Tag: ukraine war

“Progressive Realism”: The Lammynation of British Foreign Policy

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Imperialism with a human face?

David Lammy’s recent article, The Case for Progressive Realism. Why Britain Must Chart a New Global Course in Foreign Affairs claims to base itself on a “politics based on respect for facts”, to look for “realist means to pursue progressive ends” and seek “the pursuit of ideals without delusions”. His problem is that the “facts” he uses are filtered by and seen through an ideological lens that distorts them, turns things upside down and inside out; and it rapidly becomes clear that the “new course” he proposes is a reprise of the old one; as the “chart” he is using is marked up with the same old, same old Foreign Policy Shibboleths that have defined UK policy since Suez. Primarily being most favoured auxiliary for the USA during the “American Century”, and a willing supporter of attempts to prolong it for another.

Lammy aims to square a lot of circles, because that course is now increasingly unviable, and the contradictions are starting to creak. In the attempt he skates at speed across a thin ice of delusions about the world that make the ideals he touches on in places unattainable. The “means” that he defines as “realistic” are incompatible with the ends he describes as “progressive”. It is therefore not entirely coherent. Andrew Fisher, possibly kindly, describes his article as a “word salad”.

Before going through this point by point, more or less in his order, I’d like to examine one extraordinarily strange phrase that crops up near the end but, in its way, summarises the fundamental contorted distortions of his world view.

He writes “at times in the Twentieth Century, Western powers undermined the sovreignty of weaker states, especially in the Global South”.

Where do you start with this?

“At times”. As if this were an occasional aberation. An uncharacteristic lapse from an otherwise egalitarian norm of sunny mutual respect. As in, the people of the Congo had their sovreignty “undermined” “at times” by Belgium and “at times” died in their millions. Or, “at times”, Britain presided over famines in India that it took independence to stop. I could go on.

Do I really have to point out that, for the first half of the Twentieth Century, most of the Global South had no sovreignty at all, as they were under the direct territorial control of “Western” Imperial powers.

Nor that this was not abandoned willingly by the “West” in the second half of the century either.

  • The UK, France and Portugal fought a series of viscious post colonial rearguard actions against independence movements right up to the 1970s; Vietnam, Malaya, Aden (Yemen), Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinnea-Bissau.
  • Settler colonial regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa kept this up to the 1980s and 90s, and Israel is still doing it today.
  • The United States picked up “the white man’s burden” from France in Vietnam with lethal effect (2 million killed) backed coups and military take overs in Indonesia (600,000 killed) and all over Latin America; Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile.
  • The “neo colonial” settlement that allowed formal independence for former colonies left them at the mercy of their former colonial overlords, sometimes embodied in formal structures ensuring financial control and military presence, as in France Afrique until recently; leaving most of the Global South for most of the rest of the twentieth century hog tied by debt and unequal exchange, and sometimes fought over for resources.
  • Within this, the US gained greater weight over its imperial rivals via economic domination (the US notion of “decolonisation” being the removal of barriers put in the way of their trade by the territorial control of imperial competitors).
  • This has led to a process of incorporation and subordination of European powers and Japan into a dominant US centred imperial bloc with a parasitic relationship to the rest of the world; which is where we are now.

Western powers “undermine the sovreignty of weaker powers, especially in the Global South”, not just “at times”, but do so all the time as a structural norm. This is underpinned by an unparallelled capacity to unleash violence on anyone who steps out of line. Recognising this is “realism”. Failing to see it is “delusion”. Accepting or supporting it is siding with the oppressor against the oppressed, the exploiter against the exploited. Always.

Things ain’t what they used to be

Lammy, however, starts his essay by bemoaning how this has began to change; comparing the world at the time of the last Labour landslide in 1997 with the one that will greet the next in 2024.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was possible to believe in an eternal Pax Americana, in which the entire world would eventually turn into one gigantic American suburb, through US led globalisation and the wonders of the free market. This was a fantasy, even at the time.

What Lammy describes as “the liberal democratic model” – in which all countries would eventually become wealthy clones of the US (just later in the fullness of time, after a little bit of inevitable gradualism) – meant for most of the world to continue living under the crushing weight of the Washington consensus; which policed all development in US interests, guaranteeing that millions were trapped in extreme poverty, forced to live in teeming self built slums, or rural desperation, their resources extracted for little or no benefit by Western multinationals, essential services like water supply privatised; with the threat of military intervention standing permanently behind the IMF and the World Bank.

In 1997, with a slight whiff of “Good Old Days” nostalgia, he notes that the UK had an economy that was larger than those of China and India combined; and it still adminstered Hong Kong as a colony. Not any more. Never again.

Bull in a China shop

Now, as Lammy notes, “China is a superpower”. It has a larger economy than the US, in Purchase Power Partity terms. Lammy does not note, but we should, that it has been mostly in this period from 1997 that China lifted 850 million of its people out of poverty, and eliminated extreme poverty altogether in 2020. A feat described by a Labour Foreign Policy Group report in 2021 as “perhaps the single most significant contribution to human wellbeing in world history”. Something that you’d think someone with “ideals” and “moral purpose” might welcome, or even seek to learn from.

But not a bit of it. Lammy chooses to interpret this as a threat and a “systemic challenge to British interests” (a phrase that begs more than one question).

“Democracies” – a word he uses as a euphemism for the core Imperial powers which are tightly allied to, and coralled, by the United States – are “on the back foot” and losing the “hearts and minds” of the Global South “middle class”; such that “countries described … by CIA Director William Burns as the “hedging middle” are striking bargains and setting their own agendas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America” and, even worse, “they ignore the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States ever more frequently”.

They are just not doing what they are told anymore, dammit!

It is the rise of China, and the failure of the US to contain it, that has sent US politics into such a delirious tailspin. Because, if the US truly is the one indispensible nation, with a political and economic system that is the best in the world, then this should not be happening. But, happening it is. And, if everything you believe about the world is being shown to be false, but you can’t bring yourself to break with your beliefs, it becomes possible, even necessary, to believe ten impossible things before breakfast to try to make sense of it. An impulse to seek truth from anything other than the facts is characteristic of the MAGA movement, but not confined to them. “Realism” is too unbearable to be acceptable. So, dangerous fantasies take its place.

We should note at this point that more people in China think that their country is a democracy – a country run in the interests of the people – than people in the US do. In a study published by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation and Latana data tracking firm, when asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with 83% saying it is, and 91% also saying that this is important to them. In the US, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy and 76%, said it was important.

That looks like this.

Percentage of people in each country that consider it to be a democracy

We should also note that Lammy’s concern with the “middle class” in the Global South is an odd one if his major concern is with development. A striking feature of most of the Global South is the class polarisation, with very extreme Gini coefficients which show a wealthy layer with living standards comparable to those in the “West” sitting on top of a much larger number of impoverished people living in varying degrees of desperate precarity. Rajiv Ghandi’s formula of “France in India” is quite a good way to envisage this; that India contained a nation with roughly the same population and wealth as France – about 65 million – atop over a billion living in desperate straits. This polarity explains the extremity of Rightist Global South politics, producing figures like Bolsonaro or Milei. Wealthy people living in close proximity to teeming masses that they feel threatened by often feel the need to keep in their place with extreme violence. I suspect that when Lammy talks of the “middle class”, he is refering to the wealthier sort, who are in no way middling, economically or politically, but he never clarifies.

Lammy comes back down to Earth to note, appropriately, that “Climate breakdown is no longer a future worry. It is here”. He also notes that China, the US and EU all have green transition plans that require large amounts of state led investment, to a degree that the UK does not, but without digging into the figures that show that only China is doing this on the necessary scale. This is from Adam Tooze. “Measured against the $ 4 trillion per annum benchmark, the only country (my emphasis) that over the last decade has come anywhere close to spending, lending and investing on the required scale is CCP-led China“.

Bloomberg’s tabulation of the $1.1 Trillion investment in energy transition in 2022 shows the following.

China’s investment in energy transition in 2022 was almost double that of the US and EU put together. And this gap is accelerating.

It might be fair to conclude from this that it is just as well that China did not follow the Western economic model, and that its state directed economy is better able to deal with this challenge. Without their investment in renewables, having made them cheaper than fossil fuels, we would already be sunk.

Lammy however regrets that China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation did not lead to the adoption of “liberal democratic values”, putting the private sector in the driving seat of the economy and polity. Had they done so, China could be just as succesful as we are with our neo liberal model that crashed in 2008, is now leading to ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority; while infrastructure crumbles and standards of living for the majority stagnate or decline. In fact, China is the only large economy in the world in which wage rates have risen consistently for workers in the last decade, such that these are now higher than they are in Portugal and Greece and comparable with Poland.

I think Lammy is being a bit previous in stating that “the rise of China has ended the era of US hegemony”, but it certainly challenges it in trade, technology and scientific innovation – all of which flows from China’s refusal to accept permanent status as a low grade mass manufacturer, most favoured sweat shop providing cheap imports for Western consumers, while stuck in a middle level development trap for its own citizens.

Most countries around the world now trade more with China than the US, and this is a trajectory that is increasing, making attempts to “decouple” an act of self harm. This is true even when defined as “derisking” (a phrase based on the paranoia that its so much worse if a Chinese smart fridge company knows when you need to buy more milk than when Google does). Cutting Chinese tech out of 5G broadband – the most advanced in the world – is an example of voluntarily adopting additional costs for a slower service, which has the additional negative consequence of increasing unnecessary tensions. Partly because of US high technology sanctions, China has increasingly innovated and is now considered to have a lead in 37 out of 44 key technological indicators. This is particularly crucial in green transition, so “derisking” in this area carries with it a lot of serious risks that we can’t afford.

The key area in which the US maintains a crushing dominance is precisely the one that Lammy tries to present as the most threatening; the military. Lammy warns that the Chinese Navy has more ships than any other, but, as World Population Review points out, counting a small patrol vessel as having the same significance as an aircraft carrier “is akin to saying a squirrel is the same as a rhino, or a scooter is the same as an 18-wheel semi-truck”, so, “to better estimate the overall power of a given navy, some analysts turn to tonnage, which is a measure of the amount of water a ship displaces or the amount of cargo it can carry”. By this measure, the US Navy, at 3,415,893 tonnes, is just under five times bigger than the Chinese Navy, at 708,886 tonnes. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, you’d expect Lammy to know that. Perhaps he does, and is just chancing his arm in the hope that no one will check.

We can also look at this in terms of the scale of overall military spending. This year, the US is spending $831,781,000,000 on its front line military. Monthly Review has argued for some years that US military spending figures underestimate the true quantity by about half, but, even if we go with the declared amount, China’s spend of $227,000,000,000 is less than a third of the US total.

This understimates the balance, however, as direct US allies in the region, like Australia (which has a collosal military budget for a country its size), Japan and South Korea add an additional $150 billion; and some proportion of the UK’s $62 billion has to be allocated through its commitments to the AUKUS Treaty. And we should note that all these allies are under intense US pressure to increase and coordinate this spending, and other NATO allies like Italy are entering into joint projects with Japan, which is doubling its expenditure at the present time.

You can look at it in terms of overseas bases too. The US has 750 bases in 80 countries. China has 1 (in 1). The US bases near China encircle it, as we can see here. There are no Chinese bases anywhere near the United States.

The same applies to deployment. US aircraft carrier task forces, sometimes with the Royal Navy’s new carriers (probably the ugliest boats in the world, not an essential point, but they really are hideous looking) as auxiliaries regularly steam up and down the South China Sea. No Chinese Navy forces at all deploy to the Gulf of Mexico or English Channel. Imagine the headlines in the Daily Mail or USA Today if they did. In that light, it is quite amazing how calmly China takes this.

You can also look at it in terms of balance of nuclear power. The United States has 5,244 nuclear weapons. China has 500, a tenth as many. China also has a defensive, no first strike policy – the only nuclear power to have one. A First Strike policy has been US military doctrine since the 1960s, and remains so, even though it has been known since the 1980s that this would be suicidal even if it worked. The explosion of smoke and debris above the cloud layer from the first overwhelming salvo of missiles would blot out sunlight for several years; causing a nuclear winter that would obliterate the “victorious” powers through temperature collapse and starvation, just as surely as the defeated would be incinerated and blasted to death. For a sobering and essential examination of this see John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism.

Characteristically, Lammy does not note that no one in China is arguing for a war with the United States. In fact they argue for “win, win cooperation” and “a common home for humanity” as we move towards an “ecological civilisation”; all of which seem both reasonable and essential positions that it would be helpful for humanity if the West were to respond to positively. Nor does he point out that arguing for such a war within the next decade as the only way to stop a peaceful rise by China is now a live debate in mainstream US Foriegn Policy circles; and that maybe this is more than somewhat unhinged.

Arising from all this, the question that has to be realistically asked is, who is threatening whom? Who is posing the “real security threat” and how dangerous is this, realistically? And shouldn’t Labour be seeking to restrain this rather than hype it up and cheer it on? Instead Lammy argues for AUKUS to be “a floor not a ceiling”. This is, realistically, a path to war; the consequence of which cannot be considered to have any “moral purpose” whatsoever.

It is slightly mind boggling that, while he pushes this antagonistic and confrontational military alliance, he thinks positive engagement with China on economic development, climate breakdown and AI (particularly as China is leading on this) can pootle along happily in a sort of paralell universe, not distracted at all by the war drums he is so busily beating, nor thrown off course by the diversion of necessary investment into the suicidal dead end of an arms race. You can make up your own mind about whether this is remotely “realistic” or contains a scintilla of “moral purpose”.

Little Britain blues

More parochially, in an attempt to have “tough minded honesty about the UK”, Lammy goes on to note what he sees as its three key problems.

  1. Its economy is stuck in a low growth, low productivity, low investment slump. Which, given his concern with green transition and positive remarks about state led investment in China, the EU and US, should make him question why Labour has shrunk its green investment plan to little more than is already on the stocks from the Conservatives. He notes that the UK has the lowest level of investment in the G7, but seems to think that Keir Starmer’s “mission” to get the highest growth is possible without this investment, if only the country would have enough self belief. As delusions go, this is a big one.
  2. Its armed forces are too small; which is only the case if you want to prepare for a war that could easily kill us all instead of taking active steps to avert it.
  3. Public Services are crumbling. He could have noted that this also goes for infrastructure, which brings us back to the need for investment which the “realism” of the Shadow Treasury team rules out. So, do not pass Go…

Realism is for him embodied by Ernest Bevin’s actions as Foreign Secretary in the post war Labour government. The flip side of the progressive measures taken by that government, founding the welfare state and NHS, nationalising key industries, was its resolute continuity in Imperial Foriegn Policy; which led it to resist decolonisation, form NATO, aquire atomic bombs, join in the Korean war: and maintain military spending at such a high level that it had to sustain austerity to a degree that got it voted out of office in 1951.

Recognising that “realism alone will not be enough to save the planet” – which essentially means that “realism” defined in this way is anything but realistic – and that the “West” has “to cooperate with its rivals on climate change and AI” leads him to disinter the ghost of Robin Cook as the Push Me to Ernest Bevin’s Pull You. Cook is lauded for his promotion of “human rights” and “soft power”, embodied in the 0.7% of GDP allocated to development aid (a figure that Lammy notes, but does not commit to restoring) and his “realism” in making “hard choices” about “arms exports”, ie letting them go ahead. Lammy’s subsequent assertion that “governments don’t have to choose between values and interests” is belied by this.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t

So far so confusing; but Lammy’s attempt to have his bomb and drop it continues. The “West” made mistakes. Its interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the whole war on terror, became “seen as” a “recipe for disorder” because, despite initial military wins, it was unable to stabilise a viable pro Western regime anywhere. Its power lasted just as long as it could sustain boots on the ground, which is not indefinitely. The resulting chaos and impoverishment has not gone unnoticed across the world. The “moral purpose” that Lammy argues for, loses out to “self interest” every time. And because, of the decadent, parasitic stage they are now in, the US and its allies are sucking capital in, not spreading it out, and are therefore incapable of “nation building”.

Four and a half million people were killed in these wars, which I think should be categorised as the first phase of the Wars for the New American Century. Ukraine and Gaza are the start of an even more dangerous second phase, as a more desperate US takes greater risks.

The Rules are for the Little People

Lammy takes the Rules Based International Order as the embodiment of a viable global civilisation, but it is widely understood in the world that the rule that defines the rules is that Washington makes all them, none of them apply to the USA (and select few of its closest allies) and they will be changed on a whim.

A small example of this was the 1984 case at the International Court of Justice in 1984, when Nicaragua won compensation of £17 billion from the US for the damage done by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports. Not a cent was paid. Who was going to make them?

A more recent example is the reaction to the ICJ ruling that Israel has a case to answer that it is commiting genocide in Gaza. The instant reaction from the US and its allies was to defund UNWRA on the back of unsubstantiated accusations from Israel that some of its workers took part in Oct 7th. That is a direct act of collusion in the attempt to starve Palestinians, and two fingers up to the formal structures of international law.

So, the failure of these interventions were a blow to Western hegemony. As Tom Tugendhat put it after the Afghan withdrawal “This feels like defeat”. But, in a quick pivot, Lammy asserts that Western standing was also damaged by the failure to intervene in Syria, or take a harder line in Ukraine in 2014.

What Lammy is describing here, without thinking it through, is that whatever the “West” does, deepens its crisis. It loses ground when it doesn’t intervene, causes chaos when it does.

Pursuing War not Peace in Ukraine

This is demonstrably the case in Ukraine. The West is supporting Ukraine like a rope supports a hanging man. The country is being destroyed. More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died so far. A great investment according to David Cameron, as “not a single American life has been lost”.

If their concern were genuinely with peace and security in Europe, NATO would at least have been prepared to negotiate with Russia about mutual security arrangements in the Winter of 2021. Instead, we had a hubristic refusal to engage to ease off tensions, which has led to the war which NATO is now visibly losing, amidst appalling casualties and damage.

The sanctions against Russia have failed. Most of the world does not support them, because, as Lammy notes, they see the conflict as between “the West vs the rest”; and have long experience of not being “at the table” with the US, and therefore being “on the menu”, as Antony Blinken put it recently. And they are no longer so securely under the West’s thumb.

Lammy’s support for military “burden sharing” for “as long as it takes to secure victory” is hard to square with any notion of “realism” if “victory” means Ukraine reconquering parts of its pre 2014 territory which actually see themselves as Russian. Even people who consider that to be desirable, have a hard job arguing that its possible. Phrases like “once Ukraine has prevailed” are evidently hollow.

Instead of looking to a peace agreement, as outlined here, that would allow all people in all parts of Ukraine to live in the state they wish to, secure neutrailty and reduce military tensions across the continent, Lammy argues for a “long term generational response” to the “Russian threat”. Again, this is playing on fantasies, as NATO at present already spends more than eleven times as much as the Russians do on its military. That looks like this.

Total military spending 2024

The NATO bloc on this is approprately reminiscent of Pacman, and should probably have teeth drawn on it

What Lammy is proposing is a long term “generational” increase in the military industrial complex and militarisation of society, with some military sources floating the reintroduction of conscription, at a time in which the “realism” of the Treasury team will impose freezes and austerity on everything else.

The (Republican) Elephant in the room

Lammy’s argument for closer links with EU powers, and bilateral pacts to supplement NATO, are the only hint of the nervousness that all the Labour front bench feel that they could be coming into power at the same point that Donald Trump takes back possession of the White House.

Its not surprising that Lammy – with stopping climate change one of his progressive aims – does not explore this possibility; as the US under Trump would go full rogue state on climate change, pull out of the Paris Agreement like they did before and “drill, drill drill” – with an overall impact of an additional 4 billion tonnes of CO2 released by the US the end of his second term. This would make a 1.5C limit completely unachievable, and the damage globally would be horrific.

Lammy, as potential Foreign Secretary would therefore either have to straddle an impossible contradiction in which the main perceived “threat”, China, was investing in the necessary transition, while the “foundation of UK security”, the US, was sabotaging it. As he says, “no country can go green without cooperation”. So, who would he seek to cooperate with? He could only resolve this contradiction by dropping concern with climate change and playing down its significance so as not to upset the “special relationship”, or break with US policy in pursuit of the only realistic understanding of its consequences. It might be argued that Labour’s downgrade of its $28 billion green investment pledge is a pre emptive move to anticipate a Trump Presidency, not just pusillanimity in the face of Neanderthal Tory attacks. This is a concrete choice that has neither “moral purpose” nor “realism”.

Palestine, Ukraine and the Wars for the New American Century.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A recent article on Labour Hub tries to link the struggle in Gaza and the war in Ukraine as parallel “struggles for self-determination”; not noticing that one struggle (Gaza) is in resistance to the US centred global imperial system, the other (Ukraine) is a struggle to join it as an auxiliary ally.

People in the Palestine Solidarity movement have strongly felt and taken note of the difference in the response from Western governments to these “struggles for self determination”.

  • The flags of Ukraine and Israel have both been flown on public buildings, head teachers and college principals have been told by the DFE to “stand with Israel”.
  • Palestinian flags – and Keffiyas – have been denounced as “threatening”, or “symbols of terrorism” or “hate” and children drawing flags on their hands or wearing badges in schools have been referred to Prevent. This has become increasingly shrill as the movement has grown and public sympathy for the Palestinians has grown with it.

Like many similar articles, this one has two glaring pieces of disavowell at the heart of it – a selective approach who who is entitled to self determination and a failure to take account of the very active role of the United States and NATO – and a logic that leads those sections of the labour movement who support their line to end up campaigning for the rearmament and militarisation drive that our ruling class is determined to push, even as our societies crumble for want of invetsment and fail to rise to the challenge of climate bteakdown.

All peoples are entitled to self determination, but some are more entited than others.

If a struggle for “self determination” is based on denying that right to another people, it has no leg to stand on. The Palestinian struggle, including the way it is defined in the revised Hamas Charter (2017) is against Israel as a racist state, not against the Jewish population, in the same way that the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was a struggle against the state, not white people as such.

The dominant, far right, form of Ukrainian nationalism, however, denies the national rights of Russian citizens and heroises historic figures like Stepan Bandera, a recruiting seargent for Nazi concentration camp guards. The US and NATO are quite comfortable with this, but no one on the Left should be.

In this Labour Hub article, like so many others, the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine is ignored. Its as if they don’t exist, didn’t rebel in 2014 against the overthrow of a government they’d voted for, and weren’t bombed and shelled indiscrimately by the Ukrainian armed forces from then onwards. At most they are posed as “Russian proxies” with “no interests of their own”; just as Ansar Allah in Yemen is belittled as “Iranian proxies”. This writes them out of history just as surely as the Israelis would like to do to the Palestinians, who are still described in some quarters there as “not a people”.

As this statement from No Cold War – The War in Ukraine must end – points out; A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.

All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.

A “self determination” that denies the national rights of a large minority and denies it equality before the law within the area controlled by an ethnically defined state sounds a lot like Israel – a living expression of Marx’s dictum that “a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”. Not something any Socialist should be defending.

The limits of geopolitical Flat Earthism

Its important also to grasp the broader geo political context of these wars in a way that makes sense of both of them. This is because articles like this one reflect a widespread view on the left in the Global North that the world is geopolitically flat. That every country is capitalist. That there is no structure to global imperialism.

This is profoundly disorienting and can lead to the same people challenging the dominant narrative coming from our own ruling class on Gaza, while actively repeating it over Ukraine.

This is inherently distorting for any accurate understanding of whats going on; especially if you fall for, or worse, promote the sort of manichean propaganda that the Russians (or Hamas) are all evil, murdering rapists, while butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of the Azov battalion or the IDF.

The bottom line on this is…

Who is threatening whom?

In the case of the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, from 2008 to 2023 there were 319 Israeli deaths and 6,779 Palestinian deaths; thats a ratio of 21 Palestinians to 1 Israeli before Oct 7th and the ensuing IDF offensive.

That looks like this.

With 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and 235 since, and over 29,500 Palestinians killed in the Gaza strip and another 399 in the West Bank thats a ratio of more than 24 to 1.

That looks like this.

The balance of threat and the balance of death in this conflict is obvious and evident; and needs smoke screens of indignation to try to obscure it.

As there are millions of people in this country who feel a connection with the Palestinians, and have sources of information outside the establishment media, it has been impossible to control this narrative, to allow Israel to get on with what its doing with no scrutiny, and this is rebounding on the government and opposition, both now forced to oppose an IDF attack on Rafah and in some disarray. As there is no such community here with any links in the Donbass, even the existence of Russian speakers in eastern Ukriane is barely known about, let alone understood, and the narrative has been much more tightly controlled.

And, as the war in Ukraine is now being visibly lost by NATO, we are back to the sort of over heated rhetoric that was common two years ago – that NATO is an essentially defensive alliance needed to stop the Russians steamrollering over Europe.

This argument is politically absurd. Taking control of a continent would require a political project that could hold the allegiance of enough of the people who live there for it to be viable. It is not simply a technical military exercise. Russia does not have such a project. It has the military capacity and the political pull to absorb Russian speaking parts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and thats it. Even taking over the Western parts of Ukraine has been described as like “swallowing a porcupine”; let alone anywhere else.

Even if it could be reduced to the level of technical military capacity, the threat is actually in the opposite direction.

In 2023, NATO countries spent $1,100 billion on their militaries. Russia spent $100 billion.

This uses NATOs own figures for its spending. Monthly Review has assessed that US spending is actually about double the amount claimed.

That imbalance looks like the graph above and shows the absurdity of NATOs claim to be both defensive and worried about the potential of being attacked by a power with less than a tenth of its strength. The Russians however, clearly have every reason to be worried about what NATO wants all that expenditure for; especially as it conducts annual “war games” in Eastern Europe practicing for a war with them.

It was fear of that threat, and the failure of NATO to even negotiate about it, which led to the current phase of the war in Ukraine.

Two phases of the wars for the New American Century.

The global context for this is that, for the first time since 1871, we are living in a world in which the United States is no longer the largest economy. China already is in Purchase Power Parity terms; and at current growth rates is likely to overhaul the US in Current Exchange Rate terms before 2030.

The “unipolar moment” and “end of history” is long gone. This analysis of the structure of global imperialism by the Tricontinental Institute goes into this in immense detail and is essential reading. Its core point is that the US has integrated the Global North into a subordinate imperial economic bloc and set of military alliances, but its decline is leading to increasing challenges from a far more diverse set of regimes in the Global South, with China as the core; and China’s highly succesful Socialist economic model at the heart of it. Those who disagree with this definition of China nevertheless have to acknowledge its success, and perhaps concede that that’s how the Chinese themselves define their society. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

In its resistance to its slipping domination, the USA threatens the end of humanity because, with its primacy in capital formation, production and trade gone, financial control and technological lead slipping, the US is trying to push the challenges it faces increasingly onto the military field; which it still believes that it can dominate. That is what makes our current decade the most dangerous in the whole of human history.

The first stage of the wars for the New American Century, the War on Terror after 9/11 2001, was directed at weak powers that the US could overwhelm, killing 4.5 million people according to Browns University, but nevertheless ending in defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; and chaos in Libya. This was when they thought they could incorporate China into their world order.

The second phase, now they know that they can’t, threatens to be worse, and could kill all of us, with a nuclear first strike an active part of US war planning.

This is where the tension in the world is coming from. This is who is driving it.

There is an argument within the US ruling class between those who think that it has to take Russia on first before it can get on to the confrontation it wants with China – the position of the Biden administration and more traditional Republicans – and those, like Trump, who think they might be able to get Russia onside against China. Putin’s response of ridiculing questions on these lines from Tucker Carlson in his recent interview, shows that this is wishful thinking on Trump’s part.

The second phase

The US and its allies have now crossed the security red lines of a nuclear armed power (Russia) in Ukraine, and have fuelled the attempted genocide in Gaza; because they have to be seen to be able to impose their will.

  • The US has repeatedly vetoed ceasefire motions for Gaza in the UN Security Council.
  • Russia and China have voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the world majority, in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
  • In General Assembly votes, Ukraine has been among the tiny minority who have voted with the US against a ceasefire.

Israel and Ukraine are both using weapons supplied by the US. Neither could pursue their war without them.

  • The US signed up to provide $38 billion in military aid to Israel between 2016 and 2026, and additional aid has gone in since October 7th.
  • It has gave Ukraine £113 billion between 2022 and September 2023, with more on the way.

The US is intervening in and arming both in its own interests. The Israelis are already an established US attack dog and the Ukrainian regime aspires to be; and has been playing that role since 2014.

A “Big Israel” in Eastern Europe

The forces the US is supporting – or using – in each war are the same sort of ethno nationalists with far right backing.

Netanyahu has Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalal Smotrich. Zelensky has the Right Sector and the Azov battalion.

Just to dispell any doubt, speaking in April 2022, President Zelensky was very clear that he wanted Ukraine to be “a big Israel” in Eastern Europe. A country where there were “soldiers in cinemas and supermarkets” and “people with weapons”, not a “liberal European” state at all.

This vision was eagerly and approvingly embraced by US commentators (its possible that they wrote it) because being like Israel is being a military frontier state for the US.

Israel has been the lynch pin of US domination of the Middle East. President Zelensky has volunteered his country to do the same in Eastern Europe.

The Left in NATO countries, marinading as we are in the ideological stomach juices of the belly of the beast, should never forget who our ruling class is.

NATO and other direct US allies – the world’s wealthiest countries – account for 75% of global military spending, are the core of global imperialism, organised as a coordinated bloc, with the US dominating its subordinate rivals.

Russia is not part of this bloc. It is a target for it.

Not recognising that NATO expansion in Eastern Europe has predatory intent takes self delusion a little far. See the map displayed by Kyrillo Budanov, Head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence for the partition of Russia that this aims at if you have any doubts.

Climate Breakdown helps drive US brinkmanship

The accelerating breakdown of the climactic conditions for human civilisation adds urgency to the increasing US brinkmanship that we have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. To try to survive it with the current imbalance of global wealth and power intact requires catastrophic defeats to be imposed on the Global South, and any power not included in the US dominant bloc; in short order.

This can’t be kicked down the road anymore; hence the emergence of apocalyptic maniacs as mainstream political options for the ruling class – from Trump to Bolsonaro to Millais – and the increasingly unhinged quality of mainstream political debate.

Into the vortex of barbarism

We are spiralling into a vortex of barbarism in which light minded fools like Grant Shapps can float the possibility of nuclear war with “Russia, China, Iran, North Korea” and argue that we should arm even more to prepare for it; and this is repeated in a blase way by media talking heads as though this wasn’t suicidal insanity. A mainstream consensus urging us on to Armageddon stretches from the military itself – with former Generals calling for the UK to be put on “a war footing” and floating the idea of conscription – to Boris Johnson arguing in the Dail Mail that a Trump Presidency might be “just what the world needs” because of his “willingness to use force and sheer unpredictability” – to Timothy Garton Ash, arguing in the Guardian that Trump’s America First volatility gives Europe the opportunity to become a more serious military imperialism in its own right – to the Labour front bench, with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules mysteriously not applying to the large increases in military spending pencilled in by the Tories (in a country which already has one of the highest military spending burdens in the world).

Supporters of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign like Paul Mason are following the logic of their support for NATOs war aims by arguing, in his case, that the investment needed to combat climate change cannot be afforded because “the cost of borrowing has increased”, but at the same time saying that the UK should follow the US and EU in using debt to finance arms spending. Suicidal logic.

The whole labour movement should be pushing in the opposite direction.

No ifs, no buts…why the trade union movement should stand for peace in Ukraine – a reply to Gary Smith

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

However one views Russia’s invasion, to support pursuit of the war by Kyiv until victory, until all lost territory has been regained, and to call for Russia’s strategic defeat—the current position of that regime, supported by the US and NATO—is to support a profoundly criminal policy, since the goal is unrealisable. Its pursuit will not change the outcome of the war but will continue to destroy Ukraine. David Mandel

Gary Smith’s argument on Labour List, written under the pressure of a critique from Stop the War’s Andrew Murray, starts with the resounding phrase “Solidarity should know no borders”.

One border that he doesn’t acknowledge is the one that has run in blood across the Donbass since the Ukrainian Air Force bombed Donetsk City in May 2014. This followed a popular insurrection in the East of the country against the Maidan coup, because it overthrew a President they had voted for, with the help of the US and EU with an increasingly influential role being played by the local far right.

Gary Smith simplistically sees this as a “Russian occupation”. His attempt to explain away local support undermines his entire stance, however. He is AGAINST a local referendum in Crimea and Donbass, to determine whether the people who live there wish to revert to Ukraine or remain in the Russian Federation, on the grounds that there has been an exchange of population since 2014. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that some of the people who have moved into the Russian zone since the start of the war have been refugees from Western Ukraine. Russian speaking people who felt under threat or out of sympathy with the Ukrainian nationalist form of the oligarchic regime in Kyiv. Early in the war, there were convoys of cars trying to get out of Western Ukraine to get to the Russian zone. Some of them were shelled. He also doesn’t note that a third of the refugees from the war overall have fled to Russia itself, which is the largest single destination country.

He uncritically repeats lurid propaganda that a policy of evacuating civilians from war zones -as the Russians have done – amounts to “abduction”. It seems odd to argue that children in an orphanage, for instance, should be left in a zone that is being shelled and fought over by both sides. Better to get them out, surely? He does not note that when Russia evacuated Kherson last Autumn, a majority of people chose to leave, but those hostile to them stayed; and were allowed to do so; which would not be the case if they were being “abducted”. Hopefully he does not agree that keeping them in situ to act as human shields for military installations – as Amnesty International noted the Ukrainians were doing – is somehow acceptable because its them doing it.

Overall however, opposing a referendum – giving the people a choice – shows that he knows that the reversion to Ukraine would lose in these areas. There are good reasons for that. Even if you think the referenda held by the Russians last Autumn in Donbass, and in Crimea in 2014 had no significance, people in Donbass have been fighting the Ukrainian army since 2014. 50,000 of them are in the Donbass militia. Dontesk city has been shelled almost every day for nearly ten years. There is no love lost on either side of this border. It is also stated in terms by the head of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, Kyrillo Budanov, that the people in Donbass and Crimea have a “completely different view of the world” and will have to be “re educated” or “physically eliminated”. This is not, in his view, a liberation of a population oppressed by a Russian occupation, but a reconquest against the resistance of people who support it. Budanov is a serious man. We should take him at his word.

So Gary Smith’s view, and that of the GMB Motion, is that the determination of Ukraine’s future should be left in the hands of some of the pre 2014 population, but definitely not all of it. Self determination for the West. Forcible occupation and ethnic cleansing for the East. Not a position the TUC should support if we think that “solidarity has no borders”.

Gary Smith’s case relies on two gigantic false premises.

1 That it is a Russian war aim to conquer the whole of Ukraine and eliminate the Ukrainian nation. It isn’t. Occupation of the whole of Ukraine would be like “swallowing a porcupine” for Russia, as John Mearsheimer put it. Why would they want to do that?

Russian war aims have been quite clear from before the war started, and negotiating about them seriously in the Winter of 2021-2 could have averted the conflict.

  • They were initially to remove the military threat to the Donbass and allow it autonomy within Ukraine. 14,000 people had died in the conflict since 2014, most of them on the Donbass side of the line. Initially Russia didn’t even recognise the Donbass Republics, despite local pressure and pressure in the Duma from The Communist Party of the Russian Federation – the main opposition Party – to do so. The demands from Donbass itself to be absorbed into the Russian Federation were only accepted and implemented after 6 months of fighting and the failure of initial peace negotiations in May 2022 that are widely acknowledged to have been torpedoed by the US and UK.
  • Recognition of Crimea as part of the Russian Federation. This is overwhelmingly supported by the people who live in Crimea. For background see here.
  • A commitment from Ukraine not to join NATO. NATO is presented in the West/Global North as a defensive alliance, because NATO is the military expression of the Global North. Being a member if NATO is being part of a bloc of wealthy imperialist countries responsible between them for 62% of global military spending and whose core members, including the UK, are responsible for 4.5 million deaths in the war on terror over the last twenty years. It does not defend “democracy” it is an organisation to defend the Pax Americana, which is anything but peaceful for anyone on the receiving end of it. Every year, NATO conducts “war games” in Eastern Europe practising for a war with Russia. Locking in Ukraine, with a large army, swollen by Western finance and honed by Western training, spiced up by far right volunteers who see the Donbass as the front line of the war between (white) Europe and (untermensch) Asia would make such a war inevitable. The refusal of NATO to even negotiate on the Russian proposals for mutual security guarantees in the winter of 2021 -2, convinced them that this was the case.
  • A removal of far right (Banderite) influence on the Ukrainian state. This influence has been played down in the West for the last eighteen months, but it is pervasive. This goes a lot deeper than Azov battalion insignia. The wholesale glorification of Stepan Bandera, a man whose organisation provided a strong contingent of concentration camp guards, fought with the Nazis and killed 100,000 Polish villagers, as well as countless numbers of Jews, and the embedding of far right organisations and their mode of thought across the entire state is no trivial matter and reflects a wider rehabilitation of the far right increasingly pervasive in the Global North.

Supporters of the GMB motion should reflect on what, if anything, is wrong with any of these positions.

Is it desirable to glorify a Fascist movement as part of an attempt to build up national consciousness?

Is it desirable to be part of the world’s premier predatory imperialist alliance?

Should the people who live in Donbass and Crimea be forced to live in a state that is hostile to them and wants to ethnically cleanse them?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, then the GMB Motion can’t be supported.

2. Gary Smith does not acknowledge the role of NATO in general and the United States in particular in fomenting this conflict. The geo-political aim of the US since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been to “dominate the post Soviet space”. That means Eastern Europe, former Soviet Republics and, ultimately, Russia too. This goes along with breaking any relationship between countries in the EU and Russia that might threaten US dominance in Europe as a whole. That’s why they never agreed to any notion that Russia could join NATO – because the centre of military and economic gravity on the continent would be between Russia and Germany, and that would be hard for them to control. Blowing up the Nordstream pipeline is symbolic of this.

The United States is funding this war, and supplying the military equipment, satellite intelligence and propaganda mobilisation needed to keep it going. You’d have to have to have been paying no attention at all to the US record across the world in the last 150 years to have any delusion that this has anything to do with the rights or otherwise of Ukrainians. Senator Mitt Romney put it as cynically as you might expect “Supporting Ukraine weakens an adversary, enhances our national security advantage, and requires no shedding of American blood”.

On the principle that “he who pays the piper calls the tune” it would also be naive to assume that Kyiv has any weight at all in strategic decisions. A concern with “imperialism” that ignores the role and influence of the world’s dominant imperialism – and its local dominance inside Ukraine itself -is an attempt to blow smoke in our eyes.

The best traditions of international solidarity in the trade union movement are to stand up against the wars and exploitation visited upon the world by our own ruling class. The worst tradition is that of knowing our place, tugging our forelock, and going along with the foreign policy objectives of our own imperialism and its senior partner in Washington, in the hope that, loyalty will be rewarded with some crumbs from their table, like well paid manufacturing jobs in BAE systems perhaps.

The current course of the Kyiv government is to subject their people to self immolation at the behest of the US. This summary of how grim things are getting is from Dimitriy Kovalevich.

In Western media, the current conflict in Ukraine is often presented as a war between Western-style ‘freedom and democracy’ and Russian-style ‘authoritarianism and dictatorship’. We are told, furthermore, that such ‘freedom and democracy’ are represented by the governing regime in Kiev.

But this is a regime that has banned all men between the ages of 18 and 60 as well as women in certain professions from leaving the country. There is no free internal movement of citizens. The main exceptions to the prohibition on leaving the country are those unfit for military service, those fathers who have three or more minor children (all below the age of 16), and persons caring for people with disabilities. (The latter exemption only applies if there is no other family member to provide care.)

The regime, which came to power in a violent coup in February 2014, has long ago banned all left-wing political parties in the country, and since last year it has banned street protests and strikes. Also last year, it passed a law severely restricting the rights of trade unions. Ukraine was supposed to hold a legislative election this fall, but this has been postponed. (Elections are to take place in the Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine on September 8-10). For neoliberal capitalism, there can never be too many restrictions against freedom, nor can there ever be too much exploitation.

In early August, deputies of the Ukraine president’s ‘Servant of the People’ party in the national legislature (‘Rada’) introduced a bill that provides for the conscription of forced labor of all those who have not been conscripted to the armed forces. Formally free citizens who already cannot legally leave the country due to wartime restrictions will now also be subjected to forced labor.

There is also already a serious shortage of trained personnel in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of factory workers, skilled tradespeople, railway workers, drivers, and other equipment operators in agricultural industries, and on and on have been conscripted into the army. Many of them have died or been seriously injured in the futile attempts of Ukraine’s leaders and their Western patrons to storm the well fortified defensive lines of the Russian armed forces.

In addition, some eight million people have simply left the country during the past year and a half. Most of those have no wish or plans to return in any foreseeable future. Every day, Ukrainian border guards catch dozens of ‘conscription refugees’ at Ukraine’s borders. Sometimes, border officials use tracking drones generously provided by the governments of the European Union and the United States. The unfortunates who are caught quickly find themselves in the trenches along the hundreds of kilometers of front lines separating Ukrainian and Russian armies.

‘Help wanted’ signs can be seen in Ukraine on many delivery trucks, at bus stops, and in front of supermarkets. Orderlies and drivers, construction workers and packers read the signs, are “urgently needed for work”.

Although Ukraine is the poorest country on the European continent, many people are not eager to rush into a job. Since the beginning of the year, company managers are obliged to hire employees only after receiving formal approval from the local military conscription office. Thus, a man who applies for an advertised job as a driver may well instead find himself in the trenches, facing minefields and deadly Russian defensive positions. Meanwhile, his former employer will be back on the hustings looking for a replacement driver.

Another factor weighing on the labor market in Ukraine is wage reductions of up to 50 per cent. Teachers are facing salary cuts as the 2023 national budget for public education in Ukraine has been downgraded from an initial 154 billion hryvnias to 131 billion  hryvnias (US$3.5 billion). That is less than the 2022 expenditure. In addition, most school districts rely on supplementary funding from local governments, and these funds, too, are being squeezed. As the Ukrainian news outlet Apostrophe explained in a report in late 2022, citing a teacher in Kiev named Oksana: “In Kyiv, the situation is more or less the same, although the allowances have been partially removed. But the situation elsewhere in Ukraine is really worse. In many cities and villages, teachers are receiving ‘survival’ salaries only, losing from 15 per cent all the way to 50 per cent of their income, depending on the state of local budgets.”

The report explains, “Educators receive money not only from the Ministry of Education and Culture but also from local budgets. But local budgets during the war have also shrunk significantly. According to a study by the Kyiv School of Economics, every fourth community under [Russian] occupation [control] has collected 50 percent less revenue compared to pre-war plans. Another two-thirds of communities outside the combat zone reported a decrease in income. It is clear that in such a situation when it is necessary to urgently address humanitarian issues, local authorities cannot pay pre-war salaries to teachers.”

This takes place as inflation is around 30 percent annually. Wages in Ukraine today barely cover the cost of basic food. For these reasons and more, many workers retreat into the shadows and choose to work illegally, many in multiple jobs if possible.

Last year, Ukrainian authorities tried to solve their labor shortage problems by tapping into the large pool of the unemployed. The unemployed who were officially registered were sent into military zones to clear rubble, cut down trees, build shelters, etc. This is hard physical work, often located near the front lines. This initiative was labeled an ‘Army of Reconstruction’, but many people responded by simply stopping to register as unemployed. After all, unemployment benefits have also been cut in Ukraine. Today, the average benefit hovers around the equivalent of US$27 per month. The maximum benefit rate is $180 per month, but this is only good for three months.

Food prices in Ukraine are already higher than in Russia and EU countries, from where most food supplies in Ukraine come.

Simply put, Ukraine is gradually introducing a system of slave labor – people must work to meet basic food needs, but they work for steadily shrinking salaries and benefits. Western media is silent about all this ...

The new draft law on the mobilization of workers is intended to “ensure the functioning of the national economy under martial law”, in the words of those drafting the law. It is noteworthy that in early August, Ukraine began to talk about a likely ban against military conscripts leaving the country for three years following an eventual end to military hostilities and martial law. Just such a proposal was recently made by Vadym Denysenko (and here), head of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future and a former advisor to the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Denysenko said, “I am sure that even after the war it will be necessary to extend the ban on men traveling abroad for at least another three years. Otherwise, we simply will not survive as a nation.”

Earlier, Denysenko’s Ukrainian Institute for the Future published data on population numbers in Ukraine. Since the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine 18 months ago, some 8.6 million citizens have left the country and not returned. Of the 29 million citizens remaining in the country, no more than 9.5 million are working. State-financed jobs excluded, there are some six to seven million workers earning salaries. Ukraine began its path to post-Soviet ‘independence’ in 1991, with a population of 52 million. The population numbers have been steadily declining ever since due to mass emigration.

At the same time, the fertility rate of the country has fallen below one. To ensure stabilisation and a small increase of the population, the fertility rate should be more than 2. But the Institute says the average fertility rate is 0.7 children per couple. It also cites analysts who project that the number of pensioners in Ukraine in the coming years will be double the number of working-age citizens.

Vadym Denysenko is partly right in the sense that millions of Ukrainian men would no doubt rush abroad were borders to be opened. The wives and children of many of them have already been living abroad for year and a half. Many would leave in search of better wages and in order to escape the mousetrap that Ukraine has become.

Denysenko’s proposal is not at all appreciated in Ukraine. It is viewed as a return to slavery and serfdom. Of particular note is that his Ukrainian Institute for the Future is a neoliberal think tank funded by right-wing think tanks in the West, including the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States.

This idea of prohibiting Ukrainian citizens from leaving the country even after the end of hostilities stems, in part, from the fact that Ukraine is now heavily indebted to Western governments and financial institutions. Repayment with interest can only be guaranteed through the merciless exploitation of the Ukrainian population. To achieve that, it is necessary that the population be denied the option of running away from something rightly perceived as something resembling slavery or medieval serfdom.

In July 2023, the foreign exchange reserves of the National Bank of Ukraine grew by 6.9% to $41.7 billion, the highest monthly increase since 1991. However, the largest share of the increase came not from economic growth and increased export revenues but from international assistance to the tune of $4.7 billion. Most of that comes in the form of loans from the European Union, the United States, Japan, the IMF, and the World Bank, to be repaid in the future.

Bloomberg News reported on July 24 that Ukraine needs to bring back 2.8 million of its women citizens from abroad in order to have a chance at economic recovery following the end of military hostilities. According to one expert Bloomberg interviewed, if only half of the women return, this would cost Ukraine 10% of its GDP by 2032, on the order of $20 billion per year. Such losses will far outweigh the EU’s proposed four-year aid package to Ukraine in the amount of $14 billion per year.

According to a recent estimate by the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy, Ukraine will need to attract an additional 4.5 million workers to the labor market over the next ten years. But at current wage levels, people are more likely to leave the country than to stay and work.

Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko wrote on her blog earlier this month, “At the end of the war, a huge number of people will still leave. Ukrainians will be scattered all over the world, like the Roma people, for example.” She has been forced to flee Ukraine due to her writings critical of the government. She also noted in her blog post that, according to UN statistics, most Ukrainians who have left the country have settled in Russia. “It is not customary to talk about this in Kyiv, and the reason for that is clear.”

Answering a reader asking when the refugees could return to Ukraine, the journalist replied that, in her opinion, it would not be soon, the war could last a long time. Clearly, this will not help boost population growth. And how will it all end? Few in Ukraine can openly say this, but, according to Panchenko, “Ukraine has already lost – we have no economy and, even worse, we have no sovereignty. Today, we simply depend on what the West says. We have lost our identity.”

At the end of July, Ukrainians were also apprised of a stunning proposal that the working week may be increased to 60 hours, consisting of six days of work at ten hours per day or five days at 12 hours. At least, that is the idea published by the Eastern interregional office of the State Service of Ukraine on Labor Issues. The duration of weekly, uninterrupted rest would be reduced to 24 hours, that is, Ukrainians will have only Sunday as a day of rest from work. This idea would first be implemented in enterprises working in critical infrastructure or “defense”. The increase in the work week is said to be required by the shortage of workers and the need to constantly repair energy infrastructure.

As it stands presently, employers often exploit Ukrainian workers beyond the norms that would be established by this law. Recently, this same State Service of Ukraine on Labor Issues was approached by an employee whose employer set the rest period for the preceding month as only one day every three weeks and the duration of the shift as 12 hours. The employer claims that such a schedule will be in effect until the end of the year because, during martial law, the number of overtime hours required to work can be unlimited.

Thus, for the average Ukrainian, the Western values of freedom and democracy are turning into an unprecedented neoliberal experiment to abolish all labor rights and implement something resembling slavery. Measures to force Ukrainians to ‘fight or work’ are presented as a triumph of oft-spoken “European values”.

In the future that Ukrainian politicians and their Western advisors and think tanks are preparing, many Ukrainians will work up to 12 hours a day with few days off, earning less than a minimum subsistence salary. They won’t dare flee their country because the consequences of being caught could easily become deadly.

A prolonged war will make all of this worse. A fig leaf conscience clearing clause in a TUC Motion claiming to oppose this will have no weight at all in the situation. The only thing that could make a difference is for the war to end. And the path to that is not through a military victory for NATO with Ukrainians doing the fighting and dying, Even if you think this might be desirable, it isn’t possible so the attempt to pursue it becomes an act of futile cruelty.

As David Mandel puts it

… the most condemnable policy is surely to keep the war going when there is no hope that continued fighting will improve the outcome for Ukrainian workers and related popular groups. That is precisely the policy of the US, NATO and Kyiv. Biden stated clearly that he would not pressure the Ukrainian government—in private or public—to make any territorial concessions.

One need not be a military expert to see that there is not the slightest prospect that Ukraine can regain its lost territory, or possibly even avoid losing more, through continued military action, unless, of course, NATO forces directly enter the war—a move that would threaten the world with nuclear Armageddon. This was evident to objective observers from the very first moment of the war, even to the New York Times, which a month into the war admitted that the US goal was to pull Russia into a quagmire.

Continued pursuit of war will bring only more death and destruction to the people of Ukraine. At one point, that was admitted even by the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who called for a negotiated settlement and was duly instructed to shut up. And if anyone still nurtured illusions, the current Ukrainian “counteroffensive,” whose inevitable failure was obvious to any objective observer, should have finally dispelled them.

However one views Russia’s invasion, to support pursuit of the war by Kyiv until victory, until all lost territory has been regained, and to call for Russia’s strategic defeat—the current position of that regime, supported by the US and NATO—is to support a profoundly criminal policy, since the goal is unrealisable. Its pursuit will not change the outcome of the war but will continue to destroy Ukraine. Territorial compromise is inevitable, if the war is not to go on forever, a prospect that some elements in Washington and Kyiv, in particular the latter’s neo-Nazi elements, who have gained much influence thanks to the war, are apparently prepared to contemplate.

War and Peace: Points of Information for TUC delegates on the GMB Motion on Ukraine.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

These are pictures of children killed by the almost daily Ukrainian Army shelling of Donetsk City since 2014 on display in the Arbat in Moscow. There are more than 300 of these children. They are not reported here. The GMB Motion writes them out of history. Photo: Dan Kovalik

When you think through what it says, it becomes clear that support for the GMB Motion to the TUC on the Ukraine war means support for two things that contradict everything the trade union movement stands for.

1. The ethnic cleansing of the Donbass and Crimea

2. An unlimited commitment to a war without end and/or an escalation which could lead to a nuclear confrontation that will kill all of us.

To be precise about it:

1 Ethnic Cleansing

The Motion’s point 1 calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014 is not compatible with point 3, calling for a peaceful end to the conflict that secures the territorial integrity of Ukraine and carries the support of the Ukrainian people. This is because it eliminates the people of the Donbass and Crimea from the narrative. As we can see from the image above, this is because there has not been one undivided “Ukrainian people” since 2014.

There has been a civil war.

The success of the Maidan movement in 2014 in overthrowing President Yanukovych, backed by the US, EU, finished off any chance of sustaining the binational state in Ukraine balanced between Russia and “the West” that had been viable until then. The people of the Donbass and Crimea rebelled against the overthrow of a President they had voted for. The decision by the new regime in Kyiv to repress them by force was prevented in Crimea by a popularly supported Russian annexation, but the bombing of Donetsk City by the Ukrainian Air Force in May 2014 began a civil war that had already cost 12,000 lives before the Russian intervention in February 2022.

This eye witness account of that day from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site is from EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher:

“At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk.

I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre.

And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then.

And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter.

People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people.

This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return. (My emphasis).

Were Kyiv a regime that was a target for the US rather than an auxiliary, does anyone doubt that this action would have been universally condemned in our media as that of “a regime that bombs its own people”?

As a result, 50,000 people from Donetsk and Luhansk have been fighting the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbass militia since then. They see themselves as Russians, not Ukrainians. The demand of the Donbass Republics from 2014 onwards was to be incorporated into the Russian Federation, on the same lines as Crimea was in 2014. And that has now happened.

So, for the people who live there, the Russian troops are not occupiers, they are their army. The restoration of the 2014 borders would be over their dead bodies, or see them made refugees. Delegates should note that a third of the people who have fled the fighting have fled to Russia (the largest single destination of any country).

The threat of ethnic cleansing in Crimea and Donbass is not a claim by RT or a “Putin talking point”. It is what the Ukrainian leadership say themselves.

In this interview with Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military Intelligence, is quite clear about what would happen if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in). He is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”.

Budanov states that people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be; without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses “for people with blood on their hands”; so, anyone who fought in the militia. He says that this will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work”.

Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.

If the people who live in the Crimea and Donbass are to be counted as part of “the Ukrainian people”, their wishes have to be taken into account in any settlement. The imposition of the 2014 territorial borders on them, as this motion advocates, is incompatible with a “peaceful end to the conflict” capable of carrying the support of ALL of the people of pre 2014 Ukraine.

So, the Motion should be rejected on this basis alone.

2. War without end – or to an end for all of us?

Even if you discount those people and their rights, committing to continue or escalate the war until they are crushed, if it is to be taken as meaning what it says, also has to take into account the costs of doing so. There are two levels to this.

1 Crimea

Actually trying to reconquer Crimea, as opposed to engaging in rhetoric about it, is seen by US military thinkers as being likely to cross Russia’s nuclear red lines.

So, support for this motion as it is written means being prepared to risk doing that .Supporters of the Motion should think through what that means.

The danger here is not simply what the Russians would do in this scenario, but what the Americans think they might do; and therefore what action they would take themselves.

If they suspect the Russians might launch nuclear weapons, there is no limit to how rapidly this could escalate. That’s the case even if the minimum gesture were initially deployed – like the sort of very high altitude explosion above the battlefield that NATO envisaged using as an initial warning shot above a conventional Warsaw Pact break through into central Europe during the Cold War. Even in that sort of case, is hard to imagine that NATO response would be to back off. Games of military chicken tend to escalate, especially with no time to find a mutually face saving climb down, and, with the only acceptable political leaders people who are “prepared to press that red button” we would all be standing on very thin ice indeed at that point.

And, if the the threshold were to be crossed, you have to recognise that US nuclear war fighting doctrine is based on an all out “first strike” to prevent retaliation. Which means acting fast, which makes anyone in its sights doubly nervous. As the Russians have over 3,000 nuclear missiles dispersed all across their territory, such a first strike would have to be huge, widespread and comprehensive. It would also have to smash cities, to knock out control and command centres. As long ago as the early 1960s, the Pentagon’s estimate of the impact of such a strike would be that it would immediately kill upwards of 600 million people, many of them “collateral damage” in nearby countries.

That’s bad enough, but studies done in the 1980s showed that a strike on that scale would cause a “nuclear winter”, as debris from city wide firestorms would be flung too high into the atmosphere to be rained out, thereby blocking sunlight and causing a catastrophic drop in global temperatures by up to 10C; devastating plant life and therefore harvests for years. It would therefore be suicidal for all of human civilisation; even if they got away with it and there were no direct retaliation. This is explored in depth here.

So, there are two reasons why Crimea should not be forced back into Ukraine and therefore the Motion should be rejected.

1 The people who live there don’t want it to happen.

2 The attempt to do so could lead to a nuclear war that will kill most, if not all, of us.

2 Donbass

The first reason also applies to the Donbass. The second may not. But, even if it doesn’t, the costs in men and material of trying to reconquer it are and will be appalling.

The current Ukrainian offensive is effectively stalled. Thousands of men have been killed to regain villages in no man’s land that barely approach the main Russian defences. A large proportion of the “game changing” NATO supplies of Leopard tanks and Bradley armoured vehicles have been destroyed in the attempt.

At the moment, the Kyiv government is launching a further mass conscription drive. Men from 18 to 60 have not been allowed to leave the country, and they can be called up at any time. Many are actively reluctant and are having to be effectively press ganged to fight. Kyiv has just banned 16 – 18 year olds form leaving the country too, indicating that they too may be called up. A truly horrific prospect.

Even with mass conscription on this scale, the prospect of “winning” is nil. The prospect of thousands and thousands more men dying is certain.

That is what supporting a continuation of the war amounts to.

Another reason for the Motion to be rejected.

We need a peace deal instead that will save lives and respect the people on both sides of the Ukrainian divide, allow them to put their shattered lives back together; and both sides of the European divide too, as there can be no “just and enduring peace” without a mutual security arrangement that allows everyone to live without feeling threatened, and that has to include the Russians.

Smaller points

The Motion tries to make an analogy with support for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s without noting

a) that the internationalists who went to fight with the Republican side in Spain were from the trade union movement and the Left. Whereas a significant proportion of the people who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine since 2014 have been from the far right.

They look like this. Photo taken in November 2014 in front of Azov Battalion HQ in Mariupol featuring Oleg Pyenya, a volunteer who posted it on his VK page, who can also be seen here in front of another Nazi flag.

A further difference with Spain in the 1930s is that at that time the British government maintained an arms embargo against the Republic, which mostly received support from the Soviet Union. Today, the British government is very keen to supply Kyiv with arms, with BAE systems opening an office in Kyiv as it has, as the Guardian puts it “benefited from increased defence spending as a result of the conflict”. The United States moreover is spending almost as much on this war as it did when fighting directly for itself in Vietnam – which makes it the major protagonist, just using the Ukrainians to do the fighting.

NATO is not explicitly mentioned in the Motion, but no Motion concerned about “imperialist aggression” deserves support if it actively encourages its intervention, as this one does.

NATO is the military core of global imperialism, responsible for 62% of global arms spending (outspending the Russians by 19 to 1) and the deaths of 4.5 million people in the last 20 years of “war on terror”. It is not a defensive human rights organisation. Its refusal to even negotiate about mutual security arrangements with Russia led directly to the war, perhaps because it has a strategic aim to partition Russia into controllable fragments at the end of it.

b) The Motion argues that trade unions in Russia are banned; whereas there are 23 million trade union members there. The main Federation was considered an acceptable affiliate of the ITUC until it suspended itself in February 2022. The Motion also, however, notes that trade unions in Ukraine do not have “full …labour rights”. In fact, since 2014, Ukraine’s labour standards have diverged from compliance with the norms that would be required for EU membership; as more and more of the economy has been privatised, laws have been passed under the tutelage of the IMF and land has been bought up by Western agribusinesses like Monsanto. The reconstruction Plan for post war Ukraine hands the task over to Blackrock, which will sell the country wholesale into a neo liberal dystopia.

For all these reasons the GMB Motion should be rejected.

A reconquest of Donetsk or Crimea by Kyiv backed by NATO, or NATO with Ukrainians doing the fighting, would require massive ethnic cleansing because the people who live there don’t want to be part of Ukraine.

Attempting to do it will cause hundreds of thousands more deaths or a risk of nuclear war.

The TUC should not cheer this on.

The West vs Russia – was it all inevitable?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This look at Mike Phipp’s review of Gilbert Achar’s The New Cold War- The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine, is because it represents an archetype of the thinking among sections of the Left that have fallen into becoming cheerleaders for NATO; despite their recognition that, as the author approvingly quotes Achar it “continues to push, global relations in the worst possible direction, (my emphasis) at a time when the world should be focused on fighting the greatest threats that humanity has ever faced short of a nuclear Armageddon—climate change and pandemics—as well as the socioeconomic consequences of global economic crises related to these same threats.” So should we all.

The title of the review is a belated acknowledgement by the author that this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine, but a war between Russia and “the West”. “The West” can be described in many ways. “Global North” is another label for it. The most developed, advanced, dominant countries in the world, united militarily in NATO with the United States at its core is another. And it is, indeed, pushing global relations in the worst possible direction. The tragedy of the position taken by the author is that the logic of it provides them with left cover to do so.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990, the way that pushing global relations in the worst possible direction manifested itself was a drive by the United States to “dominate the post Soviet space”. This is thoroughly documented, but the author ignores it because it is such a blatant move by the dominant global imperial power to extend its dominion eastwards; with the ultimate aim of control of Russia itself, “a gas station masquerading as a country” as Senator Lindsay Graham put it. Understanding this makes supporting NATO’s war aims under the guise of supporting Ukraine’s national self determination an unsustainable posture; therefore the only possible position is disavowal. Look right at it, and not see. Or try to talk it away…

So, let’s look and see.

Dominating the post Soviet space meant not only moving to absorb Eastern European members of the former Warsaw Pact into the USA’s political, military and economic orbit, but also breaking the USSR down into its constituent republics, and seeking to control the leadership in Russia while this took place.

By 1992, precursors to the neo cons, often with direct fossil fuel interests like Dick Cheney, argued for partitioning Russia into smaller parts immediately, the better to dominate it and, “get the gas”. This is now back on the agenda, both in Ukraine and the US. The more cautious heads, who won out in 1991, felt that this would lead to uncontrollable political and economic chaos that would be more trouble than it was worth, particularly with several thousand nuclear weapons in the mix. They went for holding the country together under the control of a biddable President (Yeltsin) while shock therapy shattered its economy and reduced it to its knees as a competitive power.

Politically, in Eastern Europe, this also meant disinterring old nationalist identities from the shadows that, in their rejection of a common Soviet past, celebrated collaborators with the Nazis as national heroes, particularly in Ukraine and the Baltic States.

Economically, as the author puts it, “The IMF-blessed economic reforms plundered the former USSR, wrecking the economy and impoverishing the mass of people” throughout the nineties. GDP declined 3% in 1990, 5% in 1991, 14.5% in 1992, 8.7% in 1993 and 12.7% in 1994 and didn’t recover sustained growth until 1999. Between 1988 to 1999 per capita income in Russia dropped from $3,777 pa to just $1,331 pa.

This also involved overt anti democratic action, backed by “the West”. Again, as the author puts it ” when the Russian parliament became a centre of opposition to the policy, the then President Boris Yeltsin dissolved it and ordered the military to shell the building in 1993″ killing 147 people and wounding 437, according to Yeltsin’s own officials. The anniversary of this event on October 4th passes in silence in the West every year. Hardly surprising as the US at the time praised Yeltsin’s “superb handling” of the situation.

It is evident that Western shock therapy could not be carried through without repression. The author puts this mildly. “There’s no doubt that the economic policies imposed on Russia by the West contributed significantly to this process.” Indeed.

But he then makes an arbitrary detachment of the military dimension of US policy “It’s less evident, in my view, that US-led military policies played the same role”, on the basis that “they did not impact on the life of ordinary people in Russia in anything like the same way as the economic destruction.” As if the military, economic and political dimensions of a single policy can be divided from each other. As if the economic destruction could have been guaranteed without the military threat of the US in the full flush of its unipolar moment. This serves a purpose because, if NATO expansion is conceded to be a real, and very widely understood, threat in Russia, the whole house of cards resting on the oft repeated phrase “unprovoked invasion” collapses.

Instead, the author spins his argument around speculation about how the rise of Vladimir Putin – as an embodiment of nationalist self assertion – might have been avoided. This implies that – far from being inherently locked into a push for its own dominance, the US could have applied a different policy, one that built up and integrated Russian into a “common European home” perhaps and, instead of shock therapy, applied a Marshal Plan to the “post Soviet space”. The implication of this is that he shares Gorbachev’s delusions about the nature of US imperialism. That it is possible that it could genuinely lead the world in the interests of anything other than its venal ruling class. As though the Marshal Plan itself were an act of selfless generosity, rather than a hard nosed intervention by the US to prevent Europe going Communist – reviving flattened European competitors to revive as the price paid – allowing Western European Social Democracy half a century of delusion that its welfare states were a tribute to its own strength and wisdom rather than the temporary price paid to stave off the red threat.

This gets quite surreal when discussing Putin’s proposal to join NATO in 2001. Nowhere does the author consider why the US turned this down. The clue is in Putin’s own statement, that “Europe (my emphasis) will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent centre of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defence potential.” A strengthened European pole inside NATO with Russia as a hefty and unshiftably consolidated component part is the last thing the US wanted then, and now, as it would put its own hegemony in Europe at risk.

But, not letting the Russians in, and continuing to expand NATO at the same time, while fomenting or taking advantage of political crises in Russia’s “near abroad” in Georgia and Ukraine particularly meant that Russia, with the 20 million dead from World War 2 seared into living memory, was bound to feel under threat. Because it was, in fact, threatened. It takes an extraordinary level of dulled empathy to ignore this; or treat it as some sort of irrational paranoia on their part – or attribute it to a personality defect on the part of President Putin – all of which have become articles of faith among these currents.

In presenting the “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine as “attempts to break free” the author swallows the US narrative whole. Becoming imperial junior partners of the United States is not the same thing as to “break free”.

His argument that local actors have agency – which they do – is presented as in itself a sufficient refutation of any notion that these movements were “Western orchestrated” or “designed to encircle Russia militarily”; as if all three can’t be true at the same time.

This is odd, because the author comes close to acknowledging the point when he states, “Equally, from the standpoint of the opportunities available to self-interested Western capitalism, any military or diplomatic arrangement with Russia which left the latter’s hegemony over these states intact would be less than satisfactory, especially given the exploitable, mineral-rich nature of some of them. If opportunities for a grand US-Russia rapprochement were missed, it was not accidental. (my emphasis)”. Quite so.

There is reckoned to be $12 trillion worth of rare earths and related minerals, most of it in the rebellious region of the Donbass; which “self interested Western capitalism” would like under its control, regardless of the rights or views of the people who live there.

The Maidan movement in Ukraine had popular support in Western Ukraine. The hegemonic political current within this is passed over without comment, the better not to acknowledge the strength of the far right. To do so is embarrassing, so best not. The US and EU were also active participants in the process, and the aim to pull Ukraine decisively into the Western orbit economically and politically, and to begin to pull it in militarily, had been part of the agenda since 1991. Not to acknowledge this is disavowal again.

What is even stranger about this is that the argument is completely inverted when it comes to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. When people there rebelled against the overthrow of a government they had, for the most part, voted for, their “local agency” is dismissed by the author’s camp as completely invalid, and reduced to them being simply Russian agents.

This is where the author’s central argument, that “for socialists, the central starting point is the human and social rights of the peoples in the states involved, which could not be sacrificed to great power bloc considerations” exposes itself as utter tosh. The human and social rights of the people of the Donbass, who rebelled against Kyiv in 2014 and have been shelled and bombed by the UAF daily ever since, and mobilised in tens of thousands into the Donbass militia, are ignored completely, of no account, dismissed, written out of history. Some people, it seems, are more equal than others.

Its also evident that Ukraine itself is part of the “post Soviet space” that the US and its allies were, and are, seeking to dominate. The impact since separation in 1991 has also been to wreck the economy. As Renfrey Clarke has noted “World Bank figures show that in constant dollars, Ukraine’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product was down from the 1990 level by 38 per cent. If we use the most charitable measure, per capita GDP at Purchasing Price Parity, the decline was still 21 per cent. That last figure compares with a corresponding increase for the world as a whole of 75 per cent.”

Even before the war, Ukraine had the worst death rate in Europe and was losing 600,000 young people to emigration every year. The country has been asset stripped at an increasing pace, especially since 2014, with Western agri-businesses buying up land, and the post war reconstruction deal aimed to be run by Blackrock seeking to recoup the debts Ukraine has run up to the West by acting as its henchman/military frontier state/ willing sacrificial victim. This is grotesque any way you want to look at it, and will be crippling, whatever the residual assets and territory controlled by Kyiv.

Self determination, it won’t be.

Ukraine Chief of Intelligence drops the mask on forcible reoccupation of Crimea and partition of Russia

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The 26th May is the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the shelling of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces in 2014. For the Donbass Ukrainians that opposed the new Maidan regime this event marked the point of no return. It followed the burning alive of the anti-maidan protestors in Odessa on May 2nd 2014 and Ukrainian forces trying to storm Mariupol that same week. The shelling has continued daily ever since, including today, killing several people. Yet, listen to the news here and there is silence about that. The casualties caused by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro were reported however, and President Zelensky’s comment that this showed the Russians to be “fighters against everything humane and honest” was not put in the context of what his own forces are doing. An enemy of the United States would be accused of “shelling his own people”.

Nevertheless, most people who support the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, or call for a Russian military withdrawal and restoration of the pre 2014 borders, sincerely assume that this would be a liberation for the people who live in the Donbass and Crimea; and that this is where the war would stop.

This interview with Kyrylo Budanov – the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (the GRU) – by a journalist who has been making a film supporting the Ukrainian war effort released last week, shows that the Ukrainian high command (and journalists) have no such delusions.

Budanov says a number of interesting things in this interview, some of them revealing, some quite far fetched. He is, after all, an intelligence officer, so he has access to a lot of information; but, as an intelligence officer, a large part of his job is to spin false but instrumentally useful narratives. He is also a firm believer in the notion that if you will something hard enough, it will come to pass and that Ukraine will “win”, despite their succession of grinding defeats since the new year and the terrible cost in lives that is the price of carrying on.

At the same time, he is secure enough in the presumed support of his audience to describe what the sort of victory he wants would look like. In the same way that the Guardian is now so sure of the allegiance of its readers to Ukrainian nationalism that they can reveal that, when collaborating with the Nazis in WW2, they killed around 100,000 Poles, a massacre described as “genocide” by the Polish government as recently as 2016.

In the interview’s final section, about what would happen in Crimea if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in) he is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”*. The interviewer uses the euphemism “three million not very devoted people” and Budanov states that those people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be – without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses elsewhere. This will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work” he says.

Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.

His comments at the end section about “a new security architecture in the world” are put in context by a section “About the Future of Russia” a little before this (at 32.45 minutes in). In this, the interviewer pulls across a map of the Russian Federation – “your famous map” with the partition borders – that Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski originally proposed back in 1991 as a way to manage the “Post Soviet space” most amenably for the US – drawn in in thick blue felt tip lines; remarking that “its been shown a lot”. Not in the media here it hasn’t. It might make people wonder a bit.

This isn’t Budanov’s map, but is similar. If you google US aim to partition Russia and click on images, you get a number of variations.

Budanov uses a number of euphemisms about “unanimous transformation” of Russia and the prospective partition being “conceptual”, and speculates that the more defeats the RF suffers the more it will break up, starting with the Caucasus. His confirmation, when discussing the prospect that “new states” will be imposed on the wreck of the RF that, “Russians are well aware of this” gives a tacit recognition that the Russian security concerns raised in the run up to February 24th were real and existential.

His statement “we don’t need Russia in the form that it exists now”, underlines this and, given where the partition plan originated, cannot be defined as defensive.

*If you want an insight into why the people in Donbass might have a “completely different view of the world” – which Budanov suggests is a result of “propaganda” – consider these personal accounts from the day the Ukrainian army started shelling Donetsk city on May 26th 2014. These are from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site.

Marina Kharkova: “May 25 was the last day of peace in Donetsk, as the family celebrated the birthday of my father, a miner. The mood was anxious, restless and tense because of the general situation, but nothing yet seemed to portend tragedy. On the morning of 26, on my way to work, I heard the sounds of flying planes and distant explosions. Everyone had gathered in the largest office and was listening to an employee who lived near the railway station. She cried and told how Ukrainian planes and helicopters had bombed from the air, how their nine-storey building on Privokzalnoye had been shaking, how women killed by shells were lying directly on the pavement bleeding, how the minibus she was travelling in had hurtled away from the danger zone. She sat in silence, clutching her heads, trying to comprehend. Tanya was given water and sedatives – she was so sick. Then, by inertia, they tried to get on with their business. The rumble outside the window increased, though the office was far away from the airport. Ambulances and cars with militia were whizzing down the street. After three in the afternoon everyone decided to stop their pointless attempts to pretend to be busy and drove home. The understanding of what was happening came at once, although the consciousness was still trying to cling to yesterday’s peaceful day. The 26th of May was the point at which “it will never be the same again”.

EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher: “At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk. I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre. And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then. And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter. People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people. This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return.

From the diary of a Donetsk woman who wanted to remain anonymous: 26 May 2014, from the balcony, I saw planes firing missiles. My husband, coming home from work, told me about the dead in the station square. At the same time as the airport was being bombed, the fighting moved into the city, on Kievsky Avenue linking the city and the airport. People who had lost their jobs or shelter, relatives or loved ones, went to volunteer for the militia. And every day there were more and more of them, including my acquaintances, as the war gradually touched everyone.

It is difficult to describe the sensations of trying to sleep to the sound of shelling outside your windows. The deafening and resounding explosions are somewhere close by. Your heart sinks each time, because no one knows where the next shell will land. But when you see the dawn, you realize that another night is behind you, all your loved ones are alive today.

In addition to the fighting at the airport and the aerial bombardment with unguided shells, Ukrainian snipers shelled the Putilovsky Bridge. This road was then called the “road of death”: civilian cars with people were burnt and shot, and in the Putilovsky Grove there lay the bodies of both civilians unluckily caught up in the active fighting and the militiamen trying to save people. For several days, the bodies were decomposing in the terrible heat: there was no opportunity to pick them up and bury them.

An ambulance was also shot up on the road to Donetsk airport. Its crew, Artem Kovalevsky, the ambulance driver, paramedic Sergei Kozhukharov and doctor Vladimir Vasilievich, miraculously survived and managed to get out of hell.

They told reporters from the local branch of Komsomolka in Donetsk how they managed to survive when Ukrainian snipers shot even those who had managed to run into the wooded area.

Victoria Sergeyevna, neurologist: I was on duty that day, the hospital was far away from the airport, but we all knew what was going on. In the evening, many people of different ages with strokes or suspected strokes were brought to our department. People’s chronic illnesses were exacerbated by the stress. The statistics of deaths from heart attacks and strokes during the war has increased dramatically compared to the peacetime. And these are also our victims of the war, just as innocent as the victims who died under shelling”.

Peace in Ukraine?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In a recent interview, President Zelensky said that unless Ukraine can hold Bakhmut, he will come under immense pressure, at home and abroad, to negotiate a peace with Russia. It is possible to interpret this in four ways.

1 Zelensky is trying to stiffen the resolve of the troops in Bakhmut, whose morale is low, after conceding inch after inch of ground and terrible losses, fully aware that they are virtually surrounded and after hearing for weeks and weeks about a relief counter offensive that never arrives.

2 He is putting pressure on NATO to up its military supplies, warning them that there is a limit beyond which the Ukrainian armed forces and people will no longer fight on their behalf.

3 He is giving himself an opening to go for such negotiations if Bakhmut does fall, to cut his country’s losses in all respects – as arguing for such negotiations in public hitherto has be tantamount to treason and people have been assassinated for doing so. It is of some significance in this context that, while the USA dismissed the Chinese Peace Plan outright, Zelensky didn’t.

4 He is doing all three at once.

A negotiated peace then is no longer unthinkable. Even his more recent statement that Ukraine would be willing to discuss the status of Crimea if the offensive that has been flagged up for the end of this month and start of May manages to get through to the Black Sea, underlines that negotiation over territory is not off the table. Obviously he does not talk about what will happen if the offensive is a debacle, but this would be a much bigger deal than simply losing control of Bakhmut, which is slowly happening.

Its evident that NATO has no end game beyond crossing its fingers and hoping for the best. Its military industrial complex isn’t designed around wars of attrition with an “almost peer” military.

  • It is designed to produce immensely expensive and complex weaponry requiring months of training to use and squads of maintenance crew to keep going. These are very profitable for its manufacturers and very effective in short wars in which any resistance is qualitatively outgunned. Not so much in this war, in which the capacity to mass produce shells is more decisive. So, all they can do is shovel in enough aid to keep the war going, but not enough to turn the tide.
  • With the sanctions only adopted by direct allies and having blown back hard on Europe primarily, their presumption that the economic war would do the job has failed.
  • The alternative, of decisive direct intervention would be World War 3 and we’d all die.

So, in the meantime, hundreds of men, mostly Ukrainians, are dying every day with no prospect of “winning”. While a reader of the Guardian here might well believe that the Russians have lost 200,000 troops, because they paper they (still) trust says so, the BBC Russian Service calculated just 10,002 killed by December last year, the Russians themselves say they have lost 14,000 and the Israeli Security Agency Mossad calculated 18,840 last month. With the US reckoning on at least 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed that’s a loss ratio of at least 5 to 1 that’s completely unsustainable. Something has to give. And in the interests of not throwing away more and more lives in a hopeless fight, the sooner the better.

The outlines of a possible peace are quite clear and very like the initial Russian call before last February. Demilitarisation of Ukraine – demobilisation of the army and redeployment in reconstruction – no membership of NATO, recognition that the areas that have seceded from Ukraine don’t want to be part of it and have as much right to join the Russian Federation as the West of Ukraine does to stay out of it and mutual security guarantees between Russia and NATO, to allow both sides to de-escalate and put scheduled expansions of military budgets to more constructive use. This will open a period of intense struggle in Ukraine and NATO countries, because the war will be seen to have been futile, the far right will cry betrayal and “stab in the back” resentments at NATO might well lead to all sorts of unpredictable blowbacks, and the reconstruction deal that Zelensky has agreed with Blackrock looks like creating a neo liberal dystopia. One motivation for trying to prolong the war on their part.

Those, in USC and elsewhere, who argue for the NATO/Kyiv war aim of restoring sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s pre 2014 borders and for “Russian troops out” are ignoring a political reality within pre 2014 Ukraine, which is that there has been a civil war there since the population of the Donbass rebelled against the overthrow of a government that they had voted for. There is no doubt that the Maidan movement in Kyiv had popular support in that part of Ukraine. It was also taken advantage of by the US and EU. And hegemonised by the far right. USC people tend to emphasise the first point and turn their eyes away from the latter two, but all three are true and have to be taken into account.

The rebellion against that in Donbass has been described like this in New Left Review. After the Maidan events “opposition to the new government was broad. In late February, some 3,500 elected officials gathered at an anti-Maidan conference in Kharkiv. The following day, the Kiev parliament repealed protections for Russian as a regional language. The anti-Maidan uprisings in Eastern Ukraine copied the Kiev model of occupying central squares and taking over government buildings. The security forces were also divided; in some areas the local police made no effort to stop the anti-Maidan protestors. In cities like Kharkiv or Odessa, Kiev’s authority prevailed. In hardscrabble towns like Donetsk and Luhansk, popular militias made up of miners, truck drivers, security guards and the local unemployed stormed the regional-administration offices and declared peoples republics…” In effect a parallel movement. Arguing for Ukraine’s right to self determination while denying it to the people of the Donbass is wilfully inconsistent.

The initial, rather cautious, Russian intervention that summer was to prevent this uprising being completely crushed by the Ukrainian army. The ensuing civil war killed over 14,000 people, mostly in the Donbass Republics, over 3,000 of them civilians.

They have a memorial garden in Donetsk City to all the children that have been killed by Ukrainian shelling. And these kids are just as dead as any killed in Western Ukraine. They won’t get the full Fergal Keane treatment on the BBC, but they are just as dead. While Donetsk holds these graves…

The Donbass militia, which is locally recruited and has done a lot of the front line fighting even after last February, is 44,000 strong. They see themselves as Russian, and, since the referendums last autumn (far from perfect though they were) see their land as part of Russia. Calling for them to “withdraw” is calling for them to leave their homes, dismiss their own right to self-determination and become refugees, alongside the 3 million or so others who have fled to Russia during the conflict – about a third of the total (and the largest single destination country). This would also apply to a large number of non-combatants. Given that the Ukrainian armed forces “cleanse” captured areas of “saboteurs and collaborators” and one senior politician has called for the local “Sovoks” to be put in concentration camps after “liberation”, a very large proportion of the local population would have to abandon their homes to keep safe. USC is actually calling for ethnic cleansing.

If you doubt that, here are some statements by leading spokespeople in Kyiv in an ongoing discussion about how Ukraine should reintegrate the territories lost after the Maidan. There are various perspectives on this, from the genocidal to the more precisely targeted. The solutions range from wholesale killing, driving out the local population in whole or in part, to filtration measures for the population to identify ‘agents’ and ‘proponents of the ‘Russki Mir’ ie pro Russians, more selective punishment for anyone associated with military resistance overarched by ‘cultural’ measures, re-education, re-naming everything, forbidding use of Russian and so on.

  • July 2014 – MIkhail Koval (Ukrainian Minister of Defence) states that special filtration measures are needed to ‘identify those linked to separatism’
  • August 2014 – Bogdan Butkevich (journalist) speaking on live TV states that Ukraine should free itself from ‘excess people’ in the Donbass and that ‘some people need to simply be killed’
  • In 2018 the Ministry of Interior under Avakov proposed a law on deoccupation and reintegration and a law on collaborators. These were passed in February that year. The laws effectively suspended citizenship to suspected ‘collaborators’ and denied them political rights, and provided almost unlimited powers to the military in the ‘liberated territories’
  • In 2019 Oleg Radik (journalist) wrote that ‘when we go in there, there’ll be 40 years of purges and anti-terror, a ban on the use of Russian by state officials. Close all the higher education institutions, let them study in Lvov.’
  • November 2020 the Prime Minister Denis Shmigal proposes Bill No.4 327 which allows the SBU to identify people to be {forcibly} interned by the military.
  • In March 2021 Alexei Reznikov (vice Prime Minister for the Temporarily Occupied Territories) discusses the removal (Otseleniya) of Russians in Crimea (some 500k people).
  • In August 2021 President Zelenskii told Donbass residents who think they’re Russian ‘to go to Russia’.


Daily life in wartime Ukraine – Ukraine Dissident Digest 3.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Every Month Ukrainian dissident blogger Dmitriy Kovalevich writes a summary of developments for the New Cold War website. The extracts here deal with everyday life and media and present a very different view from the one you will see on the BBC or read in the papers here.

The full version, entitled One year of the tragic proxy war being waged by NATO in Ukraine, which also covers the ‘Official’ deaths of the peace agreements of 2014 and 2015, Russian military strategy, a ‘Ukraine offensive’? and the Tense situation brewing over Moldova can be read here at newcoldwar.org.

The situation in agriculture and utilities

As the sowing season looms in Ukraine’s countryside, agricultural enterprises in all regions are complaining about the shortage of tractor drivers and other machine operators because so many workers have been taken for military service. Due to shortages of workers, fuel and fertilizers, Ukrainian experts predict a 40 per cent drop in wheat and corn yields this year, even if fighting were to suddenly stop.

Similar shortages of skilled workers are being experienced by the country’s utility companies. Hundreds of electricians, mechanics, cleaners and other vital workers have been taken into military service and there is no one to replace them.

The utilities are experiencing an acute shortage of skilled workers because their employees are being conscripted into in the AFU, they are hiding in their homes to evade military service, or they have succeeded in fleeing the country. Current law in Ukraine prohibits any male of the age of military service from leaving the country, and this is strictly enforced along the country’s borders.

Most Ukrainian towns outside of the front lines in the southeast of the country have not been hit particularly hard so far by military hostilities. On the other hand, there is a gradual degradation of infrastructure throughout the country and there is an ever-present danger of its collapse. 

“All business in Ukraine is close to being paralyzed,” writes the Ukrainian telegram channel ‘The Skeptic’. “Entrepreneurs are suffering huge losses. Several factors contribute to this, one of which is the shortage of male employees. Men are being taken from the streets by military conscription units and immediately shipped off to the front lines.”

The channel emphasizes that no economic recovery is taking place in real life. The prospect of recovery is only ‘announced’ by Ukrainian authorities from time to time when they decide it is a good moment to again plea to the West for more money. 

Daily life in wartime Ukraine

Thanks to a relatively warm winter, the energy situation for ordinary Ukrainians has improved in February. In most regions, shutting off of electricity has diminished and hot water supply has reappeared.   

Another issue is that despite relatively low gas and electricity prices (frozen during the current period of martial law), Ukrainians have nonetheless accumulated significant debts owed to utilities. Russia has cancelled such debts in regions that have come under its control and is promising more of the same to other regions that may come under its control in the future. 

The price of gas and electricity has been raised for businesses and industrial enterprises, which has led to the closure of many enterprises and, consequently, mass layoffs of workers. 

Beginning in February of this year, businesses are required to submit lists of their employees to the military enlistment offices. Male employees then receive notification to appear for military service. To get around the loss of key workers, many companies do not list them as employed.

Significant part of workers in Ukraine since the years of privatizations during the 1990s work unofficially – working part-time or off-site—and are paid in cash. Officially, they are unemployed. This allows a business owner to avoid paying salary-delated taxes and allows workers to avoid paying income taxes. But it also means that workers do not have such rights as joining a trade union, paid vacations or paying into a company’s pension plan. Ukraine’s government has for many years tried to reduce such ‘shadow employment’, but it has returned with a vengeance due to the fear of military conscription. 

However, with this form of ’employment’ causes big problems for workers in receiving salaries. An employee can be listed as employed and is therefore subject to army recruitment, or he works without a formal contract and risks not receiving a paycheque or a fair paycheque.

For businesses and industrial enterprises, the prices of gas and electricity have risen, leading to the closure of many enterprises and, consequently, to the dismissal of employees. 

Similar problems are experienced by the utility companies. They are experiencing acute shortages of workers due to military conscription or because workers are hiding in their homes to avoid conscription or have fled the country. The hundreds of electricians, mechanics, cleaners and loaders needed to replace them are simply not available.

Most Ukrainian towns, outside the front lines in the southeast of the country, have so far not been hit particularly hard by the military conflict. On the other hand, there is a gradual degradation of infrastructure.

Continued media censorship

One year later, all media in Ukraine with a different point of view from the official line remain closed. All television channels are required to broadcast the ‘United News’, telemarathon-style broadcasts where only the official position of the office of the Ukrainian president is aired. For the past year, not a single attempt to reflect upon or explain the conflict has been broadcast in the permitted media.

Official Ukrainian propaganda involves almost exclusively the airing of hysterical emotions by Ukrainian citizens. The country’s opponents are termed “psychopaths” and the causes of the conflict are reduced exclusively to the desires of a single “tyrant”, namely, the president of Russia. The study and practice of political economy in once-renowned schools of political economy in Ukraine has been replaced in such institutions by straight-up, pro-government propaganda. 

Ukrainian propaganda for domestic consumption is focused exclusively on the emotional whipping up of its audience. This has led to a sharp fall in viewers and in trust for the television channels because their ‘reporting’ is, frankly, bringing much of the civilian population into states of nervous breakdown. This media promotes hatred of all things Russian. But most Ukrainians speak Russian fluently and many have Russian relatives. Thanks to strict censorship in the media following adoption last year of the Zelensky regime’s ‘Law On the Media’, the share of Ukrainians using television as their main source of news has fallen by 12 per cent. The images and messages on television differ too much from real life.

Nordstream 2 – “the silence shouts in your ear” (Graham Greene)

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I wrote this yesterday evening after listening to PM. Whatever your views on the Ukraine war, the way the blowing up of Nordstream 2 is being reported is so transparently manipulative that they must know they are doing it. The almost complete silence on Seymour Hersch’s story in particular is almost deafening.

The Ministry of Truth? User:Canley, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

During the discussion with Frank Gardner about the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline and the current information from Germany that they are investigating a “pro Ukrainian group” for carrying it out, Gardner complained that the Russians were calling for an international investigation that they should be part of. Given that it was their pipeline, that doesn’t seem so odd.

He went on to say that the Russians were considered the main suspects for some time, without clarifying that they were considered to be this by the West, and that this would be -as “false flag” operations go – a spectacular example of cutting off their nose to spite their face given

1) that cutting Germany off from cheap Russian gas has been a strategic objective of the US for some time (and stated as such)

2) that blowing it up helps undermine peace movements in Germany seeking and end to the bloodshed and a deal that could get their cheap gas back (blow up the pipeline, no prospect of gas)

3) thereby removing a significant piece of Russian diplomatic leverage. this is about as plausible as the stories that the Russians were shelling their own troops at the Zaporizhzhiya power station which were repeated – or at best muddied – by your programme too.

Even more striking was that at no point did Gardner, or Evan Davies, refer to the Seymour Hersch story based on leaks from US Special Services that they carried out the attack. Hersch has a long record of getting embarrassing stories for the US bang to rights – from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. I appreciate that you guys are under heavy manners to keep to the agreed script, but it makes me wonder if Vietnam was happening now, you’d close down the My Lai story too.

Probably…

This is the key sentence in what the BBC write when you complain to them about a News item, so it doesn’t hurt to do it.


We’ll normally include your complaint in our overnight report to producers and management. This will circulate your and all complaints with other reaction we receive today (but with any personal details removed) so it will then be available for the right team to read tomorrow morning.

Emotive Plagues instead of Analysis on Ukraine – A Reply to Présumey and Bekier.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The most recent apologia for a pro war stance on Labour Hub from Vincent Présumey and Stefan Bekier claims to be dispelling myths, but is transparently erecting many of its own. The most glaring is this statement slipped in towards the end. “This all-out war since February 2022 was in no way caused by NATO expansion or any aggression towards Russia on its part.” There is no attempt to justify this statement. It is simply an assertion. The most obvious rejoinder to it is that it does not look that way in Russia.

If an assessment of this war and the historical background to it has any prospect of being taken seriously, it is necessary to have some analysis of Russian motivation that goes beyond trivialised prolefeed notions that its all a manifestation of a belated mid life crisis on Vladimir Putin’s part or that Russia is inherently, timelessly imperialist, but one of the strangest things about the wall to wall coverage in the media here since Feb 24th last year has been how little of it has seriously examined why the Russians sent their troops over the border, and this piece is no exception.

Here is a list of why they did, from their point of view; which can largely be summarised as the massive increase in Ukrainian military spending and NATO military aid, training and technical assistance from 2014 to 2021.

  • The signing of a new military doctrine (2015) which explicitly named Russia as Ukraine’s enemy (in violation of the Ukrainian constitution).
  • The number of soldiers increased from 140k in 2014 to 250k in 2015, and then by 2020 with 900K reserves). Even without the reserves, this is three times bigger than the British Army and about half the size of that of the US! It is also, again, even without reserves, significantly larger than the force the Russians invaded with (around 150K).
  • The growth of the Ukrainian nationalist national guard from 15k in 2014 to 60k men in 2019. These included overtly fascist elements.
  • The ongoing war in the Donbass in which 14,000 people were killed, including over 3,000 civilians in the Donetsk Rebel Republics.
  • The ongoing flow of far right volunteers to fight in the Donbass.
  • US military aid alone amounting to almost $3 billion dollars by the end of 2021. This has, of course, been dwarfed since, with a level of expenditure comparable to what they were putting into Vietnam in the late 60s.
  • The presence of NATO advisers in military units along the frontlines in the Donbass, sometimes as contractors from western military security companies.
  • The presence of a large contingent of US intelligence officers in the headquarters of the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence service) in Kiev (according to former SBU chief).
  • Statements from senior Ukrainian figures (including a former Foreign Minister and the head of the armed forces) that discussed a future war with Russia, the targeting of Russian cities and power stations, and the annexation of Russian territory in the Kuban.
  • In that context, Ukrainian claims that they had developed and would begin producing long-range cruise missiles (2019). Not hard to see who they would be aimed at.
  • Statements by a senior Ukrainian politician that the Russian population of the Donbass and Crimea should be put in concentration camps following their ‘liberation’ by Ukraine.
  • Statements by various officials during 2021 that Ukraine would seek to acquire nuclear weapons, which substantiated a long-term far right desire for Ukraine to become a nuclear armed power.
  • Increasing verbal expressions of support for a future Ukrainian membership of NATO by senior western politicians.
  • The cutting of military-to-military relations between NATO and Russia in late 2021.
  • Recent admissions by Hollande and Merkel that they used the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements to buy time for the Ukrainian military to grow.
  • The cutting off of water supplies to Crimea and the Donbass, which affected the civilian population.
  • The January-February 2022 incursions by Ukrainian special forces into Russia and the shelling of border posts near the Donbass.
  • The massing of Ukrainian forces around the Donbass, which Russia interpreted as preparation for an invasion of the rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk.
  • Border incursions by NATO ships in the Black Sea during late 2021.
  • The use of Ukrainian territory for flights by US reconnaissance drones and aircraft.

    And this is without considering the political context within Ukraine since 2014:
  • The post 2014 purging of the state, and the promotion of fascist nationalists within its institutions.
  • The glorification of Nazi Germany and its collaborators in Ukraine, and the justification of their war against the peoples of the USSR, by both the state (in education especially) and the media.
  • The effective banning of socialist symbols and imagery through the twin effects of a ‘de-communisation’ law and a law on extremist symbolism which clearly defined socialist symbols, left Nazi symbols undefined, and which was exacerbated by selective application only to Soviet symbols such as the red star and flag, the hammer and sickle and so on.
  • Allowing nationalists and fascists to create a widespread network of social organisations, youth movements and businesses which propagated fascist ideology targeting Russians, Russian-ness (what they call the ‘internal occupation’) and manifestations of ‘Sovietism’.
  • Legal and social repression of the use of the Russian language, including in the education and state systems.
  • The imprisonment and judicial harassment of opposition activists and critical academics, the assassination of critical journalists and social leaders.
  • The adoption of laws that equated dissent with ‘separatism’ and ‘sedition’, which meant that even calls for peace and a negotiated solution to the Donbass crisis became criminalised.
  • And the total refusal of NATO to even consider negotiating about any of this in the period between November 2021 and February 24th, during which Russian attempts to propose a mutual security arrangement that would have demilitarised the crisis were turned down flat, mobilisations were treated as bluff and concessions seen as signs of weakness.

This is not simply rationally calculated on the Russian side. but emotionally felt. If you were to walk down the Arbat in Moscow, you would pass poster sized black and white portrait photographs of the hundreds of children killed by Ukrainian shelling in Donetsk since 2014. This might be considered as emotionally manipulative as the coverage we have on the BBC, though it lacks Orla Guerin’s mordant voiceovers, but it makes the point that, in any war, no one has a monopoly on suffering. Coverage that downplays that of the other side, or attempts to ignore their motivation leads to decisions based on outrage and lack of understanding.

On the Left, those that support the escalation of this war rely a lot on emotive propaganda of this sort. The point of which is to emotionally short circuit awkward questions, rule out of consideration any awkward facts, with a fierce emotional response that has to feed on itself more and more as the war drags on, digging so deep into a trench that it becomes impossible to see beyond it. This necessarily leads to some weird rewriting of history to justify it and a realignment alongside the traditional Atlanticist right in the Labour Movement in their bloc with the British ruling class and their “Special Relationship” with the USA. Ukraine Solidarity is calling a conference next weekend with the aim of generating a “new internationalism” which will gather together the currents that prioritise targeting enemies of the United States.

The Presumey and Bekier piece also contains a number of very strange historical assertions that simply don’t bear scrutiny.

  • That 19th Century cultural figures like Gogol and Tchaikovsky were Ukrainian because they were born on current Ukrainian territory. I may be wrong here, but I don’t think that Gogol or Tchaikovsky considered themselves to be Ukrainian; or indeed, Trotsky, Khrushchev or Brezhnev, all of who were born in Ukraine, would have either. Identity is more complex than birthplace, and this kind of claim is crude, misleading and ahistorical.
  • The “specific Ukrainian and peasant revolution in 1917-1918” occurred within two broad developments; an attempt to set up Soviet Republics in the Industrial South and East and an attempt to set up a nationalist regime under Petliura in the rural West. In the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution, the Petliura forces distinguished themselves by carrying out even more antisemitic pogroms that the Whites, who were hardly restrained on that front. That political division from 1917 to 1921 reflected the split between urban/industrial and Russian speaking on the one hand and rural and Ukrainian speaking on the other, and has been broadly replicated in voting patterns within modern Ukraine since 1991.
  • The existence within Ukrainian nationalism of left wing currents is taken to imply that the movement itself was overall leftish or progressive and still is. This does not look reality in the face. All national movements are diverse, but the question is, which current is dominant/hegemonic and why, (which relates to where such movements get their external support from), Given that Ukrainian nationalism’s core was in Western Ukraine, gaining sustenance initially from the Habsburgs, then later the Nazis is why even Presumey and Bekier have to concede points like “The majority of the ‘Banderist’ forces (in fact split into several armed factions) actively engaged in anti-Semitic genocide” and “Ukrainian peasants, while they were oppressed for centuries, undoubtedly had their own victims: the Jews, and a substantial part of the population had been favourably disposed towards, and even participated in, the Shoah” and today “a part of the oppressed Ukrainian youth has internalized the stigma and turned it around, taking up Banderite or Fascist emblems and flags.” While this is not original sin, there is no doubt that it is an accurate description of what the dominant current in Ukrainian nationalism has been, and still is.
  • The 1991 independence referendum is taken as still an accurate reflection about which state the peoples in the Donbass and Crimea want to be part of, without reflecting that at that time it was considered feasible to have a binational state with equal rights peacefully coexisting with Russia on the one side and the EU/USA on the other. Rather a lot has happened since then, and it no longer is.
  • The description of the 2014 crisis presents the Maidan movement as purely popular and anti oligarchic, with ne’r a whiff of Western intervention misses both the role of the US and EU and the reaction against it in other parts of Ukraine, which was equally popular. Putting “colour revolution” in inverted commas for the earlier movement of 2004 is of a piece with this and the statement about NATO having no role in the crisis. The most powerful actor in these crises is painted over, ignored, looked at and not noticed. Its as if it wasn’t (and isn’t) there. The movement against the results of the Maidan in the South and East is presented as though it had no popular support. This is an equally serious evasion of reality that makes a mockery of the fact that over 3,000 civilians have been killed by Ukrainian army shelling and thousands of Donbass residents have been actively fighting the Ukrainian Army since 2014 in the Donbass militias. They have a memorial garden in Donetsk City to all the children that have been killed. And these kids are just as dead as any killed in Western Ukraine. They won’t get the full Fergal Keane treatment on the BBC, but they are just as dead. While Donetsk holds these graves…So, any attempt to get a peace settlement has to take their rights into account as much as those of people in Western Ukraine. There is a distinct sense that Presumey and Bekier don’t think they should and that “pro Russian” forces and currents deserve everything they get for being “pro Russian”. It being OK to ban Parties, close down media outlets and even take reprisals against individuals because they are “pro Russian”. In taking this position they concede that “pro Russian” forces are sufficiently present to require such repression, which ought to make them wonder why.
  • This is also expressed in their attempt to downplay the Odessa massacre – nearly 50 people burnt to death – with a piece of nit picking about what the name of the building they were burnt to death in was, and that the people killed were “pro Russian” not just “trade unionists” as if that makes it OK somehow. They were still burnt to death. At the hands of a right wing nationalist mob.
  • If anyone thinks the Azov battalion have been sanitised, have a look at some of their films. The influence of the far right is not demonstrated in their showing in elections but by what role they play in the state. This assertion “the ethnic or culturally exclusive conception of the nation, expressed by the extreme right-wing currents claiming to be more or less Banderist, has in fact been in retreat since the Maïdan surge of social self-activity in favour of a democratic, inclusive and civic conception” is the direct opposite of the truth. Consider these points from Freedom House, quite a right wing source, from 2018. After Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and Russia’s subsequent aggression, extreme nationalist views and groups, along with their preachers and propagandists, have been granted significant legitimacy by the wider society. Extremist groups are, however, aggressively trying to impose their agenda on Ukrainian society, including by using force against those with opposite political and cultural views. They are a real physical threat to left-wing, feminist, liberal, and LGBT activists, human rights defenders, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. In the last few months, extremist groups have become increasingly active. The most disturbing element of their recent show of force is that so far it has gone fully unpunished by the authorities. Their activities challenge the legitimacy of the state, undermine its democratic institutions, and discredit the country’s law enforcement agencies.
  • The notion that Ukraine since 2014 has been primarily characterised by ” the self-organisation of civil society” misses both this and the overarching pattern of privatisation in both industry and agriculture that has gained pace since then; and which the agreement signed between President Zelensky and Blackrock will copper bottom it if Ukraine “wins”. Negotiations with the EU on a path to Ukrainian membership have been marked by complaints from the EU that Ukraine is diverging from EU standards on labour rights and environmental standards and corruption is rife and deep rooted, with twice as many Ukrainian Oligarchs named in the Panama papers as the next most corrupt country (Russia). President Zelensky was one of the people named. This was leading to a structural crisis in which 600,000 people, mostly men, were emigrating every year, both to find better prospects and avoid being conscripted and the economy was close to collapse according to the Finance Minister speaking in January last year.
  • As “the essence of montage is conflict” these two sentences coming one after the other create a dissonance that the authors seem unaware of. There is an oligarchic faction behind Zelenskiy – that of Kolomoiski, of Dnipro, which financed his studios – but he will emancipate himself from it. He began by trying to move towards the implementation of the Minsk agreements, before backing down. Funny kind of “emancipation”. As with an earlier statement about the supporters of the Orange Revolution being deceived by the politicians it had put in power, this is noted without examination, the better to move quickly on. That Zelensky was elected on peace ticket accounts for his landslide win over Poroshenko. But the way that he was rapidly brought to heel by both the far right and the US and carried on with the war as before is passed over in silence.

Their summary – that the Russian intervention is a “genocide” – that to Russia “Ukrainians can only be Russians or dead” is the complete nonsense of people made delirious by their own rhetoric. The Russian war aims are for a demilitarised Ukraine that is outside NATO and without far right influence, was initially for autonomy for the Donbass but is now for its incorporation within the Russian Federation. That is still a reasonable basis for a peace settlement that could begin to ratchet down tensions and allow people to live, if not together, at least side by side.

Not settling on this sort of basis begs a number of questions, which no one from Ukraine Solidarity ever addresses. As Russia has military superiority and the supply of NATO arms at the current rate isn’t stopping them making slow but definite military progress, at terrible cost in casualties on the Ukrainian side, and with increasing damage to infrastructure like power stations and railways, USC has called for a specific escalation of arms supplies. So, as they think the reconquest of the part of Ukraine that does not want to be part of a nationalist Ukraine is a justifiable objective, they should answer these four questions;

  1. How much additional weaponry would be needed to do it?
  2. How would this be paid for, and what else would be sacrificed to do so?
  3. Do support escalating beyond nuclear thresholds, which the Americans have already broadly concluded it would be crossed if there were an attempt to reconquer Crimea?
  4. What would be the impact of the prolonged war that such an extension of military supply would entrench be on what’s left of Ukraine and the people who live there?

Give a little to NATO, and you end up capitulating a lot.