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.
Higher fuel and food prices are a sacrifice I’m prepared to make in exchange for a greatly increased likelihood of nuclear armageddon.
❖
Let’s be clear: you’re not paying more for necessities to punish Putin and save Ukraine, you’re paying more for necessities to fund an economic war of unprecedented scale geared toward collapsing Russia to help secure US unipolar domination of this planet.
It’s not “Putin’s price hike”. This was all orchestrated by the empire, from root to flower. The goal is to use economic warfare and a costly counterinsurgency against western-backed Ukrainians to either collapse and balkanize the Russian Federation or foment enough discontent to secure regime change in Moscow. This is because Putin refuses to kiss the imperial ring.
The western empire could not possibly care less about Ukrainians beyond the extent to which they can be used to roll out this agenda. There hasn’t been nearly enough public rage about the fact that the US government knew this war was coming, knew exactly how to prevent it with very low-cost concessions to Moscow, and chose not to. They made that choice in order to advance this agenda.
That’s what you’re paying for as the your cost of living skyrockets. Not freedom and democracy. Not saving Ukrainian lives. Just the very mundane and unsexy unipolarist objectives of a few sociopathic empire managers. Empire managers who, of course, will have no trouble paying for things like fuel and groceries while ordinary people struggle.
And if you think these cold war escalations against Russia are hurting your bank account, wait til the imperial crosshairs move to China.
❖
One under-appreciated aspect of online censorship is how the fear of losing a valuable platform understandably causes people to self-censor, thereby widening the radius of the censorship campaign’s effectiveness a lot further than the actual censorship.
Never thought I’d be so worried about being censored all the time. Very carefully and cautiously watching what I say and how I say it, deciding I shouldn’t even say it at all. Some democracy we have here on the internet. Very healthy.
It’s exactly the same as the “cooling effect” that the persecution of whistleblowers and journalists has on leaks and investigative journalism. People shying away from speech they could be punished for does a lot more to restrict speech than the punishments themselves.
If for example a chemical attack occurs in Ukraine and is blamed on Russia, there will be great fear of questioning the official narrative about it on YouTube for fear of losing one’s platform because YouTube has banned skepticism of official stories about violence in that nation. People will self-censor to avoid being punished for their speech.
This is the exact same principle as a king having an artist who spoke ill of him tortured in the public square in order to deter future acts of dissent. Just re-packaged to be more palatable for the modern world.
❖
When someone brings up bad things the US does in response to outrage over bad things Russia does, it’s not to defend Russia. It’s to get the US to stop doing bad things.
Bleating “whataboutism” at sincere attempts to get the US empire to stop doing evil things is just defending those evil things. You’re basically just saying “Shut up! Now’s not the time to talk about the bad things the US power alliance does, we’re on something else right now!” Okay, so when? Never? Nothing has ever been done about the crimes of the empire. No meaningful changes whatsoever were made after Iraq.
Russia invading Ukraine doesn’t magically erase the fact that the western empire has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. Putin would have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. That still needs to be talked about, and it still needs to end.
EXCLUSIVE: Twenty years after 9/11, compelling statistical data suggests that the true death toll of the 'War on Terror' is a staggering *6 million people*: which is likely a conservative estimate. I breakdown the data for @BylineTimeshttps://t.co/YTV6IoZ3ic
People talk about this like it’s something in the past, something the US and its allies did back in history but now it’s Russia doing it. No, this is happening currently in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela etc, and will continue to happen unless drastic changes are made.
The murderousness, tyranny and omnicidal recklessness of the US-centralized empire is a problem of unequalled urgency regardless of what Russia happens to be doing. You can’t just bleat “whataboutism” and make that go away. It’s a problem that urgently needs to be dealt with.
It’s an objectively good thing if more attention is brought to that urgent problem by someone saying “Oh you’re upset about this war? Wait til you hear about what your own government has been doing.” Any attempt to interfere in their pointing this out is facilitating mass murder. Either help draw attention to this problem or stop interrupting people who are drawing attention to it with power-serving gibberish about “whataboutism”.
❖
Western leaders appear to have gone to the NYPD Academy of De-Escalation.
❖
During the Cuban Missile Crisis everyone had a healthy fear of nuclear annihilation, and people wanted de-escalation above all else. Today hardly anyone even cares about the insane nuclear brinkmanship games being played, and all mainstream factions are calling only for escalation.
❖
Schrödinger’s Putin: Simultaneously a crazy deranged lunatic and also much too level-headed and rational to respond to western escalations with nuclear weapons.
❖
Love how shitlibs finally decide to become “anti-war” the second their “anti-war” activism has a chance to help manufacture consent for World War 3.
❖
Four years of demented propaganda about an imaginary Trump-Russia conspiracy, Kremlin Facebook memes and GRU bounties in Afghanistan turned liberals into a bunch of gnashing, frothing zombies starved for Russian flesh. Ukraine just gave them something to sink their teeth into.
❖
Always wondered how long it would take for DuckDuckGo to get absorbed into the imperial narrative management campaign. https://t.co/yRHoUQHxe3
I don’t understand the common sentiment on the left that we need to spend a lot of energy criticizing Putin for this war in the same way we criticize our own rulers for their warmongering. Like even forgetting about all the things western powers did to give rise to the war in Ukraine, what specifically is the argument here? That the English-speaking world doesn’t have enough criticism of the Russian invasion, and has too much criticism of NATO aggression? That if more antiwar lefties scream about Putin he’ll go “Ah shit I pissed off a few fringe westerners, let’s cancel the war you guys”? It just doesn’t seem like those who make such claims have thought very hard about the position they’re trying to advance.
Our voices can do far more good criticizing the actions of our own governments, which receive barely any criticism, than those of someone else’s government which gets tons. It also can’t be denied that there’s a major propaganda push to manufacture consent for dangerous agendas which pre-date the invasion by many years. Is my voice better used opposing those dangerous agendas, or in helping to facilitate them by saying the same things everyone else is already saying?
Putin is bad! Putin is bad and his war is very bad!
There. I did the thing. Can anyone tell me what I just accomplished, apart from greasing the wheels for new cold war escalations? Did I plow any new ground? Expand awareness in any new direction? What specific good did I do?
None that I can see.
The fact that the Russian people are doing a better job of holding their government to account with massive antiwar protests than people in western nations have says terrible things about us and our obsequiousness to our warmongering masters. If you can’t criticize your government, you are more obedient than Russians living under Putin.
Criticizing Putin is the easiest thing in the world for a westerner to do right now. Low cost, maximum clicks, but has zero impact on the conflict and will save zero people. Criticizing the west for its role is hard; it gets you outrage mobbed, deplatformed and shunned. But it could work.
None of these outrage merchants would ever dream of going against their own government, because if they tried they would find themselves smashed against the invisible walls of our inverted totalitarian cage. On some level they know this. That’s why they project.
______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
It should be an obvious truth that the deaths of civilians, and children in particular, as a result of military action can never be acceptable as a price worth paying to achieve any political aim. The most recent figures of deaths in Ukraine from The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified a total of 564 civilian deaths during Russia’s military attack on Ukraine as of the 10th March, 2022. Of them, 41 were children.
In the worsening situation in Yemen, in the four months before the end of the human rights monitoring in October, 2021, 823 civilians were injured or killed in the war. In the four months that followed, it was 1,535 civilians, according to data from the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project. Large numbers of the civilian casualties were caused by airstrikes.
Since the post-World War II period national liberation movements and independent countries in Africa have developed solid diplomatic and economic relations with the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation.
It is this history which underlines the refusal of numerous African governments and mass organizations to side with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in its efforts to encircle Russia in order to leave it as a diminished state dependent upon the dominant imperialist nations globally.
In the immediate aftermath of the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the racist treatment of approximately 16,000 African students as well as thousands of others from Asia gained international news coverage.
A New Zealand protest flotilla has arrived outside the luxury Northland home of Russian oligarch Alexander Abramov.
The eight vessels sailed to Helena Bay, north of Whangārei, early today to protest over the two-week-old Russian invasion of Ukraine facing the private estate owned by Abramov.
Locals on kayaks and boats were expected to join them.
The flotilla is asking the government to freeze Abramov’s New Zealand assets.
Although he is one of the few super-rich influential Russians with assets in New Zealand — a handful of wealthy Russians are estimated to have $60 million invested in the country — he is not on the official sanctions list intended to put pressure on Russia to stop the invasion of Ukraine.
The government has said the list will remain under review.
Greenpeace joins protest
The global environmental campaigner Greenpeace has joined the flotilla.
Greenpeace programme director Niamh O’Flynn is on board a yacht, and told RNZ the water was a bit choppy, but demonstrators plan to remain on their vessels in the bay and stay for a few hours to get their message across.
“The main message is that we need to do our bit to end this war peacefully, and that means sanctioning oligarchs, it means freezing the assets of oligarchs like Alexander Abramov, immediately.”
She said sanctioning oligarchs puts pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
Greenpeace’s Niamh O’Flynn at the protest in Helena Bay, in front of Alexander Abramov’s Northland property. Image: Greenpeace
On February 24, the government announced a list of officials from the Russian government and others involved in the invasion of Ukraine, who are named in a targeted travel ban.
On March 9, the new Russia Sanctions Bill was passed by Parliament under urgency by all parties. It allows for New Zealand to impose harsher sanctions.
Some Northlanders living near Abramov’s lodge earlier put up Ukrainian flags on their properties.
The luxury Abramov lodge in Northland’s Helena Bay. Image: RNZ
Russia is making three demands of Kiev to end the war on its terms: recognize Crimea as part of Russia; grant independence to Lugansk and Donetsk in the Donbass and enshrine Ukraine as a neutral state in its constitution, meaning it will never join NATO. A 90-minute meeting in Turkey on Thursday between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers resulted in no progress at all towards a solution, as this phase of the war enters its third week.
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has opened the floodgates for anti-Russian racism to consume political discourse in the West. The racism has come in many forms. There is the ongoing framing in the Western media and establishment politics of Vladimir Putin as a “dictator” and a uniquely horrific evil. Some have even compared Putin to Adolf Hitler with the hardly creative moniker, “Putler.” Russia and its leaders are viewed as mindless and thoughtless “savages” deserving of the harshest punishment that can be leveled by the West.
As the U.S. and NATO work to advance their war against Russia now breaking out in Ukraine, many countries who have experienced imperialist aggression — by the U.S., France, Britain and other NATO members — are speaking out. They are denouncing the impact of U.S. sanctions as acts of war and calling NATO the threat to global peace.
A few days ago, my daughter turned 25. She has the world at her feet.
She has studied at a university in the Czech Republic, can speak several European languages and has volunteered with a childrens’ school in France.
We have friends across Europe who are ready to take her in. She could have a great future. But this week, she told me that this is not her path.
Like so many others in Ukraine, she is instead preparing to turn her back on that future, deciding instead to risk her life to defend her home town of Kamyanske, on the Dnipro river.
Writing this article is difficult. The duty of a father calls on me to protect my daughter from the horrors of war. But the duty of a journalist, even under martial law, requires me to be honest and objective. This is a cruel predicament that breaks the hearts of many Ukrainians, and is the clearest illustration of the military and humanitarian crisis that has befallen our country.
Empty Shelves
Kamyanske, located almost in the centre of Ukraine, is next to the regional capital, Dnipro.
We don’t have any bombing yet. The area is considered safe for civilians. But even here, air raid alerts sound several times a day and you can feel the cold and inexorable pressure of war, despite our distance from the Russian bombardment.
As Russia began its invasion, locals rushed to sweep food off supermarket shelves, fearing supply disruptions. Almost immediately, fresh meat, canned food, cereals and pasta disappeared from the shelves.
Most people in Ukraine simply do not have the resources to make any significant food supplies, with at least 60% of the population living in poverty. Monthly pensions before the war, on average, did not exceed €100-150 per person. Those who work in the public sector, enterprises and organisations that are financed by local and national state budgets, receive very low wages.
This social division can also be seen on supermarket shelves, at least in Kamyanske. Most food shortages have been visible in the cheaper shops and supermarkets. By contrast, in the town’s supermarkets designed for more affluent consumers, it has still been possible to buy expensive varieties of meat, sausages, butter, cereals and other products.
Local authorities are doing their best to calm the panic around food scarcity. For a week now, in different parts of the city, a local poultry farm has been distributing free packages of chicken for making soup with. Authorities have been forced to limit the number of soup kits — chicken carcasses from which the meat has already been removed — a person can take.
After two weeks of war, the panic-buying frenzy began to calm down, though the threat of food shortages remains. Maryna Gurska, director of humanitarian affairs at the Kamyanske city council, told openDemocracy that people fleeing eastern Ukraine have begun to arrive in the city, worsening the situation. “People come without things and any products, we try to provide them with everything they need. But this also affects the resources available to the city,” Gurska says.
Public concern over the availability of food, she says, also arises because of the unusually empty shelves in stores. That, combined with the large budget grocery chain, ATB redirecting part of its supplies to the Ukrainian military, has led to emptier shelves.
And while Gurska assures me there are no hungry people in the city, there is a need for children’s goods, cereals and the like.
“When people see that something is running out, they try to immediately buy up the leftovers,” Gurska explains. “Supermarkets simply don’t have time to fill the shelves with products that are currently in stock.
Medicine Shortages
Just like the country’s food systems, Ukraine’s healthcare system is facing similar problems amid war and a global pandemic, as noted recently by medical journal The Lancet. On the eve of the Russian invasion, COVID was in full swing in Ukraine. The current COVID rates are unknown since public authorities have stopped publishing relevant data. Doctors confirm that patients with severe cases of the virus are still being admitted and treated in hospitals.
People who have caught COVID or other colds in mild or moderate severity, meanwhile, have to find scarce medicines by themselves. At the start of the war, bandages and haemostatic drugs disappeared from pharmacies, as did antibiotics, cold medicines and painkillers.
People bought medicine in a panic, while sending other materials to reserves in hospitals in case the city came under attack. The military also required additional medical supplies. Now, authorities are forced to resort to drastic measures, calling on the owners of pharmacies to retrieve the necessary drugs from warehouses to ensure supply.
The problem with that is that in a city like Kamyanske, there was previously no need to keep large stocks of medications. Now, due to hostilities, the logistics chain for medicine delivery has been disrupted, leaving authorities and pharmacies attempting to build new supply chains.
For those who require insulin, the situation is especially difficult. For many, it is quite literally a matter of life and death. However, getting hold of insulin is extremely challenging, even with a prescription. Where regular deliveries are impossible because of fierce fighting, volunteers or the military try to deliver insulin and other drugs to those who desperately need it. Those deliveries are not always possible.
“The situation and assortment in pharmacies has improved a bit, but there is a shortage of other drugs, for example, those related to the regulation of thyroid hormones,” explains Natalya Ktitareva, a secretary of the Kamyanske city council who oversees healthcare.
“The main problem is that our system developed in peacetime. We simply cannot imagine what stocks of dressing materials, haemostatic drugs will be needed if hostilities begin here,” she says. “We see that in other cities there are a lot of wounded, including among civilians. But existing supplies may not be enough if the scale of shelling, destruction and injury is catastrophic.”
According to Ktitareva, the influx of refugees from eastern Ukraine has created an additional burden on the city’s healthcare system. Many have severe colds, having been forced to hide from shelling in cold basements.
Ktitareva describes Kamyanske’s access to medicine and medical care as “normal in wartime conditions, in comparison with cities that have been shelled and bombed”.
An Exacerbated Economic Crisis
One of the challenges of providing people with food and medicine is the rise in prices. The official exchange rate for the Ukrainian hryvnia was fixed on the first day of the war, but it is impossible to buy currency at this rate. Instead, it can only be sold at that rate. At the same time, on the black market, the dollar exchange rate has jumped to almost 40-44 hryvnias, and the euro has reached 50 hryvnias. This is a 50% increase from what it was before the war.
The exchange rate jump has led to a sharp increase in prices in shops and pharmacies, including in Kamyanske. This further spurs panic among people. But if the authorities manage to contain price rises on food and certain everyday goods because they are produced in Ukraine, then the situation with medicine is more complicated.
Many drugs are imported from other countries, and therefore medicines have risen in price in the wholesale markets where pharmacies buy them. As a result, Ukrainian pharmacies have to sell drugs at new, higher prices.
Shops selling household appliances, clothing and other goods, which are mainly imported, are also closing. Some retail business owners fear their property will be destroyed by shelling or be subjected to looting, which has happened in other parts of the country.
To save at least some of their stocks, large retail chains selling household appliances and building materials have announced a sale of existing warehouse stocks. But even this may fail to prevent a shortage of goods after the war has ended. And when such goods do become available, they are likely to be too expensive for those in poorer communities.
Protecting the Poorest in Society
The crisis that we are witnessing in Ukraine has once again raised the question: how much does the market economy protect the poorest sectors of society, especially during conflicts that affect a whole country?
Ukraine’s model of social assistance, introduced in recent years, involved the provision of various kinds of cash subsidies and additional payments to people who need it most, through state institutions. However, in the face of lightning-fast price increases and a shortage of goods, this model has been unable to work effectively. Poorer people in Ukraine simply cannot buy enough food or medicine in the current situation.
Europe and the international community should, of course, be providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. But if the sowing campaign on Ukrainian farms is disrupted by the fighting, it will have fast-paced consequences. And it will be the poorest people living in Ukraine’s cities — who do not have their own land to grow at least some food for themselves — that will suffer the most.
Nearly two decades after Bush administration began a nationwide crackdown on the U.S. movement against the invasion of Iraq, antiwar activists in Russia are experiencing a wave of brutal repression as President Vladimir Putin’s regime wages an extremely deadly war on Ukraine.
This is a pivotal moment for the antiwar movement in Russia. Some activists are fleeing the country to avoid persecution and agitate against the war under international protection, according to a Russian activist who must remain anonymous due to fear of arrest. There are also “plenty of examples” of others staying in Russia and developing creative ways to resist despite the threat of arrest.
“Plus, actually many don’t mind getting arrested,” the activist said over an encrypted chat this week. Many Russian antiwar organizers have emphasized that they feel strongly about putting themselves on the line at a time when Ukrainians are suffering so much at the hands of the Russian government.
Still, human rights groups say key organizers face serious criminal charges, and multiple protesters have reported injuries after being arrested and detained. Videos of police wielding batons against demonstrators and using “excessive force” have emerged from recent antiwar protests in Russia, according to Human Rights Watch. Nearly 14,000 people in Russia have been arrested or detained for participating in antiwar actions since February 24.
Meanwhile, Alexi Navalny, the Russian opposition leader jailed by the Putin regime, has reportedly called for mass antiwar protests across Russia this Sunday that could bring thousands of people into the streets.
Human Rights Watch reports that 5,000 people were detained during actions in 69 cities on March 6 alone, and several women allegedly endured violent interrogations by police at Moscow’s Brateyevo police station that could amount to torture under international law. Two activists, 22-year-old Marina Morozova and 26-year-old Aleksandra Kaluzhskikh, discreetly recorded their interrogations and gave the audio to independent media outlets.
The question of whether the Russian antiwar movement will grow into a serious challenge to Putin — or be stifled by police and the propaganda pushed by state-run media — could be answered in the coming weeks as Russian forces continue aerial bombardments of civilian areas and lay siege to key cities in Ukraine. Negotiations aimed at ending the conflict are not making progress, and with everyday Russians suffering under economic sanctions and fallen soldiers coming home in body bags, the truth is slowly seeping out despite the government’s efforts to control news outlets and social media.
In interviews, antiwar activists in the United States say they no longer discuss the war with their friends and counterparts in Russia over the phone. A new Russian law imposes a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison for statements “discrediting” the military or cutting against the official narrative of Russian’s mission in Ukraine, which the Kremlin and state media often describes as a “special military operation” rather than an “invasion” or a “war.”
Activists worry the anti-dissent law will be enforced retroactively, allowing authorities to target activists for statements and online posts made before the crackdown and even call for the extradition of activists who have fled the country.
Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy, an antiwar and anti-nuclear proliferation group that brings Russian and American women together, recently published a petition calling for an immediate ceasefire. Unlike in previous appeals, the group withheld signatures of Russian members due to fear of arrest, according to Ann Wright, a well-known antiwar activist who resigned from the U.S. military in 2003 to protest the invasion of Iraq.
“There are a few that are still speaking to the international media … but it’s very, very dangerous for them,” Wright said in an interview.
In a recent international poll by LexisNexis, less than half of Russians approved of the war but only 27 percent disapproved. Another 26 percent had no opinion, possibly reflecting the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent and independent media outlets, which has left many Russians with access to only the state’s narrative on the news.
Younger, tech-savvy Russians use Virtual Private Networks or VPNs that encrypt online data and web surfing for privacy to bypass the country’s censorship of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook and access international news about the war. However, increased sanctions imposed by the U.S. are making VPNs difficult or impossible to use. Activists say most students and young people in major metropolitan areas such as Moscow and St. Petersburg oppose the war, while members of older generations swallow the Kremlin’s misleading narratives on state-run TV.
“The Russian people are going to suffer big time in terms of all of the sanctions on them,” Wright said. “The people are isolated; nobody is giving them visas to leave the country.”
Paula Garb, a longtime activist who lived in the Soviet Union for 20 years and worked as a peacemaker during conflicts in Georgia and other areas of the post-Soviet bloc, said she remembers living in an “information bubble” created by state television broadcasts when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. However, the repression of activists and independent news media appears to be more severe now, resembling the Soviet Union under the authoritarian grasp of Joseph Stalin after World War II, Garb said.
“It does seem as though maybe there is 50 or 60 percent of the whole country which may not be happy about the conflict, but are just accepting the Russian government’s narrative,” Garb said in an interview. “Thousands of people are willing to be activists, but it may not be enough — yet.”
Garb and Wright said observers across the world were taken by surprise by Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine. Many assumed Russian troops would defend the two pro-Russian breakaway provinces in the Donbas region, but the full-scale effort to topple the Ukrainian government that has claimed thousands of lives so far seemed like a remote possibility just a few weeks ago. Antiwar organizers were forced to act quickly as Russian military action escalated into an all-out invasion, pushing more than 2.5 million civilians out of the country.
“Russians say ‘don’t hate us for what our leaders have done,’” said Wright, who has visited the country twice in the past five years. “We were hoping in the U.S. that the world wouldn’t hate American citizens for what both Bush administrations did to Iraq.”
However, Wright said, the U.S. antiwar movement was also sidelined by the media as the U.S. went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush, and thousands of activists were arrested by police over the course of several years.
“It’s not like our government here was pleased with the antiwar sentiment,” Wright said.
Activists say we must not draw absolute parallels between the conflict in Ukraine and the U.S.-led wars in the Middle East, or the many other conflicts fueled by U.S. military support around the world, such as the occupation of Palestine and the civil war in Yemen. However, like many of these conflicts, the future of the war on Ukraine remains unpredictable.
Putin has not achieved the swift victory he may have imagined, and the conflict in Ukraine is already a humanitarian catastrophe that threatens to become a quagmire lasting for months, if not years.
Wright said multiple international antiwar coalitions continue to organize and support Russian activists, but they still need all the support — and media attention in and outside Russia — that they can get.
“We have to keep looking for those who are brave enough to speak out,” Wright said. “They are going to be heroes at the end of all this, if they are still alive.”
One week from tomorrow, the world will pass — and likely ignore — a most curious anniversary. On that day two years ago, as the true scope of the COVID-19 pandemic was revealing itself and the infrastructure of “How Things Are” began to wobble and quake, the price of petroleum dialed down to zero. Less than zero, actually: If you had stores of petroleum, you were in the hole to the tune of about 40 bucks a barrel.
Why? Because thanks to COVID, everything had stopped or was in the process of stopping. Travel became practically nonexistent, and the planetary appetite for oil plummeted to almost nil (comparative to a normal day). The juggernaut that is oil production, like a full-steam oil tanker at sea, cannot stop on a dime; the inertia has to play out before forward motion is checked. So here were the world’s oil spigots pumping millions of gallons of petroleum into an already-flooded market, unable to halt… until that day, when every barrel of oil on Earth transformed into a bucket of iron pyrite, colloquially known as “Fool’s Gold.”
“If you had oil,” I wrote at the time, “you had to theoretically pay to get rid of it, instead of getting paid for delivering it. The price of a barrel of oil on Monday stood at -$37.63. Note the minus sign. Prior to yesterday, the lowest price a barrel of oil ever fetched on the market was $10 back in 1986. Note the absence of the minus sign. This is beyond unprecedented territory.”
It didn’t last, of course. Despite finding itself pantless on the world stage that day, petroleum remained the undisputed heavyweight champion of economic motivators. Amid irony-laden cries from the capitalists for a “Big Oil bailout,” the industry eventually eased down global production, enough oil was burned in the daily process of murdering the environment even in that slowed setting, and the glut resolved itself. Rust never sleeps.
It was quite completely surreal for a while there, all the more so because this went down on 4/20, the official holiday for celebrating marijuana in all its beneficent forms. You weren’t stoned — well, maybe you probably were — and that shit happened.
I went to gas up a couple of days later while capitalism and petroleum were still putting down this little economic insurrection, stuck the nozzle in the tank, and set the toggle on the handle to hands-free flow to spare myself from the cold. After a few chilly minutes, the toggle closed with a spirited KA-JONK and the pouring stopped, the universal signal for “full tank.”I looked at the price line on the pump’s readout; it said “$20.44.” That can’t be right, it’s usually twice that at least, I thought, and tried to keep filling the tank. The handle refused to let me continue pouring, KA-JONK, KA-JONK, acting as though the tank was already full. “Great, it’s broken,” I fumed, “all I need right now… wait.”
It wasn’t broken; the gas cost $1.59 a gallon. The tank really was full, and for only 20 bucks. I hadn’t paid that little for gas since high school, back before the first oil war jumped off in the Middle East.
***
Flash forward two years, to another trip I made to the gas station this past Wednesday. The news out of Ukraine, already horrific, was becoming increasingly dire by the hour: In the latest installment, the U.S. had cut off all its imports of Russian oil, and the Russians had responded by blowing up a maternity hospital filled with new mothers and their infants.
The price of gas, already rising, went berserk. I spent $50 on half a tank that day, grimly noting the likelihood that this would probably seem cheap in the coming weeks and months. All that was missing was an attendant by the pump to thank me for my custom before punching me in the face. Inflation, a political bugaboo before the Russian invasion, is set to be a long-term financial resident for millions, the roommate you hate for eating your groceries and leaving the lights on all the time.
I stood there listening to my car drink my paycheck in five-dollar swallows and pondered the power of petroleum, again. Now that it is nearly too late to fully confront it, a preponderance of learned scientific opinion — goosed along by Mordor fires and epochal droughts in the West, thousand-year floods every year in the Midwest, and coastal storms that threaten the existence of entire cities — has come to the conclusion that anthropogenic climate disruption is, in fact, a thing… a thing that was manageable and preventable at one time, but is now “baked into” our collective future to at least some deadly degree, and all due to the deliberate profit-bent interference of Big Oil, as I wrote back in 2015:
ExxonMobil, it seems, was fully aware of the existence and dangers of global climate change as early as 1981, a fact revealed by a number of recently-released internal memos. The company was looking to exploit a massive natural gas field in Indonesia, but their pet in-house scientist warned against it, because the field was 70 percent carbon dioxide, and drilling for the gas would release the CO2, which would be dangerous to the environment.
For the next 27 years, despite knowing better, ExxonMobil spent millions of dollars to promote “scientists” and think tanks who worked hammer and tongs to promulgate the idea that climate change was a myth. Climate-deniers like Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made mad bank by spraying scientific falsehoods into the polluted wind, thanks to the largesse of a number of energy corporations, including ExxonMobil.
They knew. They lied. They paid others to lie. They deranged the conversation, perverted bedrock science into a muddle of greed-inspired opinion-based nonsense, and maybe, or probably, humanity might have missed its window to fix all this because of the long delay they created in the name of profit.
The tyranny of profit is tied to poison in the ground that is treasured for its quality of burning, and never mind the multifaceted doom that waits so patiently for us all: Armageddon once we’ve squeezed the last black drop from the sand and stone with no plan for what to do next, Armageddon when we can no longer breathe, Armageddon when the wretched petroleum elites in various nations go to war over their precious product, Armageddon when the planet can no longer grow sufficient food to feed its billions of human passengers, Armageddon in the end of potable water, Armageddon at every turn.
Russia’s gruesome war in Ukraine is not specifically about oil, but its impact has everything in the world to do with oil. Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, became a state run by profiteering oligarchs like, most recently, former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Once the USSR collapsed, Big Oil pounced on the vast and virtually untapped oil resources, and Russia became a world petroleum power almost overnight.
Multiple European nations — particularly Germany — leaped at the chance to exploit this cheaper energy alternative as a means of escaping the clutches of Saudi Arabia’s expensive product. It is no accident that all those damaging sanctions levied against Russia after the invasion barely touch that nation’s energy sector. Sure, the U.S. has closed off its own imports of Siberian oil, which amounted to about 3 percent of our total usage. We here would notice it more if we’d cut off Venezuela.
There is good reason for this, which only makes the situation more bleak. If the U.S. and the world came down on Russia’s oil business with both feet, the economic shock in Europe would have potentially been enough to rattle, if not splinter, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. At a minimum, hurling Europe into the expensive dark with a war on its eastern porch would have proven to be strategically discombobulating at a moment when solidarity and a united front were the only things keeping Putin from rolling his tanks into Moldova, and then Georgia, and then God only knows where else.
That was the thinking, anyway, and nothing since has transpired to gainsay it. There are no Russian forces in Moldova, and NATO hasn’t fired a shot, yet. The lights are still on in Germany. Five dollars a gallon at the pumps, however, is going to throw serious political weight on the North American continent, especially once the Republican Party figures out how to blame the looming economic earthquake on President Biden. It doesn’t have to make sense. It only has to make Fox News.
Meanwhile, for the most part, Russia’s oil business chugs on. There is a rising tide of angst over this, particularly in the U.S., but that angst carries all the nuance of a boilerplate Hollywood rom-com. Americans want to support Ukraine with more vigor — some even advocate no-fly zones that would have us shooting down the warplanes of a nuclear-armed adversary — but they also want the cheap gasoline that has been their seeming birthright since the introduction of the internal combustion engine and steering wheels.
Over it all hovers Big Oil, ever covetous of its profits and position in a world being steadily rendered into ashes and flood plains. Something has to give. But what?
***
A growing chorus of voices is looking hard at the catastrophe in Ukraine as an imperative motivator toward clean, renewable energy. At a minimum, having an effective renewable energy infrastructure would make the militaristic whimsy of autocrats like Putin far less impactful on the global economy. At maximum, doing so might just save all our lives. “This moment is a clarion call for the urgent need to transition to domestic clean energy so that we are never again complicit in fossil-fueled conflict,” Democratic Senator and Green New Deal sponsor Ed Markey told the Guardian.
As the title of the film about the early days of the oil industry warns, there will be blood. Capitalism will jealously defend its fantastic profits in this sector; indeed, its fight is already well underway. A second Guardian article explains:
Oil and gas companies are facing a potential bonanza from the Ukraine war, though few in the industry want to admit it, and many are using soaring prices and the fear of fuel shortages to cement their position with governments in ways that could have disastrous impacts on the climate crisis.
“There is a huge opportunity for oil and gas companies, though I’m sure it is not one they would have chosen,” said Robert Buckley, head of relationship development at Cornwall Insight, an energy analysis company. “They have the opportunity to reposition themselves [as crucial to policymakers]. There is going to be a very high price for oil for a very long time, and even the prospect of physical shortages.”
Oil prices have leapt dramatically, to more than $130 a barrel, sending petrol prices in the UK to more than 155p a litre, while gas prices have also surged. Luke Sussams, of Jefferies investment bank, said: “The high-price environment is likely to last a long time. Boris Johnson has said that alongside the accelerated deployment of renewables will be greater production from the North Sea. There is the potential for growth prospects and upside [for fossil fuel producers].”
It is bleakly amusing how often we are told the best solution to the problems caused by capitalism is more capitalism. In this instance, an oil shock caused by war is not taken up as a cause to question oil or war, but as a perfectly spiffy reason to produce more oil in the name of “energy security,” even as the climate along with various economies collapse around us.
Unsurprisingly, the political pressures surrounding this argument are extreme. President Biden has spent the last several days talking out of both sides of his mouth. Speaking to a global climate summit on Monday, Biden warned that “we only have a brief window before us” to avoid the worst of the looming environmental calamities. Days earlier, however, he was imploring the planet’s largest petroleum producers to crank up their production levels. The two concepts cannot exist in the same space at the same time, yet there they are.
It isn’t just the oil companies that are in this to win it. “Goldman Sachs, the giant New York investment bank, is cashing in on the war in Ukraine by selling Russian debt to U.S. hedge funds — and using a legal loophole in the Biden administration’s sanctions to do it,” reports the Guardian. “As the Western world scrambles to defend Ukraine by locking down Russian money, the company is acting as a broker between Moscow’s creditors and U.S. investors, pitching clients on the opportunity to take advantage of Russia’s war-crippled economy by buying its debt securities low now and selling them high later.”
This, among many other reasons, is why journalist Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Taibbi wrote that 12 years ago; it has aged well with time.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has become a catalyst for capitalist profiteering in its grossest form. Could it also be the spark that motivates people to rise up against the petroleum hegemony and demand that our leadership find a better way, if only to avoid getting financially disemboweled at the gas pump and the grocery store? Enlightened self-interest can be a powerful motivator when grasped with both hands.
Consider the U.S. jobs market amid the passage of the COVID pandemic. While the disease itself has been a lethal catastrophe, it gave millions of workers pause about the quality of their jobs and their own fulfillment with those jobs. After lockdown or quarantine, many of those millions chose not to return to the grind of their old gigs, choosing instead to seek out a happier and more fulfilling path.
There has been an eruption of successful union organizing for the same reasons, and many employers have been forced to cough up higher wages, better benefits and more reasonable work hours in response. Despite decades of dire capitalist warnings, these improvements in the lives of workers did not cause the Earth to crash into the sun.
***
We are all going to endure significant economic suffering in the months to come because Russia invaded Ukraine and disrupted the latticework of global petroleum profiteering. When we emerge on the other side, and even as we cope with the present moment, ideas like the Green New Deal as well as other, more muscular climate plans must be brought to bear. We can do it if we choose to; this has been the truth of us since before the moon landings. We can, and we must.
“Until we transform the underlying infrastructure from gas-fired power and plastic production,” writes Sara Goddard for Green That Life, “we will still be hijacked by an industry that since its existence has buffeted regular people, destroyed homes and open spaces, and employs corruption and coercion as its business model. Putin is a tyrant who must be toppled, but global dependence on oil will continue to sustain petro-states like Russia until nations refuse to prop up Big Oil.”
Let’s make every day like 4/20/20, when the price of oil was nearly zero because almost nobody wanted it. Like that, but without the pandemic terrors and deep financial insecurities, of course. You weren’t stoned — or maybe you were — and that shit happened. Let’s make it happen again for more than a day.
“The United States and its allies have intelligence thatRussia may be preparing to use chemical weapons against Ukraine, U.S. and European officials saidFriday, as Moscow sought to invigorate its faltering military offensive through increasingly brutal assaults across multiple Ukrainian cities.
“Security officials and diplomats said the intelligence, which they declined to detail, pointed to possible preparations by Russia for deploying chemical munitions, and warned the Kremlin may seek to carry out a ‘false-flag’ attack that attempts to pin the blame on Ukrainians, or perhaps Western governments. The officials, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter.”
So Russia is preparing to stage a chemical attack, and also the Russian chemical attack might look like Ukrainians or western governments committing a chemical attack, and also the evidence for this is secret, and also the details are secret, and also the government officials advancing this claim are secret, and also Russia’s military offensive is faltering. Gotcha.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Intelligence points to heightened risk of Russian chemical attack in Ukraine, officials say https://t.co/eGPSCFvcRV
“The accusations surfaced as Russia repeated claims that the United States and Ukraine were operating secret biological weapons labs in Eastern Europe — an allegation that the Biden administration dismissed as ‘total nonsense’ and ‘outright lies.’”
This paragraph is awesome in two different ways. First, it’s awesome because The Washington Post goes out of its way to inform readers that Russia’s claims have been dismissed as “total nonsense” and “outright lies” after having literally just reported completely unevidenced claims by anonymous government officials with no criticism or scrutiny of any kind. Secondly, it’s awesome because at no point during the rest of the article is any mention made of Victoria Nuland’s incendiary admission before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Ukraine has “biological research facilities” that the US is “quite concerned” might end up “falling into the hands of Russian forces”.
This, again, after uncritically reporting completely unsubstantiated allegations by government officials and sheltering them from any accountability by granting them the cover of anonymity. Unproven claims by the Russian government are laughable absurdities presented without evidence; unproven claims by the US government are just The News.
The Washington Post also refers to past Russian dismissals of alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria as false flags used to frame Damascus, while of course making no mention of the mountains of evidence that this has indeed occurred. It also says the UN human rights office “has received ‘credible reports’ of Russia using cluster bombs” which “could constitute war crimes”, making no mention of the USA’s abundant use and sale of these same munitions.
Democracy Dies in Darkness.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
1/ Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy. https://t.co/TrTnOXtOTU
The fact that this Russian false flag narrative is being shoved forward with so much propagandistic fervor, not just by The Washington Post but also by government officials and CIA media pundits, makes it all the more concerning that we’re seeing things like YouTube banning the denial of “well-documented violent events” involving Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We could soon see a chemical weapons incident occur in Ukraine, after which Silicon Valley platforms ban all accounts who express skepticism of the official western narrative about what happened.
The US-centralized empire is censoring and propagandizing as though it is in a hot war with Russia currently. Officially the US and its allies are not at war, but the imperial narrative management machine is behaving as though we are. This makes sense because when two nuclear-armed powers are fighting for dominance and know a direct military confrontation can kill them both, other types of warfare are used instead, including propaganda campaigns and psychological warfare.
There is a widespread general understanding in the west that Russia stands everything to gain by lying about what happens on the ground in Ukraine and cannot be taken at its word about occurrences during this war. There is much less widespread understanding of the fact that both Ukraine and the United States stand everything to gain by lying about this war as well and cannot be trusted either.
The Washington Post’s own reporting says that behind the scenes western governments see Russian victory in this war as a foregone conclusion. Ukraine’s only chance at stopping Russia in the near term would be if it could persuade NATO powers to take a more direct role in combat, like setting up a no-fly zone as President Zelensky has persistently pleaded with them to do. One way to get around NATO’s rational resistance to directly attacking the military forces of a nuclear superpower would be to appeal to emotion via atrocity propaganda. By circulating a narrative that Russia has done something heinous which cries out to the heavens for vengeance, regardless of the risks entailed.
The United States would also benefit from circulating atrocity propaganda about Russia, in that it would further consolidate international support behind the agenda to economically strangle the nation to death in facilitation of the empire’s struggle for unipolar planetary hegemony. Even before the invasion the US was already pushing the narrative that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing.
To be clear, it is not conjecture that the US and its proxies make use of atrocity propaganda. The infamous Nayirah testimony for example helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War when a 15 year-old girl who turned out to be a coached plant falsely told the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she’d witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in Kuwait and leaving them on the floor to die.
Atrocity propaganda has been in use for as long as war and media have coexisted, and it would be incredibly naive to believe it won’t continue to be. Especially by power structures with a known history of doing so.
For this reason it is necessary to take everything claimed about what happens in Ukraine with a planet-sized grain of salt, whether it’s by Russia, Ukraine, or the US and its allies. Be very skeptical of anything you hear about chemical attacks or any other narrative that can be used to get military firepower moving in a way that it otherwise would not. All parties involved in this conflict have every reason in the world to lie about such things.
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Children are going missing and cases of human trafficking are being reported by aid groups and volunteers along Ukraine’s borders amid the chaos of the refugee crisis triggered by the Russian invasion.
Charities and rights groups working in neighbouring countries to receive refugees said they had seen cases of trafficking, missing children, extortion and exploitation as more than 2.5 million people crossed into neighbouring countries to escape the escalating violence.
The war in Ukraine is not new. Ukrainians have been living through “the long war” of a threatened – and brutally real – Russian invasion for decades. We hear from 60-year-old Irina Dovgan, who refused to leave her home, with its blooming garden and many pets, when separatist fighters took over her region in 2014. She became an international symbol of the invasion after Russian-backed forces arrested, abused and publicly humiliated her. Now, Dovgan is living through a second invasion.
Reporting from Ukraine, Coda Story’s Glenn Kates explains what it’s been like to live in Kyiv as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to invade. While many Ukrainians speak Russian and have deep ties to the country, Kates talks to Kyiv residents about how Putin’s threats of invasion and violence have shifted their sense of identity. As the invasion approaches, each person has to weigh the nearly impossible question of what they will do to survive.
To understand what it’s like to be a journalist in Ukraine and Russia right now, host Ike Sriskandarajah speaks with propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev. Born in Ukraine and now a fellow at Johns Hopkins University and contributing editor at Coda Story, Pomerantsev describes how challenging Putin’s official version of events can land journalists in prison. Under a new law, even calling the invasion an “invasion” could lead to a 15-year prison sentence.
Finally, Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren takes listeners back to a time when Russia was charting a different course. In 1989, Shogren was a Moscow-based reporter covering the Soviet Union’s first freely elected legislature. She talks with Russian reporter Sergey Parkhomenko about how, since Putin’s election in 2000, the Russian president has consolidated power by systematically squashing dissent inside the country. This month, Parkhomenko’s radio show and the whole independent Echo of Moscow network was taken off the air. The Kremlin’s harsh new censorship law, punishable by 15 years in prison, makes it illegal to call the war in Ukraine a “war.”
Reuters (3/4/22): “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict.”
Last week, Reuters/Ipsos (3/4/22) reported on a poll that found
some 74% of Americans―including solid majorities of Republicans and Democrats―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.
That poll announcement was followed this week from a report from YouGov (3/9/22) about three polls it had recently conducted―two for the Economist (2/6/22–3/1/22 and 3/5–8/22), and one for US News (3/7–9/22). The earliest poll found 45% of Americans saying it was a “good idea” for the US to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, with 20% saying it was a “bad idea.” The second poll showed a smaller margin of support, 40% to 30%.
In its third poll for US News, YouGov ran a split-sample experiment, with half the sample asking respondents if they would “support or oppose the US enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine,” and the other half asking the same question with the additional comment: “which would mean the US military would shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine.” The purpose was to determine if an explanation of what a no-fly zone means would affect support.
Both questions elicited plurality support for the no-fly zone―42% to 28% when no explanation was provided, 42% to 33% when an explanation was provided. The explanation seemed to have little effect.
But when YouGov rephrased the no-fly question in terms of the action required, it got a markedly different response. The second Economist poll asked, “Should the US military shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine?” A 46% plurality said no—16 percentage points more than said a no-fly zone was a bad idea.
And as the report indicated, large segments of the respondents gave self-contradictory answers:
Nearly three in 10 of those who say that enforcing a no-fly zone is a good idea also say that they oppose the US shooting down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine; 13% of those who call enforcing a no-fly zone a bad idea support the US shooting down Russian planes.
Making sense of polls
The Reuters poll can be dismissed as a representation of actual public opinion. Typically, Reuters/Ipsos does not measure, or ignores, “don’t know” or “unsure” responses. As I noted in a previous post (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), using that “forced-choice” format creates the illusion of public opinion, but does not give a plausible picture of reality.
The YouGov polls, by contrast, all included measures of “no opinion.” The poll for US News also included a measure of intensity, which provides even more insight into what the public is thinking.
US News/YouGov Poll on US Enforcing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ in Ukraine
No Explanation %
“No-Fly” Explained %
Strongly support
22
18
Somewhat support
20
24
Not sure
30
25
Somewhat oppose
13
15
Strongly oppose
15
18
Typically, news media combine the “strong” and “somewhat” categories when reporting the results—as I did above (42% to 28% in the first group; 42% to 33% in the second group). But that format suggests a more solidly opinionated public than is warranted.
Note the highlighted numbers. For both groups, only just over a third of respondents felt “strongly” about their views (37% strongly support or oppose in the first group; 36% in the second group). The rest are either “unsure” or hold views that are loosely held (“somewhat” support or oppose).
The weakly held or “top of mind” views explain how many people can provide self-contradictory responses. They simply haven’t given the issue much thought. New questions elicit new opinions, some of which contradict previous responses.
Those weakly held views also explain why “public opinion” can seem to fluctuate so greatly, as new information comes to light.
The key conclusion here is that most Americans have not firmly decided about the merits of a US-enforced no-fly zone. That conclusion no doubt holds true for most, if not all, of the other policy proposals included in the poll.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been amplifying Russian government propaganda claiming that the U.S. is financing biological weapons labs in Ukraine, as the two countries embark on a “no limits” alliance that appears to include a global disinformation war.
Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian referred to the claim as if it were factual when speaking to reporters in Beijing onThursday.
“This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” Zhao told a regular news briefing. “It is not something they can muddle through by saying that China’s statement and Russia’s finding are disinformation, and are absurd and ridiculous.”
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby has dismissed the claim as “Russian malarkey.”
But CIA Director William Burns said there is grave concern that Russia might be laying the groundwork for a chemical or biological attack of its own, which it would then blame on the fabricated lab operation.
“This is something, as all of you know very well, is very much a part of Russia’s playbook,” Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee onThursday. “They’ve used these weapons against their own citizens, they’ve at least encouraged the use in Syria and elsewhere, so it’s something we take very seriously.”
Moscow has also claimed that its invading forces had found evidence of hasty attempts to conceal biological weapons research in Ukraine.
Russian military figures and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov have repeated the claims, saying they are “ethnically targeted.”
The story has been picked up in Chinese state media, which has been ordered to publish only pro-Russian material since the start of the war, while video footage of Russian defense officials repeating the claims had garnered more than 10 million views on the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, seen in a file photo of a daily media briefing in Beijing on April 8, 2020, has repeatedly been called out for spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, Afghanistan and other controversial topics.
Changchun lockdown
The story was amplified in China as authorities placed the northeastern city of Changchun — home to some nine million people — under lockdown, amid a wave of new COVID-19 infections.
Residents must stay home, with one person allowed out every two days to buy essential supplies only, and public transportation, schools and businesses shut down.
China reported 1,396 new cases of COVID-19 during the past 24 hours, compared with less than 100 just three weeks ago.
Meanwhile, authorities in Shanghai have shut down schools, and are requisitioning properties in one residential district, possibly to use as enforced quarantine facilities.
The Xuhui district government issued an emergency notice onThursday, requisitioning a long-term apartment-style hotel, making the current residents homeless overnight, they told RFA.
Tenants who used the hotel were typically highly-salaried professionals who wanted a place close to the office, and were ordered to leave with no compensation or alternative arrangements, staff said.
“Xuhui district government imposed a requisition order,” a member of staff who answered the phone onFridaytold RFA. “If they are paying monthly to stay, that costs around 10,000 yuan a month.”
“I don’t know anything else about it.”
A Shanghai resident surnamed Wang said local officials had reported 11 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 64 asymptomatic infections.
A resident undergoes a nucleic acid test for the Covid-19 coronavirus in Changchun in China’s northeastern Jilin province, March 11, 2022. Credit: AFP
Reporters pressed to spread conspiracies
Repeated calls to the Shanghai municipal health commission rang unanswered during office hours onFriday, while an official at the Xuhui district health bureau referred inquiries to the district-level center for disease control and prevention (CDC).
Calls to the Xuhui CDC also rang unanswered onFriday.
One journalist told RFA they had been ordered not to carry out their own reporting into the COVID-19 wave, but instead to repost claims that the U.S. funded a biolab in Ukraine specializing in the study of pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans.
Media worker Liu Xiao said China’s zero-COVID strategy is looking less and less realistic in the face of the new wave of omicron variant infections, which is better able to escape China’s homegrown vaccines than imported vaccines.
“You can’t get the Pfizer jab; they’re not approving it,” Liu told RFA. “Everyone I know, including the director of a hospital, have all been given the Chinese-made jabs.”
“My son is still pretty sick, and he’s saying that the Chinese-made vaccines aren’t effective … Also, a lot of people are getting their immunity levels tested, but nobody is managing to get a Pfizer jab,” he said.
“Not even people in Beijing, who are very well-connected.”
Liu said nobody knows why it’s impossible to get imported jabs.
“We daren’t talk about it too much,” he said.
Political, not scientific policies
Cases continued to surge in Laixi city near the eastern port city of Qingdao, with a number of local officials punished for “allowing” the disease to spread at the No. 7 High School.
Shandong province had 121 newly confirmed cases onFriday, including 103 in Qingdao.
A Qingdao resident who gave only the nickname John said it made no sense to blame officials when the omicron variant is so highly transmissible.
“I don’t think it makes any sense, because … the virus will always spread faster than the speed of human prevention and control,” he said. “But after they did that, local officials were walking through the streets every day to oversee prevention and control efforts.”
Most flights have been canceled at Qingdao International Airport, with online video showing rows of empty check-in desks. Current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping said the zero-COVID policy is political rather than scientific.
“This virus will keep coming back, and they always use political means to deal with what should be a matter for science,” Zhang said.
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xiaoshan Huang, Chingman and Qiao Long.
These dangerous developments – the withdrawal from the INF, the development of the GBSD, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – came after the world voted ‘yes’ on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017) which went into force on 22 January 2021. An overwhelming number of United Nations member states, 122, voted in favor of this treaty; only one member (the Netherlands) voted against it. However, 69 countries abstained, including all nine of the nuclear weapons states and all NATO members (except the Netherlands). The Russian military action in Ukraine is a reminder, at the very least, of why a global nuclear weapons ban is necessary, and why every single country must commit to disarming and disposing of its nuclear weapons arsenal.
Anyone who speaks out against imperialism, capitalism, or racism with concrete examples of the terrible harm they do, can expect to be charged with the dreaded term “whataboutism.” Like clockwork, the act of revealing American crimes will result in an accusation that is used to silence dissent.
The AFL-CIO recently hosted a fundraiser by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) which aimed to support labor organizations in Ukraine assisting families suffering through the current crisis. One of the labor organizations is the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) which is a partner of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. The current chairman of KVPU is Mykhailo Volynets who is pictured on the left sitting next to his deputy, Ihor Kniazhansky, of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war.
Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy.
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”
It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.
It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).
My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.
The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:
Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.1
Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.
I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.
In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.
In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And, of course, there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.
The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgen of historical awareness knows.
The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”
Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.
After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:
Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.
Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the lead up to this tragedy. All the current wringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.
The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
“Engulfed” is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades-long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.
In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.
Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was, of course, a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.
Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.
The merry-go-round goes round and round.
I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.
I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.
The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.
I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.
But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae picks up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:
Thermobaric weapons have been used by Russian forces in Ukraine, the UK military has reported. A short Twitter video correctly explained the weapons are devastating, can destroy infrastructure and are much more deadly than conventional explosives. And it isn’t wrong.
Burning air
Thermobaric weapons can literally set the air on fire, make metal burn and cause deadly organ damage to anyone in the vicinity. They are particularly deadly to civilians because the blast wave travels through buildings, making hiding very difficult:
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.
Correctly, people were outraged. Even Sky News presenter Kay Burley, took to Twitter to air their (arguably, slightly euro-centric) disgust:
Warning: Thermobaric weapons can suck the oxygen from human lungs without impacting the brain leaving victims to suffocate to death while fully conscious.
But there’s a problem here. One which many people – including the Ministry of Defence’s social media team – seems to have overlooked: the UK also uses thermobaric weapons. Though, because we deliberately renamed them, you might not realise it.
You’d be forgiven for not knowing unless you’d read a Drone Wars article from 2018. The piece details how the UK’s use of thermobaric weapons in Syria was revealed in a freedom of information request.
Thermobaric fill
Not one but two types of Hellfire missile – the kind used on particular drones and Apache helicopters – have a thermobaric fill.
When the warhead detonates, the aluminium mixture is dispersed and rapidly burns. The sustained high pressure explosion is extremely damaging, creating a powerful shock wave and vacuum. Anyone in the vicinity is likely to die from internal organ damage.
And, responding to the MOD tweet, a former British Army tactical air controller showed they had also been used in Afghanistan:
Imagine tweeting that with a straight face, knowing @BritishArmy JTACs and Apache pilots fired thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan. Exhibit A: AGM114N pic.twitter.com/g2DozqX17t
Drone Wars also explained how the UK’s thermobaric weapons came to be unilaterally renamed as something else entirely:
Thermobaric weapons, sometimes called ‘vacuum’ weapons have been condemned by human rights groups and, as the Times reported in 2008 , “the weapons are so controversial that MoD weapons and legal experts spent 18 months debating whether British troops could use them without breaking international law.”
The ‘debate’ came to an end when a ‘Yes Minister’ solution was offered – they “redefined” the weapon as an ‘enhanced blast missile’.
Legal?!
Human Rights Watch has pointed out that these weapons, despite being truly horrific and particularly dangerous to civilians, are not illegal – unless used on built up areas, that is. A report on their use in Ukraine states:
Because enhanced blast weapons cover a wide area, they are prone to indiscriminate use, especially in or near populated areas. In urban settings it is very difficult to limit the effect of enhanced blast weapons to combatants, and the nature of enhanced blast weapons makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take shelter from their destructive effect.
And their use isn’t limited to Russia and the UK. The United States also uses them. It can be rightly pointed out that the Russian TOS launcher highlighted in the MOD tweet is a so-called area effect weapon. In short, it fires many missiles indiscriminately. But even a single Hellfire has the same effect on a smaller scale. Including on civilians.
Ban?
Thermobaric weapons show up a massive contradiction in international law. The laws of war are much less rigid than we may think. They may ban the use of, for example, cluster weapons (which Russia is also reportedly deploying) but they still allow for all manner of terrible acts. Perhaps its time to review those laws, and universally ban the use of thermobaric/enhance blast weapons too.
Perhaps this would be a tiny positive which could emerge from the brutality of the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has completely upended European military spending and the global energy market. The disruptions in both sectors could have massive ramifications for how the world addresses climate change. Already, Germany’s decision to increase its defense budget to 100 billion euros, and the move by the United States and its allies to release 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves, are only the first of what is likely to be a huge reshuffling of global priorities and supply lines in reaction to the military attack instigated by Vladimir Putin.
In the United States, President Joe Biden announced a ban on importing Russian oil, which had previously been exempt from the harsh sanctions imposed since the beginning of the war. Only about 8 percent of U.S. petroleum imports came from Russia in 2021, but even the small decline in supply could contribute to increasing gas prices. Europe hasn’t imposed its own ban, as the continent is far more reliant on Russia for oil and natural gas imports. Although European leaders have committed to decreasing their dependency on Russian energy, that transition will take years, as Russia supplies the continent with 40 percent of its gas and 25 percent of its oil.
The United States is already the world’s largest energy producer, with Saudi Arabia and Russia close behind. The growth of U.S. energy production has been a largely bipartisan affair, even as Republicans push for more and Democrats pay lip service to reining in oil and gas extraction in the name of slowing global warming. U.S. oil lobbyists are using Russia’s invasion, and the subsequent energy supply uncertainties, to push for increased fossil fuels production in the name of “energy security.”
More traditional understandings of security have also been upended since Russia’s invasion. Germany announced it would send weapons to Ukraine, a first in the post-WWII era, and it increase its military spending to 2 percent of GDP. Those moves, along with canceling the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, would have been unthinkable only several weeks ago, according to European defense experts. The United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries have long pressured Germany to increase its military spending, and although the new posture is a radically different approach domestically, the international implications aren’t clear.
Since the end of World War II, Europe has depended on the United States for its military defense capabilities through NATO, as have Japan and South Korea. Both of those countries have defense treaties with the United States, unlike Ukraine.
Some NATO critics on the left have called for Europe to move away from its reliance on the United States for defense. Those who make this argument say that if Europe were less militarily dependent on the United States, there could be an opportunity to unwind NATO and perhaps even scrap the alliance at some point in the future. That position may make sense in the abstract, but it cuts against the broader goal of decreasing militarism worldwide. Certainly, right now, it’s almost impossible to imagine dissolving NATO, as Russia’s invasion has united the alliance in ways the world hasn’t seen in decades.
Also, increased military spending out of Europe is unlikely to result in a decrease in Pentagon funding in the United States, regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House. The likely result, then, of Russia’s actions is a significant net increase in military spending from the U.S. and Europe. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a $13.6 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $6.5 billion in military aid. U.S. lawmakers are also negotiating next year’s Pentagon budget, which is set to exceed the $740 billion they had previously agreed to, far above the $715 billion the Biden administration had initally requested. Setting aside what that could mean for future wars, it is almost certainly bad news from a climate perspective.
Military spending is a notorious contributor to carbon emissions. The U.S. military is the “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” according to a 2019 Cost of War study from Brown University. Another study from the same year showed “that if the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”
The broad trend is true for other militaries, according to research from Stuart Parkinson of Scientists for Global Responsibility. “I estimate that the carbon emissions of the world’s armed forces and the industries that provide their equipment are in the region of 5% of the global total,” Parkinson wrote in 2020. When factoring in the effects of war — including fires, deforestation and post-conflict reconstruction — the toll rises even higher. In total, Parkinson estimates that militaries and their industrial partners are a greater polluting sector than civil aviation, which contributes roughly as much to global warming as Germany or Japan.
We’re forced to rely on estimates because, as a result of U.S. lobbying during the Kyoto protocols, militaries are exempt from disclosing their carbon emissions to the United Nations. The Paris climate accords also don’t require countries to report their military’s carbon footprint, resulting in a massive loophole that countries can exploit. “With military spending rapidly rising, this loophole is set to grow at a time when other emissions are falling,” Parkinson told The Guardian late last year. “The seriousness with how these nations deal with this issue will affect action in other sectors and in other nations.”
As is the case with most of Biden’s agenda, his record on climate change is decidedly uneven at best. Last month, the federal government recently auctioned off areas in New York and New Jersey for a record $4.37 billion to be used for wind farms that could ultimately power up to 2 million homes. More broadly, in Biden’s first year, he articulated a robust climate policy, by U.S. standards, as part of his Build Back Better spending plan. That plan, and its green energy components, has stalled in Congress thanks to opposition from all Republicans and two Senate Democrats: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. (Manchin has joined Republicans in calling for Biden to increase U.S. oil and gas production.)
Biden’s actual climate policies, however, bear little resemblance to his rhetoric recognizing the world historic catastrophe that climate change presents. Under his watch, the Interior Department “processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden’s first year in office than three of the four years of the Trump administration,” according to Politico. The United States has also drastically ramped up exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), becoming the world’s largest exporter.
Germany is also looking to increase its use of LNG to offset its dependence on Russian energy exports, as well as possibly extending its use of coal plants. Last year, the country embarked on an ambitious plan to use only renewable energy by 2035. It’s not clear whether Russia’s actions will accelerate that timeline or disrupt it, but in the short run Germany’s new reliance on LNG is a lateral move at best. U.S. LNG exporters are already seeing record export levels, as European countries look to offset their energy shortages. A recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council found “that LNG exports have, at best, little climate benefit compared to other options,” and that “compared to clean, renewable energy sources, LNG falls far short.”
For as much as oil lobbyists and their partners in Congress are exploiting Russia’s actions to ramp up drilling, there’s also the possibility that this moment could lead to a more widespread public awareness of the dangers that arise from reliance on fossil fuels and petrostates. Sen. Ed Markey has said a Green New Deal would be a “pathway for peace.”
The massive refugee flows we’re seeing out of Ukraine right now come after more than a decade of similar displacement from war, poverty and climate crisis. More global spending on militaries, and a doubling down on fossil fuel extraction, will make additional migration and conflict more likely. If the world takes this opportunity to recommit to renewable energy, the worst can be avoided, but the last week does not give much cause for optimism.
As Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine dominates the news cycle, it’s important that the public is aware of what else is going on. So, here’s a round up of the stories the Tories probably would prefer you not to hear about.
#CovidIsNotOver
On Twitter, #CovidIsNotOver has been trending. Little wonder – because coronavirus (Covid-19) hospital admissions are on the rise again. The Guardianreported on Thursday 10 March that:
the latest government figures showed a sharp 46% rise in new recorded UK cases week on week – to 346,059 over the past week – and a 12% rise in hospitalisations to 8,950.
Meanwhile, the number of people living with so-called long Covid continues to rise. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts the figure at 1.5 million people for January 2022. People protested outside parliament on 9 March over this:
1.5million people in the UK have Long Covid. We are great enough in numbers to cause a riot, but only well enough to cause a rumble. Please hear us. #ResearchLongCovidpic.twitter.com/UsycZIgZeZ
— Laura #ResearchLongCovid (@lautowns) March 9, 2022
But you’d be forgiven for thinking the pandemic is over. Because so far, the government is doing nothing to address rising hospitalisations and cases. Nor has it increased long Covid research funding since July 2021.
“Partygate”
The Downing Street “partygate” scandal has still been bubbling away in the background. We now know that the Met Police has sent 80 people involved in it “questionnaires” – perfectly normal behaviour from the cops during a criminal investigation, of course. We wait to find out what the Met’s conclusion is.
But the real story here is Johnson. Because before Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked like his time as PM would barely last until May’s local elections. But since then, some Tory MPs seem to think he’s safe. Factor in Keir Starmer backtracking on Labour’s calls for the PM to resign – and it could well be that Johnson and co have gotten away with it.
Bills, bills, bills
Meanwhile, the non-elected and privileged House of Lords has actually been doing some good of late. Because its members have repeatedly scuppered various bits of nasty government legislation. Overall, it’s actually inflicted the most defeats on a government since the 1970s. Some of these include:
Over 15 defeats on the Nationality and Borders Bill – including several around regressive human trafficking clauses.
Removing parts of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (the so-called policing bill) – including amending the increase in stop and search powers on protestors.
Overturning a part of the Health and Care Bill that would see poorer people hit by a cap on social care charges.
But not to be deterred, the government announced on 8 March it was making more changes to the Online Safety Bill. These include more rules surrounding social media, and a consultation on how advertising is regulated.
Perpetual chaos
And as if that all wasn’t enough – we’ve got more Tory government NHS reforms incoming; the Guardianrevealed charities had once again been shopping foreign born homeless people to the Home Office; the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) poured scorn on a petition calling for the £20-a-week Universal Uplift to be given to legacy benefit claimants as back pay – oh, and alleged ‘culture’ secretary Nadine Dorries’s braying during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) had to be seen to be believed:
Governments have always looked to conceal news that is detrimental to them. It was a Labour government spin doctor who said during the 9/11 terrorist attacks that it was a ‘good day to bury bad news‘. Since then, governments have continued to use that as an MO. So, while some news events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rightly take priority – we mustn’t take our eyes of the ball of what’s going on in the background.
Reuters reports that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms’ hate speech terms of service due to the war in Ukraine:
“Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.”
Twitter has also altered its rules against incitement and death threats in the case of Russian leaders and military personnel, as Ben Norton explains here for Multipolarista.
Last month we also learned that Facebook is now allowing users to praise the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion because of the war, a move that is arguably the most liberal thing that has ever happened.
Normally when the US and its allies are involved in a war they’ll at least pay lip service to the notion that they have nothing but good will for the people of the enemy nation, claiming they only oppose their oppressive rulers. With Russia it’s just a complete rejection of the entire culture, the entire ethnicity. It’s a widespread promotion of hatred for the actual people because of who they are.
These are the people who are being smashed with crushing economic sanctions while western pundits proclaim that “There are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore” and ask “At what point do you hold a people responsible for putting an evil despot in power?” This even as the Russian people are being arrested by the thousands in anti-war protests, putting to shame our own western society that has generally slept through war after war in the years since 9/11 while our militaries have been killing of millions of people.
And this is all over a war that the western empire knowingly provoked, almost certainly planned in advance, and appears to be doing everything possible to ensure that it continues. Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports that Washington is still to this day not engaging in any serious diplomacy with Moscow over this conflict, preferring to strangle Russia economically and pour weapons into Ukraine to make the war as painful and costly as possible. Both of these preferences just so happen to nicely complement the US empire’s goal of unipolar planetary hegemony.
Meanwhile the entire western political/media class seems to be doing everything it can to turn this from a regional proxy war into a very fast and radioactive World War 3. Calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would require directly attacking the Russian military and risking a nuclear exchange in the resulting escalations, are now ubiquitous. Claims that more directly confrontational military aggressions against Russia won’t start a nuclear war (or that it’s worth the risk anyway) are becomingmore and more common in western punditry. Democrats are braying for Russian blood while Republicans like Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney are attacking Democrats for being insufficiently hawkish and escalatory in this conflict, creating a horrifying dynamic where both parties are trying to out-hawk each other to score political points and nobody is calling for de-escalation and detente.
As luck would have it, US officials have also selected this precarious nuclear tightrope walk as the perfect time to begin hurling accusations that Russia is preparing a biological attack, potentially as a false flag blamed on Ukraine or the United States. This coincides with Victoria Nuland’s admission before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Ukraine has “biological research facilities” that the US is “quite concerned” might end up “falling into the hands of Russian forces”.
All of this on top of the unprecedented wave of authoritarian censorship that has been tearing through the US-centralized empire as our rulers work to quash dissident voices around the world. It certainly is interesting that the fight for freedom and democracy requires so much censorship, warmongering, xenophobia, propaganda and bloodlust.
I am of course only trying to make a point here. Geopolitical power struggles are not contested by opposing sides of heroes and baddies like a Marvel superhero movie, though you’d never know it from all the hero worship of Volodymyr Zelensky and the self-righteous posturing of mainstream westerners over this war. Vladimir Putin is no Peter Parker, but neither is Zelensky or Biden or any of the other empire managers overseeing this campaign to overwhelm all challengers to US global domination.
The power structure loosely centralized around the United States is without question the single most depraved and destructive on earth. No one else has spent the 21st century waging wars that have killed millions and displaced tens of millions. No one else is circling the planet with military bases and working to destroy any nation on earth which disobeys it. Not Russia. Not China. Nobody.
The hypocrisy, dishonesty and phoniness of this whole song and dance about Ukraine is one of the most distasteful things that I have ever witnessed. Rather than engaging in click-friendly Instagram activism with blue and yellow profile pics making risk-free criticisms of a foreign leader in a far off country who has nothing to do with us, perhaps we would be better served by a bit more introspection, and by a somewhat more difficult stance: intense scrutiny of the corruption and abuses running rampant in our own society.
_______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Several nuclear facilities in Ukraine have been attacked by the Russian military over the past fortnight — a nuclear research facility, two radioactive waste storage sites, the Chernobyl nuclear site, and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, reports Jim Green.
In a short statement that was issued on 10 March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated that they will no longer participate in the Council of Europe in response to ‘the EU’s and NATO’s continued efforts to destroy the Council of Europe and the common humanitarian and legal space in Europe’. It could mean that Russia may leave Europe’s main organisation on human rights, rin response to its recent suspension related to the war in Ukraine.
“Russia will not participate in the transformation by NATO and the EU obediently following them of the oldest European organization into another platform for incantations about Western superiority and narcissism,” the ministry said, according to Russian media outlet RIA News. “Let them enjoy communicating with each other without Russia.”
Russia joined the Council of Europe in the winter of 1996, and since then the country has had a moratorium on the death penalty. Two years later, Moscow ratified the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms (ECHR).
Several times Russia was deprived of the right to vote in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, despite the fact that it is one of the five largest sponsors of the organization. After the start of the special operation in Ukraine, the Council of Europe suspended Moscow’s membership.
(@DefenceHQ) 
#ResearchLongCovid (@lautowns) 
(@Ellie28507466) 
