutely a one in a million chance someone who threatens cops in a standoff in his car yelling “bomb, bomb, bomb” has a bomb. Absolutely Zero chance, really. Lots of TV shows and Netflix series, aside.
So, Putin gives the world, the EU, the UK-USA-Five Eyes, Nato, what, a month, a year, several years, eight years warning about needing those missiles and other weapons off of Ukraine’s soil?
Nothing like the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there shall be no military or no nothing allowed in the Western Hemisphere, err, in the US’s Neighborhood; i.e., backyard!
That old soft shoe — survival of the fittest or most riches or best placed bribes. That loving spoonful, here, all those pensioners, all those with multiple chronic illnesses, all those people in housing that is falling apart, all those loans hobbling folk. Choices between medications, or food. This is the country, man, USA, this is it for the epitome of exceptionalism.
Those $57 billion in loans the other laughing hyena, Zelensky the Comic, that’s what he wants forgiven. Laughing, while demanding more weaponry, more billions. That’s the jig is up game when you are a testing lab (country) for GMOs, drugs, and, well, bioweapons.
It’s funny stuff, the billions he has in Costa Rica (maybe) and the mansion in Florida ($28 million valued). These are laughing matters, and VP Harris is just one in a long line of laughers in the multimillionaire category; or for those in the billionaire’s “mile high screw the hundreds of millions of us club,” the laughing is incredible, cowboy hats and all!
Again, granny and the kiddos. When I was working as a reporter in Southern Arizona, I did a couple of pieces on the O’Malley Clan — a group of people, many in the same family, who would take their panel trucks and pick-up trucks and go to trailer parks and low income housing tracts and get old people to pay for roofing, for gutter work, for all sorts of things that the O’Malley Clan said needed fixing. Then, up on the roof, and a five gallon white can of paint later, leaky roof fixed. A cool $800 cash for a $75 five gallon of roof sealant. This is the style of the American who sees PT Barnum as a god, that sucker born every second, man oh man, that god.
Of course, States Attorney General had some squads trying to break up those O’Malley rings, but imagine, now 42 years later, and the amount of pure scam, pure fraud, pure bilking, pure rip-off, pure lying and chronic cheating that have cascaded into the American culture.
The amount of multiple millions stolen from granny and from kiddo is out the roof, out of the sky. And those Laughing Politicians and All Those Amazing Celebrities, all of them, just rah-rahing the sanctions, the price of oil going up up up, all the strain and weathering on common people who can’t afford what’s going on in their Circle Jerks.
The blame is on capitalism, on predatory and casino capitalism. The Gilded Agers, the deep state, all those Eichmann’s making money with the blood of granny and kiddo on their hands.
The laughing all the way to their offshore banks — and then, well, DeltaCron will be coming to a neighborhood around Halloween.
Those bioweapons, man:
Every day, every moment of these scams, these false flags, this depravity of Empire USA, all of those things, shit, it is, as McGovern and Mearsheimer and Matlock say, this is not a done deal, MSM.
Those chickens have come home to roost and roost and crap and crap:
A revealing Portside article of Feb. 14 describes how 36 American states either have or are seeking to pass laws that censor the teaching of both local and national history so as to tell a traditional, Eurocentric story. This effort seeks to deny the demonstrable facts about the role racism has played in shaping social and economic development since the nation’s inception. Against this trend, 17 U.S. states have moved to officially expand their history and social studies curriculum to make it more racially and class inclusive.
We should state clearly that the teaching of such a culturally approved official history has always been pursued in the United States, and is indeed not just an American tactic. It is a ubiquitous practice in much of the world. As public education evolved in the American colonies during the 19th century, it had specific goals: (1) to make the young as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty. If in this effort there was any reference to or concern for “the truth,” it was allegedly to be represented by the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. — Lawrence Davidson
[ The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0) ]
But, again, it’s the old lady down the lane. The man and child living in their RV, and it is the person just trying to live out a life with few things having no one willing to come out and saw up the downed tree and patch the hole in the side of the house. Little homes with roof bids at $20,000!
Those lovely places, Israel, now Ukraine, where money is stuffed, again, down those Hyenas’ mouths while the land here is more and more susceptible to waves, winds, rising oceans, inundation.
Pacific Northwest coastal communities are at risk from earthquakes, including “The Really Big One”, tsunamis, sea level rise, landslides, erosion, and increased precipitation. Stretching from Cape Mendocino, California through Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, Canada, these Cascadia communities are calling for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience to these coastal hazards. (Event, March 16)
Yet, here we are, the war, the Putin, after how many years stating that EU-UK-USA-Five Eyes-Nato to stand down.
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened. (Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.)
Wow! A picture says a million words from 100 million misinformed people:
Max Blumenthal on Twitter: “Larry Summers – who presided over the demolition and plundering of Russia’s economy in the 1990’s and pushed policies that led to the US financial crash – says Americans need to suffer higher gas & food prices and inflation ‘as the price of fighting tyranny.’”
A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations.
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.
In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.
“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” (source)
This seems like the poster plastered around town, no, or is Word Press now in the employ of the censors? Maybe we can put a question mark behind, “8 Real Threats to Humanity?” Does that work better?
As Russia steps up its assault on Ukraine and its forces advance on Kyiv, peace talks between the two sides were scheduled to resume today for the fourth time, but have now been postponed until tomorrow. Unfortunately, some opportunities for a peace agreement have already been squandered, so it’s hard to be optimistic about when the war will end. Regardless of when or how the war ends, though, its impact is already being felt across the international security system, as the rearmament of Europe shows. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also complicates the urgent fight against the climate crisis. The war takes a heavy toll on Ukraine and on the environment, but it also gives the fossil fuel industry extra leverage among governments.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and dissident Noam Chomsky shares his insights about the prospects for peace in Ukraine and how this war may impact our efforts to combat global warming.
Noam Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, 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, while a fourth round of negotiations was scheduled to take place today between Russian and Ukrainian representatives, it is now postponed until tomorrow, and it still seems unlikely that peace will be reached in Ukraine any time soon. Ukrainians don’t appear likely to surrender, and Putin seems determined to continue his invasion. In that context, what do you think of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s response to Vladimir Putin’s four core demands, which were (a) cease military action, (b) acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, (c) amend the Ukrainian constitution to enshrine neutrality, and (d) recognize the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: Before responding, I would like to stress the crucial issue that must be in the forefront of all discussions of this terrible tragedy: We must find a way to bring this war to an end before it escalates, possibly to utter devastation of Ukraine and unimaginable catastrophe beyond. The only way is a negotiated settlement. Like it or not, this must provide some kind of escape hatch for Putin, or the worst will happen. Not victory, but an escape hatch. These concerns must be uppermost in our minds.
I don’t think that Zelensky should have simply accepted Putin’s demands. I think his public response on March 7 was judicious and appropriate.
In these remarks, Zelensky recognized that joining NATO is not an option for Ukraine. He also insisted, rightly, that the opinions of people in the Donbas region, now occupied by Russia, should be a critical factor in determining some form of settlement. He is, in short, reiterating what would very likely have been a path for preventing this tragedy — though we cannot know, because the U.S. refused to try.
As has been understood for a long time, decades in fact, for Ukraine to join NATO would be rather like Mexico joining a China-run military alliance, hosting joint maneuvers with the Chinese army and maintaining weapons aimed at Washington. To insist on Mexico’s sovereign right to do so would surpass idiocy (and, fortunately, no one brings this up). Washington’s insistence on Ukraine’s sovereign right to join NATO is even worse, since it sets up an insurmountable barrier to a peaceful resolution of a crisis that is already a shocking crime and will soon become much worse unless resolved — by the negotiations that Washington refuses to join.
That’s quite apart from the comical spectacle of the posturing about sovereignty by the world’s leader in brazen contempt for the doctrine, ridiculed all over the Global South though the U.S. and the West in general maintain their impressive discipline and take the posturing seriously, or at least pretend to do so.
Zelensky’s proposals considerably narrow the gap with Putin’s demands and provide an opportunity to carry forward the diplomatic initiatives that have been undertaken by France and Germany, with limited Chinese support. Negotiations might succeed or might fail. The only way to find out is to try. Of course, negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its adamant refusal to join, backed by the virtually united commissariat, and if the press continues to insist that the public remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.
In fairness, I should add that on March 13, the New York Timesdid publish a call for diplomacy that would carry forward the “virtual summit” of France-Germany-China, while offering Putin an “offramp,” distasteful as that is. The article was written by Wang Huiyao, president of a Beijing nongovernmental think tank.
It also seems to me that, in some quarters, peace in Ukraine is hardly on top of the agenda. For example, there are plenty of voices both in the U.S. and in U.K. urging Ukraine to keep on fighting (although western governments have ruled out sending troops to defend Ukraine), probably in the hopes that the continuation of the war, in conjunction with the economic sanctions, may lead to regime change in Moscow. Yet, isn’t it the case that even if Putin actually falls from power, it would still be necessary to negotiate a peace treaty with whatever Russia government comes next, and that compromises would have to be made for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine?
We can only speculate about the reasons for U.S.-U.K. total concentration on warlike and punitive measures, and refusal to join in the one sensible approach to ending the tragedy. Perhaps it is based on hope for regime change. If so, it is both criminal and foolish. Criminal because it perpetuates the vicious war and cuts off hope for ending the horrors, foolish because it is quite likely that if Putin is overthrown someone even worse will take over. That has been a consistent pattern in elimination of leadership in criminal organizations for many years, matters discussed very convincingly by Andrew Cockburn.
And at best, as you say, it would leave the problem of settlement where it stands.
Another possibility is that Washington is satisfied with how the conflict is proceeding. As we have discussed, in his criminal foolishness, Putin provided Washington with an enormous gift: firmly establishing the U.S.-run Atlanticist framework for Europe and cutting off the option of an independent “European common home,” a long-standing issue in world affairs as far back as the origin of the Cold War. I personally am reluctant to go as far as the highly knowledgeable sources we discussed earlier who conclude that Washington planned this outcome, but it’s clear enough that it has eventuated. And, possibly, Washington planners see no reason to act to change what is underway.
It is worth noticing that most of the world is keeping apart from the awful spectacle underway in Europe. One telling illustration is sanctions. Political analyst John Whitbeck has produced a map of sanctions against Russia: the U.S. and the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe, and some of East Asia. None in the Global South, which is watching, bemused, as Europe reverts to its traditional pastime of mutual slaughter while relentlessly pursuing its vocation of destroying whatever else it chooses to within its reach: Yemen, Palestine, and far more. Voices in the Global South condemn Putin’s brutal crime, but do not conceal the supreme hypocrisy of western posturing about crimes that are a bare fraction of their own regular practices, right to the present.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may very well change the global order, especially with the likely emergence of the militarization of the European Union. What does the change in Germany’s Russia strategy – i.e., its rearmament and the apparent end of Ostpolitik – mean for Europe and global diplomacy?
The major effect, I suspect, will be what I mentioned: more firm imposition of the U.S.-run, NATO-based Atlanticist model and curtailing once again the repeated efforts to create a European system independent of the U.S., a “third force” in world affairs, as it was sometimes called. That has been a fundamental issue since the end of World War II. Putin has settled it for the time being by providing Washington with its fondest wish: a Europe so subservient that an Italian university tried to ban a series of lectures on Dostoyevsky, to take just one of many egregious examples of how Europeans are making fools of themselves.
Meanwhile, it seems likely that Russia will drift further into China’s orbit, becoming even more of a declining kleptocratic raw materials producer than it is now. China is likely to persist in its programs of incorporating more and more of the world into the development-and-investment system based on the Belt-and-Road initiative, the “maritime silk road” that passes through the UAE into the Middle East, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The U.S. seems intent on responding with its comparative advantage: force. Right now, that includes Biden’s programs of “encirclement” of China by military bases and alliances, while perhaps even seeking to improve the US economy as long as it is framed as competing with China. Just what we are observing now.
There is a brief period in which course corrections remain possible. It may soon come to an end as U.S. democracy, such as it still is, continues on its self-destructive course.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may also have dealt a severe blow to our hopes of tackling the climate crisis, at least in this decade. Do you have any comments to make on this rather bleak observation of mine?
Appropriate comments surpass my limited literary skills. The blow is not only severe, but it may also be terminal for organized human life on earth, and for the innumerable other species that we are in the process of destroying with abandon.
In the midst of the Ukraine crisis, the IPCC released its 2022 report, by far the most dire warning it has yet produced. The report made it very clear that we must take firm measures now, with no delay, to cut back the use of fossil fuels and to move towards renewable energy. The warnings received brief notice, and then our strange species returned to devoting scarce resources to destruction and rapidly increasing its poisoning of the atmosphere, while blocking efforts for extricating itself from its suicidal path.
The fossil fuel industry can scarcely suppress its joy in the new opportunities the invasion has provided to accelerate its destruction of life on earth. In the U.S., the denialist party, which has successfully blocked Biden’s limited efforts to deal with the existential crisis, is likely to be back in power soon so that it can resume the dedication of the Trump administration to destroy everything as quickly and effectively as possible.
These words might sound harsh. They are not harsh enough.
The game is not over. There still is time for radical course correction. The means are understood. If the will is there, it is possible to avert catastrophe and to move on to a much better world. The invasion of Ukraine has indeed been a severe blow to these prospects. Whether it constitutes a terminal blow or not is for us to decide.
In her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, the late bell hooks communicates the weight of what feels like an axiomatic truth: “All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness.” As we bear witness to the authoritarian violence imposed upon Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s deployment of Russia’s military might, and to his perverse fantasy of a “New Russia,” we must never forget that anti-Black racism in the U.S. is inextricably linked to the perverse fantasies of white supremacism and operates according to vicious, racist violence. This is one reason why, for me, all the oppressed people of the world — the colonized, the violated and the marginalized — must be heard, and their pain made legible on its own terms. At the end of the day, however, I know that, as Black, I am deemed by many to be the most racially abject monstrosity that there is. I continue, though, to be shocked by the global degree to which Black people experience anti-Black racism.
Adele N. Norris is senior lecturer in sociology and social policy in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, and coeditor of Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous Women. In my engaging discussion with Norris, which follows, she illuminates the harsh reality of the similarities of the U.S.’s anti-Black racism and that of New Zealand, which was also colonized by the British.
Whiteness as a normative structure pervades New Zealand. Indeed, the Indigenous Māori are disproportionately imprisoned, and Black bodies experience forms of anti-Black racist stereotyping that are found within the U.S. and places like Finland and Sweden. As a scholar who engages Black feminist methodologies to explore state-sanctioned violence against Black, Brown and Indigenous people, Norris explicates these contemporary dehumanizing forces with clarity and autobiographical insight.
George Yancy: In my own work, I have argued that the Black body is deemed the site of the racially deviant, the racially monstrous, the racially abhorrent and the racially abject. In the U.S., Black bodies are disproportionately stopped and placed under surveillance, incarcerated and rendered “criminal” as a “self-evident” truth. This vicious and racist treatment of Black people is not confined to the U.S. The Western world, out of which the concept of race developed, has historically operated under myths about Black bodies and the trope of blackness as “evil,” “sinister” and “ugly.” Whiteness, of course, was valorized as the apex of civilization, the most intelligent and the most aesthetically beautiful. It is this last issue that I wish to discuss with you. Here in the U.S., there have been laws passed against hair discrimination vis-à-vis Black people. This cuts at the heart of Black aesthetic integrity, agency and humanity. As you may know, Afro-Finns have started an annual celebration in the form of a “Good Hair Day” to deal with complex aspects of the racialization of hair. The denigration of Black hair has also been experienced by Black people in Sweden, especially mixed-race people who have suffered from being stared at and rendered “exotic” and “strange” because of their hair. You’ve written about the issue of Black hair and anti-Black racism. Are you surprised that such a form of racism continues to exist in the 21st century? And what are your thoughts on the psychological toll that this sort of anti-Black racism has on Black people?
Adele Norris: I remember with the election of President Barack Obama how eager people were to mark his presidency as the beginning of a post-racial era. For me, that moment is marked by the many ways his Black wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, was vilified at a national level — from her body, hair texture, to her facial expressions. A wider-white-elite society, in expressions of outrage, compared Mrs. Obama to men and monkeys. The same with Venus and Serena Williams’s appearance undergoing pervasive scrutiny over their 20-year careers. What this shows is that Black women rising to the heights of global success are not exempt from the white dehumanizing gaze. The corresponding psychological burden is felt and carried within us all when we see Black women’s appearance picked apart and disparaged. The night of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a New Zealand colleague asked me if I thought Michelle Obama would run for president. I could tell the question was meant to virtue signal, which was confirmed after my response: “Seeing her [Mrs. Obama] compared with monkeys every day, I hope not.” My colleague was visibly baffled and walked away. People are so desensitized to and comfortable with a certain amount of anti-Blackness that it hardly registers in the minds of non-Black people, including people of color.
In places where Black bodies are recent and few, there is a paucity of a language for anti-Blackness and Black racial discrimination. The language is not well-developed in academic, political and social discourses. Anti-Blackness, in these contexts, is understood primarily through the ways it is expressed in the United States, especially in its most extreme forms. Last year, a 12-year-old Black girl (Zimbabwean and Samoan) from Rotorua, New Zealand, made headlines for being called the N-word and teased for her hair texture by her classmates. I remember reading that she asked her principal to address her school about the harms associated with the N-word. She said the kids are learning it from somewhere and have been using it since she began school at the age of 6. Children who have never lived in the United States possessed an understanding of Black subordination. What I found most interesting about this case was the applause the young girl received for starting an anti-Black bullying and racism initiative at her school. She’s only 12. Why are her adolescent years spent engaging in work that schools and parents should do? These cases are everywhere (e.g., Britain, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, the U.S.).
The psychological and emotional toll related to hair discrimination is massive for Black youth, [but] gets rarely classified as anti-Black racism. Black people’s experiences of state-sanctioned violence are so severe that cases of hair discrimination are peripheral to extreme cases of police brutality against Black bodies, but they are [also] violent and disturbing. It is important to see that hair discrimination and police brutality are products of the same system.
I would argue that the stigmatizing of Black hair is one mode of visual anti-Blackness. It has to do with the anti-Black dimensions of the white imaginary and the white gaze. White people have created a world within which what they see and what they imagine are what they deem to be the only legitimate ways to see and to imagine. As a result, Black people — and I would include people of color, as Frantz Fanon would say — suffer in their bodies, because their bodies are bombarded with racist fictions and racist stereotypes. Talk about anti-Blackness and how it operates within New Zealand (or Aotearoa, its Māori name). Do Black people find themselves facing and resisting the toxic reality of being reduced to their epidermis, where they suffer under forms of anti-Black surveillance?
Experiences of anti-Blackness are often muted or subsumed by a fascination with Black culture and aesthetics. I think Black people can be deceived by non-Black people’s fascination with Black entertainers and athletes and fail to understand that Black culture can be consumed by holders of anti-Black beliefs. The two are not mutually exclusive. One of the first things I noticed teaching “Introduction to Sociology” in New Zealand was how students’ responses and understandings of racial stereotypes and social inequalities mirrored [those of] U.S. students. While there is a deeper understanding of the effects of colonization, which is the result of a powerful Indigenous presence, notions of Black and Indigenous people as “criminal,” “deviant” and “lazy” are embedded beliefs Black people engage with daily.
Also, people may be familiar with Brown bodies, but they have rarely lived next door to a Black person or worked with one. There is an expectation for Black people to make the people around them feel comfortable, which typically involves the Black person assuming a posture of subordination. Many U.S. scholars have written extensively about this. In many ways, I think my research agenda, which heavily engages with anti-Black racism and racial inequalities, protects me. People know exactly who I am when I show up because I am not just a Black body. For example, I was approached by a white colleague to collaborate on a project for which he wanted to critique U.S. Black women’s scholarship in relation to Marxism. I asked him to name five Black women authors. He stared blankly, and I walked off. While he took pride in his love for Bob Marley, he had never cited a Black woman in his 20+ years in the academy.
However, I am not surprised when I meet other Black people who are accustomed to racialized surveillance and consider racism an American invention. Some Black people from the African diaspora have spoken and written about daily experiences of racial profiling in New Zealand. With so few Black people, they are not likely supported or validated. I do think being from the U.S. links me to a tradition of resistance and a knowledge of whiteness where it does not take me long to identify covert forms of anti-Blackness and respond accordingly.
The point about your white colleague is so powerful. He wanted to critique the work of Black women without being able to cite a single Black woman author. This says to me that he doesn’t really give a damn about what Black women actually think. You know, I can imagine Black people and people of color from the U.S. visiting New Zealand and thinking that they will finally experience a reprieve from the daily insults of racist microaggressions. Given the global dimensions of anti-Black racism, however, I would not be surprised how deeply anti-Black racism runs in New Zealand. Could you say more about how you have dealt with anti-Black racism in New Zealand?
Being from Mississippi, I am often asked how it feels to have left. Mississippi is one of those places recognized — and rarely contested — for its brutal history of white hostility toward Black people. People feign a look of shock when I respond that the world is like Mississippi. Mississippi just owns what it is. It is like in 2018 when Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican senator from Mississippi, said, “If he [a cattle rancher] invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Hyde-Smith was still elected for saying exactly how she felt. Two years later, the world held a front-row viewing of George Floyd’s public lynching. For those white people seeing a large Black man rendered powerless, and his life slowly and brutally taken from him as others watched, is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, post-slavery, where the lynching of Black people by ordinary white citizens in collaboration with law enforcement was a sanctioned practice. Floyd’s public lynching represented for many people that all was right in the world and order had been restored. I work with and engage with many people like Cindy Hyde-Smith on a daily basis.
During Trump’s presidential campaign, extreme-right groups around the world mobilized and expanded exponentially. Growing visibility of white supremacist groups — the True Blue Crew and United Patriots Front in Australia, and the New Zealand National Front and Right Wing Resistance in New Zealand — hardly received media and academic attention. Yet, statements such as “We are not as bad as the U.S.” are commonplace. If the U.S. is your point of reference, you are doing pretty bad. Like the U.S., there is unwillingness to name and confront white supremacy here. Even after the Christchurch massacre in 2019, when Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a white supremacist, murdered 51 people at two mosques, New Zealanders were quick to point out that the gunman was Australian. A massacre of this scale should have signaled white supremacy as a national threat. Racism is seen as something that happens elsewhere.
Evasive tactics deployed to explain away systemic racism are most evident in the reluctance to use the terms “race/racism.” For example, racial segregation as a result of housing discriminatory practices becomes “cultural bubbles” or “ethnic clustering,” and racism becomes “unconscious bias.” Racism is viewed as something people would not do knowingly. When I informed my colleagues of my first experience of many instances of racial profiling, they responded that people are just curious. Yet, two months later when I disagreed or could not undertake a task a colleague asked of me, I was called an “uppity Negro,” twice. Of course, I was not outraged or surprised. Navigating white hostility and other forms of anti-Blackness (anti-African Americanness) has been a transnational burden. As a daughter of Jim Crow survivors, white hostility was always discussed in my home so that when we saw it, we could identify it and not internalize it.
The structure of whiteness is to obfuscate its reality. Your insights suggest global instances of white mystification. When I think about the European imperialist violence brought to bear upon the Indigenous Māori in New Zealand, I think about the suffering, misery and death of Indigenous peoples in both North America and Australia. Collectively, I think about the themes of land dispossession, cultural ruptures in language, religious rituals and broader questions of cultural identity. European imperialism is about domination, usurpation and dehumanization. Death and dying are inextricably tied to European arrogance, xenophobia, exoticization and hatred of those deemed “less than human.” Could you talk about how the Indigenous Māori continue to face contemporary forms of discrimination, inequality and oppression?
Coming from the U.S. with an understanding of the racist laws and policies — such as Black codes, Pig Laws and Jim Crow that eroded the progress Black people made during Reconstruction — I saw the effects of Indigenous land dispossession, but I also saw features of Jim Crow, though it was not codified like in the U.S. Many Indigenous people were urbanized and relocated to urban hubs like many Black people, but on a much smaller scale. While segregation was not codified in New Zealand in the same way as in the U.S. via Native reservations and redlining, Māori were encouraged to migrate from rural areas where they owned land and were targeted for social housing to meet the demand of cheap labor and to further facilitate land dispossession. Like the U.S., social housing means lack of home ownership that disrupts the creation of generational wealth.
Urbanized hubs of predominantly Indigenous and Polynesian people were singled out as in need of targeted policing and social control. When I first arrived in 2015, I looked up the imprisonment rate. I thought it was a typo. While New Zealand is a small country of 5 million people, the imprisonment rate per capita for Māori is higher than the imprisonment of Native Americans. Māori women represent roughly 16 percent of the total population of women, yet Māori women represent 65 percent of women imprisoned (over four times their representation). Māori rate of imprisonment follows the trend of Indigenous people in Australia, Canada and the U.S., which is often framed through a lens of deviancy with little attention toward state-sanctioned and colonial violence. My collaboration with Indigenous colleagues strives to fill this gap in New Zealand criminal justice scholarship.
Speaking about the issue of criminal justice, what impact did the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in the U.S. have on bringing light to bear upon the disproportionate effect of policing of Māori people? I ask because I am aware of how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the U.S. galvanized protests in Australia that brought attention to the large number of deaths of Indigenous/Aboriginal peoples there while in police custody. While there are differences, there are so many shared patterns of carceral violence experienced by Indigenous peoples who are subjected to racialized and colonial oppression. This speaks to overwhelming proof that there are fundamental links between processes of otherization, race, white supremacist state power and criminalization.
Issues raised by BLM protests resonated with many Indigenous, Black and Brown New Zealanders. Many Indigenous people have firsthand experiences of racialized policing, surveillance and imprisonment, and understand the implications via lived experiences. BLM became a rallying cry reinvigorating attention toward Māori mass imprisonment. However, in places like West Papua, where Black Indigenous people are experiencing genocide under Indonesia’s rule, BLM was easily incorporated alongside the Free West Papua movement, which has a large New Zealand base.
While I was thrilled to see how quickly BLM traveled and spoke to specific issues in this context, I did not recognize parts of it. What happens to Black social movements when they migrate, and Blackness is not centered or understood? If we are not careful, it is like consuming Black culture. BLM was adopted in ways that did not shine light on the Black experience. Expressions of anti-Blackness in the U.S. were acknowledged, but how anti-Blackness is experienced in New Zealand was not. Black children being called the N-word by white people and [non-Black] people of color is a huge problem in a place like New Zealand, but it rarely gets attention. I only use this example to show the interesting power dynamics that influence how Blackness is articulated, if at all, when movements like BLM travel outside of the U.S.
Many people who champion BLM also regard experiences of all marginalized people as being on par, when they are not. I explain to my class that Black and Indigenous bodies are read as deviant and violent by white society and by other people of color. I remember a couple of faculty members discussing a large, irate student roaming the halls. The student was described in such a way that the two people knew who the student was except for me. I was envisioning someone at least six-feet tall around 250 pounds. Finally, someone said to me that they saw me speaking with the student. The exact words were, “He accosted you in the hallway.” I think I would have remembered being accosted. The student they spoke of was a young, thin Black male nowhere close to six-feet tall. I found him quite timid. He always smiled when he saw me, because I always acknowledged him and inquired about his studies. Yet, it was amazing how two white faculty members held the same image of a “giant.”
The implications of the perceptions of Black bodies go unexamined in New Zealand. Yet, it is a truth of Black life for which BLM shines a spotlight. In some cases, BLM became a tool people used to leverage visibility and space without a particular focus on various forms of institutional racism. Under such conditions, anti-Blackness remained at the periphery if at all acknowledged.
Could you provide a sense of how you envision ways in which Black communities, though small in New Zealand, must resist anti-Black surveillance? Also, how are Indigenous communities fighting against various modes of discrimination?
Aretina Hamilton advanced a concept called “white unseen” in 2020 to explicate how deeply embedded the erasure of Blackness is as it relates to Black pain, Black anxiety and Black despair. The sanctioning of this erasure is evidenced by the fact that it is so deeply normalized that it takes severe disruptions, like in the case of George Floyd, for Black rage to gain validity.
White unseen, as Hamilton describes, is an intentional thought pattern and epistemological process where the everyday actions, terrors, ruptures, and tensions faced by Black and Indigenous people are rendered invisible. As Black people, it is important for us not to fall into this thought pattern as well, such that we do not register something like hair discrimination as a form of anti-Blackness or consider it too minor of an issue to warrant action. The insidious nature of white supremacy renders something like hair discrimination as “race neutral” compared to police violence that led to the premature deaths of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Mike Brown, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, and many more. Like racial profiling, hair discrimination reveals the insidious nature of the global white gaze that demands Black subordination. Black people are expected to acquiesce under the white gaze, and everyone knows it.
We saw how Black people were treated in China when COVID-19 first emerged. We see as the world watches Russia invade Ukraine how Black people are not allowed to flee Ukraine and have been forcefully removed from buses by Ukrainian police. We are witnessing in real time how Black lives do not matter globally. The initial step is seeing anti-Blackness as a global phenomenon, a pandemic — not something existing solely in the United States. It is important for us to see these connections and combine our energies to make them visible.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
On Sunday, the U.S. journalist and filmmaker Brent Renaud was shot dead near Kyiv while working on a documentary about refugees. He is the first foreign journalist known to have been killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Ukrainian officials are accusing Russian forces of his death. We discuss Renaud’s remarkable documentary work and feature part of an interview he gave on Democracy Now! after he was embedded in Iraq with the National Guard from his home state of Arkansas. We are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ann Marie Lipinski, who got to know both Renaud and photographer Juan Arredondo during their time as fellows at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, which Lipinski curates. “Brent was a very, very special journalist, yes, but also person,” says Lipinski. “He just brought a very, very rare humanity and patience to the work.” We also hear from Cora Weiss, former board of directors chair of Downtown Community Television, where Brent and his brother Craig started their filmmaking career in the same former firehouse building that housed Democracy Now! for over a decade. “He shouldn’t have been killed,” says Weiss. “Brent was terribly important as an educator for all Americans to understand the horrors of war and the unnecessary expense in life.” Carlos Martínez de la Serna of the Committee to Protect Journalists says Renaud’s killing amounts to a war crime.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
On Sunday, the award-winning U.S. journalist Brent Renaud died after being shot and killed near a Ukrainian checkpoint in the city of Irpin, that’s just outside the capital Kyiv, where there’s been heavy fighting as Russian troops advance on the capital. Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of killing Brent, though Agence France-Presse reports the exact circumstances are unclear. The Peabody Award-winning filmmaker was 50 years old. At the time of his death, he was with photographer Juan Arredondo, who was wounded in the attack. Arredondo briefly spoke to an Italian reporter from the hospital before he was taken into surgery.
ANNALISACAMILLI: Tell me, please: What is your name?
JUANARREDONDO: Juan.
ANNALISACAMILLI: Juan?
JUANARREDONDO: Juan.
ANNALISACAMILLI: Where are you from?
JUANARREDONDO: The U.S.
ANNALISACAMILLI: U.S.
JUANARREDONDO: Mm-hmm.
ANNALISACAMILLI: What happened to you?
JUANARREDONDO: We were — we crossed one — the first bridge, in Irpin. We were going to film other refugees leaving. And we got into a car. Somebody offered to take us to the other bridge. And we crossed a checkpoint, and they started shooting at us. So the driver turned around, and they kept shooting. It’s two of us. My friend is Brent Renaud, and he’s been shot and left behind.
ANNALISACAMILLI: And how is he?
JUANARREDONDO: I don’t know. I don’t know.
ANNALISACAMILLI: You don’t know. You don’t know what happened to him, do you?
JUANARREDONDO: He was — I saw his being shot on the neck. And we got split, and I got pulled into the —
ANNALISACAMILLI: And who brought you here?
JUANARREDONDO: An ambulance. I don’t know.
AMYGOODMAN: That was the photographer Juan Arredondo, who was wounded Sunday in a shooting in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, just outside Kyiv. At the time that he was speaking in the hospital, Juan didn’t know that Brent Renaud was dead. Brent is the first foreign journalist known to have been killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. At the time of his death, Brent Renaud was working on a documentary for Time Studios about global refugees. In a statement, Time Studios said, quote, “We are devastated by the loss of Brent Renaud. As an award-winning filmmaker and journalist, Brent tackled the toughest stories around the world often alongside his brother Craig Renaud.”
Over the past two decades, Brent had reported across the globe, including in Colombia, in Mexico, Egypt, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Haiti, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Brent and Craig Renaud both appeared on Democracy Now! a number of times to talk about their films, including Off to War, about the deployment to Iraq of National Guard from their home state of Arkansas.
BRENTRENAUD: We arrived in Baghdad with a National Guard unit —
AMYGOODMAN: Brent.
BRENTRENAUD: — with the Arkansas National Guard, in these same sort of unarmored vehicles. Right away in April, which was one of the bloodiest months of the war, when we arrived, there were, right off the bat, a lot of injuries and deaths.
AMYGOODMAN: We were broadcasting from DCTV at the time. Brent and his brother Craig Renaud started their filmmaking career at DCTV — that’s Downtown Community Television — here in Manhattan. For over a decade, Democracy Now! was housed in the same old firehouse. In a statement, DCTV founder Jon Alpert said, quote, “We had the honor of working alongside Brent for many years. We were and are inspired by his commitment to bring his camera to capture scenes the world needs to see — no matter the difficulty or the danger. Brent is a hero who sacrificed for all of us. He deserves to be celebrated. Not murdered,” Jon said.
Later in the show, we’ll hear more from Brent in his own words on Democracy Now!, but first we’re joined by Ann Marie Lipinski. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She got to know both Brent Renaud and Juan Arredondo when they were fellows at the Nieman Foundation in 2019.
Ann Marie Lipinski, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about —
ANNMARIELIPINSKI: Good morning, Amy.
AMYGOODMAN: — how you found out what happened? And our condolences. Our condolences also to Brent’s family, to his brother Craig and the whole family, to you, because you knew him, and really to the world, because this is such a loss. Talk about Brent, how he came to Nieman, and how you learned what happened. And then also tell us about Juan, who’s been injured but is alive.
ANNMARIELIPINSKI: Brent, as you well know, Amy, was a very, very special journalist, yes, but also person. And I still remember the interview with him the year he applied to become a Nieman fellow. And he always — he grew up as a shy and socially awkward child, and he still wore that as an adult. I think situations like an interview for a fellowship were difficult for him, more difficult than covering a war. But his central and just very sort of profound humanity came through in that interview.
And his work, obviously, was excellent. And anyone who has watched any of his and Craig’s documentaries can see that. But what you could also see in Brent was that he just brought a very, very rare humanity and patience to the work. He would tell us that the goal of his journalism was thoughtful stories about disenfranchised people. And I think he lived that credo every day.
I found out he had been killed yesterday morning. I woke up simultaneously to a social media post and my phone ringing. Nate Payne, one of Brent’s fellow fellows from that year at Harvard, was phoning me from Traverse City, Michigan, where he’s editor of the local newspaper. He was a very close friend of Brent’s, and he also had just heard the news. And so, we were kind of finding out together. And a little bit later in the day, the class and I and another colleague from Nieman got together on Zoom and talked for a long time about Brent and his work and the impacts that he had had on journalism, of course, but really on all of us as individuals.
AMYGOODMAN: And can you tell us about Juan Arredondo? Clearly, when he gave that interview as he was being prepped for surgery — he had been whisked away to a hospital, Brent died on the road — he didn’t know that his colleague had died. Tell us about Juan Arredondo.
ANNMARIELIPINSKI: Juan, like Brent, is just a really brilliant visual journalist. He was mainly a still photographer and really developed his videography, partly during his year at Nieman and, really, in good measure, because of Brent, and they became very close, not just friends but partners on stories. And they have traveled together a number of times. I think what’s remarkable about that video is you hear in Juan’s voice — that is Juan. He is just the picture of calm and kindness and patience, and he sounds very much like he often does, although you can also feel the strain of what he has just been through. Our understanding is he went into surgery for what was believed to be shrapnel or a bullet in his leg but that a bullet was not found. He has recovered from surgery. He will need to stay hospitalized for a handful of days. And then, there is a group that —
AMYGOODMAN: Is he in Poland or Ukraine?
ANNMARIELIPINSKI: He is in Ukraine. And there are people working to then evacuate him back to the United States and also to return Brent’s body to this country.
AMYGOODMAN: Are you having trouble — is the family having trouble getting Brent’s body back?
ANNMARIELIPINSKI: I don’t know that they are having trouble. I know that there are people working on this, including another fellow from that — there were two fellows in that class who are Ukrainian. And so there’s a lot of support and a lot of people working on this to return him home.
AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to look at some of Brent Renaud’s remarkable work. In 2003 and 2004, Brent and his brother Craig — we called them the Renaud brothers all the time at the firehouse — they’re both from Arkansas, embedded with the Arkansas National Guard as they were deployed to Iraq. After months of filming, the brothers produced the 10-part documentary series Off to War: From Rural Arkansas to Iraq. They did it for Discovery Channel.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 1: Mama, Mama, can’t you see?
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIERS: Mama, Mama, can’t you see?
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 1: What this army is doing to me?
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIERS: What this army is doing to me?
NARRATOR: As the war in Iraq enters its second year, nearly 3,000 soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard are called to active duty.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 2: Most of these guys, before we got activated, we held a civilian job.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 3: If the turkey houses get sold, then so be it. It’s out of my hands right now.
DAUGHTER: I don’t want him to go.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 4: Yeah, they’re going to target you, because they think you’re just a bunch of lazy, fat National Guardsmen who don’t know how to do their job.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 5: Get inside! Get inside!
NARRATOR: These soldiers are part of the largest deployment of National Guardsmen since the Korean War.
KATHLEENBERGER: The military has confirmed that four Arkansas soldiers are killed in Iraq this weekend.
NARRATOR: Fifty-seven of the Arkansas Guardsmen come from the town of Clarksville. This is their story, as they leave home and family behind to serve in Iraq.
AMYGOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of Off to War, directed by Brent Renaud and his brother Craig. This is another clip featuring Sergeant David Short of the Arkansas National Guard.
SGT. DAVIDSHORT: Suit up and go out on a mission today. What we’re supposed to be doing is security and stability operations, which we basically have just tossed that out the window. There’s no security here, and there is no stability here. You know, it’s basically a full-fledged, very hot combat zone. All right, guys, let’s go ahead and move on out. Another wonderful day. Woohoo!
RADIO: The situation is a vehicle pulled up to a U.S. checkpoint. Military-age male dismounted from the van, produced what appeared to be a weapon. That weapon turned out to be a toy gun cigarette lighter. A gunner from the Diamond Element opened fire with 50-caliber fire. Break.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 6: A 50-cal., you don’t get shot anywhere with a 50-cal. and not be seriously wounded.
RADIO: The ensuing fire resulted in three Iraqis killed, seven seriously wounded.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 7: The people are going to be pissed off that we shot up a bunch of innocent people.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 6: Any children or women?
SGT. DAVIDSHORT: I think there was a woman in the rear vehicle who went into labor.
NATIONALGUARDSOLDIER 8: I think this stuff is crazy, man. I really don’t want to be here.
SGT. DAVIDSHORT: Unfortunate, but they’ve got to know that we’re serious about this. We’re getting our people killed, and somebody wants to jump out with a toy, a toy pistol, and start brandishing it like he’s a big boy. He’s going to get treated like a big boy. Lock and load, gentlemen. OK, let the good times roll. I’m not into going out, meeting the people, you know, pressing the flesh, you know, trying to help them out and see what their needs are. They haven’t given me time to see what their needs are, because they won’t quit attacking me long enough for me to find out what their needs are. I really wish we would have trained more for combat operations — train for the worst, expect the best. Well, we trained for the best, and the worst happened.
AMYGOODMAN: An excerpt from the documentary series Off to War: From Rural Arkansas to Iraq, directed by Brent and Craig Renaud. In 2004, the Renaud brothers appeared on Democracy Now! several times to talk about their time embedded with the Arkansas National Guard. This is Brent Renaud.
BRENTRENAUD: We arrived in Baghdad with a National Guard unit —
AMYGOODMAN: Brent.
BRENTRENAUD: — with the Arkansas National Guard, in these same sort of unarmored vehicles. Right away in April, which was one of the bloodiest months of the war, when we arrived, there were, right off the bat, a lot of injuries and deaths, particularly with Echo Troop, who you just saw on the clip. Within that group, there were a number of guys who refused to go out on missions almost immediately, after they had seen their friends and their fellow soldiers die right in front of them. Fortunately for them, Sergeant Short, who you see in the clip, the one talking in the Humvee, handled it internally, gave them time off, allowed them to get it together and to get back on the job. But I would say, right off the bat, I witnessed about three to four guys who were just saying, “It’s too dangerous to go out there. We’re dropping like flies,” as you also heard it in the clip. This is pretty widespread sentiment.
AMYGOODMAN: I think it’s something new to the American public, when these National Guardsmen are saying, “We’re not going to go, because we don’t have the armored vehicles.” What do they mean?
BRENTRENAUD: Well, the way it works is that you — the units, when they go over to Iraq, bring their own vehicles from their home state. A lot of them, most of them, were never in combat. They were doing things like, you know, helping people after floods, cleaning up after tornadoes. They didn’t have combat-ready vehicles. But since every unit brought their vehicles with them into Iraq, at least initially, that’s the vehicles that they had to do their missions with. And the regular Army, by and large, took their vehicles back to the United States with them.
AMYGOODMAN: That was Brent Renaud, speaking on Democracy Now! in 2004, when we all worked at the firehouse at Downtown Community Television. Brent was killed yesterday in Ukraine, where he was working on a documentary about global refugees. That interview, yes, took place at the firehouse, which housed for many years both Democracy Now! and the whole DCTV crew, including Brent. See, Brent began his career with Downtown Community Television.
We’re joined now by Cora Weiss. She’s the former chair of the DCTV board of directors, a position she held for 40 years. She was also president of the Hague Appeal for Peace and has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in the international women’s and peace movements, particularly focusing on relations between the United States and Russia — at the time, the Soviet Union.
Cora, our condolences. We just played those clips of Off to War that the Renaud brothers did. They lived at your house in Bridgehampton for a year working on that series. Can you talk about, first, your response to hearing the news, and what Brent and his work has meant, and how it epitomizes independent media that came out of your Downtown Community Television, founded by Jon Alpert, the great filmmaker?
CORAWEISS: Thank you, Amy. And first, I’d like to express my feelings about this unbearable crime of killing Brent to his parents and his brother Craig. Brent and Craig lived in a summer house — that means it wasn’t built to sustain a winter weather. They lived there for almost a year editing Off to War. And we got to know two remarkable human beings. Brent spent his life working in film, trying to teach us all the truth about the evils, dangers, horrors of war. And it inspired my work for peace. Brent’s loss is huge, absolutely huge, and it was unnecessary, because this war is unnecessary.
AMYGOODMAN: I mean, you cross so many bridges. In fact, one of the works that the Renaud brothers did, one of their films, was the Bridge to Baghdad, and they went together with our colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous in 2003 to Iraq to make that. And, Cora, you are the epitome of building bridges. So, if you can talk about where Brent’s life was ended, in Ukraine? All the details are not exactly clear yet, this horrific moment where he was stopped at a checkpoint with Juan Arredondo, his colleague, and then he was shot dead and left in the road. If you can talk about how — if you see parallels between what is happening now between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and NATO — you so long fought for peace — and what he was doing back then, covering the War in Iraq, the horror of the U.S. invasion?
CORAWEISS: The Iraq War was built on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. It was unnecessary. It was avoidable. All of the wars since the end of the Second World War should never have happened. And it was possible that they didn’t have to happen, because we’re also — we’ve also become very experienced in diplomacy, and we’ve learned an enormous amount about prevention of violent conflict. And there are laws about preventing violent conflict. So, this didn’t have to happen. I don’t know anything about where or why he was killed, but he shouldn’t have been killed.
Brent was terribly important as an educator for all Americans to understand the horrors of war and the unnecessary expense in life, in lives and in money for the wars. So, you know, when you’ve spent your life trying to prevent war and this happens, you feel pretty discouraged. But I guess we can’t afford to be, and we just have to keep trying, because war doesn’t help anyone except the weapons manufacturers, who are probably the only happy people in the world today. We’re using so many weapons which destroy. Or the construction workers — not workers, but the construction owners, who will have to repair the damage, are probably pretty happy, too.
AMYGOODMAN: Cora Weiss, you began —
CORAWEISS: But otherwise —
AMYGOODMAN: You began your work in 1961, your work for the abolition of nuclear weapons and fighting for the ending of the Cold War. How concerned are you about the prospect of a nuclear war or an accident that could lead to this?
CORAWEISS: As long as there are nuclear weapons and as long as people like President Biden and Putin say nothing is off the table, there is a possibility that they could be used, either used because of an accident or deliberately. And that is the most frightening, frightening thought, because we know that all it takes is one nuclear bomb, and it’s goodbye. Goodbye, everything. You know, we talk about climate change. Climate change and nuclear weapons are the apocalyptic twins. And we have to prevent one and get rid of the other. We have to abolish nuclear weapons immediately. There should be no question about it anymore. They’re too dangerous and unnecessary. And who wants to destroy the world and the lives of everybody in it?
AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn now to Last Chance High. That was the film that Brent and Craig Renaud won a Peabody for in 2014. This is Brent speaking at the Peabody Awards ceremony.
BRENTRENAUD: When Mark Allen, a development producer at Vice, brought us in to meet with Jason Mojica and hear about his plans to launch Vice News, we pitched a project we didn’t really expect that they would greenlight: a multi-episode series that would take almost a year to produce about a Chicago school for kids with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. It’s a school that the principal described as the last stop between jail, the mental institution or the city morgue. But I remember vividly Jason saying this was exactly the kind of storytelling that Vice News was going to become known for. Over the last decade, more people have been killed in the city of Chicago by gun violence than U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Most of these shootings involve teenagers. Last Chance High is about what we feel is a severely underreported correlation between mental and behavioral disorders and the tragedy of youth violence.
AMYGOODMAN: That was Brent Renaud —
CORAWEISS: Brilliant.
AMYGOODMAN: — speaking —
CORAWEISS: Brent was brilliant.
AMYGOODMAN: Cora, can you wrap up by talking about what his work meant, whether he was in Somalia or detained in China, whether he was in Colombia or he was back in his beloved Arkansas, whether he was in Mexico, in Egypt, whether he was in Iraq, his philosophy of filmmaking?
CORAWEISS: Brent spent his life helping us to understand the evils of war, the unnecessary wars, and the destruction not just to property but to people, how it destroyed our minds, our lives, our children. And he did it unceasingly. He just did war, war, war, no more, no more, no more. And that’s a huge loss for all of us. We should all see Brent’s films over and again. The 10-part series that he and Craig did, and edited at our house for a year almost, is unique. Nobody has ever made a film with such detail and through the perspective of the young men who are being asked to go and kill and fight it — and now women, too, of course. So, his loss is enormous. And it’s a tragedy that should not happen again. Another mother and father should not have to bury their kid because of a war that didn’t have to happen.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, in denouncing the shooting, the Committee to Protect Journalists called for the killers to be brought to justice. We’re joined now by Carlos Martínez de la Serna, journalist and program manager for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Thank you so much for being with us, Carlos. Can you talk about what you understand at this point happened to Brent, and if you can talk about what other journalists are facing right now, whether in Russia or in Ukraine?
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: Sure. Thanks for having me.
So, piecing together some of the information that was made public yesterday, different testimonies, including Juan Arredondo’s own testimony from the hospital, but we can — what we understand is, as Juan described, they were going through a checkpoint, moving from one place to another in the city of Irpin. That’s northern Ukraine, very close to the capital city of Kyiv. And at some point during that process, they were shot at, and then Brent was hit in the neck, I believe, and was left behind, as Juan said. There was a testimony of a journalist who passed by the body later. He was, she described, as a body there covered by a blanket. And then others were rushed to the hospital, as Juan. Those are the two journalists that we know were affected by the attack. There is a police report from Ukrainian police that says that the responsibles were Russian troops. That’s the only report we’ve seen so far, as you mentioned, so far. There are still details missing, so we cannot categorically say who’s responsible for the killing.
But we need to — what we can do definitely right now is reiterate and clearly emphasize what are kind of the rules of war that are such regarding journalists. So, journalists, under international humanitarian law, are civilians, and civilians are never a legitimate target. So, what happened to Brent amounts, at least on paper, as of today, as a war crime. That’s the situation that civilians in Ukraine are facing all the time. This is a war where there are so many places under attack. And those are changing all the time. The situation is extremely threatening to civilians, as — of course, as well as other people, as well, but, for instance, civilians and journalists and civilians, as well. So they are exposed to attacks like this all the time. Yesterday there were reports about the city of Irpin being banned from reporters after this killing of Brent and the incident. So, this situation is changing all the time. Journalists need help and advice when they’re just trying to move from one place to another. It’s extremely fluid and extremely dangerous —
AMYGOODMAN: Carlos —
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: — as you can imagine in a war zone. Yes?
AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened on February 28th, Russian soldiers firing on a team from Sky News in the Kyiv region, the capital region?
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: Yeah, that’s one of the reports that clearly seems very similar to what happened here. They were reporting. There was a TV crew from Sky News, and they were filming, so you can clearly see how they came under attack. And they were shot at by — it seems, by the Russian troops. There are other reports, as well. At the beginning of the war — which seems years ago, but it’s only been three weeks — there were two Danish journalists that were also shot at, and they recovered, and I believe they left the country. They moved back.
AMYGOODMAN: Yes, I watched them interviewed from a hospital outside the country.
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: Yes, so they’re back in Denmark. And there are — there’s the report of a Swiss journalist, freelancer, who also was attacked and allegedly robbed by Russian troops. There are many incidents. There’s a Ukrainian journalist that was killed in the shelling of a communications tower in Kyiv. So, there’s — yes.
AMYGOODMAN: And, of course, so often it’s the local journalists who face the most danger.
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: That is. So, most of the journalists killed in conflict are usually local journalists. And also journalists killed because other reasons are also usually — I mean, other settings — there are never reason to kill journalists — but other settings, other circumstances are usually local journalists.
AMYGOODMAN: Carlos —
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: But also — yes.
AMYGOODMAN: We have to go, but I just want to ask: What are you calling for now?
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DE LA SERNA: There needs to be a credible, transparent investigation. And whoever is responsible for this needs to be held accountable. This amounts to a war crime. This is — justice in this case, and in other cases of killed journalists, is essential to really bring things to a place where we can see, well, there is some kind of closure, despite the tragic event, the loss for the family, the loss for the journalism community and the loss for the public. Brent did an amazing work that he won’t be able to continue. And as you said before, his testimony has been so powerful, as well as other journalists. We need to protect the other journalists by bringing those who are responsible for Brent killed to justice.
AMYGOODMAN: Carlos Martínez de la Serna, I want to thank you for being with us, journalist and program manager for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Coming up, as NATO accuses Russia of flying warplanes out of Belarus, we’ll speak to a leading Belarusian activist, who’s living in exile, about the Russian invasion and the escalating repression inside Belarus. Stay with us.
[break]
AMYGOODMAN: “Always” by Willie Nelson and his sister and pianist Bobbie Nelson. Bobbie died Thursday at the age of 91.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to join anti-war demonstrations across Europe on Sunday as Russia continued its deadly assault on Ukraine, bombarding major cities and intensifying a humanitarian crisis that is having reverberating effects worldwide.
In addition to protests in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Madrid — where participants carried signs and banners that read “Stop the War” and “Peace and Solidarity for the People in Ukraine” — demonstrations sprang up on a smaller scale in occupied Ukrainian cities and in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest and police brutality.
Thousands of Russian anti-war protesters have been detained and abused by law enforcement since the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, according to human rights organizations.
Despite threat of arrest, kidnapping and worse, Ukrainians in their thousands still come out to protest against occupying Russian forces. This latest video from Berdyansk on the Azov coast. pic.twitter.com/AFUf2bz0Wa
The demonstrations Sunday came amid some signs of diplomatic progress in talks between Russia and Ukraine, which have been negotiating on the border of Belarus since the early days of the invasion.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Sunday that Russia is “beginning to talk constructively” and predicted that “we will achieve some results literally in a matter of days.”
Leonid Slutsky, a Russian delegate to the negotiations with Ukraine, echoed his counterpart’s assessment.
“According to my personal expectations, this progress may grow in the coming days into a joint position of both delegations, into documents for signing,” Slutsky told reporters Sunday, without offering specifics on what an agreement would entail.
Seemingly positive developments in diplomatic talks came as Russia showed no sign of easing its attack, which has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee Ukraine and internally displaced millions more.
Zelenskyy said Saturday that around 125,000 people have been able to escape through humanitarian corridors established in besieged cities, but hundreds of thousands remain trapped in Mariupol and other areas facing heavy shelling from Russian forces.
Early Sunday morning, Russia bombed a Ukrainian military facility located just 22 miles from the border of Poland, a NATO member. The airstrike, believed to be Russia’s westernmost attack on Ukraine thus far, killed dozens of people and wounded more than 130 others.
The Associated Press reported that “continued fighting on multiple fronts heaped further misery on the country Sunday and provoked renewed international outrage.”
Brent Renaud, an American journalist who had previously contributed to the New York Times, was killed by Russian forces in the town of Irpin, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday. A second journalist who was traveling with Renaud was reportedly injured.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn of the death of U.S. journalist Brent Renaud in Ukraine,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. “This kind of attack is totally unacceptable, and is a violation of international law. Russian forces in Ukraine must stop all violence against journalists and other civilians at once, and whoever killed Renaud should be held to account.”
According to the United Nations, at least 549 civilians have been killed and nearly 1,000 have been wounded since Russia invaded Ukraine — estimates that are believed to be significant undercounts.
Local Ukrainian officials said Sunday that 2,187 civilians have been killed in Mariupol alone since the start of Russia’s attack.
The only real anti-war position on the Ukraine conflict is support for de-escalation, diplomacy, and detente. Yelling “PUTIN BAD” and calling for escalations that could lead to a very fast, very radioactive WWIII are not anti-war, and indeed such sentiments are being exploited to prolong this war.
No efforts are being made toward diplomacy and peace, only toward escalations like building an insurgency and unprecedented economic warfare which fit perfectly into pre-existing US agendas against Russia. This is in the exact opposite direction of peace.
De-escalation is a skill we’re meant to start learning in kindergarten. These people act like they learned their de-escalation skills in the Minneapolis Police Department.
If you want to keep screaming that Putin is Adolf Hitler and even insignificant concessions like promising not to add Ukraine to NATO would be Chamberlainesque “appeasement” then go ahead, but don’t pretend you’re anti-war or pro-peace, because you’re not.
Wars end in one of two ways: with diplomacy and negotiation, or with mountains of corpses. If you’re opposed to any kind of negotiation with Moscow to bring about peace, then you want the latter. And if you do, you should get your bitch ass on a plane and join the front lines.
Foreign mercenaries currently fleeing to Poland after 118 reportedly killed in Russian strike.
"There were soldiers from all over the world, even from the special forces of different countries. The missile ended everything. The entire Ukrainian foreign legion was exterminated.” https://t.co/XB4p7sVIAX
Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteer recruits. Go on all you brave blue-and-yellow keyboard warriors who scream at anyone who calls for negotiations with Russia to end this war. Put your life where your tweets are.
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Condemning Putin is the easiest, safest, most redundant, least courageous thing that anyone in the western world can do right now. What’s a lot harder at the current moment is taking a bold stand against the west’s depraved role in getting this war started and in keeping it going.
Demands that you precede every criticism of the west’s role in this war with an enthusiastic condemnation of Putin are just vapid tone policing to silence your very valid criticisms. Nobody truly believes there’s not enough condemnation of Putin in our current media environment. They just want you to shut up.
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I’d like to see a poll asking Ukrainian mothers the question, “Would you sacrifice your son for the remote possibility of future NATO/EU membership and control over Crimea and the Donbas?”
People who believe this conflict started on February 24th 2022 are as naive as people who believed America’s racism problems started on January 20th 2017.
It gives me no pleasure but I’m confident western powers won’t start World War 3 with a Ukraine no-fly zone because western rulers don’t give a fuck about Ukrainians. They’d much rather watch every single Ukrainian die a horrible death than risk their own deaths via nuclear armageddon.
The main danger of the calls for a no-fly zone is not that they’ll be listened to, it’s that they push the Overton window of acceptable debate much further toward warmongering extremism, so supporting extreme things like mass-scale economic warfare becomes the moderate position.
People tend to overestimate the power of the US war machine and underestimate the power of the US propaganda machine. They won’t fight a war for Ukraine, but they will use it to build international support for unprecedented acts of economic warfare and funding a bloody insurgency.
So nuclear war over a no-fly zone seems unlikely. There’s still no reason to believe these idiots won’t get us all nuked some other way amid all this brinkmanship, but they’ve got enough brains and self-preservation instinct to avoid deliberately attacking the Russian military.
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(NATO powers saying a chemical weapons attack may get NATO involved in this war) + (Ukraine has been pleading for direct NATO involvement since it’s their only chance of winning this war) = Strong incentive for Ukrainians to stage a chemical attack and frame the Russians for it.
#Poland's President Andrzej Duda said in an interview on Sunday that the use of chemical weapons in #Ukraine by Russia would mean #NATO should have to think seriously about how to respond.https://t.co/ZySl56X2FB
It’s very unpleasant to be subjected to the 24/7 deluge of unbelievable vitriol and McCarthyism that speaking out against the west’s role in this war gets you these days. I understand why more people don’t do it.
I’m not complaining; I know it comes with the territory. I’m just saying I understand.
Those who love peace and have enough inner clarity to see through the propaganda tend not to be thick-skinned keyboard warriors. We’re sensitive people with gooshy hearts, and it doesn’t take much to shut a lot of us down. I’d be the same if I didn’t have my healing practices. I’m sure there are many others who haven’t been able handle it.
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Two weeks have passed since the start of the war in Ukraine. Peoples Dispatch has written extensively about the role of NATO, and the United States more centrally, in setting the stage for the current war in Ukraine. But despite the centrality of NATO in creating this conflict, the people of NATO countries have been bombarded with news media that places the sole blame on Russia.
The results of this constant propaganda on the people of NATO countries are apparent. In Canada, a Russian community center, with no ties to the Russian government, was vandalized with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. In Wales, the Cardiff Philharmonic banned Tchaikovsky from future performances. And in the United States, a country with an ugly history of war-related hysteria and racism, anti-Russian Sentiment has grown to Cold War levels.
On March 8, as the Russian military operation inside Ukraine expanded, President Joseph Biden announced a total ban on Russian oil to the United States, sending oil prices to record highs. “Today I am announcing that the United States is targeting the main artery of the Russian economy. We’re banning all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy. That means Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at US ports and the Americans will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.”
Following Biden’s announcement, his allies in the media spread the message that higher gas and food prices and rising inflation was a price that Americans simply had to pay to put the hurt on Putin.
The USA Today reported that a photo that went viral about a high-rise in the Ukraine being hit by Russian bombing turned out to be a high-rise from the Gaza Strip, demolished by the Israeli Air Force in May 2021. A few days before that, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister complained to the Israeli ambassador in Kiev that “you’re treating us like Gaza”; he was furious that Israel did not condemn the Russian invasion and was only interested in evicting Israeli citizens from the state (Haaretz, February 17, 2022). It was a mixture of reference to the Ukrainian evacuation of Ukrainian spouses of Palestinian men from the Gaza Strip in May 2021, as well as a reminder to Israel of the Ukrainian president’s full support for Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in that month (I will return to that support towards the end of this piece).
President Vladimir Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’ We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.
It is clear that Putin’s army is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. It uses siege tactics as opposed to the barbarian American ‘Shock and Awe’ doctrine. Furthermore, the Russian military works hard not to dismantle the Ukrainian military. Instead it encircles cities and is cutting out the Ukrainian army in the East and South of the country. The Russian military has dismantled Ukraine’s ability to regroup, let alone counter attack. Western military analysts have agreed that clear evidence of the Ukrainian army’s growing disability is that Ukraine’s army didn’t manage to seriously damage the 60 km Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv despite the fact that the convoy stood still for more than 10 days. In the last 24 hours, Russia has made it clear to the West that any Western military supply to Ukraine will be treated as a legitimate military target. In other words, the elite Ukrainian army in the East is now a defunct military force; it can defend the cities, it can mount guerrilla attacks on stretched Russian military logistics but it cannot regroup into a fighting force that can alter the battleground.
Putin’s army, as military experts agree, enjoys massive firepower. It is hardly a secret that Russia’s artillery is a deadly force and there is no force that can match it anywhere in the world. The military rationale for this is plain. The USSR never trusted the quality and the loyalty of its foot soldiers. While it counted on the soldiers’ mass impact, their sheer numbers, it also invented the means, the technology, the tactics and the doctrine to win the battle from afar in preparation for the masses to move in. It was Red artillery that knocked down the 3rd Reich Army. Similarly, flattening enemy cities is something the USSR and modern Russia are famous for. Russia enjoys this power, but it has refrained, so far, from deploying this ability in Ukraine. Russia has displayed this capability rather than deploying it. According to military analysts, Russia hasn’t even begun to utilize its superior air power other than assuring its total air superiority over Ukraine.
The Russian army’s tactic has been to mount pressure on cities’ outskirts, demonstrating Russian military might and then opening corridors for humanitarian convoys. And this is the trick. Russia is creating a flood of refugees to the west. Due to the Ukrainian government ban on men 18-60 leaving the country, we are talking about women and children. So far there are about 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees but this number could increase dramatically. And the question follows: will Germany be happy to accept another million refugees that aren’t a working force? What about France and Britain, the USA, Canada, all those countries that pushed Zelensky and Ukraine into a war but were quick to leave the Ukrainian people to their fate?
Sooner or later, Putin believes, Europe will accept his entire list of demands and will lift the list of sanctions, and may even compensate him for his losses on oil sales all in a desperate attempt to stop the tsunami of Ukrainian refugees. By the time the guns cool down, many Ukrainians may actually prefer to stay in Germany, France, Britain and Poland. This will lead, at least in Putin’s mind, to a demographic shift in the ethnic balance in favor of the Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. Within the context of such a shift, Putin will be able to dominate the situation in his neighbour state by political and even democratic means.
Putin’s plan is not new. It already succeeded in Syria.
When the West realised that Syria was on foot to Europe, it was very quick to allow Putin to win the battle for Assad at the expense of America’s hegemony in the Middle East. Putin now deploys basically the same tactics. He may be cruel or even barbarian but stupid or irrational he isn’t.
The main question is how is it possible that our Western political and media elite are clueless about Putin and Russia’s moves? How is it possible that not one Western military analyst can connect the dots and see through the fog of this horrid war? The reason is obvious: no gifted people see a potential career in military or public service these days. Gifted people prefer the corporate world, banks, high tech, data and media giants. The result is that Western generals and intelligence experts are not very gifted. The situation of our Western political class is even more depressing. Not only are our politicians those who weren’t gifted enough to join the corporate route, they are also uniquely unethical. They are there to fulfill the most sinister plans of their globalist masters and they do it all at our expense.
I have little doubt that an experienced politician like Angela Merkel wouldn’t have let the Ukraine situation escalate into a global disaster. She, like Putin, was properly trained for her job, understanding the deep distinction between strategy and tactics. She, like Putin, was trained to think five steps ahead. As far as I can tell there is no one in the West who understands Putin, who can read his mind. Instead they attribute to the Russian leader psychotic characteristics in a desperate attempt to hide the depth of the hopeless and tragic situation the West inflicted on itself and on Ukraine in particular.
Meanwhile Putin is taking the most spectacular measures to protect his life and his regime. We in the west find it ‘laughable,’ but Putin knows very well that the only way the West can deal with its own incapacity is to eliminate him and his regime one way or another.
Content warning: this article includes an image of dead civilians
It now appears that the Russian military strategy is to lay siege to many of the towns and cities across Ukraine. This follows the targeted and systematic destruction of those towns and cities. That’s regardless of the lives lost, or the displacement of millions of Ukrainians to neighbouring countries. This is a war of terror and attrition. Its aim is to humiliate the Ukrainian leadership and demand total surrender.
Meanwhile there’s a report that an ‘international brigade’ of 16,000 Syrian soldiers are to head for Ukraine to support the Russian invaders.
A ‘second front’?
The Russian people are being fed a diet of disinformation complemented by the shutdown of social media. However, cyber activists are helping to expose Vladimir Putin’s propaganda war to the Russian people.
One online facility enables anyone in the world to send an SMS message in Russian to random-generated phone numbers of people in that country. It cannot be thwarted by the Russian authorities, barring total disablement of the mobile phone networks.
Users can click on the ‘Send’ button in order to send a text. They can then click ‘New Text’ to create a different message. By clicking ‘Copy Text’, text can be copied and pasted in any translation facility to see the meaning of the message before sending.
The facility has the potential for millions of people, globally, to send messages about what’s happening in Ukraine to millions of Russians. Although as with any such facility, the possibility for misuse exists. Especially since there’s no way of monitoring the actual content of messages sent via the facility to Russian mobile numbers.
Another online tool that anyone can use is run by Mission Lifeline. This is an organisation that specialises in the search and rescue of refugees. The facility enables anyone to volunteer practical help to refugees, offer accommodation, or donate money.
Declaration of war
Meanwhile, hacktivist network Anonymous has declared outright war on Putin and his henchmen. The group referred to “numerous government websites” it has taken offline:
In another message, Anonymous refers to Russian war crimes and urges Russian people to rise up and overthrow Putin:
Hacking the censors
Meanwhile, hacktivists have taken direct action against Russian government targets and state-run media.
Roskomnadzor threatened to block the following Russian news outlets: Ekho Moskvy, InoSMI, New Times, Novaya gazeta, Mediazona, and Dozhd. These outlets were accused of publishing “inaccurate information about the shelling of Ukrainian cities and civilian casualties in Ukraine as a result of the actions of the Russian Army”.
Roskomnadzor also blocked Facebook. Apparently this was because the social media facility “blocked the official accounts of several Russian state-media outlets, including RIA Novosti and the Defense Ministry’s television channel, Zvezda”.
More acts of sabotage
It’s claimed Anonymous also hacked a number of Russian state TV channels. The group then provided to the audiences of those channels footage of what’s happening in Ukraine. The channels includeRussia 24, First Channel and Moscow 24as well as streaming services Wink and Ivi.
The video in this tweet appears to show examples of footage Anonymous transmitted via the TV channels:
According to the Independent, the hackers claimed to have deleted confidential files regarding the agency’s satellite imaging and Vehicle Monitoring System. The head of Roscosmos has said that any attack on the agency would be regarded as an act of war.
According to CyberSecurity Mag, Anonymous has hacked into around 2.5k websites in Russia and Belarus as of one week ago. They included some high profile sites – for example, on:
February 25, Anonymous breached the Russian Ministry of Defence’s database and posted it online for Ukraine and the world to see.
In the days after that, posts by the account claimed responsibility for disabling websites belonging to the Russian oil giant Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian news agency RT, and numerous Russian and Belarusian government agencies, including the Kremlin’s official site.
On February 28, for several minutes, the websites of state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, the daily Kommersant, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia and the magazine Forbes Russia displayed a message calling for an “end” to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On February 26, the websites of the Kremlin, the Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament), and the Russian Ministry of Defense were decommissioned in an attack also claimed by Anonymous on Twitter.
The BBC goes dark
Russia has banned BBC Russia following restrictions on Sputnik and Russia Today in other countries. However, BBC Russia is now utilising the ‘dark web‘, making its Ukrainian and Russian news services available via Tor:
The BBC’s Russian news service will of course give its own slant on what’s happening. But it can be accessed here from within a Tor browser. (Instructions on how to use Tor from an Android phone are available here, and instructions for an IOS phone can be found here.)
The BBC has also published a video explaining more about the ‘dark web’. It is used by journalists and whistleblowers, but also for “dangerous, illegal, and unethical” activities.
More war crimes
Meanwhile, there are more claims of alleged war crimes, with shelling of buildings in residential areas in cities across Ukraine.
One of the latest examples, allegedly committed by the Russian military, was an airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. The attack resulted in at least 17 injuries and three deaths:
In a Google translation, Polish activist Michal Koloziejczyk claims that three children, trying to escape with their father from Irpin, were found dead (warning: graphic image):
Rodzina próbująca wydostać się z Irpinu. Troje dzieci nie żyje, u ojca wyczuwalny puls. Pozwólcie mu odejść, jego życie nie ma już sensu. Ile jeszcze takich zdjęć, ile dramatów, ile zła, ile barbarzyństwa? Ja już wiem, że nie zasnę . Fot: @lynseyaddario@nytimespic.twitter.com/0teBsNF6hu
According to the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), Russia has confirmed its deployment of thermobaric launchers, known also as TOS-1a’s, on Ukraine territory:
The Russian MoD has confirmed the use of the TOS-1A weapon system in Ukraine. The TOS-1A uses thermobaric rockets, creating incendiary and blast effects.
Watch the video below for more information about this weapon and its devastating impact.
The Canary’s Joe Glenton pointed out that thermobaric bombs are held by the US and have been deployed by the UK, but “redefined” by the latter as an ‘enhanced blast missile’.
In February, Putin placed Russia’s nuclear forces on a “special regime of combat duty“. There are fears from UK and US intelligence that Russia could also deploy chemical and biological weapons.
Knowledge is power
Christopher Chiwis writes for the ultra-right Atlantic Council. In an opinion piece for the Guardian he offers a terrifying and pessimistic view on the future directions of the war waged by Russia.
He stated:
there are really only two paths toward ending the war: one, continued escalation, potentially across the nuclear threshold; the other, a bitter peace imposed on a defeated Ukraine that will be extremely hard for the United States and many European allies to swallow.
Arguably, both those scenarios could be refined if not dismissed. Not by the Kremlin or NATO, however, but by the Russian people – provided they have access to the facts about what’s really happening in Ukraine.
But to do that would mean revolution – a real revolution. And not just in Russia.
A top Russian diplomat said Saturday that Moscow has informed U.S. officials that it views Western arms shipments to Ukraine as “legitimate targets” for military attacks, heightening fears of a direct confrontation between the nuclear-armed powers.
“We warned the United States that the orchestrated pumping of weapons from a number of countries is not just a dangerous move, it is a move that turns these convoys into legitimate targets,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, told a state television outlet Saturday morning.
Ryabkov added that Moscow emphasized to Washington “the consequences of the thoughtless transfer to Ukraine of weapons like man-portable air defense systems, anti-tank missile systems, and so on.”
While U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed not to involve American troops directly in any conflict with Russia, the administration has been pouring arms and advanced weaponry into Ukraine for months, shipments that ramped up after Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24.
On March 4, as the New York Timesreported, “some 14 wide-bodied aircraft transported a bristling array of Javelin antitank missiles, rocket launchers, guns, and ammunition to an airfield near Ukraine’s border.”
“The top U.S. military adviser to President Biden inspected the weapons transfer operation in an unannounced trip, meeting with troops and personnel from 22 countries who were working around the clock to unload the armaments for transport by land to the Ukrainian forces,” the Times continued. “The American weaponry, which included the Javelins as well as small arms and munitions, was part of a $350 million package that Mr. Biden authorized.”
“Within two days, one official said, the deliveries were landing at an airfield near the border that can process 17 airplanes a day,” the Times added. “What began as a trickle — with only two or three planes arriving a day — is now a steady flow, the official said, with 14 loads from one airfield alone.”
The Washington Postreported Friday that the Biden administration is currently “working with European allies to expedite more sophisticated air-defense systems and other armaments into the war zone.”
Ryabkov’s remarks Saturday came after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that a Russian attack on supply lines of countries providing weapons to Ukraine — which is not a NATO member — would constitute a dangerous escalation.
“The allies are helping Ukraine uphold their right for self-defense, which is enshrined in the U.N. Charter,” Stoltenberg said in an interview with CBC News.
“Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger Article 5,” Stoltenberg added, referring to the self-defense clause of NATO’s founding treaty.
The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill argued in a column on Thursday that the rapid acceleration of arms shipments into Ukraine represents “a significant escalation of Western involvement” in the deadly conflict.
“It is understandable and reasonable that people across the U.S. and Europe are demanding their governments send more weapons to support Ukraine in resisting the Russian invasion,” Scahill wrote. “Without the Western-supplied weapons Ukraine already possessed, it is very likely Russia would be in control of much larger swaths of the country.”
“It is also vital,” Scahill added, “that people advocating such a policy consider whether a sizable increase in U.S. and NATO weapons transfers will prolong the conflict and result in even more civilian death and destruction.”
Scientists trying to piece together data on the stability of one of the earth’s largest carbon sinks could see their work hampered by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Climate collapse
Permafrost, the frozen ground that covers around 60% of Russian territory, is estimated to hold twice as much greenhouse gas as the atmosphere. Its stability is key to limiting global warming to 1.5C. And the UN global target would be left far behind if the carbon were to be released.
A team from Northumbria University, alongside Russian colleagues, has recently been awarded a grant from education foundation the Leverhulme Trust to continue their decades of research gathering rock formations from Siberian caves.
Cave rocks store a history of the global climate (Stuart Umbo/PA)
The rocks store a history of the global climate. By studying them, scientists can estimate when the permafrost last shifted into a thawing state and what temperatures were reached during previous warm periods.
It’s feared a large-scale thaw will create a positive feedback loop with the freed greenhouse gases speeding up global warming. This would hasten the disappearance of the remaining permafrost and release even more carbon. Reliable data on this tipping point is a vital clue that’s largely missing from current climate modelling.
Dr Stuart Umbo of Northumbria University said:
Permafrost thaw isn’t just controlled by temperature – precipitation, seasonality and atmospheric patterns play a role too. As these change, nobody really knows the impact it’ll have on permafrost thaw at regional scale. But we know there is a huge volume of carbon locked up in it.
When permafrost starts to thaw this carbon is going to be released into the atmosphere, but what the controls are, and when that thaw begins in earnest, is really uncertain.
Researchers gathering rock samples in caves deep under the Siberian permafrost (Julia Homann/PA)
Signs of thawing
The rock samples include cave deposits such as stalagmites, stalactites and spherical cave pearls known as speleothems (which means ‘cave rocks’). They’re all formed through carbonate build-up from dripping water. Umbo told the PA news agency:
If you have speleothems forming in Siberia you must have thawed permafrost above your cave because you need dripping water. We take those formations and we can date them like you would with carbon dating, but instead of carbon we use uranium, thorium and lead, which are longer-lived elements.
If we know a stalagmite was forming at a particular period of time, we can say that we know the permafrost above the cave had thawed – that is the basis of our entire study.
The rock formations were created when the permafrost last thawed (Julia Homann/PA)
Over the last two million years, the Earth has cycled in and out of ice ages and warmer periods known as interglacials like the modern day. The last interglacial was about 130,000 years ago, and there’s already a large body of evidence on the climate during this time.
Umbo said:
We know that the global climate was maybe 2C warmer than today, so we might find that if we warm by two degrees certain areas of permafrost are likely to thaw, so that is the very basics.
Asked when the permafrost could reach the point of no return, Umbo said:
If it does thaw it is going to take a long time to thaw, it’s not all suddenly going to go overnight, but potentially it could become irreversible in the next few decades, but nobody really knows.
Much depends on regional environmental dynamics – some areas of the permafrost are already thawing, particularly in the far east of Siberia.
Study suspended
The Northumbria University team has been looking at caves close to the southern boundary, the area most vulnerable to climate change.
The team had hoped to build a map of data transecting the Russian permafrost from north to south, as the effects of climate change are unlikely to be uniform across the landscape.
But the invasion of Ukraine and resulting sanctions mean it could be a long time before the team can return to Siberia.
Although permafrost is also found in Canada, northern China and Scandinavia, by far the largest deposits are in Russia.
A speleothem sample (Julia Homann/PA)
Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine during the final days of the team’s trip. And they were forced to travel home via Cairo after Europe shut its air space to Russian flights. Umbo said:
Next year we had planned to go further north and visit some caves several hundred kilometres north of where we had been – who knows whether that’s going to happen
He added:
It is a very understudied area, and there aren’t a huge number of people looking at it and we won’t be able to look at it again for quite a while, so it is going to hinder scientific research, definitely.
Catastrophe
Dr Sebastian Breitenbach, the scientist leading the research, said:
The development in Ukraine is a catastrophe not only for the people in Ukraine, but also for globally connected climate science.
Many countries have already suspended research projects and collaborations and we fear that our long-standing collaboration and knowledge exchange might be in jeopardy.
Losing contact to a young generation of Russian scientists will hamper not only our research into permafrost, it will also lead to further isolation of Russia, and isolation is never a good thing for developing and intensifying democratic structures, knowledge exchange and mutual understanding.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is threatening to push millions further into food insecurity and starvation, as global hunger and humanitarian needs are at all-time highs. Both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of wheat, barley, sunflower oil, and other staple commodities that countries in the Middle East and Asia rely on heavily. Together, they’re called the “breadbasket of the world,” and as Ukraine’s productive capacity grinds to a halt — and Russia finds itself increasingly isolated from the world community — the consequences could be devastating for poor people around the world.
Beyond the immediate short-term risks due to the conflict itself, the war could usher in longer-term structural changes that could also exacerbate food insecurity. Conservatives and oil lobbyists in the United States have responded to Russia’s invasion by calling for an increase in U.S. domestic oil and gas production, which would pump additional carbon into the atmosphere, even as climate scientists say the world is running out of time to address global warming. Extreme and unpredictable weather has already contributed to increased droughts, flooding and fires, all of which can lower crop yields or destroy existing reserves. “Droughts have cut into recent harvests for wheat in North America and for soybean and corn in South America,” NPRreports. “Typhoons in Malaysia last year shrunk the crop of palm oil used for cooking, among other purposes.”
The war could also lead to an increase in countries hoarding the food they produce domestically, in response to fears of shortages — either real or theoretical. In the case of Ukraine, the government is understandably banning “exports of rye, barley, buckwheat, millet, sugar, salt, and meat until the end of this year,” Reuters reported on March 9, well into the second week of Russia’s invasion. Other countries could follow suit, resulting in a protectionist trade slowdown, which would hit poor countries that rely on imports especially hard, such as Yemen, Libya and Bangladesh.
More generally, Russia’s invasion comes in the midst of global supply chain bottlenecks due to COVID-19. Those issues are unlikely to be fully resolved as the pandemic enters its third year. Ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Ethiopia have also led to famine in those countries. Meanwhile the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, and the resulting austerity that has been imposed by the United States, has left millions on the edge of starvation.
As Ukrainians flee the continued Russian onslaught in numbers not seen since WWII, many will likely require at least short-term humanitarian aid. Ukrainians displaced internally could face prolonged Russian sieges, which could also lead to starvation. All of these factors, taken together, suggest that food insecurity, which is already a major humanitarian concern around the world, will only become more acute in coming years.
Global commodity markets are reflecting this crisis, as the cost of “wheat is up about 50 percent in two weeks and corn just touched a decade high” according to Bloomberg. Even before Russia’s invasion, world food costs had increased 20.7 percent over the previous year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Together, Russia and Ukraine account for almost one-third of the world’s wheat and barley exports, with much of the supply going to countries already facing food shortages. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, bought nearly $10 billion in wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine combined from 2016-2020. Lebanon is also facing wheat shortages after a 2020 explosion in Beirut destroyed the country’s primary grain silos and reserves.
The shortages aren’t limited just to the cost of bread, either. “Russia is also a key supplier for fertilizers,” Bloombergreports. “Virtually every major crop in the world depends on inputs like potash and nitrogen, and without a steady stream, farmers will have a harder time growing everything from coffee to rice and soybeans.” Ukraine and Russia are both large exporters of sunflower oil, used in cooking. Barley is a key staple for animal feed, so the cost of meat could also continue to rise due to the conflict.
According to the most recent report from the United Nations, between 720 million and 811 million people faced hunger in 2020, with nearly one in three people lacking adequate access to food. The report listed five major drivers of food insecurity: conflict, extreme weather, economic slowdowns, poverty and high food costs. Russia’s war in Ukraine threatens to exacerbate each of those in unpredictable ways, but whatever the results are, they will not be limited only to those two countries.
Africa has been particularly hard hit by climate change and food shortages. In West Africa, as many as 38 million people are expected to face food insecurity this summer due in part to droughts. But the danger encompasses much of the continent. “Southern Africa is being hurt more than other regions by climate change — and … women and girls are bearing the brunt,” the UN’s World Food Program said in a statement released on International Women’s Day. Southern Africa’s “temperatures are rising at twice the global average, triggering more frequent and severe storms, and longer droughts, deepening already widespread hunger.”
These issues should be understood primarily on their own terms, as humanitarian issues that require cooperation and solidarity. The problem is not capacity. As Deepmala Mahla, vice president for humanitarian affairs at CARE, recently toldBloomberg, “people are sleeping hungry when the world has the ability and is producing more than the food required to feed everyone.” Instead, global conflicts and poverty have created a food distribution problem, one that will only be made worse by rising global temperatures.
For as much as hunger is a humanitarian issue, it would be naive not to consider the secondary consequences it poses. There is some debate about the role that food shortages due to climate change played in the runup to the Syrian civil war, but there is little doubt that in general, food and water scarcity can be significant drivers of conflict within a country or between states. That’s also the U.S. intelligence community’s interpretation, which found that, “the economic fallout from COVID-19, combined with conflict and weather extremes, has driven hunger worldwide to its highest point in more than a decade, which increases the risk of instability,” according to the latest annual threat assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While there’s plenty in the report to disagree with, there’s value in understanding the perspective of the U.S. intelligence services, if only to counter some of their conclusions more effectively.
The world’s attention is rightly focused right now on Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, and the cascading catastrophes that Ukrainians face inside and outside their own borders. In the two weeks since the war began, it’s become almost a cliché to say that this conflict signals the end of one world order and the beginning of another. The extent to which that’s true remains to be seen, but the world is already seeing how the war is worsening existing crises. Those effects will be felt far after this conflict ends, and have already extended far beyond the breadbasket of the world.
(@YourAnonTV) 
VICTORIA GARVEY
Russian invaders fire at a civilian car with passengers inside! This is evidence for the Hague.
(@DefenceHQ) 
