Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 88

MK Bhadrakumar: The ‘inside track’ of Putin-Xi Jinping talks

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 5/21

In international diplomacy, summit meetings stand apart from regular high-level meetings when they are held at key moments or important junctures to reinforce partnerships and/or launch major initiatives.

The summit meeting at Beijing last Thursday between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin last falls into such a category, taking place at a momentous juncture when a great shift in the global power dynamic is happening and the breathtaking spectacle of history in the making playing out in real time. (Read my article in NewsClick titled Sino-Russian Entente Shifts Tectonic Plates of World Politics.) [https://www.newsclick.in/sino-russian-entente-shifts-tectonic-plates-world-politics]

The two statesmen spent an entire Thursday together after Putin’s presidential jet landed at the crack of dawn in Beijing. Extensive and very detailed discussions indeed took place. As Putin said later, this was a state visit which turned into a “working visit.”

The “debriefing” on Saturday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the foreign and security policy elite in Moscow at the annual plenary of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy — Russia’s equivalent of the Council of Foreign Relations headquartered in New York — soon after Putin’s entourage returned from China gives some invaluable glimpses into the ‘inside track’ of the closed-door discussions in Beijing.

At the most obvious level, Lavrov hit hard in his speech at the US and its NATO Allies with exceptional bluntness that their agenda to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia militarily and otherwise — to “decolonise’’ or “dismember” Russia, et al — is pure fantasy and it will be resolutely countered. Lavrov predicted that the escalation in western weapon supplies to Ukraine only highlights the ground reality that “the acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West” will continue in “full swing”.

The western thought processes are veering round dangerously to “the contours of the formation of a European military alliance with a nuclear component,” Lavrov said. In particular, France and Germany are still struggling with the demons in their attics — the crushing defeat France suffered at the hands of the Russian army in the Napoleonic war and the destruction of Hitler’s Wehrmacht by the Red Army.

The big picture is that the West is not ready for a serious conversation. Lavrov lamented that “they have made a choice in favour of a showdown on the battlefield. We are ready for this. And always.” That Lavrov spoke in such exceptionally tough tone suggests that Moscow is supremely confident of Beijing’s support in the crucial phase of the Ukraine war going forward. This is the first thing.

The current Russian offensive in the Kharkov Region took off when only six days were left for Putin’s forthcoming visit to China. Moscow gave the clearest signal possible that this is Russia’s existential war which it will fight no matter what it takes. Beijing understands fully the highest stakes involved. 

In Lavrov’s words, “Russia will defend its interests in the Ukrainian, Western and European directions. And this, by and large, is understood in the world by almost all foreign colleagues with whom we have to communicate.”

In his speech, Lavrov acknowledged that the stance of the Chinese leadership is a matter of great satisfaction for the Kremlin. As he put it, “Just the day before, President Vladimir Putin visited China. This is his first foreign visit since his re-election. Negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping and meetings with other representatives of the Chinese leadership have confirmed that our comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation surpass the traditional interstate alliances of the previous era in quality and continue to play a key role in maintaining international security and balanced global development.” This is the second thing.

The salience of Lavrov’s speech, however, lies in certain momentous remarks he made regarding the future trajectory of the Russia-China entente as such. In measured language, Lavrov declared that Russia has an open mind on “building a real alliance with China.”

“This topic can and should be discussed specifically. We [Russian foreign and security policy elites] can and should have a special conversation on this topic. We are ready to debate and discuss the ideas expressed in publications and aimed at building a real alliance with the PRC,” he told the elite audience.

Indeed, this is a hugely consequential statement against the backdrop of the gathering storms in the US-Russia-China triangle, with Russia in the middle of a bitterly-fought proxy war with the US and Beijing bracing for the inevitability of a confrontation with Washington in Asia-Pacific.

Lavrov, the consummate diplomat, ensured that his explosive idea of a “real alliance” had a soft landing. He said, “The assessment given by our leaders says that the relationship is so close and friendly that it surpasses the classic alliances of the past in quality. It fully reflects the essence of the ties that exist between Russia and China and are being strengthened in almost all areas.”

Indeed, the very fact that Lavrov aired such views openly is important, signalling coordination between Moscow and Beijing. In some form or the other, the topic figured in the discussions in Beijing just the previous day between Putin and Xi. 

Of course, never in their history have Russia and China been so deeply entwined. But for the Sino-Russian entente to assume the form of “a real alliance,” conditions are steadily developing in the Asia-Pacific. Lavrov noted meaningfully that “Our actions in Chinese and other non-Western areas arouse the undisguised anger of the former hegemon [read the US] and his satellites.”

He argued that even as the US is on overdrive “to set up as many countries as possible against Russia and then take further hostile steps,” Moscow will “work methodically and consistently to build new international balances, mechanisms, and instruments that meet the interests of Russia and its partners and the realities of a multipolar world.”

With an eye on China, Lavrov pointed out that the NATO is actively making a bid for its leading role in the Asia-Pacific region. The NATO doctrine now speaks of the “indivisibility of security in the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific region. Blocks are being introduced into it — the incarnation of the same NATO. More and more numerous attempts. “Threes”, “fours”, AUKUS and much more are created.”

Lavrov concluded that “it is impossible not to think about how we should structure our work on the topic of security in these conditions.” He sensitised the audience that the time may have come to combine “the Eurasian ‘sprouts’ of a new architecture [EAEU, BRI, CIS, CSTO, SCO, etc], a new configuration with some kind of “common umbrella.”

Lavrov assessed that such an effort will be entirely in sync with Xi Jinping’s “concept of ensuring global security based on the logic of indivisibility of security, when no country should ensure its security at the expense of infringing on the security of others.”    

Lavrov disclosed that Xi Jinping’s concept on global security was indeed discussed during Putin’s visit to China both at delegation level as well as in a restricted narrow format, and during the one-on-one conversation between the two leaders. He summed up that “We see a great reason for the practical promotion of the idea of ensuring global security to begin with the formation of the foundations of Eurasian security.”

Lavrov made these profound remarks publicly on the eve of his working visit to Astana to take part in the Foreign Ministers Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. China is assuming the SCO Chair later this year. Lavrov continued the discussions on this complex issue with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, whom he met earlier today in Astana. The Russian readout is here:

https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1951678

Gilbert Doctorow: Travel notes, St Petersburg, April-May 2024: first installment

Alexander’s Column at Palace Square, St. Petersburg, Russia; photo by Natylie S. Baldwin

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 4/28/24

My mention in my last essay of using the Estonian route to St Petersburg now that the Finnish border crossings are temporarily or, more likely, permanently closed, elicited several expressions of interest from readers, some of whom also may be looking for new ways to access Russia from Europe.

In past travel notes, I devoted some attention to the peculiarities of the political situation in Estonia where the Prime Minister and her government are among the most vicious Russophobes on the Continent and biggest cheerleaders for NATO expansion, to the outskirts of Moscow if they had their way. At the same time, their capital, Tallinn, has a substantial Russian-speaking population. I have in mind permanent residents, not tourists passing through. You see and hear them not only in the pedestrian zones of historic Tallinn but also in the shopping malls at the city outskirts. When we took the Tallink ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn a week ago many if not most of the passengers, particularly the younger ones, were Russian speakers who seemed very much at home.

Considering the anti-Russian policies and propaganda of the government, you may wonder why Russians come and why Russian speakers stay in Estonia.

Allow me to venture a guess based on what I saw as a bus traveler going from Tallinn to St Petersburg when I looked up from the movie screen in front of my seat and looked out the window. There is no denying that the farmsteads and little settlements on the Estonian territory along this west-east route are in better condition and more prosperous than the little wooden houses, some dilapidated, that line the road on first 100 km inside the Russian territory. As you move further east in Russia, the houses show prosperity, but they are already the country residences of Petersburgers, not the indigenous population. And, of course, when you approach Petersburg itself, the dynamism of the city is evident in world class infrastructure including some remarkable bridges and arterial highways.

My point is that Russian speakers in Estonia may well appreciate that they are living in a country with higher living standards for the lower strata of society than in neighboring Russia.

In this essay, I intend to add some realism as regards foreigners’ dealings with the authorities, beginning with the first obligation of anyone arriving here for more than eight business days: registration with the communal offices.

This is something that Western experts who have official Russian hosts have not faced, since the hosts take care of it all, very discreetly. The same is true for tourists on short visits: the registration is performed by the front desk staff of the hotels they stay in. But for all others, and that includes myself traveling on a visit to relatives, one is obliged to visit the nearest government office performing registration of foreigners and fill out 4-page registration forms that are very demanding. Filling out the papers by hand can be maddening, because any error you make sends you back to point zero, told to start afresh. And filling the form out on your computer using a downloaded form comes up against the Russian bureaucrats’ making little changes here or there in the form at least once a year without warning, which may well invalidate the now outdated form you are using.

In this essay I may disappoint readers who would like to believe that Moscow is the New Rome and that Russia is a very desirable place to live compared to the West which seems to have entered into moral degeneracy and terminal decline.

This turn of mind is now rather fashionable ever since Tucker Carlson in several video reports following his interview with Vladimir Putin, took his audience on a walking tour of Russian supermarkets and debunked all notions that Russians are suffering from the effects of Western sanctions. What he showed was a cornucopia, he demonstrated that Russians are ‘spoiled for choice’ in their diet, as the Brits would say.

Meanwhile, Carlson’s filmed visit to the Moscow subway showed that Russian public services are world leaders and not decrepit, as the liars among our government leaders and captive press in the West would have us believe.

However, Carlson had neither the time, nor the background knowledge to pick up nuances that go beyond the presence of Snickers in food stores or the quality and price of fruit and vegetables on sale in Moscow. I intend to present a more balanced view of how Russia and Russians are faring now in this third year of the Ukraine war.

As it turns out, precisely the food supply and pricing is the most positive feature of everyday life. It has not only held steady but is visibly improving in ways that both average workaday Russians and the wives of better-paid corporate managers can see and feel. The government claims that, overall, 2023 was a year that saw real wages rise 5% across the country. Judging by what the supermarkets are stocking, there is every reason to believe that consumer spending is ticking up, not just on essentials but on extravagances that brighten daily lives.

As recently as a year ago, when I sought to prepare a festive meal to treat visiting friends, I had to travel to the Petersburg central district from my outlying borough of Pushkin, 15 km away. Today, there is absolutely no need to go further than several hundred meters from my apartment building on foot to pick up delicacies that exceed even the high expectations of your typical Russian guest.

New specialty stores have opened in my neighborhood, which is populated not only by corporate managers but also by folks of modest means, including a large contingent of military families. Pushkin is home to a number to Ministry of Defense institutes, always has been going back to tsarist times. It also is a training center for military personnel sent here by ‘friendly countries.’ And so I am not surprised to see several blacks in their home country uniforms doing shopping in my Economy supermarket.

Regarding the new retailers, I think in particular of “Caviar and Fish,” whose product offering I will mention in a minute. Then there is the local branch of a Belarus food products chain that offers very good hard cheeses and dairy products. And further afield, 2 km away in the ‘downtown’ of Pushkin, a branch of the Bouchet bakeries has opened, offering for sale very authentic jumbo croissants, fruit pies and cream-filled cakes of every variety.

Changes even have come to the long-existing Economy class supermarket across the road from my apartment, Verny, which now offers some high value yet affordably priced items that Russian consumers adore. The most exceptional of these is premium, tender smoked white fish from Lake Ladoga, vacuum packed in 200g portions. This maslyanaya ryba (literally ‘butter fish’) is a favorite of Petersburgers. For years, our friends traveled across the border to Finland to buy this and similar smoked fish delicacies. Let the Finns weep over their lost trade while they build their border wall now.

The ‘ Caviar and Fish’ shop opened at some time in the past 7 months when I was unable to visit Petersburg. It is also part of a retail chain in Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The product range is limited and focused on what you simply cannot find elsewhere, not here and certainly not in Belgium: fresh, unpasteurized red salmon (gorbusha or keta) caviar in plastic containers of 125 grams flown in from Kamchatka in the Russian Far East and priced from 7.50 to 9.50 per pack. Then there is an assortment of black caviar offerings from various members of the sturgeon family, ranging from the enormous Beluga native to the Caspian down to the trout-sized sterlet that used to abound in West European and British rivers once upon a time and was the fish of royalty. The black caviar comes in glass containers of as little as 50 grams and is of two very different types: fish-farmed or wild. The wild version is 40% more expensive than the farmed fish caviar, but the difference between the two is day and night.

 Except for plutocrats in the West, few of us venture to explore the difference. In Russia, even folks who watch their budgets will do the taste test to celebrate some memorable anniversary with the right kind of caviar.

In Belgium, in Israel, in France, in Italy, in Russia and surely in many other countries, during the winter holiday season shops and restaurants feature the locally raised sturgeon caviar for a touch of extravagance. Given the tiny amount in sampler glass containers, you do not feel the hefty price per kg and may splurge on what is, from my experience, close to tasteless. By contrast, real wild Beluga is sensual and rich in taste.

This new wild sturgeon caviar in “Caviar and Fish” will cost you between 35 and 50 euros for 50 grams, but you and the person you choose to treat will have no regrets. This takes you back in time to the heyday of Soviet Russia, when many things in public life may have been fairly awful but when the luxury dining pleasures available to select offspring of the proletariat and their foreign guests were extraordinary.

Of course, there are also down to earth gastronomic pleasures that everyone here can and does indulge, none more so than the seasonal little fish called koryushka that is caught on its way from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland to spawn in the period following the break-up of ice on the lake and river. Now is the time, and a plate full of freshly fried koryushka is a must for visitors to the city in the coming several weeks. At the market, these fish sell for about 7 euros per kg in the best size category.

                                                                        *****

Setting a lavish table for guests is a tradition deeply embedded in the culture here. But the other side of the coin is lavish gifts from guests to host.

In anticipation of reader comments that I am describing the way of life of the wealthy, I point out that our guests are from the intelligentsia stratum of society that never was nor is today well paid or well pensioned. One of our guests is a semi-retired journalist, editor of a publication of the Union of Journalists and part-time professor in a Moscow School of Continuing Education. Another guest is a retired engineer-designer of modules for civilian-purposed rockets, whose pension is above average only because he is a blokadnik, meaning a survivor of the Great Siege of Leningrad in WWII.

The lavish gifts to one’s host may take the form of the bottle of 15 year old fine Georgian brandy (konyak) that our Moscow friend brought us a couple of days ago. But it always takes the form of a bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house. And to ensure that no visitor comes empty handed even in our outlying borough, in our residential neighborhood there is a 24-hour florist just a 5 minute walk away from our house. Indeed, our guests brought roses to our home banquet.

Sanctions or no sanctions, the Dutch flower trade continues to function in Russia very well. Amsterdam is the source for most everything you see in shops. Since the price for flowers was always very high here, the additional costs of getting payments to the supplier while circumventing the SWIFT blockade are passed along to consumers without problems. I was delighted to pick up some very fresh tulips the other day, paying 10 euros for 8 flowers, which is a premium of just 20% above what I pay for the same in Brussels.

Prices above Western levels almost never apply to foodstuffs, which, as Tucker Carlson correctly pointed out, are generally several times (not percent, but times) below supermarket prices in Western Europe on an apples for apples basis.

However, let us not pretend that there are no negative sides to the sanctions for the Russian consumer. This comes into view when you redirect your attention to computers, smart phones, home electronics, white goods and similar. Suffice it to say here that most well known global (Western) brands have been sold off since the Special Military Operation began and have not been replaced. What you see instead, on the computer Notebook or Laptop shelves are what we would call ‘no-names’ or Brand X coming from China’s producers for their domestic market. And if you find an Asus or Acer, then, as I heard from the salesman in our local branch of a nationwide electronics chain, they cannot sell you Microsoft Office software. Why not? Probably this is due to orders from the manufacturer. This does not mean that you will not have Office on your computer, but you will be buying a pirated version and Microsoft may cause you many headaches when they detect it, as they surely will. I know from personal experience.

I say this as a ‘down payment’ on my next installment of travel notes.

                                                                              *****

Before closing, I wish to share with you our experience of what makes Russia, and in particular St Petersburg, the unique cultural center in the world that it is, and the decisive reason why I keep coming back year after year.

As I said above, many of our long time friends in the city are card carrying members of the Russian intelligentsia. That makes them interesting personalities by definition. Politically it makes them nearly all “Westernizers” or “Liberals” by definition. But in this essay, I put politics aside.

Our Tamara arranged for the six of us to visit a “concert” given by a well known performer and teacher of traditional Russian romances in a most extraordinary venue: the musical scores and instruments shop called Severnaya Lira (Northern Lyre) on Nevsky 26, just adjacent to the landmark pre-Revolutionary Singer Building dating from the start of the 20th century that has for decades served as Petersburg’s number one bookseller.

The Northern Lyre has been operating at this address from before I moved to Petersburg in 1994 to work and live. This is the store where we bought a slightly tired but still functional Krasny Oktyabr upright piano that we still keep in our apartment. It is where I bought all my scores for learning to play the cello straight through to the German edition of Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

The store used to be shabby. It remains shabby. But it is run by a team of young music enthusiasts who apparently stage there the kind of mini-concerts that we saw last night. They only have seats for an audience of ten and the several others who walked in during the concert were standees. There were no suits and ties, no cocktail dresses in this audience of middle aged folks who obviously have some connection or other to the store or to the soloist. There was one kid, a girl about aged 10 with her mother. In numbers, this concert was perfectly in line with the early 20th century salons where many of the songs were created and first performed. Of course, those salons were necessarily the property of the well-to-do.

Our soloist has a perfectly pitched voice. Not strong but very precise and agreeable to the ears. She was accompanied by a highly regarded and musically very accomplished pianist who is holder of a Russian Federation award. They presented romances drawn mostly from the repertoire of a celebrated Leningrad stage performer who died many, many years ago but is regarded as a very important popularizer of the genre and inspiration for composers of her age.

The store may have the subtitle Noty (Scores), but neither soloist nor accompanist had any scores. They could go on for hours relying solely on memory. That musical professionalism was always the hallmark of the Mariinsky Theater singers and other Petersburg orchestra members whom we got to know back in the 1990s.

The ”concert” was free of charge. Looking past her through the storefront windows we saw the stream of pedestrians on Nevsky Prospekt who were oblivious to this cultural event. Still further, across the boulevard stands the Kazansky Cathedral, a symbol of this city.

I cannot imagine a concert like this in any other city I know of and it makes Petersburg especially precious.

After the concert we walked our friends a few hundred meters up Nevsky Prospekt through the throngs of pedestrians who, on a pleasant, dry Saturday evening like yesterday come out from the entire city to this boulevard to see and be seen. So it was in the 1840s, so it is today.

We went to one of our favorite haunts in Petersburg for drinks, the ground floor bar of the Grand Hotel Europe (Gostinitsa Evropeiskaya). This was the favorite hotel of Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the place where he took a room immediately upon arrival from abroad. It is located just across from the Philharmonic hall (originally the club of Petersburg nobility) and from the so-called Square of the Arts on which the buildings of the Russian Museum and the Maly Opera Theater (originally the Italian Opera) are situated. The ensemble of these streets dates from the 1820s.

There are many 4 and 5 star hotels in Petersburg today, but there is only one Grand Hotel d’Europe. When we left the hotel to catch the taxi we ordered by phone, former Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi (2000-2004) arrived by taxi with his wife. Obviously for him as well, this hotel has warm memories.

Dmitri Kovalevich: SitRep on military, political and labour conditions in Ukraine

By Dmitri Kovalevich, Multiplural World, 5/19/24

(Dmitri Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English. He writes situation reports from there twice per month. This report appeared originally in Al Mayadeen English on May 18, 2024.)

In early May, the Ukrainian army continued to gradually retreat and lose territory in the former Ukraine oblast of Donetsk in the Donbass region. In some cases, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have fled the advancing Russian military, as happened during the recent capture of the town of Ocheretino in what is today the Donetsk People’s Republic of the Russian Federation. The town is located some 35 km north of Donetsk city.

Retreating Ukrainian troops are complaining of no prepared defense lines for them to fall back upon when they are forced to withdraw. This is a repeat of events during the losses of the city of Artyomovsk (called ‘Bakhmut’ in Ukraine) in 2023 and Avdeevka in Donetsk in 2024, both situated further north and east of Donetsk city. It turns out that many of the funds allocated for the construction of defense lines for Ukraine have been stolen or otherwise appropriated. But that is only one problem. The main problem is the fact there are too few construction brigades in Ukraine available to actually build any defensive lines.

“The reason why Russians are able to undertake quick and successful offensives such as at Ocheretino is simple; it is because of ongoing plunder of financial resources for the construction of defenses,” writes the Ukrainian telegram channel ‘First News, War’. Referring to the Western-armed-and-financed governing regime in Kiev, it writes, “Zelensky and Co. are doing everything possible to fill their pockets, up to the creation of one-day companies winning state tenders.” The Associated Press wrote in early May, citing Ukrainian military officials, that Ukraine’s allocation of $960 million for the construction of defensive structures is hampered by corruption.

In reality, instead of a complex network of tunnels and fortifications, a few holes have been dug in the ground. All the fortifications shown to Ukrainians on television in videos produced by the government do not exist. There is hardly a single, fully-fledged defensive barrier along Ukraine’s second line of defense in Donbass.

The Russian army is now coming up against the main defensive line of Ukraine, between the towns of Pokrovsk and Kurakhovo, some 40 km west of Donetsk. This line protects the entire eastern front of the AFU, as explained by the ‘PolitNavigator’ Telegram channel (which is based in Crimea). The reason this is happening, according to another report on PolitNavigator, citing Russian military correspondent Marat Khairullin, is because the Russian military-industrial complex has saturated the area with attack drones. “The drones are being delivered every month by the thousands, both from official military sources and from volunteers organized in companies of 12 or 15. This is how the work with these drones is organized now, for each brigade. There used to be a problem with drones, but now there are plenty of them and there are no problems at all,” Khairullin is cited.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has proven unable to produce large numbers of drones, according to Yuriy Butusov, a Ukrainian military expert and editor-in-chief of the anti-Russia Censor online publication. “Neither the financing nor the placing of orders for drones has been organized in time. As a result, we had only a paltry number of drones delivered in the past three months. The state delivered a little more than 20,000 FPV [first-person-view] drones in this time.” Also, according to him, even the arrival of Western military aid will not alter the situation on the battlefield.

The difference in approach between the two warring sides is also due to the fact that the war in Ukraine is very much a war against Russia incited and driven by the NATO countries. Whereas Russia is fighting with its own citizens and voters, the NATO countries are fighting using expendable Ukrainians who, moreover, do not elect the president of the United States nor the chancellor of Germany and therefore cannot call them to account.

It is impossible for Ukraine to conscript yet more men into its army while seeking to step up military production at the same time. Ukrainian MP Roman Kostenko explains on Telegram how Ukraine is conscripting workers and engineers away from military production enterprises. According to him, the phones of conscripts are taken from them and they are left to leave a message with family as they are spirited away for military training.

Russian Colonel Gennady Alekhin writes in Ukraine.ru that the only means of warfare at Kiev’s disposal these days are the work of military conscriptors and the human beings they seek out for forced military service. However, the humans available for military service are quickly running out; as a result, in Alekhin’s opinion, a military-political situation is emerging in which Ukrainians will begin fighting among themselves within their own country for survival. “Today, the survival of each person being conscripted depends on one thing – whether he can jump off the train taking him to join a group of poorly-trained fighters on the front lines. Knowledge of this uncomfortable fact is becoming universal in Ukraine, and this is even more palpable than the fear of Russia’s goals of denazification and demilitarization of the country.”

Without human rights in a land of ‘democracy’

In May, amendments to the Labor Code of Ukraine come into force giving to employers the right to fire those workers who may have relatives or friends in Russia, especially in what the Ukraine regime calls “occupied territories”. These are the territories such as Crimea and Donbass which rejected the legitimacy of the government born of the coup in Kiev in February 2014 and which have voted to join the Russian Federation as constituent republics. Bill 7731, also called the ‘collaboration law’, was submitted back in 2022 by a group of people’s deputies from Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ political/electoral machine. The main initiator of the bill was Galina Tretiakova, who in 2020 complained that too many children of ‘very low quality’ were being born in Ukraine to families in need of financial assistance and were thus increasing Ukraine’s already excessive social welfare burden.

Pravda.co.ua reported on April 29, “In a letter dated April 4, 2024, which was not reported until recently, Ukraine informed Strasbourg [the European Parliament] that in the future, the obligations of the Ukrainian government to comply with Article 8 (respect of private and family life), Article 10 (freedom of speech), and Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as well as Article 2 of Protocol 4 of the Convention [right to free movement of people].”

Such changes are a gross violation of basic human rights as they introduce criminal liability based on the fact of blood relationship, not on acts committed. The Ukrainian authorities are now actively seeking channels and tools to influence Russian citizens, including for the commission of terrorist acts. They seek out relatives of Ukrainian citizens for this purpose, and this is why the amendment to the Labor Code was introduced.

At the end of April, it also became known that Ukraine has submitted a written statement to the Council of Europe announcing a partial and self-declared exemption from the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms. The statement said that during martial law, human rights provided for by a number of articles of the Ukrainian constitution may be restricted. This includes the right to free elections, inviolability of the home, secrecy of correspondence and telephone conversations, the right to freedom of speech and freedom of movement, education, entrepreneurial activity, and labor. In practice, all these freedoms have been restricted in Ukraine since the 2014 coup, but they are now being officially abandoned. Nevertheless, the Western media still refers to Ukraine as a ‘democracy’ that is ‘fighting for democracy’ against ‘authoritarian Russia’.

In May in the Odessa region, for example, a lawyer was forcibly removed by police from a client’s home as the police were conducting a search of the home. When the lawyer arrived at the house, the police informed him that he should urgently go to the local military enlistment center, but he declined to do so, asking for proper notification for such a request. Minutes later, 15 armed and masked men arrived in a minibus, rounded up the lawyer, and took him away by force.

Videos of forced abductions of civilians by military conscriptors are spreading across Ukraine every day. In response, the government introduced criminal liability in May for those videotaping the work of military recruiters. The penalties are up to eight years in prison.

In early May, a resident of Odessa received the same prison term of eight years, in that case for posting symbols on a social network of the former Soviet Union and Soviet Ukraine, namely, images of a hammer and sickle and a red star.

Zelensky wanted

In early May, the Russian Federation officially declared Vladimir Zelenskyy to be wanted by the Russian criminal system as of May 20, along with a number of other Ukrainian politicians who came to power during the ‘Maidan coup’ of February 2014. The date May 20 marks the end of Zelensky’s five-year election term as president. But the U.S. and the large countries of Western Europe (all members of NATO) want Zelensky to remain in his post for the time being because their war-financing schemes are tied to him, according to explanations by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

These words are ironically interpreted by Ukrainian political scientist and former ombudsman representative Mykhailo Chaplyga, writing on Telegram. He writes, “Aha, so it seems our presidents are to be chosen by MI6  [Britain’s secret police service], all very ‘sovereign’ decision-making, to be sure.”

Ukrainian political scientist Anton Gura wrote on Telegram on April 29, “The deadline for our president is May 20. Beyond that, he becomes a target for the Russian legal system.” To date, when Zelensky has appeared near the front lines, Russian troops have temporarily stopped firing while drones were only used to film him.

The legitimacy of any political power is determined by its ability to hold onto its power. Today, Zelensky, with the help of Ukraine’s security service (political police), is actively purging the leadership of law enforcement agencies as well as bloggers who dare to question his legitimacy.

In early May, the Security Service of Ukraine announced that it had uncovered a plot to eliminate Zelensky, which allegedly involved two colonels of the State Protection Directorate of Ukraine, the service that guards the president. But Zelensky routinely speaks to Western media of various schemes to assassinate him, and what’s more, he uses different numbers. In November 2023, he said there had been five or six assassination attempts against him since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. By January 2023, his claim had risen to 12 assassination attempts against him organized by Russian troops.

The claims of assassination attempts are no doubt an effort to arouse the sympathy of Western audiences for Zelensky, portraying him as a victim of Russian aggression and seeking to draw attention away from the large, global events unfavorable to Western interests that are occurring in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere.

The fact that the Russian Federation will not recognize Zelensky’s legitimacy after May 20 means that the Russian Federation will have no one with whom to sign a peace treaty. This was noted in April by the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. “Today, we could sign an agreement with him [Zelensky], some kind of agreement, let’s say. But then someone else would replace him in power and decide he or she doesn’t like the agreement. They know how to do this in Ukraine–just look at the Minsk agreements [of September 2014 and February 2015]. A new president will say that whatever agreement was signed, it was signed by an illegitimate president and is therefore not recognized.”

If Ukraine does not recognize the legitimacy of an agreement signed by its head of state, then any agreement signed by that person with the Russian Federation can be subsequently challenged. Thus, any rejection by Ukraine of a constitutional limit of Zelensky’s term would become another step to perpetuate NATO’s proxy war against the Russian Federation and its allies.

Related reading:

Ukraine’s divisive mobilization law comes into force as a new Russian push strains front-line troops, report by Associated Press, May 19, 2024

Fred Weir: Russia tried to stay on good terms with Iran and Israel. Then they started fighting.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 4/24/24

For a long time, the Kremlin has done a diplomatic dance in the Middle East to maintain equally good relations with all the major players. And for more than a decade, it had succeeded beyond expectations, keeping workable, if not warm, terms with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran simultaneously.

But that was before Israel and Iran threatened open hostilities against each other. Now, amid tensions in the Middle East – somewhat eased since an Israeli strike in Iran over the weekend – Moscow’s long-standing outreach to Tel Aviv may become a casualty.

Despite strong personal ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has fallen back on its traditional friends in the West for support amid the deepening crisis. Meanwhile, Russia has moved into an even tighter embrace with Iran, which it relies on for weapons to fight the war in Ukraine, growing trade and economic cooperation, and vital assistance in evading Western sanctions – apparently including a fleet of “ghost tankers” to move Russian oil to world markets.

And if the situation between Iran and Israel does spiral, it could become a major problem for Russia.

“Relations with Israel have deteriorated, though both sides retain contact,” says Vladimir Sotnikov, an expert with the IMEMO Center for International Security in Moscow. Ideally, he says, “Russia wants to maintain ties with Israel, while strengthening its strategic partnership with Tehran. A war between Israel and Iran would not be beneficial to Moscow. But Russia’s ability to influence events is quite limited. … If it were to be drawn into such a conflict, it would divert significant resources from its operations in Ukraine.”

The big exception

After Israel attacked Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, killing several top Iranian officials, Moscow issued a stern condemnation. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, called it a “flagrant violation” of international law and alleged that “such aggressive actions by Israel are designed to further fuel the conflict. They are absolutely unacceptable and must stop.”

But following a retaliatory Iranian attack, involving 300 missiles and drones fired at Israel, Moscow only called upon the two sides to exercise greater restraint. In a subsequent telephone conversation with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Mr. Putin emphasized improving relations between the two countries, and both leaders agreed on the need to avoid a new round of confrontations.

“Russia still wants to keep a balance, and has no interest in seeing a big conflict in the Middle East, but Israel has become the big exception” to traditional efforts to stay on good terms with everyone, says Dmitry Suslov, an international affairs expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

He says that Israel disappointed Moscow by condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though it declined to supply lethal weapons to Kyiv. But basic channels of communication, and even cooperation in Syria, remained until the present. “Russia still does not shoot down Israeli planes and missiles over Syrian territory, although it could,” says Mr. Suslov.

Meanwhile, Russia has supplied some advanced weaponry to Iran, including S-300 air defense systems. Unconfirmed reports suggest that it’s ready to greatly upgrade Iran’s military capabilities with advanced Su-35 fighter planes, S-400 anti-aircraft systems, submarines, and more. Russia has not yet begun major deliveries of modern weapons to Iran, which experts variously ascribed to the demands of the Ukraine war on Russian military industry and Iran’s failure to make payment.

Trade between Russia and Iran has expanded rapidly in the past few years, in a wide range of goods beyond energy cooperation and weaponry. One big item is Russia’s investment of almost $700 million in an Iranian railway that will complete the last section of the North-South Corridor, a long-discussed and much-delayed transport route that would connect Iranian ports on the Indian Ocean with Russia’s vast railway network. The completed line would help defeat efforts to sanction Russia and could potentially rival the Suez Canal as a trade route.

“The company Russia wants to be part of”

That said, some Russian analysts don’t deny that the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East has benefited Russian diplomacy and relieved international pressure on Moscow over its war in Ukraine.

“While Russia is not in favor of an Israeli-Iran war, it probably is interested in the continuation of managed tensions,” says Mr. Suslov. “It distracts from Ukraine and forces the U.S. to divert resources to Israel.”

It also dovetails with Russia’s growing investment in alternative international forums that represent mainly countries of the Global South, such as the BRICS group (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), where condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza is nearly universal and Western attempts to drum up support for Ukraine have largely gone unheeded.

“It’s vital that Iran has joined BRICS along with several other countries of the global majority,” says Mr. Suslov. “This is the company Russia wants to be part of. It’s existential for us, and for the future world order we hope is being formed.”

A wider geopolitical realignment has been underway for some time, in which Russia, in concert with China, is seeking to build alternative economic and political alliances to replace the existing Western-led ones.

It helps to have common enemies, says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “Russia and Iran had lots of differences in the past,” he says, “but in the situation where they both find themselves in opposition to the U.S. and its world order, they are drawn together out of common interest.”

Moss Robeson: Top Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ arrested for assault on Grayzone contributor

By Moss Robeson, The Grayzone, 4/25/24

Marko Suprun, an influential NATO state-funded Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ with close ties to Nazi activists, was taken into police custody in Washington, DC, after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone at an event hosted by a neocon Beltway think tank. 

The Ukrainian-Canadian host of a self-styled ‘anti-disinformation’ outfit — which receives thousands of dollars from the US and UK governments and works with Facebook to censor content — was arrested on Capitol Hill last week after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone.

On April 16, Marko Suprun, who presents an English-language show for the group StopFake.org, and whose wife has served as Ukraine’s acting Minister of Health, was charged with simple assault after strangling, shoving, and stomping on Grayzone contributor Moss Robeson. The incident occurred during an anti-Russia event hosted by the neoconservative Jamestown Foundation, entitled “Russia’s Rupture and Western Policy.” Robeson was fully credentialed and authorized by organizers to participate in the discussion.

“This is the guy! This is the guy!” Suprun reportedly shouted, while forcing Robeson into the hallway, choking him with both hands, and pushing him to the ground, leaving his glasses broken.

Footage of the event streamed online shows that immediately after the assault, one of the organizers took to the stage to denounce the US-born Robeson as a “Russian troll” and claimed that The Grayzone’s contributor deliberately incited the physical attack against him, before admonishing attendees to behave themselves:

“Today we had a troll called Moss Robeson who provoked one of our participants and managed to get him in trouble. So I’m warning everyone, be careful. Don’t get into any arguments with anyone. Just walk away.”

Mr. Stopfake and ‘Dr. Death’ honor Bandera and court Nazis

Suprun’s organization, StopFake, publicly presents itself as a humble Kiev-based “nongovernmental organization” focused on fact-checking. Its stated goals include implementing “high standards of journalism education in Ukraine, raising the “level of media literacy,” and informing the public about “the danger of propaganda and dissemination of fake information in the media.” The group insists that it receives no government funds, stating flatly on its “About Us” page: “Stopfake.org is not supported financially or otherwise by any official Ukrainian organization or government agency.”

But the group’s claim of editorial independence is immediately contradicted by its own website, which admits just four sentences later that StopFake is “also supported by… the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic, [and] the Embassy of [the] United Kingdom.”

In fact, StopFake has received extensive funding from not only the British government but also the US-based National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout that’s largely funded by Congress and the State Department.

StopFake was founded in 2014, but as a 2017 Politico report explained, “it was only after [the 2016] presidential election in the U.S. — when Russian fake news and cyberattacks were blamed for swaying the election in Donald Trump’s favor — that the site burst onto the global stage.”

“Almost overnight, the founders of StopFake went from provincial do-gooders to international media stars,” Politico marveled, while praising the group as “the ‘grand wizards’ of the fake-news-busting world.”

With lavish funding from Western governments and regular citations in legacy media outlets, Suprun has exploited his position in the “fake-news-busting world” to whitewash notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a heroic resistance fighter who simply “refused to cooperate” with the Germans. His fascist-friendly tendencies do not stop there.

Not long after the Politico article was published, Suprun appeared at a nationalist summer camp in Ukraine alongside a pair of prominent neo-Nazi band leaders, Andriy Sereda and Arseniy Bilodub, who affectionately referred to Suprun as one of their ‘blood brothers’ — a term of endearment reportedly bestowed only on those who’ve completed a pagan-style ceremony which involves bloodletting. In addition to serving as the frontman for white supremacist band Perun’s Ax, Bilodub is also a leader of the infamous Right Sector movement and has been described as “the spiritual leader of the Ukrainian far right.”

Among the attendees of the Jamestown Foundation event, Suprun was hardly alone in maintaining such relationships. Other speakers from Ukraine included the odious Russian “opposition leader” Ilya Ponomarev, a political figurehead of the Nazi-infested Russian units in the International Legion, which reports to Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Ponomarev is also the spokesman of the dubious “National Republican Army” in Russia, on whose behalf he previously attempted to claim responsibility for Ukraine’s assassinations inside Russia.

After StopFake partnered with Facebook in 2020 to create a fact-checking service for the popular social media platform in Ukraine, it seemed that such associations might come back to haunt Suprun and his employer. In an effort to address the controversy, Suprun published a lengthy defense of his behavior which culminated with a bizarre admission:

“Have I had people with swastika tattoos in my office? I don’t examine people’s bodies as a rule, but yes. Does that make me a neo-Nazi? No,” he insisted. 

Marko Suprun’s far-right connections in Ukraine are, in fact, extensive and well-documented, but they appear to pale in comparison to those of his wife, Ulana Suprun. Long before her 2016 appointment as Ukraine’s acting Minister of Health, where her lethal push for privatization earned her the nickname “Dr. Death,” Suprun has maintained close relations with a number of violent neo-Nazi organizations, including C14, which has been credited with carrying out a wave of brutal anti-Roma pogroms.

According to Ukrainian journalist Olekisy Kuzmenko, “Suprun’s contacts with C14 go back years.” What could have been a major scandal for Facebook got swept under the rug, and StopFake, which remains one of its fact-checking partners, only doubled down on its defense of C14.

Ulana Suprun has been described as one of the main patrons of the far-right activist Serhii Sternenko, 29, who led the Right Sector’s massacre of “anti-Maidan” protesters in Odessa in May 2014 and ultimately helped to ignite the civil war in eastern Ukraine. In March 2020, after StopFake officially partnered with Facebook, Suprun declared the “Russian world” to be “a threat that’s scarier than coronavirus,” and went on to hail Sternenko, who once stabbed a man to death, as “an example of that [new] generation of Ukrainians who can put everything in its place.” In the coming months, Suprun hired Sternenko’s girlfriend as her press secretary.

Suprun helps lead secret fascist network behind cover of Ukrainian American community

At the Jamestown Foundation’s April 16 event in Washington DC, Moss Robeson attempted to question Suprun approximately an hour before the assault. “Can I interest you in some OUN documents?” The Grayzone contributor asked Marko Suprun, who stonewalled. 

As an independent researcher, Robeson has spent years studying the present-day activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the infamous group of Nazi collaborators who oversaw the elimination of over 100,000 Poles and Jews in German-occupied Ukraine.

Evidence has emerged that the Supruns are sworn members of the contemporary OUN-B, the more radical ‘Banderite’ faction of the OUN which was personally founded by the genocidal fascist Stepan Bandera.

For decades, legacy media outlets have ignored the OUN-B’s continued existence in Ukraine and the diaspora, assuming the group to be irrelevant and defunct. That was certainly the impression relayed by the Jamestown Foundation forum’s alleged expert on “Russia’s rupture,” Janusz Bugajski, who visited the OUN-B headquarters in Ukraine in early 2024, but who privately insisted that the OUN-B no longer exists.

However, firsthand testimony and deep documentation reviewed by The Grayzone indicates that the group has been secretly maintained by its founders’ descendants, and continues to operate in the shadows behind a web of seemingly legitimate Ukrainian lobbying and communal organizations. The Supruns operate at the heart of this secret fascist network.

According to Ulana herself, she met her future husband, Marko Suprun, at a Banderite ideological camp in Ellenville, New York that consisted of “political workshops” with OUN-B leaders. The event was organized by the Ukrainian Student Organization of Mikhnovsky (TUSM), a Cold War-era international youth group affiliated with OUN-B and named for a pioneering ultranationalist who famously dreamed of an ethnically pure Greater Ukraine “from the Carpathians to the Caucasus.” Many contemporary leaders of the surviving OUN-B network in the Ukrainian diaspora cut their teeth in this organization, which kept the flame of Banderite fascism burning long after it was extinguished in Ukraine under Soviet authorities. 

In 1984, the TUSM elected as its vice president 21-year-old Ulana Jurkiw, just one year after she led a sit-in at the Dachau concentration camp museum to protest its supposed anti-Ukrainian bias. In 1981, Jurkiw participated in a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Banderites’ “restoration of Ukrainian statehood” in Nazi-occupied western Ukraine alongside the former Prime Minister of its short-lived Nazi client state, OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko — who famously endorsed “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.”

After Bandera’s former deputy Yaroslav Stetsko died in 1986, the local OUN-B leader in Jurkiw’s hometown of Detroit became the chairman of Stetsko’s government in exile, which only existed on paper.

Five years later, Ulana Jurkiw married Marko Suprun. They moved to New York City, where they became active in a pair of OUN-B “facade structures” established at the dawn of the Cold War — the Ukrainian Youth Association (CYM) and Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU). By the mid-2000s, Marko Suprun joined the board of directors of ODFFU, Inc., which owns the “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Manhattan — the OUN-B’s headquarters in the US.

In December 2013, when anti-Russian ‘Euromaidan’ protests began to gather steam, the Supruns relocated to Kiev, apparently viewing the deadly political crisis as a major opportunity. By February 2014, Marko Suprun was hard at work assisting far-right leader Oleh Tyahnybok as a translator. Just over a year earlier, the New York Times observed that Tyahnybok infamously “used slurs to refer to the ‘Jewish-Russian mafia, which rules in Ukraine,’” and reported that “some of his [Svoboda] party’s members are unabashed neo-Nazis.”

The Supruns were largely catapulted into the spotlight by their “Patriot Defense” initiative, which sent first aid kits to volunteer battalions in Ukraine, including extremist groups like Right Sector and Azov. “Patriot Defense” originated in the Manhattan branch of ODFFU, and rented an office in the Ukrainian headquarters of OUN-B. In the meantime, the Banderite-led Ukrainian World Congress adopted Patriot Defense and hired Ulana Suprun as its Director of Humanitarian Initiatives. 

In 2016, the Supruns’ status as a diaspora-bred Ukrainian power couple was cemented when Ulana became the acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine, and Marko joined StopFake. Already millionaires, they lived in a Kiev apartment that belonged to a treasurer of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF) — another “facade structure” which owns 40% of the Banderite headquarters in Ukraine’s capital, according to an OUN-B financial report. Their landlord’s first husband, Oleh Vitovych (1967-2011), was an early leader of yet another far-right organization in Ukraine.

In 2019, when UAFF leaders engineered a coup d’etat in ODFFU for the OUN-B to retain full control of its building in Manhattan, an anonymous whistleblower submitted a sensational complaint to the New York State Attorney General’s office, entitled “UAFF Inc  -  Large Scare Fraudulent Financial Activities  -  Fascist Organization  -  Underground Paramilitary Training Activities  -  Grand Scale Fraud.” The report described Marko Suprun as “a very active [OUN-B] member.”

The small entourage of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian-American leaders participating in the Jamestown Foundation’s April 2024 forum included UAFF president Walter Zaryckyj, an influential OUN-B figure affiliated with the TUSM, who arrived at the event alongside the Supruns. During a previous visit to the OUN-B’s Manhattan headquarters, Zaryckyj warned Robeson about the looming presence of “someone out in Washington who’s gonna blow you [up] and [The Grayzone editor] Max Blumenthal and that whole fucking circle of dipshits working with the Russians.”

Marko Suprun and his aforementioned landlord have served on the board of Zaryckyj’s Center for US-Ukrainian Relations. The Center is yet another important OUN-B front, which was established in 2000 by the “informational arm” of the UAFF — in other words, the US branch of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Central Information Service, which shared its international headquarters with a private Stepan Bandera museum in London.

But the Supruns’ extensive links to Ukrainian fascist movements don’t end there. 

In 2012-13, the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations established a Washington bureau in the headquarters of the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), with financial support from Ulana Suprun’s father, George Jurkiw. An official Ukrainian Catholic University Foundation profile describes Jurkiw as “a defense contractor that helped produce valuable technology and fire suppression equipment for the A-1 Abrams tank.”

ODFFU president Mykola Hryckowian, another veteran of the now-defunct TUSM youth camps, currently heads up the Banderite bureau in the AFPC. Robeson reports that, prior to the assault by Suprun, Hryckowian subjected him to profanity-laced tirades before complaining to forum organizers about alleged “harassment” by Robeson.

American Banderite leader Walter Zaryckyj openly refers to Herman Pirchner, the president of the AFPC, as “one of [his] best friends.” The Grayzone exposed Pirchner in 2020 as an inner-circle member of the “Christian Right’s secretive and powerful Council for National Policy.”

In 2018, after Max Blumenthal questioned the AFPC’s judgment for hosting a meeting with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy in the Senate, Pirchner responded with a bizarre non-sequitur in defense of the long-dead Nazi collaborator  Bandera, whose OUN-B organization actually helped arrange Parubiy’s trip to Washington.

When another gadfly, Moss Robeson, challenged OUN-B activist Marko Suprun six years later in Washington, Suprun decided to take matters into his own hands, strangling the “Bandera Lobby Blogger” and winding himself up in a DC jail. 

But as with his apparent affection for Nazis, this rare moment of accountability was unlikely to interfere with Suprun’s lavish Western funding. As the Ukraine proxy war slogs ahead, propagandists like him remain too useful for Washington to discard.

RAY McGOVERN: Russia & China — Two Against One

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, 5/17/24

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s extremely warm reception of President Vladimir Putin yesterday in Beijing sealed the increasingly formidable Russia-China strategic relationship. It amounts to a tectonic shift in the world balance of power. 

The Russia-China entente also sounds the death knell for attempts by U.S. foreign policy neophytes to drive a wedge between the two countries. The triangular relationship has become two-against-one, with serious implications, particularly for the war in Ukraine. If U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy geniuses remain in denial, escalation is almost certain.

In a pre-visit interview with Xinhua, Putin noted the “unprecedented level of strategic partnership between our countries.” He and Xi have met more than 40 times in person or virtually. In June 2018, Xi described Putin as “an old friend of the Chinese people” and, personally, his “best friend.”

For his part, Putin noted Thursday that he and Xi are “in constant contact to keep personal control over all pressing issues on the Russian-Chinese and international agenda.” Putin brought along Defense Minister Andrey Belousov as well as veterans like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and key business leaders.

Joint Statements Matter

Putin and Xi in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2022. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Xi and Putin signed a strong joint statement Thursday, similar to the extraordinary one the two issued on Feb. 4, 2022, in Beijing. It portrayed their relationship as “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation …”

The full import of that statement did not hit home until Putin launched the Special Military Operation into the Donbass three weeks later. China’s muted reaction shocked most analysts, who had dismissed the possibility that Xi would give “best friend” Putin, in effect, a waiver on China’s bedrock policy of non-interference abroad.

In the following weeks, official Chinese statements made clear that the principles of Westphalia had taken a back seat to “the need for every country to defend its core interests” and to judge each situation “on its own merits.”

Nuclear War

Thursday’s statement expressed concern over “increased strategic risks between nuclear powers” — referring to continued escalation of the war between NATO-supported Ukraine and Russia. It condemns “the expansion of military alliances and creation of military bridgeheads close to the borders of other nuclear powers, particularly with the advanced deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, as well as other items.”

Putin has undoubtedly briefed Xi on the U.S. missile sites already in Romania and Poland that can launch what Russians call “offensive strike missiles” with flight time to Moscow of less than 10 minutes. Putin surely has told Xi about the inconsistencies in U.S. statements regarding intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

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For example, Xi is aware — just as surely as consumers of Western media are unaware — that during a Dec. 30, 2021, telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

There was rejoicing in the Kremlin that New Years’ Eve, since Biden’s assurance was the first sign that Washington might acknowledge Russia’s security concerns. Indeed, Biden addressed a key issue in at least five of the eight articles of the Russian draft treaty given to the U.S. on Dec. 17, 2021. Russian rejoicing, however, was short-lived.

Foreign Minister Lavrov revealed last month that when he met Antony Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. secretary of state pretended he’d not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on Dec. 30, 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and only that the U.S. might be willing to limit their number, Lavrov said.

The Mother of All Miscalculations

Biden and Putin meeting at the at the Villa La Grange in Geneva, June 16, 2021, flanked by Blinken on left, Lavrov on right. (White House/ Adam Schultz)

When Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China and drive a wedge between them. This became embarrassingly clear when Biden indicated what he had told Putin during their Geneva summit on June 16, 2021.

That meeting gave Putin confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.

Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China:

“Without quoting him [Putin] — which I don’t think is appropriate — let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.”

The ‘Squeeze’

Putin in video conference with Xi on Dec. 15, 2021. (Kremlin)

At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane, but failed to stop him from sharing more wisdom on China:

“Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”

After these remarks Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” on Russia: it was not a squeeze, but a fraternal embrace. This mutual effort culminated in a Xi-Putin virtual summit on Dec. 15 of that year. 

The video of the first minute of their conversation was picked up by The New York Times, as well as others. Still, most commentators seemed to miss its significance:

Putin:

“Dear friend, dear President Xi Jinping.

Next February I expect we can finally meet in person in Beijing as we agreed. We will hold talks and then participate in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. I am grateful for your invitation to attend this landmark event.”

Xi:

“Dear President Putin, my old friend. It’s my pleasure to meet you at the end of this year by video, the second time this year, our 37th meeting since 2013. You have hailed … China-Russia relations as a model in international collaboration in the 21st Century, strongly supporting China’s position on safeguarding its core interests, and firmly opposed to attempts to drive a wedge between our two countries. I highly appreciate it.”

Is Biden still unaware of this? Have his advisers told him that Russia and China have never been closer, with what amounts to a virtual military alliance?

The Election

Putin has said he is aware that Washington’s policy toward Russia “is primarily impacted by domestic political processes.” Russia and China certainly assess that Biden’s policy on Ukraine will be influenced by the political imperative to be seen as facing Russia down.

If NATO country hotheads send “trainers” to Ukraine, the prospect of a military dust-up is ever present. What Biden needs to know is that, if it comes to open hostilities between Russia and the West, he is likely to face more than just saber rattling in the South China Sea — and the specter of a two-front war.

The Chinese know they are next in line for the ministrations of NATO/East. Indeed, it is no secret that the Pentagon sees China as enemy No. 1. According to the DOD’s National Defense Strategy, “defense priorities are first, defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

The Pentagon will be the last to sing a requiem for the dearly departed unipolar world. May sanity prevail.

Ray McGovern’s first portfolio as a C.I.A. analyst was Sino-Soviet relations. In 1963, their total trade was $220 MILLION; in 2023, $227 BILLION. Do the math.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News .

Andrew Korybko: A Former Ukrainian MP Blew The Whistle On Burisma’s Connections To Terrorism

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 5/16/24

Former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach, who’s reviled by the Biden Administration for sharing dirt about Hunter Biden’s Burisma corruption scandal with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani ahead of the 2020 elections, just gave a very important interview to Belarus’ BelTA where be blew the whistle even louder. According to him, the $6 million bribe that was paid in cash to shut down the investigation into the First Son’s scandal eventually found its way to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and its military-intelligence agency.

Derkach claimed to have proof of the secret court order that divided these funds between those two, with the first investing its portion into building up their country’s drone army while the second financed terrorist attacks like the assassination of Darya Dugina, which he specifically mentioned in the interview. These allegations expand upon the ones that he shared earlier this year regarding the real-world impact of Hunter’s corruption scandal, which were analyzed here at the time.

On the subject of Ukrainian assassinations and terrorism, Derkach said that the CIA and FBI actually condone these actions despite their public claims to the contrary, but he warned that this immoral policy will inevitably ricochet into the US itself. In particular, he cited FBI chief Christopher Wray’s testimony to Congress last April where he said that law enforcement officials fear that Crocus-like attacks are presently being plotted against their country.

About that, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Ukraine’s military-intelligence service GUR is the chief suspect of Russia’s investigation into what became one of the worst terrorist attacks in its history, thus meaning that the portion of Burisma’s $6 million bribe that made its way into their hands likely financed part of it. In other words, the third-order effect of Hunter’s corruption scandal is that it was partially responsible for the brutal murder of innocent civilians halfway across the world some years later.

That’s already scandalous enough, but Derkach shared even more details about the other indirect consequences of this cover-up into the First Son’s illicit activities, adding that some GUR-linked figures have been connected to the Western narrative about September 2022’s Nord Stream terrorist attack. He regards that story as a distraction from the US’ complicity, the view of which was elaborated upon here at the time that it entered the discourse, but lauded the CIA for the lengths it went to cover up its role.

In his view, the CIA might very well have sent a highly trained Ukrainian diving team to the Baltic Sea exactly as the Western media reported, though only to plant fake bombs. In his words, “when a cover story is made, it is done quite well. We shouldn’t belittle the experience of the CIA or the experience of MI6 in preparing cover operations. They have quite a lot of experience in using proxies, in using cover stories to form a certain position in order to dodge responsibility. This is actually what happened.”

Looking forward, Derkach expects Ukraine to attempt more terrorist attacks against Russia, which the US public is being preconditioned to accept via the CIA’s various leaks to the media. While many might lay the blame for all this on Zelensky’s lap, Derkach believes that it’s actually his Chief of Staff Andrey Yermak who’s running the show, albeit as a Western puppet. Nevertheless, he’s also convinced that the West is indeed preparing to formally replace Zelensky, but doesn’t yet know when or with whom.

Altogether, the importance of Derkach’s interview is that he’s a former veteran Ukrainian politician who still retains a lot of sources inside the regime, having served in the Rada for a whopping 22 years from 1998-2020. While his homeland charged him with treason after he fled to Russia in early 2022, which followed the US charging him with election meddling on behalf of that country in September 2020, the argument can be made that these are politically driven attempts to intimidate a top whistleblower.

The dirt that Derkach shared about Hunter’s Burisma corruption scandal, not to mention its newly revealed third-order effects that led to the brutal killing of civilians halfway across the world after part of his company’s bribe made its way into GUR’s hands, made him an enemy of the US Government. They and their Ukrainian proxies will therefore always try to discredit him with sensational allegations, but everyone would do well to listen to what he says and then make up their own minds about it.

Prof. Paul Robinson: Perceptions of Alexander III in Modern Russia

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Website, 4/24/24

I was out of the country for a bit, attending the annual conference of the British Association of Slavic and East European Studies (BASEES), after which I was mysteriously locked out of WordPress for a while. However, I am now back in, and thought it would be good to post here my BASEES conference paper, as it is unlikely to be published anywhere else. So here it is. – Paul Robinson

Perceptions of Alexander III in Modern Russia

Presentation to BASEES Conference, April 2024

It is probably fair to say that Emperor Alexander III of Russia does not have a very good reputation in the English speaking world. In Russia, though, the emperor has been rehabilitated in the post-Soviet era. In November 2017, for instance, Russian president Vladimir Putin unveiled a statue of Alexander III in Crimea, commenting that “The reign of Alexander III was called the age of national revival, a true uplift of Russian art, painting, literature, music, education and science, the time of returning to our roots and historical heritage.”

= Monument to the Peacemaker Tsar Alexander III =

In December 2023, Putin then attended the launch of the Russian navy’s latest ballistic missile submarine, the Emperor Alexander III. Alexander is in official favour.

 For this paper, I have decided to look at how historians have represented Alexander in the past 20 or so years. Alexander hasn’t received much attention from English-speaking historians – there is in fact not a single English language biography of Alexander other than one published in the year of his death in 1894 and a privately published one that isn’t available in any library anywhere. In Russia, by contrast, a huge number of works related to Alexander have been produced in recent years. The earliest one I have examined for the purpose of this talk is a biography by Alexander Bokhanov. This was originally published in 1998, but the copy I have is a sixth edition, published in 2019, indicating that there is still a lot of interest in this book.

Next are a couple of biographies by Olga Barkovets and Alexander Krylov-Tolstikovich, the first of which was produced in 2001 and the second in 2007, the latter being a slightly bigger version of the former.

Then there are further biographies by Alexander Miasnikov and I. E. Dronov from 2016, S. V. Ilyin from 2019, Nina Boiko from 2022, and V. A. Grechukhin from 2023. That’s eight biographies in about 25 years, and five in just the last 10 years. On top of that, there are a bunch of other books, for instance Tocheny and Tochenaia’s Russian Autocrats: Alexander III, Lenin, Stalin, and there are also a number of source books which publish documents about Alexander dating from his life. These include the 900 page long collection Alexander III: Pro et Contra and several volumes of correspondence between Alexander and Prince V. P. Meshchersky.

So what do these books tell us?

The first thing to note that is that for the most part, the authors of these books do not engage much with other scholarly literature, and references to English language are notable for their almost total absence. In so far as Russian historians do address previous literature it is largely to critique it for having either a communist or a liberal bias and for being too negative. The person who has the most to say on this topic is Bokhanov, who writes that ‘Russian historiography has canonized biased assessments, in which for almost a hundred years the Westernist worldview has been dominant. In accordance with this worldview, Russia is a realm of darkness, ignorance, barbarism, and “Asiaticism,” and if there was anything bright and advanced in Russia, it was only due to the influence of the “progressive West.”’ Bokhanov complains that “Liberal dogmatic terror is merciless and uncompromising. Anyone who looks at the Russian World, at Russia without contempt, who respects the history of his Native Home, the deeds of his ancestors, and who does not consider Russia’s past to be the history of a “dark kingdom,” is immediately qualified as a “monarchist” and a “reactionary.” The “Russian Europeans” forgave (and still forgive) Peter the Great everything: unthinkable debauchery, the murder of his own son, unbelievable cruelty, insane military adventures, robbery and extermination of his own people … They always praised him for “cutting a window to Europe.” Alexander III, however, was not forgiven or forgotten precisely because he was anti-Western. For his liberal slanderers, this “original sin” was enough.  … The Russian Monarch was portrayed as narrow-minded, if not just plain stupid.”

While most of Alexander’s other biographers don’t say this quite so openly, they pretty much share this attitude and adopt an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward him, both on a personal and a political level. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that the personal tends to dominate over the political in these biographies. Most spend at least half their time discussing Alexander’s life prior to becoming emperor, and even when describing his time as ruler tend not to devote a lot of attention to his role in what one might call policy issues. As a result, in most cases one learns a lot about Alexander, his upbringing, habits, and family, but not always very much about his impact on major political decisions. And generally, they paint quite a positive picture of Alexander as a person, showing him as a hard working, dedicated, modest family man, who eschewed the extravagance and scandal of other Romanovs. Thus Barkovets and Krylov-Tolstikovich note that “Alexander III invariably strove to set a personal example of behavior that he considered right for each of his subjects. His ethical norms of behavior, his entire worldview proceeded from a deep religiosity. It is unlikely that any of Alexander’s twelve predecessors on the Russian imperial throne was such a pious and sincere believer. His faith – pure and free of dogmatism – explained both the God-chosen nature of the Russian autocracy and the special Russian path that it should follow.”

This last point reflects the main point that many of Alexander’s biographies consider his defining and indeed most endearing trait – his Russianness. Alexander is portrayed as Russian through and through, to the extent of being the first Russian emperor to wear a beard. Thus Boiko quotes Ivan Turgenev as saying that Alexander was “Russian and only Russian. Only a tiny drop of Russian blood flowed in his veins, but he merged himself with his people to such an extent that everything about him – his language, his habits, his manners, even his physiognomy was marked with the defining characteristics of his race.”

This Russianness is seen also as extending into Alexander’s policies as Emperor, which are positively assessed in contrast to what are seen as the failures of his father, Alexander II, whose policies are portrayed as a rather ill-judged effort to half-heartedly implant alien Western institutions into Russia. This is said to have contributed to the rise in terrorism that eventually led to the assassination of Alexander II. By contrast, the firm hand exerted by Alexander III is described as having brought Russian back from brink of collapse. Thus in a preface to Miasnikov’s biography, Bishop Tikhon, writes that Alexander “took over a country that was in a terrible moral, economic and political condition, when Russia was wracked by revolutionary terror. But he handed over to his successor a country that was fully pacified and enjoying its heyday, advancing towards a future that to many seemed cloudless and happy.”

Similarly, Dronov begins his biography with a quote from the émigré conservative writer Ivan Solonevich, saying that “I would give 150 Provisional Governments for one Alexander III. In my opinion, Alexander III was a true progressive, not Kerensky or Miliukov. For it is progress when you have quiet, confidence, flourishing, and growth. And it is reaction when there is hunger, brutality, collapse, and defeat.” Dronov then follows this up with a quote from the revolutionary turned conservative Lev Tikhomirov, saying that “Under Alexander II, Russia was such a humiliated country that nobody could possibly be proud of being Russian. Under Alexander III, the situation was reversed, and Russia began to take on the form of a great national force.”

Let us therefore now move on to examine the means by which this alleged transformation is said to have taken place.

Alexander’s first achievement is said to have been that he restored order. As Bokhanov writes, “During Alexander III’s reign, the social political situation in Russia stabilized.” His various biographers admit that this was achieved by repressive means, including the actions of the secret service, censorship, and the elimination of university autonomy. But they consider this a necessary evil, and in any case not actually that repressive. Several of the biographers mention that only 17 people were executed during Alexander’s reign, all of whom were guilty of either murdering or attempting to murder the emperor or his father. They also mention that Alexander personally commuted several death sentences, and that by comparison with later communist rule, the repression of his reign was really very mild.

In addition, they all are at pains to point out that even with increased censorship, Alexander’s reign saw a significant growth in the number of publications in Russia, with even liberal publications such as Vestnik Evropy being allowed to appear. Alexander was, they point out, a strong supporter of the arts, and even leant his support to those who might in some respects have been deemed subversive. For instance, Alexander intervened to prevent Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata from being banned, and supported the Peredvizhniki artists.  Alexander’s reign, we are told, saw a flourishing of Russian culture, associated with names such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky. Several authors mention the large-scale expansion of education under Alexander III, with a huge increase in the number of schools, and the creation of Tomsk university and the higher women’s courses. Thus Barkovets and Krylov-Tolstikovich conclude that “It was in the reign of Alexander III that Russia first became one of the recognized centres of world culture.”

 Another important step in restoring order was what are often called the “counter-reforms.” Most of Alexander’s biographers don’t devote a lot of attention to these, but those who do are supportive of his policies. Ilyin, for instance, comments that many of the institutions set up under Alexander II didn’t work very well. The Justice of the Peace (JP) courts, for instance, were very slow moving, and cases could take years to be resolved. In addition, he notes, “In disputes between peasants and landlords, the Justices of the Peace more often than not sided with the latter.” Ilyin cites the poet Fet, who served for a decade as a JP, saying that “From my bitter experience I long ago came to the conclusion about the complete unsuitability of these institutions in village life.” By contrast, Ilyin remarks, the land captains established under Alexander III provided immediate justice and were much closer to and more accessible to the peasantry.

Similarly, Boiko remarks that “the land captains helped bring order to peasant life … And above all, combatted the unconscious spirit of anarchy among the peasants.” And Dronov claims that “the establishment of the land captains decided the problem of establishing a strong, effective and operative power in the localities, while the peasantry accepted very positively the appearance of a personal, concrete, representative of the authorities, allowing for rapid justice in accordance with conscience not the law, instead of the personless mechanism of formal judicial procedures.”

Dronov notes that the counter reforms met with strong resistance from liberals within the bureaucracy, and praises Alexander for standing up to what he considers a fifth column. According to Dronov, Alexander “understood that the “external” West – the West that exists beyond Russia’s borders – is not Russia’s most dangerous enemy; that there exists also a far more dangerous “internal West” that consists of forces within Russia who identify ideologically with the West, Western values, and the Western way of life.”

 Of all Alexander’s biographers, Dronov is by far the most virulent in his anti-Westernism and anti-liberalism. He comments that “Even when very young, Alexander hated liberals, not because he was opposed to freedom, but because, by a strange law of nature, it was precisely among liberals that one found the largest number of people who hated Russia and kowtowed to the West.”

 Dronov’s nationalism comes out very strongly in his discussion of Alexander’s nationality policies, writing that the emperor “understood the decisive significance of the national question, and what a powerful weapon regional separatism was for destroying Russia. He saw how hostile forces were igniting national divisions within Russia.” Dronov is not alone, in supporting Alexander’s nationality policies, as these gain the almost universal endorsement his biographers. Again and again they tell us that the Russian state did not discriminate against any national group in the empire. Indeed, many national minorities enjoyed autonomy and privileges that Russians did not. And this, they say, was the real problem, for it was precisely Russians who suffered discrimination.

As for Alexander, he was allegedly free of ethnic and religious prejudice. But he could not tolerate the discrimination faced by Russians, in particular at the hand of Baltic German nobles. Thus Bokhanov writes that “While we must recognize Alexander’s nationalistic inclinations, we must also note that they never reached the level of chauvinism. No repressions of other peoples, no persecution of their culture or beliefs, was ever undertaken at the initiative of the monarch, solely because they were not Russian. However, the Tsar could not and would not tolerate discrimination against Russians.” Likewise Barkovets and Krylov-Tolstikovich remark that “Carrying out the policy of Russification, the government in no way pursued chauvinistic goals. Its task consisted solely of bringing archaic local administration in line with general state norms, and defending the rights and interests of the Russian and Orthodox population against the self-rule of the German landlord-clerical authorities.”

Where things become a little trickier for the biographers is when they confront the issue anti-Jewish measures taken by Alexander’s government. Some of them respond by mentioning this only in passing and glossing over entirely Alexander’s role in the matter. Ilyin goes a bit further and admits that Alexander said some things that were regrettable, but he concludes that they didn’t amount to much, making the rather odd argument that “No few of Alexander III’s resolutions [on the issue of Jews] have been preserved and they have greatly harmed his reputation … Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to call him an anti-Semite as is sometime done. Contemporary reference books define anti-Semitism as a form of racism. But the emperor’s antipathy to Jews had nothing to do with race, but derived from his naïve, childish belief in the letter of holy tradition.” As I say, it’s a rather odd argument.

Even more disturbing is Dronov’s take on the matter. Dronov’s book is by far the most detailed of Alexander’s biographies, but also by far the most tendentious. It provides a huge amount of detail proving beyond reasonable doubt that Alexander was indeed anti-Semitic. In this sense, it is a much more useful book than other biographies. But Dronov doesn’t seem to find anything wrong with Alexander’s anti-Semitism. Indeed, he makes what one can only call anti-Semitic remarks of his own. For instance, he writes that “The dominant influence of foreigners (that is, Jews and Poles) in the alliance of the liberal-constitutionalists and revolutionaries was an entirely natural phenomenon. Liberal bourgeois ideology was a product of Talmudic ethics and Catholic religious doctrine, contradicting Orthodoxy and rejecting Christ in favour of the law of Moses. … Jews and Poles were the largest element in the Russian empire who were nationally and religiously incompatible with Russian Orthodox tradition.” Moving onto economic policy, Dronov also comments that “Alexander III could not but understand that freeing Russia from the yoke of German bankers and acquiring new, more favourable, loans from France, was only a relative success. The financial market in Paris, just as much as in Berlin, was dominated by Jews, and Russia ran the risk of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.”

For Dronov, Alexander’s economic policy were a huge success, greatly boosting not only industrial production but also the standard of living of the vast bulk of the population. The roots of this success, according to Dronov, lay precisely in Alexander’s willingness to adopt protectionist policies and to pursue a more autarkic model of development, free of the control of foreign financiers. He writes: ‘In the 13 years of his reign, production rose more than twice … with no inflation. … He built the Trans-Siberian Railway and didn’t order a single nail from abroad. All the rails, all the wagons, and all the engines were built only in Russian factories. He built a new fleet, and all the ships were constructed in Russian wharfs. … Under Alexander III, Russia became truly Russian and for the Russians.”

 Other authors are not quite so nationalistic but concur with the positive assessment of Alexander’s economic policy. All of them note that Alexander inherited a government deeply in debt with a large budget deficit, but that by the end of his reign the government was running a budget surplus. All of them similarly note the significant rise in industrial production under Alexander, a substantial expansion of Russia’s railways, the establishment of the Peasant Bank, and the passing of factory legislation designed to protect workers from excessive exploitation. Barkovets and Krylov-Tolstikovich, for instance, write that “Alexander III inherited a desolate economy. The country was in a deep economic crisis. Its finances were in a deplorable state. … The financial and economic reforms undertaken by Alexander III opened up new, previously hidden, sources of wealth, and increased the population’s incomes.”

The final aspect of Alexander’s reign that receives a lot of coverage is foreign policy. All his biographers praise him for earning the title ‘Tsar peacemaker’ by not fighting a single war. In the late 1870s, Russia had barely managed to defeat Turkey in the war of 1877-78, and under Western pressure had then had to surrender many of its gains. After this humiliation, Alexander III is described as restoring Russia’s international prestige. Though some foreign policy failures are noted, particularly relating to Bulgaria, Alexander is considered to have been a highly successful foreign policy leader. Ilyin, for instance, concludes that “Alexander III did not make any serious mistakes in the diplomatic field. And while there were certain individual errors and failures, even    such a master of diplomatic intrigue as Bismarck had those too.”

While noting that Alexander brought peace, his biographers are all point out that he did so not by surrendering Russia’s interests to the West, but rather by standing up for Russia’s interests from a position of strength, investing heavily in the Russian army and fleet. Several mention the famous statement that may or may not have been uttered by Alexander, that “Russia has only two allies, its army and its fleet. At the first opportunity, all the others will take up arms against us.” Generally, people only quote the first half of this statement, putting the stress on the need for a strong military, but interestingly Alexander’s biographers always provide the full quote and put the emphasis more on the second half, i.e. on the charge that Russia’s allies will always betray it, and thus that Western countries are not to be trusted. Thus Miasnikov states that “The bitter experience of the nineteenth century taught the tsar that every time that Russia participated in the wars of any European coalition that it would come deeply to regret it.” And Bokhanov concludes that, “Alexander III was the first Romanov emperor not to be blinded by a “love of Europe.” The emperor never forgot how the goodwill and generosity of his predecessors had been cynically abused by our so-called “friends” and how our “faithful allies” had cheated us, betrayed us, and often simply made fools of us.”

The books mentioned in this presentation vary greatly in their length, quality, and style. Still, they do all end up telling much the same story. The basic message is that Alexander III inherited a country in political and economic chaos, with low international prestige, and a weak military, but thereafter restored order, boosted the economy, and made Russia great again, putting Russia’s interests ahead of those of other countries and relying on native Russian values and institutions rather than artificially imported Western ones. There is, I think, a strong contemporary political subtext to this narrative. In this sense, the portrayals of Alexander discussed in this paper are very much a product of their time.

Intellinews: US says sending military “trainers” to Ukraine is “inevitable”

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 5/17/24

Apparently the insanity in Washington is not letting up. – Natylie

In another step in the creeping escalation, the US said sending military trainers” to participate in the War in Ukraine is “inevitable,” The New York Times (NYT) reported on May 16.

The US’ highest-ranking officer, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Western armies will provide military trainers to Kyiv “at some point” in a move that would mark a significant departure from Nato’s previous reluctance to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.

“We’ll get there eventually, over time,” Brown told reporters, according to reports. He stressed that doing so now would put “a bunch of Nato trainers at risk” and tie up air defences that would be better used protecting Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, the NYT reported.

The revelation comes only a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that it was “up to Ukraine to decide” if it wanted to use US-made weapons to strike targets inside Russian territory, a significant softening of the previous ban, due to fears of provoking a similar Russian retaliation.

The announcement also follows on from French President Emmanuel Macron’s earlier remarks that Nato should not take the possibility of committing troops to the fight in Ukraine off the table in order to maintain “strategic ambiguity” in the struggle against Russia. Those remarks provoked a strong condemnation from the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered military manoeuvres with Russian nuclear missiles in response as a signal to the West of what its direct involvement in the war in Ukraine might lead to.

A growing number of European countries have followed Macron’s lead and signalled a willingness to consider sending military personnel to Ukraine. An Estonian official said last week they are “seriously” discussing the possibility of sending troops into western Ukraine in non-combat roles, while Lithuania’s foreign minister said training missions in Ukraine “might be quite doable.” Other leading European countries such as Germany have ruled out any direct involvement in the war by their troops.

The suggestion of direct Western military participation in the conflict comes as the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) come under increasing pressure from a new heavy assault on the eastern city of Kharkiv, where Russian forces are making their first advances in months. At the same time, little of the $61bn of new US military aid has appeared on the battlefield, according to battlefield reports, and Russia continues to pulverise Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with impunity. At least half of all of Ukraine’s generating capacity has been damaged or destroyed since an intense barrage began in January that has only intensified since then.

In addition to an ammo crisis, Ukraine is suffering from a manpower shortage, as undisclosed losses reach “catastrophic levels”, according to Ukraine’s former top general Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was removed from office earlier this year.

As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and Nato counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment, the NYT reports. A Ukrainian delegation is currently in Washington to lobby for more US aid.

So far, the US has rejected these calls but Brown said at a press conference that a Nato deployment of trainers appeared to be “inevitable.” “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.

Previous US efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers have not been successful. Ahead of last summer’s much vaulted counteroffensive, elite troops were trained by the US in Grafenwoehr in Germany, but the counter-offensive was effectively thwarted by heavy Russian defences built up in the nine-month lull before the summer counteroffensive could be launched.

Compounding the problem is that Ukrainians are facing a battlefield far different and more intense than what American forces have fought on in recent years, the NYT reports.

“Moving the training into Ukraine, military officials acknowledge, would allow American trainers to more quickly gather information about the innovations occurring on the Ukrainian front lines, potentially allowing them to adapt their training,” the NYT reports.

Battlefield situation

Russia is widely expected to launch its own counter-offensive this summer; it may be already under way. Fighting to the north of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, has already become intense, with Russian forces making slow but steady advances, albeit with heavy casualties.

Nato said on May 16 that it doesn’t believe Russia will make a breakthrough in the Kharkiv Oblast, but Rob Bauer, chairman of the Nato Military Committee, told journalists that even providing Ukraine with more military aid in a timely manner will “not necessarily discourage Russia from offensive operations,” reports European Pravda.

Christopher Cavoli, Supreme Commander of Nato’s Allied Forces Europe, said at a press briefing that the Russians “don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough,” Ukrayinska Pravda reports.

“More to the point, they don’t have the skill and capability to do it, to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage. They do have the ability to make local advances and they have done some of that,” he added, saying that he was confident that the AFU will hold the line.

A Ukraine delegation in Washington is pressing for permission to use US missiles to strike at Russian forces being massed on the Russian side of the border and logistical supply lines in Russia, before crossing over to join the Kharkiv offensive. Video on Russian social media showed Grad missile launchers on the Belgorod highway, just inside Russian territory, parked on the road and firing missiles into Ukraine with impunity, as Ukraine can only use its homemade drones to strike at them under the current rules of engagement when they are in Ukraine proper.

Moscow’s reaction

The war of words is also being ratcheted up. Putin has already ordered nuclear missile military exercises and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a stern statement after Blinken’s comments allowing missile strikes inside Russia using Western-made weapons. It reminded the West that Russia’s military doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons if Russia faces an “existential threat.” On May 16, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov added that Moscow may lower the level of diplomatic relations with Washington if “certain scenarios” unfold, reports TASS. So far Russia has not broken off diplomatic relations with Washington and backchannel talks are ongoing, according to various reports.

Ryabkov said that Russia has never been the first to make such moves in its relations with the US or other Nato countries.

“But, in my opinion, [such steps are] quite possible if the West chooses the path of escalation,” the diplomat said, without saying what specifically would trigger such a move.

“I’m not ready to theorise on the subject,” he said. “If the situation continues to deteriorate, it will become a subject of specific analysis and decision-making at the level of political leaders.”

Kit Klarenberg: Meet Centuria, Ukraine’s Western-trained neo-Nazi army

By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 4/7/24

A uniquely Ukrainian strain of Neo-Nazism is spreading throughout Europe, which openly advocates violence against minorities while seeking new recruits. With Kiev’s army collapsing and a narrative of Western betrayal gaining currency, the horror inflicted on residents of Donbas for a decade could very soon be coming to a city near you.

Centuria, an ultra-violent Ukrainian Neo-Nazi faction, has cemented itself in six cities across Germany, and is seeking to expand its local presence. According to Junge Welt, a Berlin-based Marxist daily, the Nazi organization’s growth has been “unhindered by local security services.” 

Junge Welt traces Centuria’s origins to an August 2020 Neo-Nazi summit “at the edge of a forest near Kiev.” There, an ultranationalist named Igor “Tcherkas” Mikhailenko demanded the “hundreds of mostly masked vigilante fighters present,” who were members Kiev’s fascistic National Militia, “make sacrifices for the idea of ‘Greater Ukraine.’” As the former head of the Neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine’s Kharkiv division, and commander of the state sponsored Azov Battalion from 2014 to 2015, Mikhailenko has professed a desire to “destroy everything anti-Ukrainian.”

Junge Welt reports that since 2017, the National Militia “had been practicing brutal vigilante justice” throughout Ukraine, including “tyrannizing the LGBTQ scene.” Centuria was subsequently blamed for a terrifying November 2021 attack on a gay nightclub in Kiev, in which its operatives assaulted revelers with truncheons and pepper spray.

Now the same Neo-Nazi sect “has an offshoot in Germany,” Junge Welt revealed. On August 24 2023, the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, Centuria convened a “nationalist rally” in the central city of Magdeburg, “unmolested by Antifa and critical media reporting.”

Participants proudly posed with the flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) founded by World War II-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Centuria boasted at the time on Telegram, “although Ukrainian youth are not in their homeland, they are starting to unite.” Meanwhile, they threatened the “enemies” of their country with “hellish storm,” pledging that “Ukrainian emigrants” would not “forget their national identity for a few hundred euros.”

Junge Welt reports that Centuria “is currently raising funds for its parent organization’s combat unit,” which is commanded by Andriy Biletsky – the Azov Battalion founder who infamously stated in 2014 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen.” At home, Centuria’s members express similar attitudes towards Muslims, Africans, and gays, whom they refer to, respectively, as the “German Caliphate,” “black rapists,” and “pedophiles.”

Now, the group’s members are working hard to pass their ideological vision down to future racists across the continent. “We are creating a new generation of heroes!” Centuria’s Telegram channel boasts. Accordingly, the neo-Nazi group has been arranging hiking trips to Germany’s Harz mountains with a Ukrainian nationalist scout association called Plast. This outfit opened chapters across the Western world beginning in the 1950s, in response to the Soviet Union’s hounding of fascists and nationalists. Besides receiving ideological indoctrination, Plast’s youthful members may have the opportunity to improve their physical fitness and receive military training. As Centuria ominously declares on Telegram, “free people have weapons.”

Opening ceremonies at the Lithuanian camp “Iskra” with Plast youth in an apparent “scout’s honor” salute, 2022

As Washington gradually backs away from its sponsorship of Ukraine’s war with Russia, it has begun ceding responsibility for the military campaign’s management – and likely failure – to Berlin. If US arms shipments continue to dwindle, Germany will become Kiev’s chief supplier of weapons. And the Germans may find that saying “no” to Ukraine could result in some nasty surprises.

Unlike the US, Germany does not enjoy an ocean-length buffer between itself and the fascistic proxy warriors it sponsors in Ukraine. After Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive finally collapsed in late 2023, its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, grumbled a veiled threat during an interview with the Economist: “There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.”

While Ukrainians have generally “behaved well” and are “very grateful” to those who sheltered them, it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people into a corner,” Zelensky remarked to the outlet.

To understand how more radical elements of a spent proxy force could turn their guns on the Western governments that armed them, one need only look at the events of September 11, 2001.

A secret Western-backed Nazi network

Centuria is seemingly not the only Azov-related Ukrainian movement seeking to infiltrate Europe. An apparently separate but identically named Centuria is doing the same, with help from an entrenched structure of elite European support. 

In September 2021, George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) published a detailed and deeply unsettling report which documents how a once-secret order called Centuria was nurtured by a “self-described order of ‘European traditionalist’ military officers that has the stated goals of reshaping the country’s military along right-wing ideological lines and defending the ‘cultural and ethnic identity’ of European peoples against ‘Brussels’ politicos and bureaucrats.’”

IERES reported that Centuria’s military wing began training in 2018 in Ukraine’s Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National Army Academy (NAA), Kiev’s “premier military education institution and a major hub for Western military assistance to the country.” 

The paper revealed that “as recently as April 2021, [Centuria] claimed that since its launch, members have participated in joint military exercises with France, the UK, Canada, the US, Germany, and Poland.” 

Indeed, many of the neo-Nazi group’s members have drilled at the de facto NATO base in Yavoriv, just a few kilometers east of the Polish border.

Photo posted by the Canadian Armed Forces in Ukraine in 2020 shows the NAA
graduation ceremony at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv.

What’s more, “the group claims that its members serve as officers in several units of Ukraine’s military. Since at least 2019, Centuria has… [called] on ideologically aligned members of the AFU to seek transfer to specific units where the group’s members serve. To attract new members, the group – via its Telegram channel, which has over 1,200 followers and a dedicated mobilization bot – continues to tout its alleged role in the AFU and access to Western training, military, and exchange programs.”

Every Western government the IERES researchers approached claimed not to tolerate neo-Nazis in their militaries, insisting they “trusted the Ukrainian government to select and identify the right candidates” for their training programs. But Ukraine’s Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National Army Academy (NAA) has explicitly declared it carries out no such screenings, while also denying Centuria operates within its headquarters.

After the report’s author reached out to Centuria and the NAA for comment about the training of neo-Nazis, operatives of the extremist movement began purging their online footprints, and have concealed their real-world activities ever since.

Western media outlets have almost completely ignored the IERES report, save for a single article in the Jerusalem Post. The silence around the issue is all the more unusual given the credentials of its author, a Washington DC-based Ukrainian citizen whose work has been published by US government outlet Voice of America, and the US and UK-government funded “open source” investigative outfit Bellingcat.

Among Western officials, only the Canadian Armed Forces have commented on the report’s meticulously-documented findings, preposterously claiming that photos posted to Facebook by Centuria members had been “doctored” to advance “Russian disinformation.”

Such disingenuity is not surprising given the Canadian military’s well-documented history of providing training to hardened Ukrainian fascists — and its refusal to disavow Ukrainian Nazis.

To this day, the leader of the country’s military, Gen. Wayne Eyre, continues to refuse to apologize for giving a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a WWII Nazi collaborator honored by Canada’s parliament.

According to researchers, Centuria fighters within Ukraine have spent at least the last five years attempting to indoctrinate their high-achieving comrades into Neo-Nazism. The IERES report notes that Centuria “has been able to proselytize Ukraine’s future military elite inside the NAA.”

Portrait of a British-trained Neo-Nazi

Underlining the extent of the neo-Nazi penetration of Western military apparatuses, NAA cadet Kyrylo Dubrovskyi, attended an 11-month Officer Training Course at Britain’s esteemed Sandhurst Royal Military Academy in 2020. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs celebrated his graduation while the NAA published a 12-minute video profile of the new graduate’s path to military leadership. IERES noted that Dubrovskyi “showed very keen interest in Centuria matters” while attending the Academy.

Dubrovskyi appears to have narrated a Centuria promotional video circulated on Telegram in May 2020, in which the group’s members are shown marching in Lviv, attending an NAA event, and firing their weapons. Dubrovskyi can be heard intoning, “our officers are raising the new army of Ukraine… We are the Centuria. We are everywhere… defend your territories, your traditions till the last drop of blood.”

A month before, Centuria posted an interview with an unnamed “cadet of Her Majesty’s Armed forces,” a description that could only match one individual: Dubrovskyi. He made clear he preferred training in Ukraine, as British training for military officers “put less emphasis on theory.” During this time, “Dubrovskyi enjoyed access to foreign cadets who visited the Academy,” and “on several occasions escorted foreign delegations that visited the Academy,” including cadets from the US Air Force and the French military.

It is unclear how much “theory” Dubrovskyi injected into the daily routines of Western soldiers with whom he crossed paths while at Sandhurst. IERES concluded that “Dubrovskyi and Centuria leveraged his status as a Sandhurst cadet” to promote the group and its ideology. On the “about” section of his personal YouTube channel, Dubrovskyi describes himself as “a cadet of the Royal Academy of Great Britain.” There, he posted multiple videos about his experiences at the academy, and at least one message expressing a desire to join the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment.

On Telegram in December 2020, Centuria made clear that infiltrating the Ukrainian military’s highest echelons was but the first step in a much wider ideological blitzkrieg: “Centuria is shaping a first-of-its-kind military elite whose goal is to attain the highest ranks inside the Armed Forces in order to become an authoritative core able to hold significant influence.” After consolidating its hold on the military, the group plans to penetrate the ranks of “Ukraine’s political elite,” in order to “carry out societal changes.”

Editor’s note: This article has been clarified to explain that Centuria exists as two separate organizations, both with origins in the neo-Nazi Azov movement.

Kit Klarenberg discusses this topic with Alex Rubenstein at their YouTube channel Active Measures.

YouTube link here.