Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 123

Lily Lynch: The realists were right

By Lily Lynch, New Statesman, 9/2/23

Eighteen months into the war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West. Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities.

At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive”, which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. “We’re about to see what a decentralised, horizontal, innovative high-tech force can do,” Jessica Berlin, a German and American political analyst, wrote in May. “Ukraine may be underfunded, undermanned and underequipped compared to Russia. But those tactical, adaptive Ukrainian strengths deliver what money can’t buy and training can’t teach. Get ready for some stunners.” In the Daily Telegraph, the soldier-turned-civilian-military-expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was effusive as recently as June: “As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.”

But by most accounts, the counteroffensive has been a profound letdown. A Washington Post article published on 17 August cited a classified assessment by the US intelligence community which said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive would “fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol”, meaning that Kyiv “would not fulfil its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea”. Other analyses have testified to the same. As Roland Popp, strategic analyst at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich told me, “The main cause for the change in [the media’s] tune is certainly general disappointment about Ukrainian military performance in the much-anticipated ‘counteroffensive’. Military experts in Western think tanks had whipped up high expectations based on Ukrainian successes in Kharkiv and Kherson last year. They ignored the Russian ability to adapt – which is historically the main factor explaining the changing odds during wars – and overstated the effects of Western weapons technology and doctrine.”

It is said that “success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan”, and a rush to allocate blame for the underwhelming counteroffensive is now under way. Some Western military experts blame the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ failures on its “Soviet legacy”. And several recent articles have condemned Ukraine for refusing to follow US instruction. “The thinly disguised criticism of Ukrainian operational decision-making is also intended to distract from [their] own misjudgments,” Popp said. American officials have complained through media that Ukraine has focused too much on the city of Bakhmut and other points in the East, wasting Western-furnished artillery in crushing barrages, and asserted that Kyiv should concentrate its forces in an area around Tokmak in the south of the country and its artillery fire only on the most important targets. Through unnamed sources and leaks to the press, a story of a more frustrated US-Ukraine relationship has emerged in recent weeks. “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one disappointed former US official is quoted as telling the Washington Post. “It doesn’t exist.” 

“They are clearly trying to show some distance from Ukraine’s decision-making even as the official line is ‘we’re with them 100 per cent’,” Ben Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, said. The Ukrainian side, on the other hand, blames the West for its reluctance to furnish it with weapons and supplies. To cite but one of many examples communicated through the press, an anonymous source in the general staff recently told the Economist that Ukraine had received just 60 Leopard tanks despite having been promised hundreds. Adding to the irritation was the disappointment at the Nato summit in Vilnius in July, where Ukraine was not granted a much hoped-for timeline for accession to the military alliance. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, responded to the news in a series of furious tweets, calling the decision “unprecedented and absurd”.

But the stage was set for these deflated hopes in the war’s first weeks in 2022. Early on, reporters framed the war as one of David vs Goliath, in which Ukrainian grandmothers downed Russian drones with jars of pickles. Ukraine’s astonishing performance in Kharkiv fuelled expectations. Early mythmaking has made recent disappointments all the more bitter. “There were wishful expectations that Russia would collapse, fold early on, especially after Ukraine heroically survived the first round, and people got carried away,” Patrick Porter, the realist scholar of international relations, said.

Compounding the disillusionment is the fact that the early shock of the war has worn off, meaning it’s lost some of its initial sense of urgency – especially as war takes its toll far beyond Ukraine. “There was the initial widespread feeling of revulsion; then, people were naturally drawn towards ‘we must not compromise’, and moral and strategic maximalism,” Porter said. “That’s easier to hold when you’re not yet feeling the pain. Now, materially, there are costs everywhere.” And while the immediate convulsion of fear that accompanied the full-scale invasion was so strong that it prompted Sweden and Finland to apply to join Nato, the initial panic has since faded, and evolved into a more ambient dread about a long war of attrition, rising inflation, recession and food insecurity.

Recently, Ukraine itself has also been depicted in a more complicated light. On 19 August the New York Times published a story about Kyiv’s wartime policy of jailing conscientious objectors. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s new proposal to equate corruption with treason, transferring cases from anti-graft agencies to the security service, was met with unusually harsh condemnation in Politico. And this summer both the Guardian and BBC have published articles about Ukrainian deserters and men employing other means to avoid conscription, including barricading themselves inside their homes and using Telegram channels to warn other men about the location of roving military recruitment officials. On 24 February 2022 a presidential decree imposed martial law which forbade men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. But according to a BBC report in June this year, tens of thousands of men have crossed the Romanian border alone, and at least 90 men have died attempting to make the perilous crossing, either freezing to death in the mountains or by drowning in the Tisa River.

Further, the Economist recently published an article about the Ukrainian public’s waning morale. Most men eager to defend Ukraine joined the armed forces long ago, and many are now dead. The country now recruits among those effectively forced. Individually, stories about conscientious objectors, deserters, those hiding from conscription, and a war-weary public can appear anecdotal, but taken together, they begin to undermine one of the foundational tenets of the war: that Ukrainians want to fight, in the words of Joe Biden, the US president, “for as long as it takes”. And as expectations are dramatically scaled back, one cannot help but ask: for as long as it takes to do what?

As a more sober reality sets in, it’s worth asking why Western governments and the media were such effusive boosters of Ukraine’s war effort. The writer Richard Seymour has suggested that part of it was about identity formation, wherein Ukraine is emblematic of an “idealised Europe” or even democracy itself, while Russia represents Oriental despotism and authoritarianism. The war thus embodies the supposed civilisational struggle theorised by Samuel Huntington between democracies and autocracies, promoted by the Biden administration through initiatives such as its Summit for Democracy. That annual event aims to “renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, underlining the continuity between liberal opposition to the putative authoritarian affinities of Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But beyond the merely symbolic there was a practical rationale for the kinds of coverage we saw in the war’s early months: the conflict in Ukraine has revived a waning Atlanticism – a long-sought aim of proponents of Nato enlargement. Just a few years ago Emmanuel Macron, the French president, declared Nato “braindead”; the war in Ukraine has brought it back to life. Finland and Sweden applied to join. Critics say that the governments of both countries used “shock doctrine” tactics to convince their respective populations to abandon their policy of neutrality, making the decision to apply for membership while the war was top news and the public was still afraid.

Some have wondered whether the media’s shift in tone – and all the anonymous messages transmitted by official US sources – presage an imminent change in policy: negotiations, a peace settlement, or ceasefire. But most experts agree that it is still too early for that. “Russia’s invasion has been a particularly brutal war, one with many atrocities,” Porter explained. “Ukrainians are unlikely to accept peace negotiations yet.” For both Russia and Ukraine, the war is a primal one, and nowhere near its end. But the new crop of articles does mark a return of a sceptical tone largely suppressed until recently. In November last year General Mark A Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, proposed a negotiated settlement to the war. Following Ukraine’s successes in Kharkiv and Kherson, he asserted that “you want to negotiate from a position of strength” and that “Russia right now is on its back”. The Biden administration promptly distanced itself from the idea. Publicly, the US pledged support for Ukraine’s total victory, but privately, many in the administration were said to have shared Milley’s scepticism. Late last month, some in media started revisiting the general’s remarks, suggesting that perhaps he had been right all along.

Realists, most infamously John Mearsheimer, who are highly controversial among liberal boosters of Ukraine, have long warned of the dangers of the exalted rhetoric and mythmaking among Western governments and media. In an op-ed for Politico published in spring 2022, Porter, along with the grand strategy experts Friedman and Justin Logan, cautioned against the risk of “giving Ukraine false hope”, and stressed that “the rhetoric-policy gap could also raise excessive Ukrainian expectations of support”. Eighteen months into the war, with a dejected Zelensky chastising Nato for insufficient support, their unheeded warnings look prescient.

Instead of total victory, at summer’s end the media now appears to be girding the Western public for a long, protracted war of attrition. The editorial board of the Washington Post, citing US statistics of nearly half a million killed or injured, recently cautioned that “no end to the carnage is in sight, and calls for a negotiated solution are wishful thinking at this point”. The editorial asserts grimly that “the war could continue for years – waxing, waning or frozen”. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has also recently warned that “the most probable outcome… is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit”. Le Monde also reported that in July a French general, Jacques Langlade de Montgros, warned that the conflict in Ukraine “is a war of attrition, set for the long term” like “two boxers in a ring, exhausting each other blow by blow, not knowing which one will call first”.

Also hanging over the grim media coverage is the 2024 US presidential election. “The Biden administration now has the difficult task of convincing the public that an attritional approach, that is, opting for a long war, can still lead to some kind of Ukrainian victory or at least a standstill in order to maintain support for continued financial and military assistance for Ukraine,” Popp said. The war in Ukraine has polarised US public opinion. According to a recent poll by CNN, 71 per cent of Republicans are against new funding for Ukraine; among Democrats, 62 per cent support it. Significantly, the war has also divided the Republican Party. At the first Republican presidential candidate debate on 23 August, the cracks in the party were on full display: the insurgent populist right, embodied in the millennial figure of Vivek Ramaswamy, hopes to see such aid diminished or eliminated entirely, while more conventional Republicans like Chris Christie and former vice-president Mike Pence expressed a commitment to continuing it. Ramaswamy said: “I think that this is disastrous, that we are protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border, when we should use those same military resources to prevent… the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States of America.” He also mocked American deference to Zelensky, referring to him as some politicians’ “pope” to whom they paid pilgrimage while ignoring domestic catastrophes. Trump, who was not on the debate stage, called for an end to the war in an interview with Tucker Carlson, saying “that’s a war that should end immediately, not because of one side or the other, because hundreds of thousands of people are being killed”. And now, it appears that most Republicans agree with the positions of the populist candidates: 59 per cent say they believe that the US has “already done enough to support Kyiv”.

But for some, hope is not yet lost. There is new talk of a “reset” of Ukrainian strategy. In a Washington Post op-ed co-authored by David Petraeus, a retired US army general, and Frederick W Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, readers were cautioned against excess pessimism. The authors argued that major breakthroughs could happen at any moment, and that Ukraine is indeed making slow, steady progress, field by field. Those with similarly optimistic views argue that the media always vacillates wildly between unrealistic claims of imminent victory and maudlin pronunciations about catastrophic losses, both territorial and human, and the spectre of a war without end. But that the increasingly exhausted public – in Ukraine and the West – will be eager to accede to more war with the same enthusiasm it did in the war’s early months appears less likely by the hour.

Lily Lynch is a writer and editor-in-chief of Balkanist Magazine.

Emma Graham-Harrison: ‘The city wants to finish off what Russia’s attacks began’: Kyiv residents fear property grab

By Emma Graham-Harrison, The Guardian, 9/9/23

About an hour after air raid sirens sounded in the early hours of 10 August, residents on Yaroslavska Street in the heart of Kyiv’s hip Podil district heard the crash of a building coming down.

Some looked out of their windows expecting to see the smoking remains of a Russian missile. Instead, in the dawn light, two excavators were tearing apart an elegant 200-year-old mansion.

Within hours, the house, built in 1811, was a pile of rubble. Protesters gathered outside with placards attacking developers and the city’s government. “What hasn’t been destroyed by the Russian rockets is being destroyed by our officials and builders,” read one placard.

The war, perhaps surprisingly, has not diminished the appetite for prime property in Kyiv, or halted the scramble to get hold of empty plots for construction. Property prices dipped only briefly when Russian forces besieged the city last spring, then rebounded as its streets returned to life. Kyiv has extensive air defences and the frontlines are far away, so some residents have returned, and it has become a new home for people fleeing the fighting further east.

Ksenia Semenova, a city council member who focuses on protecting historic Kyiv, said she got her first post-invasion call about an illegal demolition on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia launched missiles at the capital and sent its troops across the border.

“The developers told me: ‘We thought it was a good idea – lots of people had left Kyiv so we wouldn’t disturb anyone’s work or sleep’,” she said.

But while developers seek to take advantage of Russia’s invasion, it has also spurred opposition to their plans. Vladimir Putin’s ahistorical attempt at justifying the war by denying Ukraine’s national identity has bolstered support for activists fighting to protect the city’s built heritage.

“After the full-scale invasion, when Russia said we are not a real country and don’t have any history, cultural heritage became more important to people,” said Semenova.

Perhaps because of that heightened appreciation for Ukrainian history, the August destruction of the building in Podil caused an outcry. Mayor Vitali Klitschko has pledged to investigate and the property’s owner uploaded a defiant video to YouTube.

Relaxing on a sofa and waving documents that he claimed backed his position, Serhiy Boyarchukov said he plans to build four storeys of apartment hotels and a “clubhouse” where the elegant single-storey house – a rare example of residential wooden construction in the city – had stood.

“There was no complete demolition, there was a partial dismantling, and the basement and one wall stayed in place,” he said, adding that the work was authorised under a “reconstruction permit” issued by the culture ministry in March.

He did not address questions about why the demolition began at 5am during an air raid alert.

Activists are sceptical the mayor’s investigation will really hold anyone to account. They say that for years, city authorities have allowed Kyiv’s historic fabric to be sold off, torn down or decay beyond the point of repair.

Oleh Symoroz was a veteran of that peaceful struggle before he volunteered to fight for Kyiv, then went east when the city had been saved and lost his legs on the frontline in the east of Ukraine.

Now back home for rehab care, he was furious to find the city being destroyed from the inside while many of the people who campaigned to protect it are serving on the frontlines.

“I feel terrible this destruction is happening now. Worse than I did about it before the full-scale invasion,” he said, in an interview at the hospital where he is learning to walk again with prosthetic limbs. “We are away fighting for Ukraine, and they use this chance to destroy the city.

“There are not so many construction bosses on the frontline, but a lot of activists have been killed or injured or badly traumatised.” He added: “They have an advantage now.”

Another resident, Tetiana, expected city authorities would help when a Russian drone hit flats in her building on Zhylyanska Street, a few blocks from Kyiv’s main railway station. It killed four of her neighbours, including a woman who was six months pregnant, and demolished the hall and staircase leading to her door.skip past newsletter promotion

She was traumatised and frightened by the attack, but was not worried about being made homeless. She had seen politicians on the news visiting other buildings hit by Russian attacks and promising to help, and the reconstruction that rapidly followed.

So Tetiana was stunned to get a message just three days later announcing that her building had been declared structurally unsound and would have to be demolished. The attached survey was dated 17 October, the day of the attack.

“When could the person responsible for that report have done it?” she said. “The sun set just after six, which is around when the firefighters finished putting out flames, and curfew was at 9pm then.”

The surviving residents were urged to sign away the rights to their historic flats in the city centre. In return, they would be put on a waiting list for new homes on the outskirts of Kyiv about 12 miles away.

Tetiana refused, marking the start of a bureaucratic nightmare that has left her homeless – staying with friends and relatives – for nearly a year.

When her fellow survivors tried to register a residents’ association – a key step to getting their own survey and protecting the site of their building – they were rejected 15 times by city authorities on technicalities.

Tetiana, who asked to be identified only by her first name because of the stress of the long battle with city authorities, now believes officials want to use the damage caused on 17 October as an excuse to demolish her building and seize the land.

“What the Russians began, the city council is trying to finish off,” she said. “Even if our building isn’t sound, I don’t understand why they can’t use the money to rebuild. Why do they want to move us away and what do they plan to do with the land?”

Asked about the building, Kyiv’s city authorities only said: “The house cannot be reconstructed.” They declined to answer questions about why the building was not on the register of damaged objects, how they had been able to carry out the survey in a single day and why residents were being asked to move to the city’s outskirts.

Tetiana is determined to reclaim her flat and protect the historic property, but is braced for a long battle.

“There are a lot of old people in this building – maybe the Kyiv authorities thought: ‘Let’s wait and maybe they will die and the problem will be resolved.’ They didn’t take into account that there are still young people who decided to fight for their rights.”

Andrew Korybko: Poland & Ukraine Have Plunged Into A Full-Blown Political Crisis With No End In Sight

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/21/23

Both parties are in a dilemma whereby each believes that they have more to gain at the level of national and political interests by escalating tensions than by being the first to de-escalate them. A self-sustaining cycle is thus in the process of forming, which risks leading to such a drastic deterioration of their ties that the presently dismal state thereof might soon be looked fondly upon.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s revelation to local media on Wednesday that his country had stopped supplying arms to Ukraine in favor of arming itself showed just how far bilateral ties have plunged over the past week. Warsaw unilaterally extended restrictions on its eastern neighbor’s agricultural imports upon the expiry of the European Commission’s deal on 15 September in order to protect its farmers, which prompted Kiev to complain to the WTO about it on Monday.

Later that same day, Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller suggested that Warsaw might let its aid to Ukrainian refugees lapse next spring instead of extending it, thus hinting at a willingness to expand their trade dispute into other dimensions. If that happens, then the over one and a half million Ukrainians temporarily residing in Poland would either have to return home or go to elsewhere to Germany for instance. Everything then snowballed into a full-blown political crisis on Tuesday.

Polish Minister of European Affairs Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek ominously warned that:

“Ukraine’s actions make no impression on us… but they do make a certain impression on Polish public opinion. This can be seen in the polls, in the level of public support for continued support for Ukraine. And this harms Ukraine itself. We would like to continue supporting Ukraine, but, for this to be possible, we must have the support of Poles in this matter. If we don’t have it, it will be difficult for us to continue supporting Ukraine in the same way as we have been doing so far.”

Zelensky then exploited his global pulpit at the UNGA to fearmonger about the following:

“We are working to ensure food stability. And I hope that many of you will join us in these efforts. We launched a temporary sea export corridor from our ports. And we are working hard to preserve the land routes for grain exports. And it is alarming to see how some in Europe, some of our friends in Europe, play out solidarity in a political theater – making a thriller from the grain. They may seem to play their own role but in fact they are helping set the stage to a Moscow actor.”

Polish President Andrzej Duda’s response that he shared with reporters showed how offended he was:

“Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to everything he can… but we have the right to defend ourselves against harm being done to us. A drowning person is extremely dangerous, he can pull you down to the depths… simply drown the rescuer. We must act to protect ourselves from the harm being done to us, because if the drowning person… drowns us, he will not get help. So we have to take care of our interests and we will do it effectively and decisively.”

It was against this backdrop that Poland urgently summoned the Ukrainian Ambassador on Wednesday, after which Morawiecki revealed later that day that Poland is no longer sending weapons to Kiev. Prior to Ukraine complaining to the WTO about Poland, which is what set this fast-moving sequence of events into motion, tensions were already boiling for some time as a result of the failed counteroffensive sobering them up from the mutual delusion of seemingly inevitable victory over Russia.

These neighboring nations then naturally began to fall out with one another as the full range of their preexisting differences were exacerbated and quickly reshaped bilateral relations. Their trade dispute was just the tip of the iceberg but it showed that each side was starting to prioritize their contradictory national interests at the expense of shared political ones. This signaled to their societies that it was now once again acceptable target the other with nationalist rage instead of focusing solely on Russia.  

All this have been prevented, however, if only Ukraine showed some gratefulness to Poland for everything that Warsaw did for it these past 19 months and didn’t complain to the WTO about the grain issue. Even worse was Zelensky breaking the taboo of accusing his Polish counterpart of all people, who leads one of the world’s most Russophobic states in history, of supposedly doing Russia’s geopolitical bidding. He crossed a red line and there’s now no going back to their previously illusory mutual trust.

Polish-Ukrainian ties are expected to plunge even further in the coming weeks as the first approaches its next elections on 15 October, which the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party hopes to win by making everything about national security. This explains why they cut off arms shipments to Ukraine in response to Zelensky’s ridiculous innuendo about Poland being a Russian puppet, and it’s possible that more such meaningful moves might soon follow to remind Ukraine that it’s indebted to Poland for its survival.

With these calculations in mind, it can confidently be predicted that Polish-Ukrainian ties will likely continue plunging till mid-October at the earliest, after which they might rebound if the “Civic Platform” (PO) opposition’s latest media campaign succeeds in turning enough rural voters against PiS. It’ll be an uphill battle for them, and PiS could possibly form a coalition government with the anti-establishment Confederation party if they aren’t totally trounced, so PO’s return to power isn’t guaranteed.  

That being the case, there’s a credible chance that Polish-Ukrainian ties could plunge even further across the coming year, especially if PiS is forced into a coalition government with Confederation. The first has come to resent Zelensky in recent months while the latter was consistently against Poland’s leading role in waging NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine, which could lead to a devastating combination for Kiev. In such a situation, everything might get much worse, and at an even faster pace at that.

Absent PO’s victory at the polls next month, the only other variable that could realistically offset this scenario is if Kiev backtracks on its threatened WTO lawsuit and Zelensky finally shows sincere gratitude in public for everything that Poland has done for Ukraine. Nobody should get their hopes up about that, however, since he’s expected to seek re-election next spring and might worry that walking back on his newly assertive policy towards Poland could lose him the nationalist vote.

Both parties are therefore in a dilemma whereby each believes that they have more to gain at the level of national and political interests by escalating tensions than by being the first to de-escalate them. A self-sustaining cycle is thus in the process of forming, which risks leading to such a drastic deterioration of their ties that the presently dismal state thereof might soon be looked fondly upon. This is especially so if Poland moves to more openly exert its creeping hegemony over Western Ukraine in the near future.  

To be clear, the aforementioned sequence of events is the absolute worst-case scenario and accordingly isn’t all that likely, but it also can’t be ruled out either since few foresaw how far their ties would plunge just a few short months ago. It’s undeniable that Polish-Ukrainian relations have entered a period of uncertainty that might last for a while so both would do well to prepare their societies for the possibility of continued tensions so that they can most effectively adapt to this emerging geostrategic reality.  

Levada: The majority of Russians view their country and China as “great,” but would not say the same of the U.S. or its allies

Russia Matters, 9/15/23

The majority of Russians view their country and China as “great,” but would not say the same of the U.S. or its allies, according to Levada Center polling. The share of Russians who view their own country as great has almost doubled over the past two decades, from 43% in 2002 to 80% in 2023. The same period has seen the share of Levada respondents who view China as great triple from 19% in 2002 to 63% in 2023. By comparison, the share of Russians who view the U.S. as great halved from 62% in 2002 to 30% in 2023. The same period saw the share of Russians who view Japan, the U.K., Germany and France as great shrink at an even faster rate, ending at 9%, 9%, 8% and 3%, respectively, in 2023. Interestingly, while the share of Russians who admire Western greatness has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades, shorter-term measurements reveal certain improvements in Russians’ views toward some of these countries. For instance, the share of Russians who say they have a good attitude toward the U.S. was 22% in August 2023, which is higher than at any other point since February 2022.

Gilbert Doctorow: The past week we have advanced considerably to a full-blown Russia-NATO war

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 9/23/23

Latest news on the war: these past two days we have advanced considerably to a full-blown Russia-NATO war

This past week most Western media discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war has focused on developments in New York, where Zelensky and Biden gave their propaganda speeches about Russian imperialism threatening the world order, and then in Washington, where Zelensky met with Congressional leaders and with the President in his pursuit of further deliveries of arms. The focus was on air defense systems, on F-16 fighter jets and on the ATACMS ground to ground missiles.

This past week Western media broke ranks on the prospects for a Ukrainian victory. It appeared that there is growing consensus that the Ukrainian counter-offensive had failed and there was more talk of Ukraine-fatigue in American political circles. Speculation now turned both in major media and in dissident media on how the United States will respond to a looming defeat in Ukraine.  Many decided that Washington would just move on after ‘throwing Ukraine under the bus’ and raise the war cries against China so as to avoid getting bogged down in recriminations over ‘who lost Ukraine.’

However, that was two days ago. Today Washington’s Plan B is becoming clearer. And what I see does not look good for world peace and for our chances of surviving this conflict.

Plan B took the form of the Storm Shadow strike a couple of days ago directly on the General Staff building of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.  You have not seen or heard much about this in Western media and the Russians were dead silent until today. And even today what little information we have comes from the civilian administration in Sevastopol, not from the Russian Ministry of Defense, a fact which by itself raises the intrigue.

The Russian news tickers, by which I mean Dzen (formerly Yandex news) and mail.ru, tell us that one staff member of the general staff is unaccounted for. We are told by the Governor of Sevastopol that another strike may be expected and people were warned not to visit the downtown area. As for the building itself, the attack touched off a fire which took several hours to bring under control. There were reports that debris was scattered up to several hundred meters away. There was talk of back-up equipment being prepared to carry on the functions that were performed in the staff building. Finally, the attacking missile has been identified as a British-made Storm Shadow air-to-ground cruise missile. There may have been a cluster of these missiles incoming, because Russian air defense is said to have shot down five.

Judging by past experience when the Ukrainians have committed some sensational act, such as their bombing of the Crimean bridge or the destruction of the Kakhovka dam or their incursion across the border to the Belgorod region of Russia, there was some menacing response from the Russian Defense Ministry. Now there is silence. Why? Russian state television news yesterday and today has carried on as if there is nothing more important than the price of diesel fuel and whether the new ban on export will dampen the price and improve availability across the country.

The next troublesome straw in the wind is the reversal of the Biden administration on the question of sending the ATACMS to Kiev. The optimal moment to announce such a decision would have been during Zelensky’s day on Capitol Hill and meetings in the Oval Office. Instead Jake Sullivan told reporters that no decision had been taken as yet by the President.

I believe there is a clear connection between the successful Storm Shadow attack on the general staff building in Sevastopol and the decision to ship ATACMS to Ukraine now. I also note that the decision to supply the American missiles will surely be followed in a few days by the German decision to ship its long-range TAURUS missiles. Both decisions have till now been held back on grounds that they would lead to a Russian escalation of the war. Now it would appear that, facing imminent defeat, the Biden administration is throwing caution to the wind and is ready to risk outbreak of a direct, not proxy Russia-NATO war.

As a further straw in the wind, I point to another deeply troublesome bit of information that you will not find in The New York Times. The Russian news ticker today carries a report from a Russian commander in the field in Ukraine that his unit just destroyed a Leopard tank and found that the entire crew was Germans. Two of them were killed and one injured tank officer was taken prisoner. Those manning a Leopard surely were not soldiers of fortune but genuine Bundeswehr boys.  Put in other words, NATO is now directly on the battlefield and not as advisers or instructors.  We are headed into very dangerous territory.

Poscript: One reader has sent in a valuable further bit of information that is not in mainstream reporting:

See https://en.lentafeed.com/@infodefENGLAND/12520

This, coming from Turkish sources, says that the Russians retaliated to the Sevastopol destruction by staging their own cruise missile attack on the Kremenchug Airport, the launch site used by the Ukrainians. “Both SCALP and Storm Shadow missiles, which were stationed at the airbase, along with the SU24M/MR bombers responsible for today’s attack, have been detroyed. A substantial number of firefighters and ambulances have been dispatched to the airfield. There are significant casualties among pilots, ground personnel and even NATO personnel, ncluding Poles, who were involved in coordinating the operatoins and maintaining the missiles.”

This all suggests an additional reason for Biden to consent to shipment of the ATACMS missiles to Ukraine now: unlike the Storm Shadow, they are launched from the ground on mobile launchers similar to HIMARS. Therefore the loss of airfields and bombers and pilots does not constrain their use and holds the promise of more destuction of Russian assets in Crimea. I would also wager that US forces will be sent not just to maintain but to target and launch the ATACMS.

Brett Wilkins: Report Urges US-Russian Cooperation to Reduce Risk of Cyberattack Causing Nuclear War

NOTE: I apologize for the flurry of posts sent last night. Something went haywire with my scheduling settings. The problem appears to be fixed now. – Natylie

by Brett Wilkins, Antiwar.com, 9/16/23

A report published Wednesday [9/13/23] by a U.S. nonprofit group recommends cooperation between the United States and Russia aimed at reducing the threat of a nuclear war sparked by cyberattacks on nuclear weapon systems.

“In the modern nuclear age, there is no more urgent task than understanding and mitigating the potential risks posed by the interaction of advancing cyber capabilities and nuclear weapons systems,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) asserted in the report, entitled Reducing Cyber Risks to Nuclear Weapons: Proposals From a U.S.-Russia Expert Dialogue.

The publication “highlights the critical need for a global diplomatic approach to address growing cyber risks, including, where possible, through cooperation between the United States and Russia.”

“Despite significant current geopolitical tensions, the United States and Russia have a mutual interest in avoiding the use of nuclear weapons and an obligation to work together to do so based on the understanding that a cyberattack on a nuclear weapons system could trigger catastrophic and unintended conflict and escalation,” the group said in an implied reference to strained relations amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

NTI drew from talks between U.S. and Russian nonproliferation experts that took place in 2020 and 2021 prior to last year’s invasion of Ukraine.

“While acknowledging the challenges posed by an already charged political environment, the dialogue emphasized the importance of maintaining cooperation between the United States and Russia on key nuclear security issues, the value of unilateral risk reduction actions, and the benefit of developing ideas for cooperative steps to be advanced when the political situation improves,” the organization noted.

The talks yielded six recommendations for the U.S. and Russia to reduce cyber risks:

Refrain from cyber interference in nuclear weapons and related systems, including nuclear command, control, communications, delivery, and warning systems;Evaluate options to minimize entanglement and/or integration of conventional and nuclear assets;Continue to improve the cybersecurity of their respective nuclear systems, including through unilateral “fail-safe” reviews;Increase transparency and expand communications during periods of increased tension;Adopt procedures to ensure that any cyber, information, or other operation involving information and communications technologies emanating from the United States or Russia with the potential to disrupt another nation’s nuclear deterrence mission be approved at the same level as required for nuclear use; andEliminate policies that threaten a nuclear weapons response to cyberattack.

“Today, the United States and Russia still possess roughly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and are also among the most proficient and active developers and users of information and communications technology (ICT),” the report notes. “Nuclear weapons policies, however, have not kept up with these technological advancements.”

“Meanwhile,” the publication continues, “the ubiquity of advanced digital ICT tools, as well as their fulsome functional benefits, have led both countries’ nuclear weapons enterprises to incorporate digital technologies into their nuclear weapons, warning, command, control, and communications systems.”

“With that modernization come vulnerabilities and openness to cyberattacks that could prompt dangerous miscalculations or accidents, leading to nuclear use,” NTI stated, adding that “in the mid- to long-term, cybersecurity can be improved in the
context of ongoing nuclear weapons systems modernization.”

“Mutual commitments can be codified through various political or legal formats,” the report states. “Nuclear force modernization in each country presents an opportunity to clarify, isolate, and distinguish which systems are involved in nuclear deterrence missions from civilian infrastructure, critical national assets, and conventional warfighting systems.”

“Modernization also provides opportunities to improve system resiliency and upgrade cybersecurity measures and practices,” the publication adds. “Both the United States and Russia should prioritize cyber-nuclear weapons risk-reduction as they pursue future bilateral and multilateral arms control, confidence-building, and transparency initiatives.”

The new report came a day after the U.S. Department of Defense published an unclassified summary of its 2023 Cyber Strategy, the first update in five years, in which the Pentagon stated it would “use cyberspace operations for the purpose of campaigning, undertaking actions to limit, frustrate, or disrupt adversaries’ activities below the level of armed conflict and to achieve favorable security conditions.”

The Pentagon added that it would “remain closely attuned to adversary perceptions and will manage the risk of unintended escalation.”

Russia’s war and U.S. support for Ukrainian efforts to oust invaders have heightened international calls for disarmament, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently warning that nuclear modernization and rising global mistrust is “a recipe for annihilation.”

Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace.

RT Germany: Yalta European Strategy 2023 – Fateful Battle of the West in Kiev

RT (Germany) (Machine translation), 9/16/23

“The future of the world will be decided in Ukraine” – this was the motto under which the two-day conference of the “Yalta European Strategy” (YES) forum took place in Kiev last week. The event has been organized by the Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk’s foundation since 2006. RT DE took the trouble to watch almost all of the video recordings of more than a dozen panels of the conference, which the organizer gradually published on YouTube a few days after it ended .

Why is that important? The YES has established itself as an annual meeting point for the loud and influential Ukraine lobby among the Western elites, a kind of mixture between a “Ukrainian Davos” and the “Munich SiKo on a small scale”. Ideas are developed, information is exchanged and plans for the future are made. It is a look into the workshop of Western thought about Ukraine, Russia, the West and the rest of the world. In a practical sense, it is the opportunity to understand what is being discussed and planned in governments, parliaments, editorial offices of well-known media, think tanks and military staffs about the current status of the Ukraine conflict.

Pinchuk is a multi-billionaire, media mogul and son-in-law of former President Leonid Kuchma. He also sees himself as a link between the Western establishment and Ukrainian business elites. As organizer of YES, he said in his welcoming speech:

“Ukraine is at the center of the universe. Ukraine has been at the center of European history for hundreds of years. Today it is at the center of world history. This war is the most important and significant war in world history.”

These words were received with enthusiasm by the audience. Many high-ranking and well-known participants who subsequently appeared in dozens of panels at the conference saw the situation similarly. Something eschatological was in the air, the philosophy of the morally based final battle between good and evil, rise and fall, form and chaos, reason and irrationality, etc.

So it started with images of the world apocalypse that President Vladimir Zelensky painted on the wall in his welcoming speech if Ukraine, as a champion of “democracy and humanism,” does not win this fateful battle:

“The speech is about the future of morality. If Russia wins, the world will turn into a world of slaves who will kill people like Putin just because they like it.”

He also compared Russia’s victory to the coming climate catastrophe. Historians and journalists gave this narrative a further “civilizational” component. According to the US historian Timothy Snyder, ancient Greek democracy and thus the civilization of the cities were only able to develop thanks to access to the fertile southern Ukrainian soil in the Black Sea region.

Later wars were mainly about control of these areas. The Polish colonization of the 16th and 17th centuries, Adolf Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin’s project of modernization are examples of this. Today Ukraine is the main breadwinner of the world population. If she loses, there will be global hunger.

Since Russia went to war without ideas or a vision of the future, this war was also the war against hopelessness. “It makes Russians angry that Ukrainians have hope,” he claimed. By hope he meant the desired accession to the EU and NATO. Since Russia does not rely on the power of ideas, but on the right of the strongest – i.e. brute force – a Russian victory means the triumph of the forces of chaos and darkness.

His Ukrainian colleague Jaroslav Grizak also shared this idea. A defeat of Ukraine would mean nothing less than the end of human civilization. According to him, the previous world wars were about “improving the world” (although he didn’t say exactly what). The Ukraine war is about the sheer survival of humanity.

Russia is a central problem. It is not capable of becoming a “normal European country”. Since reforms that always fail are always followed by a strengthening of tyranny, there is the so-called “Russian pendulum”, which inevitably culminates in aggression against its neighboring countries. This pendulum must be stopped, demanded Grizak.

The majority of other Ukrainian participants in the forum from politics and the media supported the idea that Russia cannot be improved, regardless of whether Vladimir Putin is in power in the Kremlin or a “better person” like Alexei Navalny. “We in Ukraine often say that only a dead Russian is a good Russian,” explained a Ukrainian politician. At one of the panels, four Ukrainian military officers who had come straight from the front sat on the podium. The death (of the heroic Ukrainians and the “evil Russians”) was a central theme.

Among them was lawyer and fighter Masi Nayyem, who lost his right eye in the war. The uncovered, gaping scar at this point allowed him to have a say because it gave him the credibility of a sufferer. Nayyem described what his fondest dream is:

“I cannot say that I am waging this war in the name of new values. I want to take revenge. I want to take revenge in the most cruel way possible in view of international conventions. The more Russians die, the better it is for me as a participant in hostilities. I have the right to kill Russians, and that is my greatest wish.”

“What the heroes fight for and give their lives for” – that was the name of the corresponding panel. The monologues of the hand-picked war participants were undoubtedly the emotional highlight of the entire two-day conference. The Western spectators showed respect and admiration for the hard-tested fighters – after all, they sacrificed themselves for their interests, which they openly admitted on occasion.

But there was also a bit of culture and entertainment. A Ukrainian singer and a writer should explain to the audience what makes the Ukrainian idea “so strong.” The panel also had a meaningful name. However, the reason for this was quite easy to identify.

“Ukrainians are smarter and better than Russians,” said a Ukrainian rock singer based in New York in unaccented English. The writer and avowed nationalist Sergei Shadan, who has been showered with Western prizes and awards, compared Ukraine to a young and cool punk band and Russia to an aging cabaret singer who is completely unaware that her time is over. At the end, the two sang passionate songs about “Peremoga”, the Ukrainian victory.

The respectable audience was amused. These Ukrainians are a wonderful people! Not only does it go to war against the Russians heroically and without fear of death, but it also sings. But will the oft-touted Ukrainian victory come at some point? Are there problems on the way to the glorious future of a transparent, successful, digitalized, climate-friendly country, a mandatory NATO and EU member that attracts investments, feeds the world and develops the most advanced technologies – as Prime Minister Denis Shmygal enthused in his speech ?

Yes, these problems exist, and at least one panel has been devoted to each of them. For example, the organizers correctly recognized that the majority of the world’s population is not on the side of Ukraine. Or that voters in the West could vote out Ukraine’s supporters in their governments. And finally, that the Russians simply cannot allow a military victory for Ukraine.

However, these difficulties still appear to be surmountable. The Third World can still be convinced by adapting the narrative. After all, ordinary people are on the side of Ukraine, as Zelensky and a British participant suggested. For Africa, for example, it would make sense to declare that the Russian war against Ukraine was the last “Western”, imperialist-colonial war. Russia is an eternal imperialist, whereas the West has overcome its colonial past.

Problems with “Ukraine fatigue” in the West could be solved by increasing “reporting” on “cruel” Russian war crimes. “Then people know who is good and who is bad, and of course they feel like supporting the good side,” said a US lawmaker. His French colleague added that people in his country are well aware that supporting Ukraine is simply “in our own economic interest.”

And in addition to the heroism and ingenuity of the Ukrainian soldiers, only an intensification of arms deliveries can help against the slow advance of the Ukrainian army. “Weapons, weapons, weapons,” echoed so often through the hall on these days ( RT DE reported ).

Conclusion

YES 2023 was a first-class propaganda event, with the usual fantasies on this topic. It showed: The West is preparing for a long-term war against the “enemy of humanity” Russia. A Ukrainian (and therefore our own) defeat or a fragile peace are out of the question.

And this war is still being fought – as originally planned – by its loyal mercenary state Ukraine. However, its condition is worrying. It was therefore carefully examined whether the level of hatred against the enemy and the ambition of the remaining fighters were still high. The result: satisfactory.

Anger, sadness and a desire for revenge should now more than ever guide the soldiers’ final battle. The Victor Pinchuk Foundation has caught the spirit of the times and posted the one-eyed fighter Nayyem’s vows of revenge as the quintessence of the event, which lasted several hours, on the Internet. The short video translated into English is spreading like wildfire, and the bloody slaughter at the hands of strangers can continue.

Ben Aris: Russia approves first full wartime budget for 2024 with 1.7-fold increase in military spending

Photo by Rūdolfs Klintsons on Pexels.com

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/23/23

The Russian government has approved its first full wartime budget that will significantly increase military spending in 2024 as well as boost social spending to shelter the population from the effects of war and sanctions.

The draft budget for 2024 will increase military spending 1.7-fold and for the first time in the history of modern Russia will exceed social spending. The latter, however, will also increase, as will the costs of security forces and intelligence services, The Bell reported onSeptember 22.

To finance these huge expenses, the government will have to find somewhere an additional RUB7 trillion rubles in revenue compared to 2023. Firstly, this makes it inevitable that inflation will continue to accelerate and the Central Bank will maintain a high rate. And secondly, it almost inevitably means new taxes – and the authorities are already moving in this direction. So far the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) has done everything it can to avoid raising taxes other than hitting big business with a windfall tax on large enterprises that should bring in an extra RUB300bn ($4bn) of revenues. 

The draft federal budget for 2024–2026 must be submitted to the Duma before October 1. The government press service disclosed only the general parameters of the budget, without a breakdown of expenses, but Bloomberg was leaked figures for the most important items.

Military expenditures (item “National Defence”) in 2024 will amount to RUB10.8 trillion rubles — 1.7 times more than Russia will actually spend on defence in 2023 (RUB6.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg), and 2.3 times more than in the first war year of 2022 (RUB4.7 trillion).

RUB10.8 trillion rubles is approximately 6% of GDP, twice as much as the budget spent on defence items in the pre-war years. This ratio is comparable to US military spending in the 1980s, at the last peak of the Cold War (after 1988, the US never spent more than 6% of GDP on defence). Russia is still far from the USSR, which spent 12–14% of GDP on defence.

Almost nominal, but still, growth is planned for the “National Security” section, which takes into account spending on law enforcement agencies and intelligence services – from RUB3.2 to RUB3.5 trillion rubles.

Of the three remaining major sections of the budget, expenses for the National Economy – where government investments and subsidies to business are taken into account — will be reduced from RUB4.1 to RUB3.9 trillion rubles.

The remaining healthcare and education will remain unchanged: RUB1.6 and RUB1.5 trillion rubles, respectively.

The government’s willingness to dramatically increase military spending, without sacrificing anything else, is based on over-optimistic forecasts of budget revenues and expenditures.

The government expects that in 2024 the budget will receive RUB35 trillion in revenue, compared to RUB26.1 trillion planned for this year (an increase of RUB8.9 trillion rubles, or 34% compared to 2023). Of this, RUB11.5 trillion rubles should come from oil and gas revenues (RUB8 trillion is planned for 2023).

“The government’s expectation for revenues looks optimistic and unrealistic,” says Alexandra Prokopenko, a Russian finance expert. “The key take aways from Russia’s wartime budget: Putin prepares for the long war; guns above the butter (military spending exceeds social for the first time ever; and all the cows that can still give milk in Russia’s economy will be milked to death.”

Budget expenditures are planned at RUB36.6 trillion (an increase of RUB7.6 trillion, or 26.2% by 2023). This means that the budget deficit in 2024, according to the government’s plan, should be significantly reduced – from 2% of GDP planned for 2023 (RUB2.9 trillion rubles) to 0.8% of GDP (RUB1.6 trillion rubles).

These figures should be supported by the optimistic forecasts of the Ministry of Economy for 2024 included in the budget – GDP growth by 2.3% (and not less than 2% in 2025-2026), the price of Urals oil is $85 per barrel. The average dollar exchange rate in 2024, according to the forecast, will be RBU90.1 to the dollar. The current forecast of the Central Bank is somewhat more modest – for 2024 it promises 0.5–1.5% GDP growth and Urals at $60.

The bottom line is that the government, in order to finance the cosmic increase in military spending, while not forgetting about social ones, will have to find RUB9 trillion rubles of additional income somewhere in 2024 (an increase of 34%).

On the one hand, the nominal growth of budget revenues will be facilitated by the weakening of the ruble that has already occurred and accelerating inflation (by the end of 2023 it should be 7.5%).

On the other hand, a new budget rule, announced on September 22 by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, should increase revenues. In fact, we are talking about a return to the old formula, forgotten after the start of the war: all oil and gas revenues received above the cut-off price set by the government go to the National Welfare Fund, and all income below this price goes to the budget. Only the cut-off price will now be $60 per barrel – $15 higher than it would have been under the old formula.

The chief economist for Russia at Bloomberg Economics, Alexander Isakov, estimated the effect of the new version of the fiscal rule at RUB1.5 trillion in additional budget revenues.

But all this will not bring RUB9 trillion, says The Bell. The government directly hinted at how they were supposed to receive them this same week, announcing the introduction of new duties for exporters. They will be in effect from October 1 until the end of 2024. Depending on the exchange rate, the duty will be 10% for fertilizer producers and 4–7% for all other industries. At an exchange rate of RUB80 per dollar and below, the duty will be reset to zero (but the forecast of the Ministry of Economy – the average annual rate of RUB90.1 – does not assume this).

In fact, we are talking about an indirect tax for export-oriented businesses. A businessman working in the fertilizer market shared his calculations with The Bell: for his industry, the introduction of new duties is equivalent to an increase in the effective income tax rate in the fourth quarter of 2023 to 40% (the nominal rate is 20%), and taking into account the previously introduced one-time tax on excess profits – 55%.

This proposal was not particularly discussed with business, two of The Bell’s interlocutors say. Moreover, he claims that the chief commissioner for combating inflation, the Central Bank, did not participate in the discussion. This seems strange to The Bell’s interlocutor – after all, after the proposal appeared, experts immediately saw pro-inflationary risks in it.

The government does not have many other options for replenishing the budget, other than increasing or introducing new taxes. The growth of domestic demand, on which the economy grew (and with it non-oil and gas budget revenues) in 2023, should soon slow down due to an increase in the Central Bank rate.

At the same time, the budget, which plans to increase spending by 26%, means that high rates are here to stay, otherwise inflation will get out of control. And high rates, in turn, make it more expensive for the Ministry of Finance to service existing government debt (the yield of 40% of currently outstanding OFZs is tied to the Central Bank rate) and worsen the conditions for new borrowings.

This year budget on course for 2% GDP deficit

 Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin expects execution of the federal budget by the end of this year with a planned deficit of 2% of GDP.

“Sustainable focus on positive changes permits expecting execution of the federal budget this year with a deficit at the level of the initial projection of 2% of GDP,” he said at a meeting devoted to drafting federal budget for a three-year period. According to Economic Development Ministry’s data, “amid this background it is safe to speak about maintaining and even improving of those trends next year,” PM added.

Speaking about expenditures, he said that after the advancing period at the beginning of the year they returned to their traditional level and amounted to around RUB2.24 trillion in August.

According to preliminary figures provided by the Finance Ministry, Russia’s federal budget deficit totalled RUB2.81 trillion ($28bn) in January-July. (chart)

Russia had a surplus federal budget in August in the amount of around RUB230bn ($2.3bn), Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said at a meeting devoted to drafting federal budget for a three-year period.

The Russian economy is adjusting to current challenges, he noted. “In August, federal budget ran a surplus, which amounted to around RUB230bn. Consolidated balance of the regions added another RUB140bn,” he said, noting that the Russian economy “is adjusting to current challenges.” The budget ran a surplus largely due to a surge in non-oil and gas revenues, PM explained, adding that they exceeded RUB1.8 trillion ($18.5bn) in August, up 56% compared with last year.

Oil and gas revenues of the Russian federal budget totalled RUB4.836 trillion ($44.76bn) in January – August 2023, which is 38.2% lower than a year ago, the Finance Ministry said on its website. Accumulation of extra oil and gas revenues during periods of the comfortable price situation and use of National Wealth Fund resources to cover shortfalls in oil and gas revenues in line with fiscal rule parameters provide for the budgetary system resilience to fluctuations in receiving oil and gas revenues, the ministry added.

Non-oil and gas revenues of the Russian budget amounted to RUB12.155 trillion ($124bn) in January – August 2023, the Finance Ministry said on its website.

“Non-oil and gas revenues totalled RUB12,155bn and surged by 24.2% year on year. The dynamics of receiving the largest non-oil and gas revenues of the federal budget (turnover taxes and income tax) remains consistently positive, including against the level of 2021 (as the least exposed to statistical effects of the base),” the ministry informed.

Food exports are emerging as a significant revenue source for Russia’s budget, following energy exports, according to Ruslan Davydov, Director of the Federal Customs Service. During an interview at the Eastern Economic Forum, Davydov highlighted the substantial increase in Russia’s grain exports compared to 2022.

Davydov stated, “Our agricultural products exports are performing well. We have almost exceeded last year’s exporting figures, with grain being the primary export, along with oil seeds, oil, vegetable oil, and sunflower seeds.” He noted that China, the Middle East, Egypt, and Kazakhstan are the primary importers of Russian food products. While food exports have increased by approximately 70% in volume, their value has been influenced by price dynamics.

In addition to food exports, Davydov discussed the remarkable growth in Russia’s car cargo transportation, which has more than doubled year-on-year in the past months of 2023. He highlighted the growth in both sea and railway cargo traffic, with car cargo traffic experiencing a 2.5-fold increase compared to 2022.

Furthermore, Davydov mentioned that China accounts for a significant share of Russia’s car imports, representing 92% in the period from January to August.

Max Blumenthal: Canada’s honoring of Nazi vet exposes Ottawa’s longstanding Ukraine policy

Note: Due to a vacation and then a move in recent weeks, I’m playing catchup on recent news and events. – Natylie

By Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone, 9/26/23

By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans.Canada’s second most powerful official, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of one of Nazi Germany’s top Ukrainian propagandists.

In the Spring of 1943, Yaroslav Hunka was a fresh-faced soldier in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia when his division received a visit from the architect of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies, Heinrich Himmler. Having presided over the battalion’s formation, Himmler was visibly proud of the Ukrainians who had volunteered to support the Third Reich’s efforts.

80 years later, the Speaker of Canada’s parliament, Anthony Rota, also beamed with pride after inviting Hunka to a reception for Volodymyr Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president lobbied for more arms and financial assistance for his country’s war against Russia.

“We have in the chamber today Ukrainian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98,” Rota declared during the September 22 parliamentary event in Ottawa.

“His name is Yaroslav Hunka but I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota continued.

Gales of applause erupted through the crowd, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and leaders of all Canadian parties rose from their seats to applaud Hunka’s wartime service.

Since the exposure of Hunka’s record as a Nazi collaborator – which should have been obvious as soon as the Speaker announced him – Canadian leaders (with the notable exception of Eyre) have rushed to issue superficial, face-saving apologies as withering condemnations poured in from Canadian Jewish organizations.

The incident is now a major national scandal, occupying space on the cover of Canadian papers like the Toronto Sun, which quipped, “Did Nazi that coming.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.

The Liberal Party has attempted to downplay the affair as an accidental blunder, with one Liberal MP urging her colleagues to “avoid politicizing this incident.” Melanie Joly, Canada’s Foreign Minister, has forced Rota’s resignation, seeking to turn the the Speaker into a scapegoat for her party’s collective actions.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero.

To be sure, the incident was no gaffe. Before Canada’s government and military brass celebrated Hunka in parliament, they had provided diplomatic support to fascist hooligans fighting to install a nationalist government in Kiev, and oversaw the training of contemporary Ukrainian military formations openly committed to the furtherance of Nazi ideology.

Ottawa’s celebration of Hunka has also lifted the cover on the country’s post-World War Two policy of naturalizing known Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and weaponizing them as domestic anti-communist shock troops. The post-war immigration wave included the grandfather of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who functioned as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainain propagandists inside Nazi-occupied Poland.

Though Canadian officialdom has worked to suppress this sordid record, it has resurfaced in dramatic fashion through Hunka’s appearance in parliament and the unsettling contents of his online diaries.

Yaroslav Hunka, front and center, as a member of the Waffen-SS Galicia division“We welcomed the German soldiers with joy”

The March 2011 edition of the journal of the Association of Ukrainian Ex-Combatants in the US contains an unsettling diary entry which had gone unnoticed until recently.

Authored by Yaroslav Hunka, the journal consisted of proud reflections on volunteering for the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia. Hunka decribed the Nazi Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights” when they first arrived in his hometown of Berezhany, and recalled his own service in the Waffen-SS as the happiest time in his life.

“In my sixth grade,” he wrote, “out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.”

The Jewish Virtual Library details the extermination of Berezhany’s Jewish population at the hands of the “civilized” Germans: “In 1941 at the end of Soviet occupation 12,000 Jews were living in Berezhany, most of them refugees fleeing the horrors of the Nazi war machine in Europe. During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1, 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200, listed as poor by the Judenrat, were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur 1942 (Sept. 21), 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec and on June 12, 1943, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”

When Soviet forces held control of Berezhany, Hunka said he and his neighbors longed for the arrival of Nazi Germany. “Every day,” he recalled, “we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights, who give bullets to the hated Lyakhs are about to appear.” (Lyakh is a derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles).

In July 1941, when the Nazi German army entered Berezhany, Hunka breathed a sigh of relief. “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy,” he wrote. “People felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.”

Two years later, Hunka joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade – a unit formed under the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler inspected the Ukrainian volunteers in May 1943 (below), he was accompanied by Otto Von Wachter, the Nazi-appointed governor of Galicia who established the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.

“Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews…” Himmler reportedly told the Ukrainian troops. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”

“Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders”

Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.

The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, “some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.”

The journal described the unreformed Nazis as anticommunist shock troops whose “‘ideological leaders’ are already busy fomenting WWIII, propagating a new world holocaust in which Canada will perish.”

In 1997, the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the Canadian government with having admitted over 2000 veterans of the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.

That same year, 60 Minutes released a special, “Canada’s Dark Secret,” revealing that some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states had been granted citizenship by Canada after the war. Irving Abella, a Canadian historian, told 60 Minutes that the easiest way to get into the country “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”

Abella also alleged that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) explained to him that his government kept silent about the Nazi immigrants “because they were afraid of exacerbating relationships between Jews and Eastern European ethnic communities.”

Yaroslav Hunka was among the post-war wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans welcomed by Canada. According to the city council website of Berezhany, he arrived in Ontario in 1954 and promptly “became a member of the fraternity of soldiers of the 1st Division of the UNA, affiliated to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.”

Also among the new generation of Ukrainian Canadians was Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s second-most-powerful official, Chrystia Freeland. Throughout her career as a journalist and Canadian diplomat, Freeland has advanced her grandfather’s legacy of anti-Russian agitation, while repeatedly exalting wartime Nazi collaborators during public events.

During a March 2, 2020 rally, Canadian Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland proudly displayed a banner of the Ukrainian Partisan Organzation which fought alongside Nazi Germany during WWII.Canada welcomes Hitler’s top Ukrainian propagandists

Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.

Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.

Michael Chomiak at a party with Emile Gassner, the Nazi media chief for Occupied Poland

In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies. On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”

The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation, “This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”

Freeland nurtures media career as undercover regime change agent in Soviet-era Ukraine

Following his death in 1984, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.

A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.

During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for her meteoric rise to journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.

“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.

Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”

In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.

She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.

Canada trains, protects Nazis in post-Maidan Ukraine

When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.

In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag. When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on February 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Canada’s Foreign Ministry provided shelter to the neo-Nazis (above) who occupied and vandalized Kiev’s city hall in 2014.

Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).

Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who  declared, “the historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

As Nazi family history surfaces, Freeland lies to the public

Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.

The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.

Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.

For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”

When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”

By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”

“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.

After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.

Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.

Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.

**Note: Polish officials have announced that they are seeking extradition of Hunka to Poland for war crimes.

John Mearsheimer & Sebastian Rosato: The Russian invasion was a rational act

By John Mearsheimer & Sebastian Rosato, UnHerd, 9/14/23

It is widely believed in the West that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was not a rational act. On the eve of the invasion, then British prime minister Boris Johnson suggested that perhaps the United States and its allies had not done “enough to deter an irrational actor and we have to accept at the moment that Vladimir Putin is possibly thinking illogically about this and doesn’t see the disaster ahead”. US senator Mitt Romney made a similar point after the war started, noting that “by invading Ukraine, Mr Putin has already proved that he is capable of illogical and self-defeating decisions”. The assumption underlying both statements is that rational leaders start wars only if they are likely to win. By starting a war he was destined to lose, the thinking went, Putin demonstrated his non-rationality.

Other critics argue that Putin was non-rational because he violated a fundamental international norm. In this view, the only morally acceptable reason for going to war is self-defence, whereas the invasion of Ukraine was a war of conquest. Russia expert Nina Khrushcheva asserted that “with his unprovoked assault, Mr Putin joins a long line of irrational tyrants”, and appears “to have succumbed to his ego-driven obsession with restoring Russia’s status as a great power with its own clearly defined sphere of influence”. Bess Levin of Vanity Fair described Russia’s president as “a power-hungry megalomaniac”; former British ambassador to Moscow Tony Brenton suggested his invasion was proof that he is an “unbalanced autocrat” rather than the “rational actor” he once was.

These claims all rest on common understandings of rationality that are intuitively plausible but ultimately flawed. Contrary to what many people think, we cannot equate rationality with success and non-rationality with failure. Rationality is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control. There is also a powerful tendency to equate rationality with morality since both qualities are thought to be features of enlightened thinking. But this too is a mistake. Rational policies can violate widely accepted standards of conduct and may even be murderously unjust.

So what is “rationality” in international politics? Surprisingly, the scholarly literature does not provide a good definition. For us, rationality is all about making sense of the world — that is, figuring out how it works and why — in order to decide how to achieve certain goals. It has both an individual and a collective dimension. Rational policymakers are theory-driven; they are homo theoreticus. They have credible theories — logical explanations based on realistic assumptions and supported by substantial evidence — about the workings of the international system, and they employ these to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it. Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by robust and uninhibited debate.

All of this means that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was rational. Consider that Russian leaders relied on a credible theory. Most commentators dispute this claim, arguing that Putin was bent on conquering Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe to create a greater Russian empire, something that would satisfy a nostalgic yearning among Russians but that makes no strategic sense in the modern world. President Joe Biden maintains that Putin aspires “to be the leader of Russia that united all of Russian speakers. I mean… I just think it’s irrational.” Former national security adviser H. R. McMaster argues: “I don’t think he’s a rational actor because he’s fearful, right? What he wants to do more than anything is restore Russia to national greatness. He’s driven by that.”

But there is solid evidence that Putin and his advisers thought in terms of straightforward balance-of-power theory, viewing the West’s efforts to make Ukraine a bulwark on Russia’s border as an existential threat that could not be allowed to stand. Russia’s president laid out this logic in a speech explaining his decision for war: “With Nato’s eastward expansion the situation for Russia has been becoming worse and more dangerous by the year… We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us.” He went on to say: “It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the redline which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”

In other words, for Putin, this was a war of self-defence aimed at preventing an adverse shift in the balance of power. He had no intention of conquering all of Ukraine and annexing it into a greater Russia. Indeed, even as he claimed in his well-known historical account of Russia-Ukraine relations that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole”, he also declared: “We respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe, and prosperous… And what Ukraine will be — it is up to its citizens to decide.” None of this is to deny that his aims have clearly expanded since the war began, but that is hardly unusual as wars unfold and circumstances change.

It is worth noting that Moscow sought to deal with the growing threat on its borders through aggressive diplomacy, but the United States and its allies were unwilling to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. On 17 December 2021, Russia put forward a proposal to solve the growing crisis that envisaged a neutral Ukraine and the withdrawal of Nato forces from Eastern Europe to their positions in 1997. But the United States rejected it out of hand.

This being the case, Putin opted for war, which analysts expected to result in the Russian military’s overrunning Ukraine. Describing the view of US officials just before the invasion, David Ignatius of The Washington Post wrote that Russia would “quickly win the initial, tactical phase of this war, if it comes. The vast army that Russia has arrayed along Ukraine’s borders could probably seize the capital of Kyiv in several days and control the country in little more than a week.” Indeed, the intelligence community “told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army”. Of course, these assessments proved wrong, but even rational policymakers sometimes miscalculate, because they operate in an uncertain world.

The Russian decision to invade was also the product of a deliberative process, not a knee-jerk reaction by a lone wolf. Again, many observers dispute this point, arguing that Putin operated without serious input from civilian and military advisers, who would have counselled against his reckless bid for empire. As Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put it: “He’s not had that many people having direct inputs to him. So we’re concerned that this kind of isolated individual [has] become a megalomaniac in terms of his notion of himself being the only historic figure that can rebuild old Russia or recreate the notion of the Soviet sphere.” Elsewhere, former ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul suggested that one element of Russia’s non-rationality is that Putin is “profoundly isolated, surrounded only by yes men who have cut him off from accurate knowledge”.

But what we know about Putin’s coterie and its thinking about Ukraine reveals a different story: Putin’s subordinates shared his views about the nature of the threat confronting Russia, and he consulted with them before deciding on war. The consensus among Russian leaders regarding the dangers inherent in Ukraine’s relationship with the West is clearly reflected in a 2008 memorandum by then ambassador to Russia William Burns; it warned that “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests… I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”

Nor does Putin appear to have made the decision for war alone, as stories of him plotting in Covid-induced confinement implied. When asked whether the Russian president consulted with his key advisers, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied: “Every country has a decision-making mechanism. In that case, the mechanism existing in the Russian Federation was fully employed.” To be sure, it seems clear that Putin relied on only a handful of like-minded confidants to make the final decision to invade, but that is not unusual when policymakers are faced with a crisis. All of this is to say that the Russian decision to invade most likely emerged from a deliberative process — one with political allies who shared his core beliefs and concerns about Ukraine.

Moreover, not only was Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine rational, but it was also not anomalous. Many great powers are said to have acted non-rationally when in fact they acted rationally. The list includes Germany in the years before the First World War and during the July Crisis, as well as Japan in the Thirties and during the run-up to Pearl Harbor. In both cases, the key policymakers relied on credible theories of international politics and deliberated among themselves to formulate strategies for dealing with the various issues facing them.

This is not to say that states are always rational. The British decision not to balance against Nazi Germany in 1938 was driven by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s emotional aversion to another European land war coupled with his success at shutting down meaningful deliberation. Meanwhile, the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003 relied on non-credible theories and emerged from a non-deliberative decision-making process. But these cases are the exceptions. Against the increasingly common view among students of international politics that states are often non-rational, we argue that most states are rational most of the time.

This argument has profound implications for both the study and the practice of international politics. Neither can be coherent in a world where non-rationality prevails. Inside the academy, our argument affirms the rational actor assumption, which has long been a fundamental building block for understanding world politics even if it has recently come under assault. If non-rationality is the norm, state behaviour can be neither understood nor predicted, and studying international politics is a futile endeavour. Only if other states are rational actors can practitioners anticipate how friends and enemies are likely to behave in a given situation and thus formulate policies that will advance their own state’s interests.

All of this is to say that Western policymakers would be well-advised not to automatically assume that Russia or any other adversary is non-rational, as they often do. That only serves to undermine their ability to understand how other states think and craft smart policies to deal with them. Given the enormous stakes in the Ukraine war, this cannot be emphasised enough.

This is an edited extract from How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato