Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 76

Andrew C. Kuchins: Vladimir Putin’s Chechen Time Bomb

By Andrew C. Kuchins, The National Interest, 5/2/24

Andy Kuchins is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya since 2007, was diagnosed with pancreatic necrosis in 2019. It was reported last week that his health has taken a serious turn for the worse, and he is in “critical condition” with perhaps months left to live. Novaya Gazeta Evropa broke the story based on research dating to 2019, including reports of Kadyrov missing many key public appearances, including the United Russia Party Congress in December of last year. Appearing in photos with Vladimir Putin last September, the Chechen leader’s face appeared bloated. A PR video of Kadyrov pumping iron in a gym was released this week to promote an image of health. It is not very convincing; he is lifting at most 50 percent the weight, usually far less, than I, a sixty-five-year-old getting a hip replacement next month, can lift. Ramzan is not in good health.

Chechnya has been reasonably stable since Ramzan took over as president at age thirty, three years after his father Akhmat, also president, was blown up in a Victory Day celebration in May 2004. The relationship between Putin and Kadyrov, while framed as like father and son, is actually a Faustian bargain. Kadyrov receives huge subsidies from Moscow to distribute as he sees fit and free sway in controlling the notoriously troublesome republic. Putin gets a stable Chechnya, and Kadyrov has been eager to support Putin by sending more than 20,000 Chechen soldiers to the war in Ukraine and carrying out the occasional political assassination.

It appears that Kadyrov would like to maintain a family dynasty (he has at least fourteen known children) and has recently promoted his eighteen-year-old son Akhmat to Minister of Sport and Youth and sixteen-year-old Adam as a trustee at Special Forces University in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Adam bears the strongest resemblance to his father and seems to have inherited his father’s sadistic and violent nature. In September 2023, Ramzan released a video of Adam, then fifteen, beating up a Ukrainian in detention accused of burning the Koran. However, since Chechnya’s constitution calls for the president to be at least thirty years old, it would seem unlikely that Kadyrov Sr. could engineer a family dynastic succession, at least in the short term.

Unquestionably, the Kremlin will seek a peaceful succession. Ramzan Kadyrov’s consistent support for Putin has been very valuable for the Russian president, even if it has raised the hackles of some in the Russian intelligence and security agencies who view Kadyrov as a loose cannon with his own regional ambitions in the North Caucasus. But the historical grievances of Chechens against Russia run deep. The Chechens fought decades-long struggles for independence against the Tsars in the nineteenth century, suffered from Stalin’s mass deportations from their homeland, and struggled against Moscow rule in two wars in the 1990s and 2000s. Chechnya is a volatile place with a well-armed population.

The ISIS-K-sponsored attack conducted by Tajik guest workers at Crocus City Hall in Moscow, resulting in more than 140 dead, marked the end of a six-year lull in Islamic terrorist attacks in Russia. For more than twenty years before 2018, the catalyst for nearly all terrorist attacks in Russia came from Chechen groups and others from the North Caucasus. In 2012 and 2013, most of the fighters in the North Caucasus found conditions too difficult for fighting at home and moved to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, where, by 2018, the majority were killed.

Global Jihadist group ties to the North Caucasus, however, date back to the 1990s, and the links with ISIS remain. Chechnya was de facto independent in the late 1990s as the Islamic Republic of Ichkeria and served as a criminal hub of trafficking in all manner of illicit goods. When legendary Chechen leader and author of the largest terrorist attacks in Russia, Shamil Basaev, led Chechen troops across the border into Dagestan in August 1999, the second Chechen War began, which catapulted new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to public acclaim.

Putin understands the immense value of a subdued Chechnya in the Russian Federation. His symbiotic relationship with Ramzan Kadyrov has served the interests of each leader very well, but it has not been without costs. Kadyrov and his fearsome legions of “Kadyrovtsy” have created many potential opponents to stability in Chechnya and Russia at large. The large number of Chechen casualties in Ukraine add to a seething dissatisfaction there. It is not hard to imagine that ISIS and other Jihadi groups could come to view Chechnya and the North Caucasus once again as an attractive target for mayhem. Putin’s concern for this possibility may well be a factor in his very public support for Palestinians in the war in Gaza. With Russian intelligence and security forces already stretched to the breaking point, the near future would be a particularly inopportune time for unrest in Chechnya.

Russia Matters: Syrskyi Admits to ‘Very Difficult’ Situation at Front as Russian Troops Creep Forward

Russia Matters, 7/26/24

Since last autumn, Ukraine’s armed forces have been going steadily backward and things have become “very difficult” for the ZSU. This follows from Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi’s interview with the Guardian. In the interview, Syrskyi acknowledged that the Ukrainian forces are outgunned and outmanned, warning that Moscow plans to boost its fighting force in Ukraine to 690,000 by the end of 2024. Syrskyi insisted, however, that Russia’s recent creeping advances were “tactical” ones—local gains. The latter included this week the capture of Pishchane in the Kharkiv region and Prohres in the Donetsk region. The Russian military claimed control of these settlements on July 21, and Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT project’s map then appeared to show Russian forces in control of them as of July 25. The Russian Defense Ministry also claimed this week that its forces had captured the villages of Andriivka in the eastern Luhansk region and Ivano-Dariivka in the Donetsk region, but the DeepState OSINT project’s map showed Russian forces not in full control of either Andriivka or Ivano-Dariivka as of July 25.Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top adviser Mykhailo Podolyak asserted this week that signing an agreement with Russia to stop the war with Ukraine would amount to signing a deal with the devil. It remains unclear how Podolyak’s July 25 comments can be reconciled with Zelenskyy’s recent announcement that a second Ukraine peace summit should include officials from Russia. In addition to Podolyak’s comments, expectations of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks have also been dimmed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s  statement  to his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in Beijing on July 24 that the time was “not yet ripe” for peace talks to end the war. Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump told Fox News that he had told Zelenskyy the following: “This is a war machine you’re facing. That’s what they (the Russians) do they fight wars. They beat Hitler. They beat Napoleon.” “We got to get this war over with,” Trump told Zelenskyy, according to Reuters.Russia and China have flown a joint strategic bomber patrol near Alaska for  the first time , according to FT. U.S. and Canadian fighter jets detected, tracked and intercepted two Russian Tu-95 and two Chinese H-6 aircraft on July 24. The interception occurred three days after Russia said it scrambled its own fighter jets as two U.S. strategic bombers approached Russia’s border at the Barents Sea in the Arctic, according to RFE/RL. It’s “not a surprise to us,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of the Russian-Chinese patrol, according to Bloomberg. Austin’s comments came less than a week after the Pentagon had unveiled a new Arctic Strategy that commits the U.S. to expanding its military readiness and surveillance in the region because of heightened Chinese and Russian interest coupled with new risks brought on by accelerating climate change, Bloomberg reported.Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and support his VP Kamala Harris has Russian influentials divided on whether a Democrat can defeat the GOP’s DonaldTrump in November, according to RM’s review of commentary by Russian influentials on this development. Boris Mezhuev, a Moscow-based political scientist, told pro-Kremlin portal Vzglyad in reference to Harris: “I think her prospects can be described as positive. The gap in ratings with Donald Trump is only a few percent.” According to Russian foreign policy veteran Sen. Alexey Pushkov, however, “in the battle for the presidency, Trump defeated Biden ahead of schedule.” Pushkov’s colleague, and deputy chairman of the Russian Senate, Konstantin Kosachev, also believes Trump is more likely to win. In contrast, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “nothing good can be expected” when asked what the Kremlin expects from the U.S. presidential elections.Real wages have grown by almost 14% in Russia, and the consumption of goods and services by around 25%, FT reported, citing the Russian state statistics agency. A further bump in real wages of up to 3.5% is expected this year, alongside an expected 3% jump in real disposable income, according to Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, again as cited by FT’s article, “Russia’s surprising consumer boom.”

Ian Proud: The ticking time bomb of Ukrainian debt (that the west will have to pay)

By Ian Proud, Website, 6/23/24

The G7 recently made the headlines by agreeing to lend Ukraine $50bn which will be repaid using the yearly interest accrued on $329bn of confiscated Russian sovereign foreign exchange reserves. When it is finally structured, the loan will consist of a series of loans by G7 member countries, with the US topping up the fund by the required amount so it hits the $50bn mark.

Taking a step back from the legality of, effectively, expropriating another country’s sovereign assets to repay a rival country’s debt, what does this mean for Ukraine? Figures vary, and the Ukrainian government is increasingly coy about releasing economic data sets, but Ukraine’s economy is currently around $180-190bn in size. To put that into context, that is around 11 times smaller than Russia’s economy and 131 times smaller than the US economy.

$50bn, therefore, represents around 27% of Ukraine’s yearly GDP. That is a huge figure for a single loan. But the problem is that Ukraine has been borrowing this amount every year since the war started. According to politico, Ukraine borrowed $58bn in 2022, $46bn in 2023 and is set to borrow $52bn in 2024. So, in just three years, Ukraine will have borrowed 82% of GDP.

Ukraine needs to borrow this much because its government spends almost twice as much each year as it receives in income from taxation and other sources. To put that into context, the European Union sets a limit that Member States cannot run a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. Ukraine, which aspires to join the EU, has been running a yearly budget deficit of 25% since the war began. And in addition to that, with Ukraine running a deficit on its current account each year – the difference between how much it exports and imports – it also needs capital to stop its currency going into meltdown.

And here’s the thing, Ukraine will probably need to borrow even more this year than what is currently forecast. Don’t be fooled by the official defence budget for 2024 of $28.6bn; this is around half of what Ukraine actually spent on defence in 2023. (Ukraine adjusted its original 2023 defence budget up from $39.4bn – still more than the 2024 budget – to $56.3bn). Ukraine’s massive spending spree on the war effort, in 2023 at least, accounted for one third of total economic output. With Zelensky showing no appetite to negotiate, there’s little reason to believe it won’t in 2024. 

So, with Ukraine taking on 25% of its GDP in debt each year, its debt mountain will continue to spiral out of control. The EU forecasts that Ukrainian debt is growing by 10% of GDP each year since the war started, but I view these forecasts with a heavy dose of scepticism. Even if Ukraine’s economy grew by 5.5% in 2023, it remains smaller than it was in 2021, before the war started. More realistically, Ukraine’s debt is growing by 15-20% of GDP each year.

So, Ukraine’s debt will hit 100% of GDP in the current financial year (if it hasn’t already). And the really worrying thing is that there are no plans to repay any of it. Because Ukraine isn’t making debt repayments each year to tamp down its debt growth. In fact, Ukraine stopped making payments ona its existing external debt in 2022 when the war started. For those who remember the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Ukraine immediately refused to pay a debt of $3bn that Russia had given it as part of the deal with Yanukovich to stay out of the EU Association Agreement.

Fueled by hubris and self-righteousness, Ukraine has become addicted to taking on debt and then refusing to make payments on that debt. Since the start of the war, Zelensky has been pressing for the $329bn in frozen Russian assets to be given to Ukraine. The G7 loan of $50bn therefore marks an alarming shift in that direction. It assumes that Ukraine itself will never need to repay the debt itself, even though it’s Ukraine’s debt. But when the war ends, if this needless war ever ends, who will repay the G7 countries their loans then? The Americans seem to believe that it would be possible to continue to freeze Russia’s frozen reserve assets even after war finished.

If that be so, what motivation, then, for Russia to stop fighting if it feels that massive sanctions and the theft of its assets will continue? As I said at the top, Russia’s economy is 11 times larger than Ukraine’s. Russia is also bringing in healthy amounts of capital each year as its exports continue to exceed its imports. Put simply, Russia gains a surplus of around $50bn each year in its exports, which roughly equates to what Ukraine borrows each year to prop up the war effort. While Putin has offered a peace deal – or at least, terms for peace negotiations to restart – Russia has sufficient resources to keep fighting, even if the fighting results in a barely shifting stalemate.

So, in economic terms at least, winning the war doesn’t matter to Russia right now, even if he and the Russian people would prefer an end to it all. Because the longer the war continues, the more indebted and delinquent Ukraine becomes. Putin knows that practically all of the foreign money that Ukraine borrows comes from western countries that are bankrolling Ukraine’s fight. And we have already seen the sands shift in western support with pure hand-outs transitioning to actual loans. So, over time, the west will increasingly offer Ukraine debt rather than freebees.

And it is pure fantasy to believe that Russia will repay this debt, as Russia wants its frozen money back. A one-sided peace will not be possible in which the west continues to punish Russia, including economically, after the cannon fire stops. Indeed, stealing Russia’s assets will only lead to potential further escalation, prolonging Ukraine’s suffering, and ramping up its unsustainable debt still further. This war will end when Putin feels that there are economic incentives to stand his troops down and to negotiate a lasting peace.  

Until then, the west is holding a ticking time bomb of debt that Zelensky doesn’t believe that he should have to pay. Or, to put it another way, he is paying for this war using credit cards; except that they are our credit cards, not his.

Ukraine’s mobilisation – public support vs private resistance

By Leonid Ragozin, Intellinews, 5/27/24

In Odesa, a young woman was badly bruised when a draft officer attacked her with metal crutches as she protested her friend’s detention by a press gang.

Near Dnipro, a man apprehended by draft officers knifed one of them while trying to escape from their vehicle.

In Kharkiv, members of a press gang beat up a man at a bus stop. A video circulated on local Telegram channels shows the dazed man walking staggeringly towards a bench with hands on the back of his head as if suffering a concussion, while women form a human chain protecting the men and shout at the recruiters.

Originating from all around the country, videos of men actively resisting press gangs with the help of women, often random passersby, pop up online on a daily basis. In more than a few of these videos, draft officers are seen using violence against their targets. There were also reports of people dying inside draft centres – either from beatings or from medical conditions, such as epilepsy, ignored by the military.

This has been happening for many months before the new stringent law on mobilisation came into force on May 18. It obliges all draft age men to update their personal data in the reserve registry, making it easier for the military to hand them draft notices or punish them for draft dodging.

The shortage of manpower on the frontline is acute. Both the Ukrainian military and Western allies have been pushing hard to make the government facilitate mobilisation. But its prolonged hesitation is easy to understand when you hear what’s happening in real-life Ukraine, not inside the brilliant minds of military strategists and information warriors.

Sad or outright harrowing stories also come from the national border. In Zakarpattia Region, a man was shot dead by a border guard as he attempted an illegal border crossing. The shooter was charged with misusing the weapon.

In a separate incident, one of the best-known Ukrainian basketball players, Vadym Zaplotnytsky, was detained as he tried to escape into Romania.

More than 30 bodies of draft age men have been found in the Tisza river, which separates Ukraine from Hungary and Romania, since the beginning of the year. Still, Ukrainian men keep risking their lives by swimming across the cold and rapid mountainous stream, ridden with spiky underwater rocks, only to avoid being sent to the frontline. Others walk across the Carpathian mountains, an ordeal that sometimes also proves lethal.

Along a short section of a Ukrainian highway that runs through the territory of Moldova outside Odesa, people abandon their cars and escape into the neighbouring country.

A total of 11 thousand Ukrainian men illegally crossed into northern Romania alone since the start of the full-out Russian invasion over two years ago, according to Liberty Radio, quoting local police. Romania is only one of five countries Ukraine borders in the west.

On social networks, ukhylyant (or draft dodger) is the buzzword – there is an avalanche of memes, Tik-Tok videos, musical clips and posts which more often than not celebrate rather than shame those who try their utmost in order to avoid being sent to the frontline.

Information bubble

The Ukrainian leadership knew well that the mobilisation law would be extremely unpopular, so they kept postponing it despite considerable Western pressure. It was only adopted last month, a few days before the US Congress finally unblocked $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine. That synchronisation at least guaranteed that mobilised soldiers wouldn’t be fighting the Russian army with bare hands.

But the question of what they are really fighting for is dogging Ukrainian society and despite superficial appearances, it is difficult to say what Ukrainians really think on that matter.

Out of all theatres of this war, information space remains the one where the Ukrainian-Western alliance has an absolute advantage over the Russians. Infowar professionals are making a convincing case that Ukrainians are united like one in their desire to fight Putin until the last drop of blood, even though the prospects of victory are extremely dim and the devastation caused by Russian invasion has already set the country back by many decades, demographically and economically.

But when you look at what’s propping up this PR bubble more attentively, it may come across as a colossus with feet of clay. Worse than that, it only manages to linger in an atmosphere that feels eerily similar to the one that is being observed in Russia, Ukraine’s brutal and dictatorial adversary.

Opinion polls show an overwhelming support for the country’s war effort, mirroring similar results in Putin’s Russia. But as many experts, like sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, point out, war time polls can’t be taken at face value. In Ukraine, millions of people have left the country, also millions have been internally displaced. This migration tsunami primarily affected southeastern regions where pro-peace and pro-Russian sentiments have always been stronger.

But perhaps an even greater factor is preference falsification – a dominant issue in societies where people face serious risks for expressing their private opinions.

Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, puts out regular updates on people arrested for “justifying Russian aggression” in their social media posts or even in private phone conversations. Vast majority of opinion polls happen to be conducted over the phone.

In February, the Guardian reported that SBU had opened more than eight thousand criminal cases related to collaboration with the enemy since the start of the invasion. By comparison, a total of 483 politically motivated criminal cases (317 of them for antiwar views) were registered in the supposedly more repressive Russia in 2023, according to OVD-Info.

In recent months, the arrest spree extended to the hierarchs and ordinary priests of Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest church organisation which used to be formally affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate. The affiliation naturally raises suspicion about loyalty to Ukraine and some priests in the east of the country did actively support the occupation. But specific charges in individual cases often sound about as plausible as those brought against members of the opposition, or religious dissidents like Jehovah Witnesses, in Putin’s Russia.

The spectrum of opinions in the Ukrainian media space shrank considerably in the early 2021, when president Zelensky decided to clamp down on TV channels associated with Kremlin’s ally Victor Medvedchuk. The channels commanded considerable audiences, but didn’t explicitly promote Russian propaganda. It’s unlikely that the ban made members of these audiences less sceptical of the government or Western-funded Ukrainian media.

When Putin launched a full-out invasion of Ukraine, regular broadcast on main channels was replaced with the government-controlled news stream known as “TV marathon”. Critical coverage is sparse and mostly confined to pointing out the shortcomings of the government’s war effort, not the overall maximalist policy of fighting Russia until Ukraine territorial integrity is fully restored. The criticism of secret services or far right groups, associated with various military units, is virtually impossible.

As a result, millions have drifted to Telegram with its proliferation of Russian military propaganda as well as fugitive Ukrainian media outlets operating out of the EU.

One of these, run by ex-journalist and politician Anatoly Shary, has 1.2 million followers. By comparison, president Zelensky’s channel on Telegram had 760 thousand followers at the time of writing. Shary covers events in Ukraine using combative and often obscene language typical that attracts the largest audiences on the platform.

An unashamedly biased commentator, Shary charges Ukrainian leadership with pursuing a suicidal confrontation with Russia and thus ruining the country. Official Kyiv routinely dismisses him as a Russian stooge, but Shary doesn’t mince words about Putin’s dictatorship and is universally hated by the Russian milblogger community.

A very different phenomenon is Politika Strany, a professional media outlet that was better known as the website strana.ua until it was squeezed out of Ukraine. Associated with media manager Igor Guzhva (and possibly with one of the fugitive Ukrainian oligarchs), it has adopted a neutral and dispassionate tone in its news coverage. It monitors a multitude of regional channels, scouring them for fresh mobilisation videos and other war-related stories. It also does a great job of monitoring Western media output related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. With over 270 thousand followers, it finds itself well ahead of major professional Ukrainian news outlets, such Ukrayinska Pravda (164K) or NV (50K).

It is no wonder that Ukrainian politicians and security officials periodically call for banning Telegram, but that radical step hasn’t been taken yet.

What are we dying for?

Channels like Shary’s or Politika Strany are popular because they provide an alternative to the predominant view which dwells on two controversial narratives – that the war was inevitable and that it is also existential. That there is no middle ground between Ukraine’s complete subjugation by Russian dictatorship and overwhelming victory that involves complete restoration of the country’s territorial integrity. Or, as people like Estonian prime minister Kaya Kallas and Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov hope, Russia’s disintegration into many small countries.

Russia’s full-out invasion in February 2022 shocked with its brutality, which seemed entirely out of place in the 21st century Europe. Its sheer disregard for international law was also dumbfounding. But when the shock subsided and war became part of the daily routine, people began to get a clearer view of what Putin’s invasion is and what it isn’t.

Notwithstanding the horror Putin has subjected Ukrainians to, when one’s lives are at stake – as in the case of Ukrainian men facing mobilisation – outlandish hyperbole and manipulation of the war’s cheerleaders become a hard sell. It is only natural for people to suspect that an earlier compromise with Putin – any time between 2014 and the failed Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022 – would have likely been a much better outcome for them personally and for their country as a whole. Especially when this idea is backed up by some of Ukraine’s own negotiators.

Over the last two years, infowarriors kept creating an illusion that it only takes this of that new weapon, provided to Ukraine at the risk exceeding the critical mass of Russian red lines crossed, and the Russian regime and its war machine will collapse. But now, after the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, people are seeing clearly that if anything, the escalatory game is making Russia stronger.

The question which the men facing mobilisation are asking themselves goes along these lines: What if my sacrifice will be in vain or that it only helps to promote the agendas of other people and other countries?

The scope of material which demonstrates resistance to mobilisation in Ukraine is just too overwhelming to be dismissed as abnormal behaviour by people lacking the sense of civic duty or as the result of Russian propaganda.

It shows a growing rift between the public face of Ukrainian society, as presented by cheerleaders calling for war till victorious end, and the private opinion of real life Ukrainian citizens, expressed through draft dodging, cross-border escapes and a seemingly widespread hatred against press gangs hunting for men. This rift may play out in many different ways politically and Putin’s regime will surely try to exploit it to its own advantage.

The Next Episode of the Clown Show that is Washington Leadership

YouTube link here.

Dr. Grande’s YouTube Channel covers topics related to counselor education and supervision including but not limited to mental health, human behavior, relationship dynamics, psychopathology, personality theory, true crime, pop culture, research, statistics, SPSS, Excel, appraisal, and group counseling. Dr. Grande has a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor of Mental Health (LPCMH) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Professional (LCDP).

In this video Dr. Grande recites 12 “word salad” comments made publicly by Kamala Harris in the past few years while trying to keep a straight face. – Natylie

Lev Golinkin: Why Is the American Library Association Whitewashing the History of Ukrainian Nazis?

By Lev Golinkin, The Nation, 4/10/24

Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Amazon’s Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among others.

America’s largest library association, which annually hands out prestigious literary prizes such as the John Newbery Medal for children’s literature, the Caldecott Medal for picture books for children, the Stonewall Award for LBGTQ+ books for young readers, and the Coretta Scott King award for African American authors and illustrators, has recently honored two authors with a track record of whitewashing Nazi collaborators.

This January, the American Library Association (ALA) published a list of Best Historical Materials for 2023, which includes Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives.

This compendium of Soviet documents was edited by Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk. Viatrovych, who is currently a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, is notorious for drafting laws glorifying Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. He’s been condemned by Jewish organizations as well as the governments of Poland and Israel. Luciuk, a professor in Canada’s elite military college, has defended a Third Reich division accused of war crimes.

The ALA’s influence reaches beyond awards: The world’s largest library association plays a key role in lobbying Congress for federal funding, and runs Booklist magazine, which covers soon-to-be published titles; receiving a Booklist review is an important step on the road to successful publication.

This isn’t the ALA’s first scandal over skewing historical narratives. A 2022 panel musing about the legitimacy of books about Holocaust denial necessitated an apology clarifying that Holocaust denial is, indeed, a means of disinformation and therefore not appropriate. The group has since partnered with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on a traveling exhibit for libraries.

Yet the selection of Enemy Archives places any commitment to avoid both-sides-ing WWII in doubt. One of the book’s editors has described soldiers from an SS division as “war victims,” while the other demanded that the Canadian parliament apologize for calling an SS veteran a Nazi.

In 2015, Kyiv triggered international headlines after passing laws declaring two World War II–era paramilitary groups—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its offshoot the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—to be Ukrainian national heroes and making it illegal to deny that heroism. The OUN collaborated with the Nazis in massacring tens of thousands of Jews, while the UPA liquidated thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles.

The laws institutionalizing the OUN/UPA cult across Ukraine were the brainchild of Volodymyr Viatrovych, who at the time headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), a department in the federal government.

The legislation was only the beginning: Viatrovych’s systematic campaign transforming killers of Jews into freedom fighters became so endemic he was mentioned by name in the annual report on global antisemitism issued by Israel. The 2015 laws and the UINM’s whitewashing were condemned by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Articles such as “How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past” in The Nation and “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past” in Foreign Policy exposed a pattern of distortion. In 2017, Viatrovych was barred from entering Poland.

When Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called out Ukraine’s Holocaust revisionism during a 2018 visit, Viatrovych attacked him for “spreading the Soviet myth about the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust,” (the OUN’s involvement is an established historical fact). And when Ukrainian Jewish leader Eduard Dolinsky warned of the institute’s excesses, Viatrovych accused him of claiming antisemitism in order to profit. These smears echoed long-standing racist tropes of Jews carrying water for the Kremlin and concocting false acts of antisemitism to make money.

Viatrovych, who was fired as the head of UINM by President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, is now a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament.

Viatrovych’s coeditor, Luciuk, is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada—the country’s equivalent of West Point. Last year, he published an edited excerpt from Enemy Archives in the National Post, a major Canadian paper. The article described the OUN as having been maligned by the USSR, which “routinely portrayed members of this Ukrainian nationalist movement as war criminals, Nazi collaborators, fascists and so on, a trope regurgitated regularly by the Russian Federation.”

The piece made it sound as if the OUN’s collaboration with the Third Reich was Soviet propaganda, instead of established historical fact. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) denounced the National Post for providing “space to Lubomyr Luciuk who continues to spread Holocaust distortion and disinformation.”

In responding to SWC, the National Post’s editor in chief admitted that the article “included a paragraph disputing the view that the Second World War era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were Nazi collaborators. However, we recognize that this collaboration has been established by prior scholarship.”

Luciuk has also vociferously defended the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), commonly known as SS Galizien. This was a formation in the SS—the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party and the chief perpetrator of the Holocaust.

SS Galizien was armed, trained, and commanded by German SS officers. Its soldiers, who were overwhelmingly volunteers, swore an oath to Hitler. A video clip from USHMM archives shows the German high command staging elaborate, Nuremberg-style enlistment ceremonies with beaming recruits marching under SS banners. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler—the mastermind of the Holocaust—who praised the fighters’ willingness to slaughter Poles. Indeed, prior to Himmler’s visit, SS Galizien subunits distinguished themselves by burning 500–1,000 Polish villagers alive.

Luciuk has written numerous defenses of SS Galizien, stating that “they weren’t pro-Nazi, they weren’t anti-Semitic and they didn’t engage in war crimes.”

Last fall, on the occasion of a visit by Zelensky, the speaker of the Canadian Parliament recognized SS Galizien veteran Yaroslav Hunka, who was present, prompting a standing ovation by parliamentarians. The ensuing scandal led to the speaker’s resignation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and condemnation from Canadian Jewish organizations.

Luciuk disagreed. The professor employed by the Canadian military—which lost over 45,000 men in the war against Nazi Germany—claimed that “members of Parliament joined an execrable chorus of zealots and prats who gibbeted Hunka for someone he never was —‘a former Nazi.’ I’d say the House owes our fellow Canadian, and an innocent man, a public apology.”

(It must again be stated that the SS was literally the military wing of the Nazi Party.)

The annual Best Historical Materials list is published by the Reference and User Service Association, an ALA division. The 2023 list contains 12 titles, each with a brief review by a scholar. The Enemy Archives review is signed by University of Southern Mississippi professor Jennifer Brannock. Tellingly, her review states that the documents in the book “cover topics such as the Soviet claim that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis.”

Andrew Korybko: Ukraine Might Actually Be Semi-Serious About Resuming Peace Talks With Russia

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 7/23/24

The conventional thinking is that Ukraine isn’t interested in resuming peace talks with Russia unless the latter capitulates to its unacceptable ultimatums, otherwise it’ll continue fighting “until the last Ukrainian”, but that might be about to be turned on its head as a result of recent developments. In the span of less than a week: Trump talked to Zelensky about his peace plan; the Vatican’s top diplomat visited Ukraine; and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister is visiting China, the last two for the first time since 2022.

From the looks of it, Ukraine is fretting about Trump’s likely return to power and wants to get ahead of the curve by exploring paths to peace, which are intended to give it a chance to shape the process instead of being completely controlled by it if the US suddenly decides to end its latest “forever war”. The supplementary developments that led up to the three aforementioned ones are Orban’s peace missions and the unveiling of former British Prime Minister Johnson’s peace plan.

Regarding the first of these two, this saw the Hungarian leader travel to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, DC, and Mar-a-Lago, after which he recommended in a report to the EU that their bloc explore the modalities of the next peace conference with China and resume dialogue with Russia. As for the second, this infamous hawk proposed territorial compromises with Russia and Ukraine protecting the rights of Russian speakers. These five developments were also just followed by an unexpected proof of concept.

It was announced on Tuesday that 14 Palestinian factions signed the Beijing Declaration that’ll end the years-long divisions between Hamas and Fatah, thus showing that lightning does indeed strike twice after China brokered the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement last year. For background, it was explained here how China is trying to organize a Brazilian-fronted parallel peace process on Ukraine ahead of and/or during November’s G20 in Rio, which is more realistic than ever now.

To explain, Zelensky read the writing on the wall over the past few weeks about Biden’s inevitable departure from the campaign, especially after Trump’s famous fist-pumping picture that followed his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt earlier this month turned him into a hero. This places his unprecedented proposal of Russia participating in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November into context even though he hasn’t yet at this point signaled any willingness to compromise with it.

He suggested this on 15 July, and it was sometime last week that the Vatican’s and Ukraine’s top diplomats finalized their trips, the first to Ukraine and the second to China. 19 July then saw Johnson publish his peace plan, the details of which he likely conveyed to Ukraine and others beforehand, which was the same day as the Trump-Zelensky call. Then the previously mentioned diplomats set off on their respective trips and China coincidentally proved yet again that it can broker game-changing peace deals.

The EU disavowed Orban’s peace mission and associated report, yet the visit of the Vatican’s top diplomat to Ukraine hints that they might be relying on the Holy See as a backchannel for finding out whether the political fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump changed Zelensky’s views. After all, Orban visited Kiev less than a week afterwards when it wasn’t yet clear what its full implications would be, so it’s sensible to dispatch someone else a few weeks later to follow up on everything.

Zelensky’s unprecedented proposal last week for Russia to participate in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November showed the world that he’s becoming more flexible at least in his rhetoric, thus paving the way for the Vatican’s top diplomat to visit Kiev and for his own such one to visit Beijing. Johnson’s peace plan also contained some carrots in it for Russia pertaining to its return to the G7 and the resumption of its partnership with NATO, which Trump may or may not have discussed with Zelensky.

The last part remains unclear since Johnson noted in his op-ed that he talked about the conflict with Trump but clarified that the views expressed therein are his own and claimed that he supposedly doesn’t know how the former American leader might try to resolve this conflict if he’s re-elected. Nevertheless, it’s more likely than not that Johnson sought to informally float at least some of Trump’s proposals in his piece, with the former promoting them before the public and the latter before Zelensky.

Trump considers China to be the US’ systemic rival so he doesn’t want it to play any role in the peace process, yet Zelensky just dispatched his top diplomat to Beijing regardless, which is intended to gain negotiating leverage with the US regardless of whatever November’s outcome may be. That trip is obviously at variance with American interests, which suggests that he’s once again “going rogue” a bit by behaving somewhat independently of his patrons.

Zelensky knows that his maximalist goal of reconquering all of Ukraine’s lost territory is unrealistic no matter what he says for the purpose of keeping morale high. He therefore wants to retake as much as he can before the US either becomes too fatigued with its latest “forever war” or is forced by circumstances into “Pivoting (back) to Asia” before it’s ready. By publicly displaying interest in China’s mediation, he hopes to either keep the US supporting him for longer or to reach a better peace deal with China’s help.

It’s a gamble, but he hopes that the next US President might either become so nervous about him flirting with China that they decide to give him more of what he’s been demanding and remove their restrictions or that China can convince Russia to scale back some of its maximalist demands for peace if they won’t. Nobody can confidently predict how far he’ll go in this regard nor exactly how serious he is, but it’s undeniable that Zelensky is changing tack to an extent, which is remarkable development in this conflict.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Russia’s Soaring Wartime Salaries Are Bolstering Working-Class Support for Putin

I’m posting this article because there’s useful information in it, but the concluding paragraph is garbage. I have included my comments at the end. – Natylie

By Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva, Carnegie Endowment, 5/28/24

The reasons for rising incomes in Russia have been well documented: a labor shortage, hefty payments to soldiers and their families, and an unprecedented level of state spending that has obliged defense sector factories to work around the clock. However, whether standards of living have actually improved is open to debate, given the record military spending, high inflation, Western sanctions, and limits on hydrocarbon exports.

The data that would normally be used to attempt to reach a conclusion should be treated with caution: Russian consumer behavior has changed too radically amid the war in Ukraine, and there are huge differences across Russian society. While the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a major shock for the middle class, it has also channeled wealth to many people who were previously struggling to make ends meet.

The data that are available show that real incomes rose 5.8 percent in 2023 and at the same rate in the first quarter of 2024, according to Russia’s State Statistics Service (Rosstat). On top of that, figures from the Federal Tax Service show that the Russian state’s income tax revenues in 2023 were 40 percent higher than in 2021 (the lion’s share of this increase took place in 2023).

The fifteen fastest growing regions in terms of income tax contribution (excluding the regions Russia claims it has annexed in Ukraine) include hardly any of the traditionally big donors. Instead, the top spots are occupied by regions that before the war were traditionally net recipients from the federal budget. They include the republic of Chuvashia (a rise of 56 percent over two years), Bryansk region (54 percent), Kostroma region (52 percent), Kurgan region (50 percent), Smolensk region (49 percent), and Zabaikalsky region (47 percent). There were only three regions where income tax contribution growth was under 20 percent.

It’s important to remember that using income tax payments to gauge standards of living means excluding a key source of wartime wealth, since soldiers’ wages and payouts in case of injury or death are not subject to income tax. However, given the growth in income tax payments (and that Rosstat assesses that 59 percent of incomes in 2023 derived from wages), it can be said with confidence that real incomes have risen faster than inflation since the full-scale invasion.

How are Russians spending this money? The answer seems to be that they are both spending more and saving more (a trend that the head of Russia’s central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, has described as odd). According to the central bank, the amount of rubles held in Russian bank accounts climbed 19.7 percent to 7.4 trillion in 2023 (nearly three times what it was in 2022), buoyed by high interest rates. In particular, there has been growth in the category of deposits worth between 3 million and 10 million rubles (both in terms of their total value and in the number of people holding such deposits). In other words, a lot of people are prepared to hold sizable sums in the bank, and they appear confident that there will be no disaster in the near future.

When it comes to consumption, the picture is extremely varied. Consumers operate within certain limits: for example, Russians aren’t going to Europe because air transport links were severed at the start of the war, and it’s hard to get a visa. It’s also difficult to buy a car: not everyone wants a Chinese-made vehicle.

However, there are two spending trends that suggest at least some consumers have money to burn. Firstly, demand continues to grow for mortgages (the total value of mortgages held in Russia grew 34.5 percent in 2023). This growth has mostly been driven by state-subsidized mortgage programs. And demand showed no sign of slacking in the first four months of 2024. Many Russians have enough savings to put down a 30 percent deposit on a property (the average initial deposit), and are happy to take on twenty-year mortgages, suggesting they are counting on continued state support.

The second trend is the booming gambling market. The income of legal bookmakers rose 40 percent in 2023, and active gamblers (those who bet at least once a week) numbered some 6.6 million people. In total, more than 15 million people gambled (about one in seven Russians over the age of 18) over the course of the year. At the same time, inflation means the size of the average bet is growing. Current trends have even led to calls to raise the legal limit on a single bet from 600,000 rubles to 1.4 million rubles.

Among those who are “winning” from the current situation are the millions of Russians in blue-collar and gray-collar jobs. Some of the most in-demand wartime professions are: milling machine operator, machinist, welder, weaver, and garment worker. While there are some regional differences, the wages of the men and women working in these professions have more than tripled and in some cases quintupled. Weavers, for instance, were paid between 18,000 and 25,000 rubles per month in December 2021 (about $250–350 back then), whereas now they can get 120,000 rubles ($1,300).

Another good example is couriers and drivers. Long-distance truck drivers now get an average of 180,000 rubles a month (up 38 percent year-on-year), while couriers can earn up to 200,000 rubles a month. For comparison, President Vladimir Putin recently signed a decree raising the monthly payment to members of the Russian Academy of Sciences—the country’s leading academics and researchers—to 200,000 rubles from next year.

From even this brief analysis, it’s clear that the main financial beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine (excluding security officials and soldiers) are those whose professions were long considered low paid and low status. Now they enjoy high salaries and a surfeit of attention from both employers struggling to fill job vacancies, and the state as a whole.

More money in their pockets makes these people—who are not accustomed to self-reflection and who do not have easy access to independent sources of information—even more susceptible to propaganda. Putin’s public image provides them with a comforting feeling of stability, and a sense that their leaders are making the right decisions. It’s unsurprising that the level of support for the Russian regime among these groups is only growing.

[“who are not accustomed to self-reflection and who do not have easy access to independent sources of information” – suggesting that these people don’t ever engage in self-reflection is just plain elitist, same for suggesting that they have no access to smart phones and therefore Telegram, YouTube and the like: elitist and ignorant. Also, it’s normal for working class people anywhere to vote for and support policies that result in concrete improvements to their material lives. Again, suggesting that doing so is merely a result of propaganda is insulting and elitist. This is typical of the kind of people that write for western think tanks about Russia – people who have contempt for their subject. – Natylie]

Paul Grenier: American Messianism

By Paul Grenier, Landmarks, 6/12/24

Introduction

Americans have a tendency to assume that their opponents are evil.  Bond films and Hollywood blockbusters instantiate, in the final analysis, what is already the common American assumption. It is not simply a matter of America’s opponents doing something bad. The situation is far more dire than that.  The opponent wishes to do evil, because their very will is oriented in that direction.  Given such an assumption, it follows quite naturally that neither diplomacy nor compromise can be considered realistic options. How can one compromise with evil?  The only possible response is to wage a war – perhaps a messianic war – against the enemy of the moment.  

The most recent consequence of this long-standing pattern is America’s intractable and constantly escalating proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.  From the perspective that matters in Washington, the reasons for this war are uncomplicated, having to do with the evil will of the Russian president, who, it is said, initiated a war on his neighbor, wholly unprovoked, in the usual Bond villain pattern. Still today, no compromise is being considered, nor is any diplomacy underway. Quite to the contrary, what we have seen, since the war began, is a constant escalation in the lethality of weapons supplied to Ukraine, and in the risks the US side is willing to take in its unprecedented direct confrontation with the Russian nuclear superpower.   

The result is a strange paradox:  on the one hand, we are confronted with a war which, as any responsible analyst will admit, could easily have been prevented altogether, by the simple expedient of allowing Ukraine to remain neutral. It is also a war that could have almost immediately been stopped, back in March/April 2022, after negotiations between Kiev and Moscow reached a successful compromise in Istanbul – a compromise which the Americans, making use of the good offices of British foreign minister Boris Johnson, saw fit to reject. The upshot of this process, then, is that, for the sake of avoiding a neutral Ukraine, the world now faces the very real risk of a further escalation that could easily end in nuclear war.  

How did we get into such a thoroughly irrational position, which seemingly has reached a dead end?  We have gotten here by viewing reality through the prism of moralism, through the assumptions, just described, that those who oppose us must be motivated by an evil will.  It goes without saying that this moralizing pattern of thought (the word ‘thought’ is being used here in a purely metaphorical sense) nearly always involves a complete distortion of reality.  

The dire consequences of these habitual assumptions make obvious the need for a different approach, one that is both less moralistic and more adequate to reality.  Fortunately, such a perspective exists, and has existed for almost as long as philosophy itself. In the Platonic (Socratic) philosophical tradition, as anyone can see from reading, for example, the dialogue Gorgias or The Republic, the greatest danger we face in our political community is viewed not as the ‘bad will’ of the enemy, but ignorance and illusion, which may exist and usually does exist on all sides.  From Socrates’ perspective, all desire is oriented to what is believed to be the good, even if irrationality, or failure to understand the true needs of the soul, often leads us astray. 

The Platonic tradition, to be sure, does not deny the reality of evil. After all, a stubborn persistence in ignorance and illusion is also a form of evil. All the same, the Platonic perspective allows for a far more subtle understanding of the problem of evil.  “When we do evil,” noted the Christian Platonist Simone Weil, “we do not know it, because evil flees from the light.” The avoidance of thought is the typical form taken by this ‘fleeing from the light.’ Continuing on this same theme, Weil adds: “When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.”  

“When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity or even a duty.   Messianism: General Considerations

Normally we think of messianism as a proselytizing mania conducted by those who are certain that God is on their side.  The key to any messianism, however, is not the presence of the Absolute, but the conviction that what one values is absolute.  This conviction can be, and regularly is, based on some such value as ‘development,’ or ‘return on investment’ or ‘democracy.’  Hans Morgenthau, in his outline of the four cardinal rules of diplomacy, places in first place the need to banish “the crusading spirit” — another name for messianism.  The ideal vehicle for such a crusading spirit is what Morgenthau refers to as abstract principles, or some suitable ‘catchword’, which is then molded and adapted to suit the needs of the moment. There is no problem with the meaning of the catchword being twisted into variously-shaped pretzels in the process.  That is the beauty of the abstract principle or catchword in the first place. Its very vagueness lends its owners an ever-expanding freedom and power.  Or so it appears at first.  And yet, as Morgenthau notes, citing William Graham Sumner: “If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny.”  

Democracy today serves as just such a catchword for the American political class, and it has, correspondingly, generated its own species of messianism, that of democracy promotion.  Freedom is another such catchword.  Now, true freedom is, to be sure, among the greatest of values. It becomes a catchword when the meaning of freedom is distorted and misunderstood, as it has in our time, generating thereby freedom as ideology, freedom as a generator of the crusading spirit, of messianism.  We will return below to the crucial question of freedom. 

An additional form of messianism, perhaps the most obvious of all, is the quest to eliminate evil from the world. The American-led Global War on Terror was just such an effort. So too was the communist effort to eliminate from the world all capitalists, thereby supposedly ushering in a secular heaven within history.  

American Messianism

According to Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921 – 1983), the American Protestant spirit has a strong tendency toward sectarianism, and this is a direct result of its rejection of the sacramental order, in other words, its rejection of the religious nature of creation itself.  Inhabiting this de-sacramentalized world are individual believers “obsessed with salvation,” but now their salvation can no longer be rooted in a relationship with the world or with the kingdom of heaven. As a result, a ‘salvation’ so conceived becomes an empty thing, shorn of content—and in this respect, as we will see, it echoes the liberal concept of freedom. At the same time, even a salvation so conceived must find some content, some justification; and so, the “experience of ‘being saved’… is unavoidably filled with any content. The one who is saved must ‘save.’ ” All the activity and all the excitement of life becomes a process of ‘saving,’ a process of struggling against various evils, whatever they happen to be (communism, populism, drugs, and most recently of course, Vladimir Putin). Without an evil to do battle against, there is literally nothing else to do; there is no substance, there are no ‘things’ which warrant loving and valuing for their own sake.   

Freedom from Roots

Schmemann’s perspective on the sectarian origins of American messianism bears a close resemblance to, and provides an added dimension, to Simone Weil’s famous dictum that “whoever is uprooted himself, uproots others” (cf. ‘those who are saved must save’).  Weil’s concept of being rooted overlaps in certain respects with Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit in as much as both presuppose a substantive complex of inherited moral and practical traditions as well as orientations to various ‘treasures’ which must be passed on to the future.  In a rooted community, work (labor) itself is a continuation of the liturgical side of life – or, to use a vocabulary more typical of Weil, labor becomes an expression within the world of the beauty and goodness ‘which lies beyond this world.’  

The process of emptying the world of rich content of this sort is nailed in place, is made all but irretrievable, by the peculiar liberal (mis)understanding of freedom.  American theologian and philosopher D.C. Schindler has, over the course of several books and numerous articles, carefully diagnosed where the liberal concept of freedom, which has been embraced from the beginning by the United States, goes astray. To vastly oversimplify, what D.C. Schindler has outlined is the process whereby the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

…the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

A freedom so understood uproots the whole world.  It is helpful to contrast this innovation with the traditional view of freedom, which Schindler terms ‘symbolical’: 

To say that the will terminates in things – that is, in actual goods outside the soul – is to conceive of freedom in essentially symbolical terms as a ‘joining with,’ a sharing in goodness, by uniting with a reality that evokes desire and at the very same time responsibility. To deny this, as Locke came to see that he must, is to deny that the will connects with reality in any genuine sense; it is to lock the will within its own boundaries, to replace the ontological union of the soul and reality with the power to carry out an activity …  

Modern freedom creates a world that is strangely empty, even as it becomes ever more filled with stuff.  And as we have seen, idle hands become the devil’s playground. 

Conclusion: The Good Will that Destroys Worlds

Paul Robinson, in his article for Landmarks critiquing the proposed new Containment policy, points out that Kiev’s extremely poor prospects for success, and the likelihood that continuing the war will lead to perhaps hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, doesn’t seem to bother ‘the new Cold War’ enthusiasts: 

Convinced that they are ‘helping’ Ukraine, they lead it further into the abyss, just as their predecessors led Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans, and others into the abyss in decades past … Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, one might complain that the issue here is a failure to follow Kant’s categorical imperative and to view people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. The end is weakening Russia and China, and if others suffer in the process, we shrug our shoulders and consider it a price worth paying, knowing full well that it is not us but others who are paying the price. I think, though, that this complaint is not entirely accurate because the architects of these policies strike me not so much as cynics who know full well what they are doing but as true believers, who really imagine that their ‘help’ is in fact help, that the United States is a force for good in the world, and that spreading its influence and undermining that of others is thus for the benefit of all humanity.

What is striking here is the chasm between the declared aims — ‘helping this or that other nation’ — and the visibly disastrous effects of that ‘help.’ What is being offered, it is said, and if Paul Robinson is right, is being offered in the sincere belief that what is being offered is something good, is variously termed ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’ or ‘democratic values.’ What is actually being delivered to Ukraine, as in the other countries he mentioned (and his was a very abbreviated list), is national dismemberment, death on an unimaginable scale (50% of Ukrainians today are said to be suffering from PTSD – the ones who are still alive, of course).  What I am trying to draw attention to here is a certain aspect of the psychology of modern liberalism: there is something here that is so pathologically self-absorbed that its notions of the good are incapable of noticing realities beyond its own ideological construct.

I want to close with an image that greatly impressed me, taken from a recent English novel that to my mind symbolizes the liberal uprooted consciousness. The novel in question, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, takes place in early 19th century England. The England described therein has all the familiar realism of a Jane Austen novel, until two men with astonishing magical powers make their presence known. What drives the story forward are their efforts to counteract the efforts of yet another magical character, a powerful faerie, called the Man with Thistledown Hair. This faerie uses his power to ensnare and trap victims within his own world, a world which the Man with Thistledown Hair considers utterly delightful. This faerie takes a fancy to certain characters in the novel and sets about, with perfect sincerity, to ‘help’ them.  He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines. 

He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines.

It is not that he hears, but is indifferent to, the protests of his victims, who do not want any of these ‘gifts.’ What we have in the faerie is a degree of egotistical solipsism that has reached an infinite degree, such that he is simply incapable of noticing anything outside of his own interpretation of the world.  Spoken words that contradict his internal thoughts and wishes ‘to do good’ for others are, in the purely mechanical sense, ‘heard,’ and yet they might as well not be, in as much as they remain to the faerie utterly incomprehensible.  Only what is locked inside his own mind has any meaning for him. 

A Lindsay Graham, a Joe Biden, a Victoria Nuland, and, indeed, most of the liberal foreign policy establishment – an establishment which extends also to Europe –  strike me as analogues of the Man with Thistledown Hair.  As Paul Robinson said in respect to their efforts in such places as Vietnam, or Central America, or Libya, or Syria, or Ukraine, and now Georgia, in all such cases, they believe that they are doing good, that their help is actively desired. That they are saving the world.

WATCH: Lavrov at UN on Avoiding WWIII

Consortium News, 7/17/24

[Click on link above to watch video]

“Let’s face it: not all countries represented in this chamber recognise the key principle of the U.N. Charter which is the sovereign equality of all states,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. “Speaking through its presidents, the United States has long declared its exceptionalism. This applies to Washington’s attitude towards its allies, whom it demands to be unquestioningly obedient even to the detriment of their national interests. Rule, America! This is the thrust of the notorious ‘rules-based order’ which presents a direct threat to multilateralism and international peace.”  Dozens of nations’ representatives spoke after Lavrov in a debate on multilateralism called by Russia, the council’s president for July. 

FULL TEXT OF SPEECH BY RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER SERGEI LAVROV TO THE U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL

I would like to extend a warm welcome to distinguished dignitaries present in the Security Council Chamber. Their participation in today’s meeting confirms the importance of the subject under review. In accordance with Rule 37 of the Council’s provisional rules of procedure, I invite the representatives of Australia, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Türkiye, the UAE, Uganda, Vietnam, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to take part in the session.

In accordance with Rule 39 of the Council’s provisional rules of procedure, I invite His Excellency Stavros Lambrinidis, Head of the European Union Delegation to the United Nations, to participate in this meeting.

The Security Council will now begin its consideration of agenda item 2. I would like to draw the attention of the Council members to document S/2024/537, a cover letter dated July 9, 2024 from the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations addressed to Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres for a policy brief on the item under review.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

Your Excellency,

Today, the very foundations of the international legal order – strategic stability and the U.N.-centric system of international politics – are put to the test. We won’t be able to resolve the mounting conflicts unless we understand their root causes and restore faith in our ability to join forces for the common good and justice for all.

Let’s face it: not all countries represented in this chamber recognise the key principle of the U.N. Charter which is the sovereign equality of all states. Speaking through its presidents, the United States has long declared its exceptionalism. This applies to Washington’s attitude towards its allies, whom it demands to be unquestioningly obedient even to the detriment of their national interests.

Rule, America! This is the thrust of the notorious “rules-based order” which presents a direct threat to multilateralism and international peace.

The most important components of international law – the U.N. Charter and the resolutions of our Council – are interpreted by the collective West in a perverse and selective manner, depending on the instructions coming from the White House. Numerous Security Council resolutions have been ignored altogether, among them Resolution 2202, which approved the Minsk agreements on Ukraine, and Resolution 1031, which approved the Dayton Agreement on peace in BiH on the basis of the principle of equal rights of the three constituent peoples and two entities.

We can discuss endlessly the sabotage of the resolutions on the Middle East. Just think back to what Antony Blinken had to say in an interview with CNN in February 2021 taking a question about what he thinks about the decision of the previous US administration to recognise the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel. In case someone is not sure what his answer was, I will refresh your memory. The Secretary of State said, “Leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security.”

This is despite the fact that U.N. Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which you and I are well aware of and which no one has cancelled, qualifies annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel as illegal. However, according to those very “rules,” to quote Mr Blinken, “legal questions are something else.” And, of course, everyone remembers the statement by the US Ambassador to the U.N. that Resolution 2728 adopted on March 25 demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “is not legally binding,” meaning that the American “rules” supersede Article 25 of the U.N. Charter.

Last century, George Orwell predicted the essence of the rules-based order in the novel Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” It means that you are allowed to do what you wish if you follow orders from the ruling leader. But if you dare to protect your national interests, you will be declared an outlaw and beleaguered by sanctions.

Washington’s hegemonistic policy has been the same for decades. Absolutely all schemes of Euro-Atlantic security were based on America’s domination, including the subjugation of Europe and the “containment” of Russia. The main role in this was assigned to NATO, which has ultimately tramped down the European Union that had been created to serve Europeans. The alliance has unceremoniously privatised OSCE bodies in brazen violation of the Helsinki Final Act.

The unrestrained enlargement of NATO, which went on for years contrary to Moscow’s warnings, has also provoked the Ukraine crisis that began with the state coup organised by Washington in February 2014 to seize full control of Ukraine and use the neo-Nazi regime they brought to power to prepare an attack on Russia. When Petr Poroshenko, and after him Vladimir Zelensky, waged a war against their own citizens in Donbass, outlawed Russian education, Russian culture, Russian media and the Russian language and banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, nobody in the West noticed that, and nobody demanded that their wardens in Kiev “observe the proprieties” and respect international conventions on the rights of national minorities or the Constitution of Ukraine, which stipulates respect for these rights.

It is to eliminate these threats to the national security of Russia, to protect the people who consider themselves part of Russian culture and live on the land that their ancestors developed for centuries, as well as to save them from legal and physical extermination that the special military operation began.

It is notable that today, when numerous initiatives are advanced for a settlement in Ukraine, few remember that Kiev trampled on the human rights and the rights of national minorities. It was only recently that a relevant request had been added to the EU documents on the start of negotiations, and then mostly thanks to Hungary’s firm position of principle. However, Brussels’s ability and willingness to influence the Kiev regime are open to speculation.

We urge everyone who is sincerely interested in overcoming the crisis in Ukraine to formulate their proposals with due regard for the fundamental issue of ensuring the rights of all, without exception, ethnic minorities. Its suppression will debase any peace initiatives, while giving de facto approval to Vladimir Zelensky’s racist policy. It is notable that ten years ago, in 2014, Zelensky said, quote: “If people in eastern Ukraine and Crimea want to speak Russian, leave them alone and let them speak Russian on legal grounds. Language will never divide our country.”  But Washington has disciplined him, and in 2021 Zelensky said in an interview that those who regard themselves as part of Russian culture should pack up and go to Russia for the sake of their children and grandchildren.

I call on the masters of the Ukrainian regime to make it respect Article 1.3 of the U.N. Charter, which declares respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all “without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”

Colleagues,

The North Atlantic Alliance is no longer satisfied with the war it has unleashed against Russia by the hands of the illegitimate government in Kiev, nor is it satisfied with the entire OSCE space. Having destroyed almost to the ground the fundamental agreements on arms control, the United States continues to escalate the confrontation.

At a recently held summit in Washington, D.C., the leaders of the NATO countries reaffirmed their claims to the leading role not only in the Euro-Atlantic but also in the Asia-Pacific region. They declared that NATO is still guided by the objective of defending the territory of its members, but for this purpose they allegedly need to extend the alliance’s dominance to the entire Eurasian continent and adjacent sea areas.

NATO’s military infrastructure is moving into the Pacific with the obvious aim of undermining the ASEAN-centric architecture, which has for many decades been built on the principles of equality, mutual interests and consensus. To replace the inclusive mechanisms created around ASEAN, the United States and its allies are cobbling up closed confrontational blocs such as AUKUS and other groups of four or three countries that are subordinate to them. The other day Deputy Secretary of Defence Kathleen Hicks said the United States and its allies must be “prepared for the possibility of protracted war…and not just in Europe, either.”

For the sake of “containing” Russia, China and other countries whose independent policies are perceived as a challenge to hegemony, the West, through its aggressive actions, is breaking the system of globalisation, which was originally formed according to its own moulds. Washington has done everything to blow up (including literally by organising terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines) the foundations of mutually beneficial energy cooperation between Russia and Germany and Europe as a whole. Berlin was silent at the time.

Today, we see yet another humiliation of Germany, whose government unquestioningly obeyed the US decision to deploy US ground-based medium-range missiles on German territory. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said simple-heartedly that the United States has decided to deploy precision strike systems in Germany, and “it is a necessary and important decision at the right time.” The United States has decided so.

On top of it, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stated on behalf of the US President that they were not seeking a third world war, since it would have terrible consequences for Europe. A Freudian slip, as they say. Washington is convinced that it is not the US that will suffer from a new global war, but its European allies. If the Biden administration’s strategy is based on such an analysis, it is an extremely dangerous misconception. Europeans, of course, must realise the suicidal role they are destined to play.

The Americans, having called the entire collective West to arms, are expanding the trade and economic war with the unwanted actors, having unleashed an unprecedented campaign of unilateral coercive measures that are backfiring, primarily, on Europe and further fragment the global economy. The countries of the Global South in Asia, Africa and Latin America are suffering from the neo-colonial practices of Western countries. Illegal sanctions, numerous protectionist measures, restrictions on access to technology directly contradict genuine multilateralism and create serious obstacles to achieving the goals of the U.N. development agenda.

Where are the free market attributes that the United States and its allies have been telling everyone to follow for so many years? Market economy, fair competition, inviolability of private property, presumption of innocence, freedom of movement of people, goods, capital and services – all of these have been scrapped. Geopolitics has buried the laws of the market that the West once touted as sacred. Recently, we have heard public demands from the US and EU officials for China to reduce overproduction in high-tech industries, as the West has begun to lose its long-standing advantages in these sectors as well. Now, the very same “rules” have superseded market principles.

Colleagues,

The actions of the United States and its allies are hindering international cooperation and the creation of a more just world. They have taken countries and regions hostage, prevent nations from realising their sovereign rights declared in the U.N. Charter, and interfere with their vital joint efforts to settle conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and other regions, to reduce global inequality and combat the threats of terrorism and drug crime, hunger and diseases.

I am confident that this situation can be changed if there is good will, of course. To stop the implementation of a negative scenario, we would like to propose to discuss a number of steps towards restoring trust and stabilising the international situation.

1. The root causes of the ongoing crisis in Europe should be eliminated once and for all. The conditions for restoring stable peace in Ukraine have been put forth by President of Russia Vladimir Putin. There is no need to repeat them.

A political and diplomatic settlement should be complemented with practical steps, to be taken in the West and the Euro-Atlantic community, to remove threats to the Russian Federation. The coordination of mutual guarantees and agreements should be based on the recognition of the new geostrategic realities on the Eurasian continent, where a continental architecture of really equal and indivisible security is taking shape. Europe risks lagging behind this objective historical process. We are ready to discuss a balance of interests.

2. The restoration of the regional and global balance of forces should be accompanied with active efforts to eliminate injustices in the global economy. There must be no monopoly in monetary and financial regulation, trade and technologies, by definition. This opinion is shared by the overwhelming majority of international community. It is extremely important to reform the Bretton-Woods institutions and the WTO as soon as possible, for their operations must reflect the real weight of the non-Western growth and development centres.

3. Major fundamental changes are necessary in other institutes of global governance if we want them to work to the benefit of all. This primarily concerns the United Nations Organisation, which remains the embodiment of multilateralism against all the odds, with unique and universal legitimacy and universally recognised broad competencies.

An important step towards the restoration of the U.N.’s effectiveness would be the reconfirmation by all member states of their commitment to the principles of the U.N. Charter, not selectively but in their entirety and as a whole. The form of this reconfirmation can be discussed jointly.

The Group of Friends in Defence of the U.N. Charter, created at the initiative of Venezuela, is doing a great deal towards this. We invite all countries that believe in the priority of international law to join its efforts.

The pivotal element of the reform of the U.N. should be the reshuffle of the U.N. Security Council, although this alone will not promote efficiency without a fundamental agreement of the permanent members on its operating methods.  However, this must not hinder the imperative elimination of the geographic and geopolitical imbalances in the Security Council, which clearly has too many representatives of the collective West. A badly needed step is to reach the broadest accord possible on the concrete parameters of the reform, which should increase the representation of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The personnel policy of the U.N. Secretariat should be changed as well to eliminate the domination of Western citizens and subjects in the administrative U.N. bodies. The U.N. Secretary-General and his staff must faithfully and with no exceptions comply with the principles of impartiality and neutrality, as it is set out in Article 100 of the U.N. Charter, which we keep reminding you about.

4. The strengthening of the foundations of multipolarity should not only be promoted by the U.N. but also by other international organisations, including the Group of Twenty where all countries of the Global Majority and the West are represented.   The mandate of G20 is restricted to discussing economic and development issues, and it is important to protect substantive dialogue at this venue from populist attempts to add geopolitical topics to its agenda. This might destroy this useful platform.

BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation are playing an increasing role in the development of a just multilateral world based on the principles of the U.N. Charter. Their member states represent different regions and civilisations whose interaction is based on equality, mutual respect, consensus and mutually accepted compromises, which is the golden standard of multilateral cooperation involving great powers.

Regional associations have practical significance for the development of multipolarity, including the CIS, the CSTO, the EAEU, ASEAN, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Arab League, the African Union and CELAC. We believe that it is important to develop multifaceted ties between these associations, including by using the U.N. potential. Russia will devote one of the next meetings during its Security Council Presidency to interaction between the U.N. and Eurasian regional organisations.

Colleagues,

On July 9, 2024, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, addressing the BRICS Parliamentary Forum in St Petersburg, noted: “The formation of a world order that reflects the real balance of forces and the new geopolitical, economic and demographic reality is a complicated and, unfortunately, even painful process.” We believe that discussions of this issue should not devolve into fruitless polemics, and that they should hinge on a sober assessment of the totality of facts. First of all, it is necessary to reinstate professional diplomacy, the culture of dialogue, the ability to listen and hear and to retain the channels of crisis communications.

The lives of millions of people depend on the ability of politicians and diplomats to formulate something like a common perception of the future. It depends on member countries alone whether our world will be diverse and equitable. The Charter of our Organisation is our foothold. The United Nations will be able to overcome current disagreements and to reach consensus on most issues if everyone, without exception, honours its letter and spirit. “The end of history” has failed to materialise. Let us work together in the interests of launching the history of genuine multilateralism that reflects the entire wealth of cultural and civilisational diversity of the world’s nations. We are inviting everyone to join the discussion, which should certainly be completely honest.