Ques­tions of ‘how did we get here?’ are bound to pro­lif­er­ate as the con­flict in Ukraine inten­si­fies and deep­ens in the coun­try’s east. But if the warn­ings in the fol­low­ing Opin­ion piece recent­ly pub­lished in the New York Times pan out, those ques­tions are going to be asked for the fore­see­able future because this con­flict may already be at a point where it can’t real­ly be stopped. That’s the con­clu­sion arrived at by con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ist Christo­pher Cald­well, who writes about the warn­ings issued by Heni Guaino, a top advis­er to Nico­las Sarkozy when he was pres­i­dent of France, about how Europe was “sleep­walk­ing” into a war with Rus­sia. A sleep­walk that appeared to be part of a kind of “Peace through Strength” US strat­e­gy that was pred­i­cat­ed on pre­vent­ing a Russ­ian inva­sion by build­ing up Ukraine’s mil­i­tary strength. A strat­e­gy that obvi­ous­ly already failed. But a strat­e­gy that’s still in place. It’s that strat­e­gy — a strat­e­gy of “peace through strength, and if that does­n’t work win­ning the war through more strength” — that Cald­well warns is effec­tive­ly unstop­pable. Each side has to win...or else.

But Cald­well also points out an event that should­n’t be glossed over in answer­ing the “how did we get here?’ ques­tion: back on Novem­ber 10, 2021, the US and Ukraine signed a “char­ter on strate­gic part­ner­ship” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, con­demned “ongo­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion” and affirmed an “unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment” to the rein­te­gra­tion of Crimea into Ukraine. Accord­ing to Guaino, that char­ter “con­vinced Rus­sia that it must attack or be attacked.” As Guaino wrote, “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its ter­ri­fy­ing puri­ty.”

Recall how this isn’t the first time Ukraine’s NATO ambi­tions have been pub­licly tout­ed. Pres­i­dent Petro Poroshenko had a sim­i­lar kind of NATO ambi­tion cer­e­mo­ny back in Feb­ru­ary 2019 involv­ing Euro­pean Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Don­ald Tusk, who attend­ed the cer­e­mo­ny where Ukraine adopt­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ments that includ­ed an amend­ment com­mit­ting Ukraine to join­ing NATO by 2023.

As we’re also going to see, it was dur­ing this sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny where we heard some of the first pub­lic warn­ings about the threat of a Russ­ian troop build up and inva­sion plans. At that same cer­e­mo­ny we hear Ukraine’s for­eign min­is­ter basi­cal­ly artic­u­late this ‘Peace through Strength’ doc­trine and his hopes that by mak­ing it clear that Ukraine has pow­er­ful mil­i­tary allies that Rus­sia can be dis­suad­ed. A strat­e­gy that obvi­ous­ly did­n’t work. But we’re dou­bling and tripling down on it any­way:

The New York Times

The War in Ukraine May Be Impos­si­ble to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame.

By Christo­pher Cald­well
May 31, 2022

In the Paris dai­ly news­pa­per Le Figaro this month, Hen­ri Guaino, a top advis­er to Nico­las Sarkozy when he was pres­i­dent of France, warned that Europe’s coun­tries, under the short­sight­ed lead­er­ship of the Unit­ed States, were “sleep­walk­ing” into war with Rus­sia. Mr. Guaino was bor­row­ing a metaphor that the his­to­ri­an Christo­pher Clark used to describe the ori­gins of World War I.

Nat­u­ral­ly, Mr. Guaino under­stands that Rus­sia is most direct­ly to blame for the present con­flict in Ukraine. It was Rus­sia that massed its troops on the fron­tier last fall and win­ter and — hav­ing demand­ed from NATO a num­ber of Ukraine-relat­ed secu­ri­ty guar­an­tees that NATO reject­ed — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24.

But the Unit­ed States has helped turn this trag­ic, local and ambigu­ous con­flict into a poten­tial world con­fla­gra­tion. By mis­un­der­stand­ing the war’s log­ic, Mr. Guaino argues, the West, led by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, is giv­ing the con­flict a momen­tum that may be impos­si­ble to stop.

He is right.

In 2014 the Unit­ed States backed an upris­ing — in its final stages a vio­lent upris­ing — against the legit­i­mate­ly elect­ed Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment of Vik­tor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russ­ian. (The cor­rup­tion of Mr. Yanukovych’s gov­ern­ment has been much adduced by the rebellion’s defend­ers, but cor­rup­tion is a peren­ni­al Ukrain­ian prob­lem, even today.) Rus­sia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a his­tor­i­cal­ly Russ­ian-speak­ing part of Ukraine that since the 18th cen­tu­ry had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

One can argue about Russ­ian claims to Crimea, but Rus­sians take them seri­ous­ly. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of Russ­ian and Sovi­et fight­ers died defend­ing the Crimean city of Sev­astopol from Euro­pean forces dur­ing two sieges — one dur­ing the Crimean War and one dur­ing World War II. In recent years, Russ­ian con­trol of Crimea has seemed to pro­vide a sta­ble region­al arrange­ment: Russia’s Euro­pean neigh­bors, at least, have let sleep­ing dogs lie.

But the Unit­ed States nev­er accept­ed the arrange­ment. On Nov. 10, 2021, the Unit­ed States and Ukraine signed a “char­ter on strate­gic part­ner­ship” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, con­demned “ongo­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion” and affirmed an “unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment” to the rein­te­gra­tion of Crimea into Ukraine.

That char­ter “con­vinced Rus­sia that it must attack or be attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its ter­ri­fy­ing puri­ty.”

This is a faith­ful account of the war that Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin has claimed to be fight­ing. “There were con­stant sup­plies of the most mod­ern mil­i­tary equip­ment,” Mr. Putin said at Russia’s annu­al Vic­to­ry Parade on May 9, refer­ring to the for­eign arm­ing of Ukraine. “The dan­ger was grow­ing every day.”

Whether he was right to wor­ry about Russia’s secu­ri­ty depends on one’s per­spec­tive. West­ern news reports tend to belit­tle him.

The rocky course of the war in Ukraine thus far has vin­di­cat­ed Mr. Putin’s diag­no­sis, if not his con­duct. Though Ukraine’s mil­i­tary indus­try was impor­tant in Sovi­et times, by 2014 the coun­try bare­ly had a mod­ern mil­i­tary at all. Oli­garchs, not the state, armed and fund­ed some of the mili­tias sent to fight Russ­ian-sup­port­ed sep­a­ratists in the east. The Unit­ed States start­ed arm­ing and train­ing Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, hes­i­tant­ly at first under Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. Mod­ern hard­ware began flow­ing dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, though, and today the coun­try is armed to the teeth.

Since 2018, Ukraine has received U.S.-built Javelin anti­tank mis­siles, Czech artillery and Turk­ish Bayrak­tar drones and oth­er NATO-inter­op­er­a­ble weapon­ry. The Unit­ed States and Cana­da have late­ly sent up-to-date British-designed M777 how­itzers that fire GPS-guid­ed Excal­ibur shells. Pres­i­dent Biden just signed into law a $40 bil­lion mil­i­tary aid pack­age.

In this light, mock­ery of Russia’s bat­tle­field per­for­mance is mis­placed. Rus­sia is not being stymied by a plucky agri­cul­tur­al coun­try a third its size; it is hold­ing its own, at least for now, against NATO’s advanced eco­nom­ic, cyber and bat­tle­field weapons.

And this is where Mr. Guaino is cor­rect to accuse the West of sleep­walk­ing. The Unit­ed States is try­ing to main­tain the fic­tion that arm­ing one’s allies is not the same thing as par­tic­i­pat­ing in com­bat.

In the infor­ma­tion age, this dis­tinc­tion is grow­ing more and more arti­fi­cial. The Unit­ed States has pro­vid­ed intel­li­gence used to kill Russ­ian gen­er­als. It obtained tar­get­ing infor­ma­tion that helped to sink the Russ­ian Black Sea mis­sile cruis­er the Mosk­va, an inci­dent in which about 40 sea­men were killed.

And the Unit­ed States may be play­ing an even more direct role. There are thou­sands of for­eign fight­ers in Ukraine. One vol­un­teer spoke to the Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion this month of fight­ing along­side “friends” who “come from the Marines, from the States.” Just as it is easy to cross the line between being a weapons sup­pli­er and being a com­bat­ant, it is easy to cross the line from wag­ing a proxy war to wag­ing a secret war.

In a sub­tler way, a coun­try try­ing to fight such a war risks being drawn from par­tial into full involve­ment by force of moral rea­son­ing. Per­haps Amer­i­can offi­cials jus­ti­fy export­ing weapon­ry the way they jus­ti­fy bud­get­ing it: It is so pow­er­ful that it is dis­sua­sive. The mon­ey is well spent because it buys peace. Should big­ger guns fail to dis­suade, how­ev­er, they lead to big­ger wars.

A hand­ful of peo­ple died in the Russ­ian takeover of Crimea in 2014. But this time around, matched in weapon­ry — and even out­matched in some cas­es — Rus­sia has revert­ed to a war of bom­bard­ment that looks more like World War II.

Even if we don’t accept Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arm­ing of Ukraine is the rea­son the war hap­pened in the first place, it is cer­tain­ly the rea­son the war has tak­en the kinet­ic, explo­sive, dead­ly form it has. Our role in this is not pas­sive or inci­den­tal. We have giv­en Ukraini­ans cause to believe they can pre­vail in a war of esca­la­tion.

...

The Unit­ed States has shown itself not just liable to esca­late but also inclined to. In March, Mr. Biden invoked God before insist­ing that Mr. Putin “can­not remain in pow­er.” In April, Defense Sec­re­tary Lloyd Austin explained that the Unit­ed States seeks to “see Rus­sia weak­ened.”

Noam Chom­sky warned against the para­dox­i­cal incen­tives of such “hero­ic pro­nounce­ments” in an April inter­view. “It may feel like Win­ston Churchill imper­son­ations, very excit­ing,” he said. “But what they trans­late into is: Destroy Ukraine.”

For sim­i­lar rea­sons Mr. Biden’s sug­ges­tion that Mr. Putin be tried for war crimes is an act of con­sum­mate irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty. The charge is so seri­ous that, once lev­eled, it dis­cour­ages restraint; after all, a leader who com­mits one atroc­i­ty is no less a war crim­i­nal than one who com­mits a thou­sand. The effect, intend­ed or not, is to fore­close any recourse to peace nego­ti­a­tions.

The sit­u­a­tion on the bat­tle­field in Ukraine has evolved to an awk­ward stage. Both Rus­sia and Ukraine have suf­fered heavy loss­es. But each has made gains, too. Rus­sia has a land bridge to Crimea and con­trol of some of Ukraine’s most fer­tile agri­cul­tur­al lands and ener­gy deposits, and in recent days has held the bat­tle­field momen­tum. Ukraine, after a robust defense of its cities, can expect fur­ther NATO sup­port, know-how and weapon­ry — a pow­er­ful incen­tive not to end the war any­time soon.

But if the war does not end soon, its dan­gers will increase. “Nego­ti­a­tions need to begin in the next two months,” the for­mer U.S. sec­re­tary of state Hen­ry Kissinger warned last week, “before it cre­ates upheavals and ten­sions that will not be eas­i­ly over­come.” Call­ing for a return to the sta­tus quo ante bel­lum, he added, “Pur­su­ing the war beyond that point would not be about the free­dom of Ukraine but a new war against Rus­sia itself.”

In this, Mr. Kissinger is on the same page as Mr. Guaino. “To make con­ces­sions to Rus­sia would be sub­mit­ting to aggres­sion,” Mr. Guaino warned. “To make none would be sub­mit­ting to insan­i­ty.”

The Unit­ed States is mak­ing no con­ces­sions. That would be to lose face. There’s an elec­tion com­ing. So the admin­is­tra­tion is clos­ing off avenues of nego­ti­a­tion and work­ing to inten­si­fy the war. We’re in it to win it. With time, the huge import of dead­ly weapon­ry, includ­ing that from the new­ly autho­rized $40 bil­lion allo­ca­tion, could take the war to a dif­fer­ent lev­el. Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky of Ukraine warned in an address to stu­dents this month that the blood­i­est days of the war were com­ing.

———-

”
The War in Ukraine May Be Impos­si­ble to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame” By Christo­pher Cald­well; The New York Times; 05/31/2022

“Even if we don’t accept Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arm­ing of Ukraine is the rea­son the war hap­pened in the first place, it is cer­tain­ly the rea­son the war has tak­en the kinet­ic, explo­sive, dead­ly form it has. Our role in this is not pas­sive or inci­den­tal. We have giv­en Ukraini­ans cause to believe they can pre­vail in a war of esca­la­tion.”

The US has giv­en Ukraini­ans cause to believe they can pre­vail in a war of esca­la­tion. Which is obvi­ous­ly a recipe for ever greater esca­la­tion. That’s the thrust of Cald­well’s argu­ment.

But the US has­n’t giv­en Ukraine this impres­sion that it can win a war of esca­la­tion just by flood­ing the coun­try with weapons. On Novem­ber 10, 2021, the Unit­ed States and Ukraine signed a “char­ter on strate­gic part­ner­ship” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, con­demned “ongo­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion” and affirmed an “unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment” to the rein­te­gra­tion of Crimea into Ukraine.

It was just the US and Ukraine who signed this char­ter. But don’t for­get how Pres­i­dent Petro Poroshenko had a sim­i­lar kind of NATO ambi­tion cer­e­mo­ny back in Feb­ru­ary 2019 involv­ing Euro­pean Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Don­ald Tusk, who attend­ed the cer­e­mo­ny where Ukraine adopt­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ments that includ­ed an amend­ment com­mit­ting Ukraine to join­ing NATO by 2023. So when the US and Ukraine made this mutu­al com­mit­ment to get Ukraine in NATO, it’s a com­mit­ment that real­ly does include more than just the US and Ukraine:

...
One can argue about Russ­ian claims to Crimea, but Rus­sians take them seri­ous­ly. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of Russ­ian and Sovi­et fight­ers died defend­ing the Crimean city of Sev­astopol from Euro­pean forces dur­ing two sieges — one dur­ing the Crimean War and one dur­ing World War II. In recent years, Russ­ian con­trol of Crimea has seemed to pro­vide a sta­ble region­al arrange­ment: Russia’s Euro­pean neigh­bors, at least, have let sleep­ing dogs lie.

But the Unit­ed States nev­er accept­ed the arrange­ment. On Nov. 10, 2021, the Unit­ed States and Ukraine signed a “char­ter on strate­gic part­ner­ship” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, con­demned “ongo­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion” and affirmed an “unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment” to the rein­te­gra­tion of Crimea into Ukraine.

That char­ter “con­vinced Rus­sia that it must attack or be attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its ter­ri­fy­ing puri­ty.”

This is a faith­ful account of the war that Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin has claimed to be fight­ing. “There were con­stant sup­plies of the most mod­ern mil­i­tary equip­ment,” Mr. Putin said at Russia’s annu­al Vic­to­ry Parade on May 9, refer­ring to the for­eign arm­ing of Ukraine. “The dan­ger was grow­ing every day.”

...

In a sub­tler way, a coun­try try­ing to fight such a war risks being drawn from par­tial into full involve­ment by force of moral rea­son­ing. Per­haps Amer­i­can offi­cials jus­ti­fy export­ing weapon­ry the way they jus­ti­fy bud­get­ing it: It is so pow­er­ful that it is dis­sua­sive. The mon­ey is well spent because it buys peace. Should big­ger guns fail to dis­suade, how­ev­er, they lead to big­ger wars.

...

The Unit­ed States is mak­ing no con­ces­sions. That would be to lose face. There’s an elec­tion com­ing. So the admin­is­tra­tion is clos­ing off avenues of nego­ti­a­tion and work­ing to inten­si­fy the war. We’re in it to win it. With time, the huge import of dead­ly weapon­ry, includ­ing that from the new­ly autho­rized $40 bil­lion allo­ca­tion, could take the war to a dif­fer­ent lev­el. Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky of Ukraine warned in an address to stu­dents this month that the blood­i­est days of the war were com­ing.
...

It’s a rather high stakes strat­e­gy: com­mit to pro­vid­ing Ukraine with what­ev­er sup­port it needs to defeat Rus­sia as a means of dis­suad­ing a Russ­ian inva­sion. It’s the kind of strat­e­gy that ignores the fact that arm­ing Ukraine with advanced weapons and pledg­ing to have it join NATO are, from the Krem­lin’s per­spec­tive, basi­cal­ly bait to force Rus­sia into doing some­thing. There are no easy answers when it comes to these kinds of seem­ing­ly intractable inter­na­tion­al crises. And yet flood­ing Ukraine with more and more weapons while mak­ing pledges to make Ukraine a NATO mem­ber are basi­cal­ly being treat­ed as a kind of easy answer to this sit­u­a­tion. And easy answer that’s already proven wrong.

But it’s also worth not­ing some­thing else the US and Ukraine were declar­ing on Novem­ber 10, the day of the “char­ter on strate­gic part­ner­ship” was signed: dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the State Depart­ment, US Sec­re­tary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrain­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Dmytro Kule­ba expressed their con­cerns about large Russ­ian mil­i­tary build up along Ukraine’s bor­der and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an upcom­ing Russ­ian inva­sion.

Now, what is not at all men­tioned in the arti­cle is the NATO ambi­tions expressed dur­ing that sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny. There’s a ref­er­ence to the sign­ing of a renewed Ukraine-US Strate­gic Part­ner­ship, but that’s it. Nei­ther is there a men­tion of the large build up of Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary forces in the east fol­low­ing the March 24, 2021, decree by Zelen­sky to recap­ture Crimea that began a rede­ploy­ment of Ukrain­ian forces which Jacque Baude has talked about. And that more or less cap­tures the dynam­ic Cald­well is warn­ing about. After all, the US did indeed fol­low the strat­e­gy of arm­ing Ukraine to the teeth and pledg­ing ever deep­er mil­i­tary alliances, osten­si­bly as part of a strat­e­gy of ward­ing off a Russ­ian response. That’s what this sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny and renewed strate­gic part­ner­ship sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny were all about. The strat­e­gy of mak­ing ever deep­er mil­i­tary com­mit­ments was fol­lowed. And either back­fired entire­ly or worked exact­ly as planned:

CNN

Blinken says US is con­cerned Rus­sia may be ‘attempt­ing to rehash’ 2014 inva­sion of Ukraine

By Nicole Gaou­ette, Natasha Bertrand, Kylie Atwood and Jim Sciut­to
Updat­ed 6:55 PM ET, Wed Novem­ber 10, 2021

(CNN)US Sec­re­tary of State Antony Blinken said Wednes­day that the Unit­ed States is “con­cerned by reports of unusu­al Russ­ian mil­i­tary activ­i­ty” and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Rus­sia may be “attempt­ing to rehash” its 2014 inva­sion of Ukraine.

Blinken’s com­ments came a week after Rus­si­a’s pow­er­ful secu­ri­ty chief did not deny that Moscow was mov­ing troops or assuage the US’ con­cerns about Rus­si­a’s inten­tions dur­ing a meet­ing with CIA direc­tor Bill Burns, accord­ing to four peo­ple briefed on the dis­cus­sion.

Speak­ing along­side Ukrain­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Dmytro Kule­ba at the State Depart­ment, Blinken said that the US is “con­cerned by reports of unusu­al Russ­ian mil­i­tary activ­i­ty,” and is “mon­i­tor­ing very close­ly” the Rus­sia activ­i­ty.

“Our con­cern is that Rus­sia may make a seri­ous mis­take of attempt­ing to rehash what it under­took back in 2014, when it amassed forces along the bor­der, crossed into sov­er­eign Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry and did so claim­ing false­ly that it was pro­voked,” Blinken said, refer­ring to Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Crimea. “So the play­book that we’ve seen in the past was to claim some provo­ca­tion as a ratio­nale for doing what it, what it intend­ed and planned to do. All which is why we’re look­ing at this very care­ful­ly.”

The top US diplo­mat also reit­er­at­ed the US’ com­mit­ment to Ukraine’s sov­er­eign­ty and inde­pen­dence, call­ing it “iron­clad.”

In a post on his Face­book page Wednes­day, Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky thanked the US for its sup­port and for intel­li­gence it had shared about the sit­u­a­tion.

“Our West­ern part­ners have pro­vid­ed data on the active move­ment of Russ­ian troops along the Ukrain­ian bor­der and the increase in their con­cen­tra­tion,” he wrote. “Fore­most, we are very grate­ful to our part­ners for this infor­ma­tion. This is a proof of sup­port of Ukraine.”

He echoed Blinken’s remarks about Rus­si­a’s play­book, say­ing that “from [the] Russ­ian side, we hear accu­sa­tions that it is Ukraine that is delay­ing the peace process. ... I hope now the whole world can clear­ly see who real­ly wants peace and who is con­cen­trat­ing almost 100,000 troops on our bor­der.”

‘Demo­ti­vate them’

Kule­ba also said the US and Ukraine shared “ele­ments” with each oth­er Wednes­day regard­ing the Russ­ian mil­i­tary activ­i­ties. “What we heard and saw today in Wash­ing­ton, DC, cor­re­sponds to our own find­ings and analy­sis, adds some new ele­ments, which allow us to get a bet­ter and more com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture,” he said.

Blinken and Kule­ba addressed reporters at the con­clu­sion of a strate­gic dia­logue that led to the sign­ing of a renewed Ukraine-US Strate­gic Part­ner­ship. The Ukrain­ian offi­cial expressed grat­i­tude to the US for deep­en­ing defense and secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion “to help Ukraine build its capac­i­ty to defend itself and also to deter Rus­sia to demo­ti­vate them from tak­ing fur­ther aggres­sive actions.”

“The best way to deter aggres­sive Rus­sias is to make it clear for the Krem­lin that Ukraine is strong,” Kule­ba said. “I have repeat­ed on numer­ous occa­sions that Russ­ian aggres­sion against Ukraine will end on the day Ukraine’s place as part of the West is insti­tu­tion­al­ized and undoubt­ed. Today, we have made anoth­er impor­tant step in that direc­tion.”

Blinken said the US would con­tin­ue to “con­sult close­ly as well with allies and part­ners” about Rus­si­a’s troop move­ments. On Fri­day, the US sent out a for­mal diplo­mat­ic note, known as a démarche, to NATO allies pro­vid­ing them with addi­tion­al intel­li­gence and request­ing fur­ther coor­di­na­tion in response to the irreg­u­lar troop move­ments, a per­son famil­iar with the mes­sage said.

“As we make clear, any esca­la­to­ry or aggres­sive actions will be of great con­cern to the Unit­ed States,” Blinken said Wednes­day. He added that the US will con­tin­ue to sup­port deesca­la­tion in the region and a diplo­mat­ic res­o­lu­tion to the con­flict in east­ern Ukraine.

Vig­i­lant and resilient

Kule­ba indi­cat­ed that find­ing a diplo­mat­ic way out could be dif­fi­cult. Point­ing to var­i­ous Russ­ian efforts to desta­bi­lize Europe — includ­ing its coer­cive use of ener­gy sup­plies, “pro­pa­gan­da efforts, dis­in­for­ma­tion, cyber­at­tacks, mil­i­tary buildups, an attempt of Rus­sia to digest Belarus” — the Ukrain­ian diplo­mat warned that “in this com­pli­cat­ed game, we have to remain vig­i­lant, we have, have to be resilient.”

The joint press appear­ance is just the lat­est effort by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion to demon­strate sup­port for Ukraine, some of which has hap­pened behind closed doors.

Burns met with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin and Rus­si­a’s secu­ri­ty chief, Niko­lai Patru­shev, last week, as the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has grown increas­ing­ly con­cerned about Rus­si­a’s recent troop move­ments near Ukraine. As CNN report­ed Fri­day, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden dis­patched Burns to Moscow to deliv­er a clear mes­sage to the Krem­lin that the US is mon­i­tor­ing the move­ments close­ly.

...

The flur­ry of high-lev­el diplo­ma­cy under­scores how seri­ous­ly the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is tak­ing the lat­est Russ­ian troop move­ments, even after an ear­li­er buildup this spring ulti­mate­ly did not lead to a renewed inva­sion. Ten­sions between Ukraine and Rus­sia have also been exac­er­bat­ed in recent weeks by a deep­en­ing Ukrain­ian ener­gy cri­sis that Kiev believes Moscow has pur­pose­ful­ly pro­voked.

“The buildup, cou­pled with the ener­gy black­mail, does sug­gest a more aggres­sive Russ­ian pos­ture,” an advis­er to Zelen­sky told CNN.

Pen­ta­gon press sec­re­tary John Kir­by said on Fri­day that the “scale” and “the size of the units that we’re see­ing” from Rus­sia is “unusu­al.”

“We con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor this close­ly, and as I’ve said before, any esca­la­to­ry or aggres­sive actions by Rus­sia would be of great con­cern to the Unit­ed States,” he said.

———-

“Blinken says US is con­cerned Rus­sia may be ‘attempt­ing to rehash’ 2014 inva­sion of Ukraine” by Nicole Gaou­ette, Natasha Bertrand, Kylie Atwood and Jim Sciut­to; CNN; 11/10/2021

“Blinken and Kule­ba addressed reporters at the con­clu­sion of a strate­gic dia­logue that led to the sign­ing of a renewed Ukraine-US Strate­gic Part­ner­ship. The Ukrain­ian offi­cial expressed grat­i­tude to the US for deep­en­ing defense and secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion “to help Ukraine build its capac­i­ty to defend itself and also to deter Rus­sia to demo­ti­vate them from tak­ing fur­ther aggres­sive actions.”

A renewed Ukraine-US Strate­gic Part­ner­ship cer­e­mo­ny that involves a com­mit­ment to hav­ing Ukraine join NATO. So at a cer­e­mo­ny where the US and Ukraine were pledg­ing to do some­thing that has long been viewed as a kind of ‘red line’ by the Krem­lin — hav­ing Ukraine join NATO — was the venue last Novem­ber where we some some of the first pub­lic pro­nounce­ments from the US gov­ern­ment about con­cerns of Russ­ian inva­sion. Ukrain­ian for­eign min­is­ter Kule­ba was quite explic­it bout this “Peace through Strength” pol­i­cy, declar­ing that the “best way to deter aggres­sive Rus­sias is to make it clear for the Krem­lin that Ukraine is strong.” So, if noth­ing else, this sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny real­ly cap­tured an impor­tant aspect of that under­ly­ing dynam­ics dri­ving this con­flict. There real­ly was a strat­e­gy of mak­ing con­flict inevitable by adopt­ing a kind of ‘Peace Through Strength’ pol­i­cy and act­ing like that was was­n’t a mas­sive provo­ca­tion:

...
Speak­ing along­side Ukrain­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Dmytro Kule­ba at the State Depart­ment, Blinken said that the US is “con­cerned by reports of unusu­al Russ­ian mil­i­tary activ­i­ty,” and is “mon­i­tor­ing very close­ly” the Rus­sia activ­i­ty.

“Our con­cern is that Rus­sia may make a seri­ous mis­take of attempt­ing to rehash what it under­took back in 2014, when it amassed forces along the bor­der, crossed into sov­er­eign Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry and did so claim­ing false­ly that it was pro­voked,” Blinken said, refer­ring to Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Crimea. “So the play­book that we’ve seen in the past was to claim some provo­ca­tion as a ratio­nale for doing what it, what it intend­ed and planned to do. All which is why we’re look­ing at this very care­ful­ly.”

The top US diplo­mat also reit­er­at­ed the US’ com­mit­ment to Ukraine’s sov­er­eign­ty and inde­pen­dence, call­ing it “iron­clad.”

...

Kule­ba also said the US and Ukraine shared “ele­ments” with each oth­er Wednes­day regard­ing the Russ­ian mil­i­tary activ­i­ties. “What we heard and saw today in Wash­ing­ton, DC, cor­re­sponds to our own find­ings and analy­sis, adds some new ele­ments, which allow us to get a bet­ter and more com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture,” he said.

...

“The best way to deter aggres­sive Rus­sias is to make it clear for the Krem­lin that Ukraine is strong,” Kule­ba said. “I have repeat­ed on numer­ous occa­sions that Russ­ian aggres­sion against Ukraine will end on the day Ukraine’s place as part of the West is insti­tu­tion­al­ized and undoubt­ed. Today, we have made anoth­er impor­tant step in that direc­tion.”

...

Kule­ba indi­cat­ed that find­ing a diplo­mat­ic way out could be dif­fi­cult. Point­ing to var­i­ous Russ­ian efforts to desta­bi­lize Europe — includ­ing its coer­cive use of ener­gy sup­plies, “pro­pa­gan­da efforts, dis­in­for­ma­tion, cyber­at­tacks, mil­i­tary buildups, an attempt of Rus­sia to digest Belarus” — the Ukrain­ian diplo­mat warned that “in this com­pli­cat­ed game, we have to remain vig­i­lant, we have, have to be resilient.”
...

That’s the dynam­ic Cald­well is warn­ing about: ‘Peace Through Strength’ for Ukraine has been a dri­ving force for get­ting us into this sit­u­a­tion and also the core strat­e­gy for get­ting us out. So while we don’t know how this is going to end, we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent Ukraine is going to be a giant pile of rub­ble by the end up it. Per­haps a vic­to­ri­ous pile of rub­ble. We’ll see. But the only peace that’s going to be allowed in Ukraine clear­ly going to come through one side win­ning by force. It’s a reminder that ‘Peace through Strength’ does­n’t mean there’s nev­er going to be war. It just means war, or the threat of war, is the only way any­thing is going to be solved.

The war in Ukraine has obvi­ous­ly been a mas­sive boon for US defense con­trac­tors. A gift that promis­es to keep on giv­ing. So it should­n’t come as any sur­prise to learn that Palan­tir is report­ed­ly involved in the Ukrain­ian war effort. We don’t yet know exact­ly what ser­vices Palan­tir is pro­vid­ing to Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, but as the fol­low­ing Bloomberg arti­cle from a few days ago makes clear, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment is quite inter­est­ed in expand­ing Palan­tir’s involve­ment in Ukraine’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Some­thing that Palan­tir is also very inter­est­ed in, And as Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp also makes clear.

But as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing arti­cles, Palan­tir’s inter­est in the war in Ukraine isn’t just about get­ting anoth­er gov­ern­ment client. As Karp has been express­ing in inter­views in recent months, Palan­tir views the war in Ukraine as a pos­si­ble inflec­tion point for civ­i­liza­tion. An inflec­tion point that could bring about a bifur­ca­tion of the glob­al econ­o­my and a New Cold War between the ‘West’ on one side and Chi­na and Rus­sia on the oth­er side. Karp also includ­ed his now stan­dard crit­i­cisms of Sil­i­con Val­ley firms that are will­ing to do busi­ness in Rus­sia and Chi­na. So in this sense, Karp’s com­ments were an exten­sion of the ‘Yel­low-per­il’ kind of com­men­tary we’ve been hear­ing from fig­ures like Peter Thiel and Steve Ban­non for years. It’s a reminder that when Karp warns about a glob­al bifur­ca­tion, he’s also call­ing for it.

But Karp isn’t just warn­ing about the risk of the con­flict in Ukraine trig­ger­ing a glob­al bifur­ca­tion. He’s also warn­ing that the West­’s insti­tu­tions appear to be inca­pable of deal­ing with today’s stress­es and pre­dict­ing mas­sive insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure and social dis­rup­tions. But there’s a far more dire warn­ing: Karp put the odds of nuclear war at 20–30% if the war in Ukraine becomes a long-term con­flict.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Karp isn’t pre­dict­ing a renewed nuclear arms race. Instead, he fore­sees a new Cold War with AI as the key tech­nol­o­gy instead of nukes. As Karp sees it, the coun­tries with the most advanced AIs will in effect have the most pow­er in com­ing decades, much like how nuclear weapons defined pow­er in the last cen­tu­ry. This is obvi­ous­ly a high­ly self-serv­ing pre­dic­tion giv­en that this is the exact ser­vice Palan­tir pro­vides. But that does­n’t mean there’ isn’t more than a grain a truth to what Karp is pre­dict­ing. AI real­ly is set to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant in the nation­al secu­ri­ty realm.

So how does Karp address con­cerns about the poten­tial gov­ern­ment abus­es that will sure­ly come as nation­al secu­ri­ty AIs play ever greater roles in our lives? Well, he assures us that Palan­tir’s soft­ware makes third-par­ty audit­ing avail­able. That’s it. So if Palan­tir’s clients decide to police them­selves, they can do so.

Final­ly, as we’re going to see an in inter­view Karp gave back in April, Palan­tir won’t just be pro­vid­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty intel­li­gence to gov­ern­ment clients. Karp also envi­sions Palan­tir facil­i­tat­ing data shar­ing between nations. In par­tic­u­lar, Japan’s data shar­ing with the Five Eyes. Karp thinks Palan­tir can help with that. It’s a hint about the com­pa­ny’s ambi­tions. Palan­tir wants to become the West­’s inter­na­tion­al intel­li­gence bro­ker. A role that it will assume as part of a long-term new AI Cold War con­flict that will play out in a bifur­cat­ed world. And if this sce­nario plays out, Palan­tir also envi­sions a major pos­si­bil­i­ty of nuclear war and mass insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure. So the com­pa­ny that gov­ern­ments hire to ana­lyze data and make pre­dic­tions is both call­ing for a major New Cold War and also pre­dict­ing pre­dict­ing a glob­al melt­down will result from it:

Bloomberg

Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp Met With Zelen­skiy in Ukraine

Ukrain­ian vice prime min­is­ter says Karp is first CEO to vis­it since Russ­ian inva­sion.

By Lizette Chap­man
June 2, 2022 at 1:29 PM CDT
Updat­ed on June 2, 2022 at 2:14 PM CDT

Alex Karp, the chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies Inc., vis­it­ed Ukraine and met with Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skiy to dis­cuss ways its tech­nol­o­gy could help the coun­try resist the con­tin­u­ing Russ­ian inva­sion.

Palan­tir, co-found­ed by con­tro­ver­sial right-wing bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel, makes data min­ing soft­ware and ser­vices and pow­ers dozens of agen­cies with­in the US gov­ern­ment and its allies, as well as large insti­tu­tions.

“We are hon­ored to be includ­ed in these dis­cus­sions and rec­og­nize the lead­ing role tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies can play to rein­force their mis­sion,” Palan­tir said in a state­ment. At the meet­ing, Karp and Zelen­skiy “dis­cussed how Palan­tir can con­tin­ue to use its tech­nol­o­gy to sup­port Ukraine,” the state­ment said. “With geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions ris­ing all over the world, enhanc­ing secu­ri­ty and pro­tect­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions has nev­er been more impor­tant.”

In a tweet on Thurs­day, Ukraine’s vice prime min­is­ter and min­is­ter for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, Mykhai­lo Fedorov, said that Karp was the first CEO to vis­it the coun­try since the begin­ning of the Russ­ian inva­sion. Sev­er­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials, includ­ing US House Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi and UK Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son, have also made the trip.

Den­ver-based Palan­tir has pre­vi­ous­ly won sig­nif­i­cant defense con­tracts aimed at updat­ing gov­ern­ment soft­ware. In recent months, Palantir’s Karp has warned of the large nation­al secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of the war in Ukraine. In the company’s annu­al let­ter to share­hold­ers in May, Karp wrote that the world is at an “inflec­tion point,” and that the “glob­al pan­dem­ic and war in Europe have now con­spired to shat­ter our col­lec­tive illu­sions of sta­bil­i­ty and per­pet­u­al peace.”

Palantir’s tech­nol­o­gy has been in use by Ukraine, the US and oth­er NATO coun­tries since the begin­ning of the con­flict three months ago, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the com­pa­ny who asked not to be iden­ti­fied dis­cussing pri­vate infor­ma­tion.

The com­pa­ny, which got its start near­ly two decades ago help­ing intel­li­gence agen­cies aggre­gate data, said in a recent investor pre­sen­ta­tion that gov­ern­ments in the region had used a range of Palan­tir ser­vices. “Every prod­uct and capa­bil­i­ty has been employed by our cus­tomers to sup­port mis­sion out­comes for Ukraine—and across Poland, Lithua­nia and oth­er nations to pow­er refugee relief,” the com­pa­ny said.

———-

“Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp Met With Zelen­skiy in Ukraine” By Lizette Chap­man; Bloomberg; 06/02/2022

“Palantir’s tech­nol­o­gy has been in use by Ukraine, the US and oth­er NATO coun­tries since the begin­ning of the con­flict three months ago, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the com­pa­ny who asked not to be iden­ti­fied dis­cussing pri­vate infor­ma­tion.”

We don’t know what exact­ly Palan­tir is doing in rela­tion to Ukraine’s war effort. But as the first for­eign CEO to vis­it the coun­try since the start of the con­flict, Palan­tir is clear­ly very inter­est­ed in Ukraine.

But if we take Alex Karp at his word, his inter­est in Ukraine isn’t just the poten­tial new mar­ket Ukraine presents for Palan­tir’s ser­vices. Accord­ing to Karp, the con­flict in Ukraine rep­re­sents a kind of glob­al secu­ri­ty inflec­tion poin. An inflec­tion point that could “shat­ter our col­lec­tive illu­sions of sta­bil­i­ty and per­pet­u­al peace.” It’s a pro­found­ly dark pre­dic­tion:

...
In a tweet on Thurs­day, Ukraine’s vice prime min­is­ter and min­is­ter for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, Mykhai­lo Fedorov, said that Karp was the first CEO to vis­it the coun­try since the begin­ning of the Russ­ian inva­sion. Sev­er­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials, includ­ing US House Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi and UK Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son, have also made the trip.

Den­ver-based Palan­tir has pre­vi­ous­ly won sig­nif­i­cant defense con­tracts aimed at updat­ing gov­ern­ment soft­ware. In recent months, Palantir’s Karp has warned of the large nation­al secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of the war in Ukraine. In the company’s annu­al let­ter to share­hold­ers in May, Karp wrote that the world is at an “inflec­tion point,” and that the “glob­al pan­dem­ic and war in Europe have now con­spired to shat­ter our col­lec­tive illu­sions of sta­bil­i­ty and per­pet­u­al peace.”
...

So what kinds of tur­moil is Karp pre­dict­ing might come with this glob­al insti­tu­tion­al melt­down? Well, we got a hint for Karp in an inter­view a cou­ple weeks ago where he shared a pre­dic­tion: If the war in Ukraine turns into a long-term con­flict, Karp puts the odds of a nuclear war at 20–30%:

CNBC

Palan­tir CEO weighs in on the Ukraine war: ‘The les­son for every big coun­try is holy s—’

* The tech exec said every large nation is cur­rent­ly eval­u­at­ing its offen­sive and defen­sive abil­i­ties.
* Karp added that he believes there is a 20–30% chance of a nuclear war tak­ing place in the long term.
* It’s worth not­ing that Palan­tir stands to ben­e­fit if every­one thinks a nuclear war on the way as the com­pa­ny sells its soft­ware to mil­i­taries around the world.

by Sam Shead
Pub­lished Tue, May 24 2022 11:54 AM EDT
Updat­ed Tue, May 24 20221:22 PM EDT

Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp believes that the war between Rus­sia and Ukraine is mak­ing big coun­tries re-con­sid­er their mil­i­tary strate­gies.

Asked by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin if there is a les­son for Chi­na from the war, Karp said: “The les­son for every big coun­try is ‘holy s—. We’ve been buy­ing all this heavy stuff and if peo­ple are will­ing to fight as heroes, fight to the last per­son ... they might actu­al­ly be able to beat us’.”

Karp, who was inter­viewed at the World Eco­nom­ic Forum in Davos on Tues­day, said every large nation is cur­rent­ly eval­u­at­ing its offen­sive and defen­sive abil­i­ties.

“Is our offen­sive capa­bil­i­ty actu­al­ly offence? Or will defense-offense like in Ukraine be able to beat us? Every sin­gle large coun­try in the world is look­ing at this. Not just our adver­saries but also our allies.”

...

Nuclear risk

Karp said he believes there is a 20–30% chance of a nuclear war tak­ing place in the long term as the war in Ukraine shows no sign of dis­si­pat­ing.

He added that the risk of nuclear war is cur­rent­ly being under­es­ti­mat­ed, adding that most peo­ple see it as being below 1%.

“I think, of course, it depends on the dura­tion. If you have a long dura­tion, I think the risk is modellable and it’s prob­a­bly in the 20–30% range.”

One of the rea­sons peo­ple are under­es­ti­mat­ing the risk of nuclear war is because there has been a “sys­tem that’s func­tioned” ever since World War II, accord­ing to Karp, who believes the sys­tem has allowed more peo­ple in the West to become more edu­cat­ed and wealth­i­er.

“But we’re now in a moment where the sys­tem actu­al­ly flips,” Karp said, adding that times like this can lead to moments of com­plete irra­tional­i­ty.

“Our insti­tu­tions have not taught us how to deal with that,” Karp added. “And there­fore we sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly under­es­ti­mate the risk.”

Palantir’s data ana­lyt­ics tech­nol­o­gy aims to try to help lead­ers join the dots so they can make deci­sions, be it in busi­ness or on the bat­tle­field. It’s worth not­ing that Palan­tir stands to ben­e­fit if every­one thinks a nuclear war is on the way as the com­pa­ny sells its soft­ware to mil­i­taries around the world. The com­pa­ny works with armed forces in the U.S. and Europe although it keeps the exact nature of most mil­i­tary part­ner­ships secret.

———-

“Palan­tir CEO weighs in on the Ukraine war: ‘The les­son for every big coun­try is holy s—’” by Sam Shead; CNBC; 05/24/2022

““I think, of course, it depends on the dura­tion. If you have a long dura­tion, I think the risk is modellable and it’s prob­a­bly in the 20–30% range.””

A 20–30% change of nuclear war. Those are the odd Karp was plac­ing on the risk of a nuclear war between Rus­sia and the West if the con­flict in Ukraine ends up becom­ing a long run­ning con­flict. But beyond that grim pre­dic­tion, Karp appears to be sug­gest­ing that the world is poised for a peri­od of mass insti­tu­ta­tion­al fail­ure and com­plete irra­tional­i­ty. He’s pre­dict­ing a kind of glob­al men­tal melt­down:

...
One of the rea­sons peo­ple are under­es­ti­mat­ing the risk of nuclear war is because there has been a “sys­tem that’s func­tioned” ever since World War II, accord­ing to Karp, who believes the sys­tem has allowed more peo­ple in the West to become more edu­cat­ed and wealth­i­er.

“But we’re now in a moment where the sys­tem actu­al­ly flips,” Karp said, adding that times like this can lead to moments of com­plete irra­tional­i­ty.

“Our insti­tu­tions have not taught us how to deal with that,” Karp added. “And there­fore we sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly under­es­ti­mate the risk.”
...

So will the nuclear war hap­pen before or after the insti­tu­tion­al melt­downs? We’ll find out.

But the inva­sion of Ukraine and Palan­tir’s role in that fight has­n’t just prompt­ed fears of a nuclear exchange in Karp’s mind. As he describes in the fol­low­ing Asahi Shim­bun arti­cle from back in April, Karp views the West as being locked in a long-term strate­gic full spec­trum Cold War with Russ­ian and Chi­na. But unlike the last Cold War, AI will be the crit­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy in the future of nation­al secu­ri­ty.

And what about the con­cerns about the kinds of ser­vices Palan­tir offers gov­ern­ments being abused as these nation­al secu­ri­ty AIs become more and more pow­er­ful and inva­sive? Well, Karp assures us that Palan­tir’s soft­ware allows for over­sight by third par­ties with­in orga­ni­za­tions who do not have a stake in project out­comes. In oth­er words, Palan­tir isn’t active­ly mon­i­tor­ing its clients for abus­es, but if those clients want­ed to mon­i­tor them­selves the tools are avail­able. It’s not exact­ly assur­ing.

But we also get a rather remark­able state­ment about Palan­tir’s ambi­tions in rela­tion to Japan: the com­pa­ny wants to play a role in facil­i­tat­ing intel­li­gence shar­ing between Japan and the Five Eyes alliance. So Palan­tir is warn­ing about a com­ing AI Cold War. A Cold War that’s going to require mas­sive vol­umes of data col­lec­tion and shar­ing shared inter­na­tion­al across the West and its part­ners, with Palan­tir at the heart of it as the West­’s intel­li­gence shar­ing hub:

The Asahi Shim­bun

INTERVIEW/ Meet Palan­tir, the big data firm ana­lyz­ing the Ukraine con­flict

By NAOATSU AOYAMA/ Staff Writer

April 20, 2022 at 10:30 JST

An offi­cial at the U.S.-based data-analy­sis firm Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies Inc. point­ed to a loca­tion on a screen at the company’s head­quar­ters in Den­ver, Col­orado, as Russ­ian troops massed on the Ukrain­ian bor­der.

“This image was tak­en of a site just north of Ukraine,” he said on Feb. 10 dur­ing a demon­stra­tion of soft­ware that coor­di­nates satel­lite imagery. “A plan­ner might want to know how fre­quent­ly this site needs to be imaged so that they could detect new move­ments.”

Palantir’s soft­ware pro­vides analy­sis of the cri­sis unfold­ing in Ukraine and oth­er regions around the world to assist the U.S. gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary.

“Over just a two-day time peri­od, for exam­ple, there have been 1,200 satel­lite fly­overs,” the offi­cial con­tin­ued.

The firm, which has grown much clos­er to Wash­ing­ton than oth­er IT giants and Sil­i­con Val­ley dar­lings, uses its soft­ware to sched­ule image col­lec­tion from hun­dreds of satel­lites orbit­ing the Earth to deliv­er crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion to deci­sion mak­ers.

The offi­cial then pulled up an image of the South Chi­na Sea, where Chi­na con­tin­ues to increase its naval pow­er. The company’s soft­ware enables its cus­tomers to con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor the move­ments of Chi­nese sub­marines, destroy­ers, air­craft car­ri­ers and oth­er ves­sels, pro­vid­ing vital tac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion for strate­gic and pol­i­cy deci­sions.

“How can our tech­nol­o­gy enable our cus­tomers to make deci­sions faster than their adver­saries? To do that, we need more eyes,” the offi­cial said.

...

Although Google LLC or Face­book Inc., now Meta Plat­forms Inc., main­tain some dis­tance from the U.S. gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary, Palan­tir is one exam­ple of how Big Data is work­ing close­ly with Wash­ing­ton.

When the firm was list­ed in 2020, its reg­is­tra­tion doc­u­ments said that it would not trade with adver­sar­i­al coun­tries or the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

Over the past decades since the end of the Cold War, a con­sen­sus had been reached that glob­al­iza­tion would fos­ter world peace because inter­na­tion­al businesses–IT giants and multi­na­tion­al companies–deepen mutu­al depen­dence among nations.

But the emer­gence of Chi­na as a hege­mon­ic world pow­er, and now Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, are begin­ning to shake that belief.

AI WILL ‘DICTATE NORMS OF THE FUTURE’

Alex Capri, an expert at the Hin­rich Foun­da­tion, a non­prof­it think tank focused on trade issues, believes the world has entered an era of tech­no-nation­al­ism, when nations–particularly the Unit­ed States and China–struggle for hege­mo­ny over data and AI.

“Data is a com­mod­i­ty. It’s trade­able. But it’s also a tool and a resource for all kinds of activ­i­ties, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive,” Capri said.

These activ­i­ties include state attempts to dis­sem­i­nate fake news or con­tro­ver­sial infor­ma­tion to under­mine polit­i­cal adver­saries.

“As glob­al­iza­tion becomes more region­al­ized and local­ized, we will see more ring-fenc­ing around strate­gic data indus­tries.”

Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp also empha­sizes the impor­tance of data. Known as a unique busi­ness­man who majored in phi­los­o­phy and earned a doc­tor­ate in Ger­many, Karp said in an inter­view with The Asahi Shim­bun that his indus­try is now the key to the suc­cess of nations.

“The coun­try that con­trols the best soft­ware, in this case AI soft­ware and its many man­i­fes­ta­tions, will dic­tate the norms of the future, the same way the coun­tries that con­trolled the nuclear bomb in the last half decade de fac­to defined the rules of the game,” Karp said.

Karp showed dis­sat­is­fac­tion with U.S. IT giants that have expand­ed their busi­ness­es world­wide after the Cold War end­ed, regard­less of the norms embod­ied by dif­fer­ent states.

“Sil­i­con Val­ley 1.0 believed it should build tech­nol­o­gy pri­mar­i­ly for the mil­i­tary and repur­pose that tech­nol­o­gy so that it would be use­ful for the rest of human­i­ty,” he said.

Then, “Sil­i­con Val­ley 2.0” mar­ket­ed its prod­ucts as things that help peo­ple, while at the same time was trans­form­ing their users into the prod­ucts being con­sumed, he said.

In oth­er words, Google and Face­book are essen­tial­ly adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies. Con­sumers use their ser­vices because they are free, but the com­pa­nies vac­u­um up their per­son­al data and put it up for sale at enor­mous prof­its.

More recent­ly, Big Tech com­pa­nies have come under fire for dis­tort­ing democ­ra­cy through monop­o­lis­tic busi­ness mod­els that exac­er­bate wealth dis­par­i­ties and allow states such as Chi­na and Rus­sia to eas­i­ly prop­a­gate dis­in­for­ma­tion online.

Con­verse­ly, Palan­tir has become a major con­trac­tor for the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence agen­cies, a fact that has drawn its own crit­i­cism from observers.

While Palan­tir works to pro­tect the U.S. and its allies from Islamist ter­ror­ism and infringe­ment on free­doms by author­i­tar­i­an states, there is also con­cern that Palantir’s soft­ware can be per­vert­ed by gov­ern­ments to sur­veil the pub­lic or cur­tail civ­il lib­er­ties.

Respond­ing to these crit­i­cisms, Karp not­ed that while it is true any tech­nol­o­gy can be abused, Palantir’s soft­ware allows for over­sight by third par­ties with­in orga­ni­za­tions who do not have a stake in project out­comes. All oper­a­tions of the soft­ware deliv­ered to the gov­ern­ment are record­ed, mak­ing it hard­er to mis­use, he said.

Palantir’s oper­a­tions are not lim­it­ed to the nation­al secu­ri­ty realm, how­ev­er. Amid the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the firm also built a com­put­er sys­tem for the U.S. government’s vac­ci­na­tion roll­out.

In Japan, Som­po Hold­ings Inc. has invest­ed in Palan­tir since 2020. It is work­ing to deploy Palantir’s soft­ware in elder­ly nurs­ing care facil­i­ties and med­ical busi­ness­es.

Palan­tir like­wise coop­er­at­ed with the Kana­gawa pre­fec­tur­al gov­ern­ment to ana­lyze the spread of COVID-19 across the local com­mu­ni­ty. More than half of Palantir’s cus­tomers are now in the pri­vate sec­tor.

Karp said he pays close atten­tion to the rela­tion­ship between the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment and the Five Eyes countries–the Unit­ed States, Britain, Cana­da, Aus­tralia and New Zealand–which share con­fi­den­tial intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion.

Palan­tir is “very inter­est­ed in help­ing Japan play an even big­ger role in the Five Eyes com­mu­ni­ty,” he not­ed.

Matthew Turpin, who works at Palan­tir as Senior Advis­er, is a for­mer U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer who pre­vi­ous­ly served as the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s Direc­tor for Chi­na dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

He helped for­mu­late eco­nom­ic and secu­ri­ty coun­ter­mea­sures against Chi­na, includ­ing sanc­tions, tar­iffs and export con­trols, while also coor­di­nat­ing actions among allies.

Turpin sees rela­tions with Chi­na and Rus­sia as a com­pre­hen­sive, long-term strate­gic com­pe­ti­tion across a broad range of eco­nom­ic, intel­li­gence, diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary domains, just like the Cold War with the for­mer Sovi­et Union. The key to this new com­pe­ti­tion is data.

Chi­na is using the data gen­er­at­ed by its enor­mous pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 bil­lion peo­ple to improve AI tech­nolo­gies, such as facial recog­ni­tion, which it exports to author­i­tar­i­an states for domes­tic sur­veil­lance and cen­sor­ship.

It is wide­ly believed to be wag­ing a “hybrid war” against demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ments such as Tai­wan by exploit­ing their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to cyber­at­tacks and pro­pa­gan­da.

While some argue that author­i­tar­i­an regimes have an advan­tage in the data race, Turpin said democ­ra­cies “should be quite con­fi­dent about the plu­ral­is­tic natures of our sys­tems.”

“Democ­ra­cies have to both ensure secu­ri­ty and civ­il lib­er­ties. As a com­pa­ny, we feel you can pro­tect sen­si­tive data while also shar­ing data when it’s mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial. This also over­laps with the Japan­ese government’s pol­i­cy of ‘data free flow with trust.’”

After Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, Karp issued a state­ment titled “On the Defense of Europe.”

There he assert­ed, “Our soft­ware is in the fight around the world. The cen­ter will hold. But we need an allied tech­nol­o­gy indus­try in Europe to step up and fight this bat­tle along­side us in order to win.”

Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine could be the begin­ning of a glob­al bifur­ca­tion, but Karp believes that Palantir’s data ana­lyt­ics soft­ware will be on the right side of the fight.

Here are some excerpts from the inter­view:

Q: Are demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries like the Unit­ed States or Japan at a major infor­ma­tion dis­ad­van­tage when com­pared to Chi­na and its strat­e­gy to reign in its big tech firms and main­tain exclu­sive gov­ern­ment con­trol over data flows?

A: Palan­tir is play­ing a very large role on a num­ber of clas­si­fied projects in the con­text of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and very sophis­ti­cat­ed machine learn­ing. There’s a gen­er­al asser­tion that non-demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries have an advan­tage in build­ing soft­ware because they have unfet­tered access to data. But the most impor­tant advan­tage is the know-how about build­ing a tech com­pa­ny. And the kind of tech com­pa­nies that build our kind of soft­ware are most­ly, almost exclu­sive­ly, built here in the Unit­ed States.

Now, soft­ware comes down to build­ing a soft­ware cul­ture that retains and recruits and trains peo­ple. The West in gen­er­al, and Amer­i­ca, in par­tic­u­lar, are still by far the best at build­ing enter­prise soft­ware.

I’d be very pas­sion­ate about chang­ing that so there are more soft­ware com­pa­nies in Japan and Europe.

America’s form of cap­i­tal­ism, inno­va­tion, and, quite frankly, abil­i­ty to build the bomb, con­vinced peo­ple around the world Amer­i­ca’s val­ues were right. It was not that the val­ues them­selves, in the absence of these accom­plish­ments, con­vinced peo­ple that the Amer­i­can mod­el was the best.

Q: What is your out­look for tomor­row? Will we see an increas­ing­ly bifur­cat­ed world between dig­i­tal democ­ra­cies and tech­no-author­i­tar­i­an states, con­test­ing data and AI?

A: As you would say in Eng­lish, “buck­le up.” It’s going to be very, very rough waters, I think–politically, eco­nom­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly. I believe we’re going to see mas­sive dis­rup­tions, both inside and out­side coun­tries.

———-

“INTERVIEW/ Meet Palan­tir, the big data firm ana­lyz­ing the Ukraine con­flict” by NAOATSU AOYAMA; The Asahi Shim­bun; 04/20/2022

““The coun­try that con­trols the best soft­ware, in this case AI soft­ware and its many man­i­fes­ta­tions, will dic­tate the norms of the future, the same way the coun­tries that con­trolled the nuclear bomb in the last half decade de fac­to defined the rules of the game,” Karp said.”

AI is the new nukes. That’s how Karp was char­ac­ter­iz­ing the role he envi­sions AI play­ing in the geostrate­gic land­scape of tomor­row. The coun­tries with supe­ri­or AI capa­bil­i­ties will dom­i­nate the future.

Of course, under this AI-cen­tric vision, that also means the mass col­lec­tion of data to feed these AIs are going to be more and more of a nation­al secu­ri­ty issue. So how to Karp envi­sion this bat­tle of super-AIs play­ing out in the con­text of an osten­si­ble glob­al divide between the ‘free’ West and author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments? Author­i­tar­i­an regimes would obvi­ous­ly have a mas­sive advan­tage in terms of data col­lec­tion and uses. Karp echoed the ‘yel­low per­il’ crit­i­cism Peter Thiel and Steve Ban­non have long issued against Palan­tir’s Sil­i­con Val­ley rivals for their will­ing­ness to do busi­ness in coun­tries like Chi­na. He goes on to warn about a glob­al bifur­ca­tion. A bifiru­ca­tion that, of course, he is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly call­ing for when he makes his demands that West­ern com­pa­nies sim­ply stop doing busi­ness with Rus­sia or Chi­na.

So how does Karp address con­cerns that Palan­tir’s ser­vices are pro­vid­ing tools ripe for gov­ern­ment abuse as this AI Cold War plays out? Well, Karp offers bland assur­ances about how “soft­ware allows for over­sight by third par­ties with­in orga­ni­za­tions who do not have a stake in project out­comes.” In oth­er words, Palan­tir isn’t actu­al­ly mon­i­tor­ing how its soft­ware is used, but if its clients want to set up their own inter­nal abuse-track­ing mea­sures they are free to do so. It’s the kind of none-answer answer that’s a remind that the issue of civ­il rights abus­es by gov­ern­ment AIs is poised dur­ing the upcom­ing AI Cold War. An AI Cold War that will be guid­ed by fig­ures like Alex Karp who want to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly assure us that the AI ser­vices pro­vid­ed by Palan­tir are both absolute­ly vital for inter­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty and also safe from abuse:

...
Karp showed dis­sat­is­fac­tion with U.S. IT giants that have expand­ed their busi­ness­es world­wide after the Cold War end­ed, regard­less of the norms embod­ied by dif­fer­ent states.

“Sil­i­con Val­ley 1.0 believed it should build tech­nol­o­gy pri­mar­i­ly for the mil­i­tary and repur­pose that tech­nol­o­gy so that it would be use­ful for the rest of human­i­ty,” he said.

Then, “Sil­i­con Val­ley 2.0” mar­ket­ed its prod­ucts as things that help peo­ple, while at the same time was trans­form­ing their users into the prod­ucts being con­sumed, he said.

In oth­er words, Google and Face­book are essen­tial­ly adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies. Con­sumers use their ser­vices because they are free, but the com­pa­nies vac­u­um up their per­son­al data and put it up for sale at enor­mous prof­its.

More recent­ly, Big Tech com­pa­nies have come under fire for dis­tort­ing democ­ra­cy through monop­o­lis­tic busi­ness mod­els that exac­er­bate wealth dis­par­i­ties and allow states such as Chi­na and Rus­sia to eas­i­ly prop­a­gate dis­in­for­ma­tion online.

Con­verse­ly, Palan­tir has become a major con­trac­tor for the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence agen­cies, a fact that has drawn its own crit­i­cism from observers.

While Palan­tir works to pro­tect the U.S. and its allies from Islamist ter­ror­ism and infringe­ment on free­doms by author­i­tar­i­an states, there is also con­cern that Palantir’s soft­ware can be per­vert­ed by gov­ern­ments to sur­veil the pub­lic or cur­tail civ­il lib­er­ties.

Respond­ing to these crit­i­cisms, Karp not­ed that while it is true any tech­nol­o­gy can be abused, Palantir’s soft­ware allows for over­sight by third par­ties with­in orga­ni­za­tions who do not have a stake in project out­comes. All oper­a­tions of the soft­ware deliv­ered to the gov­ern­ment are record­ed, mak­ing it hard­er to mis­use, he said.

...

Turpin sees rela­tions with Chi­na and Rus­sia as a com­pre­hen­sive, long-term strate­gic com­pe­ti­tion across a broad range of eco­nom­ic, intel­li­gence, diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary domains, just like the Cold War with the for­mer Sovi­et Union. The key to this new com­pe­ti­tion is data.

Chi­na is using the data gen­er­at­ed by its enor­mous pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 bil­lion peo­ple to improve AI tech­nolo­gies, such as facial recog­ni­tion, which it exports to author­i­tar­i­an states for domes­tic sur­veil­lance and cen­sor­ship.

It is wide­ly believed to be wag­ing a “hybrid war” against demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ments such as Tai­wan by exploit­ing their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to cyber­at­tacks and pro­pa­gan­da.

While some argue that author­i­tar­i­an regimes have an advan­tage in the data race, Turpin said democ­ra­cies “should be quite con­fi­dent about the plu­ral­is­tic natures of our sys­tems.”

“Democ­ra­cies have to both ensure secu­ri­ty and civ­il lib­er­ties. As a com­pa­ny, we feel you can pro­tect sen­si­tive data while also shar­ing data when it’s mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial. This also over­laps with the Japan­ese government’s pol­i­cy of ‘data free flow with trust.’”

After Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, Karp issued a state­ment titled “On the Defense of Europe.”

There he assert­ed, “Our soft­ware is in the fight around the world. The cen­ter will hold. But we need an allied tech­nol­o­gy indus­try in Europe to step up and fight this bat­tle along­side us in order to win.”

Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine could be the begin­ning of a glob­al bifur­ca­tion, but Karp believes that Palantir’s data ana­lyt­ics soft­ware will be on the right side of the fight.

...

Q: What is your out­look for tomor­row? Will we see an increas­ing­ly bifur­cat­ed world between dig­i­tal democ­ra­cies and tech­no-author­i­tar­i­an states, con­test­ing data and AI?

A: As you would say in Eng­lish, “buck­le up.” It’s going to be very, very rough waters, I think–politically, eco­nom­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly. I believe we’re going to see mas­sive dis­rup­tions, both inside and out­side coun­tries.
...

And then we get this fas­ci­nat­ing hint about anoth­er area of growth Palan­tir has in mind in this future AI Cold War land­scape: As AI becomes more and more impor­tant for glob­al secu­ri­ty, so will infor­ma­tion shar­ing between nations. As such, Karp appar­ent­ly envi­sions Palan­tir play­ing a role in that infor­ma­tion shar­ing glob­al infra­struc­ture. For exam­ple, facil­i­tat­ing the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion between Japan and the Five Eyes. So Palan­tir is try­ing to become a kind of Five Eyes inter­na­tion­al data broke mid­dle-man:

...
Karp said he pays close atten­tion to the rela­tion­ship between the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment and the Five Eyes countries–the Unit­ed States, Britain, Cana­da, Aus­tralia and New Zealand–which share con­fi­den­tial intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion.

Palan­tir is “very inter­est­ed in help­ing Japan play an even big­ger role in the Five Eyes com­mu­ni­ty,” he not­ed.
...

It’s worth keep­ing in mind the­bizarre con­tra­dic­tion in Palan­tir’s stance here: it wants to be a hyper-nation­al­is­tic com­pa­ny with a focus on nation­al­ist secu­ri­ty while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly offer­ing sim­i­lar ser­vices to just about any gov­ern­ment on the plan­et that isn’t Rus­sia or Chi­na. It’s the kind of busi­ness plan that rais­es the ques­tion of how long before Palan­tir has more access to intel­li­gence than any oth­er enti­ty on the plan­et? And what are the glob­al secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of giv­ing a pri­vate enti­ty run by known fas­cists that much pow­er? We’ll find out. But don’t be shocked if it ends in glob­al calami­ty. That is what Palan­tir is pre­dict­ing, after all.

The unof­fi­cial — yet basi­cal­ly offi­cial — crack­down on Con­sor­tium New had an dis­turb­ing, if not unex­pect­ed, new twist: fol­low­ing on Pay­Pal’s deci­sion to per­ma­nent­ly cut off Con­sor­tium News from its pay­ment ser­vices for mys­te­ri­ous unex­plained rea­sons, we’re now learn­ing that Con­sor­tium News has been “reviewed” by a new US gov­ern­ment affil­i­at­ed enti­ty called “News­Guard”, which has assumed the role of judg­ing news out­lets for the qual­i­ty of their news cov­er­age. So in addi­tion to cut­ting off Con­sor­tium News’s abil­i­ty to finance itself, the site is also being attack as a pur­vey­or of false news by an app being pushed on the pub­lic with gov­ern­ment back­ing.

As we should expect, News­Guard has charged Con­sor­tium News with pub­lish­ing “false con­tent”. As we should also expect, those charges of “false con­tent” are focused on the out­let’s cov­er­age of the events in Ukraine. Charges of “false con­tent” that are absolute­ly out­ra­geous and eas­i­ly refut­ed using a myr­i­ad of main­stream sources. And that’s more or less what the fol­low­ing arti­cle by Joe Lau­ria of Con­sor­tium News lays out in exten­sive detail. It’s just one giant refu­ta­tion of News­Guard’s attacks, filled with main­stream news reports back­ing Con­sor­tium News’s report­ing. A giant refu­ta­tion of News­Guard filled with main­stream news reports back­ing Con­sor­tium News’s report­ing that will pre­sum­ably be entire­ly ignored by News­Guard and the rest of the main­stream media:

Con­sor­tium News

US State-Affil­i­at­ed News­Guard Tar­gets Con­sor­tium News

June 2, 2022

The Pen­ta­gon and State Dept.-linked out­fit, with an ex‑N.S.A. and C.I.A. direc­tor on its board, is accus­ing Con­sor­tium News of pub­lish­ing “false con­tent” on Ukraine, reports Joe Lau­ria.

By Joe Lau­ria
Spe­cial to Con­sor­tium News

Con­sor­tium News is being “reviewed” by News­Guard, a U.S. gov­ern­ment-linked orga­ni­za­tion that is try­ing to enforce a nar­ra­tive on Ukraine while seek­ing to dis­cred­it dis­sent­ing views.

The orga­ni­za­tion has accused Con­sor­tium News, begun in 1995 by for­mer Asso­ci­at­ed Press inves­tiga­tive reporter Robert Par­ry, of pub­lish­ing “false con­tent” on Ukraine.

It calls “false” essen­tial facts about Ukraine that have been sup­pressed in main­stream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a sig­nif­i­cant force in Ukraine. Report­ing cru­cial infor­ma­tion left out of cor­po­rate media is Con­sor­tium News‘ essen­tial mis­sion.

But News­Guard con­sid­ers these facts to be “myths” and is demand­ing Con­sor­tium News “cor­rect” these “errors.”

Who is News­Guard?

News­Guard set itself up in 2018 as a judge of news orga­ni­za­tions’ cred­i­bil­i­ty. The front page of NewsGuard’s web­site shows that it is “part­ners” with the State Depart­ment and the Pen­ta­gon, as well as with sev­er­al major cor­po­ra­tions, such as Microsoft. The nature of these “part­ner­ships” is not entire­ly clear.

News­Guard is a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion that can shield itself from First Amend­ment oblig­a­tions. But it has con­nec­tions to for­mer­ly high-rank­ing U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials in addi­tion to its “part­ner­ships” with the State Dept. and the Pen­ta­gon.

Among those sit­ting on NewsGuard’s advi­so­ry board are Gen. Michael Hay­den, the for­mer Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency direc­tor; Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Home­land Secu­ri­ty direc­tor and Anders Fogh Ras­mussen, a for­mer sec­re­tary gen­er­al of NATO. New­Guard says its “advi­sors pro­vide advice and sub­ject-mat­ter exper­tise to News­Guard. They play no role in the deter­mi­na­tions of rat­ings or the Nutri­tion Label write ups of web­sites unless oth­er­wise not­ed and have no role in the gov­er­nance or man­age­ment of the orga­ni­za­tion.”

The co-CEO, with for­mer Wall Street Jour­nal pub­lish­er Louis Gor­don Crovitz, is Steven Brill, who in the 1990s pub­lished Brill’s Con­tent, a mag­a­zine that was billed as a watch­dog of the press, cri­tiquing the role of the media to hold gov­ern­ment to account. News­Guard is a gov­ern­ment-affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tion judg­ing media like Con­sor­tium News that is total­ly inde­pen­dent of gov­ern­ment or cor­po­ra­tions.

News­Guard has a rat­ing process that results in a news orga­ni­za­tion receiv­ing either a green or red label. Fox News and oth­er major media, for exam­ple, have received green labels.

Get­ting a red label means that poten­tial­ly mil­lions of peo­ple that have the News­Guard exten­sion installed and oper­at­ing on their browsers will see the green or red mark affixed to web­sites on social media and Google search­es. (For indi­vid­u­als that do not already have it installed and oper­at­ing on Microsoft’s brows­er, it costs $4.95 a month in the U.S., £4.95 in the U.K., or €4.95 in the EU to run the exten­sion.)

Accord­ing to News­Guard, libraries in the U.S. and Britain have had it installed on their com­put­ers, and it is also being put on com­put­ers of U.S. active duty per­son­nel. Slate report­ed in Jan­u­ary 2019 that News­Guard:

“struck a deal with Microsoft to incor­po­rate those rat­ings into the tech giant’s Edge brows­er as an option­al set­ting. That’s when the Guardian noticed that the Mail Online had been tagged by News­Guard with a ‘red’ label, a reli­a­bil­i­ty score of 3 out of 9, and the fol­low­ing warn­ing: ‘Pro­ceed with cau­tion: This web­site gen­er­al­ly fails to main­tain basic stan­dards of accu­ra­cy and account­abil­i­ty.’ For Microsoft Edge users with the ‘News Rat­ings’ fea­ture turned on, that warn­ing appeared along­side every link to the Mail Online—whether in Google search results, Face­book or Twit­ter feeds, or the Mail’s own home­page.”

Approach to Con­sor­tium News

Con­sor­tium News was con­tact­ed by News­Guard ana­lyst Zachary Fish­man. In his request to speak to some­one at Con­sor­tium News he said cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that CN had pub­lished “false con­tent” and that the inter­view would be on the record. “I’m hop­ing to talk with some­one who could answer a few ques­tions about its struc­ture and edi­to­r­i­al process­es — includ­ing its own­er­ship, its han­dling of cor­rec­tions, and its pub­li­ca­tion of false con­tent,” he wrote in an email.

As edi­tor-in-chief, I informed him that our founder, edi­tors and writ­ers came from high lev­els of estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ism. I told him that in thou­sands of press inter­views I’ve con­duct­ed over near­ly half a cen­tu­ry in jour­nal­ism I had nev­er known any­one accus­ing a prospec­tive inter­vie­wee of mis­con­duct upfront and then deter­min­ing that the inter­view would be on the record, when the ground rules are usu­al­ly set by the per­son being inter­viewed.

Fish­man apol­o­gized and tried to say his mind wasn’t made up about Con­sor­tium News, when he had clear­ly stat­ed that it was. “I do apol­o­gize that the word­ing of my email insin­u­at­ed that I had come to a pre­de­ter­mined con­clu­sion on whether your web­site has pub­lished false con­tent, when I have not — be sure that I am inter­est­ed in your respons­es to my ques­tions,” he wrote in an email.

Accord­ing to his LinkedIn pro­file, Fish­man had one pre­vi­ous job in sci­ence and finan­cial jour­nal­ism that last­ed 15 months for a com­pa­ny called Fastin­form that is now defunct. Last month, all the links of his pub­lished pieces on LinkedIn went to a site that no longer exists. The links have now been removed.

Fish­man has degrees in health, envi­ron­ment and sci­ence jour­nal­ism and engi­neer­ing physics. He has no expe­ri­ence in polit­i­cal report­ing and espe­cial­ly of the pol­i­tics of East­ern Europe and U.S.-Russia rela­tions.

NewsGuard’s deter­mi­na­tion on Con­sor­tium News will be made by the ana­lyst and, “At least one senior edi­tor and NewsGuard’s co-CEOs review every Nutri­tion Label pri­or to pub­li­ca­tion to ensure that the rat­ing is as fair and accu­rate as pos­si­ble.”

Charge: There Was ‘No US-Backed Coup’

News­Guard alleges that Con­sor­tium News has pub­lished “false con­tent” by report­ing that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in the coun­try.

Fish­man took issue with a:

“Feb­ru­ary 2022 arti­cle ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflec­tion,’ [which] assert­ed, ‘Hence, the infla­tion of Russ­ian behav­ior in Ukraine (where Wash­ing­ton orga­nized a coup against a demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment because we dis­liked its polit­i­cal com­plex­ion) … .’

Fish­man then wrote:

“The U.S. sup­port­ed the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion that oust­ed then-Ukraine Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — includ­ing a Decem­ber 2013 vis­it by John McCain to Kyiv in sup­port of pro­test­ers — but there is no evi­dence that the U.S. ‘orga­nized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the mark­ings of a pop­u­lar upris­ing, pre­cip­i­tat­ed by wide­ly cov­ered protests against Yanukovych’s deci­sion to sus­pend prepa­ra­tions for the sign­ing of an asso­ci­a­tion and free-trade agree­ment with the Euro­pean Union.”

Vik­tor Yanukovych was demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed as pres­i­dent of Ukraine in 2010 in an elec­tion cer­ti­fied by the Orga­ni­za­tion for Secu­ri­ty and Coop­er­a­tion in Europe, a fact not men­tioned in NewsGuard’s writ­ings on the change of gov­ern­ment in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU polit­i­cal set­tle­ment and ear­ly elec­tions, vio­lence forced him to flee from the cap­i­tal on Feb. 21, 2014. Report­ing that the neo-Nazi Right Sec­tor was at the fore­front of the vio­lent over­throw, The New York Times (green check) wrote ear­li­er that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sec­tor, a coali­tion of hard-line nation­al­ist groups, react­ed defi­ant­ly to news of the set­tle­ment, draw­ing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agree­ments that were reached do not cor­re­spond to our aspi­ra­tions,’ he said. ‘Right Sec­tor will not lay down arms. Right Sec­tor will not lift the block­ade of a sin­gle admin­is­tra­tive build­ing until our main demand is met — the res­ig­na­tion of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his sup­port­ers were ‘ready to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the rev­o­lu­tion.’ The crowd shout­ed: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the vio­lence used to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, by Prof. Ser­hiy Kudelia, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty, says the over­throw suc­ceed­ed because of “the embed­ded­ness of vio­lent groups” in a non-vio­lent protest. The vio­lence began on Dec. 1, 2013 when these vio­lent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bull­doz­er through police lines. The police vicious­ly fought back that day.

As the Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

““Accord­ing to a mem­ber of anti-fas­cist Union Ukraine, a group that mon­i­tors and fights fas­cism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nation­al­ists here [Euro­Maid­an] includ­ing Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of pro­test­ers.

Dif­fer­ent groups [of anar­chists] came togeth­er for a meet­ing on the Maid­an. While they were meet­ing, a group of Nazis came in a larg­er group, they had axes and base­ball bats and sticks, hel­mets, they said it was their ter­ri­to­ry. They called the anar­chists things like Jews, blacks, com­mu­nists. There weren’t even any com­mu­nists, that was just an insult. The anar­chists weren’t expect­ing this and they left. Peo­ple with oth­er polit­i­cal views can’t stay in cer­tain places, they aren’t tol­er­at­ed,’ a mem­ber of the group con­tin­ued.”

The vio­lence by far-right groups was evi­dent­ly con­doned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his sup­port for the upris­ing by address­ing the Maid­an crowd lat­er that month. Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State Vic­to­ria Nuland and then U.S. ambas­sador Geof­frey Pyatt vis­it­ed the square after the vio­lence had bro­ken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the ear­ly elec­tions, “angry pro­tes­tors demand­ed Yanukovych’s imme­di­ate res­ig­na­tion,” and he fled on that day after “hun­dreds of police guard­ing gov­ern­ment build­ings aban­doned their posts.” News­Guard then says “pro­tes­tors took con­trol of sev­er­al gov­ern­ment build­ings the next day.”

Gov­ern­ment Build­ings Seized

But pro­tes­tors had already seized gov­ern­ment build­ings as ear­ly as Decem­ber 2013. On Jan. 24 pro­tes­tors broke into the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry build­ing in Kiev and occu­pied it. On the same day bar­ri­cades were set up near the pres­i­den­tial head­quar­ters. Gov­ern­ment build­ings in the west of the coun­try had also been occu­pied. The Guardian (green check) report­ed on Jan. 24:

“There were dra­mat­ic devel­op­ments in the west of the coun­try on Thurs­day as hun­dreds of peo­ple forced their way into the office of the region­al gov­er­nor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a res­ig­na­tion let­ter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where sup­port for the pres­i­dent is in the low sin­gle dig­its, lat­er said he signed the let­ter under duress and was rescind­ing his res­ig­na­tion.

Thou­sands also stormed region­al admin­is­tra­tion head­quar­ters in Rivne on Thurs­day, break­ing down doors and demand­ing the release of peo­ple detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency report­ed. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 pro­test­ers took over the first two floors of the main admin­is­tra­tion build­ing and lit fires out­side the build­ing.

Sim­i­lar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmel­nyt­sky in west­ern and cen­tral Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Par­ty of the Regions said.”

Pro­tes­tors had begun occu­py­ing Kiev City Hall in Decem­ber, with a por­trait of Ukraine’s World War II fas­cist leader Stepan Ban­dera hang­ing from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fas­cist Right Sec­tor, Andriy Paru­biy, announced that the Verk­hov­na Rada (par­lia­ment), the Pres­i­den­tial Admin­is­tra­tion, the Cab­i­net of Min­is­ters and the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs had all come under con­trol of the pro­tes­tors.

There­fore News­Guard has pub­lished “false con­tent” by report­ing that gov­ern­ment build­ings were occu­pied the day after Yanukovych fled the cap­i­tal. It should print a cor­rec­tion.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada vot­ed with­out the pres­ence of Yanukovych’s par­ty — the largest in the coun­try — to impeach him after the fact of his vio­lent over­throw. News­Guard omit­ted the key fact that the impeach­ment vote was taint­ed by the absence of Yanukovych’s par­ty and that the impeach­ment became large­ly irrel­e­vant after vio­lence forced him to flee the cap­i­tal.

Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly-elect­ed lead­ers are removed by elec­toral defeat, impeach­ment or votes of no con­fi­dence, not by vio­lence. News­Guard writes that “hun­dreds of police guard­ing gov­ern­ment build­ings aban­doned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why. As Jacobin (News­Guard green check) mag­a­zine reports:

“What­ev­er one thinks of the Maid­an protests, the increas­ing vio­lence of those involved was key to their ulti­mate vic­to­ry. In response to a bru­tal police crack­down, pro­test­ers began fight­ing with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bull­doz­er — and, even­tu­al­ly, firearms, all cul­mi­nat­ing in what was effec­tive­ly an armed bat­tle in Feb­ru­ary, which left thir­teen police offi­cers and near­ly fifty pro­test­ers dead. The police ‘could no longer defend them­selves’ from pro­test­ers’ attacks,’ writes polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Sergiy Kudelia, caus­ing them to retreat, and pre­cip­i­tat­ing Yanukovych’s exit.”

News­Guard calls the events a “rev­o­lu­tion,” yet rev­o­lu­tions in his­to­ry have typ­i­cal­ly been against mon­archs or dic­ta­tors, not against demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly-elect­ed lead­ers. For instance, the 1776 Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, the 1789 French Rev­o­lu­tion, the 1917 Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the 1952 Egypt­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the 1979 Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion and count­less oth­ers were against mon­archs. Coups have been against both elect­ed and non-elect­ed lead­ers. Rev­o­lu­tions change polit­i­cal sys­tems, usu­al­ly from monar­chies to republics. Ukraine’s polit­i­cal sys­tem was not changed, only its leader.

...

Cir­cum­stan­tial Evi­dence

In its ver­sion of these events, News­Guard only refers to cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence of the coup, inter­pret­ing it as U.S. “sup­port” for a “rev­o­lu­tion” against a demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly-elect­ed pres­i­dent.

News­Guard fails to point out that McCain, Sen. Christo­pher Mur­phy (D‑CT) as well as Nuland appeared on stage in the Maid­an with Oleh Tyah­ny­bok, leader of the Neo-fas­cist Svo­bo­da Par­ty, for­mer­ly known as the Social Nation­al Par­ty.

News­Guard does not con­sid­er how such events would be seen in the Unit­ed States if a senior Russ­ian for­eign min­istry offi­cial, two lead­ing Russ­ian law­mak­ers and Russia’s ambas­sador to the U.S. appeared on stage with a far-right Amer­i­can leader to address a crowd on the Wash­ing­ton Mall seek­ing to oust an elect­ed U.S. pres­i­dent. If that pres­i­dent were over­thrown vio­lent­ly, would Amer­i­cans think it a Russ­ian-backed the coup?

News­Guard dis­cuss­es Nuland’s 2013 speech in which she revealed that since 1991 the U.S. had spent $5 bil­lion to help bring about Ukraine’s “aspi­ra­tions.” What it fails to point out is that U.S. aspi­ra­tions were to turn Ukraine towards the West and away from Rus­sia. And the U.S. had work to do.

In a 2008 poll, 17 years after this U.S. effort began, and the year in which the U.S. said Ukraine would one day join NATO, 50 per­cent of Ukraini­ans actu­al­ly opposed NATO mem­ber­ship against just 24.3 per­cent who favored it. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 40 per­cent of Ukraini­ans viewed NATO as more threat than pro­tec­tor. Just 17 per­cent had the oppo­site view. So build­ing up civ­il soci­ety through U.S.-funded NGOs to favor the West was the U.S. chal­lenge.

News­Guard does not men­tion that part of the $5 bil­lion the U.S. spent was to help orga­nize protests. There was gen­uine pop­u­lar dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Yanukovych that the NED nur­tured and trained. Jacobin report­ed of the 2014 events:

“US offi­cials, unhap­py with the scut­tled EU deal, saw a sim­i­lar chance in the Maid­an protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then pres­i­dent, point­ing to Yanukovych’s Euro­pean out­reach, wrote that “the oppor­tu­ni­ties are con­sid­er­able, and there are impor­tant ways Wash­ing­ton could help.”

In prac­tice, this meant fund­ing groups like New Cit­i­zen, which the Finan­cial Times report­ed “played a big role in get­ting the protest up and run­ning,” led by a pro-EU oppo­si­tion fig­ure. Jour­nal­ist Mark Ames dis­cov­ered the orga­ni­za­tion had received hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars from US democ­ra­cy pro­mo­tion ini­tia­tives.”

Writ­ing in Con­sor­tium News six days after Yanukovych’s ouster, Par­ry report­ed that over the pre­vi­ous year, the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy (NED), which funds NGOs in coun­tries the U.S. tar­gets for regime change, had bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine total­ing more than $20 mil­lion. Par­ry called it “a shad­ow polit­i­cal struc­ture of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment didn’t act as desired.”

The NED, on Feb. 25, the day after the Russ­ian inva­sion, delet­ed all projects in Ukraine it fund­ed, which are archived here. The NED med­dled in Ukrain­ian pol­i­tics in 2004 in the so-called Orange Rev­o­lu­tion. The Wash­ing­ton Post (green check) wrote in 1991 that what the C.I.A. once did in secret — desta­bi­liz­ing and over­throw­ing regimes — the NED was now doing open­ly.

C.I.A. or NED-led coups are nev­er made up out of whole cloth. The U.S. works with gen­uine oppo­si­tion move­ments with­in a coun­try, some­times pop­u­lar upris­ings, to finance, train and direct them. This U.S. has a long his­to­ry of over­throw­ing for­eign gov­ern­ments, the most infa­mous exam­ples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973.

In Sep­tem­ber 2013, before the Maid­an upris­ing began, long-time NED head Carl Gerhs­man called Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Wash­ing­ton Post op-ed piece, and warned that “Rus­sians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find him­self on the los­ing end not just in the near abroad but with­in Rus­sia itself.”

In 2016 he said the NED has been involved in Ukraine since the 1980s and he praised the “over­throw of Yanukovych.”

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Omit­ted

Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, NewsGuard’s attempt to refute U.S. involve­ment in the coup omits the 2014 inter­cept­ed and leaked tele­phone call between Nuland and Pyatt, the then U.S. ambas­sador to Ukraine, in which the two dis­cuss who will make up the new gov­ern­ment weeks before Yanukovych was over­thrown.

On the leaked tape, Nuland and Pyatt talk about “mid­wif­ing” a new gov­ern­ment; Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s role, and set­ting up meet­ings with Ukrain­ian politi­cians to make it hap­pen. Nuland says the prime min­is­ter should be Arseniy Yat­senyuk, and indeed he became prime min­is­ter after the coup.

At the time, the BBC (green check) wrote of the leak: “The US says that it is work­ing with all sides in the cri­sis to reach a peace­ful solu­tion, not­ing that ‘ulti­mate­ly it is up to the Ukrain­ian peo­ple to decide their future’. How­ev­er this tran­script sug­gests that the US has very clear ideas about what the out­come should be and is striv­ing to achieve these goals.”

The U.S. State Depart­ment nev­er denied the authen­tic­i­ty of the video, and even issued an apol­o­gy to the Euro­pean Union after Nuland is heard on the tape say­ing, “Fu ck the EU.” Main­stream media at the time focused almost exclu­sive­ly on that off-col­or remark as a dis­trac­tion from the greater sig­nif­i­cance of U.S. inter­fer­ence in Ukraine’s inter­nal affairs.

Why did Nuland say, “Fu ck the EU”? At the time she said it, France, Ger­many and Poland were work­ing for the EU on a polit­i­cal set­tle­ment with Rus­sia to the Maid­an cri­sis that would leave Yanukovych in pow­er.

Indeed the E.U. bro­kered a deal with Yanukovych, who agreed to ear­ly elec­tions by Decem­ber, a restora­tion of the 2004 Con­sti­tu­tion and an amnesty for all pro­tes­tors, clear­ing the way for no one to be held respon­si­ble for the vio­lent ouster. Yanukovych announced the agree­ment, with E.U. offi­cials at his side in Kiev, on Feb. 21, 2014. Lat­er that day he was vio­lent­ly dri­ven from pow­er.

Leav­ing the his­toric role of the NED and the essen­tial Nuland-Pyatt con­ver­sa­tion out of its report­ing is an omis­sion of evi­dence by News­Guard, typ­i­cal of cor­po­rate media. Omit­ting cru­cial ele­ments of a sto­ry changes its mean­ing and in this case under­mines NewsGuard’s account of the events of 2014.

This is an excel­lent exam­ple of why Par­ry start­ed Con­sor­tium News: to report on cru­cial infor­ma­tion that cor­po­rate media some­times pur­pose­ly and decep­tive­ly leave out to change the mean­ing of a sto­ry. News­Guard should cor­rect its sto­ry about the coup, not Con­sor­tium News. News­Guard invites read­ers to request cor­rec­tions by email­ing them at corrections@newsguardtech.com.

...

Charge: Nazi Influ­ence ‘Exag­ger­at­ed’

The U.S. rela­tion­ship with Ukrain­ian fas­cists began after the Sec­ond World War. Dur­ing the war, units of the Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (OUN‑B) took part in the Holo­caust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. Myko­la Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Ban­dera, the leader of the fas­cist OUN‑B, was recruit­ed by the C.I.A. after the war, accord­ing to a 2010 study by the U.S. Nation­al Archives.

The gov­ern­ment study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a mil­i­tant fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion.” Bandera’s clos­est deputy, Yaroslav Stet­sko, said: ““I…fully appre­ci­ate the unde­ni­ably harm­ful and hos­tile role of the Jews, who are help­ing Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I there­fore sup­port the destruc­tion of the Jews and the expe­di­ence of bring­ing Ger­man meth­ods of exter­mi­nat­ing Jew­ry to Ukraine….”

The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meet­ing in Lwów, Ban­dera loy­al­ists deter­mined that Jews ‘have to be treat­ed harsh­ly…. We must fin­ish them off…. Regard­ing the Jews, we will adopt any meth­ods that lead to their destruc­tion.’”

Lebed him­self pro­posed to “’cleanse the entire rev­o­lu­tion­ary ter­ri­to­ry of the Pol­ish pop­u­la­tion,’ so that a resur­gent Pol­ish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “for­eign min­is­ter” of a Ban­derite gov­ern­ment in exile, but he lat­er broke with Ban­dera for act­ing as a dic­ta­tor. The U.S. Army Coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence Corps termed Ban­dera “extreme­ly dan­ger­ous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spir­i­tu­al and nation­al hero of all Ukraini­ans….”

The C.I.A. was not inter­est­ed in work­ing with Ban­dera, pages 81–82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrain­ian orga­ni­za­tion abroad, is deemed com­pe­tent to train par­ty cadres, [and] build a moral­ly and polit­i­cal­ly healthy orga­ni­za­tion….’” An ear­ly 1954 MI6 sum­ma­ry not­ed that, “the oper­a­tional aspect of this [British] col­lab­o­ra­tion [with Ban­dera] was devel­op­ing sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly. Grad­u­al­ly a more com­plete con­trol was obtained over infil­tra­tion oper­a­tions … “

Britain end­ed its col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ban­dera in 1954. West Ger­man intel­li­gence, under for­mer Nazi intel­li­gence chief Rein­hard Gehlen, then worked with Ban­dera, who was even­tu­al­ly assas­si­nat­ed with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Ban­dera, the C.I.A. was inter­est­ed in Lebed, despite his fas­cist back­ground. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he direct­ed sab­o­tage and pro­pa­gan­da oper­a­tions on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Sovi­et Union. The U.S. gov­ern­ment study says:

“CIA oper­a­tions with these Ukraini­ans began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relo­cat­ed to New York and acquired per­ma­nent res­i­dent sta­tus, then U.S. cit­i­zen­ship. It kept him safe from assas­si­na­tion, allowed him to speak to Ukrain­ian émi­gré groups, and per­mit­ted him to return to the Unit­ed States after oper­a­tional trips to Europe. Once in the Unit­ed States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief con­tact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA han­dlers point­ed to his ‘cun­ning char­ac­ter,’ his ‘rela­tions with the Gestapo and … Gestapo train­ing,’ that the fact that he was ‘a very ruth­less oper­a­tor.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sab­o­tage and pro-Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist pro­pa­gan­da oper­a­tions inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence in 1991. “Myko­la Lebed’s rela­tion­ship with the CIA last­ed the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA oper­a­tions involv­ing wartime per­pe­tra­tors back­fired, Lebed’s oper­a­tions aug­ment­ed the fun­da­men­tal insta­bil­i­ty of the Sovi­et Union.”

Ban­dera Revival

The U.S. thus covert­ly kept Ukrain­ian fas­cist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrain­ian inde­pen­dence was achieved. “Myko­la Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jer­sey, and his papers are locat­ed at the Ukrain­ian Research Insti­tute at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty,” the U.S. Nation­al Archives study says.

The suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tion to the OUN‑B in the Unit­ed States did not die with him, how­ev­er. It had been renamed the Ukrain­ian Con­gress Com­mit­tee of Amer­i­ca (UCCA), accord­ing to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion was hon­ey­combed with UCCA mem­bers. Rea­gan per­son­al­ly wel­comed [Yaroslav] Stet­sko, the Ban­derist leader who over­saw the mas­sacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT report­ed. “Fol­low­ing the demise of Yanukovich’s regime, the UCCA helped organ­ise ral­lies in cities across the US in sup­port of the Euro­Maid­an protests,” it report­ed.

That is a direct link between Maid­an and WWII-era Ukrain­ian fas­cism.

Despite the U.S. favor­ing the less extreme Lebed over Ban­dera, the lat­ter has remained the more inspir­ing fig­ure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence, the Neo-fas­cist Social Nation­al Par­ty, lat­er Svo­bo­da Par­ty, was formed, trac­ing its prove­nance direct­ly to Ban­dera. It had a street named after Ban­dera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s air­port after him. (Svo­bo­da won 10 per­cent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before McCain and Nuland appeared with its leader the fol­low­ing year.)

In 2010, pro-West­ern Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yushchenko declared Ban­dera a Hero of Ukraine, a sta­tus reversed by Yanukovych, who was over­thrown.

More than 50 mon­u­ments, busts and muse­ums com­mem­o­rat­ing Ban­dera have been erect­ed in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-Amer­i­can Yuschenko was elect­ed. A Swiss aca­d­e­m­ic study says:

“On Jan­u­ary 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Coun­cil, meet­ing at an extra­or­di­nary ses­sion next to the Ban­dera mon­u­ment in L’viv, react­ed to the abro­ga­tion [ska­su­van­nya] of Vik­tor Yushchenko’s order about nam­ing Stepan Ban­dera a ‘Hero of Ukraine” by affirm­ing that ‘for mil­lions of Ukraini­ans Ban­dera was and remains a Ukrain­ian Hero notwith­stand­ing pitiable and worth­less deci­sions of the courts’ and declar­ing its inten­tion to rename ‘Stepan Ban­dera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Ban­dera Street.’”

Torch­lit parades behind Bandera’s por­trait are com­mon in Ukrain­ian cities, par­tic­u­lar­ly on Jan. 1, his birth­day, includ­ing this year.

...

NewsGuard’s Objec­tions

NewsGuard’s argu­ment against the major influ­ence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine rests on Neo-fas­cist polit­i­cal par­ties far­ing poor­ly at the polls. This ignores the stark fact that these groups engage instead in extra-par­lia­men­tary extrem­ism.

In its charge against Con­sor­tium News for pub­lish­ing “false con­tent” about Neo-fas­cism in Ukraine, NewsGuard’s Fish­man wrote:

“There isn’t evi­dence that Nazism has a sub­stan­tial influ­ence in Ukraine. Rad­i­cal far-right groups in Ukraine do rep­re­sent a ‘threat to the demo­c­ra­t­ic devel­op­ment of Ukraine,’ accord­ing to 2018 Free­dom House report. But it also stat­ed that far-right extrem­ists have poor polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Ukraine and no plau­si­ble path to pow­er — for exam­ple, in the 2019 par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, the far-right nation­al­ist par­ty Svo­bo­da won 2.2 per­cent of the vote, while the Svo­bo­da can­di­date, Rus­lan Koshu­lyn­skyy, won just 1.6 per­cent of the vote in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”

But this argu­ment of focus­ing on elec­tions results has been dis­missed by a num­ber of main­stream sources, not least of which is the Atlantic Coun­cil, prob­a­bly the most anti-Russ­ian think tank in the world. In a 2019 arti­cle, a writer for the Atlantic Coun­cil said:

“To be clear, far-right par­ties like Svo­bo­da per­form poor­ly in Ukraine’s polls and elec­tions, and Ukraini­ans evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argu­ment is a bit of ‘red her­ring.’ It’s not extrem­ists’ elec­toral prospects that should con­cern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwill­ing­ness or inabil­i­ty to con­front vio­lent groups and end their impuni­ty. Whether this is due to a con­tin­u­ing sense of indebt­ed­ness to some of these groups for fight­ing the Rus­sians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real prob­lem and we do no ser­vice to Ukraine by sweep­ing it under the rug.” [Empha­sis added.]

“Fear that they might turn on the state itself,” acknowl­edges the pow­er­ful lever­age these groups have over the gov­ern­ment. The Atlantic Coun­cil piece then under­scores how influ­en­tial these groups are:

“It sounds like the stuff of Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da, but it’s not. Last week Hro­madske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Min­istry of Youth and Sports is fund­ing the neo-Nazi group C14 to pro­mote ‘nation­al patri­ot­ic edu­ca­tion projects’ in the coun­try. On June 8, the Min­istry announced that it will award C14 a lit­tle less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also award­ed funds to Holosiyiv Hide­out and Edu­ca­tion­al Assem­bly, both of which have links to the far-right. The rev­e­la­tion rep­re­sents a dan­ger­ous exam­ple of law enforce­ment tac­it­ly accept­ing or even encour­ag­ing the increas­ing law­less­ness of far-right groups will­ing to use vio­lence against those they don’t like.

Since the begin­ning of 2018, C14 and oth­er far-right groups such as the Azov-affil­i­at­ed Nation­al Mili­tia, Right Sec­tor, Karpats­ka Sich, and oth­ers have attacked Roma groups sev­er­al times, as well as anti-fas­cist demon­stra­tions, city coun­cil meet­ings, an event host­ed by Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al, art exhi­bi­tions, LGBT events, and envi­ron­men­tal activists. On March 8, vio­lent groups launched attacks against IInter­na­tion­al Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cas­es did police do any­thing to pre­vent the attacks, and in some they even arrest­ed peace­ful demon­stra­tors rather than the actu­al per­pe­tra­tors.”

The Atlantic Coun­cil is not the only anti-Russ­ian out­fit that rec­og­nizes the dan­ger­ous pow­er of the Neo-fas­cist groups in Ukraine. Belling­cat pub­lished an alarm­ing 2018 arti­cle head­lined, “Ukrain­ian Far-Right Fight­ers, White Suprema­cists Trained by Major Euro­pean Secu­ri­ty Firm.”

NATO has also trained the Azov Reg­i­ment, direct­ly link­ing the U.S. with far-right Ukrain­ian extrem­ists.

The Hill report­ed in 2017 in an arti­cle head­lined, “The real­i­ty of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da,” that:

“Some West­ern observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi ele­ments in Ukraine, chalk­ing the asser­tion up to pro­pa­gan­da from Moscow. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they are sad­ly mis­tak­en.

There are indeed neo-Nazi for­ma­tions in Ukraine. This has been over­whelm­ing­ly con­firmed by near­ly every major West­ern out­let. The fact that ana­lysts are able to dis­miss it as pro­pa­gan­da dis­sem­i­nat­ed by Moscow is pro­found­ly dis­turb­ing.

Azov’s logo is com­posed of two emblems — the wolf­san­gel and the Son­nen­rad — iden­ti­fied as neo-Nazi sym­bols by the Anti-Defama­tion League. The wolf­san­gel is used by the U.S. hate group Aryan Nations, while the Son­nen­rad was among the neo-Nazi sym­bols at this summer’s dead­ly march in Char­lottesville.

Azov’s neo-Nazi char­ac­ter has been cov­ered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Tele­graph and Reuters, among oth­ers. On-the-ground jour­nal­ists from estab­lished West­ern media out­lets have writ­ten of wit­ness­ing SS runes, swastikas, torch­light march­es, and Nazi salutes. They inter­viewed Azov sol­diers who read­i­ly acknowl­edged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unam­bigu­ous head­lines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. back­ing in Ukraine?” and “Vol­un­teer Ukrain­ian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da?

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch have accused Azov, as well as oth­er Kiev bat­tal­ions, of a litany of human rights abus­es.”

Neo-facism has infect­ed Ukrain­ian pop­u­lar cul­ture as well. A half-dozen neo-Nazi music groups held a con­cert in 2019 com­mem­o­rat­ing the day Nazi Ger­many invad­ed the Sovi­et Union.

Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al in 2019 warned that “Ukraine is sink­ing into a chaos of uncon­trolled vio­lence posed by rad­i­cal groups and their total impuni­ty. Prac­ti­cal­ly no one in the coun­try can feel safe under these con­di­tions.”

...

———-

“US State-Affil­i­at­ed News­Guard Tar­gets Con­sor­tium News” by Joe Lau­ria; Con­sor­tium News; 06/02/2022

“Get­ting a red label means that poten­tial­ly mil­lions of peo­ple that have the News­Guard exten­sion installed and oper­at­ing on their browsers will see the green or red mark affixed to web­sites on social media and Google search­es. (For indi­vid­u­als that do not already have it installed and oper­at­ing on Microsoft’s brows­er, it costs $4.95 a month in the U.S., £4.95 in the U.K., or €4.95 in the EU to run the exten­sion.)”

The threat is clear: News­Guard is threat­en­ing to put a gov­ern­ment-spon­sored “False News!” label that will show up next to any links to any Con­sor­tium News sites on com­put­ers where the News­Guard app is installed. That’s part of what makes the gov­ern­ment spon­sor­ship of News­Guard so sig­nif­i­cant. News­Guard does­n’t just have a kind of US gov­ern­ment stamp of approval. It’s also going to have the gov­ern­men­t’s implic­it sup­port in pay­ing for the News­Guard ser­vices at places like pub­lic libraries:

...
News­Guard set itself up in 2018 as a judge of news orga­ni­za­tions’ cred­i­bil­i­ty. The front page of NewsGuard’s web­site shows that it is “part­ners” with the State Depart­ment and the Pen­ta­gon, as well as with sev­er­al major cor­po­ra­tions, such as Microsoft. The nature of these “part­ner­ships” is not entire­ly clear.

News­Guard is a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion that can shield itself from First Amend­ment oblig­a­tions. But it has con­nec­tions to for­mer­ly high-rank­ing U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials in addi­tion to its “part­ner­ships” with the State Dept. and the Pen­ta­gon.

Among those sit­ting on NewsGuard’s advi­so­ry board are Gen. Michael Hay­den, the for­mer Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency direc­tor; Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Home­land Secu­ri­ty direc­tor and Anders Fogh Ras­mussen, a for­mer sec­re­tary gen­er­al of NATO. New­Guard says its “advi­sors pro­vide advice and sub­ject-mat­ter exper­tise to News­Guard. They play no role in the deter­mi­na­tions of rat­ings or the Nutri­tion Label write ups of web­sites unless oth­er­wise not­ed and have no role in the gov­er­nance or man­age­ment of the orga­ni­za­tion.”

The co-CEO, with for­mer Wall Street Jour­nal pub­lish­er Louis Gor­don Crovitz, is Steven Brill, who in the 1990s pub­lished Brill’s Con­tent, a mag­a­zine that was billed as a watch­dog of the press, cri­tiquing the role of the media to hold gov­ern­ment to account. News­Guard is a gov­ern­ment-affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tion judg­ing media like Con­sor­tium News that is total­ly inde­pen­dent of gov­ern­ment or cor­po­ra­tions.

News­Guard has a rat­ing process that results in a news orga­ni­za­tion receiv­ing either a green or red label. Fox News and oth­er major media, for exam­ple, have received green labels.
...

And as Joe Lau­ria lays out in his piece, not only was News­Guard accus­ing Con­sor­tium News of pub­lish­ing false­hoods about the forces behind the 2014 Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion, but News­Guard’s own ver­sion of the ‘truth’ of those events is itself filled with bla­tant false­hoods. Like the objec­tive­ly false asser­tion that pro­test­ers only took con­trol of gov­ern­ment build­ings fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the Yanukovych gov­ern­ment. It under­scores how News­Guard’s mis­sion isn’t just to dis­cred­it inde­pen­dent media out­lets but also to rein­force offi­cial lies:

...
News­Guard alleges that Con­sor­tium News has pub­lished “false con­tent” by report­ing that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in the coun­try.

Fish­man took issue with a:

“Feb­ru­ary 2022 arti­cle ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflec­tion,’ [which] assert­ed, ‘Hence, the infla­tion of Russ­ian behav­ior in Ukraine (where Wash­ing­ton orga­nized a coup against a demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment because we dis­liked its polit­i­cal com­plex­ion) … .’

Fish­man then wrote:

“The U.S. sup­port­ed the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion that oust­ed then-Ukraine Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — includ­ing a Decem­ber 2013 vis­it by John McCain to Kyiv in sup­port of pro­test­ers — but there is no evi­dence that the U.S. ‘orga­nized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the mark­ings of a pop­u­lar upris­ing, pre­cip­i­tat­ed by wide­ly cov­ered protests against Yanukovych’s deci­sion to sus­pend prepa­ra­tions for the sign­ing of an asso­ci­a­tion and free-trade agree­ment with the Euro­pean Union.”

Vik­tor Yanukovych was demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed as pres­i­dent of Ukraine in 2010 in an elec­tion cer­ti­fied by the Orga­ni­za­tion for Secu­ri­ty and Coop­er­a­tion in Europe, a fact not men­tioned in NewsGuard’s writ­ings on the change of gov­ern­ment in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU polit­i­cal set­tle­ment and ear­ly elec­tions, vio­lence forced him to flee from the cap­i­tal on Feb. 21, 2014. Report­ing that the neo-Nazi Right Sec­tor was at the fore­front of the vio­lent over­throw, The New York Times (green check) wrote ear­li­er that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sec­tor, a coali­tion of hard-line nation­al­ist groups, react­ed defi­ant­ly to news of the set­tle­ment, draw­ing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agree­ments that were reached do not cor­re­spond to our aspi­ra­tions,’ he said. ‘Right Sec­tor will not lay down arms. Right Sec­tor will not lift the block­ade of a sin­gle admin­is­tra­tive build­ing until our main demand is met — the res­ig­na­tion of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his sup­port­ers were ‘ready to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the rev­o­lu­tion.’ The crowd shout­ed: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the vio­lence used to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, by Prof. Ser­hiy Kudelia, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty, says the over­throw suc­ceed­ed because of “the embed­ded­ness of vio­lent groups” in a non-vio­lent protest. The vio­lence began on Dec. 1, 2013 when these vio­lent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bull­doz­er through police lines. The police vicious­ly fought back that day.

As the Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

““Accord­ing to a mem­ber of anti-fas­cist Union Ukraine, a group that mon­i­tors and fights fas­cism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nation­al­ists here [Euro­Maid­an] includ­ing Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of pro­test­ers.

Dif­fer­ent groups [of anar­chists] came togeth­er for a meet­ing on the Maid­an. While they were meet­ing, a group of Nazis came in a larg­er group, they had axes and base­ball bats and sticks, hel­mets, they said it was their ter­ri­to­ry. They called the anar­chists things like Jews, blacks, com­mu­nists. There weren’t even any com­mu­nists, that was just an insult. The anar­chists weren’t expect­ing this and they left. Peo­ple with oth­er polit­i­cal views can’t stay in cer­tain places, they aren’t tol­er­at­ed,’ a mem­ber of the group con­tin­ued.”

The vio­lence by far-right groups was evi­dent­ly con­doned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his sup­port for the upris­ing by address­ing the Maid­an crowd lat­er that month. Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State Vic­to­ria Nuland and then U.S. ambas­sador Geof­frey Pyatt vis­it­ed the square after the vio­lence had bro­ken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the ear­ly elec­tions, “angry pro­tes­tors demand­ed Yanukovych’s imme­di­ate res­ig­na­tion,” and he fled on that day after “hun­dreds of police guard­ing gov­ern­ment build­ings aban­doned their posts.” News­Guard then says “pro­tes­tors took con­trol of sev­er­al gov­ern­ment build­ings the next day.”

...

But pro­tes­tors had already seized gov­ern­ment build­ings as ear­ly as Decem­ber 2013. On Jan. 24 pro­tes­tors broke into the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry build­ing in Kiev and occu­pied it. On the same day bar­ri­cades were set up near the pres­i­den­tial head­quar­ters. Gov­ern­ment build­ings in the west of the coun­try had also been occu­pied. The Guardian (green check) report­ed on Jan. 24:

“There were dra­mat­ic devel­op­ments in the west of the coun­try on Thurs­day as hun­dreds of peo­ple forced their way into the office of the region­al gov­er­nor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a res­ig­na­tion let­ter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where sup­port for the pres­i­dent is in the low sin­gle dig­its, lat­er said he signed the let­ter under duress and was rescind­ing his res­ig­na­tion.

Thou­sands also stormed region­al admin­is­tra­tion head­quar­ters in Rivne on Thurs­day, break­ing down doors and demand­ing the release of peo­ple detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency report­ed. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 pro­test­ers took over the first two floors of the main admin­is­tra­tion build­ing and lit fires out­side the build­ing.

Sim­i­lar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmel­nyt­sky in west­ern and cen­tral Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Par­ty of the Regions said.”

Pro­tes­tors had begun occu­py­ing Kiev City Hall in Decem­ber, with a por­trait of Ukraine’s World War II fas­cist leader Stepan Ban­dera hang­ing from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fas­cist Right Sec­tor, Andriy Paru­biy, announced that the Verk­hov­na Rada (par­lia­ment), the Pres­i­den­tial Admin­is­tra­tion, the Cab­i­net of Min­is­ters and the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs had all come under con­trol of the pro­tes­tors.

There­fore News­Guard has pub­lished “false con­tent” by report­ing that gov­ern­ment build­ings were occu­pied the day after Yanukovych fled the cap­i­tal. It should print a cor­rec­tion.
...

It’s also worth recall­ing one of the oth­er major aspects of the 2014 Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion that is con­ve­nient­ly obscured by News­Guard’s nar­ra­tive: by not acknowl­edg­ing the pro­test­er’s pres­ence in these build­ings, it’s a lot eas­i­er to also obscure the evi­dence of the role far right snipers played in the sniper attacks that cat­alyzed the final col­lapse of the Yanukovych gov­ern­ment.

And, again, that was all just a sub­set of Lau­ri­a’s giant arti­cle that does­n’t just shred News­Guard’s attack but also points out how News­Guard’s own nar­ra­tives are false. A mas­sive refu­ta­tion of News­Guard that relies almost entire­ly on the cita­tion of the very same main­stream news sources News­Guard endors­es. It’s that kind of gross bad faith from News­Guard that pos­es the ever present ques­tion: what’s next? Since the out­break of the con­flict in Ukraine less than four months ago, Con­sor­tium News has had its finances attacked and now its edi­to­r­i­al cred­i­bil­i­ty smeared. Con­sor­tium News’s report­ing is clear­ly seen as a threat. The kind of threat that can’t real­ly be dealt with direct­ly and remains threat­en­ing just by exist­ing. The truth is like that. So what’s next in this war on the truth of what’s hap­pen­ing in places like Ukraine? We’ll see. Although we pre­sum­ably won’t see if every­thing goes accord­ing to plan.

Fol­low­ing up on the dis­turb­ing sto­ry of News­Guard — the US gov­ern­ment-backed app that pur­ports to give ‘nutri­tion’ labels to var­i­ous news out­lets — and its absurd attacks on Con­sor­tium News’s cov­er­age of events in Ukraine, here’s a stun­ning new report out The Gray­zone about a par­al­lel intel­li­gence recent­ly set up in the UK to car­ry­ing out the same mis­sion. The oper­a­tion is run by for­mer Trot­sky­ist and BBC jour­ney­man, jour­nal­ist Paul Mason and Amil Khan, the founder of a shad­owy intel­li­gence con­trac­tor called Valent Projects. Accord­ing to a series of leaked emails, Mason and Khan have been work­ing with UK spies to orches­trate an attack on The Gray­zone that won’t just deplat­form the site but poten­tial­ly finan­cial destroy it.

At the cen­ter of this scheme is an assump­tion that The Gray­zone must be secret­ly financed by Rus­sia and Chi­na. It’s an assump­tion that Mason and Khan appear to hold about vir­tu­al­ly all inde­pen­dent media that ques­tion offi­cial nar­ra­tives on for­eign con­flicts, includ­ing Con­sor­tium News. Amus­ing­ly, Mason even reached out the now-for­mer US Dis­in­for­ma­tion Czar, Nina Jankow­icz, about his con­cerns about Con­sor­tium News’s Krem­lin fund­ing. Jankow­icz report­ed­ly saw Con­sor­tium News as a case of “use­ful idiots rather than fund­ing,” but Mason’s sus­pi­cions of Krem­lin fund­ing appar­ent­ly remained. It’s one of aspects of Mason’s think­ing that comes out in these emails: the guy real­ly seems to gen­uine­ly be absolute­ly con­vinced that inde­pen­dent media out­lets must be fund­ed by hos­tile for­eign pow­ers. Con­sid­er­ing we’re talk­ing about a for­mer Troskyite-turned-spy, It’s the kind of per­spec­tive that gives you a hint as to how pro­found­ly cyn­i­cal Mason’s view of the world must be. If you’re chal­leng­ing offi­cial lies, you must be a spy.

It also sounds like fil­ing for­mal com­plaints in the UK against The Gray­zone is also part of the plan. The idea would be to get a com­plaint sub­mit­ted by the var­i­ous ‘tar­gets’ of The Gray­zone’s report­ing, and use that a pre­text to start an offi­cial UK inves­ti­ga­tion into the Gray­zone’s financ­ing. The UK’s new­ly formed psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions unit, the Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion Cell, could also be involved in these efforts.

Oh, an it also turns out that Mason and Khan are plan­ning on set­ting up their own “Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Brigade” ded­i­cat­ed to coun­ter­ing what it deems to be Russ­ian or Chi­nese pro­pa­gan­da. So over­all, between the US gov­ern­ment-backed News­Guard attacks on Con­sor­tium News and this new­ly revealed UK gov­ern­ment plot against The Gray­zone, it’s pret­ty clear that the kind of report­ing chal­leng­ing offi­cial nar­ra­tives on these for­eign con­flicts has been deemed to be too dan­ger­ous be allowed to con­tin­ue:

The Gray­zone

Paul Mason’s covert intel­li­gence-linked plot to destroy The Gray­zone exposed

Kit Klaren­berg and Max Blu­men­thal
June 7, 2022

Leaked emails reveal British jour­nal­ist Paul Mason plot­ting with an intel con­trac­tor to destroy The Gray­zone through “relent­less deplat­form­ing” and a “full nuclear legal” attack. The scheme is part of a wider planned assault on the UK left.

A for­mer Trot­sky­ist and BBC jour­ney­man, jour­nal­ist Paul Mason has made a career as the establishment’s favorite gate­keep­er of the UK left. Since the Russ­ian mil­i­tary incur­sion into Ukraine, he has cement­ed his posi­tion as one of Britain’s most vocal “left” cheer­lead­ers for West­ern mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion.

While lead­ing a “U.K. left” del­e­ga­tion to Kiev and a demon­stra­tion through the streets of Lon­don in sup­port of NATO mil­i­tary esca­la­tion against Rus­sia, Mason has accord­ing­ly used his plat­form to assail jour­nal­ists, aca­d­e­mics, Labour par­ty mem­bers and pri­vate cit­i­zens who oppose ship­ping piles of advanced weapon­ry to Ukraine.

In a series of recent columns, Mason called for the state-enforced sup­pres­sion of facts and per­spec­tives he con­sid­ers over­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the Krem­lin, and demand­ed “state action” against mem­bers of the media that oppose the NATO line on Ukraine. He placed The Gray­zone at the top of his fan­ta­sy cen­sor­ship tar­get list.

Mason has since announced a run for par­lia­ment on the Labour tick­et to wage his cru­sade against “dis­in­for­ma­tion” from inside the House of Com­mons.

The Gray­zone, mean­while, has learned through anony­mous­ly leaked emails and doc­u­ments that Mason has been engaged in a mali­cious secret cam­paign that aims to enlist the British state and “friend­ly” intel­li­gence cut-outs to under­mine, cen­sor and even crim­i­nal­ize anti­war dis­senters.

In one leaked email, Mason thun­dered for the “relent­less deplat­form­ing” of The Gray­zone and the cre­ation of “a kind of per­ma­nent rebut­tal oper­a­tion” to dis­cred­it it.

In anoth­er, the celebri­ty jour­nal­ist declared that “the far left rogue aca­d­e­mics is who I’m after,” then rants that he is moti­vat­ed by fear of an emer­gent “left anti impe­ri­al­ist iden­ti­ty” which “will be attrac­tive because lib­er­al­ism doesn’t know how to counter it.”

[see screen of email]

Mason is joined in his covert cru­sade by Amil Khan, the founder of a shad­owy intel­li­gence con­trac­tor called Valent Projects. In the cache of leaked emails, Khan pro­posed to Mason the ini­ti­a­tion of a “clever John Oliv­er style stunt that makes [The Gray­zone] a laugh­ing stock,” as well as a “full nuclear legal to squeeze them finan­cial­ly.”

The Gray­zone has pre­vi­ous­ly revealed Khan’s exten­sive involve­ment in the Syr­i­an dirty war, dur­ing which he pro­vid­ed pub­lic rela­tions guid­ance to jihadist groups, trained anti-gov­ern­ment activists in com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies, and secret­ly over­saw sup­posed cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist col­lec­tives backed by for­eign gov­ern­ments. His goal was to flood inter­na­tion­al media with pro-oppo­si­tion pro­pa­gan­da, desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment of Bashar Assad, and ready the ground for West­ern regime change.

This eth­i­cal­ly dubi­ous work was con­duct­ed for a vari­ety of intel­li­gence-adja­cent British For­eign Office con­trac­tors, such as ARK, a firm found­ed by prob­a­ble MI6 oper­a­tive Alis­tair Har­ris, and IncoS­trat, which has been plau­si­bly accused of pro­duc­ing pro­pa­gan­da for the blood-stained UK and Sau­di-backed insur­gents.

After leav­ing the Mid­dle East, Khan rein­vent­ed him­self as an expert in coun­ter­ing “dis­in­for­ma­tion”, and has since charged a num­ber of blue chip clients a pre­mi­um for his dubi­ous ser­vices. As this out­let report­ed, the same tech­niques of manip­u­la­tion and infor­ma­tion war­fare that Khan honed in Syr­ia were turned against West­ern cit­i­zens when he over­saw a British qua­si-state fund­ed astro­turf YouTube project designed to counter pub­lic skep­ti­cism of Covid-relat­ed restric­tions.

Khan’s email com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Mason illus­trate the grudge he has har­bored since The Gray­zone exposed his devi­ous exploits. In the mis­sives, he descends into self-delu­sion, insist­ing this outlet’s fac­tu­al report­ing was, in fact, state-spon­sored retal­i­a­tion for his cru­sad­ing work “oppos­ing mil­i­tary dic­ta­tors and klep­to­crats.”

Togeth­er, Khan and Mason plot­ted to assem­ble a coali­tion of anti-Gray­zone actors, includ­ing the US and UK gov­ern­ment-fund­ed “open source” out­let Belling­cat, which Mason reveal­ing­ly described as a chan­nel for “intel ser­vice input by proxy.” Khan pro­posed con­ven­ing the de fac­to Vic­tims of Gray­zone Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion at an in-per­son sum­mit to “come up with a plan that address­es [The Grayzone’s] objec­tives and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.”

At one point, he even reached out across the Atlantic for advice from Nina Jankow­icz, the dis­graced for­mer head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s Dis­in­for­ma­tion Gov­er­nance Board.

It is uncer­tain how Mason and Khan became acquaint­ed, but their mutu­al coin­ci­dence of needs, motives and vendet­tas is obvi­ous. The pub­lic inter­est in releas­ing the pair’s pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions is also abun­dant­ly clear. If their planned crim­i­nal­iza­tion of The Gray­zone for pub­lish­ing facts and opin­ions they abhor is suc­cess­ful, it will have dire ram­i­fi­ca­tions for any and all jour­nal­ists and inde­pen­dent media insti­tu­tions seek­ing to chal­lenge the sta­tus quo.

When approached by The Gray­zone, Paul Mason declined to com­ment on the incrim­i­nat­ing cor­re­spon­dence with Khan, and claimed to have informed local police that “an attempt was made” to hack his email account. While dis­miss­ing the leaked con­tent as “like­ly to be edit­ed, dis­tort­ed or fake,” he went on to pledge he would “not cease to iden­ti­fy and rebut Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tions mas­querad­ing as jour­nal­ism.”

In oth­er words, Mason implied he plans to car­ry on with the very activ­i­ty exposed in the leaked emails.

Any­one who wants to see the com­plete intel­lec­tu­al col­lapse of @paulmasonnews under pres­sure from @OwenJones84 and @michaeljswalker should watch this.Paul can’t explain why he thinks what he thinks.(Clip below and in full here: https://t.co/xqI011FVMu)pic.twitter.com/75tibsletf— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) May 8, 2022

Khan and Mason col­lude to form anti-Gray­zone coali­tion and shat­ter Cor­bynite left

On April 30 this year, Paul Mason emailed Amil Khan, mak­ing clear he was “keen to help” de-plat­form The Gray­zone.

He attached a bizarrely con­struct­ed “dynam­ic map of the ‘left’ pro-Putin infos­phere” that resem­bled a spider’s web, with a mess of arrows link­ing the names of mem­bers of par­lia­ment, media out­lets, activists, caus­es, and British minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties.

The bare­ly coher­ent, racial­ly-tinged chart con­nect­ed the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, Russ­ian state broad­cast­er RT, the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na, and Bei­jing-based tech mil­lion­aire-financier Roy Sing­ham to the “Mus­lim Com­mu­ni­ty,” “Young Net­worked Left” and “Black Com­mu­ni­ty” through a series of left­ist out­fits and UK Labour fig­ures. No evi­dence was pro­vid­ed to sup­port Mason’s link­ages.

At the cen­ter of Mason’s chart (see below) is Jere­my Cor­byn. When Cor­byn served as Labour leader, Mason plot­ted against him in pri­vate while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pos­ing as one of his most ardent pub­lic sup­port­ers. He also sought to influ­ence Shad­ow Chan­cel­lor John McDon­nell in a pro-war direc­tion.

The impli­ca­tion behind Mason’s Nixon­ian ene­mies chart was clear: Rus­sia and Chi­na have weaponized the British left to cor­rupt key Labour con­stituen­cies – there­fore the left must be neu­tral­ized.

[see chart]

Mason sug­gest­ed to Khan that he enlist the help of “pro traf­fic ana­lysts to map” how these “dif­fer­ent echo cham­bers inter­act, where their mate­r­i­al begins – and work out who might [empha­sis added] be pulling the strings.”

He nonethe­less seemed cer­tain about the dark forces ani­mat­ing The Gray­zone, bom­bas­ti­cal­ly charg­ing that its “attacks” on Khan and oth­ers are “fed by Russ­ian and Chi­nese intel,” includ­ing hack­ing, “elec­tron­ic war­fare” and human intel­li­gence.

Mason com­pared this process to Belling­cat receiv­ing “a steady stream of intel from West­ern agen­cies.” The US and UK gov­ern­ment-fund­ed out­let Belling­cat has fre­quent­ly been accused of laun­der­ing CIA and MI6 dirt, a charge which the oper­a­tives behind it aggres­sive­ly repu­di­ate. How­ev­er, Khan – a long-time advo­cate and asso­ciate of the out­let – did not once chal­lenge Mason’s repeat­ed char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the sup­posed cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist col­lec­tive as a clear­ing house for friend­ly spy agen­cies.

Under­lin­ing the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the pair’s mali­cious plans for The Gray­zone, Mason stressed the need for their work to be con­duct­ed via “white label organ­i­sa­tions oper­at­ing with firm infos­ec – Signal/ProtonMail, clean phones.”

[see screen of email]

Khan was clear­ly amenable to his sug­ges­tions. Five days lat­er, he out­lined two options for tak­ing down The Gray­zone: “some sort of clever John Oliv­er style stunt that makes them a laugh­ing stock” – ref­er­enc­ing a sting oper­a­tion tar­get­ing aca­d­e­m­ic Paul McK­eigue con­duct­ed by the dubi­ous, intel­li­gence-linked Com­mis­sion for Inter­na­tion­al Jus­tice and Account­abil­i­ty back in 2021 – “or full nuclear legal to squeeze them finan­cial­ly.”

Mason was enthused by the lat­ter prospect, sub­mit­ting that it should be “com­bined with relent­less deplat­form­ing,” includ­ing cut­ting off The Gray­zone from dona­tion sources such as Pay­Pal, in the man­ner of Con­sor­tium News and Mint­Press, and set­ting up “a kind of per­ma­nent rebut­tal oper­a­tion.”

[see screen of email]

Khan agreed, propos­ing the pair “get a few peo­ple togeth­er who are look­ing at/been tar­get [sic] by this togeth­er and do a cen­tre of grav­i­ty analy­sis,” pool­ing “what we’ve all learnt about how they oper­ate” in order to “come up with a plan that address­es their objec­tives and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, not just their argu­ments.”

Mason respond­ed by launch­ing into a con­spir­a­to­r­i­al aside assert­ing that the Orga­ni­za­tion for Secu­ri­ty and Co-oper­a­tion in Europe’s (OSCE) post-Feb­ru­ary 16, 2022 reports show­ing a dra­mat­ic Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary esca­la­tion against pro-Russ­ian sep­a­ratists in the Don­bas region rep­re­sent­ed “manip­u­lat­ed facts.”

He then pro­posed “cre­at­ing a dynam­ic ref­er­ence cat­a­logue debunk­ing all [The Grayzone’s] allegetions[sic] and ‘facts,’” pitch­ing the ini­tia­tive as an alter­na­tive to direct engage­ment or “toe to toe” debate.

[see screen of email]

“Keen” to move on the project, Mason sug­gest­ed sev­er­al infor­ma­tion war­riors to join them; Emma Bri­ant, an aca­d­e­m­ic research­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion; Chloe Had­ji­math­eou, the British intel­li­gence-linked BBC jour­nal­ist who pro­duced a mul­ti-part pod­cast series smear­ing crit­ics of the NATO-backed Syr­i­an White Hel­mets orga­ni­za­tion as Krem­lin stooges and fas­cists; and Belling­cat, which he said could pro­vide “intel ser­vice input by proxy.”

Khan said he was “hap­py” to host a secret meet­ing of these indi­vid­u­als at Valent Projects’ Lon­don offices.

[see screen of email]

After Mason pro­posed invit­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UK For­eign Office to the anti-Gray­zone meet and greet, the Valent Projects chief reached out to a friend at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­torate, a White­hall unit “tasked with hybrid threats.”

His Direc­torate source said the British gov­ern­ment would be averse to send­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the gath­er­ing, “as it could jeop­ar­dise out­comes lat­er.” Nonethe­less, they advo­cat­ed con­ven­ing peo­ple “tar­get­ed” by The Gray­zone, to col­late evi­dence that could be sub­mit­ted to OFCOM, Britain’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor, and/or Dig­i­tal, Cul­ture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the name of both a gov­ern­ment depart­ment and par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee, “as part of a for­mal com­plaint.”

They imag­ined that this process could some­how trig­ger an inves­ti­ga­tion into The Grayzone’s “fund­ing and activ­i­ties,” lead­ing the gov­ern­ment to “get prop­er­ly involved.”

Khan added that his pal sug­gest­ed also approach­ing Thom­son Reuters Foun­da­tion and BBC Media Action for the initiative.The Gray­zone has pre­vi­ous­ly exposed these media char­i­ties as hav­ing par­tic­i­pat­ed in covert British state-fund­ed efforts to “weak­en the Russ­ian state’s influ­ence.”

Khan said he would also be in touch with the For­eign Office’s new­ly-found­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare unit, the Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion Cell.

[see screen of email]

Mason’s reac­tion was mixed. While hail­ing the prospect of trig­ger­ing an offi­cial gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tion into The Gray­zone as “a good idea,” he seemed crest­fall­en the plan did not include secur­ing mate­r­i­al from British intel­li­gence on who funds the site, and “what their ulti­mate deliv­er­ables are on behalf of the ppl [peo­ple] their work ben­e­fits.”

“An inves­ti­ga­tion into them would lead to what? Deplat­form­ing? Any­way that’s progress,” he con­clud­ed.

Khan reas­sured Mason that OFCOM and DCMS could task “oth­er bits of gov­ern­ment to get that intel; and the find­ings will auto­mat­i­cal­ly enter the sys­tem” – mean­ing The Gray­zone and its con­trib­u­tors could end up slapped with “Russ­ian state affil­i­at­ed media” labels on social media, lead­ing to algo­rith­mic dis­crim­i­na­tion and poten­tial shad­ow ban­ning, among oth­er penal­ties.

“I think/hope there’s poten­tial to go fur­ther [empha­sis added]. It’s too easy for them to flip deplat­form­ing with ‘the sys­tem is scared of us’. We need to look at their influence/legitimacy with audi­ences,” Khan stat­ed.

[see screen of email]

Yet Khan is like­ly to be extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ed if he and Mason fol­low through on their dream of sub­mit­ting for­mal com­plaints about The Gray­zone to OFCOM and/or DCMS.

For one, OFCOM’s remit extends to domes­tic broad­cast media, such as TV, radio, and stream­ing plat­forms. In oth­er words, it does not and can­not scru­ti­nize or sanc­tion online con­tent, let alone that of US web­sites. On the same grounds, it is unclear what juris­dic­tion DCMS has to inves­ti­gate The Gray­zone. Fur­ther, no British gov­ern­ment depart­ment, except per­haps for MI6, could pos­si­bly be tasked with unearthing dam­ag­ing “intel” on this pub­li­ca­tion or its staff.

It is there­fore stun­ning that vet­er­an main­stream media pros like Mason and Khan were unaware of such an obvi­ous, fatal flaw in their scheme. More impor­tant­ly, The Gray­zone does not and nev­er will receive fund­ing or direc­tion of any kind from the Chi­nese or Russ­ian gov­ern­ments, or any oth­er for­eign state or con­nect­ed enti­ty.

Khan and Mason plan pro-Ukraine pro­pa­gan­da shop backed by NATO states “through cutouts”

Mason and Khan’s brazen attempt to de-plat­form and finan­cial­ly crip­ple an inde­pen­dent media out­let on the slan­der­ous, fic­tion­al pre­text it is actu­al­ly a hos­tile for­eign infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion is espe­cial­ly per­verse giv­en that oth­er leaked emails in The Grayzone’s pos­ses­sion reveal that Khan and Mason appar­ent­ly plan to con­struct a hos­tile for­eign infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion of their own.

Dubbed by Khan “Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Brigade,” the pro­posed project would rep­re­sent an astro­turfed civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tion which serves as “the major, for­ward lean­ing play­er in the infor­ma­tion war.” While pub­licly oper­at­ing as an NGO, the Brigade would be fund­ed by West­ern states “through cutouts,” and close­ly inter­twined with intel­li­gence ser­vices.

[see screen of email]

Mason respond­ed that Khan’s plan for a state-backed pro­pa­gan­da oper­a­tion pre­sent­ed as a grass­roots civ­il soci­ety ini­tia­tive was a “good idea,” and pro­posed “imme­di­ate trans­la­tion of Kyiv inde­pen­dent stuff,” not­ing that “the Euro­pean Young Social­ists are doing this already and have raised funds.”

The Young Euro­pean Social­ists is a social demo­c­rat-ori­ent­ed youth orga­ni­za­tion spon­sored by the Euro­pean Union. And the Kyiv Inde­pen­dent is a key pro­pa­gan­da organ of the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment which has received finan­cial sup­port from the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment and Euro­pean Union.

Khan drafts invite to secret anti-Gray­zone sum­mit

Whether Khan and Mason’s bold plans for an anti-Gray­zone sum­mit have been put into action remains unclear. How­ev­er, by May 12, Khan had draft­ed an invi­ta­tion for prospec­tive mem­bers to attend the ini­tial brain­storm­ing ses­sion. In his note, he con­jured up a vast and fear­some nexus of “pro-Russ­ian trolls” destroy­ing any­one in the Kremlin’s way, at the cen­ter of which rests The Gray­zone Death Star.

...

[see screen of email]

Mason sug­gest­ed a minor amend­ment to “avoid libel risk”: revis­ing the pas­sage refer­ring to The Gray­zone as “in fact an infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion of a dic­ta­tor­ship.” He felt this should be soft­ened to The Gray­zone “present them­selves as jour­nal­ists when their modus operan­di looks more like [an] infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion – whether vol­un­tary or co-ordi­nat­ed – of a dic­ta­tor­ship.”

Khan agreed to the alter­ation and pro­posed more sum­mit guests. They includ­ed the BBC’s “first spe­cial­ist dis­in­for­ma­tion and social media reporter,” Mar­i­an­na Spring, who recent­ly smeared sev­er­al British aca­d­e­mics for scru­ti­niz­ing West­ern claims relat­ing to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. He also sug­gest­ed includ­ing for­mer BBC and Jew­ish Chron­i­cle edi­tor Mar­tin Bright, who he said may be “head­ing up a group look­ing at the legal side of this sort of thing.”

For fur­ther par­tic­i­pants in the anti-Gray­zone sum­mit, Khan referred Mason to Paul Hilder, the Ted Talk-ing, Labourite co-founder of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy-fund­ed OpenDemocracy.net and Avaaz, which has lob­bied for NATO mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions in both Libya and Syr­ia.

[see screen of email]

Con­sult­ing Nina Jankow­icz on para­noid scheme against Con­sor­tium News

On April 8, Mason emailed Khan to express alarm about a piece in Con­sor­tium News, the inde­pen­dent news plat­form found­ed by the late Robert Par­ry in 1995, ques­tion­ing the West­ern nar­ra­tive of the Bucha mas­sacre. “Who’s behind Con­sor­tium News?”, the sub­ject head­er read.

Khan respond­ed that he had con­sult­ed Nina Jankow­icz, for­mer chief of the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s Dis­in­for­ma­tion Gov­er­nance Board, who resigned her post in dis­grace just three weeks after being appoint­ed due to intense crit­i­cism of her pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ry, bizarre behav­ior, and record of cen­so­ri­ous state­ments.

Accord­ing to Khan, Jankow­icz saw Con­sor­tium News as a case of “use­ful idiots rather than fund­ing,” pre­sum­ably a ref­er­ence to Krem­lin finan­cial sup­port. Khan was by con­trast “not so sure,” sug­gest­ing “the gap” in its out­put “between 2005 and 2011” was “of a lot of inter­est.”

[see screen of email]

Joe Lau­ria, edi­tor-in-chief of Con­sor­tium News, expressed bewil­der­ment at the pur­port­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion expert’s obser­va­tions, and out­rage at the defam­a­to­ry impli­ca­tion that the site might be in receipt of illic­it Russ­ian fund­ing.

“There was nev­er any ‘gap’ in our pub­li­ca­tion,” Lau­ria told The Gray­zone. “Our founder, Bob Par­ry, sim­ply switched to Word­Press in 2011 and trans­ferred some of the most impor­tant arti­cles from the old sys­tem. There were thou­sands of arti­cles so he couldn’t pos­si­bly trans­fer all of them, it had to be done man­u­al­ly. The arti­cles that weren’t trans­ferred can be found on Way­back Machine.”

Indeed, any­one perus­ing Consortium’s archive of “most impor­tant” past pieces can see that numer­ous arti­cles from the peri­od cit­ed by Khan have been avowed­ly repub­lished, with their orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion dates clear­ly stat­ed. This rais­es the ques­tion of whether such con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing influ­enced PayPal’s deci­sion to ter­mi­nate Consortium’s account in May 2022.

...

———

“Paul Mason’s covert intel­li­gence-linked plot to destroy The Gray­zone exposed” by Kit Klaren­berg and Max Blu­men­thal; The Gray­zone; 06/07/2022

“It is uncer­tain how Mason and Khan became acquaint­ed, but their mutu­al coin­ci­dence of needs, motives and vendet­tas is obvi­ous. The pub­lic inter­est in releas­ing the pair’s pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions is also abun­dant­ly clear. If their planned crim­i­nal­iza­tion of The Gray­zone for pub­lish­ing facts and opin­ions they abhor is suc­cess­ful, it will have dire ram­i­fi­ca­tions for any and all jour­nal­ists and inde­pen­dent media insti­tu­tions seek­ing to chal­lenge the sta­tus quo.”

Yes, while we don’t know how these two British spies became acquaint­ed, it’s clear they have a shared mis­sion. And that mis­sion appears to start with the destruc­tion of The Gray­zone. But it obvi­ous­ly won’t end there because their shared mis­sion is to destroy inde­pen­dent out­lets that put out report­ing con­tra­dict­ing the UK nation­al secu­ri­ty state’s pre­ferred nar­ra­tives on for­eign con­flicts. They’re going after The Gray­zone because they see it being at the cen­ter of this net­work of inde­pen­dent voic­es. A net­work they are appar­ent­ly con­vinced is being financed and oper­at­ed by the gov­ern­ments of Rus­sia and Chi­na. Or at least that’s the con­ve­nient excuse. And on one lev­el it should­n’t be too shock­ing that these obvi­ous intel­li­gence assets view every­one else as also being an intel­li­gence asset. Paul Mason and Amil Khan inhab­it a hall of mir­rors world where the truth goes to die. It’s got to be tempt­ing to assume every­one is cyn­i­cal­ly run­ning an intel­li­gence oper­a­tion when that’s the envi­ron­ment you’re oper­at­ing in:

...
In a series of recent columns, Mason called for the state-enforced sup­pres­sion of facts and per­spec­tives he con­sid­ers over­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the Krem­lin, and demand­ed “state action” against mem­bers of the media that oppose the NATO line on Ukraine. He placed The Gray­zone at the top of his fan­ta­sy cen­sor­ship tar­get list.

Mason has since announced a run for par­lia­ment on the Labour tick­et to wage his cru­sade against “dis­in­for­ma­tion” from inside the House of Com­mons.

The Gray­zone, mean­while, has learned through anony­mous­ly leaked emails and doc­u­ments that Mason has been engaged in a mali­cious secret cam­paign that aims to enlist the British state and “friend­ly” intel­li­gence cut-outs to under­mine, cen­sor and even crim­i­nal­ize anti­war dis­senters.

...

Mason is joined in his covert cru­sade by Amil Khan, the founder of a shad­owy intel­li­gence con­trac­tor called Valent Projects. In the cache of leaked emails, Khan pro­posed to Mason the ini­ti­a­tion of a “clever John Oliv­er style stunt that makes [The Gray­zone] a laugh­ing stock,” as well as a “full nuclear legal to squeeze them finan­cial­ly.”

The Gray­zone has pre­vi­ous­ly revealed Khan’s exten­sive involve­ment in the Syr­i­an dirty war, dur­ing which he pro­vid­ed pub­lic rela­tions guid­ance to jihadist groups, trained anti-gov­ern­ment activists in com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies, and secret­ly over­saw sup­posed cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist col­lec­tives backed by for­eign gov­ern­ments. His goal was to flood inter­na­tion­al media with pro-oppo­si­tion pro­pa­gan­da, desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment of Bashar Assad, and ready the ground for West­ern regime change.

This eth­i­cal­ly dubi­ous work was con­duct­ed for a vari­ety of intel­li­gence-adja­cent British For­eign Office con­trac­tors, such as ARK, a firm found­ed by prob­a­ble MI6 oper­a­tive Alis­tair Har­ris, and IncoS­trat, which has been plau­si­bly accused of pro­duc­ing pro­pa­gan­da for the blood-stained UK and Sau­di-backed insur­gents.

...

Whether Khan and Mason’s bold plans for an anti-Gray­zone sum­mit have been put into action remains unclear. How­ev­er, by May 12, Khan had draft­ed an invi­ta­tion for prospec­tive mem­bers to attend the ini­tial brain­storm­ing ses­sion. In his note, he con­jured up a vast and fear­some nexus of “pro-Russ­ian trolls” destroy­ing any­one in the Kremlin’s way, at the cen­ter of which rests The Gray­zone Death Star.
...

And note how the assump­tion that The Gray­zone is secret­ly being financed by Rus­sia and Chi­na is treat­ed like such an arti­cle of faith by Mason that he appar­ent­ly con­tin­ued to sus­pect Con­sor­tium News was for­eign asset even after Nina Jankow­icz, the per­son tapped for the short-live role of US Dis­in­for­ma­tion Czar, told him the web­site was more just a bunch of “use­ful idiots”. It under­scores how the label of for­eign asset appears to be at the cen­ter of this intel­li­gence oper­a­tion:

...
On April 30 this year, Paul Mason emailed Amil Khan, mak­ing clear he was “keen to help” de-plat­form The Gray­zone.

He attached a bizarrely con­struct­ed “dynam­ic map of the ‘left’ pro-Putin infos­phere” that resem­bled a spider’s web, with a mess of arrows link­ing the names of mem­bers of par­lia­ment, media out­lets, activists, caus­es, and British minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties.

The bare­ly coher­ent, racial­ly-tinged chart con­nect­ed the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, Russ­ian state broad­cast­er RT, the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na, and Bei­jing-based tech mil­lion­aire-financier Roy Sing­ham to the “Mus­lim Com­mu­ni­ty,” “Young Net­worked Left” and “Black Com­mu­ni­ty” through a series of left­ist out­fits and UK Labour fig­ures. No evi­dence was pro­vid­ed to sup­port Mason’s link­ages.

At the cen­ter of Mason’s chart (see below) is Jere­my Cor­byn. When Cor­byn served as Labour leader, Mason plot­ted against him in pri­vate while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pos­ing as one of his most ardent pub­lic sup­port­ers. He also sought to influ­ence Shad­ow Chan­cel­lor John McDon­nell in a pro-war direc­tion.

The impli­ca­tion behind Mason’s Nixon­ian ene­mies chart was clear: Rus­sia and Chi­na have weaponized the British left to cor­rupt key Labour con­stituen­cies – there­fore the left must be neu­tral­ized.

[see chart]

Mason sug­gest­ed to Khan that he enlist the help of “pro traf­fic ana­lysts to map” how these “dif­fer­ent echo cham­bers inter­act, where their mate­r­i­al begins – and work out who might [empha­sis added] be pulling the strings.”

He nonethe­less seemed cer­tain about the dark forces ani­mat­ing The Gray­zone, bom­bas­ti­cal­ly charg­ing that its “attacks” on Khan and oth­ers are “fed by Russ­ian and Chi­nese intel,” includ­ing hack­ing, “elec­tron­ic war­fare” and human intel­li­gence.

...

On April 8, Mason emailed Khan to express alarm about a piece in Con­sor­tium News, the inde­pen­dent news plat­form found­ed by the late Robert Par­ry in 1995, ques­tion­ing the West­ern nar­ra­tive of the Bucha mas­sacre. “Who’s behind Con­sor­tium News?”, the sub­ject head­er read.

Khan respond­ed that he had con­sult­ed Nina Jankow­icz, for­mer chief of the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s Dis­in­for­ma­tion Gov­er­nance Board, who resigned her post in dis­grace just three weeks after being appoint­ed due to intense crit­i­cism of her pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ry, bizarre behav­ior, and record of cen­so­ri­ous state­ments.

Accord­ing to Khan, Jankow­icz saw Con­sor­tium News as a case of “use­ful idiots rather than fund­ing,” pre­sum­ably a ref­er­ence to Krem­lin finan­cial sup­port. Khan was by con­trast “not so sure,” sug­gest­ing “the gap” in its out­put “between 2005 and 2011” was “of a lot of inter­est.”

[see screen of email]

Joe Lau­ria, edi­tor-in-chief of Con­sor­tium News, expressed bewil­der­ment at the pur­port­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion expert’s obser­va­tions, and out­rage at the defam­a­to­ry impli­ca­tion that the site might be in receipt of illic­it Russ­ian fund­ing.

“There was nev­er any ‘gap’ in our pub­li­ca­tion,” Lau­ria told The Gray­zone. “Our founder, Bob Par­ry, sim­ply switched to Word­Press in 2011 and trans­ferred some of the most impor­tant arti­cles from the old sys­tem. There were thou­sands of arti­cles so he couldn’t pos­si­bly trans­fer all of them, it had to be done man­u­al­ly. The arti­cles that weren’t trans­ferred can be found on Way­back Machine.”

Indeed, any­one perus­ing Consortium’s archive of “most impor­tant” past pieces can see that numer­ous arti­cles from the peri­od cit­ed by Khan have been avowed­ly repub­lished, with their orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion dates clear­ly stat­ed. This rais­es the ques­tion of whether such con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing influ­enced PayPal’s deci­sion to ter­mi­nate Consortium’s account in May 2022.

...

And that brings us to Mason’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UK For­eign Office, where they imag­ined cre­at­ing a sit­u­a­tion where the UK gov­ern­ment filed a for­mal com­plaint against The Gray­zone. A scheme that will poten­tial­ly involve the UK’s new­ly found­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare unit, the Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion Cell. Under this scheme, the peo­ple ‘tar­get­ed’ by The Gray­zone would get togeth­er and sub­mit mate­ri­als required to get a for­mal com­plaint issued, at which point the UK gov­ern­ment could begin inves­ti­gat­ing The Gray­zone’s finances:

...
After Mason pro­posed invit­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UK For­eign Office to the anti-Gray­zone meet and greet, the Valent Projects chief reached out to a friend at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­torate, a White­hall unit “tasked with hybrid threats.”

His Direc­torate source said the British gov­ern­ment would be averse to send­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the gath­er­ing, “as it could jeop­ar­dise out­comes lat­er.” Nonethe­less, they advo­cat­ed con­ven­ing peo­ple “tar­get­ed” by The Gray­zone, to col­late evi­dence that could be sub­mit­ted to OFCOM, Britain’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor, and/or Dig­i­tal, Cul­ture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the name of both a gov­ern­ment depart­ment and par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee, “as part of a for­mal com­plaint.”

They imag­ined that this process could some­how trig­ger an inves­ti­ga­tion into The Grayzone’s “fund­ing and activ­i­ties,” lead­ing the gov­ern­ment to “get prop­er­ly involved.”

Khan added that his pal sug­gest­ed also approach­ing Thom­son Reuters Foun­da­tion and BBC Media Action for the initiative.The Gray­zone has pre­vi­ous­ly exposed these media char­i­ties as hav­ing par­tic­i­pat­ed in covert British state-fund­ed efforts to “weak­en the Russ­ian state’s influ­ence.”

Khan said he would also be in touch with the For­eign Office’s new­ly-found­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare unit, the Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion Cell.

[see screen of email]
...

Also note how Mason does­n’t just want deplat­form­ing. He wants the finan­cial destruc­tion of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism:

...
Khan was clear­ly amenable to his sug­ges­tions. Five days lat­er, he out­lined two options for tak­ing down The Gray­zone: “some sort of clever John Oliv­er style stunt that makes them a laugh­ing stock” – ref­er­enc­ing a sting oper­a­tion tar­get­ing aca­d­e­m­ic Paul McK­eigue con­duct­ed by the dubi­ous, intel­li­gence-linked Com­mis­sion for Inter­na­tion­al Jus­tice and Account­abil­i­ty back in 2021 – “or full nuclear legal to squeeze them finan­cial­ly.”

Mason was enthused by the lat­ter prospect, sub­mit­ting that it should be “com­bined with relent­less deplat­form­ing,” includ­ing cut­ting off The Gray­zone from dona­tion sources such as Pay­Pal, in the man­ner of Con­sor­tium News and Mint­Press, and set­ting up “a kind of per­ma­nent rebut­tal oper­a­tion.”

...

And note how Mason was report­ed­ly unim­pressed by the scope of this plan. A for­mal UK inves­ti­ga­tion into The Gray­zone was­n’t enough. But Khan assured Mason that such an inves­ti­ga­tion could result in actions like algo­rith­mic dis­crim­i­na­tion and shad­ow ban­ning:

...
Mason’s reac­tion was mixed. While hail­ing the prospect of trig­ger­ing an offi­cial gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tion into The Gray­zone as “a good idea,” he seemed crest­fall­en the plan did not include secur­ing mate­r­i­al from British intel­li­gence on who funds the site, and “what their ulti­mate deliv­er­ables are on behalf of the ppl [peo­ple] their work ben­e­fits.”

“An inves­ti­ga­tion into them would lead to what? Deplat­form­ing? Any­way that’s progress,” he con­clud­ed.

Khan reas­sured Mason that OFCOM and DCMS could task “oth­er bits of gov­ern­ment to get that intel; and the find­ings will auto­mat­i­cal­ly enter the sys­tem” – mean­ing The Gray­zone and its con­trib­u­tors could end up slapped with “Russ­ian state affil­i­at­ed media” labels on social media, lead­ing to algo­rith­mic dis­crim­i­na­tion and poten­tial shad­ow ban­ning, among oth­er penal­ties.

“I think/hope there’s poten­tial to go fur­ther [empha­sis added]. It’s too easy for them to flip deplat­form­ing with ‘the sys­tem is scared of us’. We need to look at their influence/legitimacy with audi­ences,” Khan stat­ed.

[see screen of email]
...

Final­ly, note the broad­er con­text that this oper­a­tion is tak­ing place in: Mason and Khan aren’t just try­ing to destroy out­lets like The Gray­zone that punch holes in the offi­cial nar­ra­tives. They’re also plan­ning on set­ting up a new “Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Brigade”. So this attack on the The Gray­zone should be viewed as in part a response to impact The Gray­zone’s past report­ing has had in reveal­ing state sanc­tioned lies. But it’s also a pre­emp­tive move to neu­tral­ize The Gray­zone in antic­i­pa­tion of set­ting up even more brazen pro­pa­gan­da oper­a­tions:

...
Mason and Khan’s brazen attempt to de-plat­form and finan­cial­ly crip­ple an inde­pen­dent media out­let on the slan­der­ous, fic­tion­al pre­text it is actu­al­ly a hos­tile for­eign infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion is espe­cial­ly per­verse giv­en that oth­er leaked emails in The Grayzone’s pos­ses­sion reveal that Khan and Mason appar­ent­ly plan to con­struct a hos­tile for­eign infor­ma­tion oper­a­tion of their own.

Dubbed by Khan “Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Brigade,” the pro­posed project would rep­re­sent an astro­turfed civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tion which serves as “the major, for­ward lean­ing play­er in the infor­ma­tion war.” While pub­licly oper­at­ing as an NGO, the Brigade would be fund­ed by West­ern states “through cutouts,” and close­ly inter­twined with intel­li­gence ser­vices.

[see screen of email]
...

How will the “Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Brigade” fare when actu­al­ly tasked with wag­ing these infor­ma­tion wars? Well, as we saw with Joe Lau­ri­a’s dev­as­tat­ing take down of News­Guard’s attacks on Con­sor­tium News, they’re prob­a­bly not going to do very well. At least not in any direct debate. But they can poten­tial­ly silence the oppo­si­tion. Hence the plan.

As report­ing on the inten­si­fy­ing fight­ing in East­ern Ukraine con­tin­ues to depict slow but steady Russ­ian gains, ques­tions about what exact­ly Rus­sia has in mind for Ukraine in the long run are grow­ing all the more rel­e­vant. Espe­cial­ly after Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp recent­ly pre­dict­ed a 20–30% prob­a­bil­i­ty of a nuclear war emerg­ing should this end up becom­ing a long-term con­flict. So what’s the plan? Well, we’re get­ting a bet­ter idea of what that long-term plan might be: ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion, with parts of East­ern Ukraine join­ing Rus­sia via pub­lic ref­er­en­dum. In oth­er words, the Crimea play­book. At least that’s what we can infer based on reports out of the Russ­ian-installed admin­is­tra­tion in the occu­pied part of Ukraine’s Zapor­izhzhia region, where offi­cials have announced plans for a pub­lic ref­er­en­dum to join Rus­sia that will be held some time this year. The exact tim­ing is unclear, but it sounds like it will hap­pen at some point in the next 6 months.

Now, we have no idea how real­is­tic these declared plans are. But it does give us at least a puta­tive time­line for this open­ing phase of this con­flict: at point this Rus­sia, these Russ­ian occu­pied regions in East­ern Ukraine could poten­tial­ly decide to join Rus­sia. Now, what hap­pens at that point is entire­ly unclear. Per­haps we achieve a new kind of frozen stale­mate. But there’s also the obvi­ous­ly pos­si­bil­i­ty that this is exact­ly the kind of sce­nario that turns this into a long-term con­flict, with NATO resolv­ing to pro­vide Ukraine with what­ev­er it deems is nec­es­sary to recap­ture these ter­ri­to­ries. It’s the kind of sce­nario that makes direct con­flict between Rus­sia and NATO all the more like­ly, espe­cial­ly if Rus­sia con­sid­ers it a NATO inva­sion of Rus­sia at that point. So as we’re hear­ing these reports about planned ref­er­en­dums in Russ­ian occu­pied regions of Ukraine, it’s going to be worth keep­ing in mind that we could be see­ing what is the next major piv­ot point in this con­flict unfold­ing. Per­haps it’s a piv­ot back to a frozen con­flict. Or maybe a piv­ot towards WWIII. Time will tell:

Reuters

Russ­ian prox­ies plan vote in Ukraine’s Zapor­izhzhia region on join­ing Rus­sia

June 8, 2022 9:52 AM CDT
Updat­ed

LONDON, June 8 (Reuters) — The Russ­ian-installed admin­is­tra­tion in the occu­pied part of Ukraine’s Zapor­izhzhia region plans to stage a ref­er­en­dum lat­er this year on join­ing Rus­sia, Russ­ian news agen­cies quot­ed one of its mem­bers as say­ing.

“The peo­ple will deter­mine the future of the Zapor­izhzhia region. The ref­er­en­dum is sched­uled for this year,” the offi­cial, Vladimir Rogov, was quot­ed by TASS as say­ing, giv­ing no fur­ther details about the tim­ing.

...

Around two-thirds of the region is under Russ­ian con­trol, part of a swathe of south­ern Ukraine that Moscow seized ear­ly in the war, includ­ing most of neigh­bour­ing Kher­son province where Russ­ian-installed offi­cials have also dis­cussed plans for a ref­er­en­dum. read more

Rogov said the admin­is­tra­tion would draw up plans for how to pro­ceed with a ref­er­en­dum even if Rus­sia could not gain con­trol over the entire region. Zapor­izhzhia city, the main urban cen­tre, is still held by Ukraine.

The region was home to around 1.6 mil­lion peo­ple before Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Bids to incor­po­rate Kher­son or Zapor­izhzhia into Rus­sia would con­tra­dict Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s asser­tion at the start of the inva­sion that Moscow had no plan to occu­py Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry.

The Krem­lin has said it is for peo­ple liv­ing in the regions to decide their future.

...

The may­or of Meli­topol, a city in the Zaporozhzhia region, poured scorn on the lat­est ref­er­en­dum plan.

“They start­ed by open­ly say­ing they were prepar­ing to stage a ref­er­en­dum in our city and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry of the Zapor­izhzhia region. But today they clear­ly under­stand that even at gun­point they will not be able to gath­er peo­ple to vote,” said the major, Ivan Fedorov.

“Now they are start­ing a pro­pa­gan­da war, under­stand­ing that they don’t have the sup­port, and that it is unclear when it will appear. In my opin­ion, it nev­er will,” Fedorov, who was abduct­ed by Russ­ian forces in the first days of the war, said on Ukrain­ian TV.

Rogov, the Russ­ian-installed offi­cial, also said the first ship­ments of grain would depart from the Berdyan­sk port on the Sea of Azov lat­er this week, TASS report­ed.

Ukraine says any such ship­ments from occu­pied ports would amount to ille­gal loot­ing. A block­ade of exports from Ukraine — one of the world’s largest grain exporters — has dri­ven up glob­al prices and trig­gered fears of a world­wide food cri­sis. The Krem­lin blames Kyiv and West­ern sanc­tions for the sit­u­a­tion.

———-

“Russ­ian prox­ies plan vote in Ukraine’s Zapor­izhzhia region on join­ing Rus­sia”; Reuters; 06/08/2022

““The peo­ple will deter­mine the future of the Zapor­izhzhia region. The ref­er­en­dum is sched­uled for this year,” the offi­cial, Vladimir Rogov, was quot­ed by TASS as say­ing, giv­ing no fur­ther details about the tim­ing.”

We don’t know when the ref­er­en­dum is going to hap­pen in the Zapor­izhzhia region. Nor will the region nec­es­sar­i­ly be entire­ly under Russ­ian con­trol when it hap­pens. But a ref­er­en­dum appears to be in the works for some time in the next six months:

...
Around two-thirds of the region is under Russ­ian con­trol, part of a swathe of south­ern Ukraine that Moscow seized ear­ly in the war, includ­ing most of neigh­bour­ing Kher­son province where Russ­ian-installed offi­cials have also dis­cussed plans for a ref­er­en­dum. read more

Rogov said the admin­is­tra­tion would draw up plans for how to pro­ceed with a ref­er­en­dum even if Rus­sia could not gain con­trol over the entire region. Zapor­izhzhia city, the main urban cen­tre, is still held by Ukraine.
...

So does a ref­er­en­dum actu­al­ly stand a chance of pass­ing a legit­i­mate pop­u­lar vote? It seems like a dicey propo­si­tion. Keep in mind that these are the cities that chose not to join the inde­pen­dent republics back in 2014 and have been expe­ri­enc­ing a low lev­el con­flict for the past eight years. Odds are opin­ions are pret­ty entrenched at this point. But at the same time, let’s not for­get that it’s the cities in the East where the bru­tal­i­ties of Nazi bat­tal­ions like Azov and Right Sec­tor are going to be most direct­ly felt. Bru­tal­i­ties that have pre­sum­ably only got­ten worse since the start of Rus­si­a’s inva­sion. And pre­sum­ably, in some cas­es, by the local author­i­ties. Don’t for­get that, while regions like Zaporozhzhia chose to stay in Ukraine, a large per­cent of the pop­u­lace like­ly had deep sym­pa­thies for the inde­pen­dent republics. How are those ele­ments of the pop­u­lace been treat­ed by the far right ele­ments of Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment in the East? It’s a poten­tial­ly sig­nif­i­cant aspect of this sto­ry that we haven’t real­ly have very much cov­er­age of in the report­ing.

And that brings us to the com­ments by Ivan Fedorv, the may­or of Meli­topol, dis­miss­ing the prospect that the pop­u­lace would ever sup­port a ref­er­en­dum to join Rus­sia. Recall how Federov, a mem­ber or Right Sec­tor, was abduct­ed by Russ­ian forces for inter­ro­ga­tion ear­ly on in the con­flict. Abduct­ed and returned unharmed. It was an episode that under­scored how unusu­al this mil­i­tary adven­ture real­ly is in terms of stat­ed aims. Aims that might now include ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion via ref­er­en­dum that is guar­an­teed to illic­it the most extreme kind of response from Ukraine’s nation­al­ists:

...
The may­or of Meli­topol, a city in the Zaporozhzhia region, poured scorn on the lat­est ref­er­en­dum plan.

“They start­ed by open­ly say­ing they were prepar­ing to stage a ref­er­en­dum in our city and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry of the Zapor­izhzhia region. But today they clear­ly under­stand that even at gun­point they will not be able to gath­er peo­ple to vote,” said the major, Ivan Fedorov.

“Now they are start­ing a pro­pa­gan­da war, under­stand­ing that they don’t have the sup­port, and that it is unclear when it will appear. In my opin­ion, it nev­er will,” Fedorov, who was abduct­ed by Russ­ian forces in the first days of the war, said on Ukrain­ian TV.
...

Will Ukraine’s far right get nasty enough to con­vince the local pop­u­lace to join Rus­sia? It’s part of the dynam­ic of this sit­u­a­tion.

But there’s also the ques­tion of how Ukraine’s inter­na­tion­al allies are going to respond to these ref­er­en­dums, espe­cial­ly if they result in these regions join­ing Rus­sia, whether or not the vote is valid. How will ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sions affect the abil­i­ty for this con­flict to come to an end? Will annex­ing parts of East­ern Ukraine be the events that effec­tive­ly end the con­flict? Or deep­en it? Again, don’t for­get Alex Karp’s pre­dic­tion: if this con­flict turns into a long-term one, there’s a 20–30% chance of nuclear war. So when we’re see­ing ear­ly indi­ca­tions of these kinds of ter­ri­to­r­i­al ambi­tions, are we see­ing the pre­text for the res­o­lu­tion of this con­flict? Or a dra­mat­ic esca­la­tion of it? We’ll find out. But as the fol­low­ing TPM piece makes clear, the top­ic of ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion is some­thing Vladimir Putin isn’t shy­ing from. So if Ukraine’s NATO allies want to use these ref­er­en­dums as an pre­text for dra­mat­i­cal­ly deep­en­ing NATO’s involve­ment in the con­flict they’ll have plen­ty of excus­es to do so:

Talk­ing Points Memo
News

Putin Sug­gests Rus­sia Is Enter­ing A Peri­od Of Indef­i­nite Expan­sion
How much land does Putin need?

By Josh Koven­sky
June 9, 2022 1:15 p.m.

Vladimir Putin sug­gest­ed on Thurs­day that it’s time for Rus­sia to stay in the busi­ness of ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion — draw­ing direct allu­sion to long wars with the West to that end.

It comes as the Russ­ian army has spent weeks try­ing to take the Don­bas — Ukraine’s east­ern region that, accord­ing to Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da, should be full of eth­nic Rus­sians wait­ing for Moscow’s arrival.

Instead, and after ear­li­er retreats from Ukraine’s north, Putin has found him­self stuck in a slow, slog­ging cam­paign. Russ­ian rhetoric and saber-rat­tling has increased as the stag­na­tion con­tin­ues.

So on Thurs­day, after vis­it­ing an exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cat­ed to Peter the Great’s 350-year anniver­sary, Putin remarked on how lit­tle had changed over the inter­ven­ing cen­turies.

“Peter I fought the North­ern War for 21 years,” Putin remarked. “It seemed then, fight­ing with Swe­den, that he took some­thing away … but he wasn’t tak­ing any­thing away, he was return­ing!”

Putin added that Peter I found­ed Russia’s impe­r­i­al cap­i­tal — St. Peters­burg — on ter­ri­to­ry tak­en from Swe­den dur­ing that war.

“When he laid the new cap­i­tal, not one coun­try of Europe rec­og­nized this ter­ri­to­ry as Rus­sia, they all rec­og­nized it as Sweden’s,” Putin said. “And there, since time immemo­r­i­al, the slavs had lived along­side the Finno-Urgic peo­ples, and this ter­ri­to­ry was locat­ed under the con­trol of the Russ­ian state.”

...

But Putin insert­ed anoth­er ref­er­ence in his Wednes­day remarks: Peter the Great’s cam­paign to take Nar­va, a city that’s cur­rent­ly part of Esto­nia.

Peter I fought two cam­paigns for the city — the first one, an embar­rass­ing fail­ure. The sec­ond was a suc­cess.

“It’s the same in the West­ern direc­tion, with Nar­va, his first cam­paigns,” Putin said. “Why did he go that way? He was return­ing and for­ti­fy­ing [this land] — that’s what he did.”

Putin added that Russia’s des­tiny today is the same: return­ing and for­ti­fy­ing lost slav­ic lands.

“Judg­ing from every­thing, it’s fall­en to us to also return and strength­en,” he added. “And if we start from these basic val­ues form­ing the foun­da­tion of our exis­tence, we will uncon­di­tion­al­ly suc­ceed in solv­ing the tasks that stand before us.”

———-

“Putin Sug­gests Rus­sia Is Enter­ing A Peri­od Of Indef­i­nite Expan­sion” by Josh Koven­sky; Talk­ing Points Memo; 06/09/2022

““Judg­ing from every­thing, it’s fall­en to us to also return and strength­en,” he added. “And if we start from these basic val­ues form­ing the foun­da­tion of our exis­tence, we will uncon­di­tion­al­ly suc­ceed in solv­ing the tasks that stand before us.””

Return­ing and strength­en­ing. It’s an omi­nous theme for Putin to be pub­licly cham­pi­oning. Espe­cial­ly omi­nous when the his­toric cap­ture of places like the capi­tol of Esto­nia are brought up. It’s the kind talk that is guar­an­teed to fuel claims that Putin is plan­ning on tak­ing land from NATO mem­bers next:

...
“Peter I fought the North­ern War for 21 years,” Putin remarked. “It seemed then, fight­ing with Swe­den, that he took some­thing away … but he wasn’t tak­ing any­thing away, he was return­ing!”

...

But Putin insert­ed anoth­er ref­er­ence in his Wednes­day remarks: Peter the Great’s cam­paign to take Nar­va, a city that’s cur­rent­ly part of Esto­nia.

Peter I fought two cam­paigns for the city — the first one, an embar­rass­ing fail­ure. The sec­ond was a suc­cess.

“It’s the same in the West­ern direc­tion, with Nar­va, his first cam­paigns,” Putin said. “Why did he go that way? He was return­ing and for­ti­fy­ing [this land] — that’s what he did.”

Putin added that Russia’s des­tiny today is the same: return­ing and for­ti­fy­ing lost slav­ic lands.
...

Will talk of Russ­ian expan­sion have a kind of sober­ing effect on world lead­ers or will this be treat­ed as cause for greater alarmism and esca­la­tion? Again, time will tell. If the ref­er­en­dum time­line is accu­rate we’re going to find out how world lead­ers will react with­in the next six months or so. It’s omi­nous. On the one hand, some sort of ref­er­en­dum like this is almost the default kind of end to this con­flict. But it could also be the trig­ger point for some­thing far worse. In oth­er words, we’re look­ing at the begin­ning of the end. We’re just not sure which end.

What is the actu­al casu­al­ty rate for the Ukrain­ian forces in the Don­bas? It’s large­ly been a mys­tery from the out­break of the con­flict, although we could be pret­ty con­fi­dent the true num­ber was high­er than the offi­cial num­bers. Recall those reports from a few weeks about Ukrain­ian vol­un­teers in the Don­bas con­tact­ing reporters to share with the world the awful con­di­tions under which they were expect­ed to fight, with lit­tle to no train­ing or equip­ment. That’s all part of the con­text of a dis­turb­ing pair of new offi­cial updates to the Ukrain­ian death rate in the Don­bas.

First, that offi­cial num­ber jumped from 100 to 200 troops a day in a BBC report last week. Then, just yes­ter­day, anoth­er Ukrain­ian offi­cial just bumped it up to 200–500 deaths per day for Ukraine’s forces. Despite that, Ukraine main­tains that no peace nego­ti­a­tions are pos­si­ble as long as Rus­sia holds Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry. Nego­ti­a­tions can only start after Ukraine wins back its lost ter­ri­to­ry. So in the last week, the offi­cial death rate has jumped 2–5 fold at the same time the gov­ern­ment dou­bled and tripled down on no peace nego­ti­a­tions until it starts win­ning:

BBC

Ukrain­ian casu­al­ties: Kyiv los­ing up to 200 troops a day — Zelen­sky aide

Pub­lished
06/09/2022

A senior Ukrain­ian pres­i­den­tial aide has told the BBC that between 100 and 200 Ukrain­ian troops are being killed on the front line every day.

Mykhay­lo Podolyak said Ukraine need­ed hun­dreds of West­ern artillery sys­tems to lev­el the play­ing field with Rus­sia in the east­ern Don­bas region.

He also said Kyiv is not ready to resume peace talks with Moscow.

Ukrain­ian troops are under relent­less bom­bard­ment as Russ­ian forces attempt to take con­trol of the whole of Don­bas.

“The Russ­ian forces have thrown pret­ty much every­thing non-nuclear at the front and that includes heavy artillery, mul­ti­ple rock­et launch sys­tems and avi­a­tion,” Mr Podolyak said.

He repeat­ed Ukraine’s appeal for more weapons from the West, say­ing that the “com­plete lack of par­i­ty” between the Russ­ian and Ukrain­ian armies was the rea­son for Ukraine’s heavy casu­al­ty rate.

“Our demands for artillery are not just some kind of whim... but an objec­tive need when it comes to the sit­u­a­tion on the bat­tle­field,” he said, adding that Ukraine needs 150 to 300 rock­et launch sys­tems to match Rus­sia — a much high­er num­ber than it has received so far.

Mr Podolyak also said peace talks could only resume if Rus­sia sur­ren­dered the ter­ri­to­ry it had gained since it invad­ed on 24 Feb­ru­ary.

Mr Podolyak’s sug­ges­tion that 100 to 200 Ukrain­ian sol­diers are dying each day is high­er than pre­vi­ous esti­mates. On Thurs­day, Ukraine’s Defence Min­is­ter, Olek­sii Reznikov, said Ukraine was los­ing 100 sol­diers a day, and 500 more were injured.

The dif­fer­ing casu­al­ty fig­ures are a sign of how dif­fi­cult it is to get pre­cise infor­ma­tion from the bat­tle­field.

...

In addi­tion to the front­line fight­ing, two Britons and a Moroc­can man who fought for Ukraine’s armed forces were sen­tenced to death on Thurs­day by an unrecog­nised court in the so-called Donet­sk Peo­ple’s Repub­lic.

They were found guilty of being mer­ce­nar­ies and of “tak­ing action towards the vio­lent seizure of pow­er”.

———-

“Ukrain­ian casu­al­ties: Kyiv los­ing up to 200 troops a day — Zelen­sky aide”; BBC; 06/09/2022

“Mr Podolyak’s sug­ges­tion that 100 to 200 Ukrain­ian sol­diers are dying each day is high­er than pre­vi­ous esti­mates. On Thurs­day, Ukraine’s Defence Min­is­ter, Olek­sii Reznikov, said Ukraine was los­ing 100 sol­diers a day, and 500 more were injured.”

It was just a week ago when the offi­cial esti­mates for the dai­ly num­ber of killed Ukrain­ian sol­diers jumped from 100 to 200. And yet, despite this dire news, the mes­sage com­ing out of the Ukrain­ian side was that nego­ti­a­tions are still off the table and peace talks could only resume fol­low­ing a com­plete Russ­ian with­draw­al back to the Feb 24 pre-con­flict lines. Ongo­ing mass casu­al­ties are the plan:

...
Mr Podolyak also said peace talks could only resume if Rus­sia sur­ren­dered the ter­ri­to­ry it had gained since it invad­ed on 24 Feb­ru­ary.
...

So how much longer is Ukraine plan­ning on sus­tain­ing these casu­al­ty rates? Well, we got a rather dis­turb­ing update on that front yes­ter­day from David Arakhamia, who leads Ukraine’s nego­ti­a­tions with Rus­sia and is described as one of Zelen­sky’s clos­est advis­ers. Accord­ing to Arakhamia, 200–500 Ukrain­ian sol­diers are being killed each day in the Don­bas region. In just over a week, the offi­cial esti­mates have jump from 100 to 200–500 deaths per day.

How is this cat­a­stroph­ic death rate affect­ing the peace nego­ti­a­tions? Well, accord­ing to Arakhamia, he con­tin­ues to con­tact his Russ­ian coun­ter­parts once or twice a week but “both sides clear­ly real­ize that right now, there is no place for nego­ti­a­tion.” “Our nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion is actu­al­ly quite weak, so we don’t want to sit at the table if we are in this posi­tion. We need to reverse it in some way,” Arakhamia said, who went on to stress the need for a counter-oper­a­tion to regain lost ter­ri­to­ry.

Arakhamia also point­ed out that Ukraine has recruit­ed one mil­lion peo­ple into the army and has the capac­i­ty to recruit two mil­lion more, leav­ing it ade­quate poten­tial man­pow­er. It’s weapons that the coun­try needs. In oth­er words, the worse the war goes for Ukraine, the less pos­si­ble nego­ti­a­tions become and the greater the call for more weapons because Ukraine will accept as high a casu­al­ty rate as is nec­es­sary to win the war. That’s the mes­sage com­ing out of Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment.

So how long can we expect Ukraine to be able to main­tain this death rate? Well, we got a bit of a hint from Arakhamia on that mat­ter. When dis­cussing the rel­a­tive lack of eco­nom­ic impact sanc­tions have had on Rus­si­a’s econ­o­my, Arakhamia coun­tered that it will take three to four years for the sanc­tions to ful­ly take effect, adding “The ques­tion is if we (Ukraine) are still here in three or four years to enjoy the show”:

Axios

Ukraine suf­fer­ing up to 1,000 casu­al­ties per day in Don­bas, offi­cial says

Dave Lawler, author of Axios World
06/15/2022

Up to 1,000 Ukrain­ian sol­diers are being killed or wound­ed each day in the Don­bas region of east­ern Ukraine, with 200 to 500 killed on aver­age and many more wound­ed, a top Ukrain­ian offi­cial said on Wednes­day.

The big pic­ture: Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky said on June 1 that 60 to 100 Ukrain­ian troops were being killed dai­ly as Rus­sia stepped up its Don­bas offen­sive. Over the past two weeks that num­ber has climbed sig­nif­i­cant­ly accord­ing to David Arakhamia, who leads Ukraine’s nego­ti­a­tions with Rus­sia and is one of Zelen­sky’s clos­est advis­ers.

* Ukraine has recruit­ed one mil­lion peo­ple into the army and has the capac­i­ty to recruit two mil­lion more, Arakhamia said, so it has the num­bers to con­tin­ue the fight in Don­bas, where Rus­sia has been grad­u­al­ly gain­ing ter­ri­to­ry.

* Joint Chiefs Chair­man Gen. Mark Mil­ley was asked about the rate of Ukrain­ian casu­al­ties on Wednes­day and said it was dif­fi­cult to esti­mate but pre­vi­ous media reports of around 100 killed and up to 300 injured each day had been “in the ball­park of our assess­ments.” He was not respond­ing to the lat­est Ukrain­ian esti­mate.

...

What Ukraine lacks, Arakhamia con­tend­ed, is the weapon­ry and ammu­ni­tion to match Rus­sia in “one of the biggest fights of the 21st cen­tu­ry.” He said: “We have the peo­ple trained to attack, to coun­ter­at­tack, but we need weapons for this.”

* “Our nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion is actu­al­ly quite weak, so we don’t want to sit at the table if we are in this posi­tion. We need to reverse it in some way,” Arakhamia said, stress­ing the need for a counter-oper­a­tion to regain lost ter­ri­to­ry.

Dri­ving the news: Arakhamia is lead­ing a Ukrain­ian del­e­ga­tion in Wash­ing­ton this week to lob­by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion and Con­gress to increase the pace of weapons ship­ments and to rec­og­nize Rus­sia as a state spon­sor of ter­ror­ism — a top­ic he said they plan to raise with House Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi (D‑Calif.).

* Pres­i­dent Biden spoke with Zelen­sky Wednes­day and informed him of addi­tion­al mil­i­tary and human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance, the White House said. The $1 bil­lion in weapons to be shipped to Ukraine include rock­ets and artillery ammu­ni­tion.
* In a round­table Wednes­day at the Ger­man Mar­shall Fund, Arakhamia and oth­er mem­bers of the del­e­ga­tion not­ed that while Biden had signed a $40 bil­lion pack­age to aid Ukraine in May, it was only very grad­u­al­ly trans­lat­ing into actu­al weapons ship­ments.
* Mean­while, Ukraine’s part­ners — par­tic­u­lar­ly in Europe — are begin­ning to focus on replen­ish­ing their own stock­piles rather than arm­ing Ukraine, Arakhamia said. He not­ed that the Ger­man gov­ern­ment was still very reluc­tant to approve export licens­es to arm Ukraine, per­haps due to “inter­nal fear” of Rus­sia.

What to watch: While for­mal nego­ti­a­tions are frozen, Arakhamia said he and his team speak by phone with their Russ­ian coun­ter­parts “one or two times per week” to check in, even though “both sides clear­ly real­ize that right now, there is no place for nego­ti­a­tion.”

* He said there was domes­tic back­lash to the idea of nego­ti­at­ing with Rus­sia at all after the alleged war crimes in cities like Bucha and Mar­i­upol, but also not­ed the war would have to end through “com­pro­mise.”

More from the round­table:

* Arakhamia said Rus­sia was using neigh­bor­ing Geor­gia to evade sanc­tions, with the com­pli­ance of the “obvi­ous­ly pro-Russ­ian” gov­ern­ment, which Geor­gia denies.
* Arakhamia said “our mil­i­tary peo­ple” strong­ly oppose the idea of de-min­ing Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in exchange for Rus­sia allow­ing grain exports, because there would be “no guar­an­tee” Rus­sia would­n’t use those cor­ri­dors to attack by sea.
* The Ukrain­ian nego­tia­tor said Rus­sia was large­ly insu­lat­ed from sanc­tions due to high oil prices, but would feel the full effects in three or four years. “The ques­tion is if we (Ukraine) are still here in three or four years to enjoy the show.”

————-

“Ukraine suf­fer­ing up to 1,000 casu­al­ties per day in Don­bas, offi­cial says” by Dave Lawler; Axios; 06/15/2022

“Up to 1,000 Ukrain­ian sol­diers are being killed or wound­ed each day in the Don­bas region of east­ern Ukraine, with 200 to 500 killed on aver­age and many more wound­ed, a top Ukrain­ian offi­cial said on Wednes­day.”

The offi­cial death rate jumped 2–5 fold in just a week. It’s the kind of jump that rais­es the obvi­ous­ly ques­tion of whether or not this new death rate is even accu­rate. Could it be even worse? Don’t for­get the recent reports about new con­scripts being sent to the front lines in the Don­bas with lit­tle or not train­ing and equip­ment. Ukraine is going to have to start tap­ping that reserve capac­i­ty for its armed forces soon rather than lat­er because it appears to be treat­ing its sol­diers as an expend­able resource:

...
* Ukraine has recruit­ed one mil­lion peo­ple into the army and has the capac­i­ty to recruit two mil­lion more, Arakhamia said, so it has the num­bers to con­tin­ue the fight in Don­bas, where Rus­sia has been grad­u­al­ly gain­ing ter­ri­to­ry.

* Joint Chiefs Chair­man Gen. Mark Mil­ley was asked about the rate of Ukrain­ian casu­al­ties on Wednes­day and said it was dif­fi­cult to esti­mate but pre­vi­ous media reports of around 100 killed and up to 300 injured each day had been “in the ball­park of our assess­ments.” He was not respond­ing to the lat­est Ukrain­ian esti­mate.
...

And yet, despite this dire news, Arakhamia is reit­er­at­ing the posi­tion that no peace nego­ti­a­tions are pos­si­ble until Ukraine wins back its lost ter­ri­to­ry:

...
* “Our nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion is actu­al­ly quite weak, so we don’t want to sit at the table if we are in this posi­tion. We need to reverse it in some way,” Arakhamia said, stress­ing the need for a counter-oper­a­tion to regain lost ter­ri­to­ry.

...

What to watch: While for­mal nego­ti­a­tions are frozen, Arakhamia said he and his team speak by phone with their Russ­ian coun­ter­parts “one or two times per week” to check in, even though “both sides clear­ly real­ize that right now, there is no place for nego­ti­a­tion.”

* He said there was domes­tic back­lash to the idea of nego­ti­at­ing with Rus­sia at all after the alleged war crimes in cities like Bucha and Mar­i­upol, but also not­ed the war would have to end through “com­pro­mise.”

...

* The Ukrain­ian nego­tia­tor said Rus­sia was large­ly insu­lat­ed from sanc­tions due to high oil prices, but would feel the full effects in three or four years. “The ques­tion is if we (Ukraine) are still here in three or four years to enjoy the show.”
...

How long will this con­tin­ue? Three to four years maybe? Will Ukraine still have a func­tion­ing mil­i­tary by that point? It’s an open ques­tion. And yet, despite that open ques­tion, Ukraine appears to be absolute­ly com­mit­ted to the cur­rent strat­e­gy. A strat­e­gy that appears to demand that Ukraine com­mit itself ever more to win­ning at all costs the more lives are lost. It’s a recipe for an extreme­ly bloody even­tu­al vic­to­ry. Or an extreme­ly bloody even­tu­al defeat. Maybe it’s not the best strat­e­gy.

The purg­ing of all things Russ­ian from Ukrain­ian soci­ety got anoth­er boost: Ukraine’s par­lia­ment just passed a law ban­ning books and music from Rus­sia.

But it’s not just con­tent from Rus­sia. Even Russ­ian-lan­guage con­tent from oth­er coun­tries will need to get a spe­cial exemp­tion for import. In oth­er words, this is effec­tive­ly an attempt to ban the Russ­ian lan­guage, mak­ing it the lat­est exten­sion of a trend of sup­press­ing the Russ­ian lan­guage that was start­ed imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the 2014 Maid­an revolt and pre­cip­i­tat­ed the ensu­ing civ­il war.

So in a coun­try where ~1/3 of the pop­u­lace are native Russ­ian speak­ers, how much sup­port does the new law have? ~2/3 of MP sup­port­ed it and 1/3 opposed. Imag­ine that. So while the law is being tout­ed as the lat­est exam­ple of Ukraine fight­ing back against Russ­ian cul­tur­al impe­ri­al­ism or some­thing, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that we’re look­ing at the lat­est exam­ple of the same Ukrain­ian chau­vin­ist impuls­es that helped spark Ukraine’s civ­il war in the first place:

Reuters

Ukraine to restrict Russ­ian books, music in lat­est cul­tur­al break from Moscow

By Max Hun­der
June 19, 2022 1:58 PM CDT
Updat­ed

KYIV, June 19 (Reuters) — Ukraine’s par­lia­ment on Sun­day vot­ed through two laws which will place severe restric­tions on Russ­ian books and music as Kyiv seeks to break many remain­ing cul­tur­al ties between the two coun­tries fol­low­ing Moscow’s inva­sion.

One law will for­bid the print­ing of books by Russ­ian cit­i­zens, unless they renounce their Russ­ian pass­port and take Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship. The ban will only apply to those who held Russ­ian cit­i­zen­ship after the 1991 col­lapse of Sovi­et rule.

It will also ban the com­mer­cial import of books print­ed in Rus­sia, Belarus, and occu­pied Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry, while also requir­ing spe­cial per­mis­sion for the import of books in Russ­ian from any oth­er coun­try.

Anoth­er law will pro­hib­it the play­ing of music by post-1991 Russ­ian cit­i­zens on media and on pub­lic trans­port, while also increas­ing quo­tas on Ukrain­ian-lan­guage speech and music con­tent in TV and radio broad­casts.

The laws need to be signed by Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skiy to take effect, and there is no indi­ca­tion that he oppos­es either. Both received broad sup­port from across the cham­ber, includ­ing from law­mak­ers who had tra­di­tion­al­ly been viewed as pro-Krem­lin by most of Ukraine’s media and civ­il soci­ety.

Ukraine’s Cul­ture Min­is­ter Olek­san­dr Tkachenko said he was “glad to wel­come” the new restric­tions.

“The laws are designed to help Ukrain­ian authors share qual­i­ty con­tent with the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence, which after the Russ­ian inva­sion do not accept any Russ­ian cre­ative prod­uct on a phys­i­cal lev­el,” the Ukrain­ian cab­i­net’s web­site quot­ed him as say­ing.

DERUSSIFICATION

The new rules are the lat­est chap­ter in Ukraine’s long path to shed­ding the lega­cy of hun­dreds of years of rule by Moscow.

Ukraine says this process, pre­vi­ous­ly referred to as “decom­mu­ni­sa­tion” but now more often called “derus­si­fi­ca­tion,” is nec­es­sary to undo cen­turies of poli­cies aimed at crush­ing Ukrain­ian iden­ti­ty.

...

This process gained momen­tum after Rus­si­a’s 2014 inva­sion of Crimea and sup­port for sep­a­ratist prox­ies in Ukraine’s Don­bas, but took on new dimen­sions after the start of the full-scale inva­sion on Feb. 24.

Hun­dreds of loca­tions in Ukraine’s cap­i­tal, Kyiv, have already been ear­marked for renam­ing to shed their asso­ci­a­tions with Rus­sia, and a Sovi­et-era mon­u­ment cel­e­brat­ing the friend­ship of the Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian peo­ple was torn down in April, elic­it­ing cheers from the assem­bled crowd. read more

————

“Ukraine to restrict Russ­ian books, music in lat­est cul­tur­al break from Moscow” by Max Hun­der; Reuters; 06/19/2022

““The laws are designed to help Ukrain­ian authors share qual­i­ty con­tent with the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence, which after the Russ­ian inva­sion do not accept any Russ­ian cre­ative prod­uct on a phys­i­cal lev­el,” the Ukrain­ian cab­i­net’s web­site quot­ed him as say­ing.”

Any “cre­ative prod­uct” gen­er­at­ed by Russ­ian authors or musi­cians is offi­cial­ly phys­i­cal­ly reject­ed by Ukraini­ans, accord­ing to Ukraine’s Cul­ture Min­is­ter Olek­san­dr Tkachenko. It’s just the lat­est exam­ple of the “decommunisation”/“derussification” agen­da that’s been increas­ing­ly both purg­ing Ukrain­ian soci­ety of any­thing asso­ci­at­ed with Rus­sia while Ukrain­ian-lan­guage con­tent is offi­cial ele­vat­ed. Even Russ­ian-lan­guage books from coun­tries oth­er than Rus­sia or Belarus will require spe­cial import per­mis­sions. That’s a key aspect to keep in mind here in this coun­try where ~1/3 of the pop­u­lace speaks Russ­ian at home: this isn’t just an attempt to ban con­tent for Rus­sia. It’s designed to purge the Russ­ian lan­guage out of Ukrain­ian soci­ety:

...
One law will for­bid the print­ing of books by Russ­ian cit­i­zens, unless they renounce their Russ­ian pass­port and take Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship. The ban will only apply to those who held Russ­ian cit­i­zen­ship after the 1991 col­lapse of Sovi­et rule.

It will also ban the com­mer­cial import of books print­ed in Rus­sia, Belarus, and occu­pied Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry, while also requir­ing spe­cial per­mis­sion for the import of books in Russ­ian from any oth­er coun­try.

Anoth­er law will pro­hib­it the play­ing of music by post-1991 Russ­ian cit­i­zens on media and on pub­lic trans­port, while also increas­ing quo­tas on Ukrain­ian-lan­guage speech and music con­tent in TV and radio broad­casts.

...

The new rules are the lat­est chap­ter in Ukraine’s long path to shed­ding the lega­cy of hun­dreds of years of rule by Moscow.

Ukraine says this process, pre­vi­ous­ly referred to as “decom­mu­ni­sa­tion” but now more often called “derus­si­fi­ca­tion,” is nec­es­sary to undo cen­turies of poli­cies aimed at crush­ing Ukrain­ian iden­ti­ty.
...

.
And while we’re told that this new lawa has ‘broad sup­port’ in the the par­lia­ment, it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize just how lim­it­ed that broad sup­port real­ly was. AS the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, 303 of the 450 deputies vot­ed for the new law. So in a coun­try where ~1/3 of the pop­u­lace prefers to speak Russ­ian, 32% of the MP vot­ed against his law. In oth­er words, while we’re being told that this is move is wide­ly embraced by the Ukrain­ian pop­u­lace, that does­n’t actu­al­ly appear to be the case. Quite the con­trary:

BBC News

Ukraine to ban music by some Rus­sians in media and pub­lic spaces

By Alys Davies
06/19/2022

Ukraine’s par­lia­ment has vot­ed in favour of ban­ning some Russ­ian music in media and pub­lic spaces.

The ban will not apply to all Russ­ian music, but rather relates to music cre­at­ed or per­formed by those who are or were Russ­ian cit­i­zens after 1991.

Artists who have con­demned Rus­si­a’s war in Ukraine can apply for an exemp­tion from the ban.

...

Many of those liv­ing in areas of east and south Ukraine have his­tor­i­cal­ly felt a strong con­nec­tion to Rus­sia, often speak­ing Russ­ian as their first lan­guage.

But Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine has led many Ukraini­ans to want to sep­a­rate them­selves from Russ­ian cul­ture.

The bill, approved by MPs on Sun­day, bans some Russ­ian music from being played or per­formed on tele­vi­sion, radio, schools, pub­lic trans­port, hotels, restau­rants, cin­e­mas and oth­er pub­lic spaces.

It secured sup­port from 303 of the 450 deputies in the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment.

The doc­u­ment says the ban will “min­imise the risks of pos­si­ble hos­tile pro­pa­gan­da through music in Ukraine and will increase the vol­ume of nation­al music prod­ucts in the cul­tur­al space,” BBC Mon­i­tor­ing reports.

The ban will apply to musi­cians who have or had Russ­ian cit­i­zen­ship at any time after 1991 — the year Ukraine declared inde­pen­dence — except for those who are Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens or were so at the time of their death.

This means the works of long-dead Russ­ian com­posers such as Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich can still be per­formed.

Russ­ian artists who con­demn the war in Ukraine can apply for an exemp­tion for their music by sub­mit­ting an appli­ca­tion to Ukraine’s secu­ri­ty ser­vice. In it, they must state that they sup­port the sov­er­eign­ty and integri­ty of Ukraine, call on Rus­sia to imme­di­ate­ly stop its aggres­sion against Ukraine, and under­take to refrain from any steps that con­tra­dict these writ­ten state­ments, the BBC’s Ukrain­ian Ser­vice reports.

The doc­u­ment also includes laws to increase the share of Ukrain­ian songs played on the radio to 40%, as well as increas­ing the use of Ukrain­ian in dai­ly pro­grammes to 75%, Ukraine’s pub­lic broad­cast­er (Sus­pilne) reports.

Russ­ian books also banned

In a par­al­lel bill to that affect­ing music, books import­ed from Rus­sia, Belarus and occu­pied Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ries will also banned, as well as mate­r­i­al in Russ­ian import­ed from oth­er coun­tries.

This law will ban the pub­lish­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing of books writ­ten by Russ­ian cit­i­zens (with sim­i­lar exemp­tions to those for music) though this will not apply to books already pub­lished in Ukraine.

In addi­tion, trans­la­tions of books will only be pub­lished in Ukrain­ian, offi­cial EU lan­guages or indige­nous Ukrain­ian lan­guages.

———–

“Ukraine to ban music by some Rus­sians in media and pub­lic spaces” By Alys Davies; BBC News; 06/19/2022

“It secured sup­port from 303 of the 450 deputies in the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment.”

Yep, in a coun­try where ~1/3 of the pop­u­lace prefers to speak Russ­ian, ~1/3 of the par­lia­ment vot­ed against effec­tive­ly ban­ning the Russ­ian lan­guage. Imag­ine that.

On one lev­el, this is just the lat­est move in a trend that’s been going on 2014. It’s also a grim reminder that the civ­il war that erupt­ed in 2014 was very much fought along these lan­guage-iden­ti­ty lines.

But it’s hard to ignore the real­i­ty that its the regions of the coun­try with the largest Russ­ian-speak­ing pop­u­la­tions that are being occu­pied by Russ­ian forces, poten­tial­ly with end goal of annex­ing these ter­ri­to­ries. It’s part of the dark con­text of this move by the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment: at the same time the Russ­ian-speak­ing parts of the coun­try are being cleaved off, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment is tak­ing steps to ensure those Russ­ian-speak­ers know they are seen as sec­ond-class cit­i­zens in their soci­ety. The vil­lainiza­tion of Ukraine’s Russ­ian-speak­ers con­tin­ues. Even now.

When the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment fired Omduds­man Lyud­mi­la Deniso­va back in May, in part, over her dis­sem­i­na­tion of unver­i­fied claims of Russ­ian atroc­i­ties against civil­ians it raised the ques­tion of whether or not we were going to see a pull back in the num­ber of unground­ed claims from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment of Russ­ian geno­cide and ter­ror­ism. Well, on July 1, we sort of got an answer: : Dmytro Lubi­nets will be replac­ing Deniso­va. And accord­ing to this tweet by jour­nal­ist Leonid Dragozin, Lubi­nets hap­pens to be an MP with a large far right fan base that was quite excit­ed to this “Friend of nation­al­ists” ele­vat­ed to such a posi­tion:

Azov-linked TG chan­nel Tales of the Fourth Reich cel­e­brates Dmytro Lubi­nets’ appoint­ment as Ukraine’s new ombudsmen:“The only pro-Ukrain­ian MP from Don­bas… Friend of nation­al­ists. Fan of Sva Stone [far right fash­ion brand]”. Pic: Lubi­nets in a Fortress Europe t‑shirt pic.twitter.com/0foYnpbaFw— Leonid ?? Ragozin (@leonidragozin) July 1, 2022

That’s all part of the con­text of the fol­low­ing set of arti­cles about the recent mis­sile attack near a mall in the city of Kre­manchuk a week and a half ago. There’ no ques­tion as to whether or not the mall was destroyed as a result of a June 27 mis­sile strike. No one dis­putes that hap­pened. The first dis­pute is over whether or not the mall actu­al­ly tar­get­ed by a mis­sile. Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment asserts that the mall itself was direct­ly tar­get­ed as part of a ter­ror strike intend­ed to kill civil­ians. Rus­sia insists that the Kre­manchuk mechan­i­cal plant adja­cent to the mall was the actu­al tar­get and that fire from the plant spread to the mall.

The sec­ond major dis­pute about the basic facts of the attack is whether or not the mall was open and crowd­ed, or large­ly emp­ty. As we’re going to see, the evi­dence on this front is quite con­flict­ed. On the one hand, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment claim that over 1000 civil­ians were shop­ping at the mall at the time. Pres­i­dent Zelen­skiy described the death toll as like­ly “unimag­in­able” at the time. And yet that does­n’t seem to square with avail­able evi­dence. For starters, video of the min­utes after the attack show a large­ly emp­ty park­ing lot. That’s jux­ta­posed to a video post­ed on June 25 on Telegram show­ing what appears to be a full mall filled with peo­ple and with a full park­ing lot too. Vlodymyr Zelen­skiy him­self claimed that the mall had been evac­u­at­ed after air sirens went off ear­li­er in the day, which was a con­tra­dic­tion of his own claims about 1,000 civil­ians being inside. So the recent cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence sug­gests the mall may indeed have been open to the pub­lic in recent weeks, but was­n’t actu­al­ly full of peo­ple at the time of the attack.

Yet we were warned by Zelen­skiy in the wake of the attack that the num­ber of dead would be “unimag­in­able”, with ini­tial reports of at least 18 killed. And as we’re going to see in the sec­ond arti­cle except below fea­tur­ing an inter­view of a woman who claimed to have been at the mall in the min­utes before the attack, this wit­ness claims the mall was filled with young fam­i­lies and large­ly staffed by young women. The wit­ness, who is described in the arti­cle as “a local polit­i­cal activ­i­ties”, also claims that she learned that 9 peo­ple in the com­put­er store she was just in had died in the attack. So based on these claims, we should expect a large num­ber of addi­tion­al deaths to have been con­firmed in the fol­low­ing days. And yet that’s not at all what we’ve found. A July 2 update on the casu­al­ty num­bers puts the num­ber of dead at 21 and there does­n’t appear to be any addi­tion­al updates. In oth­er words, the total num­ber of dead in this mall full of young fam­i­lies has appar­ent­ly bare­ly budged from that ini­tial report of 18 dead. Which does seem rather unimag­in­able if you think about it:

Covert Action Mag­a­zine

Is Russia’s Bomb­ing of the Mall in Kre­manchuk Anoth­er False Atroc­i­ty Sto­ry Being Used to Jus­ti­fy Ongo­ing Mil­i­tary Inter­ven­tion in Ukraine?

By Jere­my Kuz­marov and Steve Brown — July 1, 2022

Emp­ty mall park­ing lot and exis­tence of a muni­tions plant near­by raise ques­tions about offi­cial nar­ra­tive advanced in main­stream U.S. media

On Tues­day June 28, main­stream media out­lets report­ed that at least 18 peo­ple were killed and dozens injured in a Russ­ian mis­sile strike on a “crowd­ed shop­ping mall” in the cen­tral Ukrain­ian city of Kre­menchuk on Mon­day.

Thir­ty-six oth­er peo­ple were said to be miss­ing and a sur­vivor was on record say­ing that she had been shop­ping with her hus­band when the blast threw her into the air.

The Asso­ci­at­ed Press, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR and oth­er news out­lets report­ing on the sto­ry used Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment offi­cials as their pri­ma­ry source, notably May­or Vitaliy Malet­skiy—who wrote on Face­book that the attack “hit a very crowd­ed area, which is 100% cer­tain not to have any links to the armed forces.”

But they made no inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion as to the truth of the self-serv­ing state­ment. Also with­out ver­i­fi­ca­tion they quot­ed Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelensky—who said in a Telegram post that the num­ber of vic­tims was “unimag­in­able,” and cit­ed reports that more than 1,000 civil­ians were inside at the time of the attack.

How­ev­er, oth­er reports con­tra­dict Zelen­sky and sug­gest that the Russ­ian mis­sile attack in Kre­menchuk is just one more false sto­ry about alleged Russ­ian atroc­i­ties known to have been fab­ri­cat­ed by Ukraine’s very active pro­pa­gan­da mill.

For exam­ple, there are reports that the mall—which Zelen­sky claims was filled with 1,000 civil­ian shoppers—had actu­al­ly been closed for months. Zelen­sky him­self claimed that the mall had been evac­u­at­ed after air sirens went off ear­li­er in the day—con­tra­dict­ing his own claims about 1,000 civil­ians being inside.

This seems cred­i­ble because there were vir­tu­al­ly no cars in the mall park­ing lot dur­ing the attack, let alone enough cars for 1,000 shop­pers. And accord­ing to satel­lite imagery, adja­cent to the mall was a machine plant that man­u­fac­tured weapons.

This plant, Rus­sia said, was the tar­get of a legit­i­mate mil­i­tary strike, which result­ed in a fire in the adja­cent mall that had been closed to busi­ness since the war began in Feb­ru­ary.

First Casu­al­ty of War is Truth

The cru­cial Russ­ian coun­ter­claim was not report­ed by most news media out­lets, includ­ing alter­na­tive media. The Ukrain­ian com­mis­sion­er for human rights, Lyud­mi­la Deniso­va, was recent­ly fired by par­lia­ment in part because she was fab­ri­cat­ing and feed­ing false reports of Russ­ian atroc­i­ties to West­ern news media.

This looks poten­tial­ly to be anoth­er case of that. Since the war began, a large per­cent­age of the tor­ture, muti­la­tion, rape and mass killings fea­tured dai­ly in West­ern media have been com­mit­ted by Ukrain­ian forces–sometimes out of mere bru­tal­i­ty, as revealed by their own videos that they have post­ed online–but also as “false flag” events blamed on Rus­sia to inflame world anger and encour­age the West to send Ukraine more mon­ey and arma­ments.

Most promi­nent­ly impli­cat­ed in mul­ti­ple war crimes is Ukraine’s noto­ri­ous Azov Bat­tal­ion, which boasts of its love for Hitler and has been com­mit­ting tor­ture, muti­la­tion, rape and mass mur­ders of Russ­ian-speak­ing Ukrain­ian women and chil­dren in the Don­bas region since 2014.

RT News Report

An RT News report fea­tured Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment videos from the scene of the mis­sile attack—videos which cor­re­lat­ed with pho­tographs fea­tured on NPR’s web­site and those of oth­er media outlets—that showed dozens of men, many in mil­i­tary uni­forms, run­ning in the most­ly emp­ty park­ing lot out­side the burn­ing build­ing as black smoke rose into the sky.

The peo­ple run­ning curi­ous­ly did not seem to be run­ning out of the build­ing but next to it.

The arti­cle raised the legit­i­mate ques­tion about why there were so few cars in the park­ing lot if 1,000 peo­ple were real­ly inside the mall as Zelen­sky claimed.

It also ref­er­enced the fac­to­ry next to the mall and a rail­way junc­tion that was often a tar­get of Russ­ian mis­sile strikes.

“Just Scru­ti­nize the Facts”

Moon of Alabama’s June 28th polit­i­cal blog pro­vid­ed a link to satel­lite imagery con­firm­ing that the shop­ping mall in Kre­manchuk was next to a large machine plant, which Moon said man­u­fac­tured arma­ments that were being deliv­ered to Ukrain­ian troops in Don­bass.

...

Moon goes on to report about the emp­ty park­ing lot and fact that only 16 peo­ple died and 25 were injured–meaning that over 900 sur­vived unscathed. The video showed at most sev­er­al dozen peo­ple in the park­ing lot, rais­ing ques­tions as to where all the sur­vivors went.

The Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment pub­lished sur­veil­lance video from a park locat­ed next to the machine plant which caught the moments of the two explo­sions, Moon notes.

A large flash appeared and peo­ple began run­ning away as some debris—coming obvi­ous­ly from the machine plant after it was struck—fell down.

Moon con­clud­ed that: “the shop­ping cen­ter was obvi­ous­ly as emp­ty as its large emp­ty park­ing space…It some­how came on fire after the fac­to­ry next door was bombed. Those who died were most like­ly sol­diers or fac­to­ry work­ers who were prepar­ing ‘west­ern’ weapons for deliv­ery to the front.”

More Evi­dence to Cast Doubt

In response to Moon’s col­umn, one read­er wrote:

“Peo­ple with far more com­mon­sense than me posed a sim­ple ques­tion: if it is a shop­ping mall then like all shop­ping malls around the world, there will be shop­pers who will post—for good or for ill—their opin­ions of how good or bad their expe­ri­ence was. So they went out and looked and, sure enough, you can find online rat­ing on a zero-to-five star scale for that shop­ping cen­tre. All of those reviews—all of them—ceased at the end of Feb­ru­ary of this year i.e. when Rus­sia launched its spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. The rea­son­able con­clu­sion is that the moment this war began, that shop­ping mall was closed and its floor space turned over to the use of the Kred­mash machine plant. 1,000 shop­pers were inside that build­ing? Bullsh**t.”

Google reviews of the Amstor mall in Kre­manchuk con­firm what the read­er was say­ing in that the reviews end four months ago when the war start­ed and state that the mall was tem­porar­i­ly closed.

A video sur­fac­ing on telegram on June 25 did sug­gest that the mall was open by show­ing shop­pers (the date though was hard to ver­i­fy), and Human Rights Watch said it spoke to 15 peo­ple, includ­ing local offi­cials and some of those they said were injured in the attack, who said the cen­ter was open.

Claims about a crowd­ed mall being struck are still mis­lead­ing, nev­er­the­less, because a) we don’t yet know if the mall was ever direct­ly struck by a mis­sile; b) the emp­ty park­ing lot could be explained by the mall’s hav­ing been evac­u­at­ed ear­li­er in the day if it was open to shop­pers.

A drone view of the mall fur­ther­more and pho­to of the rear facade shows that it burned—from the back where the fac­to­ry is locat­ed—but there is no impact crater.

On June 29, Pres­i­dent Zelen­sky released a new video pub­lished on CNN which claimed to pro­vide more proof of the Russ­ian strike on the shop­ping mall. How­ev­er, the video actu­al­ly showed an explo­sion next to some kind of indus­tri­al facil­i­ty or scrap yard and no evi­dence of a mall being hit, lend­ing greater cred­i­bil­i­ty to the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive.

...

Pre­text For Fur­ther Esca­la­tion of War

The alleged mall attack is being used now to val­i­date the fur­ther expan­sion of West­ern involve­ment in Ukraine.

At the G‑7 sum­mit in Madrid this week, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden pro­claimed that the Unit­ed States was strength­en­ing its forces in Europe and announced the estab­lish­ment of a per­ma­nent mil­i­tary base in Poland, Russia’s tra­di­tion­al ene­my.

British Prime-Min­is­ter Boris John­son said that the mall attack showed “the depths of cru­el­ty and bar­barism to which the Russ­ian leader will sink,” just as British troops were set to be part of a mas­sive expan­sion of NATO forces in East­ern Europe.

French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron mean­while on Tues­day called the Russ­ian attack in Kre­manchuk “a new war crime,” while Zelen­sky addressed the UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil say­ing Rus­sia was a “ter­ror­ist state,” com­mit­ting “dai­ly ter­ror­ist acts.”

“We need to act urgent­ly to do every­thing to make Rus­sia stop the killing spree,” Zelen­sky said.

1. The BBC dis­put­ed that the plant man­u­fac­tured any mil­i­tary equip­ment, claim­ing that it made road equip­ment, and machines for road con­struc­tion.

————

“Is Russia’s Bomb­ing of the Mall in Kre­manchuk Anoth­er False Atroc­i­ty Sto­ry Being Used to Jus­ti­fy Ongo­ing Mil­i­tary Inter­ven­tion in Ukraine?” By Jere­my Kuz­marov and Steve Brown; Covert Action Mag­a­zine; 07/01/2022

“The cru­cial Russ­ian coun­ter­claim was not report­ed by most news media out­lets, includ­ing alter­na­tive media. The Ukrain­ian com­mis­sion­er for human rights, Lyud­mi­la Deniso­va, was recent­ly fired by par­lia­ment in part because she was fab­ri­cat­ing and feed­ing false reports of Russ­ian atroc­i­ties to West­ern news media.”

Yes, Ukraine was just forced the replace its com­mis­sion­er for human rights because the last com­mis­sion­er, Lyud­mi­la Deniso­va, was fired for list of com­plaints that includ­ed pro­mot­ing unver­i­fied claims of civil­ian atroc­i­ties. Her replace­ment, Dmytro Lubi­nets — the new ombuds­man who is being cheered on by the Azov Bat­tal­ion on social media — was­n’t actu­al­ly appoint­ed until July 1. So these claims of an inten­tion­al Russ­ian attack on a mall filled with civil­ians took place dur­ing the inter­im peri­od between the ombuds­man who was fired for fab­ri­ca­tions and the new one being cham­pi­oned by Azov. That’s the sad con­text of this con­tro­ver­sy. So when we hear claims about this shop­ping mall being filled with more than 1,000 civil­ians and an “unimag­in­able” num­ber of deaths, jux­ta­posed with images show­ing an emp­ty mall park­ing lot and only 20 deaths, it’s hard not to avoid sus­pi­cions that we’re being fed a garbage sto­ry­line:

...
Thir­ty-six oth­er peo­ple were said to be miss­ing and a sur­vivor was on record say­ing that she had been shop­ping with her hus­band when the blast threw her into the air.

The Asso­ci­at­ed Press, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR and oth­er news out­lets report­ing on the sto­ry used Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment offi­cials as their pri­ma­ry source, notably May­or Vitaliy Malet­skiy—who wrote on Face­book that the attack “hit a very crowd­ed area, which is 100% cer­tain not to have any links to the armed forces.”

But they made no inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion as to the truth of the self-serv­ing state­ment. Also with­out ver­i­fi­ca­tion they quot­ed Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelensky—who said in a Telegram post that the num­ber of vic­tims was “unimag­in­able,” and cit­ed reports that more than 1,000 civil­ians were inside at the time of the attack.

How­ev­er, oth­er reports con­tra­dict Zelen­sky and sug­gest that the Russ­ian mis­sile attack in Kre­menchuk is just one more false sto­ry about alleged Russ­ian atroc­i­ties known to have been fab­ri­cat­ed by Ukraine’s very active pro­pa­gan­da mill.

For exam­ple, there are reports that the mall—which Zelen­sky claims was filled with 1,000 civil­ian shoppers—had actu­al­ly been closed for months. Zelen­sky him­self claimed that the mall had been evac­u­at­ed after air sirens went off ear­li­er in the day—con­tra­dict­ing his own claims about 1,000 civil­ians being inside.

This seems cred­i­ble because there were vir­tu­al­ly no cars in the mall park­ing lot dur­ing the attack, let alone enough cars for 1,000 shop­pers. And accord­ing to satel­lite imagery, adja­cent to the mall was a machine plant that man­u­fac­tured weapons.

This plant, Rus­sia said, was the tar­get of a legit­i­mate mil­i­tary strike, which result­ed in a fire in the adja­cent mall that had been closed to busi­ness since the war began in Feb­ru­ary.

...

An RT News report fea­tured Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment videos from the scene of the mis­sile attack—videos which cor­re­lat­ed with pho­tographs fea­tured on NPR’s web­site and those of oth­er media outlets—that showed dozens of men, many in mil­i­tary uni­forms, run­ning in the most­ly emp­ty park­ing lot out­side the burn­ing build­ing as black smoke rose into the sky.

The peo­ple run­ning curi­ous­ly did not seem to be run­ning out of the build­ing but next to it.

The arti­cle raised the legit­i­mate ques­tion about why there were so few cars in the park­ing lot if 1,000 peo­ple were real­ly inside the mall as Zelen­sky claimed.

It also ref­er­enced the fac­to­ry next to the mall and a rail­way junc­tion that was often a tar­get of Russ­ian mis­sile strikes.
...

Then there’s the evi­dence about the mal­l’s cur­rent activ­i­ty that is open­ly avail­able online: all of the online reviews for the mall end four months ago. Now, as the arti­cle points out, there’s a June 25 video that appears to show the mall being open and full of civil­ians. But if you watch that video, it’s also hard not to notice how full the park­ing lot is with cars, a com­plete jux­ta­po­si­tion to the images of an emp­ty lot on the day of the attack. So while that video does rep­re­sent cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that the mall was at least par­tial­ly open to the pub­lic in recent weeks, that same cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence sug­gests it was­n’t open to the pub­lic when the attack actu­al­ly hap­pened:

...
In response to Moon’s col­umn, one read­er wrote:

“Peo­ple with far more com­mon­sense than me posed a sim­ple ques­tion: if it is a shop­ping mall then like all shop­ping malls around the world, there will be shop­pers who will post—for good or for ill—their opin­ions of how good or bad their expe­ri­ence was. So they went out and looked and, sure enough, you can find online rat­ing on a zero-to-five star scale for that shop­ping cen­tre. All of those reviews—all of them—ceased at the end of Feb­ru­ary of this year i.e. when Rus­sia launched its spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. The rea­son­able con­clu­sion is that the moment this war began, that shop­ping mall was closed and its floor space turned over to the use of the Kred­mash machine plant. 1,000 shop­pers were inside that build­ing? Bullsh**t.”

Google reviews of the Amstor mall in Kre­manchuk con­firm what the read­er was say­ing in that the reviews end four months ago when the war start­ed and state that the mall was tem­porar­i­ly closed.

A video sur­fac­ing on telegram on June 25 did sug­gest that the mall was open by show­ing shop­pers (the date though was hard to ver­i­fy), and Human Rights Watch said it spoke to 15 peo­ple, includ­ing local offi­cials and some of those they said were injured in the attack, who said the cen­ter was open.

Claims about a crowd­ed mall being struck are still mis­lead­ing, nev­er­the­less, because a) we don’t yet know if the mall was ever direct­ly struck by a mis­sile; b) the emp­ty park­ing lot could be explained by the mall’s hav­ing been evac­u­at­ed ear­li­er in the day if it was open to shop­pers.
...

So was the mall actu­al­ly open to shop­pers or not? Was it per­haps some sort of hybrid sit­u­a­tion, where the mall had a few shops open but was large­ly emp­ty? That remains unclear, in large part because the claims by wit­ness­es and the avail­able evi­dence just isn’t align­ing. Beyond that, we’ve received basi­cal­ly no infor­ma­tion on the iden­ti­ties of the peo­ple killed at the mall. Were they ran­dom civil­ians or peo­ple work­ing in the gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary? Well, here’s a report out of CBC Radio with one of the few inter­views of some­one who claims to have been at the mall when the attack hap­pened. Oksana Gui­da, described only as ‘a local polit­i­cal activist’, claims she had been at a com­put­er store at the mall min­utes before the attack. She asserts that the mall was filled with young fam­i­lies and pri­mar­i­ly staffed by young women. So, at a min­i­mum, we should expect the dead should include a num­ber of women and chil­dren. Gui­da had left the store because they did­n’t have what she need­ed and had gone back to her car with her fam­i­ly and suf­fered head trau­ma and hear­ing dam­age. Gui­da also claims that she lat­er learned that 9 peo­ple in the com­put­er store died in the attack. The arti­cle states that 18 peo­ple we con­firmed dead at the time of the report. So half of the con­firmed dead were appar­ent­ly in this one com­put­er store in a mall full of over a 1000 peo­ple, filled with young fam­i­lies. The sto­ry just does­n’t add up:

CBC Radio

A Ukrain­ian woman went to buy a com­put­er. Moments lat­er, a mis­sile hit the mall

Mis­sile destroyed crowd­ed shop­ping mall in city of Kre­menchuk on Mon­day

Post­ed: Jun 29, 2022 1:32 PM ET | Last Updat­ed: June 29

On Mon­day, Oksana Gui­da went to a mall in Ukraine’s cen­tral city of Kre­menchuk to buy a com­put­er. Min­utes lat­er, that same mall was engulfed in flames after being hit by a Russ­ian mis­sile attack.

Gui­da, a local polit­i­cal activist, had gone back to her car with her fam­i­ly, when the store did­n’t have what she need­ed.

Twelve min­utes lat­er, a Russ­ian mis­sile hit the shop­ping cen­tre, with report­ed­ly 1,000 peo­ple inside. So far, 18 deaths have been con­firmed, with dozens injured and many more miss­ing.

Gui­da was about 160 metres from the explo­sion, and suf­fered head trau­ma and dam­age to her hear­ing.

Through a trans­la­tor, she told The Cur­rent that the mall had been filled with young fam­i­lies, and main­ly staffed by young women. She said she saw smoke in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack, and then fire. Peo­ple were run­ning from the build­ing, but also oth­ers ran back inside, to help.

She would lat­er learn that nine peo­ple in the com­put­er store she just vis­it­ed had burned to death.

Kre­menchuk has a pop­u­la­tion of about 220,000. Gui­da said that many peo­ple know some­one who was trapped or killed in the shop­ping cen­tre, and the city is in shock.

The attack unfold­ed as G7 lead­ers met in Ger­many, and released a joint state­ment pledg­ing fresh sanc­tions on Rus­sia, and to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

Inna Sov­sun, a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment, said it was a “nice state­ment,” but she wants to see efforts to stop the four-month-old war from becom­ing a long-term con­flict.

“In order to make it short, we need arm sup­plies not some­time in the future, we need them today,” she said.

She wel­comed U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s pledge to send rock­et sys­tems ear­li­er this month, but said Ukraine has been ask­ing for help with air defence from the very begin­ning.

“Oksana’s friends who have been burned alive in that build­ing, they could have lived if our voic­es were heard a bit ear­li­er,” she said.

Rus­sia tar­get­ing civil­ians, says MP

Rus­sia has claimed that its mis­sile tar­get­ed a near­by ammu­ni­tion stor­age, set­ting off a fire that spread to the shop­ping mall. Those claims have been denied by Ukrain­ian offi­cials.

Sov­sun said Rus­sia “is specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ing civil­ians,” point­ing to oth­er attacks, includ­ing an April strike on a train sta­tion in Kram­a­torsk that left at least 52 peo­ple dead.

“They knew per­fect­ly well what they were doing and they need to be pun­ished for what they have done to Kre­menchuk and oth­er cities, all over Ukraine,” she said.

She wants G7 lead­ers to meet Rus­si­a’s inva­sion “not by voic­ing their con­cern, not by say­ing that they are extreme­ly out­raged by what hap­pened, but by actu­al­ly increas­ing the arms sup­plies to Ukraine.”

...

———–

“A Ukrain­ian woman went to buy a com­put­er. Moments lat­er, a mis­sile hit the mall”; CBC Radio; 06/29/2022

“On Mon­day, Oksana Gui­da went to a mall in Ukraine’s cen­tral city of Kre­menchuk to buy a com­put­er. Min­utes lat­er, that same mall was engulfed in flames after being hit by a Russ­ian mis­sile attack.”

Oksana Gui­da, a ‘local polit­i­cal activist’, nar­row­ly escaped a fiery demise. A fiery demise that would pre­sum­ably have been the fate of the many young fam­i­lies she claims filled the mall at the moment of the attack. In fact, nine peo­ple were killed in the com­put­er store she had just vis­it­ed. Keep in mind that, at the time of that report, 18 peo­ple were con­firmed dead. So half of the con­firmed dead appar­ent­ly were killed in the com­put­er store she was just inside right before it hap­pened:

...
Gui­da, a local polit­i­cal activist, had gone back to her car with her fam­i­ly, when the store did­n’t have what she need­ed.

Twelve min­utes lat­er, a Russ­ian mis­sile hit the shop­ping cen­tre, with report­ed­ly 1,000 peo­ple inside. So far, 18 deaths have been con­firmed, with dozens injured and many more miss­ing.

Gui­da was about 160 metres from the explo­sion, and suf­fered head trau­ma and dam­age to her hear­ing.

Through a trans­la­tor, she told The Cur­rent that the mall had been filled with young fam­i­lies, and main­ly staffed by young women. She said she saw smoke in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack, and then fire. Peo­ple were run­ning from the build­ing, but also oth­ers ran back inside, to help.

She would lat­er learn that nine peo­ple in the com­put­er store she just vis­it­ed had burned to death.
...

It’s quite an eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny. The kind of tes­ti­mo­ny that does­n’t actu­al­ly seem to align with the oth­er avail­able facts. The death count start­ed off in the mid teens and by July 2 had risen to 21, with no appar­ent new deaths hav­ing been con­firmed since. Should­n’t there be dozens more con­firmed dead by now? How is it pos­si­ble that this mall alleged­ly filled with peo­ple got hit by a direct mis­sile strike and how the death count had bare­ly budged from the ini­tial shock­ing­ly low tal­ly?

But per­haps the biggest part of this eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny that does­n’t align with the oth­er wit­ness tes­ti­monies is the fact that Oksana Guida’s name is being used, mak­ing her basi­cal­ly the only named eye wit­ness in any reports about the activ­i­ty at the mall dur­ing the attack. For exam­ple, here’s a report­ing in the Guardian pur­port­ing to debunk the Russ­ian gov­ern­men­t’s claims about the tar­get of the attack being the adja­cent fac­to­ry and not the mall. As we’re going to see, the report refers to dozens of work­ers and peo­ple who lived near­by who con­firm that the mall was open to the pub­lic. Not one of those wit­ness­es is named or even quot­ed.

The report does claim that parts of a mis­sile were found in the mall. If true, that would indeed sug­gest the mall was struck. Whether it was tar­get­ed or not would still be in ques­tion, but mis­sile frag­ments would be pret­ty con­clu­sive evi­dence. Of course, pieces of mis­sile frag­ments could have sim­ply been tak­en from the fac­to­ry. Stag­ing that kind of evi­dence would be triv­ial, which is why the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­men­t’s cred­i­bil­i­ty on these mat­ters is so para­mount when it comes to these kinds of ques­tions and why the world real­ly needs inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tions of these events if there’s going to be any hope of mak­ing sense of them.

Anoth­er part of this report’s appar­ent debunk­ing of the Russ­ian gov­ern­men­t’s claims that the mall itself was nev­er tar­get­ed or direct­ly struck by a mis­sile involves a CCTV video released by the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment that does indeed show a mis­sile hit­ting some­thing but it’s entire­ly unclear from the video which build­ing is being struck. That footage is fol­lowed by a mono­logue of Zelen­skiy insist­ing that the attack was an inten­tion­al ter­ror strike tar­get­ing civil­ians.

Anoth­er inter­est­ing fact tucked away in this arti­cle has to do with the mys­tery of Zelen­skiy’s claims that the mall had been evac­u­at­ed after air sirens went off ear­li­er in the day. Accord­ing to this Guardian report, mul­ti­ple employ­ees at the mall were giv­en orders to ignore the air raid sirens and con­tin­ue work­ing. So it’s as if that dis­crep­an­cy in Zelen­skiy’s sto­ry was being address in this sub­se­quent report­ing. But that’s quite a rev­e­la­tion if true: mall employ­ees were appar­ent­ly told to ignore air raid sirens. And an air raid siren appar­ent­ly went off before the attack. Should­n’t that be a scan­dal?

The Guardian

Evi­dence con­tra­dicts Russ­ian claims about Kre­menchuk mall attack

Wit­ness accounts and expert analy­sis dis­cred­it Moscow’s claim fire spread from arms cache to emp­ty mall

Loren­zo Ton­do in Kre­menchuk
Wed 29 Jun 2022 12.27 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Thu 30 Jun 2022 00.12 EDT

First-hand accounts from sur­vivors and expert analy­sis have dis­cred­it­ed Moscow’s account of the dead­ly mis­sile strikes on a shop­ping mall in the Ukrain­ian city of Kre­menchuk.

Igor Konashenkov, a spokesper­son for Russia’s defence min­istry, said its mil­i­tary fired a “high-pre­ci­sion air attack at hangars where arma­ment and muni­tions were stored”, and the explo­sion of those weapon caches caused a fire in the near­by shop­ping cen­tre, which he said was “non-func­tion­ing” at the time.

How­ev­er, wit­ness state­ments, infor­ma­tion released by Ukrain­ian pros­e­cu­tors and analy­sis by inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary experts point to three pos­si­ble erro­neous state­ments in that account – that the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary was hid­ing weapons near­by, that the mall was not a tar­get, and that nobody was using it.

[see video]

CCTV footage shows the first mis­sile struck the mall at 3.51pm on Mon­day, and a sec­ond short­ly after­wards hit a fac­to­ry that Moscow con­tends was stor­ing west­ern muni­tions.

Out­side the mall, Ukrain­ian police set up a table to col­lect twist­ed bits of a mis­sile found inside. It is believed to have been an X‑22 Russ­ian cruise mis­sile fired from a Tu-22M long-range bomber.

Satel­lite images show the fac­to­ry is 500 metres from the mall. Accord­ing to inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary experts and researchers from Mol­far, a glob­al open source intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, the explo­sion there could not have pro­voked a fire strong enough to reach anoth­er build­ing that far away.

Dur­ing a vis­it to the area between the mall and the fac­to­ry, lit­tle to no dam­age to build­ings or roads was observed, sug­gest­ing no spread­ing fire.

Dozens of work­ers who sur­vived, as well as wit­ness­es who lived near­by, told the Guardian that the mall was open and busy when attacked. Debris includ­ed the remains of work­ers’ badges, and prod­ucts sold that day at the super­mar­ket.

The Guardian has seen a phone mes­sage alleged­ly sent by the local man­age­ment of the mall on 23 June urg­ing employ­ees not to leave the shop­ping cen­tre in case of air raid sirens. “Start­ing from today, this shop­ping cen­tre will not close dur­ing the air alarms,” the mes­sage stat­ed. “The shop­ping cen­tre is open from 8am till 9pm. No breaks.” At least five employ­ees con­firmed they had received the mes­sage.

Belling­cat, a non-prof­it online jour­nal­ism col­lec­tive ded­i­cat­ed to war crime inves­ti­ga­tions, col­lect­ed receipts from pur­chas­es at the mall in recent days that were post­ed on social media by res­i­dents in Kre­menchuk to show that the mall was indeed open.

#??????????, ?? ???????? ? ?????, ????? ?? ?????, ???? ?????????????????? (?) ???????https://t.co/QhFdLVXpU8 https://t.co/b8XEitNX6X #????????? #war­crimes pic.twitter.com/wlIxmic1ne— Necro Mancer (@666_mancer) June 27, 2022

As for the alleged weapons depot, the Kred­Mash fac­to­ry, Kre­menchuk Road Machin­ery is a com­pa­ny pro­duc­ing equip­ment to repair and main­tain roads or to repair vehi­cles used by con­struc­tion work­ers.

Belling­cat said: “Although one report in 2014 stat­ed that the fac­to­ry had been used to repair three mil­i­tary vehi­cles, this in itself does not prove that it was a stor­age site for US and Euro­pean weapons and ammu­ni­tion eight years lat­er, as Rus­sia has claimed.”

...

———–

“Evi­dence con­tra­dicts Russ­ian claims about Kre­menchuk mall attack” by Loren­zo Ton­do; The Guardian; 06/29/2022

“How­ev­er, wit­ness state­ments, infor­ma­tion released by Ukrain­ian pros­e­cu­tors and analy­sis by inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary experts point to three pos­si­ble erro­neous state­ments in that account – that the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary was hid­ing weapons near­by, that the mall was not a tar­get, and that nobody was using it.”

Wit­ness state­ments, gov­ern­ment reports, and inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary expert analy­sis. That’s the array of evi­dence this Guardian report is claim­ing to have deployed to debunk Rus­si­a’s claims. Let’s take a clos­er look at that evi­dence.

First, there was the CCTV video that pur­ports to show the mis­sile hit­ting the mall. Watch the video. It’s basi­cal­ly impos­si­ble to tell what exact­ly the mis­sile is hit­ting because it’s strik­ing some­thing below the hori­zon. Is it hit­ting the mall or an adja­cent build­ing? We have no idea:

...
[see video]

CCTV footage shows the first mis­sile struck the mall at 3.51pm on Mon­day, and a sec­ond short­ly after­wards hit a fac­to­ry that Moscow con­tends was stor­ing west­ern muni­tions.
...

Then there’s the inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary experts for Mol­far who insist that an explo­sion at the fac­to­ry could­n’t have trig­gered a fire strong enough to reach a build­ing 500 m away. Of course, that rais­es a ques­tion these ana­lysts prob­a­bly don’t want to ask: so what about if the fac­to­ry was sto­ry weapons as Rus­sia claims? What kind of explo­sion can we pre­dict from a weapons depot?

...
Satel­lite images show the fac­to­ry is 500 metres from the mall. Accord­ing to inde­pen­dent mil­i­tary experts and researchers from Mol­far, a glob­al open source intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, the explo­sion there could not have pro­voked a fire strong enough to reach anoth­er build­ing that far away.

Dur­ing a vis­it to the area between the mall and the fac­to­ry, lit­tle to no dam­age to build­ings or roads was observed, sug­gest­ing no spread­ing fire.
...

Then there’s the X‑22 Russ­ian mis­sile frag­ments alleged­ly found inside the mall. Note how the evdi­dene as obvi­ous­ly already been moved. But also keep in mind what we aren’t being shown: pic­tures show­ing an obvi­ous mis­sile explo­sion at the mall. There’s plen­ty of footage of a burn out struc­ture con­sisent with a vicious fire. But it seems like a mis­sile strike should have an impact zone. Where are the pic­tures of that impact zone?

...
Out­side the mall, Ukrain­ian police set up a table to col­lect twist­ed bits of a mis­sile found inside. It is believed to have been an X‑22 Russ­ian cruise mis­sile fired from a Tu-22M long-range bomber.
...

Final­ly, there’s the dozens of wit­ness­es who claim to have been work­ing there at the time. While these wit­ness­es aren’t named, note their remark­able claims: the local man­age­ment told mall employ­ees on June 23 to stop respond­ing to air raid sirens:

...
Dozens of work­ers who sur­vived, as well as wit­ness­es who lived near­by, told the Guardian that the mall was open and busy when attacked. Debris includ­ed the remains of work­ers’ badges, and prod­ucts sold that day at the super­mar­ket.

The Guardian has seen a phone mes­sage alleged­ly sent by the local man­age­ment of the mall on 23 June urg­ing employ­ees not to leave the shop­ping cen­tre in case of air raid sirens. “Start­ing from today, this shop­ping cen­tre will not close dur­ing the air alarms,” the mes­sage stat­ed. “The shop­ping cen­tre is open from 8am till 9pm. No breaks.” At least five employ­ees con­firmed they had received the mes­sage.
...

Will a more sen­si­ble pic­ture even­tu­al­ly emerge? Like the actu­al names of dead shop­pers and employ­ees? Mourn­ing over the death and dev­as­ta­tion at the com­put­er store where at least nine peo­ple died? We’ll see. But so far, the sto­ry of the Kre­menchuk mall attack is such a mess that the only thing we can con­fi­dent­ly con­clude is that the near­by fac­to­ry was hit with a mis­sile and the neigh­bor­ing mall burned down as a result. Where’s a cred­i­ble ombuds­man when you need one?

We’re get­ting reports about anoth­er major announced shake­up in Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment. This time, it sounds like Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skiy is look­ing for a replace­ment for Ivan Bakanov, the head of the pow­er­ful SBU and a long-time friend of Zelen­skiy. It’s the kind of sto­ry that echos back to the alarm­ing warn­ings we got from Zelen­skiy back in Decem­ber about a loom­ing coup plot by a group of oli­garchs. Is Zelen­skiy fac­ing a new round of inter­nal threats? It’s hard to avoid sus­pi­cions after news like this.

And that renewed reports of poten­tial secu­ri­ty con­cerns inside the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment brings us to a fas­ci­nat­ing recent piece in Jacobin about the rad­i­cal, and deeply desta­bi­liz­ing, eco­nom­ic and mon­e­tary poli­cies being effec­tive­ly imposed on Ukraine by its West­ern finan­cial back­ers in the US, EU, and IMF. It’s a sto­ry that, at this point, is pret­ty famil­iar. Don’t for­get how Vik­tor Yanukovych report­ed­ly ulti­mate­ly backed out of the EU Trade Asso­ci­a­tion talks due pri­mar­i­ly to the harsh aus­ter­i­ty the EU was going to demand in exchange. Decades of harsh aus­ter­i­ty with min­i­mal finan­cial assis­tance. The cost of join­ing the EU was putting Ukraine through the neolib­er­al meat grinder. For gen­er­a­tions to come.

And, of course, that’s exact­ly the path Ukraine end­ed up going down fol­low­ing the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion and large-scale adop­tion of poli­cies demand­ed by Ukraine’s new West­ern back­ers. This isn’t a new path for Ukraine. But it sounds like the war has dra­mat­i­cal­ly accel­er­at­ed Ukraine down this path. A path of no return as Ukraine’s increas­ing­ly dire eco­nom­ic and finan­cial posi­tion makes it even more depen­dent on West­ern aid. As a result, the pop­u­la­tion of Ukraine can expect low­er wages, few­er employ­ee pro­tec­tions, low­er gov­ern­ment sup­port, and poten­tial­ly the loss of their sav­ings in engi­neered bank col­laps­es designed to week out the ‘weak’ finan­cial insti­tu­tions. That’s all part of the plan. A plan that envi­sions Ukraine as a grand exper­i­ment in what hap­pens what you just allow ‘mar­ket forces’ to reign supreme and deter­mine the devel­op­ment of a coun­try. That’s actu­al­ly how Canada’s for­mer ambas­sador to Ukraine describe the nation in 2020: a lab­o­ra­to­ry for ide­al-world exper­i­men­ta­tion.

That’s part of the con­text of any reports rais­ing ques­tions about the sta­bil­i­ty of Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment: A rad­i­cal neolib­er­al desta­bi­liza­tion of Ukrain­ian soci­ety is the plan for Ukraine. Or, rather, is the planned ‘ide­al-world exper­i­ment’ for Ukraine:

Jacobin

Ukraine’s War Econ­o­my Is Being Choked by Neolib­er­al Dog­mas

By Peter Koro­taev
07.14.2022

States at war gen­er­al­ly adopt inter­ven­tion­ist eco­nom­ic poli­cies to mobi­lize resources and man­pow­er. Ukraine hasn’t fol­lowed suit, instead pur­su­ing dog­mat­ic free-mar­ke­teer mea­sures that suit West­ern cred­i­tors more than its own pop­u­la­tion.

In a 2020 lec­ture, Canada’s for­mer ambas­sador to Ukraine said that after Euro­maid­an the coun­try had become a lab­o­ra­to­ry for ide­al-world exper­i­men­ta­tion. In oth­er words, the eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­iza­tion unac­cept­able at home could instead be tried out in Ukraine.

But how is this “exper­i­ment” deal­ing with con­di­tions of total war? And if such a sit­u­a­tion gen­er­al­ly push­es states toward eco­nom­ic inter­ven­tion­ism, is Ukraine fol­low­ing suit?

Ukraine’s Finan­cial Needs

First is the prob­lem of Ukraine’s ris­ing debts. Accord­ing to the Ukrain­ian Finance Min­istry, from Jan­u­ary to June the state bud­get record­ed $35 bil­lion in expen­di­tures and $21.8 bil­lion in rev­enues. This sit­u­a­tion has been wors­en­ing. June’s $1.5 bil­lion in rev­enues, down from $2.5 bil­lion in May, only cov­ered 19.4 per­cent of expen­di­tures.

Over Jan­u­ary to June 2022, $19 bil­lion of the total rev­enues came from var­i­ous forms of cred­it and for­eign aid. Over half, $11.8 bil­lion, owed to state bonds, while $7.6 bil­lion (35 per­cent) was sim­ply mon­ey print­ed by the nation­al bank and giv­en to the Finance Min­istry. The remain­ing $7.2 bil­lion came from var­i­ous for­eign cred­its and grants.

Finance min­is­ter Ser­hii Marchenko has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that with­out an immense increase in aid, Ukraine will be forced to fur­ther cut non­mil­i­tary spend­ing with­in months. The strain has already made itself felt on state employ­ees. Work­ers at the state rail­way com­pa­ny, who have been play­ing an impor­tant and dan­ger­ous role in sav­ing the lives of mil­lions of civil­ians, receive their wages with delays of sev­en to ten days, and when they do receive them, they are cut by a third, leav­ing about $150 a month. Many teach­ers and uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors haven’t received wages for months. At ports, work­ers who used to earn $260 a month now earn a lit­tle over $50 and that with delays.

Despite much talk of West­ern gen­eros­i­ty, in May Ukraine only received one-third of the $5 bil­lion it needs in aid. By mid-May the Econ­o­mist report­ed that Ukraine had run up a fis­cal short­fall of $15 bil­lion and received only $4.5 bil­lion worth of for­eign grants. The Finance Min­istry reports that ful­ly 21 per­cent ($7.3 bil­lion) of all Jan­u­ary-June bud­get expen­di­tures were ded­i­cat­ed to pay­ments on state debt. The sit­u­a­tion will only wors­en, with Bloomberg cal­cu­lat­ing that Ukraine will face a $1.4‑billion debt-repay­ment dead­line in Sep­tem­ber.

The extent of Ukraine’s exter­nal pub­lic debt (the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment also recent­ly announced that it hopes for $200-$300 bil­lion in West­ern cred­its for post­war recon­struc­tion) means that it will have even less abil­i­ty to refuse the pol­i­cy demands imposed by West­ern cred­i­tors. The finance min­is­ter and the direc­tor of tax­es have con­stant­ly reit­er­at­ed through­out the war that Ukraine will con­tin­ue ser­vic­ing its sov­er­eign debt, under­lin­ing their will­ing­ness to fol­low cred­i­tor demands.

Cor­rup­tion and Nation­al­iza­tion

Since 2014 — but with renewed vig­or in recent days — Ukraine’s West­ern part­ners have pushed Ukraine to “fight cor­rup­tion.” This “strug­gle” has many impor­tant eco­nom­ic effects. Gen­er­al­ly, states at war tend to nation­al­ize key sec­tors of the econ­o­my to max­i­mize arma­ments pro­duc­tion and sta­bi­lize the civil­ian econ­o­my, both to pre­vent chaos in the rear and feed the army. Strange­ly, this has not tak­en place in Ukraine, despite what the gov­ern­ment declares a “total war” sit­u­a­tion. Remark­ably, a law was even passed in late June that aims to “restart pri­va­ti­za­tion of state assets on a new lev­el.” Some politi­cians have cri­tiqued this approach — Vadym Deny­senko, assis­tant to the inte­ri­or min­is­ter ear­li­er in the war, urged a turn toward “direct state man­age­ment of the econ­o­my.” But so far, his call has gone unheed­ed.

Call­ing for nation­al­iza­tion, Deny­senko not­ed that “it is no longer time for the Nation­al Anti-Cor­rup­tion Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).” He said this because over the past eight years, a flur­ry of “anti-cor­rup­tion organs” — NGOs, state organs, and in-between — have focused on elim­i­nat­ing state inter­ven­tion in the econ­o­my.

Set up by Ukraine’s lib­er­al “civ­il soci­ety,” the Unit­ed States Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID), and the Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tion, such organs have cre­at­ed web­sites such as Pro­zor­ro (“trans­paren­cy”), which han­dles Ukrain­ian state pur­chas­es. The may­or of Dnipro has harsh­ly crit­i­cized Pro­zor­ro in recent months, due to the government’s deci­sion to require all pur­chas­es of mil­i­tary equip­ment to go through this pro­gram. He insists that such pub­lic trans­paren­cy in mil­i­tary affairs and the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of urgent mil­i­tary ten­ders is only help­ing the Russ­ian army.

The web­site, telling­ly, has no func­tion for ensur­ing domes­tic local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es. Accord­ing to Pro­zor­ro and its allies, domes­ti­cal­ly local­iz­ing state ten­ders is in the inter­ests of a cor­rupt “oli­garchy” that depends on state rents rather than effi­cien­cy. And any­way — as Ukraine’s lib­er­al press nev­er tires of remind­ing us — why buy a low­er-qual­i­ty Ukrain­ian prod­uct if it can be bought cheap­er else­where?

The require­ment that state ten­ders be made with a min­i­mum amount of domes­tic sup­pli­ers is com­mon in most coun­tries, and its absence in Pro­zor­ro was called “extreme­ly strange” by the new econ­o­my min­is­ter in 2021. As a result of this neu­tral­iza­tion of the “cor­rup­tion risks” pre­sent­ed by the domes­tic local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es, around 40 per­cent of Ukrain­ian state pur­chas­es are from for­eign pro­duc­ers. By com­par­i­son, the Unit­ed States and Euro­pean Union (EU) coun­tries make around 5 and 8 per­cent of their state pur­chas­es abroad respec­tive­ly. The imper­a­tives of “stop­ping cor­rup­tion” take pri­or­i­ty over Ukraine’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

When Ukrain­ian leg­is­la­tors tried to pass a bill in 2020 ensur­ing local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es, the anti-cor­rup­tion bureaus (as well as the EU and the Unit­ed States) fran­ti­cal­ly tore it down, cit­ing the “pos­si­bil­i­ties for the cor­rupt use” of this patent­ly ordi­nary mea­sure. The law was even­tu­al­ly passed — but amend­ed, so that local­iza­tion restric­tions were only applied to non–EU or North Amer­i­can nations. In short, Ukraine’s vast anti-cor­rup­tion ecosys­tem is a con­trol mech­a­nism that keeps its econ­o­my per­pet­u­al­ly open to dec­i­ma­tion by for­eign exporters who often enjoy pref­er­en­tial treat­ment from their own gov­ern­ments. The idea that “cor­rup­tion” is the great­est bar­ri­er to devel­op­ment is a fic­tion used to jus­ti­fy trade lib­er­al­iza­tion in which the stronger West­ern cap­i­tal­ists inevitably win, to the detri­ment of the Ukrain­ian econ­o­my.

Large­ly a result of this valiant “anti-cor­rup­tion” strug­gle, Ukraine has dra­mat­i­cal­ly dein­dus­tri­al­ized over the past eight years. From 2013 to 2019, exports of aero­space pro­duc­tion declined by 4.8 times, of train wag­ons by 7.5 times, of met­al­lur­gi­cal prod­ucts by 1.7 times, and of chem­i­cal prod­ucts by 2.1 times. The sit­u­a­tion was par­tic­u­lar­ly bad in the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex, with Sovi­et Ukraine’s once-great ship­build­ing and rock­et com­plex­es essen­tial­ly dis­ap­pear­ing. Not a bud­get passed by with­out grandiose — and cost­ly — pur­chas­es of West­ern mil­i­tary equip­ment. Over 2018 to 2021, $1 bil­lion was even spent to buy 110 French heli­copters for the Ukrain­ian police, despite Ukraine pos­sess­ing an excel­lent Sovi­et heli­copter fac­to­ry, albeit one falling into dis­use due to the pref­er­ence for for­eign pur­chasers. This immense dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, even if in the ser­vice of such admirable ideals as “Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion,” haven’t served Ukraine well in a war decid­ed by the size of each army’s rock­et and heavy-artillery stocks.

The var­i­ous scan­dalous per­son­al­i­ties of the anti-cor­rup­tion courts have, since the begin­ning of the war, remained under the radar in rel­a­tive­ly peace­ful Lviv, or sim­ply left for Paris. Sev­er­al famous such fig­ures, such as Artem Syt­nyk, have even been con­vict­ed in court of cor­rup­tion but are not removed from their posts due to the direct demands of the Unit­ed States and the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF). Syt­nyk was revealed to have received $30,000 in sev­er­ance pay from one anti-cor­rup­tion organ in the ear­ly months of the war, before being giv­en a new post at a dif­fer­ent one. Receiv­ing the high­est wages of all state employ­ees, $83 mil­lion of the 2021 Ukrain­ian bud­get was ded­i­cat­ed to the three biggest anti-cor­rup­tion organs, though they are often crit­i­cized for fail­ing to make any large-scale arrests for cor­rup­tion. While ordi­nary state work­ers have seen their wages decrease to absurd lev­els, Ukraine’s over­strained bud­get finds space for such “essen­tial work­ers.”

These courts have very unclear juridi­cal sta­tus, and the method by which their man­agers are cho­sen was even ruled uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court in 2020, fol­low­ing which Volodymyr Zelen­sky unsuc­cess­ful­ly (and ille­gal­ly) tried to sack the con­sti­tu­tion­al judges. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, one of the EU’s biggest demands, repeat­ed in recent days, is for Ukraine to “reform” this court, which has also ruled against such sym­bols of EU inte­gra­tion as the pri­va­ti­za­tion of agri­cul­tur­al land. Wartime has pro­vid­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the dis­taste­ful judges final­ly to be pushed out.

The EU has already begun demand­ing that Ukraine con­tin­ue giv­ing the anti-cor­rup­tion organs unim­ped­ed con­trol as one of the con­di­tions for its “Euro­pean inte­gra­tion” (or rather, the grant­i­ng of a con­di­tion­al EU can­di­date sta­tus). The “strug­gle against cor­rup­tion” bodes ill for any wartime attempts to increase state eco­nom­ic inter­ven­tion, though anti-cor­rup­tion organs have already done enough to elim­i­nate any dirigiste politi­cians in Ukraine over the past eight years. When finance min­is­ter Marchenko list­ed off what ter­ri­ble things the gov­ern­ment might be forced to do with­out suf­fi­cient aid, he list­ed “nation­al­iza­tion” along­side cat­a­stroph­ic bud­get cuts.

Instead of large-scale nation­al­iza­tions of cru­cial sec­tors, there has been a mix of failed nation­al­iza­tions, “nation­al­iza­tion” by Ukraine’s most lib­er­al fig­ures, and takeovers by neolib­er­al­ized state com­pa­nies. In terms of failed nation­al­iza­tion, the past months have seen sev­er­al attempts to reg­u­late prices on petrol, short in sup­ply due to tar­get­ed bomb­ing cam­paigns. Giv­en the lack of state capac­i­ty, this reg­u­la­tion has gen­er­al­ly failed, and the gov­ern­ment reg­u­lar­ly switch­es between tem­porar­i­ly reg­u­lat­ing the price or let­ting it float. Spec­u­la­tion-dri­ven short­ages have inten­si­fied once again in recent days.

...

Mean­while, the gas sec­tor has become monop­o­lized by the infa­mous state-owned gas com­pa­ny, Naftogaz. Its head, Yuri Vit­renko, enjoys regal­ing sacked ener­gy-sec­tor work­ers with lessons from Adam Smith, as part of his expla­na­tion for why they should sim­ply go work in Poland instead of Ukraine’s super­flu­ous ura­ni­um refiner­ies. Nev­er­the­less, the com­pa­ny “can­celed the gas mar­ket” by tak­ing con­trol of 93 per­cent of the sec­tor in March–May.

In May, Naftogaz announced a 300 per­cent increase in gas prices for sup­pli­ers. The gov­ern­ment quick­ly assured the pub­lic that con­sumer gas prices would not increase any­more dur­ing the war thanks to West­ern finan­cial help. But what about after the war, when Naftogaz will face no com­peti­tors? One of the IMF’s most con­stant demands has been the lib­er­al­iza­tion of the gas mar­ket such that its price con­verges with that in Ger­man mar­kets. Though the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment was often forced to reg­u­late gas prices due to protests, in 2021 it signed a mem­o­ran­dum with the IMF, where a first $700 mil­lion loan was con­di­tion­al on the agree­ment that by May 2022, 50 per­cent of the gas mar­ket would be sold at (Euro­pean) mar­ket prices, and by 2024, 100 per­cent. This would mean increas­ing con­sumer gas prices by more than 400 per­cent. Since Ukraine became depen­dent on IMF cred­its in 2014, con­sumer gas prices have already increased by 650 per­cent. Giv­en Ukraine’s grow­ing depen­den­cy on the IMF, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that it will con­tin­ue freez­ing con­sumer gas prices at a low lev­el thanks to West­ern aid.

In short, though this move toward nation­al­iza­tion of the ener­gy sec­tor in wartime is cer­tain­ly bet­ter than the alter­na­tive of let­ting the mar­ket decide prices, and the deci­sion to ban export of coal, gas, and fuel in wartime is praise­wor­thy, the fact that Naftogaz has a his­to­ry of being more inter­est­ed in prof­its than pub­lic good makes it dif­fi­cult to be opti­mistic about any post­war future. Many ener­gy experts also doubt that Naftogaz has the capac­i­ty to deal with tak­ing con­trol of the entire Ukrain­ian ener­gy sys­tem. Had Ukraine not been so pre­oc­cu­pied with build­ing a “Euro-inte­grat­ed gas mar­ket” over past years, it could have been bet­ter pre­pared.

Lib­er­al­iza­tion of Labor Law

Aside from gas prices, Ukrain­ian work­ers will have even more rea­son to head to Poland, as their bar­gain­ing pow­er vis-à-vis boss­es declines due to lib­er­al­ized labor laws. Over the past three decades, almost every year has seen new leg­is­la­tion to lib­er­al­ize the labor code, and in May the most max­i­mal­ist ver­sion yet was passed. Instead of the pro­vi­sion of uni­fied labor rights for all and the abil­i­ty to cre­ate col­lec­tive agree­ments, work­ers at enter­pris­es with under two hun­dred employ­ees (i.e., most work­ers) will now only have the “option” of indi­vid­u­al­ly agree­ing to rules pro­posed by the employ­er — effec­tive­ly can­cel­ing leg­isla­tive cov­er­age for most work­ers. These reforms allow busi­ness­es to fire work­ers at will with­out even nom­i­nal con­sul­ta­tion with trade unions and removes employ­ers from the oblig­a­tion to pay wages for work­ers mobi­lized to the front. While this mod­el had often been pro­posed in Ukraine, it was gen­er­al­ly soft­ened due to trade-union protests. Wartime — with its mass unem­ploy­ment and sup­pres­sion of labor activism — was the per­fect time to pass it.

The politi­cians who cre­at­ed this leg­is­la­tion did so under the aus­pices of a USAID pro­gram. Rich West­ern coun­tries have always been eager to push such laws in Ukraine. IMF reports on Ukraine often ref­er­ence the need for more labor-mar­ket lib­er­al­iza­tion, and some­times this was even the con­di­tion of fur­ther IMF loans. In 2021, leaked doc­u­ments emerged of the British For­eign Office orga­niz­ing work­shops for Ukraine’s Econ­o­my Min­istry explain­ing how best to con­vince vot­ers of the need for such laws.

Giv­en the depen­dence of the post-Brex­it UK econ­o­my on low-paid Ukrain­ian migrant work­ers — with 67 per­cent of its farm­work­er visas in 2021 going to Ukraini­ans — it is no won­der that the British For­eign Office spon­sors such dereg­u­la­tion in Ukraine. A wors­ened labor mar­ket in Ukraine would push even more Ukraini­ans to work in the UK for wages far below British lev­els. Since the war has seen Ukraine become increas­ing­ly indebt­ed to the IMF and the EU, it is also entire­ly like­ly that part of the moti­va­tion in pass­ing this leg­is­la­tion was to show the EU Ukraine’s fideli­ty to the “reform path.”

Fis­cal Pol­i­cy

At the start of the war, Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment can­celed import tax­es and tar­iffs. This was great news for auto deal­ers, with thou­sands of cars cross­ing the bor­der for far low­er prices than they would usu­al­ly sell for. But it was bad for Ukraine’s bud­get, which lost around $100 mil­lion a month. It also wors­ened Ukraine’s fuel deficit as petrol trucks were halt­ed by the immense traf­fic jams at the bor­der. As a result, the Nation­al Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the finance min­istry lob­bied hard for the return of this tax, final­ly suc­ceed­ing in late June.

Although the gov­ern­ment dis­plays some will­ing­ness to restore basic tax­es, it oth­er­wise does not con­sid­er increased tax­a­tion of big busi­ness nec­es­sary. In a Bloomberg inter­view, “Marchenko reit­er­at­ed that he does not favor amend­ing the tax­a­tion sys­tem in any form, either through eas­ing or tight­en­ing it.” Wartime Ukraine’s fis­cal pol­i­cy has hence not depart­ed from the post-Euro­maid­an con­sen­sus that sees decreased tax­a­tion as the key to growth and pros­per­i­ty. Indeed, by can­cel­ing so many tax­es and main­ly speak­ing of post­war recon­struc­tion in terms of tax-free export zones, the war has para­dox­i­cal­ly seen an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of this fis­cal mod­el.

...

Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy

One of the most impor­tant and con­stant demands made on Ukraine by the IMF and oth­er West­ern cred­i­tors since 2014 has been “cen­tral bank inde­pen­dence.” This means choos­ing NBU fig­ures approved by the IMF, who ensure that it obeys the strictest of ortho­dox lib­er­al log­ics, con­sid­er­ing “infla­tion tar­get­ing” through mon­e­tary means the only accept­able form of state inter­ven­tion. Busi­ness can’t get cred­it and the coun­try dein­dus­tri­al­izes, but at least the cur­ren­cy is sta­ble. In Ukraine, the NBU is cer­tain­ly “inde­pen­dent,” though some ana­lysts joke that this real­ly means that it is inde­pen­dent of Ukraine’s inter­ests alto­geth­er. This has been par­tic­u­lar­ly stark­ly illus­trat­ed by the NBU’s wartime deci­sions.

The finance min­is­ter cre­at­ed spe­cial war bonds upon the inva­sion, hop­ing to receive around 400 bil­lion hryv­nia ($13.5 bil­lion) by appeal­ing to “patri­ot­ic cit­i­zens.” But after two months, only 57 bil­lion ($2 bil­lion) had been raised through these war bonds on the open mar­ket. The nation­al bank was forced to step in, buy­ing 70 bil­lion hryv­nias’ worth. But the NBU instant­ly start­ed wor­ry­ing because of the ten­den­cies toward infla­tion and cur­ren­cy deval­u­a­tion, wors­ened by its print­ing mon­ey to buy war bonds. By late June, the NBU had bought $7.5 bil­lion of bonds — some 17 per­cent of Ukraine’s pre­war bud­get. As Bloomberg notes, its print­ing of mon­ey has low­ered Ukraine’s gold reserves by $3 bil­lion, with $25 bil­lion left, while infla­tion has risen to 20.1 per­cent.

Cit­ing these mon­e­tary dan­gers, on June 1 the NBU hiked inter­est rates from 10 to 25 per­cent. This had two aims — first, hop­ing to stop infla­tion and cur­ren­cy deval­u­a­tion by tight­en­ing the mon­ey sup­ply for busi­ness and con­sumers; and sec­ond, to allow the finance min­istry to make more mon­ey to cov­er the bud­get, since its war bonds would be pushed by NBU rate com­pe­ti­tion to increase its yield rate, there­by attract­ing more buy­ers.

Alex­ey Kusch, a pop­u­lar Ukrain­ian econ­o­mist, pub­lished a long Face­book post about the deci­sion, writ­ing that it made him “have doubts for the first time since the start of the war, not in vic­to­ry, but in the pos­si­bil­i­ty that after it our coun­try might start devel­op­ing in anoth­er way” than the lib­er­al course he has always cri­tiqued. He cit­ed the adop­tion of a fixed exchange rate, the cre­ation of war bonds, and cer­tain con­trols on cap­i­tal exports at the war’s begin­ning as signs of the emer­gence of a wis­er and less lib­er­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy in Ukraine. In con­trast, the NBU’s deci­sion was an ortho­dox mon­e­tarist solu­tion total­ly inad­e­quate to the wartime con­text.

First, this is because no inter­est rate is high enough to con­vince for­eign cap­i­tal to invest in Ukraine, giv­en the mil­i­tary risks and dev­as­ta­tion. Kusch cites the fact that Ukrain­ian Eurobonds with a Sep­tem­ber mat­u­ra­tion rate (Ukrain­ian war bonds have a thir­ty-year mat­u­ra­tion rate, mak­ing them even less attrac­tive) were being resold on the sec­ondary mar­ket with a yield of 250 per­cent. The gov­ern­ment has mis­placed faith in pri­vate investors’ desire to save a war-torn state.

Sec­ond, because infla­tion in Ukraine is caused by sup­ply-side fac­tors such as the glob­al ener­gy cri­sis, petrol short­ages due to Russ­ian mil­i­tary attacks and bor­der traf­fic jams, and so on. This means that the stan­dard mon­e­tarist solu­tion of cut­ting demand will have lit­tle effect in stop­ping infla­tion. There instead needs to be state inter­ven­tion at the lev­el of sup­ply.

Third, because the fixed exchange rate a pri­ori pre­vents any mon­e­tary attempts to influ­ence the exchange rate. In Kusch’s words, if the nation­al bank plans to float the exchange rate, “then things are real­ly bad.” He recalls the 2014–15 cur­ren­cy lib­er­al­iza­tion, when the hryv­nia went from eight to around thir­ty to the US dol­lar. This float­ing rate allowed elites to mas­sive­ly with­draw cap­i­tal from the coun­try while the pop­u­la­tion became impov­er­ished, with over 80 per­cent of Ukraini­ans on under $5 a day in 2015.

Back then Ukraine had a port sys­tem — now, noth­ing can leave the ports because of the war, and exports have dropped to no high­er than 40 per­cent of pre­war lev­els. Kusch hence prog­noses a dra­mat­ic deval­u­a­tion of the cur­ren­cy if importers are allowed to buy for­eign cur­ren­cy on an active inter­bank mar­ket.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, things “real­ly are bad.” This move toward a “mar­ket-dri­ven” float­ing cur­ren­cy is pre­cise­ly what was announced by the NBU sev­er­al days after its inter­est rate hike. Exchange rates have begun increas­ing, although infla­tion rates, as Kusch pre­dict­ed, have con­tin­ued increas­ing. In July, the NBU removed cur­ren­cy restric­tions on var­i­ous import goods, fur­ther increas­ing the deval­u­a­tion of the cur­ren­cy. “The main ben­e­fi­cia­ries” of the NBU’s inter­est rate hike and inevitable exchange rate deval­u­a­tion, Kusch writes, “are struc­tures that want to with­draw their cap­i­tal from the coun­try.”

As for war bonds, Kusch pre­dict­ed that there would be lit­tle inter­est in buy­ing them even if the yield is increased, because the lim­it of Ukrain­ian domes­tic sav­ings for this pur­pose has already been reached. Fur­ther­more, the uncer­tain­ty of future Ukrain­ian exchange rate behav­ior makes such an asset even less attrac­tive. What would be bought would have to have a very high, 30-per­cent-plus rate and would only inter­est short-term domes­tic and for­eign spec­u­la­tors. Mean­while, to pay for this, the bud­get hole would become even vaster. Accord­ing to an NBU state­ment in July, the Ukrain­ian state bud­get has received less from its sale of bonds than it has had to pay the bond own­ers.

For this rea­son, the finance min­istry refused to increase the rate of yield of its war bonds to the astro­nom­i­cal height demand­ed by the NBU’s inter­est rate. This was why pur­chas­es of war bonds hit a record low of $79 mil­lion in the three weeks fol­low­ing the rate hike, as oth­er assets became rel­a­tive­ly much more attrac­tive. The first auc­tion on state bonds in July brought in lit­tle over $4 mil­lion.

The fact that the NBU inter­est rate is high­er than that of the yields on the bonds sold by the finance min­istry cre­ates anoth­er dan­ger­ous pos­si­bil­i­ty — the col­lapse of Ukraine’s “bond pyra­mid.” This scheme — pop­u­lar through­out the post-2014 peri­od but par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the COVID lock­downs, when inter­est rates were espe­cial­ly low — con­sist­ed of buy­ing NBU cred­its at around 5–6 per­cent and using them to buy high­er-yield­ing finance-min­istry bonds with around 11 per­cent yields. This gave Ukraine’s banks easy prof­its, with the two biggest Ukrain­ian banks invest­ing almost 40 per­cent of their cap­i­tal in this finan­cial pyra­mid. But this all falls apart if NBU inter­est rates are high­er than NBU bond yields. All but two of Ukraine’s banks depend in some degree or oth­er on NBU cred­it: such cred­it makes up 20–85 per­cent of almost a third of all Ukrain­ian banks’ repay­ment oblig­a­tions.

The last time the NBU hiked inter­est rates, in 2015, the so-called “bank-o-fall” began, with over 60 per­cent of Ukraine’s banks going bank­rupt and dis­ap­pear­ing over the next two years. While the IMF praised this clo­sure of “cor­rupt ghost banks,” many depos­i­tors lost their mon­ey, and cred­its for busi­ness and con­sumers became very hard to come by. It only took a day for the NBU’s lat­est inter­est hike to destroy one bank, leav­ing six­ty-eight remain­ing.

Both because of com­pe­ti­tion with the NBU’s new rate and faced with the bur­den of repay­ing NBU cred­its involved in the enor­mous “bond pyra­mid,” banks have harshened con­di­tions for debtors, result­ing in a wave of com­plaints from busi­ness and the broad­er pop­u­la­tion. Inter­est rates increased by 15 per­cent overnight for many busi­ness­es; con­sumer and busi­ness cred­it rates are pre­dict­ed to rise toward 25–40 per­cent, where­as before the inter­est rate hike they were clos­er to 15 per­cent.

In the weeks fol­low­ing the inva­sion, the trade and indus­try cham­ber rec­og­nized the war as force majeure: a spe­cial law (No. 2120-IX) was passed that pro­hib­it­ed banks from plac­ing fines or penal­ties on debtors. Yet banks are get­ting around this by sim­ply increas­ing the rate of inter­est. One refugee from the Kharkiv area report­ed that the biggest Ukrain­ian bank start­ed using his pen­sion funds to repay his cred­it debt. Oth­ers who have lost their jobs due to the war com­plain that banks refuse to give cred­it hol­i­days. The best deal that banks are giv­ing so far — only to peo­ple in ter­ri­to­ries cur­rent­ly con­trolled by Rus­sia — is can­cel­ing 30–40 per­cent of the owed amount but with the rest still paid at a low­er inter­est rate. There are reports of harsh nego­ti­a­tions where banks threat­en to block access to assets in areas con­trolled by Ukraine to busi­ness­men who have lost their assets in areas no longer con­trolled by Ukraine and hence can­not pay. For its part, the NBU was quite clear about which side it was on when law 2120-IX first came out, rec­om­mend­ing indi­vid­u­als come to an indi­vid­ual agree­ment with their bank about cred­it rates.

...

Future Promis­es

Faced with such an array of eco­nom­ic crises, wors­ened by the lib­er­al treat­ment of them, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment has stuck to what it does best: promis­ing that for­eign donors will resolve these prob­lems. It has promised that for­eign aid will sub­si­dize the 300 per­cent increase in gas prices while Russia’s seized for­eign assets will be used to rebuild hous­ing and pay for cred­it sub­si­dies. Even aside from the ques­tion of how real­is­tic it is to assume that the West will pay for the monop­o­liza­tion of the Ukrain­ian gas mar­ket, the Wall Street Jour­nal and the Swiss gov­ern­ment each tell us that seized Russ­ian assets are high­ly unlike­ly to end up in Ukraine’s hands.

We’ve seen that West­ern aid is already insuf­fi­cient in cov­er­ing Ukraine’s bud­get deficit, forc­ing the state to embark on infla­tion­ary print­ing of cur­ren­cy. Now even that finan­cial assis­tance seems to be under ques­tion: the Ukrain­ian finance min­is­ter has con­firmed West­ern media reports that Ger­many is block­ing a €9 bil­lion EU loan to Ukraine.

The most like­ly result will sim­ply be that, lack­ing for­eign aid, Ukraine will declare low tax­es in var­i­ous war-torn regions and wait for investors to come and build — a solu­tion already pro­posed by var­i­ous may­ors. No doubt, West­ern coun­tries’ promis­es to rebuild Ukraine will also bring some impres­sive show projects. To give an exam­ple of how seri­ous these pro­pos­als look, Esto­nia has promised to rebuild Zhy­to­myr region, which is only 33 per­cent small­er than Esto­nia itself.

This per­spec­tive was made explic­it on July 7, when Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment unveiled its plan for how a hypo­thet­i­cal $750 bil­lion could be used to recon­struct the econ­o­my. Appar­ent­ly, $200-$250 bil­lion will come from for­eign grants and $200-$300 bil­lion from for­eign loans. Fur­ther, $250 bil­lion will come from pri­vate investors, who the gov­ern­ment clear­ly believes will be des­per­ate to invest in a coun­try destroyed by war that is spend­ing only $5 bil­lion of its recon­struc­tion fund on edu­ca­tion. The fact that anoth­er $5 bil­lion will be spent on “improv­ing the busi­ness envi­ron­ment” (fur­ther lib­er­al­iz­ing labor law?) and $200 mil­lion on anti-cor­rup­tion organs and the “cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion of state enter­pris­es” fur­ther goes to show the depth of the government’s faith in the pow­er of the free mar­ket.

While the plan does involve rebuild­ing infra­struc­ture, noth­ing is said about any state-led recon­struc­tion of Ukraine’s indus­tri­al com­plex. No doubt, it is assumed that “effi­cient pri­vate investors” will accom­plish this with gus­to. If they don’t, Ukraine’s final trans­for­ma­tion into a dein­dus­tri­al­ized source for agri­cul­tur­al goods and labor pow­er is sim­ply nat­ur­al — and in accor­dance with lib­er­al prin­ci­ples of each nation’s com­par­a­tive advan­tage.

Instead of effec­tive wartime inter­ven­tions, the gov­ern­ment sticks to its old for­mu­la of jus­ti­fy­ing present sac­ri­fices in the name of promised EU pros­per­i­ty. Wors­en­ing labor con­di­tions, the “Euro­peaniza­tion” of gas prices (but with Ukrain­ian wages), the cen­tral bank’s “inde­pen­dence” from “its” country’s nation­al inter­ests — all this is jus­ti­fied in the name of the shin­ing Euro­pean Future, or rather, pos­si­bly receiv­ing the mar­gin­al sta­tus EU-can­di­date coun­try Turkey has had for decades. Ukrain­ian and inter­na­tion­al media nev­er cease to remind us that this war is being fought in the name of Ukraine’s “Euro­pean Future” — and what are these eco­nom­ic sac­ri­fices com­pared to all the blood being shed for this “grand ide­al”?

The EU has plen­ty of inter­est in keep­ing up the illu­sion of Ukraine’s “Euro­pean inte­gra­tion.” In the glob­al con­text, the EU is increas­ing­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble, with high wages and much high­er ener­gy costs due to sanc­tions on Rus­sia. Many Euro­pean coun­tries have in recent decades become increas­ing­ly reliant on Ukrain­ian migrant work­ers, many of them dri­ven out of Ukraine pre­cise­ly because of the unem­ploy­ment and low wages cre­at­ed by the EU’s wise reforms. Accord­ing to Poland’s cen­tral bank, 11 per­cent of Poland’s GDP growth from 2015 to 2020 owed to Ukrain­ian migrants. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Poland has always been among the most active in encour­ag­ing Ukraine’s “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion­al choice,” with Pol­ish diplo­mats being the first at Maid­an Square in 2013. Inter­est­ing­ly, the Ukrain­ian government’s $750 bil­lion recon­struc­tion plan includes a high-speed train from Ukraine to Poland.

Much of US lend-lease aid is going toward prepar­ing the EU to accom­mo­date Ukrain­ian migrants. By pay­ing for hous­ing, lan­guage edu­ca­tion, and bud­get ben­e­fits, many of the refugees will choose to stay and work in the EU. What this means is that this aspect of aid “for Ukraine” is sub­si­diz­ing the inte­gra­tion of a cheap, edu­cat­ed work­force that will not return to or earn mon­ey in Ukraine. Unlike pre­vi­ous migra­tion to the EU, where a sin­gle fam­i­ly mem­ber left and sent back tax­able mon­ey to Ukraine, this form of migra­tion involves entire fam­i­lies that are becom­ing tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens of for­eign coun­tries. While the nation­al bank facil­i­tates the flight of mon­ey cap­i­tal, the “West­ern part­ners” do their best to facil­i­tate the flight of human cap­i­tal.

———–

“Ukraine’s War Econ­o­my Is Being Choked by Neolib­er­al Dog­mas” by Peter Koro­taev; Jacobin; 07/14/2022

“Instead of effec­tive wartime inter­ven­tions, the gov­ern­ment sticks to its old for­mu­la of jus­ti­fy­ing present sac­ri­fices in the name of promised EU pros­per­i­ty. Wors­en­ing labor con­di­tions, the “Euro­peaniza­tion” of gas prices (but with Ukrain­ian wages), the cen­tral bank’s “inde­pen­dence” from “its” country’s nation­al inter­ests — all this is jus­ti­fied in the name of the shin­ing Euro­pean Future, or rather, pos­si­bly receiv­ing the mar­gin­al sta­tus EU-can­di­date coun­try Turkey has had for decades. Ukrain­ian and inter­na­tion­al media nev­er cease to remind us that this war is being fought in the name of Ukraine’s “Euro­pean Future” — and what are these eco­nom­ic sac­ri­fices com­pared to all the blood being shed for this “grand ide­al”?”

This isn’t you’re father’s ‘wartime inter­ven­tion’ tak­ing place in Ukraine. What we’re see­ing is effec­tive­ly a grand exper­i­ment on a nation­al scale: what hap­pens for strict neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic ortho­doxy is imposed on a poor nation at war? We’re all going to find out, with Ukraini­ans learn­ing the lessons of these grand exper­i­ment first hand. As the arti­cle describes, Ukraine is in the midst of a eco­nom­ic and fis­cal melt­down. A melt­down that is obvi­ous­ly pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the Russ­ian inva­sion, but is being deep­ened and exac­er­bat­ed by the kind of ‘eco­nom­ic ortho­doxy’ being demand­ed by Ukraine’s West­ern back­ers. And with Ukraine increas­ing­ly reliant on these cred­i­tors the worst its finan­cial sta­tus gets, the more invest­ed it gets in this neolib­er­al exper­i­ment. A long-term exper­i­ment that leaves Ukraine increas­ing­ly reliant on for­eign donors and investors. And there­fore increas­ing­ly unable to say ‘no’ to their demands. In oth­er words, Ukraine isn’t just fac­ing the loss of ter­ri­to­ry to Rus­sia as a con­se­quence of this war. It’s also los­ing the eco­nom­ic free­dom to gov­ern­ment itself:

...
In a 2020 lec­ture, Canada’s for­mer ambas­sador to Ukraine said that after Euro­maid­an the coun­try had become a lab­o­ra­to­ry for ide­al-world exper­i­men­ta­tion. In oth­er words, the eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­iza­tion unac­cept­able at home could instead be tried out in Ukraine.

...

Over Jan­u­ary to June 2022, $19 bil­lion of the total rev­enues came from var­i­ous forms of cred­it and for­eign aid. Over half, $11.8 bil­lion, owed to state bonds, while $7.6 bil­lion (35 per­cent) was sim­ply mon­ey print­ed by the nation­al bank and giv­en to the Finance Min­istry. The remain­ing $7.2 bil­lion came from var­i­ous for­eign cred­its and grants.

Finance min­is­ter Ser­hii Marchenko has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that with­out an immense increase in aid, Ukraine will be forced to fur­ther cut non­mil­i­tary spend­ing with­in months. The strain has already made itself felt on state employ­ees. Work­ers at the state rail­way com­pa­ny, who have been play­ing an impor­tant and dan­ger­ous role in sav­ing the lives of mil­lions of civil­ians, receive their wages with delays of sev­en to ten days, and when they do receive them, they are cut by a third, leav­ing about $150 a month. Many teach­ers and uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors haven’t received wages for months. At ports, work­ers who used to earn $260 a month now earn a lit­tle over $50 and that with delays.

Despite much talk of West­ern gen­eros­i­ty, in May Ukraine only received one-third of the $5 bil­lion it needs in aid. By mid-May the Econ­o­mist report­ed that Ukraine had run up a fis­cal short­fall of $15 bil­lion and received only $4.5 bil­lion worth of for­eign grants. The Finance Min­istry reports that ful­ly 21 per­cent ($7.3 bil­lion) of all Jan­u­ary-June bud­get expen­di­tures were ded­i­cat­ed to pay­ments on state debt. The sit­u­a­tion will only wors­en, with Bloomberg cal­cu­lat­ing that Ukraine will face a $1.4‑billion debt-repay­ment dead­line in Sep­tem­ber.

The extent of Ukraine’s exter­nal pub­lic debt (the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment also recent­ly announced that it hopes for $200-$300 bil­lion in West­ern cred­its for post­war recon­struc­tion) means that it will have even less abil­i­ty to refuse the pol­i­cy demands imposed by West­ern cred­i­tors. The finance min­is­ter and the direc­tor of tax­es have con­stant­ly reit­er­at­ed through­out the war that Ukraine will con­tin­ue ser­vic­ing its sov­er­eign debt, under­lin­ing their will­ing­ness to fol­low cred­i­tor demands.

...

Faced with such an array of eco­nom­ic crises, wors­ened by the lib­er­al treat­ment of them, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment has stuck to what it does best: promis­ing that for­eign donors will resolve these prob­lems. It has promised that for­eign aid will sub­si­dize the 300 per­cent increase in gas prices while Russia’s seized for­eign assets will be used to rebuild hous­ing and pay for cred­it sub­si­dies. Even aside from the ques­tion of how real­is­tic it is to assume that the West will pay for the monop­o­liza­tion of the Ukrain­ian gas mar­ket, the Wall Street Jour­nal and the Swiss gov­ern­ment each tell us that seized Russ­ian assets are high­ly unlike­ly to end up in Ukraine’s hands.
...

As part of that loss of sov­er­eign­ty, note how Ukraine is effec­tive­ly being forced by agen­cies like USAID and George Soro’s Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tion to adopt mea­sures that pre­vent Ukraine from pre­fer­ring domes­ti­cal­ly pro­duced goods and ser­vices when mak­ing gov­ern­ment expen­di­tures. So not only is Ukraine being blocked from engag­ing in the kind of nation­al­iza­tions that are his­tor­i­cal­ly rou­tine dur­ing a time of war, it’s also being forced to aban­don the state’s sup­port for domes­tic pri­vate indus­try. All under the ban­ner of ‘anti-cor­rup­tion’ mea­sures. Inter­na­tion­al­ly imposed anti-cor­rup­tion mea­sures that ensure Ukraine imports more than ever from its inter­na­tion­al part­ners:

...
Since 2014 — but with renewed vig­or in recent days — Ukraine’s West­ern part­ners have pushed Ukraine to “fight cor­rup­tion.” This “strug­gle” has many impor­tant eco­nom­ic effects. Gen­er­al­ly, states at war tend to nation­al­ize key sec­tors of the econ­o­my to max­i­mize arma­ments pro­duc­tion and sta­bi­lize the civil­ian econ­o­my, both to pre­vent chaos in the rear and feed the army. Strange­ly, this has not tak­en place in Ukraine, despite what the gov­ern­ment declares a “total war” sit­u­a­tion. Remark­ably, a law was even passed in late June that aims to “restart pri­va­ti­za­tion of state assets on a new lev­el.” Some politi­cians have cri­tiqued this approach — Vadym Deny­senko, assis­tant to the inte­ri­or min­is­ter ear­li­er in the war, urged a turn toward “direct state man­age­ment of the econ­o­my.” But so far, his call has gone unheed­ed.

Call­ing for nation­al­iza­tion, Deny­senko not­ed that “it is no longer time for the Nation­al Anti-Cor­rup­tion Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).” He said this because over the past eight years, a flur­ry of “anti-cor­rup­tion organs” — NGOs, state organs, and in-between — have focused on elim­i­nat­ing state inter­ven­tion in the econ­o­my.

Set up by Ukraine’s lib­er­al “civ­il soci­ety,” the Unit­ed States Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID), and the Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tion, such organs have cre­at­ed web­sites such as Pro­zor­ro (“trans­paren­cy”), which han­dles Ukrain­ian state pur­chas­es. The may­or of Dnipro has harsh­ly crit­i­cized Pro­zor­ro in recent months, due to the government’s deci­sion to require all pur­chas­es of mil­i­tary equip­ment to go through this pro­gram. He insists that such pub­lic trans­paren­cy in mil­i­tary affairs and the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of urgent mil­i­tary ten­ders is only help­ing the Russ­ian army.

The web­site, telling­ly, has no func­tion for ensur­ing domes­tic local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es. Accord­ing to Pro­zor­ro and its allies, domes­ti­cal­ly local­iz­ing state ten­ders is in the inter­ests of a cor­rupt “oli­garchy” that depends on state rents rather than effi­cien­cy. And any­way — as Ukraine’s lib­er­al press nev­er tires of remind­ing us — why buy a low­er-qual­i­ty Ukrain­ian prod­uct if it can be bought cheap­er else­where?

The require­ment that state ten­ders be made with a min­i­mum amount of domes­tic sup­pli­ers is com­mon in most coun­tries, and its absence in Pro­zor­ro was called “extreme­ly strange” by the new econ­o­my min­is­ter in 2021. As a result of this neu­tral­iza­tion of the “cor­rup­tion risks” pre­sent­ed by the domes­tic local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es, around 40 per­cent of Ukrain­ian state pur­chas­es are from for­eign pro­duc­ers. By com­par­i­son, the Unit­ed States and Euro­pean Union (EU) coun­tries make around 5 and 8 per­cent of their state pur­chas­es abroad respec­tive­ly. The imper­a­tives of “stop­ping cor­rup­tion” take pri­or­i­ty over Ukraine’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

When Ukrain­ian leg­is­la­tors tried to pass a bill in 2020 ensur­ing local­iza­tion of state pur­chas­es, the anti-cor­rup­tion bureaus (as well as the EU and the Unit­ed States) fran­ti­cal­ly tore it down, cit­ing the “pos­si­bil­i­ties for the cor­rupt use” of this patent­ly ordi­nary mea­sure. The law was even­tu­al­ly passed — but amend­ed, so that local­iza­tion restric­tions were only applied to non–EU or North Amer­i­can nations. In short, Ukraine’s vast anti-cor­rup­tion ecosys­tem is a con­trol mech­a­nism that keeps its econ­o­my per­pet­u­al­ly open to dec­i­ma­tion by for­eign exporters who often enjoy pref­er­en­tial treat­ment from their own gov­ern­ments. The idea that “cor­rup­tion” is the great­est bar­ri­er to devel­op­ment is a fic­tion used to jus­ti­fy trade lib­er­al­iza­tion in which the stronger West­ern cap­i­tal­ists inevitably win, to the detri­ment of the Ukrain­ian econ­o­my.
...

But Ukraine isn’t just being effec­tive­ly forced to import more goods from its West­ern back­ers. It’s also being forced adopt labor laws that will like­ly see even more Ukraini­ans becom­ing eco­nom­ic refugees. Labors laws that appear to be anoth­er gift from USAID:

...
Aside from gas prices, Ukrain­ian work­ers will have even more rea­son to head to Poland, as their bar­gain­ing pow­er vis-à-vis boss­es declines due to lib­er­al­ized labor laws. Over the past three decades, almost every year has seen new leg­is­la­tion to lib­er­al­ize the labor code, and in May the most max­i­mal­ist ver­sion yet was passed. Instead of the pro­vi­sion of uni­fied labor rights for all and the abil­i­ty to cre­ate col­lec­tive agree­ments, work­ers at enter­pris­es with under two hun­dred employ­ees (i.e., most work­ers) will now only have the “option” of indi­vid­u­al­ly agree­ing to rules pro­posed by the employ­er — effec­tive­ly can­cel­ing leg­isla­tive cov­er­age for most work­ers. These reforms allow busi­ness­es to fire work­ers at will with­out even nom­i­nal con­sul­ta­tion with trade unions and removes employ­ers from the oblig­a­tion to pay wages for work­ers mobi­lized to the front. While this mod­el had often been pro­posed in Ukraine, it was gen­er­al­ly soft­ened due to trade-union protests. Wartime — with its mass unem­ploy­ment and sup­pres­sion of labor activism — was the per­fect time to pass it.

The politi­cians who cre­at­ed this leg­is­la­tion did so under the aus­pices of a USAID pro­gram. Rich West­ern coun­tries have always been eager to push such laws in Ukraine. IMF reports on Ukraine often ref­er­ence the need for more labor-mar­ket lib­er­al­iza­tion, and some­times this was even the con­di­tion of fur­ther IMF loans. In 2021, leaked doc­u­ments emerged of the British For­eign Office orga­niz­ing work­shops for Ukraine’s Econ­o­my Min­istry explain­ing how best to con­vince vot­ers of the need for such laws.

Giv­en the depen­dence of the post-Brex­it UK econ­o­my on low-paid Ukrain­ian migrant work­ers — with 67 per­cent of its farm­work­er visas in 2021 going to Ukraini­ans — it is no won­der that the British For­eign Office spon­sors such dereg­u­la­tion in Ukraine. A wors­ened labor mar­ket in Ukraine would push even more Ukraini­ans to work in the UK for wages far below British lev­els. Since the war has seen Ukraine become increas­ing­ly indebt­ed to the IMF and the EU, it is also entire­ly like­ly that part of the moti­va­tion in pass­ing this leg­is­la­tion was to show the EU Ukraine’s fideli­ty to the “reform path.”

...

And then there’s the ‘trick­le-down’ poli­cies: when war broke out, Ukraine slashed import tax­es and tar­iffs, while talk of post-wear tax-free export zones grows. Ukraine is being posi­tioned to be a post-war export hub. An export hub dom­i­nat­ed by inter­na­tion­al investors with low tax­es, low labor pro­tec­tions, and a shrunk­en ‘effi­cient’ gov­ern­ment set up to cater to these inter­na­tion­al investors. This is actu­al goal of the West­’s grand ‘ide­al-world exper­i­men­ta­tion’ in Ukraine:

...
At the start of the war, Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment can­celed import tax­es and tar­iffs. This was great news for auto deal­ers, with thou­sands of cars cross­ing the bor­der for far low­er prices than they would usu­al­ly sell for. But it was bad for Ukraine’s bud­get, which lost around $100 mil­lion a month. It also wors­ened Ukraine’s fuel deficit as petrol trucks were halt­ed by the immense traf­fic jams at the bor­der. As a result, the Nation­al Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the finance min­istry lob­bied hard for the return of this tax, final­ly suc­ceed­ing in late June.

Although the gov­ern­ment dis­plays some will­ing­ness to restore basic tax­es, it oth­er­wise does not con­sid­er increased tax­a­tion of big busi­ness nec­es­sary. In a Bloomberg inter­view, “Marchenko reit­er­at­ed that he does not favor amend­ing the tax­a­tion sys­tem in any form, either through eas­ing or tight­en­ing it.” Wartime Ukraine’s fis­cal pol­i­cy has hence not depart­ed from the post-Euro­maid­an con­sen­sus that sees decreased tax­a­tion as the key to growth and pros­per­i­ty. Indeed, by can­cel­ing so many tax­es and main­ly speak­ing of post­war recon­struc­tion in terms of tax-free export zones, the war has para­dox­i­cal­ly seen an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of this fis­cal mod­el.
...

Then there’s the mon­e­tary pol­i­cy: West­ern back­ers have demand­ed Ukraine’s cen­tral bank (the NBU) be set up on the mod­el of strict “inde­pen­dence” where infla­tion con­cerns reign supreme over all oth­ers. So what do we find the NBU doing dur­ing this peri­od of extreme nation­al mon­e­tary stress? Mak­ing that stress worse by pri­or­i­tiz­ing infla­tion con­cerns and hik­ing inter­est rates. Who ben­e­fits from this? Pow­er­ful inter­ests who want to move their wealth out of the coun­try as bet­ter for­eign exchange rates, that’s who:

...
One of the most impor­tant and con­stant demands made on Ukraine by the IMF and oth­er West­ern cred­i­tors since 2014 has been “cen­tral bank inde­pen­dence.” This means choos­ing NBU fig­ures approved by the IMF, who ensure that it obeys the strictest of ortho­dox lib­er­al log­ics, con­sid­er­ing “infla­tion tar­get­ing” through mon­e­tary means the only accept­able form of state inter­ven­tion. Busi­ness can’t get cred­it and the coun­try dein­dus­tri­al­izes, but at least the cur­ren­cy is sta­ble. In Ukraine, the NBU is cer­tain­ly “inde­pen­dent,” though some ana­lysts joke that this real­ly means that it is inde­pen­dent of Ukraine’s inter­ests alto­geth­er. This has been par­tic­u­lar­ly stark­ly illus­trat­ed by the NBU’s wartime deci­sions.

The finance min­is­ter cre­at­ed spe­cial war bonds upon the inva­sion, hop­ing to receive around 400 bil­lion hryv­nia ($13.5 bil­lion) by appeal­ing to “patri­ot­ic cit­i­zens.” But after two months, only 57 bil­lion ($2 bil­lion) had been raised through these war bonds on the open mar­ket. The nation­al bank was forced to step in, buy­ing 70 bil­lion hryv­nias’ worth. But the NBU instant­ly start­ed wor­ry­ing because of the ten­den­cies toward infla­tion and cur­ren­cy deval­u­a­tion, wors­ened by its print­ing mon­ey to buy war bonds. By late June, the NBU had bought $7.5 bil­lion of bonds — some 17 per­cent of Ukraine’s pre­war bud­get. As Bloomberg notes, its print­ing of mon­ey has low­ered Ukraine’s gold reserves by $3 bil­lion, with $25 bil­lion left, while infla­tion has risen to 20.1 per­cent.

Cit­ing these mon­e­tary dan­gers, on June 1 the NBU hiked inter­est rates from 10 to 25 per­cent. This had two aims — first, hop­ing to stop infla­tion and cur­ren­cy deval­u­a­tion by tight­en­ing the mon­ey sup­ply for busi­ness and con­sumers; and sec­ond, to allow the finance min­istry to make more mon­ey to cov­er the bud­get, since its war bonds would be pushed by NBU rate com­pe­ti­tion to increase its yield rate, there­by attract­ing more buy­ers.

Alex­ey Kusch, a pop­u­lar Ukrain­ian econ­o­mist, pub­lished a long Face­book post about the deci­sion, writ­ing that it made him “have doubts for the first time since the start of the war, not in vic­to­ry, but in the pos­si­bil­i­ty that after it our coun­try might start devel­op­ing in anoth­er way” than the lib­er­al course he has always cri­tiqued. He cit­ed the adop­tion of a fixed exchange rate, the cre­ation of war bonds, and cer­tain con­trols on cap­i­tal exports at the war’s begin­ning as signs of the emer­gence of a wis­er and less lib­er­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy in Ukraine. In con­trast, the NBU’s deci­sion was an ortho­dox mon­e­tarist solu­tion total­ly inad­e­quate to the wartime con­text.

...

Third, because the fixed exchange rate a pri­ori pre­vents any mon­e­tary attempts to influ­ence the exchange rate. In Kusch’s words, if the nation­al bank plans to float the exchange rate, “then things are real­ly bad.” He recalls the 2014–15 cur­ren­cy lib­er­al­iza­tion, when the hryv­nia went from eight to around thir­ty to the US dol­lar. This float­ing rate allowed elites to mas­sive­ly with­draw cap­i­tal from the coun­try while the pop­u­la­tion became impov­er­ished, with over 80 per­cent of Ukraini­ans on under $5 a day in 2015.

...

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, things “real­ly are bad.” This move toward a “mar­ket-dri­ven” float­ing cur­ren­cy is pre­cise­ly what was announced by the NBU sev­er­al days after its inter­est rate hike. Exchange rates have begun increas­ing, although infla­tion rates, as Kusch pre­dict­ed, have con­tin­ued increas­ing. In July, the NBU removed cur­ren­cy restric­tions on var­i­ous import goods, fur­ther increas­ing the deval­u­a­tion of the cur­ren­cy. “The main ben­e­fi­cia­ries” of the NBU’s inter­est rate hike and inevitable exchange rate deval­u­a­tion, Kusch writes, “are struc­tures that want to with­draw their cap­i­tal from the coun­try.”
...

And note how these actions by the NBU appear to be risk­ing the col­lapse of the “bond pyra­mid” that could trig­ger a major col­lapse in Ukraine’s bank­ing sys­tem. Again. A col­lapse that the IMF appar­ent­ly sees as desir­able because it got rid of “cor­rupt ghost banks”. Ghost banks that hap­pened to be hold­ing a lot of peo­ple’s sav­ings. Even a col­lapse of Ukraine’s bank­ing sys­tem is seen as fine by Ukraine’s West­ern ‘part­ners’ as long as that col­lapse hap­pens in response to poli­cies dic­tat­ed by neolib­er­al ortho­doxy:

...

The fact that the NBU inter­est rate is high­er than that of the yields on the bonds sold by the finance min­istry cre­ates anoth­er dan­ger­ous pos­si­bil­i­ty — the col­lapse of Ukraine’s “bond pyra­mid.” This scheme — pop­u­lar through­out the post-2014 peri­od but par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the COVID lock­downs, when inter­est rates were espe­cial­ly low — con­sist­ed of buy­ing NBU cred­its at around 5–6 per­cent and using them to buy high­er-yield­ing finance-min­istry bonds with around 11 per­cent yields. This gave Ukraine’s banks easy prof­its, with the two biggest Ukrain­ian banks invest­ing almost 40 per­cent of their cap­i­tal in this finan­cial pyra­mid. But this all falls apart if NBU inter­est rates are high­er than NBU bond yields. All but two of Ukraine’s banks depend in some degree or oth­er on NBU cred­it: such cred­it makes up 20–85 per­cent of almost a third of all Ukrain­ian banks’ repay­ment oblig­a­tions.

The last time the NBU hiked inter­est rates, in 2015, the so-called “bank-o-fall” began, with over 60 per­cent of Ukraine’s banks going bank­rupt and dis­ap­pear­ing over the next two years. While the IMF praised this clo­sure of “cor­rupt ghost banks,” many depos­i­tors lost their mon­ey, and cred­its for busi­ness and con­sumers became very hard to come by. It only took a day for the NBU’s lat­est inter­est hike to destroy one bank, leav­ing six­ty-eight remain­ing.
...

How many more bank col­laps­es should Ukrain­ian savers expect in response to teh NBU rate hikes? We’ll see. The more the mer­ri­er appar­ent­ly, at least from the IMF’s per­spec­tive. Neolib­er­al­ism as a built-in plan for mass bank col­laps­es: at some point the strongest insti­tu­tions will just gob­ble of the remains of the weak and be even stronger. Prob­lem solved. At least the finan­cial prob­lems for the strongest remain­ing finan­cial insti­tu­tions will be solved. It’s unclear how this eco­nom­ic ortho­doxy is plan­ning on solv­ing all of the social prob­lems cre­at­ed by these kinds of events. And that rais­es what is one of the grimmest ques­tions we have to ask in this sit­u­a­tion: So what is the neolib­er­al solu­tion that Ukraine’s West­ern spon­sors have in mind for the col­lapse of the Ukrain­ian pub­lic’s faith in this grand neolib­er­al exper­i­ment? And a col­lapse of faith in the via­bil­i­ty of Ukraine’s future as a Euro­pean part­ner? What hap­pens with the hope of a bet­ter futures is replaced with a sense of betray­al and despair as none of the West­’s imposed ‘solu­tions’ actu­al­ly work? We’ll see...although we have a pret­ty good idea of what to expect.

And it’s offi­cial. Almost: Ukraine’s his­toric strip­ping of labor rights is almost com­plete with the pas­sage of two new bills by Ukraine’s par­lia­ment. The bills now await Pres­i­dent Zelen­skiy’s sig­na­ture. One of the bills for­mal­izes gig-style short term labor con­tracts. The oth­er, Bill 5371, promis­es to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form the nature of labor rela­tions in Ukraine. As we’ve seen, in real­i­ty this is a promise to trans­form Ukraine’s labor laws back to the pro-col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing modal­i­ty of the 19th cen­tu­ry, where indi­vid­u­als and employ­ers all sep­a­rate­ly nego­ti­ate their own labor con­tracts. And as we’ve also seen, that bill was craft­ed in part­ner­ship with groups like USAID and the Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tion. Drag­ging Ukraine’s work­ers back to the 19th cen­tu­ry was­n’t just a ran­dom scheme by Ukraine’s par­lia­men­tar­i­ans. Its part of the envi­sioned future of Ukraine held by the coun­try’s West­ern back­ers. Or, as Canada’s for­mer ambas­sador for Ukraine described it in 2020, post-Maid­an Ukraine had become a lab­o­ra­to­ry for ide­al-world exper­i­men­ta­tion. That ‘ide­al-world exper­i­ment’ is about to enter its next phase.

So how are Ukraine’s work­ers going to react to have their rights to col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing stripped away? We’ll see, but that points towards one of the oth­er intrigu­ing aspects to this whole sit­u­a­tion: the back­ers of this law are por­tray­ing it to the pub­lic as a move that puts Ukraine more in line with EU labor stan­dards. Now, as we’re going to see, labor experts see the new laws as going in the exact oppo­site direc­tion from EU stan­dards. This is a loss of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights, after all. So the new laws appear to be in con­flict with EU stan­dards and yet these laws were craft­ed in part­ner­ship with agen­cies like USAID and are tak­ing place at the same time Ukraine is a mem­ber of a trade asso­ci­a­tion with the EU and on track for EU mem­ber­ship. So if any Ukrain­ian work­ers got the impres­sion that this real­ly is an EU-backed law, you can’t blame them. The EU appears to be more than hap­py to stand by and watch this hap­pen.

And let’s also not for­get that attack­ing labor rights was one of the key fea­tures of so many of the aus­ter­i­ty bat­tles fought with­in the EU not that long ago. It was just 2015 when EU lead­ers were demand­ing that Greek PM Alex­is Tsipras not restore the col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights that had been stripped away under Greece’s aus­ter­i­ty regime. And that’s part of what makes this sto­ry much big­ger than just the lat­est sto­ry of Ukraine’s descent into a new Dark Age. What’s hap­pen­ing to Ukraine’s labor pro­tec­tions is a mod­el for the rest of the EU. That’s why there’s so lit­tle inter­na­tion­al out­cry:

OpenDemocracy.net

Ukraine uses Russ­ian inva­sion to pass laws wreck­ing work­ers’ rights

Zero-hours con­tracts set to be legalised and 70% of work­force exempt­ed from work­place pro­tec­tions

Thomas Row­ley Ser­hiy Guz
20 July 2022, 10.09am

The Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment has passed two new rad­i­cal mea­sures on labour lib­er­al­i­sa­tion, prompt­ing fears of Ukraini­ans los­ing work­place rights per­ma­nent­ly as Russia’s war puts huge pres­sure on the country’s econ­o­my.

In two laws passed on Mon­day and Tues­day, MPs vot­ed to legalise zero-hours con­tracts and made moves towards remov­ing up to 70% of the country’s work­force from pro­tec­tions guar­an­teed by nation­al labour law.

The lat­ter mea­sure means the nation­al labour code no longer applies to employ­ees of small- and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es; instead, it is pro­posed that each work­er strikes an indi­vid­ual labour agree­ment with their employ­er. It also removes the legal author­i­ty of trade unions to veto work­place dis­missals.

Draft law 5371 had pre­vi­ous­ly been crit­i­cised by the Inter­na­tion­al Labor Orga­ni­za­tion, as well as Ukrain­ian and Euro­pean trade unions, on the basis that it could “infringe inter­na­tion­al labour stan­dards”.

Ukraine’s rul­ing Ser­vant of the Peo­ple par­ty argued that the “extreme over-reg­u­la­tion of employ­ment con­tra­dicts the prin­ci­ples of mar­ket self-reg­u­la­tion [and] mod­ern per­son­nel man­age­ment”.

Red tape in Ukraine’s HR laws, it sug­gest­ed, “cre­ates bureau­crat­ic bar­ri­ers both for the self-real­i­sa­tion of employ­ees and for rais­ing the com­pet­i­tive­ness of employ­ers”.

The Fed­er­a­tion of Trade Unions of Ukraine will now ask pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyi to veto draft law 5371 when it goes to him for sig­na­ture – but will not make the same request over the pro­posed law on zero-hours con­tracts, Ukrain­ian MP Vadym Ivchenko told open­Democ­ra­cy.

Natali­ia Lomonoso­va, an ana­lyst at Ukrain­ian think tank Cedos, warned that the two laws could fur­ther dete­ri­o­rate an already dif­fi­cult socio-eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion for Ukraini­ans suf­fer­ing from Russia’s mil­i­tary cam­paign.

Accord­ing to the UN’s lat­est num­bers, Russia’s inva­sion has led to at least sev­en mil­lion peo­ple becom­ing dis­placed inside Ukraine itself, which has been com­pound­ed by a severe eco­nom­ic cri­sis hit­ting fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als hard. At the same time, the World Bank has pre­dict­ed that Ukraine’s econ­o­my will con­tract by 45% this year.

With these fac­tors in mind, Lomonoso­va argued that Ukraini­ans have lit­tle choice or bar­gain­ing pow­er when it comes to employ­ers – the num­ber of avail­able vacan­cies is vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the num­ber of peo­ple now look­ing for work in the coun­try. “Peo­ple right now have no bar­gain­ing pow­er, and trade unions can­not pro­tect them,” she said.

Speak­ing to open­Democ­ra­cy, Lomonoso­va expressed a fear that, as a result of the dis­place­ment, “many peo­ple will find them­selves in the sit­u­a­tion of Ukrain­ian migrant work­ers” in their own coun­try – mean­ing, for instance, peo­ple will have lit­tle choice but to accept poor con­di­tions and to be ever more depen­dent on their employ­ers.

‘Win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty’

A lead­ing mem­ber of Zelenskyi’s par­ty promised fur­ther lib­er­al­i­sa­tion of Ukraine’s labour leg­is­la­tion ear­li­er this month.

“These are draft laws that busi­ness is wait­ing for, draft laws that will pro­tect the inter­ests of all entre­pre­neurs. And work­ers, too, by the way,” wrote MP Dany­lo Het­mant­sev on Telegram on 9 July.

“A work­er should be able to reg­u­late his rela­tion­ship with an employ­er him­self. With­out the state,” not­ed Het­mant­sev, who is head of the Ukrain­ian parliament’s finance com­mit­tee.

“This is what hap­pens in a state if it’s free, Euro­pean and mar­ket-ori­ent­ed. Oth­er­wise, the coun­try will be trav­el­ling with one leg on an express train to the EU, and with anoth­er inside a Sovi­et-era train going in the oth­er direc­tion.”

Ukrain­ian labour lawyer George San­dul pre­vi­ous­ly told open­Democ­ra­cy that MPs had used Russia’s inva­sion of the coun­try as a “win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty” in which to try to push through dras­tic changes to labour leg­is­la­tion.

Lomonoso­va, of Cedos, agreed with San­dul, argu­ing that dereg­u­la­tion and the strip­ping back of social guar­an­tees was a long-term pol­i­cy of the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment even before the war, and was like­ly part of an effort to attract for­eign investors.

She point­ed to the fact that both of the laws passed this week date to an ear­ly attempt by the Zelen­skyi admin­is­tra­tion and the rul­ing par­ty to dereg­u­late labour leg­is­la­tion in 2020–21. This attempt was beat­en back as a result of a protest cam­paign by Ukrain­ian trade unions, a prospect now hard to imag­ine due to the war and mar­tial law, Lomonso­va said.

As she put it, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and rul­ing par­ty are also now increas­ing­ly talk­ing about the fact that the state “can­not afford wel­fare, employ­ment ben­e­fits or pro­tec­tion of labour rights” because of the war.

In con­trast to the dereg­u­la­tion trend, Lomonso­va says that there is clear sup­port among the Ukrain­ian pub­lic for social democ­ra­cy.

“Year on year, opin­ion sur­veys have shown that Ukraini­ans have strong social demo­c­ra­t­ic atti­tudes, includ­ing in favour of wel­fare,” Lomonoso­va said. “They expect the gov­ern­ment to pro­tect their labour rights and offer a com­plete social pack­age. Not even war can change this.”

Zero-hours con­tracts

Under Ukraine’s new zero-hours leg­is­la­tion, employ­ers who choose to use the con­tract option will be able to call up work­ers at will, though con­tracts must define the method and min­i­mum time­frame for inform­ing an employ­ee of work, and the response time of the work­er to agree or refuse to work.

The leg­is­la­tion also says peo­ple employed on these new con­tracts must be guar­an­teed a min­i­mum of 32 hours’ work a month, and that the per­cent­age of employ­ees on zero-hours con­tracts at com­pa­ny can’t be more than 10%.

In its expla­na­tion of the law, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment stat­ed that peo­ple involved in irreg­u­lar work are cur­rent­ly employed “with­out any social or labour guar­an­tees”.

There­fore, it says, zero-hours con­tracts – a term the gov­ern­ment used – will help “legalise the work of free­lancers, who most­ly work on short-term projects and are not lim­it­ed to work­ing for a sin­gle client”.

Labour lawyer and activist Vitaliy Dudin told open­Democ­ra­cy that, as a result of the eco­nom­ic cri­sis caused by the war, Ukraini­ans are fac­ing ever greater “eco­nom­ic risks” and pover­ty – and this means that Ukrain­ian employ­ers “will be able to rad­i­cal­ly reduce labour costs”.

The new con­tracts pro­posed under zero-hours leg­is­la­tion, he sug­gest­ed, could also lead to two-tier work­places, where employ­ers offer secure jobs to loy­al or non-unionised staff, while oth­ers face pre­car­i­ous employ­ment or imme­di­ate dis­missal for rea­sons man­u­fac­tured by the employ­ers.

This could affect work­places with hun­dreds of work­ers, includ­ing pub­lic sec­tor jobs at risk of aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies, such as hos­pi­tals, rail­way depots, post offices and infra­struc­ture main­te­nance, Dudin said.

...

What hap­pens after the war?

Euro­pean trade union groups have long crit­i­cised the grow­ing trend towards labour lib­er­al­i­sa­tion in Ukraine since Zelen­skyi and his polit­i­cal par­ty, Ser­vant of the Peo­ple, came to pow­er in 2019.

On 14 July, as rumours of a new vote on draft law 5371 spread, three Euro­pean trade union con­fed­er­a­tions expressed their con­cern that the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and rul­ing par­ty “con­tin­ue to reject the EU’s val­ues of social dia­logue and social rights” with its labour lib­er­al­i­sa­tion pro­gramme.

“We are strong­ly con­cerned about regres­sive labour reforms con­tin­u­ing after the emer­gency of war is over,” the unions’ let­ter said, claim­ing the reforms “go in the oppo­site direc­tion to EU prin­ci­ples and val­ues”.

Ukrain­ian par­lia­men­tar­i­ans have pre­vi­ous­ly crit­i­cised draft law 5371 as a poten­tial dan­ger to the country’s inte­gra­tion into the Euro­pean Union. Ukraine was grant­ed EU can­di­date sta­tus in late June.

Both Ukraine’s 2014 Asso­ci­a­tion Agree­ment with the EU and its 2020 Polit­i­cal, Free Trade and Strate­gic Part­ner­ship Agree­ment with the UK con­tain pro­vi­sions on ensur­ing work­place pro­tec­tions – includ­ing against attempts to attract inter­na­tion­al invest­ment.

Lás­zló Andor, a for­mer EU com­mis­sion­er for employ­ment, social affairs and inclu­sion between 2010 and 2014, told open­Democ­ra­cy that he believed this new leg­is­la­tion sug­gest­ed that Ukraine was going in a “com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion” from EU norms on decent work.

“This case is a big dose of oppor­tunism,” said Andor, now sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Foun­da­tion for Euro­pean Pro­gres­sive Stud­ies, a Brus­sels think tank.

“Ukrain­ian law­mak­ers need to under­stand bet­ter what the dif­fer­ence is between a con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean mod­el and these moves towards a very pre­car­i­ous labour mar­ket.

“Ukrain­ian trade unions are not being lis­tened to suf­fi­cient­ly. This would be ele­men­tary in the Euro­pean Union.“

“There is an enor­mous amount of nation­al cohe­sion in Ukraine, which the rest of the world admires,“ Andor con­tin­ued. “But these moves, in my opin­ion, can also under­mine nation­al uni­ty – some­thing very much need­ed for resist­ing a for­eign inva­sion.“

...

While rul­ing par­ty MPs have sug­gest­ed that draft law 5371 will passed as a tem­po­rary, wartime mea­sure, MP Mykhai­lo Volynets, a mem­ber of the same Batkivshchy­na par­ty as Ivchenko, argued “it is clear that no one will be able to undo this sit­u­a­tion lat­er” in a post on Face­book.

“The labour code will no longer apply, col­lec­tive agree­ments will be elim­i­nat­ed, and even those mech­a­nisms of employ­ee pro­tec­tion that are in place today will not work. This is a brazen vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al norms and stan­dards in the field of labour,” he said.

———-

“Ukraine uses Russ­ian inva­sion to pass laws wreck­ing work­ers’ rights” by Thomas Row­ley Ser­hiy Guz; OpenDemocracy.net; 07/20/2022

“In two laws passed on Mon­day and Tues­day, MPs vot­ed to legalise zero-hours con­tracts and made moves towards remov­ing up to 70% of the country’s work­force from pro­tec­tions guar­an­teed by nation­al labour law.”

The writ­ing was on the wall for months now, so we can’t real­ly be sur­prised. Still, it’s a shock­ing move by Ukraine’s par­lia­ment, made all the more shock­ing by the dis­turb­ing neolib­er­al lan­guage being used by the back­ers of these laws. Lan­guage mim­ic­k­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry far­ci­cal notion that employ­ers and employ­ees can nego­ti­ate with each oth­er on a lev­el play­ing field, and there­fore col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing is unnec­es­sary. Ukraine real­ly is being turned into a giant exper­i­ment. An exper­i­ment of shack­ling a pop­u­lace in the mid­dle of a war-trig­gered eco­nom­ic melt­down with 19th cen­tu­ry labor laws. The kind of exper­i­ment where we more or less already know how it’s going to turn out. That’s part of what makes this such a shock­ing move: it’s guar­an­teed to cre­ate mas­sive hard­ship for the Ukrain­ian pop­u­lace. Unless you hap­pen to be a busi­ness own­er, you’re life is poised to get A LOT worse as a result of this law. And that’s on top of all of the hard­ship from the war. The pas­sage of these kinds of laws at any point would be an act of cru­el­ty, but doing this in the mid­dle of war is just a shock­ing lev­el of cru­el­ty:

...
The lat­ter mea­sure means the nation­al labour code no longer applies to employ­ees of small- and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es; instead, it is pro­posed that each work­er strikes an indi­vid­ual labour agree­ment with their employ­er. It also removes the legal author­i­ty of trade unions to veto work­place dis­missals.

...

Ukraine’s rul­ing Ser­vant of the Peo­ple par­ty argued that the “extreme over-reg­u­la­tion of employ­ment con­tra­dicts the prin­ci­ples of mar­ket self-reg­u­la­tion [and] mod­ern per­son­nel man­age­ment”.

Red tape in Ukraine’s HR laws, it sug­gest­ed, “cre­ates bureau­crat­ic bar­ri­ers both for the self-real­i­sa­tion of employ­ees and for rais­ing the com­pet­i­tive­ness of employ­ers”.

...

A lead­ing mem­ber of Zelenskyi’s par­ty promised fur­ther lib­er­al­i­sa­tion of Ukraine’s labour leg­is­la­tion ear­li­er this month.

“These are draft laws that busi­ness is wait­ing for, draft laws that will pro­tect the inter­ests of all entre­pre­neurs. And work­ers, too, by the way,” wrote MP Dany­lo Het­mant­sev on Telegram on 9 July.

“A work­er should be able to reg­u­late his rela­tion­ship with an employ­er him­self. With­out the state,” not­ed Het­mant­sev, who is head of the Ukrain­ian parliament’s finance com­mit­tee.

“This is what hap­pens in a state if it’s free, Euro­pean and mar­ket-ori­ent­ed. Oth­er­wise, the coun­try will be trav­el­ling with one leg on an express train to the EU, and with anoth­er inside a Sovi­et-era train going in the oth­er direc­tion.”
...

And it’s not like the real motive for draft law 5371 was the war despite the cur­rent claims by the law’s back­ers. As we saw, Zelenkskiy’s par­ty has been try­ing to pass this law for over a year. As we also saw, the politi­cian who craft­ed 5371 did so under the aus­pices of a USAID pro­gram. They just could­n’t get the par­lia­men­tary sup­port until now. That’s why the assur­ances by some of the law’s back­ers that bill 5371 is just a tem­po­rary wartime mea­sure can’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Ukraine has clear­ly been turned into a inter­na­tion­al neolib­er­al exper­i­ment. The kind of exper­i­ment that might get start­ed with the war but obvi­ous­ly isn’t meant to end with the war. It’s intend­ed to be a per­ma­nent exper­i­ment:

...
Natali­ia Lomonoso­va, an ana­lyst at Ukrain­ian think tank Cedos, warned that the two laws could fur­ther dete­ri­o­rate an already dif­fi­cult socio-eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion for Ukraini­ans suf­fer­ing from Russia’s mil­i­tary cam­paign.

...

Speak­ing to open­Democ­ra­cy, Lomonoso­va expressed a fear that, as a result of the dis­place­ment, “many peo­ple will find them­selves in the sit­u­a­tion of Ukrain­ian migrant work­ers” in their own coun­try – mean­ing, for instance, peo­ple will have lit­tle choice but to accept poor con­di­tions and to be ever more depen­dent on their employ­ers.

...

Ukrain­ian labour lawyer George San­dul pre­vi­ous­ly told open­Democ­ra­cy that MPs had used Russia’s inva­sion of the coun­try as a “win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty” in which to try to push through dras­tic changes to labour leg­is­la­tion.

Lomonoso­va, of Cedos, agreed with San­dul, argu­ing that dereg­u­la­tion and the strip­ping back of social guar­an­tees was a long-term pol­i­cy of the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment even before the war, and was like­ly part of an effort to attract for­eign investors.

She point­ed to the fact that both of the laws passed this week date to an ear­ly attempt by the Zelen­skyi admin­is­tra­tion and the rul­ing par­ty to dereg­u­late labour leg­is­la­tion in 2020–21. This attempt was beat­en back as a result of a protest cam­paign by Ukrain­ian trade unions, a prospect now hard to imag­ine due to the war and mar­tial law, Lomonso­va said.

As she put it, the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and rul­ing par­ty are also now increas­ing­ly talk­ing about the fact that the state “can­not afford wel­fare, employ­ment ben­e­fits or pro­tec­tion of labour rights” because of the war.

...

While rul­ing par­ty MPs have sug­gest­ed that draft law 5371 will passed as a tem­po­rary, wartime mea­sure, MP Mykhai­lo Volynets, a mem­ber of the same Batkivshchy­na par­ty as Ivchenko, argued “it is clear that no one will be able to undo this sit­u­a­tion lat­er” in a post on Face­book.

“The labour code will no longer apply, col­lec­tive agree­ments will be elim­i­nat­ed, and even those mech­a­nisms of employ­ee pro­tec­tion that are in place today will not work. This is a brazen vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al norms and stan­dards in the field of labour,” he said.
...

But when we lis­ten to the advo­cates for the new law, they don’t describe what is hap­pen­ing in Ukraine as a grand exper­i­ment. Quite the con­trary, they describe it as being in line with EU stan­dards. A claim that’s hard to dis­miss con­sid­er­ing all of this is hap­pen­ing in the con­text of Ukraine’s EU mem­ber can­di­date sta­tus. And yet, as we’ve seen, labor experts warn that Ukraine’s moves are decid­ed­ly against the EU’s labor stan­dards that includes the right to col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing. How are Ukrain­ian atti­tudes towards join­ing the EU going to shift as a result of what is effec­tive­ly a giant betray­al:

...
Draft law 5371 had pre­vi­ous­ly been crit­i­cised by the Inter­na­tion­al Labor Orga­ni­za­tion, as well as Ukrain­ian and Euro­pean trade unions, on the basis that it could “infringe inter­na­tion­al labour stan­dards”.

...

The Fed­er­a­tion of Trade Unions of Ukraine will now ask pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyi to veto draft law 5371 when it goes to him for sig­na­ture – but will not make the same request over the pro­posed law on zero-hours con­tracts, Ukrain­ian MP Vadym Ivchenko told open­Democ­ra­cy.

...

On 14 July, as rumours of a new vote on draft law 5371 spread, three Euro­pean trade union con­fed­er­a­tions expressed their con­cern that the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and rul­ing par­ty “con­tin­ue to reject the EU’s val­ues of social dia­logue and social rights” with its labour lib­er­al­i­sa­tion pro­gramme.

“We are strong­ly con­cerned about regres­sive labour reforms con­tin­u­ing after the emer­gency of war is over,” the unions’ let­ter said, claim­ing the reforms “go in the oppo­site direc­tion to EU prin­ci­ples and val­ues”.

Ukrain­ian par­lia­men­tar­i­ans have pre­vi­ous­ly crit­i­cised draft law 5371 as a poten­tial dan­ger to the country’s inte­gra­tion into the Euro­pean Union. Ukraine was grant­ed EU can­di­date sta­tus in late June.

Both Ukraine’s 2014 Asso­ci­a­tion Agree­ment with the EU and its 2020 Polit­i­cal, Free Trade and Strate­gic Part­ner­ship Agree­ment with the UK con­tain pro­vi­sions on ensur­ing work­place pro­tec­tions – includ­ing against attempts to attract inter­na­tion­al invest­ment.

Lás­zló Andor, a for­mer EU com­mis­sion­er for employ­ment, social affairs and inclu­sion between 2010 and 2014, told open­Democ­ra­cy that he believed this new leg­is­la­tion sug­gest­ed that Ukraine was going in a “com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion” from EU norms on decent work.

“This case is a big dose of oppor­tunism,” said Andor, now sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Foun­da­tion for Euro­pean Pro­gres­sive Stud­ies, a Brus­sels think tank.

“Ukrain­ian law­mak­ers need to under­stand bet­ter what the dif­fer­ence is between a con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean mod­el and these moves towards a very pre­car­i­ous labour mar­ket.

“Ukrain­ian trade unions are not being lis­tened to suf­fi­cient­ly. This would be ele­men­tary in the Euro­pean Union.“
...

So what’s going on here? Is Ukraine actu­al­ly craft­ing laws that are anti­thet­i­cal to EU labor pro­tec­tions? Or is Ukraine ahead of the curve on these mat­ters? Again, let’s not for­get that it was­n’t that long ago that the EU was impos­ing bru­tal aus­ter­i­ty on the work­ers of coun­tries like Greece that includ­ed mass pri­va­ti­za­tions and oth­er mea­sures fol­low­ing neo­liober­al dog­ma. It was just 2015 when EU lead­ers were demand­ing that Greek PM Alex­is Tsipras not restore the col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights that had been stripped away under Greece’s aus­ter­i­ty regime. The EU of 2022 is a lot less ‘labor friend­ly’ than it was in 2002, before all of the var­i­ous crises pre­sent­ed one oppor­tu­ni­ty after anoth­er to pare back those pro­tec­tions. And as the rad­i­cal nature of the changes in Ukraine demon­strate, long-term crises present long-term oppor­tu­ni­ties for even more rad­i­cal changes. It’s some­thing EU work­ers will prob­a­bly want to keep in mind as the war in Ukraine steadi­ly morphs into a long-term eco­nom­ic cri­sis across the EU. A long-term eco­nom­ic cri­sis that dou­bles as a very juicy long-term oppor­tu­ni­ty for the same forces cur­rent­ly ‘help­ing’ Ukraine in its time of need.

The fact that a Saky air base in Crimea suf­fered a sig­nif­i­cant attack isn’t real­ly in dis­pute at this point. But just about every­thing else involv­ing the attack on the air base locat­ed at least 150 kilo­me­ters from the clos­est launch sites usable by Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary forces remains mys­tery. In part that’s because the Ukraine gov­ern­ment itself is treat­ing the attack like state secret. The only thing reporters are being told by anony­mous gov­ern­ment offi­cials is that “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used.”

So a Russ­ian air base thought to be well out of range of the longest-range Ukrain­ian mis­sile sys­tems is struck by a num­ber of explo­sions and the only infor­ma­tion being released by the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment about the attack is that a domes­ti­cal­ly-pro­duced “device” was used. What’s going on here?

Well, as we’re going to see in the sec­ond arti­cle except below from the Kyiv Post, observers are start­ing to sus­pect the Ukrain­ian-built Grim heavy mis­sile launch­ing plat­form was used in the attacks. The Grim launch­er was devel­oped between 2013–2019 and has four times the range of US-deliv­ered HIMARS.

There’s a prob­lem with this Grim the­o­ry. Only two copies were known to exist as of 2019: one for test­ing and one for over­seas sales. And yet, as we’re going to see, the quick suc­ces­sion of explo­sion at the air­base sug­gests that Ukraine would have need­ed at least 6 of these sys­tem in oper­a­tion. These are the kinds of nag­ging detail that has at least one observ­er sug­gest­ing that the Grim nar­ra­tive is just a diver­sion.

If Ukraine did­n’t car­ry out that attack using Grim mis­siles, what did it use? Sab­o­tage is one pos­si­bil­i­ty, but the Krem­lin is already mak­ing anoth­er obvi­ous sug­ges­tion: secret US-deliv­ered long-range mis­sile sys­tems, which would be in vio­la­tion of the White House­’e repeat­ed pledges to not deliv­er long-range mis­siles to Ukraine.

So while we don’t yet know if Ukraine is in secret pos­ses­sion of a game-change long-range mis­sile sys­tem that it devel­oped domes­ti­cal­ly, we had prob­a­bly bet­ter hope that’s the case. Because the alter­na­tive is that Ukraine is sport­ing long-range mis­sile sys­tems secret­ly deliv­ered by its West­ern part­ners despite assur­ances that no such esca­la­tions would take place, which would be an act of MAD­ness:

The New York Times

Explo­sions Rip Through Russ­ian Base on Crimea

A senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial said his country’s forces were respon­si­ble, which Ukraine did not pub­licly con­firm or deny. Russ­ian offi­cials said only that muni­tions had det­o­nat­ed.

By Michael Schwirtz
Aug. 9, 2022

ODESA, Ukraine — A series of explo­sions rocked a key Russ­ian air base in Krem­lin-occu­pied Crimea on Tues­day, killing at least one per­son and sow­ing con­fu­sion among local offi­cials about the cause and whether Ukraine’s mil­i­tary could threat­en tar­gets on the penin­su­la.

Pub­licly, Ukrain­ian offi­cials would not con­firm the involve­ment of Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, as Russ­ian and occu­pa­tion offi­cials scram­bled to deter­mine the source of the blasts, rais­ing the ter­ror­ist threat lev­el in the area. But a senior Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary offi­cial with knowl­edge of the sit­u­a­tion said that Ukrain­ian forces were respon­si­ble, hav­ing car­ried out an attack on the Saki air base on the west­ern coast of Crimea.

Speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive mil­i­tary mat­ters, the offi­cial said the air base was one from which planes reg­u­lar­ly took off for attacks on Ukrain­ian forces. The offi­cial would not dis­close what type of weapon caused the explo­sions, say­ing only that “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used.”

A Ukrain­ian attack on Russ­ian forces in the Crimean Penin­su­la would rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant expan­sion of Ukraine’s offen­sive efforts, which had most­ly been con­fined to push­ing Russ­ian troops from ter­ri­to­ries occu­pied after Feb. 24, when the inva­sion began. For weeks, how­ev­er, Ukraine has been shift­ing troops and strik­ing deep­er behind the front lines than before, as it sig­nals that it is prepar­ing a major coun­terof­fen­sive in the Kher­son region and uses longer-range weapons sup­plied by the West.

Crimea, shield­ed by the Russ­ian Navy and heav­i­ly for­ti­fied after eight years in Russ­ian con­trol, has large­ly been spared the vio­lence. Last month, a small explo­sive device deliv­ered by drone blew up at the head­quar­ters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sev­astopol, injur­ing six but caus­ing lit­tle dam­age. Rus­sia blamed Ukrain­ian forces for the attack, but Ukrain­ian offi­cials vocif­er­ous­ly denied it.

A strike in Crimea would also be an embar­rass­ment for Pres­i­dent Vladimir V. Putin of Rus­sia, who often speaks of Crimea, which he ille­gal­ly annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as if it were hal­lowed ground. Ukraine pos­sess­es few weapons that can reach the penin­su­la, aside from air­craft that would risk being shot down imme­di­ate­ly by Russia’s heavy air defens­es in the region. The air base, which is near the city of Novofed­eriv­ka, is well over 100 miles from the near­est Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary posi­tion.

The senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial said the attack involved par­ti­san resis­tance forces loy­al to the gov­ern­ment in Kyiv, but he would not dis­close whether those forces car­ried out the attack or assist­ed reg­u­lar Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary units in tar­get­ing the base, as has some­times occurred in oth­er occu­pied Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ries. It was not clear how many det­o­na­tions there were, but wit­ness­es and Russ­ian offi­cials cit­ed mul­ti­ple blasts, which videos post­ed to social media appeared to con­firm.

As with past explo­sions and fires in occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry or with­in Russ­ian bor­ders, Ukrain­ian offi­cials made no pub­lic admis­sions, but hint­ed at involve­ment.

Ukraine’s Defense Min­istry said in a state­ment that it could not “deter­mine the cause of the explo­sion,” and sug­gest­ed that per­son­nel at the base adhere to no-smok­ing reg­u­la­tions. It then tweet­ed, with a pho­to of black smoke ris­ing over the penin­su­la, “the pres­ence of occu­py­ing troops on the ter­ri­to­ry of Ukrain­ian Crimea is not com­pat­i­ble with the high tourist sea­son.”

...

Russia’s Defense Min­istry said in a state­ment that the explo­sions were caused by the det­o­na­tion of avi­a­tion ord­nance at the base. While the min­istry offered no spec­u­la­tion about whether Ukrain­ian forces might have been involved, the deci­sion by Crimea’s Krem­lin-installed leader, Sergei Aksy­onov, to raise the ter­ror­ist threat lev­el to yel­low sug­gest­ed offi­cials were con­cerned about secu­ri­ty on the penin­su­la.

“This mea­sure is exclu­sive­ly pro­phy­lac­tic, because the sit­u­a­tion in the region is under full con­trol,” Mr. Aksy­onov said in a state­ment on Telegram.

In the eight years of Russia’s occu­pa­tion of Crimea, the penin­su­la has trans­formed from a qui­et south­ern Ukrain­ian beach des­ti­na­tion into a major base of Russ­ian mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. It is from there that the Kremlin’s forces lunged into south­ern Ukraine in a light­ing oper­a­tion after Feb. 24 that gob­bled up a huge swath of ter­ri­to­ry, includ­ing the neigh­bor­ing Kher­son region, which Russ­ian forces almost ful­ly con­trol.

Short­ly after the explo­sions, Mr. Aksy­onov arrived at the scene. Stand­ing in front of a large black plume of smoke, he said that a three-mile perime­ter had been erect­ed around the site of the base to pro­tect res­i­dents.

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, one per­son died,” he said. “I express my most sin­cere sym­pa­thies to fam­i­ly and friends.” Crimea’s health min­istry report­ed that at least nine peo­ple were injured.

To reach tar­gets deep behind ene­my lines, Ukraine has increas­ing­ly turned to par­ti­sans, often res­i­dents of Russ­ian-occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries who are loy­al to Ukraine, offi­cials said. Such peo­ple have helped Ukraine’s mil­i­tary strike Russ­ian bases and ammu­ni­tion depots, Ukrain­ian offi­cials say.

Oth­ers have car­ried out attacks them­selves. Over the week­end, the Krem­lin-installed may­or of the city of Kher­son sud­den­ly fell ill and had to be evac­u­at­ed to Moscow, where there were reports that he was in a coma. Less than 24 hours lat­er, the deputy head of a major town in the region was shot and killed at his home, a spokes­woman for the region said.

The senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial said that both instances were the work of local par­ti­san forces, though his claim could not be inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied.

In May, an explo­sion in Meli­topol, an occu­pied city north­east of Crimea, appeared to tar­get — and miss — the region­al chief installed by Moscow.

Since the inva­sion began, Rus­sia has peri­od­i­cal­ly suf­fered attacks with­in its own bor­ders, includ­ing a heli­copter assault on a fuel depot and fires at anoth­er fuel depot — both sites rel­a­tive­ly close to Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry — and a blaze much deep­er into Rus­sia, at a mil­i­tary research insti­tute in Tver, near Moscow.

Rus­sia accused Ukraine of car­ry­ing out the heli­copter strike, and ana­lysts have sug­gest­ed that Ukrain­ian sab­o­tage was prob­a­bly behind the fires. But Ukrain­ian only indi­rect­ly sug­gest­ed any involve­ment, and declined, and declined to pub­licly con­firm it.

...

———-

“Explo­sions Rip Through Russ­ian Base on Crimea” By Michael Schwirtz; The New York Times; 08/09/2022

“Speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive mil­i­tary mat­ters, the offi­cial said the air base was one from which planes reg­u­lar­ly took off for attacks on Ukrain­ian forces. The offi­cial would not dis­close what type of weapon caused the explo­sions, say­ing only that “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used.””

Some sort of very suc­cess­ful mys­tery attack was car­ried out against the Saky air base in Crimea. Ukraine won’t say what it used in the attack but still insists that “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used.” We’re also told that par­ti­san resis­tance forces were involved, but noth­ing about whether they played a direct role:

...
A strike in Crimea would also be an embar­rass­ment for Pres­i­dent Vladimir V. Putin of Rus­sia, who often speaks of Crimea, which he ille­gal­ly annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as if it were hal­lowed ground. Ukraine pos­sess­es few weapons that can reach the penin­su­la, aside from air­craft that would risk being shot down imme­di­ate­ly by Russia’s heavy air defens­es in the region. The air base, which is near the city of Novofed­eriv­ka, is well over 100 miles from the near­est Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary posi­tion.

The senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial said the attack involved par­ti­san resis­tance forces loy­al to the gov­ern­ment in Kyiv, but he would not dis­close whether those forces car­ried out the attack or assist­ed reg­u­lar Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary units in tar­get­ing the base, as has some­times occurred in oth­er occu­pied Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ries. It was not clear how many det­o­na­tions there were, but wit­ness­es and Russ­ian offi­cials cit­ed mul­ti­ple blasts, which videos post­ed to social media appeared to con­firm.
...

So is Kyiv being coy about a net­work of sabo­teurs oper­at­ing in Crimea? It’s pos­si­ble. But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle in the Kyiv Post describes, observers have oth­er sus­pi­cions. Sur­pris­ing sus­pi­cions cen­tered on the Grim long-range mis­sile sys­tem. It’s been far from con­firmed that Grim mis­sile sys­tems were used, but they’re the log­i­cal sus­pect for a sim­ple rea­son: Ukraine does­n’t have any oth­er long-range mis­siles capa­ble of strike a tar­get that far away. The sur­pris­ing part is that Ukraine has any Grim mis­sile sys­tems at all. The weapon was being devel­oped between 2013 and 2019 and only two sys­tems were thought to have been built. This is why some experts sus­pect the talk about Grim mis­siles is just a dis­trac­tion. Rus­sia has already start­ed sug­gest­ing that US-deliv­ered long-range miss were used. If so, a Grim dis­trac­tion makes sense giv­en the US’s repeat­ed pledges of not deliv­er­ing any long-range mis­siles to Ukraine. So did Ukraine use a domes­ti­cal­ly-pro­duced long-range mis­sile sys­tem that it secret­ly pos­sess­es? Or is that just a cov­er for secret­ly-deliv­ered long-range mis­siles deliv­ered by the West?:

Kyiv Post

Evi­dence mount­ing that weapon used in Crimea air­field strikes may be Ukraine-made mis­sile sys­tem

By Ste­fan Kor­shak.
Pub­lished Aug. 10 at 4:59 pm

A day after a wave of unex­pect­ed and destruc­tive strikes against a crit­i­cal Russ­ian air force air base in Crimea, evi­dence was mount­ing on Aug. 11 that the weapon used most like­ly was a high­ly-capa­ble Ukraine-pro­duced mis­sile sys­tem pos­si­bly thought by Moscow not to be in oper­a­tion.

Saky air base, as the mis­sile flies, is at least 150 kilo­me­ters from the clos­est launch sites usable by Ukrain­ian Armed Forces (UAF) units. Until Tues­day, it was unclear to the Krem­lin and inde­pen­dent observers alike whether Ukraine had a weapon capa­ble of shoot­ing even close to that dis­tance.

Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary sources on Wednes­day said that the Saky strikes destroyed at least nine Russ­ian air force planes parked at the base, and det­o­nat­ed mul­ti­ple muni­tions depots. Kyiv offi­cial sources made no com­ment on how, and by what means, the attacks were car­ried out.

Andriy Tsaplienko, a high-pro­file Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary jour­nal­ist, in an August 10 Telegram post said that the only pos­si­ble tool Ukraine has to cause all that dam­age, at that range, was a weapon called the Grim heavy mis­sile launch­er. Oth­er sources said the evi­dence sup­port­ing Grim sys­tems as is not con­clu­sive.

Also known as Sap­san, the truck-mount­ed Grim sys­tem was devel­oped by Ukraine’s Dnipro-based Yuzh­mash aero­space com­pa­ny from 2013–2019. Twin mis­siles car­ried aboard would have a range of at least 280 km – twice the reach of the Ukrain­ian army’s aging Tochka‑U rock­ets, and four times the range of US-deliv­ered HIMARS mis­siles known to be oper­at­ed by the Ukraine Armed Forces. Each Grim mis­sile, per design, car­ries close to a half ton of explo­sives, and is, per Yuzh­mash adver­tis­ing, capa­ble of pul­ver­iz­ing 10,000 square meters of tar­get area.

Field­ing the Grim was slow and dif­fi­cult, due to lim­it­ed financ­ing of Ukraine’s defense sec­tor, the exact­ing tol­er­ances in bal­lis­tic mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ing, and Kyiv’s loss of access to Russ­ian-man­u­fac­tured parts after Russ­ian inva­sion of Crimea and Don­bas in 2014. By 2019 only two sys­tems had report­ed­ly been built: one a test copy for the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary, and one a sam­ple for over­seas arms sales, pos­si­bly to Sau­di Ara­bia. In 2021 Ukraine’s Defense Min­istry announced it intend­ed to field a “divi­sion” of Grim sys­tems, with­out say­ing when or how the sys­tems would be paid for.

Some well-informed mil­i­tary observers sug­gest­ed talk of Grim mis­siles hit­ting Crimea could be mis­di­rec­tion. “I think a Grim is just a clever cov­er for the actu­al means to deliv­er that long-range strike (on Saky),” said Olek­sii Izhak, an ana­lyst for Ukraine’s Nation­al Insti­tute of Strate­gic Research. “Tar­get­ing and con­trol sys­tems need some test­ing and (the mis­siles) were hard­ly test­ed in real flights.”

“But it (com­bat use of mul­ti­ple Grim sys­tems against Saky) is possible…and I hope it is,” Izhak added. He is a for­mer Yuzh­mash staffer.

Russ­ian state media has flat­ly reject­ed even the pos­si­bil­i­ty Ukraine could man­u­fac­ture a world-class bal­lis­tic mis­sile sys­tem. Fol­low­ing the Saky strikes, Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da plat­forms have offered expla­na­tions for the blasts split rough­ly even­ly between a fire start­ed acci­dent­ly by a Russ­ian air force mem­ber, and deliv­ery of long-range Amer­i­can pre­ci­sion rock­ets to Ukraine, notwith­stand­ing flat, White House denials, first made in April, that the US will not trans­fer long-range strike sys­tems to Ukraine.

Since inva­sion in Feb­ru­ary, the Russ­ian mil­i­tary has hit Yuzh­mash only once, on July 15, launch­ing at least four long-range cruise mis­siles at the site, killing three peo­ple and dam­ag­ing some build­ings. Oth­er­wise, notwith­stand­ing more than 3,000 mis­siles fired at “strate­gic” tar­gets across Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s announced goal of destroy­ing all Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary infra­struc­ture, Moscow has left Yuzh­mash untouched. One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion may be in the plant’s design: As Sovi­et-era crit­i­cal mil­i­tary infra­struc­ture, Yuzhmash’s pro­duc­tion lines are wide­ly thought to be deep under­ground, in sites designed to resist a nuclear strike.

What Yuzh­mash is man­u­fac­tur­ing and how capa­ble the pro­duc­tion lines are of hold­ing out against bom­bard­ment are Ukrain­ian state secrets, as is the num­ber of Grim sys­tems oper­at­ed by the UAF, and where they are locat­ed.

Open-source news reports and hun­dreds of videos and social media posts fol­low­ing the Saky strikes showed between ten and twelve pow­er­ful explo­sions in and around the Saky air sta­tion. The scale of each of the det­o­na­tions – among oth­er dam­age blow­ing out auto­mo­bile win­dows a half-kilo­me­ter away – was con­sis­tent with the Grim missile’s 500 kg war­head. Alter­na­tive­ly, but the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, aer­i­al bombs or, even less like­ly, Ukrain­ian sabo­teurs, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly could also have been behind the blasts.

The US news­pa­per New York Times, in a Tues­day arti­cle, cit­ed an unnamed Ukrain­ian offi­cial as say­ing “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used” in the Saky strikes. If the Grim was used in the Saky strikes, giv­en the quick suc­ces­sion of the explo­sions on Wednes­day after­noon, it would like­ly mean Ukraine is oper­at­ing at min­i­mum six sys­tems – three times as many as were thought to be oper­a­tional in 2019.

...

————

“Evi­dence mount­ing that weapon used in Crimea air­field strikes may be Ukraine-made mis­sile sys­tem” By Ste­fan Kor­shak; Kyiv Post; 08/10/2022

” Saky air base, as the mis­sile flies, is at least 150 kilo­me­ters from the clos­est launch sites usable by Ukrain­ian Armed Forces (UAF) units. Until Tues­day, it was unclear to the Krem­lin and inde­pen­dent observers alike whether Ukraine had a weapon capa­ble of shoot­ing even close to that dis­tance.”

No one was expect­ing an attack like this was even pos­si­ble. That’s why sus­pi­cions were imme­di­ate­ly direct­ed at the Grim heavy mis­sile launch­er, which has four times the range of the US-deliv­ered HIMARs. And yet no one thought Ukraine had any Grim sys­tems ready to field, hence the Krem­lin’s sug­ges­tions that Ukraine may have received long-range mis­siles from the US:

...
Andriy Tsaplienko, a high-pro­file Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary jour­nal­ist, in an August 10 Telegram post said that the only pos­si­ble tool Ukraine has to cause all that dam­age, at that range, was a weapon called the Grim heavy mis­sile launch­er. Oth­er sources said the evi­dence sup­port­ing Grim sys­tems as is not con­clu­sive.

Also known as Sap­san, the truck-mount­ed Grim sys­tem was devel­oped by Ukraine’s Dnipro-based Yuzh­mash aero­space com­pa­ny from 2013–2019. Twin mis­siles car­ried aboard would have a range of at least 280 km – twice the reach of the Ukrain­ian army’s aging Tochka‑U rock­ets, and four times the range of US-deliv­ered HIMARS mis­siles known to be oper­at­ed by the Ukraine Armed Forces. Each Grim mis­sile, per design, car­ries close to a half ton of explo­sives, and is, per Yuzh­mash adver­tis­ing, capa­ble of pul­ver­iz­ing 10,000 square meters of tar­get area.

...

Some well-informed mil­i­tary observers sug­gest­ed talk of Grim mis­siles hit­ting Crimea could be mis­di­rec­tion. “I think a Grim is just a clever cov­er for the actu­al means to deliv­er that long-range strike (on Saky),” said Olek­sii Izhak, an ana­lyst for Ukraine’s Nation­al Insti­tute of Strate­gic Research. “Tar­get­ing and con­trol sys­tems need some test­ing and (the mis­siles) were hard­ly test­ed in real flights.”

“But it (com­bat use of mul­ti­ple Grim sys­tems against Saky) is possible…and I hope it is,” Izhak added. He is a for­mer Yuzh­mash staffer.

Russ­ian state media has flat­ly reject­ed even the pos­si­bil­i­ty Ukraine could man­u­fac­ture a world-class bal­lis­tic mis­sile sys­tem. Fol­low­ing the Saky strikes, Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da plat­forms have offered expla­na­tions for the blasts split rough­ly even­ly between a fire start­ed acci­dent­ly by a Russ­ian air force mem­ber, and deliv­ery of long-range Amer­i­can pre­ci­sion rock­ets to Ukraine, notwith­stand­ing flat, White House denials, first made in April, that the US will not trans­fer long-range strike sys­tems to Ukraine.
...

Adding to the mys­tery is that only two Grim sys­tems were known to have been built, and one of those sys­tems was a sam­ple for over­seas sales. And yet, based on the quick suc­ces­sion of explo­sions in Crimea, that would sug­gest more than one Grim sys­tem was used to launch that attack. A min­i­mum of six Grim launch­er would have been need­ed to car­ry out that attack. So that would be quite a debut for this pre­vi­ous­ly secret mis­sile sys­tem if true:

...
Field­ing the Grim was slow and dif­fi­cult, due to lim­it­ed financ­ing of Ukraine’s defense sec­tor, the exact­ing tol­er­ances in bal­lis­tic mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ing, and Kyiv’s loss of access to Russ­ian-man­u­fac­tured parts after Russ­ian inva­sion of Crimea and Don­bas in 2014. By 2019 only two sys­tems had report­ed­ly been built: one a test copy for the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary, and one a sam­ple for over­seas arms sales, pos­si­bly to Sau­di Ara­bia. In 2021 Ukraine’s Defense Min­istry announced it intend­ed to field a “divi­sion” of Grim sys­tems, with­out say­ing when or how the sys­tems would be paid for.

...

The US news­pa­per New York Times, in a Tues­day arti­cle, cit­ed an unnamed Ukrain­ian offi­cial as say­ing “a device exclu­sive­ly of Ukrain­ian man­u­fac­ture was used” in the Saky strikes. If the Grim was used in the Saky strikes, giv­en the quick suc­ces­sion of the explo­sions on Wednes­day after­noon, it would like­ly mean Ukraine is oper­at­ing at min­i­mum six sys­tems – three times as many as were thought to be oper­a­tional in 2019.
...

So did Ukraine secret­ly build 4 extra Grim mis­siles launch­ers and mis­siles? Because if not, sab­o­tage or West­ern-deliv­ered long-range mis­siles are the only oth­er real­is­tic options left. And it does­n’t real­ly sound like this was sab­o­tage.

Here’s a recent WaPo arti­cle that under­scores one of the most impor­tant facts about the con­flict in Ukraine to keep in mind: Ukraine is a glob­al min­er­al pow­er­house filled with not just boun­ti­ful stores of tra­di­tion­al min­er­als like coal but the rare earth met­als like lithi­um that are cru­cial to mod­ern high-tech economies. A lot of cov­er­age has been giv­en to sto­ries involv­ing Ukraine’s vast nat­ur­al gas reserves. It’s easy to for­get that Ukraine also has 117 of the 120 most wide­ly used min­er­als and met­als. Tens of tril­lions of dol­lars in min­er­al reserves are at stake.

And as the arti­cle also points out, those min­er­al reserves are now trad­ing at deep dis­counts as the war cre­ates enor­mous investor uncer­tain­ty. As the arti­cle also points out, that fire sale on Ukraine’s min­er­al wealth is unlike­ly end until a long-term peace agree­ment with Rus­sia has been achieved. Frozen con­flicts are bad for invest­ment. So as long as Ukraine and Rus­sia are tech­ni­cal­ly at war, Ukraine’s vast min­er­al wealth is going to be for sale. .

So it’s worth keep­ing in mind that Ukraine’s pos­ses­sion of one of the largest reserves of strate­gic min­er­al wealth in Europe was prob­a­bly a major fac­tor moti­vat­ing the years-long efforts to pull Ukraine into a ‘West­ern’ orbit, cul­mi­nat­ing in all of the West­ern involve­ment with the 2014 Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion. And it’s also worth keep­ing in mind that, the more own­er­ship of Ukraine’s min­er­al wealth is in the hands of inter­na­tion­al investors, the greater the inter­na­tion­al pres­sure will be for the con­flict in Ukraine to not just come to a peace­ful set­tle­ment but to end with Ukraine back in con­trol of all of the areas where those investors own those reserves:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

In the Ukraine war, a bat­tle for the nation’s min­er­al and ener­gy wealth

By Antho­ny Faio­la and Dal­ton Ben­nett
August 10, 2022 at 2:00 a.m. EDT

Less than 100 miles east, artillery salvos pound Ukrain­ian defen­sive posi­tions as Russ­ian forces inch for­ward. But below the sur­face of this sprawl­ing Don­bas coal field, a dwin­dling num­ber of min­ers are still work­ing, extract­ing a fuel that is emblem­at­ic of one of Ukraine’s biggest chal­lenges.

The Krem­lin is rob­bing this nation of the build­ing blocks of its econ­o­my — its nat­ur­al resources.

After near­ly six months of fight­ing, Moscow’s slop­py war has yield­ed at least one big reward: expand­ed con­trol over some of the most min­er­al-rich lands in Europe. Ukraine har­bors some of the world’s largest reserves of tita­ni­um and iron ore, fields of untapped lithi­um and mas­sive deposits of coal. Col­lec­tive­ly, they are worth tens of tril­lions of dol­lars.

The lion’s share of those coal deposits, which for decades have pow­ered Ukraine’s crit­i­cal steel indus­try, are con­cen­trat­ed in the east, where Moscow has made the most inroads. That’s put them in Russ­ian hands, along with sig­nif­i­cant amounts of oth­er valu­able ener­gy and min­er­al deposits used for every­thing from air­craft parts to smart­phones, accord­ing to an analy­sis for The Wash­ing­ton Post by the Cana­di­an geopo­lit­i­cal risk firm SecDev..

Rus­sia pos­sess­es vast amounts of nat­ur­al resources. But deny­ing Ukraine its own has strate­gi­cal­ly under­mined the country’s econ­o­my, forc­ing Kyiv to import coal to keep the lights on in cities and towns. Should the Krem­lin suc­ceed in annex­ing the Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry it has seized — as U.S. offi­cials believe it will try to do in com­ing months — Kyiv would per­ma­nent­ly lose access to almost two-thirds of its deposits.

Ukraine would also lose myr­i­ad oth­er reserves, includ­ing stores of nat­ur­al gas, oil and rare earth min­er­als — essen­tial for cer­tain high-tech com­po­nents — that could ham­per West­ern Europe’s search for alter­na­tives to imports from Rus­sia and Chi­na.

“The worst sce­nario is that Ukraine los­es land, no longer has a strong com­mod­i­ty econ­o­my and becomes more like one of the Baltic states, a nation unable to sus­tain its indus­tri­al econ­o­my,” said Stanislav Zinchenko, chief exec­u­tive of GMK, a Kyiv-based eco­nom­ic think tank. “This is what Rus­sia wants. To weak­en us.”

Late last month, 1,200 feet under­ground in the Don­bas region mine, soot-caked work­ers clawed at the black coal seams with a sense of urgency. The coal hewed from the walls fuels a near­by pow­er plant, part of an ener­gy grid strained and weak­ened by the war.

“Those that left to fight at the front are fight­ing for us down here,” said Yuri, a 29-year-old exca­va­tor oper­a­tor. “We need to get as much coal as we can. The coun­try needs it.”

$12.4 tril­lion in lost wealth

Ukraine is wide­ly known as an agri­cul­tur­al pow­er­house.. But as a raw-mate­r­i­al moth­er lode, it’s home to 117 of the 120 most wide­ly used min­er­als and met­als, and a major source of fos­sil fuels. Offi­cial web­sites no longer show geolo­ca­tions of these deposits; the gov­ern­ment, cit­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty, took them down in ear­ly spring.

Yet SecDev’s analy­sis indi­cates that at least $12.4 tril­lion worth of Ukraine’s ener­gy deposits, met­als and min­er­als are now under Russ­ian con­trol. That fig­ure accounts for near­ly half the dol­lar val­ue of the 2,209 deposits reviewed by the com­pa­ny. In addi­tion to 63 per­cent of the country’s coal deposits, Moscow has seized 11 per­cent of its oil deposits, 20 per­cent of its nat­ur­al gas deposits, 42 per­cent of its met­als and 33 per­cent of its deposits of rare earth and oth­er crit­i­cal min­er­als includ­ing lithi­um.

Some of those deposits are hard to reach or require explo­ration to assess their via­bil­i­ty. Some were over­tak­en dur­ing either Moscow’s 2014 annex­a­tion of Crimea or the Ukrain­ian government’s eight-year war with Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists in the east.

Since the inva­sion began in Feb­ru­ary, how­ev­er, the Krem­lin has steadi­ly expand­ed its hold­ings. Accord­ing to SecDev and Ukrain­ian min­ing and steel indus­try exec­u­tives, it has seized: 41 coal fields, 27 nat­ur­al gas sites, 14 propane sites, nine oil fields, six iron ore deposits, two tita­ni­um ore sites, two zir­co­ni­um ore sites, one stron­tium site, one lithi­um site, one ura­ni­um site, one gold deposit and a sig­nif­i­cant quar­ry of lime­stone pre­vi­ous­ly used for Ukrain­ian steel pro­duc­tion.

Roman Opi­makh, direc­tor gen­er­al of the Ukrain­ian Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, said the gov­ern­ment is still assess­ing the war’s impact on its min­er­al resources. But giv­en how much of Ukraine’s raw mate­ri­als are in the east and south, he sug­gest­ed that the val­ue of lost reserves exceeds the total cal­cu­lat­ed in the inde­pen­dent analy­sis.

“There is a neg­a­tive asset, which we’ve lost — resources which we use right now to sup­port our indus­tri­al activ­i­ties and to gen­er­ate pow­er,” he not­ed. “But there’s anoth­er dimen­sion of min­er­als of the future which are still under the ground. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is a risk that the Ukrain­ian peo­ple will not get the ben­e­fits of the devel­op­ment of those mate­ri­als.”

The bulk of the country’s oil and gas reserves remain under its con­trol. But for West­ern Europe, Russia’s expand­ed land grab in Ukraine amounts to a tac­ti­cal set­back.

“Russ­ian occu­pa­tion of Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry has direct impli­ca­tions for West­ern ener­gy secu­ri­ty,” said Robert Mug­gah, SecDev co-founder. “Unless the Euro­peans can rapid­ly diver­si­fy oil and gas sources, they will remain high­ly depen­dent on Russ­ian hydro­car­bons.”.”

The great­est threat is to Ukraine’s future. Dur­ing the 2014 Russ­ian inva­sion, in which Ukraine lost rough­ly 7 per­cent of its land mass, crit­i­cal West­ern invest­ment in the ener­gy and min­ing sec­tor was scared away. The cur­rent war has had the same impact.

Pol­ish-Ukrain­ian invest­ment com­pa­ny Mill­stone & Co, for instance, struck a 2021 deal with an Aus­tralian min­ing com­pa­ny for active explo­ration at two untouched lithi­um sites. Once the war start­ed, the com­pa­nies froze those plans, said Mill­stone man­ag­ing part­ner Mykhai­lo Zher­nov.

One site — a deposit cov­ered by farm­land — now is so close to the front lines that Zher­nov remains uncer­tain whether it is under Ukrain­ian or Russ­ian con­trol. Ini­tial plans to build a lithi­um bat­tery fac­to­ry there have also been shelved.

Ana­lysts say licens­es for oth­er min­er­al deposits sold by the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment last year are now trad­ing at deep dis­counts as investors ques­tion the via­bil­i­ty of extrac­tion.

“Every day, Ukraini­ans are los­ing their econ­o­my,” Zher­nov said. “I know many investors who start­ed geol­o­gy research, but they have stopped because [of the war]. Every­thing, it’s a bet now.”

The blow to Ukraine is far worse because of the Russ­ian seizure of key Ukrain­ian ports and a broad block­ade of the Black Sea. Some ana­lysts see the lost sea tran­sit routes as more sig­nif­i­cant than the lost min­er­al reserves — par­tic­u­lar­ly coal, despite its cur­rent val­ue — as oth­er coun­tries switch to green­er ener­gy.

“Raw mate­ri­als like coal are not the future, they’re the past,” said Anders Aslund, an econ­o­mist who has long stud­ied Ukraine. “It’s more about whether Ukraine los­es its ports, which I don’t think they will. If they did not have those ports, they would need to build a com­plete­ly new infra­struc­ture for exports.”

Coal’s prac­ti­cal and sym­bol­ic val­ue

Coal is by far the most abun­dant of the deposits in Russ­ian-con­trolled parts of Ukraine. The approx­i­mate­ly 30 bil­lion tons of hard coal deposits there have an esti­mat­ed com­mer­cial val­ue of $11.9 tril­lion, SecDev esti­mates. They also have sym­bol­ic val­ue as a sto­ried ener­gy source, with the region­al metrop­o­lis­es of Donet­sk and Luhan­sk being built on the backs of coal min­ers and steel­work­ers.

The tox­ic com­bi­na­tion of a loss of raw mate­ri­als plus dam­aged, destroyed or seized infra­struc­ture has vast impli­ca­tions for a core indus­try like steel, which until the war sus­tained 4 mil­lion Ukraini­ans. Two large fac­to­ries were destroyed or over­run in the siege of Mar­i­upol. Oth­er fac­to­ries have reduced pro­duc­tion and face a host of chal­lenges.

Across the coun­try, many of the Sovi­et-era steel plants still run on coal. But the nation’s loss­es to Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists in the east between 2014 and 2017 forced Kyiv to begin import­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of coal, both for those plants and ther­mal pow­er plants. In 2021, imports amount­ed to almost 40 per­cent of Ukraine’s coal con­sump­tion.

Along with coal mines, Rus­sia has recent­ly seized a sig­nif­i­cant lime­stone deposit used for steel pro­duc­tion. The impact of that has been min­i­mized because Ukrain­ian steel pro­duc­tion has dropped so much because of the war — 60 per­cent to 70 per­cent — that fac­to­ries have been able to make do with low­er-qual­i­ty lime­stone deposits in the west. But Yuriy Ryzhenkov, chief exec­u­tive of the Ukrain­ian steel and min­ing giant Met­invest, warned that ramp­ing back up to nor­mal lev­els will mean “we will have to import it.”

...

DTEK chief exec­u­tive Max­im Tim­chenko doesn’t think the Rus­sians real­ly need these raw mate­ri­als. “They are just try­ing to destroy our econ­o­my,” he said.

But such loss­es, if per­ma­nent, would com­pel what’s left of Ukraine to realign its econ­o­my. The pos­si­ble upside: a mod­ern­iza­tion that could make its dat­ed steel plants more effi­cient and green­er. Ear­ly esti­mates sug­gest the price tag for rebuild­ing the broad­er econ­o­my range upward of $750 bil­lion.

Some eco­nom­ic experts sug­gest the war’s longer-term impact could be blunt­ed even if Ukraine were to cede sig­nif­i­cant land, as long as it were to ful­ly embrace the tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vice sec­tors that helped fuel growth in recent years and expand its pur­suit of alter­na­tive ener­gies.

Still, it would face a mas­sive task. Ukraine’s more recent attempt to mod­ern­ize its ener­gy grid has been upend­ed by war. Almost half its renew­able ener­gies plants — includ­ing 89 per­cent of its wind farms — are locat­ed in seized ter­ri­to­ry or con­flict zones. More than half of its wind farms are shut down.

Any rebuild­ing effort with large-scale for­eign invest­ment would also prob­a­bly require a true end to the fight­ing — as opposed to anoth­er pro­tract­ed but con­tained con­flict with Rus­sia, as was seen in 2014.

“Not only will Ukraine have lost a lot of its ter­ri­to­ry and its resources, but it would be con­stant­ly vul­ner­a­ble to anoth­er onslaught by Rus­sia,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a fel­low at the Wash­ing­ton-based Peter­son Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ics. “No one in their right mind, a pri­vate com­pa­ny, would invest in the rest of Ukraine if this were to become a frozen con­flict.”

———–

“In the Ukraine war, a bat­tle for the nation’s min­er­al and ener­gy wealth” by Antho­ny Faio­la and Dal­ton Ben­nett; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/10/2022

“After near­ly six months of fight­ing, Moscow’s slop­py war has yield­ed at least one big reward: expand­ed con­trol over some of the most min­er­al-rich lands in Europe. Ukraine har­bors some of the world’s largest reserves of tita­ni­um and iron ore, fields of untapped lithi­um and mas­sive deposits of coal. Col­lec­tive­ly, they are worth tens of tril­lions of dol­lars.”

Tril­lions of dol­lars in min­er­al wealth are at stake in this con­flict. Ukraine is an inter­na­tion­al min­er­al pow­er­house and home to some of Europe’s largest reserves of rare earth min­er­als like lithi­um that are cru­cial for the mod­ern econ­o­my:

...
Ukraine is wide­ly known as an agri­cul­tur­al pow­er­house.. But as a raw-mate­r­i­al moth­er lode, it’s home to 117 of the 120 most wide­ly used min­er­als and met­als, and a major source of fos­sil fuels. Offi­cial web­sites no longer show geolo­ca­tions of these deposits; the gov­ern­ment, cit­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty, took them down in ear­ly spring.

Yet SecDev’s analy­sis indi­cates that at least $12.4 tril­lion worth of Ukraine’s ener­gy deposits, met­als and min­er­als are now under Russ­ian con­trol. That fig­ure accounts for near­ly half the dol­lar val­ue of the 2,209 deposits reviewed by the com­pa­ny. In addi­tion to 63 per­cent of the country’s coal deposits, Moscow has seized 11 per­cent of its oil deposits, 20 per­cent of its nat­ur­al gas deposits, 42 per­cent of its met­als and 33 per­cent of its deposits of rare earth and oth­er crit­i­cal min­er­als includ­ing lithi­um.

Some of those deposits are hard to reach or require explo­ration to assess their via­bil­i­ty. Some were over­tak­en dur­ing either Moscow’s 2014 annex­a­tion of Crimea or the Ukrain­ian government’s eight-year war with Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists in the east.

Since the inva­sion began in Feb­ru­ary, how­ev­er, the Krem­lin has steadi­ly expand­ed its hold­ings. Accord­ing to SecDev and Ukrain­ian min­ing and steel indus­try exec­u­tives, it has seized: 41 coal fields, 27 nat­ur­al gas sites, 14 propane sites, nine oil fields, six iron ore deposits, two tita­ni­um ore sites, two zir­co­ni­um ore sites, one stron­tium site, one lithi­um site, one ura­ni­um site, one gold deposit and a sig­nif­i­cant quar­ry of lime­stone pre­vi­ous­ly used for Ukrain­ian steel pro­duc­tion.

...

The bulk of the country’s oil and gas reserves remain under its con­trol. But for West­ern Europe, Russia’s expand­ed land grab in Ukraine amounts to a tac­ti­cal set­back.

“Russ­ian occu­pa­tion of Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry has direct impli­ca­tions for West­ern ener­gy secu­ri­ty,” said Robert Mug­gah, SecDev co-founder. “Unless the Euro­peans can rapid­ly diver­si­fy oil and gas sources, they will remain high­ly depen­dent on Russ­ian hydro­car­bons.”.”
...

But the war is cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty for one group: there’s a fire sale on those min­er­al deposits. And as experts warn, that fire-sale is expect­ed to last as long as the con­flict in Ukraine con­tin­ues. Even a frozen con­flict would con­tin­ue to sup­press those prices. Tril­lions of dol­lars in min­er­al wealth stuck in a fire sale, with an long-term peace agree­ment being the nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent for end­ing that sale:

...
Ana­lysts say licens­es for oth­er min­er­al deposits sold by the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment last year are now trad­ing at deep dis­counts as investors ques­tion the via­bil­i­ty of extrac­tion.

“Every day, Ukraini­ans are los­ing their econ­o­my,” Zher­nov said. “I know many investors who start­ed geol­o­gy research, but they have stopped because [of the war]. Every­thing, it’s a bet now.”

...

DTEK chief exec­u­tive Max­im Tim­chenko doesn’t think the Rus­sians real­ly need these raw mate­ri­als. “They are just try­ing to destroy our econ­o­my,” he said.

But such loss­es, if per­ma­nent, would com­pel what’s left of Ukraine to realign its econ­o­my. The pos­si­ble upside: a mod­ern­iza­tion that could make its dat­ed steel plants more effi­cient and green­er. Ear­ly esti­mates sug­gest the price tag for rebuild­ing the broad­er econ­o­my range upward of $750 bil­lion.

Some eco­nom­ic experts sug­gest the war’s longer-term impact could be blunt­ed even if Ukraine were to cede sig­nif­i­cant land, as long as it were to ful­ly embrace the tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vice sec­tors that helped fuel growth in recent years and expand its pur­suit of alter­na­tive ener­gies.

...

Any rebuild­ing effort with large-scale for­eign invest­ment would also prob­a­bly require a true end to the fight­ing — as opposed to anoth­er pro­tract­ed but con­tained con­flict with Rus­sia, as was seen in 2014.

“Not only will Ukraine have lost a lot of its ter­ri­to­ry and its resources, but it would be con­stant­ly vul­ner­a­ble to anoth­er onslaught by Rus­sia,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a fel­low at the Wash­ing­ton-based Peter­son Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ics. “No one in their right mind, a pri­vate com­pa­ny, would invest in the rest of Ukraine if this were to become a frozen con­flict.”
...

Also keep in mind that any inter­na­tion­al­ly-backed rebuild­ing of Ukraine will almost cer­tain­ly involve turn­ing the coun­try into a neo-lib­er­al exper­i­men­tal employ­ee hell hole, which is already hap­pen­ing whether or not the con­flict ends.

And don’t for­get one the oth­er ben­e­fi­cia­ries of this con­flict: coal exporters. Ukraine was import­ing 40 per­cent of its coal con­sump­tion in 2021:

...
Across the coun­try, many of the Sovi­et-era steel plants still run on coal. But the nation’s loss­es to Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists in the east between 2014 and 2017 forced Kyiv to begin import­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of coal, both for those plants and ther­mal pow­er plants. In 2021, imports amount­ed to almost 40 per­cent of Ukraine’s coal con­sump­tion.
...

Note that the EU’s ban on Russ­ian coal just kicked in a day ago. It’s a grand time for coal exporters. And it will even­tu­al­ly be a grand time for the investors in Ukraine’s strate­gic min­er­al reserves. But only after the war is over and Ukraine has com­plete­ly recap­tured con­trol of the coun­try. In the mean time, the Ukrain­ian fire sale con­tin­ues to smol­der.

With the prospect of the US’s nuclear secrets being traf­ficked by a for­mer pres­i­dent sud­den­ly in the news fol­low­ing last week’s FBI raid of a Mar-a-Lago, it’s a weird­ly appro­pri­ate to see a new inter­view of Hen­ry Kissinger sud­den­ly show up in the Wall Street Jour­nal. The 99 year old for­mer sec­re­tary of state just pub­lished a new book pro­fil­ing var­i­ous 20th cen­tu­ry lead­ers. And while the inter­view is in part about his new book, Kissinger shares his con­cerns about the state of the world today and his fears of a dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um tak­ing hold in the strug­gles between the world pow­ers, in par­tic­u­lar when it comes to brew­ing con­flicts with Russ­ian and Chi­na. Kissinger appears to take a gen­er­al­ly crit­i­cal view of the deci­sions made by the West in rela­tion to the foment­ing of both con­flicts.

But it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly worth not­ing his take on the sit­u­a­tion in Ukraine, in large part because he’s been a crit­ic of the US’s pol­i­cy in Ukraine. It’s espe­cial­ly worth not­ing Kissinger’s per­spec­tive giv­en the lack of any viable ‘off ramp’ for the cur­rent war in Ukraine: As Kissinger describes it, Ukraine should have nev­er been seen as a future mem­ber of NATO, espe­cial­ly giv­en that many of its ter­ri­to­ries were long viewed by Rus­sia as essen­tial­ly Russ­ian lands, even if the Ukraini­ans dis­agreed. But, as Kissinger sees it, the die has been cast now that the inva­sion has hap­pened. As Kissinger puts it, “now I con­sid­er, one way or the oth­er, for­mal­ly or not, Ukraine has to be treat­ed in the after­math of this as a mem­ber of NATO.” So that’s a pret­ty big state­ment com­ing from Kissinger. But there’s a catch. Kissinger goes on to add that he fore­sees a set­tle­ment that pre­serves Russia’s gains from its ini­tial incur­sion in 2014, when it seized Crimea and por­tions of the Don­bass region. Now, Rus­sia has already seized quite a bit of ter­ri­to­ry well beyond Crimea and the the sep­a­ratist republics, so it would appear that Kissinger is tak­ing a stance that sug­gests Ukraine and NATO should set a goal of dri­ving Rus­sia back to the pre-2022 inva­sion bor­ders. But giv­en that this is Kissinger we’re talk­ing about we can rea­son­ably assume he would be flex­i­ble on those details.

So in Kissinger’s view, the US and the West kind of blun­dered its way into this show­down with Rus­sia dri­ven, in part, from a lack of long-term strate­gic think­ing on the part of US pol­i­cy-mak­ers. Long-term real­is­tic strate­gic think­ing that goes beyond sim­ply con­tain­ing Rus­sia and Chi­na and envi­sions how to live and sur­vive in a world where the US isn’t the sole mil­i­tary super­pow­er. The kind of strate­gic think­ing that man­aged to get the world through the Cold War with­out things get­ting to ‘hot’. But here we are with a major cri­sis in Ukraine. And in Kissinger’s view the way out of that cri­sis will include both the kind of resolve that kept the West unit­ed cur­ing the Cold War — like grant­i­ng Ukraine a kind of de fac­to NATO-like sta­tus — while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rec­og­niz­ing the need for real­is­tic com­pro­mise in areas like Crimea and the Don­bass. A strate­gic main­te­nance of a nuclear equi­lib­ri­um that Kissinger sees as cur­rent­ly wild­ly out of bal­ance:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

Hen­ry Kissinger Is Wor­ried About ‘Dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um’

The 99-year-old for­mer sec­re­tary of state has just pub­lished a book on lead­er­ship and sees a dan­ger­ous lack of strate­gic pur­pose in U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy

By Lau­ra Sec­or
Aug. 12, 2022 1:27 pm ET

At 99 years old, Hen­ry Kissinger has just pub­lished his 19th book, “Lead­er­ship: Six Stud­ies in World Strat­e­gy.” It is an analy­sis of the vision and his­tor­i­cal achieve­ments of an idio­syn­crat­ic pan­theon of post-World War II lead­ers: Kon­rad Ade­nauer, Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan-Yew and Mar­garet Thatch­er.

In the 1950s, “before I was involved in pol­i­tics,” Mr. Kissinger tells me in his mid­town Man­hat­tan office on a steamy day in July, “my plan was to write a book about the mak­ing of peace and the end­ing of peace in the 19th cen­tu­ry, start­ing with the Con­gress of Vien­na, and that turned into a book, and then I had about a third of a book writ­ten on Bis­mar­ck, and it was going to end with the out­break of World War I.” The new book, he says, “is a kind of con­tin­u­a­tion. It’s not just a con­tem­po­rary reflec­tion.”

All six fig­ures pro­filed in “Lead­er­ship,” says the for­mer sec­re­tary of state and nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, were shaped by what he calls the “sec­ond Thir­ty Years’ War,” the peri­od from 1914 to 1945, and con­tributed to mold­ing the world that fol­lowed it. And all com­bined, in Mr. Kissinger’s view, two arche­types of lead­er­ship: the far­sight­ed prag­ma­tism of the states­man and the vision­ary bold­ness of the prophet.

...

One nev­er goes long in con­ver­sa­tion with Mr. Kissinger with­out hear­ing that word—pur­pose—the defin­ing qual­i­ty of the prophet, along with anoth­er, equi­lib­ri­um, the guid­ing pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of the states­man. Since the 1950s, when he was a Har­vard schol­ar writ­ing on nuclear strat­e­gy, Mr. Kissinger has under­stood diplo­ma­cy as a bal­anc­ing act among great pow­ers shad­owed by the poten­tial for nuclear cat­a­stro­phe. The apoc­a­lyp­tic poten­tial of mod­ern weapons tech­nol­o­gy, in his view, makes sus­tain­ing an equi­lib­ri­um of hos­tile pow­ers, how­ev­er uneasy it might be, an over­rid­ing imper­a­tive of inter­na­tion­al rela­tions.

“In my think­ing, equi­lib­ri­um has two com­po­nents,” he tells me. “A kind of bal­ance of pow­er, with an accep­tance of the legit­i­ma­cy of some­times oppos­ing val­ues. Because if you believe that the final out­come of your effort has to be the impo­si­tion of your val­ues, then I think equi­lib­ri­um is not pos­si­ble. So one lev­el is a sort of absolute equi­lib­ri­um.” The oth­er lev­el, he says, is “equi­lib­ri­um of con­duct, mean­ing there are lim­i­ta­tions to the exer­cise of your own capa­bil­i­ties and pow­er in rela­tion to what is need­ed for the over­all equi­lib­ri­um.” Achiev­ing this com­bi­na­tion takes “an almost artis­tic skill,” he says. “It’s not very often that states­men have aimed at it delib­er­ate­ly, because pow­er had so many pos­si­bil­i­ties of being expand­ed with­out being dis­as­trous that coun­tries nev­er felt that full oblig­a­tion.”

Mr. Kissinger con­cedes that equi­lib­ri­um, while essen­tial, can’t be a val­ue in itself. “There can be sit­u­a­tions where coex­is­tence is moral­ly impos­si­ble,” he notes. “For exam­ple, with Hitler. With Hitler it was use­less to dis­cuss equilibrium—even though I have some sym­pa­thy for Cham­ber­lain if he was think­ing that he need­ed to gain time for a show­down that he thought would be inevitable any­way.”

There is a hint, in “Lead­er­ship,” of Mr. Kissinger’s hope that con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can states­men might absorb the lessons of their pre­de­ces­sors. “I think that the cur­rent peri­od has a great trou­ble defin­ing a direc­tion,” Mr. Kissinger says. “It’s very respon­sive to the emo­tion of the moment.” Amer­i­cans resist sep­a­rat­ing the idea of diplo­ma­cy from that of “per­son­al rela­tion­ships with the adver­sary.” They tend to view nego­ti­a­tions, he tells me, in mis­sion­ary rather than psy­cho­log­i­cal terms, seek­ing to con­vert or con­demn their inter­locu­tors rather than to pen­e­trate their think­ing.

Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verg­ing on a dan­ger­ous dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um. “We are at the edge of war with Rus­sia and Chi­na on issues which we part­ly cre­at­ed, with­out any con­cept of how this is going to end or what it’s sup­posed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. man­age the two adver­saries by tri­an­gu­lat­ing between them, as dur­ing the Nixon years? He offers no sim­ple pre­scrip­tion. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each oth­er. All you can do is not to accel­er­ate the ten­sions and to cre­ate options, and for that you have to have some pur­pose.”

On the ques­tion of Tai­wan, Mr. Kissinger wor­ries that the U.S. and Chi­na are maneu­ver­ing toward a cri­sis, and he coun­sels steadi­ness on Washington’s part. “The pol­i­cy that was car­ried out by both par­ties has pro­duced and allowed the progress of Tai­wan into an autonomous demo­c­ra­t­ic enti­ty and has pre­served peace between Chi­na and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very care­ful, there­fore, in mea­sures that seem to change the basic struc­ture.”

Mr. Kissinger court­ed con­tro­ver­sy ear­li­er this year by sug­gest­ing that incau­tious poli­cies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the cri­sis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stat­ed secu­ri­ty con­cerns seri­ous­ly and believes that it was a mis­take for NATO to sig­nal to Ukraine that it might even­tu­al­ly join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the tra­di­tion­al West­ern coun­tries that have been part of West­ern history—were log­i­cal mem­bers of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a col­lec­tion of ter­ri­to­ries once append­ed to Rus­sia, which Rus­sians see as their own, even though “some Ukraini­ans” do not. Sta­bil­i­ty would be bet­ter served by its act­ing as a buffer between Rus­sia and the West: “I was in favor of the full inde­pen­dence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was some­thing like Fin­land.”

He says, how­ev­er, that the die has now been cast. After the way Rus­sia has behaved in Ukraine, “now I con­sid­er, one way or the oth­er, for­mal­ly or not, Ukraine has to be treat­ed in the after­math of this as a mem­ber of NATO.” Still, he fore­sees a set­tle­ment that pre­serves Russia’s gains from its ini­tial incur­sion in 2014, when it seized Crimea and por­tions of the Don­bas region, though he does not have an answer to the ques­tion of how such a set­tle­ment would dif­fer from the agree­ment that failed to sta­bi­lize the con­flict 8 years ago.

The moral claim posed by Ukraine’s democ­ra­cy and independence—since 2014, clear majori­ties have favored EU and NATO membership—and the dire fate of its peo­ple under Russ­ian occu­pa­tion fit awk­ward­ly into Mr. Kissinger’s state­craft. If the avoid­ance of nuclear war is the great­est good, what is owed to small states whose only role in the glob­al equi­lib­ri­um is to be act­ed upon by larg­er ones?

“How to mar­ry our mil­i­tary capac­i­ty to our strate­gic pur­pos­es,” Mr. Kissinger reflects, “and how to relate those to our moral purposes—it’s an unsolved prob­lem.”

Look­ing back over his long and often con­tro­ver­sial career, how­ev­er, he is not giv­en to self-crit­i­cism. Asked if he has regrets from his years in pow­er, he replies, “From a manip­u­la­tive point of view, I ought to learn a great answer to that ques­tion, because it’s always being asked.” But while he might revis­it some minor tac­ti­cal points, on the whole, he says, “I do not tor­ture myself with things we might have done dif­fer­ent­ly.”

———–

“Hen­ry Kissinger Is Wor­ried About ‘Dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um’” By Lau­ra Sec­or; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 08/12/2022

““In my think­ing, equi­lib­ri­um has two com­po­nents,” he tells me. “A kind of bal­ance of pow­er, with an accep­tance of the legit­i­ma­cy of some­times oppos­ing val­ues. Because if you believe that the final out­come of your effort has to be the impo­si­tion of your val­ues, then I think equi­lib­ri­um is not pos­si­ble. So one lev­el is a sort of absolute equi­lib­ri­um.” The oth­er lev­el, he says, is “equi­lib­ri­um of con­duct, mean­ing there are lim­i­ta­tions to the exer­cise of your own capa­bil­i­ties and pow­er in rela­tion to what is need­ed for the over­all equi­lib­ri­um.” Achiev­ing this com­bi­na­tion takes “an almost artis­tic skill,” he says. “It’s not very often that states­men have aimed at it delib­er­ate­ly, because pow­er had so many pos­si­bil­i­ties of being expand­ed with­out being dis­as­trous that coun­tries nev­er felt that full oblig­a­tion.””

The chal­lenge isn’t just main­tain­ing the equi­lib­ri­um. It’s an equi­lib­ri­um of equi­lib­ri­ums. A bal­ance of val­ues and ambi­tions cou­pled with a bal­ance of con­duct and self-imposed lim­i­ta­tions. A bal­ance that has swung wild­ly out of whack in the case of the West­’s rela­tion­ship with Rus­sia. So much so that Kissinger now views some sort of de fact NATO-like sta­tus for Ukraine fol­low­ing Rus­si­a’s inva­sion. And yet, cru­cial­ly, Kissinger isn’t call­ing for some sort of NATO-backed expul­sion of Rus­sia from all of Ukraine. Some sort of set­tle­ment that pre­serves Rus­si­a’s pre-2022 ter­ri­to­r­i­al gains in the Don­bass and Crimea is going to be required. How that set­tle­ment dif­fers from the failed Min­sk agree­ments remains unclear, but Kissinger does­n’t appear to see an alter­na­tive to con­ced­ing those ter­ri­to­ries:

...
Mr. Kissinger court­ed con­tro­ver­sy ear­li­er this year by sug­gest­ing that incau­tious poli­cies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the cri­sis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stat­ed secu­ri­ty con­cerns seri­ous­ly and believes that it was a mis­take for NATO to sig­nal to Ukraine that it might even­tu­al­ly join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the tra­di­tion­al West­ern coun­tries that have been part of West­ern history—were log­i­cal mem­bers of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a col­lec­tion of ter­ri­to­ries once append­ed to Rus­sia, which Rus­sians see as their own, even though “some Ukraini­ans” do not. Sta­bil­i­ty would be bet­ter served by its act­ing as a buffer between Rus­sia and the West: “I was in favor of the full inde­pen­dence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was some­thing like Fin­land.”

He says, how­ev­er, that the die has now been cast. After the way Rus­sia has behaved in Ukraine, “now I con­sid­er, one way or the oth­er, for­mal­ly or not, Ukraine has to be treat­ed in the after­math of this as a mem­ber of NATO.” Still, he fore­sees a set­tle­ment that pre­serves Russia’s gains from its ini­tial incur­sion in 2014, when it seized Crimea and por­tions of the Don­bas region, though he does not have an answer to the ques­tion of how such a set­tle­ment would dif­fer from the agree­ment that failed to sta­bi­lize the con­flict 8 years ago.

The moral claim posed by Ukraine’s democ­ra­cy and independence—since 2014, clear majori­ties have favored EU and NATO membership—and the dire fate of its peo­ple under Russ­ian occu­pa­tion fit awk­ward­ly into Mr. Kissinger’s state­craft. If the avoid­ance of nuclear war is the great­est good, what is owed to small states whose only role in the glob­al equi­lib­ri­um is to be act­ed upon by larg­er ones?

“How to mar­ry our mil­i­tary capac­i­ty to our strate­gic pur­pos­es,” Mr. Kissinger reflects, “and how to relate those to our moral purposes—it’s an unsolved prob­lem.”
...

On one lev­el, it’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly remark­able that Hen­ry Kissinger feels some sort of realpoli­tik solu­tion is going to be required. Of course that’s his approach. He’s Hen­ry Kissinger.

What is notable, how­ev­er, is that Kissinger feels the need to pub­licly express these views in an inter­view where he is lament­ing what appears to be a long-term strat­e­gy by the US that lacks a strate­gic vision beyond con­tain­ing Rus­sia and Chi­na. In oth­er words, the long-term strate­gic vision for the US does­n’t appear to real­ly go beyond main­tain­ing the long-term strate­gic dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um of a unipo­lar world dom­i­nat­ed by a sin­gle mil­i­tary hyper­pow­er. That’s kind of the start and end of it. And main­tain­ing that kind of dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um in sta­tus invari­ably involves a dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um in action. It’s a recipe for the kinds of dis­as­ter Kissinger spent a lot of time think­ing about decades ago. At least that’s how Kissinger sees it.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Kissinger’s com­men­tary trig­gers any response from the US for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment. But giv­en that Kissinger’s the­sis appears to be that the US for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment lacks a coher­ent vision, a lack of a coher­ent response from that for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment might be more telling.

@Pterrafractyl–

Hen­ry the K is 99 years old!

Well, as they say, the good die young.

NB: As dis­cussed in FTR#‘s 1244 and 1245, among oth­er pro­grams, there is no con­vinc­ing evi­dence that Rus­sia ever “invad­ed” either the Don­bass or Crimea.

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr1244-how-many-lies-before-you-belong-to-the-lie-part-17/

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr1245-how-many-lies-before-you-belong-to-the-lie-part-18/

Anoth­er, major, prob­lem con­cerns would Rus­sia believe what the U.S. says?

Uncle Same and his sup­port­ing cast lied about, and/or, with­drew from:

1.–The march­ing of NATO to the East.

2. The ABM Treaty.

3.–The Open Skies Treaty.

4.–The Inter­me­di­ate Range Mis­sile Treaty.

5.–The Min­sk Accords.

Why would Rus­sia believe them now?

Hav­ing lived through Rock­e­feller pro­tégé Kissinger’s man­ag­ing of the secret B‑52 raids into Cam­bo­dia dur­ing the Viet­nam War, with the con­scious and achieved aim of killing 10,000 civil­ians a day, I would have a tough time believ­ing the Nobel Peace Prize win­ner’s words.

Keep up the great work!

Best,

Dave

I’ve read quite a few of your posts and lis­tened to many of your pod­casts, in fact I briefly vol­un­teered at KKUP maybe 44 years ago. Your research as always is impec­ca­ble, but I have one sim­ple ques­tion: At this point what do we do about it, oth­er than “get­ting the word out.”

Per­haps some clues are in a new book by Halik Kochan­s­ki: Resis­tance: the under­ground war against Hitler 1939–1945

The book cov­ers all of the resis­tance move­ments in Europe, not only in Poland (best orga­nized), Yugoslavia (largest), and France (over­hyped by Hol­ly­wood), but in all of the occu­pied coun­tries.

Myself, I believe we need to get smart and get stealthy, quick­ly.

Cheers.

@Khane Eudi­gette–

I’ve only been on the air for 43 years.

Oth­er than “get­ting the word out,” I don’t think there is any­thing to be done.

Social con­trol is main­tained by con­trol­ling the flow of infor­ma­tion.

Build­ing any kind of mil­i­tary resis­tance would play right into the hands of the Pow­ers That Be.

Thanks for the kind words.

Best,

Dave

Are we see­ing the start of a new phase in the con­flict between Rus­sia and the West? A phase that might involve vio­lent regime change oper­a­tions and tar­get­ed assas­si­na­tions? Those are the huge ques­tions raised by a stun­ning assas­si­na­tion of Daria Dug­i­na — daugh­ter of far right Krem­lin strate­gist Alexan­der Dug­in — over the week­end in a plot that appears to have tar­get­ed her father.

The FSB is point­ing the fin­ger as an alleged mem­ber of the Azov bat­tal­ion, Natalya Vovk, who appar­ent­ly slipped into the coun­try some time under cov­er with her 12 year old daugh­ter in July and man­aged to get an apart­ment on the same block of Dug­i­na. From there, Vovk sur­veilled Dug­i­na for a month before plant­i­ng a bomb on her car and then slip­ping out of the coun­try with her daugh­ter fol­low­ing the bomb­ing. The FSB has released video of the alleged assas­sin. It has­n’t yet been con­firmed if the women was indeed Vovk.

But if what the FSB claims is true it would be a huge intel­li­gence fail­ure, in part because Vovk was report­ed­ly doxxed back in April by Russ­ian hacked. And in that doxxed mate­r­i­al she was shown to be a mem­ber of the Azov bat­tal­ion. Russ­ian media is already cir­cu­lat­ing pho­tos of this doxxed Azov ID:

Krem­lin-linked media is post­ing what they say is Natalya Vovk’s ID card, which iden­ti­fies her as a mem­ber of the nation­al­ist Azov regiment.Not the most obvi­ous thing to take with you when you plot a car bomb­ing in Rus­sia pic.twitter.com/RNlBlGxfv6— max sed­don (@maxseddon) August 22, 2022

Note that while Max Sed­don under­stand­ably notes that it would be an unusu­al choice to take your Azov ID card with you on an under­cov­er assas­si­na­tion mis­sion, don’t for­get that she was report­ed­ly doxxed in April so that’s pre­sum­ably where these pho­tos came from.

At the same time, if you’ve been recent­ly doxxed and shown to be a mem­ber of Azov, it was be all the more remark­able that you choose to go on an under­cov­er assas­si­na­tion mis­sion in Rus­sia. With your 12 year old daugh­ter, no less. But that’s what the Russ­ian author­i­ties are claim­ing. It’s a wild sto­ry.

And it gets a lot wilder. Because we already have a group claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the bomb­ing: Ilya Pono­marev — a for­mer “lib­er­tar­i­an com­mu­nist” mem­ber of the Russ­ian Duma who was the only mem­ber to vote against the annex­a­tion of Crimea in 2014 — appeared on Ukrain­ian TV claim­ing his group — the Nation­al Repub­li­can Army (NRA) — car­ried out the attack. Pono­marev read from a man­i­festo that promised many more attacks on Rus­si­a’s lead­er­ship. It was basi­cal­ly a dec­la­ra­tion of vio­lent regime change cam­paign.

As Pro­fes­sor Ivan Katchanovs­ki not­ed in a series of tweets, Pono­marev also assert­ed that the tar­get­ing of Dug­i­na was in part revenge for the deaths of the Avoz POWs in Russ­ian-con­trolled prison camp in Oleniv­ka. It’s an impor­tant detail that’s left out of vir­tu­al­ly all of the cov­er­age of Pono­marev’s tele­vised claims:

Ex-oppo­si­tion mem­ber of Russ­ian par­lia­ment, who lives in exile in #Ukraine, relays admis­sion by “Nation­al Repub­li­can Army” of assas­si­na­tion of #Dug­in daugh­ter in revenge for killing of POWs from Neo-Nazi-led Azov in sep­a­ratist prison in #Don­bas & plan to assas­si­nate both of them— Ivan Katchanovs­ki (@I_Katchanovski) August 21, 2022

Keep in mind that the bomb­ing of the Azov POWs took place on July 29, just over three weeks pri­or to Dug­i­na’s bomb­ing. So if Vovk arrive in Rus­sia in July, it was pre­sum­ably before that bomb­ing took place.

But then Pro­fes­sor Katchanovs­ki makes this cru­cial obser­va­tion about Pono­marev’s claims of respon­si­bil­i­ty: Pono­marev also admit­ted links between the NRA and a group of Russ­ian neo-Nazis were where involved with an appar­ent pipeline-sab­o­tage plot inside Rus­sia last week. That’s part of the con­text of Dug­i­na’s assas­si­na­tion: it was a week after Russ­ian author­i­ties killed two mem­bers of a Russ­ian neo-Nazi gang alleged­ly involved with a pipeline plot they were coor­di­nat­ing with mem­bers of Azov:

Ex-mem­ber of Russ­ian par­lia­ment in exile in #Ukraine states his sup­port for NRA that admit­ted assas­si­na­tion of #Dug­in daugh­ter. He admits links to NRA & to group of Russ­ian neo-Nazis, who were report­ed­ly linked to neo-Nazi-led Azov & were recent­ly killed in Vol­gograd in #Rus­sia.— Ivan Katchanovs­ki (@I_Katchanovski) August 21, 2022

So last week we have Russ­ian author­i­ties appar­ent­ly thwart a Russ­ian neo-Naz­i/A­zov sab­o­tage plot. Then a week lat­er we have the car bomb­ing of Daria Dug­i­na, which Russ­ian author­i­ties imme­di­ate­ly blame on an alleged Azov mem­ber Natalya Vovk — with her 12 year old daugh­ter — who was doxxed months ago as an Azov mem­ber. At the same time, a for­mer mem­ber of the Russ­ian Duma appears on Kyiv-based TV claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty while acknowl­edg­ing that his group was involved with that Azov-con­nect­ed pipeline plot.

Oh, and it turns out Pono­marev gained Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship in 2019 and made his claims of respon­si­bil­i­ty on a Russ­ian-lan­guage oppo­si­tion TV chan­nel that was allowed to launch in Kyiv ear­li­er this year. So while the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment is insist­ing it had no involve­ment in the plot, the guy claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty just got to open a Kyiv-based TV chan­nel a few months ago. Again, it’s a wild sto­ry. And poised to get a lot wilder if Pono­marev’s claims about a sleep­er assas­sin army ready to wage more high pro­file attacks are true.

Ok, first, here’s a report in the Tele­graph describ­ing the FSB’s claims against Vovk. Note how the ana­lysts dis­miss­ing the claims are bas­ing their dis­missals on the idea that Vovk should­n’t have been able to slip in and out of Rus­sia unde­tect­ed after hav­ing already been doxxed back in April. So it sounds like the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the FSB’s claims hinge, in part, on whether or not it’s real­is­tic to imag­ine that some­one plan­ning an assas­si­na­tion cam­paign would be able to ade­quate­ly hide their iden­ti­ty:

The Tele­graph

Daria Dug­i­na: Moscow claims female ‘Azov fight­er’ behind car bomb escaped to Esto­nia in Mini Coop­er

Russ­ian offi­cials say Natalya Vovk brought her 12-year-old daugh­ter to Moscow to help her stake out Daria Dug­i­na, who died on Sat­ur­day

By James Kil­ner and Roland Oliphant, Senior For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent 22 August 2022 • 6:37pm

A moth­er serv­ing in the Ukrain­ian army slipped into Moscow to assas­si­nate a pro-war jour­nal­ist before escap­ing to Esto­nia in a Mini Coop­er, Russia’s FSB secu­ri­ty ser­vice claimed on Mon­day.

Russ­ian offi­cials said Natalya Vovk brought her 12-year-old daugh­ter to the cap­i­tal to help her stake out Daria Dug­i­na, 29, who was killed by a bomb plant­ed under the seat of her car on Sat­ur­day evening.

The FSB released a pass­port pho­to of Vovk along­side a video pur­port­ing to show her in Moscow. Pro-Krem­lin web­sites claimed she was part of the nation­al­ist Azov reg­i­ment, which Rus­sia accus­es of “Nazism”.

Ana­lysts raised doubts over the FSB’s swift res­o­lu­tion of the case and sug­gest­ed it was unlike­ly — or a sign of wor­ry­ing incom­pe­tence — that a Ukrain­ian sol­dier could have trav­elled so eas­i­ly into and out of the coun­try.

Dugina’s father, Alexan­der Dug­in, a blood­thirsty philoso­pher who backed the inva­sion, said only “total vic­to­ry” over Ukraine would make up for his loss.

Vladimir Putin announced Dug­i­na would receive a posthu­mous medal, and Ukrain­ian offi­cials sug­gest­ed the bar­rage of Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da could be the pre­lude to fur­ther attacks on Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence day on August 24.

Kyiv denies hav­ing any­thing to do with the assas­si­na­tion and offi­cials said Dug­i­na was too incon­se­quen­tial for them to both­er with in any case.

Accord­ing to the FSB, Vovk, 43, rent­ed an apart­ment in the same block as Dug­i­na and car­ried out sur­veil­lance for a month before tail­ing her to a fes­ti­val on the out­skirts of Moscow.

There she placed a bomb under Dugina’s car, the agency said, before escap­ing with her daugh­ter in a Mini Coop­er with fake license plates across the Rus­sia-Esto­nia bor­der.

The FSB released video of a woman dri­ving a Mini Coop­er in Moscow and enter­ing the apart­ment block where Vovk was said to have stayed. It was unclear if the woman in the video, who wore sun­glass­es in one sec­tion, was the same per­son in the pass­port pho­to.

In a state­ment released on Telegram, the Azov reg­i­ment denied hav­ing any link to Vovk and said the Krem­lin was seek­ing an excuse to car­ry out grue­some show tri­als of its fight­ers on Inde­pen­dence Day.

“The ter­ror­ist attack itself is a prepa­ra­tion for the ‘tri­bunal’ over the peo­ple of Azov,” the state­ment said. “After all, in this way, Rus­sia warms up the pub­lic opin­ion of its cit­i­zens regard­ing the ‘neces­si­ty’ of such a court”

Russ­ian media has already released images of cages being built for the tri­als in Mar­i­upol. As the Donet­sk People’s Repub­lic (DPR) per­mits the death penal­ty, the Azov fight­ers, who are accused of war crimes by Moscow, could be put to death.

In a state­ment released by the Krem­lin, Putin called the assas­si­na­tion of Dug­i­na a “cru­el crime”.

“She was a jour­nal­ist, sci­en­tist, philoso­pher, war cor­re­spon­dent, she hon­est­ly served the peo­ple, the father­land, she proved by deed what it means to be a patri­ot of Rus­sia,” he said.

Dug­in, whose ultra­na­tion­al­ist writ­ings Putin has cit­ed, said his “beau­ti­ful, ortho­dox” daugh­ter was assas­si­nat­ed before his eyes.

“We only need our vic­to­ry. My daugh­ter sac­ri­ficed her young woman’s life to its altar. So please, achieve it!” he said.

Mar­gari­ta Simonyan, the head of Rus­sia Today media hold­ings, threat­ened to poi­son Vovk, tweet­ing that Rus­sia might send a team to “admire the spires” of Tallin — a ref­er­ence to the GRU assas­si­na­tion team who car­ried out the Sal­is­bury Novi­chok attack.

Ana­lysts ques­tioned the FSB’s the­o­ry of the case.

Let­ting Vovk in and out of the coun­try “would sug­gest a pret­ty major fail­ure” on its part, said Mark Gale­ot­ti, an author on Rus­sia and direc­tor of Mayak Intel­li­gence con­sul­tan­cy.

“I think this is a major Krem­lin blindspot, to fail to appre­ci­ate how its evolv­ing nar­ra­tive is actu­al­ly paint­ing it as incom­pe­tent”.

Chris­to Gorozev, of the inves­tiga­tive web­site Belling­cat, said Russ­ian hack­ers were aware Vovk was a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary in April, hav­ing post­ed her details on a site encour­ag­ing “doxxing” as harass­ment on the inter­net is known.

“How did she get into Rus­sia with that eas­i­ly dis­cov­er­able mil­i­tary foot­print?” he said.

A range of alter­na­tive expla­na­tions for the killing was offered on Mon­day.

Ilya Pono­mary­ov, a for­mer Russ­ian law­mak­er turned Ukraine-based Krem­lin crit­ic, said on Sun­day evening that a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown group of Russ­ian mil­i­tants called the Nation­al Repub­li­can Army was respon­si­ble for Dugina’s killing.

No evi­dence was pro­vid­ed for the exis­tence of the group.

...

Gov­ern­ment work­ers in Kyiv were on Mon­day told to work from home this week over fears of strikes on min­istry build­ings in the city cen­tre, and civil­ians have been told not to cel­e­brate the bank hol­i­day in pub­lic.

It came as Mr Zelen­sky warned Rus­sia will destroy any chance of a nego­ti­at­ed peace with Ukraine if it goes ahead with a Nurem­berg-style tri­al of Azov pris­on­ers of war.

“If our peo­ple are made to take part in this spec­ta­cle in vio­la­tion of all agree­ments, all inter­na­tion­al rules, if there is abuse... This will be the line beyond which any nego­ti­a­tions are impos­si­ble,” he said.

————

“Daria Dug­i­na: Moscow claims female ‘Azov fight­er’ behind car bomb escaped to Esto­nia in Mini Coop­er” By James Kil­ner and Roland Oliphant; The Tele­graph; 08/22/2022

“The FSB released a pass­port pho­to of Vovk along­side a video pur­port­ing to show her in Moscow. Pro-Krem­lin web­sites claimed she was part of the nation­al­ist Azov reg­i­ment, which Rus­sia accus­es of “Nazism”.”

Yes, the FSB almost imme­di­ate­ly point­ed the fin­ger in the direc­tion of Natalya Vovk, who Rus­sia also accus­es of being a mem­ber of Azov, which the West­ern press still can’t open­ly acknowl­edge is a Nazi out­fit, hence the phras­es like “which Rus­sia accus­es of “Nazism””.

But if what the FSB asserts is true, it would indeed be an intel­li­gence fail­ure since it sounds like Vovk alleged­ly man­aged to rent an apart­ment on the same block of Dug­i­na and had her under sur­veil­lance. But intel­li­gence fail­ures hap­pen:

...
Accord­ing to the FSB, Vovk, 43, rent­ed an apart­ment in the same block as Dug­i­na and car­ried out sur­veil­lance for a month before tail­ing her to a fes­ti­val on the out­skirts of Moscow.

There she placed a bomb under Dugina’s car, the agency said, before escap­ing with her daugh­ter in a Mini Coop­er with fake license plates across the Rus­sia-Esto­nia bor­der.

The FSB released video of a woman dri­ving a Mini Coop­er in Moscow and enter­ing the apart­ment block where Vovk was said to have stayed. It was unclear if the woman in the video, who wore sun­glass­es in one sec­tion, was the same per­son in the pass­port pho­to.

...

Inter­est­ing­ly, while Azov denies any links to Vovk, it sounds like Russ­ian hack­ers doxxed her back in April as a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary. It’s that doxxing that is cit­ed is cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence sug­gest­ed that it could have been Vovk who car­ried this out since she was already a known enti­ty of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary. And as we saw, the Krem­lin is already cir­cu­lat­ed pur­port­ed pho­tos of Vovk’s doxxed mil­i­tary ID card that clear­ly iden­ti­fies her as being a mem­ber of Azov. So hack­ers doxxed her as a mem­ber of Azov (which would like­ly the point of the doxxing in the first place) back in April, then she appar­ent­ly slipped into Rus­sia with her 12 year old daugh­ter back in July and man­aged to rent an apart­ment on the same block as Dug­i­na and sur­veilled her for a month, and slip back out. It’s a pret­ty wild sto­ry if true. But, again, intel­li­gence fail­ures do hap­pen and it’s not like peo­ple don’t have means of con­ceal­ing their iden­ti­ties. Still, tak­ing her 12 year old daugh­ter with her on a mis­sion like that would be a rather extreme move:

...
In a state­ment released on Telegram, the Azov reg­i­ment denied hav­ing any link to Vovk and said the Krem­lin was seek­ing an excuse to car­ry out grue­some show tri­als of its fight­ers on Inde­pen­dence Day.

“The ter­ror­ist attack itself is a prepa­ra­tion for the ‘tri­bunal’ over the peo­ple of Azov,” the state­ment said. “After all, in this way, Rus­sia warms up the pub­lic opin­ion of its cit­i­zens regard­ing the ‘neces­si­ty’ of such a court”

...

Ana­lysts ques­tioned the FSB’s the­o­ry of the case.

Let­ting Vovk in and out of the coun­try “would sug­gest a pret­ty major fail­ure” on its part, said Mark Gale­ot­ti, an author on Rus­sia and direc­tor of Mayak Intel­li­gence con­sul­tan­cy.

“I think this is a major Krem­lin blindspot, to fail to appre­ci­ate how its evolv­ing nar­ra­tive is actu­al­ly paint­ing it as incom­pe­tent”.

Chris­to Gorozev, of the inves­tiga­tive web­site Belling­cat, said Russ­ian hack­ers were aware Vovk was a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary in April, hav­ing post­ed her details on a site encour­ag­ing “doxxing” as harass­ment on the inter­net is known.

“How did she get into Rus­sia with that eas­i­ly dis­cov­er­able mil­i­tary foot­print?” he said.
...

Final­ly, note how the planned Nurem­burg-style tri­al of the Azov sol­diers is being treat­ed by Kyiv as a deal­break­er for any peace nego­ti­a­tions. It under­scores the sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance that group has been ele­vat­ed to in Ukrain­ian soci­ety:

...
Russ­ian media has already released images of cages being built for the tri­als in Mar­i­upol. As the Donet­sk People’s Repub­lic (DPR) per­mits the death penal­ty, the Azov fight­ers, who are accused of war crimes by Moscow, could be put to death.

...

Gov­ern­ment work­ers in Kyiv were on Mon­day told to work from home this week over fears of strikes on min­istry build­ings in the city cen­tre, and civil­ians have been told not to cel­e­brate the bank hol­i­day in pub­lic.

It came as Mr Zelen­sky warned Rus­sia will destroy any chance of a nego­ti­at­ed peace with Ukraine if it goes ahead with a Nurem­berg-style tri­al of Azov pris­on­ers of war.

“If our peo­ple are made to take part in this spec­ta­cle in vio­la­tion of all agree­ments, all inter­na­tion­al rules, if there is abuse... This will be the line beyond which any nego­ti­a­tions are impos­si­ble,” he said.
...

So the FSB is imme­di­ate­ly blam­ing Azov, which denies any cul­pa­bil­i­ty. That brings us to the remark­able claims made by Ilya Pono­marev — a for­mer mem­ber of the Russ­ian Duma and the sole vote against the 2014 annex­a­tion of Crimea — claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty for the bomb­ing in a man­i­festo that promised many more attacks to come on Rus­si­a’s lead­er­ship. It was basi­cal­ly a dec­la­ra­tion of a vio­lent regime-change cam­paign.

And while the fol­low­ing arti­cle does­n’t men­tion how Pono­marev admit­ted that the attack was done in part as retal­i­a­tion for the bomb­ing of Azov POWs last month, don’t for­get that Pro­fes­sor Katchanovs­ki report­ed that Pono­marev did indeed make that claim. So we have what amount to a kind of dec­la­ra­tion of war against the Krem­lin made by some­one who was just giv­en per­mis­sion to launch their Kyiv-based Russ­ian-lan­guage oppo­si­tion TV chan­nel ear­li­er this year. At a min­i­mum it com­pli­cates the Kyiv gov­ern­men­t’s claims of no involve­ment:

The Guardian

Ex-Russ­ian MP claims Russ­ian par­ti­sans respon­si­ble for Moscow car bomb

Speak­ing in Kyiv, Ilya Pono­marev alleges bomb that killed daugh­ter of Putin ally was work of under­ground group

Luke Hard­ing
Sun 21 Aug 2022 13.54 EDT

A for­mer mem­ber of Russia’s Duma who was expelled for anti-Krem­lin activ­i­ties has claimed that Russ­ian par­ti­sans were alleged­ly behind a car bomb which blew up the daugh­ter of one of Vladimir Putin’s close polit­i­cal allies on the out­skirts of Moscow.

Speak­ing in Kyiv, where he is based, Ilya Pono­marev alleged the explo­sion on Sat­ur­day evening was the work of the Nation­al Repub­li­can Army, which he claimed was an under­ground group work­ing inside Rus­sia and ded­i­cat­ed to over­throw­ing the Putin regime.

...

“This action, like many oth­er par­ti­san actions car­ried out on the ter­ri­to­ry of Rus­sia in recent months, was car­ried out by the Nation­al Repub­li­can Army (NRA),” Pono­marev said. He was speak­ing in a 7pm broad­cast on Feb­ru­ary Morn­ing, a Russ­ian-lan­guage oppo­si­tion TV chan­nel he launched in Kyiv ear­li­er this year.

He added: “A momen­tous event took place near Moscow last night. This attack opens a new page in Russ­ian resis­tance to Putin­ism. New – but not the last.”

The blast killed Darya Dug­i­na, the 30-year-old daugh­ter of the Russ­ian polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor and far-right ide­o­logue Alexan­der Dug­in, both of whom had been sanc­tioned by the UK and US for act­ing to desta­bilise Ukraine.

Pono­marev said par­ti­sans inside Rus­sia were ready to con­duct fur­ther sim­i­lar attacks against high-pro­file Krem­lin-con­nect­ed tar­gets, includ­ing offi­cials, oli­garchs and mem­bers of Russia’s secu­ri­ty agen­cies.

The for­mer deputy read what pur­port­ed to be an NRA man­i­festo: “We declare Pres­i­dent Putin a usurp­er of pow­er and a war crim­i­nal who amend­ed the Con­sti­tu­tion, unleashed a frat­ri­ci­dal war between the Slav­ic peo­ples and sent Russ­ian sol­diers to cer­tain and sense­less death.

“Pover­ty and coffins for some, palaces for oth­ers – the essence of his pol­i­cy. We believe that dis­en­fran­chised peo­ple have the right to rebel against tyrants. Putin will be deposed and destroyed by us!”

Pono­marev con­firmed his com­ments in a mes­sage sent by text. A left­wing mem­ber of Russia’s par­lia­ment, he was the only deputy to vote in 2014 against the annex­a­tion of Crimea.

A venge­ful Krem­lin barred him when he was on a trip to the US from re-enter­ing his own coun­try. He became a Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen in 2019. In March, after the inva­sion of Ukraine, he launched Feb­ru­ary Morn­ing and Roz­par­ti­san, a Telegram chan­nel which gives news updates of anti-war actions in Russ­ian towns and cities.

Ponomarev’s feud with Putin is well known. His claim there is an active indige­nous under­ground move­ment seek­ing to assas­si­nate promi­nent sup­port­ers of the war inside Rus­sia would, if true, mark a dra­mat­ic esca­la­tion. It is like­ly to enrage – if not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­vince – the Krem­lin.

The alleged man­i­festo declared that the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment and region­al admin­is­tra­tions are Putin’s “accom­plices”.

“Those who do not resign their pow­er will be destroyed by us,” it said.

Oth­er tar­gets include cor­rupt busi­ness­men, the homes and prop­er­ties of those who fail to con­demn the Krem­lin and its war, and “employ­ees of pow­er struc­tures”. Mil­i­tary car­goes and peo­ple who prof­it from them will also be wiped out, it said.

...

Promi­nent Russ­ian hawks have demand­ed the Krem­lin respond by tar­get­ing gov­ern­ment offi­cials in Kyiv. “Deci­sion-mak­ing cen­tres!! Deci­sion-mak­ing cen­tres!!!” wrote Mar­gari­ta Simonyan, the edi­tor-in-chief of the state-fund­ed RT tele­vi­sion sta­tion, repost­ing a call to bomb the head­quar­ters of the Ukrain­ian SBU intel­li­gence agency.

———–

“Ex-Russ­ian MP claims Russ­ian par­ti­sans respon­si­ble for Moscow car bomb” by Luke Hard­ing; The Guardian; 08/21/2022

““This action, like many oth­er par­ti­san actions car­ried out on the ter­ri­to­ry of Rus­sia in recent months, was car­ried out by the Nation­al Repub­li­can Army (NRA),” Pono­marev said. He was speak­ing in a 7pm broad­cast on Feb­ru­ary Morn­ing, a Russ­ian-lan­guage oppo­si­tion TV chan­nel he launched in Kyiv ear­li­er this year.”

So Ilya Pono­marev made these claims on a Russ­ian-lan­guage oppo­si­tion TV chan­nel he launched in Kyiv ear­li­er this year. Mak­ing state­ments like that on a new­ly-launched Kyiv plat­form cer­tain­ly makes it more dif­fi­cult for Kyiv to deny any involve­ment.

And this was just an open­ly blow, accord­ing to Pono­marev. The Nation­al Repub­li­can Army (NRA) is ready for more high pro­file attacks on Rus­si­a’s lead­er­ship. That’s accord­ing to a Pono­marev’s man­i­festo:

...
Pono­marev said par­ti­sans inside Rus­sia were ready to con­duct fur­ther sim­i­lar attacks against high-pro­file Krem­lin-con­nect­ed tar­gets, includ­ing offi­cials, oli­garchs and mem­bers of Russia’s secu­ri­ty agen­cies.

The for­mer deputy read what pur­port­ed to be an NRA man­i­festo: “We declare Pres­i­dent Putin a usurp­er of pow­er and a war crim­i­nal who amend­ed the Con­sti­tu­tion, unleashed a frat­ri­ci­dal war between the Slav­ic peo­ples and sent Russ­ian sol­diers to cer­tain and sense­less death.

“Pover­ty and coffins for some, palaces for oth­ers – the essence of his pol­i­cy. We believe that dis­en­fran­chised peo­ple have the right to rebel against tyrants. Putin will be deposed and destroyed by us!”

...

The alleged man­i­festo declared that the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment and region­al admin­is­tra­tions are Putin’s “accom­plices”.

“Those who do not resign their pow­er will be destroyed by us,” it said.

Oth­er tar­gets include cor­rupt busi­ness­men, the homes and prop­er­ties of those who fail to con­demn the Krem­lin and its war, and “employ­ees of pow­er struc­tures”. Mil­i­tary car­goes and peo­ple who prof­it from them will also be wiped out, it said.
...

Final­ly, note how Pono­marev was report­ed­ly a left­wing mem­ber of Rus­si­a’s par­lia­ment, and the only deputy to vote against the annex­a­tion of Crimea in 2014. He described him­self as a “lib­er­tar­i­an com­mu­nist” dur­ing an inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2015. It’s a rather neb­u­lous term, at a min­i­mum:

...
Pono­marev con­firmed his com­ments in a mes­sage sent by text. A left­wing mem­ber of Russia’s par­lia­ment, he was the only deputy to vote in 2014 against the annex­a­tion of Crimea.

A venge­ful Krem­lin barred him when he was on a trip to the US from re-enter­ing his own coun­try. He became a Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen in 2019. In March, after the inva­sion of Ukraine, he launched Feb­ru­ary Morn­ing and Roz­par­ti­san, a Telegram chan­nel which gives news updates of anti-war actions in Russ­ian towns and cities.
...

So giv­en Pro­fes­sor Katchanovk­i’s obser­va­tion that Pono­marev has appar­ent­ly admit­ted links to a group of Russ­ian neo-Nazis recent­ly killed in Vol­gograd with an Azov-linked plot, here’s a report from least week about that plot. Accord­ing to the FSB, it was a planned pipeline attack being devised by were part of the so-called Restruct group, cre­at­ed by the nation­al­ist Max­im Martsinke­vich. Martsinke­vich was a Russ­ian neo-Nazi pre­vi­ous­ly jailed by Russ­ian author­i­ties after he made a video of him­self beat­ing and tor­tur­ing a gay Iraqi man in 2014. So it sounds like Pono­marev’s NRA has been palling around with Russ­ian neo-Nazi gangs. And based on Pro­fes­sor Katchanovski’s tweet it sounds like Pono­marev is open­ly admit­ting this. And that all sug­gests Pono­marev’s claims of addi­tion­al plots might be more than just puffery:

Ukrain­s­ka Prav­da

Russia’s FSB kills 2 Rus­sians, say­ing they “pre­vent­ed a ter­ror­ist attack” on oil pipeline

UKRAINSKA PRAVDA — MONDAY, 15 AUGUST 2022, 18:22

The Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion (FSB) announced that they had killed two Rus­sians who were sup­pos­ed­ly prepar­ing a “ter­ror­ist attack” on an oil pipeline in Vol­gograd Oblast “under the con­trol of Ukraine’s spe­cial ser­vices.”

Source: Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da news agency TASS with ref­er­ence to the Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion

Details: The Rus­sians say that the cit­i­zens killed dur­ing the deten­tion were part of the so-called Restruct group, cre­at­ed by the nation­al­ist Max­im Martsinke­vich (Tesak); he com­mit­ted sui­cide in a Russ­ian pre-tri­al deten­tion cen­tre in 2020.

Accord­ing to the FSB, one of those who organ­ised the “sab­o­tage” alleged­ly serves in the Azov bat­tal­ion; the oth­er is a Russ­ian from the Ura­han [Hur­ri­cane] bat­tal­ion.

The FSB reports that dur­ing their “oper­a­tion” they seized a high-pow­ered impro­vised explo­sive device, as well as two trau­mat­ic guns mod­i­fied for fir­ing live ammu­ni­tion.

...

———-

“Russia’s FSB kills 2 Rus­sians, say­ing they “pre­vent­ed a ter­ror­ist attack” on oil pipeline”; Ukrain­s­ka Prav­da; 08/15/2022

“The Rus­sians say that the cit­i­zens killed dur­ing the deten­tion were part of the so-called Restruct group, cre­at­ed by the nation­al­ist Max­im Martsinke­vich (Tesak); he com­mit­ted sui­cide in a Russ­ian pre-tri­al deten­tion cen­tre in 2020.”

The alleged pipeline sab­o­tage plot was being devised by the so-called Restruct group, cre­at­ed by the nation­al­ist Max­im Martsinke­vich. An impor­tant detail left out of this report is that Martsinke­vich was a Russ­ian neo-Nazi pre­vi­ous­ly jailed by Russ­ian author­i­ties after he made a video of him­self beat­ing and tor­tur­ing a gay Iraqi man in 2014. So if this is the crew Pono­marev has been hang­ing around with he appears to have strayed pret­ty far from his far left roots.

Also note the claims by Russ­ian author­i­ties that one of the orga­niz­ers of the plot serves in the Azov bat­tal­ion. A mem­ber of a Nazi bat­tal­ion work­ing with a Russ­ian neo-Nazi gang. Who knows if it’s true, but It tracks:

...
Accord­ing to the FSB, one of those who organ­ised the “sab­o­tage” alleged­ly serves in the Azov bat­tal­ion; the oth­er is a Russ­ian from the Ura­han [Hur­ri­cane] bat­tal­ion.
...

All in all, it’s quite a wild mys­tery. Last week, we had Russ­ian author­i­ties killing two cit­i­zens who appeared to be mem­bers of a Russ­ian neo-Nazi gang that was plot­ting pipeline attacks in con­cert with mem­bers of Azov. That was the FSB’s claims. Flash for­ward a week, and we have the bomb­ing of the daugh­ter of one of the most promi­nent fig­ures in Rus­sia. The FSB imme­di­ate­ly blames a pre­vi­ous­ly-doxxed mem­ber of Azov who alleged­ly man­aged to pull off a dar­ing under­cov­er assas­si­na­tion cam­paign with her 12 year old daugh­ter tag­ging along. But then a dis­si­dent for­mer par­lia­men­tar­i­an based in Kyiv claims respon­si­bil­i­ty on a Kyiv-based TV chan­nel he start­ed ear­li­er this year, claim­ing the bomb­ing was done in retal­i­a­tion for the deaths of the Azov POWs while and promis­ing many more attacks in the future. And this dis­si­dent, by his own admis­sion, also appears to have some sort of con­nec­tion to last week’s Azov-con­nect­ed pipeline plot. A lot of the details in this sto­ry seem rather unbe­liev­able and yet there’s no deny­ing the fact in this mys­tery are start­ing to gel. We’ll pre­sum­ably get a lot more updates on the nature of group behind this if Pono­marev’s warn­ings about many more attacks to come are cred­i­ble.

@Pterrafractyl–

Byzan­tine indeed!

A prob­a­ble expla­na­tion involves the com­plex nature of counter-intel­li­gence, dou­ble and triple agents.

The car­di­nal rule for a good dou­ble agent is to make one­self indis­pens­able to the effort.

A dou­ble agent work­ing for the oppo­si­tion is going to do things to fur­ther the cause they are osten­si­bly work­ing for.

My guess is that those con­sid­er­a­tions are at work here.

The fact Vovk was an appar­ent­ly doc­u­ment­ed Azov per­son may have facil­i­tat­ed her entry, with FSB attempt­ing to track her to iden­ti­fy oth­er ele­ments of the Nazi net­work that is alleged­ly at work in the coun­try.

In the ear­ly stages of the war, an SBU offi­cial claimed they had pen­e­trat­ed Russ­ian intel.

Note, also, the lev­el of lying that we have seen in the cov­er­age of the war: Ukraine win­ning (not), No Nazis in Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment (not) etc.

Also, note that Ukrain­s­ka Prav­da is an overt­ly OUN/B pub­li­ca­tion.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/05/12/army-of-secret-propagandists-in-ukraine-funded-by-u-s-to-win-western-hearts-and-minds-for-nato-policies/

Best,

Dave

Here’s a pair of arti­cles relate to the Russian/Iranian push to cre­ate a ‘Gas OPEC’ at the same time the ongo­ing Euro­pean ener­gy cri­sis con­tin­ues to only get worse as win­ter approach­es. They also indi­rect­ly relate the expect­ed dura­tion of war in Ukraine and the West­’s eco­nom­ic show­down with Rus­sia, because it sounds like Big Oil is prepar­ing the West for a future with­out Russ­ian oil and gas. A future that’s going to involve a lot more record prof­its for the ener­gy sec­tor:

So how much longer can we expect oil and gas short­ages across the con­ti­nent, bleed­ing into a ele­vate prices around the world? For years to come. That was pre­dic­tion recent­ly made by the heads of Shell and Total, and echoed by Euro­pean ener­gy min­is­ters. Bel­gium’s ener­gy min­is­ter pre­dict­ed dif­fi­cult times for Euro­pean ener­gy con­sumers for the next 5 to 10 years. Beyond that, there’s talk of tran­si­tion the EU to a future where it’s not reliant on Russ­ian oil and gas at all. A post-Rus­sia-pow­ered EU econ­o­my. Those were the kinds of com­ments were heard from the heads of Shell and Total and var­i­ous EU ener­gy min­is­ters dur­ing a sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny for a new car­bon cap­ture and stor­age facil­i­ty. Com­ments that do indeed sug­gest the EU — and the West in gen­er­al — is going to be deal­ing with high ener­gy prices for years to come.

Now, if the EU takes this oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly tran­si­tion to renew­able green ener­gy tech­nolo­gies, well, that could make an extend­ed peri­od of ele­vate prices worth it. If, on the oth­er hand, this ends up just being an extend­ed peri­od of record prof­its the ener­gy sec­tor, that would obvi­ous­ly be awful. So while it sounds like the EU is increas­ing­ly poised for an extend­ed mul­ti-year peri­od of painful­ly high ener­gy prices, it’s not at all clear what kind of EU econ­o­my we can expect by the end of that pain: is the EU going to expe­ri­ence a painful tran­si­tion to a green ener­gy tomor­row? Or just a painful peri­od of high prices and no green tomor­row and extra huge record prof­its for the ener­gy sec­tor?

The Guardian

Euro­pean gas short­ages like­ly to last sev­er­al win­ters, says Shell chief

Warn­ing rais­es prospect of con­tin­ued rationing, as Total boss says Europe has to plan for future with­out Russ­ian sup­plies

Gwyn Topham
Mon 29 Aug 2022 13.47 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Tue 30 Aug 2022 02.33 EDT

Gas short­ages across Europe are like­ly to last for sev­er­al win­ters to come, the chief exec­u­tive of Shell has said, rais­ing the prospect of con­tin­ued ener­gy rationing as gov­ern­ments across the con­ti­nent push to devel­op alter­na­tive sup­plies.

Cuts to the sup­ply of Russ­ian gas since the inva­sion of Ukraine have plunged Euro­pean coun­tries into a dev­as­tat­ing ener­gy cri­sis, dri­ving up whole­sale prices to leave con­sumers fac­ing huge bills and the high­est rates of infla­tion since the 1980s.

Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence in Nor­way on Mon­day, Ben van Beur­den said the sit­u­a­tion could per­sist for sev­er­al years. “It may well be that we will have a num­ber of win­ters where we have to some­how find solu­tions,” he said.

Van Beur­den said solu­tions to the ener­gy cri­sis would have to found through “effi­cien­cy sav­ings, through rationing and a very, very quick build­out of alter­na­tives”.

“That this is going to be some­how easy, or over, I think is a fan­ta­sy that we should put aside,” he added.

...

Rus­sia, the major sup­pli­er of gas to most of the EU before the war in Ukraine, has throt­tled exports in response to west­ern sanc­tions imposed since Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion six months ago. While not all EU coun­tries are direct­ly reliant on Russ­ian sup­plies, com­pe­ti­tion for scarce resources has pushed whole­sale Euro­pean gas prices up by a fac­tor of 12 com­pared with a year ago.

Britain sources lit­tle of its gas direct­ly from Rus­sia, although is exposed to soar­ing prices on the whole­sale mar­ket. Liz Truss, who is like­ly to be the next British prime min­is­ter, has so far refused to spell out what help she would give to house­holds as the price cap on ener­gy bills jumps 80% to £3,549 a year from Octo­ber.

Speak­ing on Mon­day, the pres­i­dent of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, Ursu­la von der Leyen, said a pack­age of emer­gency mea­sures would be unveiled soon. Speak­ing in Slove­nia as EU offi­cials work on a plan, which could be announced as ear­ly as this week, Von der Leyen said “emer­gency inter­ven­tions” would be intro­duced in addi­tion to longer-term ener­gy mar­ket reforms.

“Sky­rock­et­ing elec­tric­i­ty prices are now expos­ing, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, the lim­i­ta­tions of our cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty mar­ket design,” she said.

The French prime min­is­ter, Eliz­a­beth Borne, warned com­pa­nies that ener­gy could be rationed this win­ter, while Belgium’s ener­gy min­is­ter said the next five to 10 years could be dif­fi­cult.

Speak­ing along­side the Shell chief exec­u­tive in Nor­way, the head of anoth­er ener­gy com­pa­ny, TotalEnergies’s Patrick Pouyan­né, said Europe’s gov­ern­ments and pol­i­cy­mak­ers would have to plan for a future with­out Russ­ian gas.

The com­ments were made at a cer­e­mo­ny to mark a car­bon cap­ture and stor­age deal between the two firms, the Finan­cial Times report­ed. “If you think with­out it [Russ­ian gas], we will man­age. There is enough ener­gy in this plan­et to do with­out it,” Pouyan­né added.

...

Main­te­nance work is expect­ed to take place this week by Russ­ian state-owned com­pa­ny Gazprom on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that links Rus­sia and Ger­many via the Baltic Sea, com­pli­cat­ing efforts to fill up gas stor­age sites.

Whole­sale gas prices fell back on Mon­day after Germany’s econ­o­my min­is­ter said he expect­ed the country’s stor­age to be 85% full next month. How­ev­er, prices still remain more than triple the lev­el at the start of this year.

Soar­ing ener­gy prices have helped oil and gas com­pa­nies to record bumper prof­its, prompt­ing demands for wind­fall tax­es to help finance emer­gency sup­port for strug­gling house­holds and busi­ness­es. Shell made record prof­its of near­ly £10bn between April and June and promised to give share­hold­ers div­i­dends worth £6.5bn.

————

“Euro­pean gas short­ages like­ly to last sev­er­al win­ters, says Shell chief” by Gwyn Topham; The Guardian; 08/29/2022

“Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence in Nor­way on Mon­day, Ben van Beur­den said the sit­u­a­tion could per­sist for sev­er­al years. “It may well be that we will have a num­ber of win­ters where we have to some­how find solu­tions,” he said.”

The ener­gy emer­gency is going to be the sta­tus quo for years to come. That was the pre­dic­tion from Shell CEO Ben van Beur­den dur­ing a sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny for a new car­bon cap­ture stor­age deal. As Van Beur­den describes, the nec­es­sary solu­tions includ­ing a “very, very quick build­out of alter­na­tives”. He, of course, made these state­ments at the same time Shell is expe­ri­enc­ing record prof­it, which is reminder that Shel­l’s investors may not actu­al­ly share the expressed sense of urgency. The emer­gency sta­tus quo is going quite nice­ly for Shell:

...
Van Beur­den said solu­tions to the ener­gy cri­sis would have to found through “effi­cien­cy sav­ings, through rationing and a very, very quick build­out of alter­na­tives”.

“That this is going to be some­how easy, or over, I think is a fan­ta­sy that we should put aside,” he added.

...

Soar­ing ener­gy prices have helped oil and gas com­pa­nies to record bumper prof­its, prompt­ing demands for wind­fall tax­es to help finance emer­gency sup­port for strug­gling house­holds and busi­ness­es. Shell made record prof­its of near­ly £10bn between April and June and promised to give share­hold­ers div­i­dends worth £6.5bn.
...

Echo­ing those sen­ti­ments at the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny was the head of Total­En­er­gy, Patrick Pouyan­né, who indi­cat­ed that Euope need­ed to build a future with­out Russ­ian gas at all. In oth­er words, record prof­its for the ener­gy sec­tor for years to come...at least until that ener­gy sec­tor final­ly builds out the alter­na­tives that could replace Russ­ian ener­gy:

...
Speak­ing along­side the Shell chief exec­u­tive in Nor­way, the head of anoth­er ener­gy com­pa­ny, TotalEnergies’s Patrick Pouyan­né, said Europe’s gov­ern­ments and pol­i­cy­mak­ers would have to plan for a future with­out Russ­ian gas.

The com­ments were made at a cer­e­mo­ny to mark a car­bon cap­ture and stor­age deal between the two firms, the Finan­cial Times report­ed. “If you think with­out it [Russ­ian gas], we will man­age. There is enough ener­gy in this plan­et to do with­out it,” Pouyan­né added.
...

Now, if this was just ener­gy com­pa­ny exec­u­tives mak­ing these kinds of pre­dic­tions of ele­vat­ed ener­gy prices for years to come it would be eas­i­er to dis­miss this as wish­ful think­ing from the indus­try. But when you have Belgium’s ener­gy min­is­ter pre­dict­ing 5 to 10 more years of “dif­fi­cult” ener­gy prices, it sounds like EU gov­ern­ments are think­ing along sim­i­lar lines:

...
The French prime min­is­ter, Eliz­a­beth Borne, warned com­pa­nies that ener­gy could be rationed this win­ter, while Belgium’s ener­gy min­is­ter said the next five to 10 years could be dif­fi­cult.
...

And as the lessons from the UK price spikes remind us, this isn’t just an EU issue. The Euro­pean scram­ble to replace that Russ­ian gas and oil has been push­ing up whole­sale prices for every­one:

...
Rus­sia, the major sup­pli­er of gas to most of the EU before the war in Ukraine, has throt­tled exports in response to west­ern sanc­tions imposed since Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion six months ago. While not all EU coun­tries are direct­ly reliant on Russ­ian sup­plies, com­pe­ti­tion for scarce resources has pushed whole­sale Euro­pean gas prices up by a fac­tor of 12 com­pared with a year ago.

Britain sources lit­tle of its gas direct­ly from Rus­sia, although is exposed to soar­ing prices on the whole­sale mar­ket. Liz Truss, who is like­ly to be the next British prime min­is­ter, has so far refused to spell out what help she would give to house­holds as the price cap on ener­gy bills jumps 80% to £3,549 a year from Octo­ber.

...

Whole­sale gas prices fell back on Mon­day after Germany’s econ­o­my min­is­ter said he expect­ed the country’s stor­age to be 85% full next month. How­ev­er, prices still remain more than triple the lev­el at the start of this year.
...

And that brings us to the fol­low­ing arti­cle about the glob­al nature of the ener­gy price cri­sis. A glob­al cri­sis that’s lead­ing to record-break­ing prof­its for one oil and gas multi­na­tion­al after anoth­er:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Amid world crises, ‘grotesque greed’ wins out

Analy­sis by Ishaan Tha­roor
August 8, 2022 at 12:00 a.m. EDT

For months, spik­ing infla­tion has roiled poor and rich nations alike. The ris­ing costs, which have reached 40-year highs, are large­ly thanks to the cas­cad­ing glob­al effects of the pan­dem­ic com­bined with the sud­den sup­ply chain and ener­gy mar­ket dis­rup­tions that fol­lowed Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, as read­ers of this newslet­ter are well aware. Their effects have been deep and far-reach­ing.

Some coun­tries are already in the grips of painful eco­nom­ic con­trac­tions; for oth­ers, includ­ing the Unit­ed States, the prospect of reces­sion seems around the cor­ner. Europe, ensnared by its reliance on Russ­ian gas, is brac­ing for what’s being billed as a “win­ter of despair.” Aid agen­cies and U.N. offi­cials warn of hunger stalk­ing the plan­et, as price ris­es push sta­ples out of reach for tens of mil­lions of peo­ple. The glob­al macro­eco­nom­ic mael­strom has already col­lapsed one debt-rid­den, devel­op­ing econ­o­my (Sri Lan­ka), while oth­er nations (Zam­bia, Laos and Pak­istan, to name a few) find them­selves on the brink.

But for major multi­na­tion­al fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies, it’s the best of times.

Recent sec­ond-quar­ter earn­ings reports prof­fered eye-pop­ping fig­ures: BP post­ed sec­ond-quar­ter prof­its worth $8.5 bil­lion, its biggest wind­fall in 14 years. Exxon­Mo­bil went one fur­ther — its $17.9 bil­lion in net income was its largest-ever quar­ter­ly prof­it. U.S. com­pa­ny Chevron, Lon­don-based Shell and France’s Total­En­er­gies also record­ed block­buster results. Put togeth­er, these five major com­pa­nies made $55 bil­lion this past quar­ter, as hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple around the world bore the brunt of surg­ing prices at the pump.

And it’s not just oil and gas — coal, which cli­mate cam­paign­ers are des­per­ate­ly seek­ing to phase out, is surg­ing, too. Glen­core, the world’s largest coal ship­per, gen­er­at­ed record prof­its in the first half of 2022 and plans to pay out an addi­tion­al $4.5 bil­lion in div­i­dends and buy­backs to share­hold­ers.

The com­bined prof­its of the largest ener­gy com­pa­nies in the first quar­ter of this year are close to $100 billion.This grotesque greed of the fos­sil fuel indus­try and their financiers is pun­ish­ing the poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, while destroy­ing our only home.— António Guter­res (@antonioguterres) August 4, 2022

Unit­ed Nations Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al António Guter­res believes this state of affairs is abhor­rent. In remarks made last week, he ham­mered ener­gy com­pa­nies for price goug­ing at a time of glob­al cri­sis and urged gov­ern­ments to aggres­sive­ly tax these cor­po­ra­tions’ prof­its.

“It is immoral for oil and gas com­pa­nies to be mak­ing record prof­its from this ener­gy cri­sis on the backs of the poor­est peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties, at a mas­sive cost to the cli­mate,” Guter­res said, assum­ing once more his peren­ni­al role as the world’s town crier on the threat of cli­mate change and the need for gov­ern­ments to dras­ti­cal­ly reduce emis­sions.

“This grotesque greed … is pun­ish­ing the poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, while destroy­ing our only home,” he added.

A host of coun­tries, espe­cial­ly in Europe, have attempt­ed to raise funds off com­pa­nies that raked in mam­moth prof­its in the wake of Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine. There have been mixed results. Italy’s lame-duck gov­ern­ment recent­ly report­ed that its 25 per­cent wind­fall tax on Ital­ian ener­gy com­pa­nies had so far not yield­ed what author­i­ties expect­ed, with some com­pa­nies appear­ing to snub pay­ment. The funds are expect­ed to be redis­trib­uted to help strug­gling house­holds and busi­ness­es.

Last month, Britain’s Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment pushed through its own 25 per­cent wind­fall tax on com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in the North Sea, which offi­cials think will help raise an addi­tion­al 5 bil­lion pounds ($6 bil­lion) over the next year to help ordi­nary Britons with their ener­gy costs. The move was cast as insuf­fi­cient by oppo­si­tion Labour politi­cians, who want to see fur­ther tax breaks and sub­si­dies to oil com­pa­nies scrapped.

The Tories’ coun­ter­parts across the Atlantic are even more pro­tec­tive of fos­sil fuel con­cerns. Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­tion that would rein in price goug­ing and impose a form of wind­fall tax on U.S. com­pa­nies face a fun­da­men­tal road­block in Con­gress, with Repub­li­cans in the Sen­ate staunch­ly opposed to impos­ing such mea­sures on the oil indus­try.

Oil indus­try exec­u­tives have insist­ed they are rein­vest­ing some of their prof­its into projects that are part of a broad­er green ener­gy tran­si­tion. Some oil experts also con­tend that prof­itabil­i­ty in the ener­gy sec­tor is cycli­cal and sub­ject to the volatil­i­ty of the mar­ket. “The indus­try is cur­rent­ly enjoy­ing record lev­els of prof­itabil­i­ty, but two years ago the covid-relat­ed com­mod­i­ty crash was an epic deba­cle,” Pavel Molchanov of Ray­mond James invest­ment bank told my col­leagues.

Cli­mate cam­paign­ers argue that the bal­loon­ing prof­its of the past half-year and the snail’s pace of the ener­gy tran­si­tion are all part of the plan for fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tions, many of which have spent vast sums lob­by­ing Group of 20 major economies on curb­ing the scale and speed of their decar­boniza­tion poli­cies.

“For decades cli­mate pol­i­cy has been designed based on a the­o­ry that we can reduce demand for fos­sil fuels and increase the price of car­bon and that the mar­ket — tur­bocharged by alter­na­tives such as wind and solar that are now cheap­er than fos­sil fuels — will respond by con­strain­ing sup­ply,” wrote Tzepo­rah Berman in the Guardian. “But that’s not hap­pen­ing fast enough because there is cur­rent­ly no mech­a­nism to coun­ter­act the tax breaks, fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies and delay tac­tics that are dis­tort­ing the mar­kets.”

Down­stream from the boon of oil com­pa­ny share­hold­ers is the mount­ing hard­ship faced by hun­dreds of mil­lions of ordi­nary peo­ple around the world. Accord­ing to U.N. data, glob­al food prices have risen about 50 per­cent since Decem­ber 2019 — that is, before the onset of the pan­dem­ic. And since the start of this year, the price of crude oil rose 26 per­cent and, con­se­quent­ly, glob­al ship­ping prices surged 22 per­cent.

...

———-

“Amid world crises, ‘grotesque greed’ wins out” by Ishaan Tha­roor; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/08/2022

“But for major multi­na­tion­al fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies, it’s the best of times.”

It’s not just great times. It’s the best of times. At least if you’re a major multi­na­tion­al oil and gas firm. Not just Euro­pean firms. Chevron and Exxon­Mo­bil joined Shell and Total in record­ing block­buster returns. Even coal min­ers are get­ting in on the action. And when EU coun­tries have tied to claw back some of those exor­bi­tant prof­its, the com­pa­nies are appar­ent­ly just ignor­ing the wind­fall tax­es. Good times:

...
Recent sec­ond-quar­ter earn­ings reports prof­fered eye-pop­ping fig­ures: BP post­ed sec­ond-quar­ter prof­its worth $8.5 bil­lion, its biggest wind­fall in 14 years. Exxon­Mo­bil went one fur­ther — its $17.9 bil­lion in net income was its largest-ever quar­ter­ly prof­it. U.S. com­pa­ny Chevron, Lon­don-based Shell and France’s Total­En­er­gies also record­ed block­buster results. Put togeth­er, these five major com­pa­nies made $55 bil­lion this past quar­ter, as hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple around the world bore the brunt of surg­ing prices at the pump.

And it’s not just oil and gas — coal, which cli­mate cam­paign­ers are des­per­ate­ly seek­ing to phase out, is surg­ing, too. Glen­core, the world’s largest coal ship­per, gen­er­at­ed record prof­its in the first half of 2022 and plans to pay out an addi­tion­al $4.5 bil­lion in div­i­dends and buy­backs to share­hold­ers.

...

A host of coun­tries, espe­cial­ly in Europe, have attempt­ed to raise funds off com­pa­nies that raked in mam­moth prof­its in the wake of Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine. There have been mixed results. Italy’s lame-duck gov­ern­ment recent­ly report­ed that its 25 per­cent wind­fall tax on Ital­ian ener­gy com­pa­nies had so far not yield­ed what author­i­ties expect­ed, with some com­pa­nies appear­ing to snub pay­ment. The funds are expect­ed to be redis­trib­uted to help strug­gling house­holds and busi­ness­es.

...

And note the obser­va­tions from cli­mate activists regard­ing the claims from these oil giants that high ener­gy prices will help fuel a tran­si­tion to green­er alter­na­tives: It’s all talk and not actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing. And why would it with­out gov­ern­ments forc­ing it to hap­pen? The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is per­fect for the ener­gy giants. Why ruin it:

...

Oil indus­try exec­u­tives have insist­ed they are rein­vest­ing some of their prof­its into projects that are part of a broad­er green ener­gy tran­si­tion. Some oil experts also con­tend that prof­itabil­i­ty in the ener­gy sec­tor is cycli­cal and sub­ject to the volatil­i­ty of the mar­ket. “The indus­try is cur­rent­ly enjoy­ing record lev­els of prof­itabil­i­ty, but two years ago the covid-relat­ed com­mod­i­ty crash was an epic deba­cle,” Pavel Molchanov of Ray­mond James invest­ment bank told my col­leagues.

Cli­mate cam­paign­ers argue that the bal­loon­ing prof­its of the past half-year and the snail’s pace of the ener­gy tran­si­tion are all part of the plan for fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tions, many of which have spent vast sums lob­by­ing Group of 20 major economies on curb­ing the scale and speed of their decar­boniza­tion poli­cies.

“For decades cli­mate pol­i­cy has been designed based on a the­o­ry that we can reduce demand for fos­sil fuels and increase the price of car­bon and that the mar­ket — tur­bocharged by alter­na­tives such as wind and solar that are now cheap­er than fos­sil fuels — will respond by con­strain­ing sup­ply,” wrote Tzepo­rah Berman in the Guardian. “But that’s not hap­pen­ing fast enough because there is cur­rent­ly no mech­a­nism to coun­ter­act the tax breaks, fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies and delay tac­tics that are dis­tort­ing the mar­kets.”
...

End­less war cou­pled with end­less dither­ing on alter­na­tives is indeed the indus­try’s sweet spot. There’s no real deny­ing it. False promis­es from Big Oil about a green­er tomor­row is a cot­tage indus­try. A cot­tage indus­try set to get tur­bo charged with record prof­its for years to come. Record prof­its that are going to be a lot more sus­tain­able with­out green alter­na­tives or Russ­ian ener­gy.

That’s the depress­ing take­away les­son from these arti­cles: while it might be tempt­ing to assume that a peri­od of ele­vat­ed ener­gy prices is just what ‘the mar­ket’ needs to finance a tran­si­tion to a green ener­gy tomor­row, ‘the mar­ket’ might have oth­er ideas for how to spend those wind­fall prof­its. It’s all a reminder that the indus­tri­al scale col­laps­ing of the envi­ron­ment isn’t just an exis­ten­tial threat. It’s also the great­est prof­it oppor­tu­ni­ty in his­to­ry. Most­ly short-term prof­its, obvi­ous­ly.

The cel­e­bra­tion over Ukraine’s rapid recap­ture of lost ter­ri­to­ries around Kharkiv has unsur­pris­ing­ly already led to talk about the ‘lib­er­a­tion’ of the entire­ty of Ukraine’s lost ter­ri­to­ries, includ­ing the sep­a­ratist republics of Luhan­sk and Donet­sk. We’re even hear­ing talk of Ukraine dri­ving Rus­sia out of Crimea. And while all of that talk may be wild­ly pre­ma­ture, it’s worth not­ing what we aren’t hear­ing amidst all this talk about the recap­ture of those lost ter­ri­to­ries: what to do with all of the Russ­ian-speak­ing Ukraini­ans who actu­al­ly live in those ter­ri­to­ries, many who no longer feel any sense of loy­al­ty to a Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment that has long treat­ed them as an ene­my? What’s the plan for all of these peo­ple?

That’s the ques­tion the fol­low­ing piece wres­tles with. A piece made all the more pow­er­ful by the fact that it was writ­ten by a Ukrain­ian who clear­ly oppos­es Rus­si­a’s role in this con­flict and wants Ukraine to ulti­mate­ly win back all those lost ter­ri­to­ries. As the author puts it, the “super­flu­ous peo­ple” of East­ern Ukraine are basi­cal­ly going to be two choic­es: go live in Rus­sia, or stay in Ukraine in a soci­ety locked in a per­ma­nent men­tal war with Rus­sia and all things ‘Russ­ian’ includ­ing any inter­nal ‘Russ­ian’ ene­mies. A soci­ety defined by its oppo­si­tion to Rus­sia. An obses­sive oppo­si­tion poised to become the new ‘Great Rea­son’ for a per­ma­nent war foot­ing and a per­ma­nent inter­nal war against any­thing or any­one per­ceived to be sym­pa­thet­ic with a per­ma­nent ene­my always just over the bor­der. That’s the plan for these ‘super­fuous peo­ple’. At least that’s what we have to assume since there’s nev­er any talk about any oth­er plans for them:

Left East

The Super­flu­ous Peo­ple of East­ern Ukraine

By Ana­toli Ulyanov
Sep­tem­ber 10, 2022

Imag­ine you are a Russ­ian-speak­er in some bombed-out East­ern Ukrain­ian city, wait­ing to be lib­er­at­ed. Some of the “lib­er­a­tors” will be first check­ing your clos­ets for young men to mobi­lize and use as a Z‑branded canon fod­der. The oth­er lib­er­a­tors make it clear that they see you ?s noth­ing more than a “vat­nik,” a Homo Sovi­eti­cus. All that remains for you to choose is which knife you would like to be lib­er­at­ed with: the good knife of the vic­tim or the evil knife of the aggres­sor?

Lis­ten­ing to Olex­ey Danilov, the Sec­re­tary of Ukraine’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Defense Coun­cil, I under­stand that nobody is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the “rein­te­gra­tion of Don­bas.” What mat­ters is ter­ri­to­ry, prefer­ably cleared of the “superfluous”population. Peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly incon­ve­nient. All of them are so dif­fer­ent and nuanced, with their own views and iden­ti­ties. They need to be some­how glued togeth­er, rep­re­sent­ed. Nobody wants to trou­ble with this.

For if you want­ed to be in dia­logue with the inhab­i­tants of the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, you don’t tell them “It’s you who need to find a com­mon lan­guage with us, not the oppo­site”; you don’t accuse the granny of trea­son because she has chewed on human­i­tar­i­an aid from the Z‑truck; you don’t wipe your feet on the Sovi­et symbols–by now no longer ide­o­log­i­cal but social and cultural–that are part of someone’s mom and dad’s iden­ti­ties to the point that their destruc­tion means less of a polit­i­cal revenge (decom­mu­niza­tion) and more of social exclu­sions. Even the [Russ­ian] invaders thought of includ­ing Ukrain­ian lan­guage in Kher­son schools because pub­lic rela­tions mat­ters while the Ukrain­ian side can­not con­vey some image of tol­er­ance and inclu­sive­ness even at the lev­el of pro­pa­gan­da.

When you want the cit­i­zens of the invad­ing coun­try to rise up against their regime, you don’t call for their visas to be tak­en away and for them to be locked in a cage with Putin because they hap­pened to be born in the wrong place. You don’t say that all of them with­out excep­tion are “like that,” you don’t burn cul­tur­al bridges, you don’t chip off tablets with Bul­gakov, cas­trat­ing your­self to spite the ene­my …

Rus­sia is the aggres­sor here. This is crys­tal clear. What is not clear is what should attract these “super­flu­ous” Ukraini­ans to a coun­try that makes no effort to find a space for them. Noth­ing except for the sheer hor­ror of Rus­sia. It will be worse there; here it’s just bad. What is bet­ter – worse or bad? Bad is bet­ter, of course! That’s all the choice you are giv­en.

...

Now the uni­ty of soci­ety is ensured by the Russ­ian aggres­sion and the pres­ence of an exter­nal ene­my. As soon as the war is over, inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions will sharp­en.

War will become a uni­ver­sal argu­ment. It will serve to jus­ti­fy any prob­lems in the econ­o­my, any repres­sion, arbi­trari­ness. The vic­tim is always right. The vic­tim is allowed every­thing and not respon­si­ble for any­thing.

Since Rus­sia won’t dis­ap­pear from the globe, the prox­im­i­ty to it and the mem­o­ry of the inva­sion will always make it pos­si­ble, even nec­es­sary, to pre­pare for war. This is how the war becomes the Great Rea­son, the ques­tion and the answer, the uni­fy­ing, ini­ti­at­ing force, nation’s idea, our very orbit. In the mean­time, while the main exter­nal ene­my remains out of reach, we will deal with the reach­able, inter­nal “ene­my.”

Every­thing Sovi­et will be erased as part of the rejec­tion of this part of your­self; it will become shame­ful, repressed, lead­ing to the impov­er­ish­ment of cul­ture, dimin­ished inclu­siv­i­ty, the reduc­tion in the range of accept­able iden­ti­ties. Who is guilty here? Rus­sia. But this does not make it any eas­i­er for the “super­flu­ous” cit­i­zens.

We will see many grotesque per­for­mances of reject­ing “the lan­guage of the invaders,” as many peo­ple fol­low either the direc­tion of the pre­vail­ing winds or the log­ic “since my grand­moth­er was Rus­si­fied, I will now rape myself in pub­lic.”

Ukraini­ans who sur­vived the war in Ukraine will nat­u­ral­ly feel more enti­tled than those who sur­vived it in Berlin, but peo­ple in Lviv or Kiev won’t apply this log­ic to the IDPs and res­i­dents of the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, who had the most imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence of the war. Because it’s “them” who have to find a com­mon lan­guage with “us”.

Any appeals to pro­tect the rights of “super­flu­ous” cit­i­zens will be declared some­thing sus­pi­cious, fake, Krem­lin-backed, and arti­fi­cial, unre­al­is­tic or even dan­ger­ous. Some­thing that the Ukrain­ian state had tol­er­at­ed far too long, some­thing that led to the cur­rent war, so now is the time to deal with it once and for­ev­er.

I see noth­ing good in store for these “super­flu­ous” Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens. Some­thing like dou­ble-life in silence and per­formed con­sent with “patri­ot­ic stan­dards,” at best. Being a stranger in your own coun­try. The new oppres­sions will be jus­ti­fied by the old ones, mak­ing them con­tin­u­ous, end­less and, seem­ing­ly, just.

...

————

“The Super­flu­ous Peo­ple of East­ern Ukraine” by Ana­toli Ulyanov; Left East; 09/10/2022

“Since Rus­sia won’t dis­ap­pear from the globe, the prox­im­i­ty to it and the mem­o­ry of the inva­sion will always make it pos­si­ble, even nec­es­sary, to pre­pare for war. This is how the war becomes the Great Rea­son, the ques­tion and the answer, the uni­fy­ing, ini­ti­at­ing force, nation’s idea, our very orbit. In the mean­time, while the main exter­nal ene­my remains out of reach, we will deal with the reach­able, inter­nal “ene­my.””

The writ­ing is on the wall. It’s abun­dant­ly clear that there is zero inter­est insid­er the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment in any mean­ing­ful rein­te­gra­tion of the ‘super­flu­ous’ pop­u­la­tions in the coun­try’s east. On the con­trary, all signs point towards these pop­u­la­tions becom­ing the new inter­nal ene­my who pre­cip­i­tat­ing the war and who will have to be dealt with once and for­ev­er:

...
Lis­ten­ing to Olex­ey Danilov, the Sec­re­tary of Ukraine’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Defense Coun­cil, I under­stand that nobody is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the “rein­te­gra­tion of Don­bas.” What mat­ters is ter­ri­to­ry, prefer­ably cleared of the “superfluous”population. Peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly incon­ve­nient. All of them are so dif­fer­ent and nuanced, with their own views and iden­ti­ties. They need to be some­how glued togeth­er, rep­re­sent­ed. Nobody wants to trou­ble with this.

...

Every­thing Sovi­et will be erased as part of the rejec­tion of this part of your­self; it will become shame­ful, repressed, lead­ing to the impov­er­ish­ment of cul­ture, dimin­ished inclu­siv­i­ty, the reduc­tion in the range of accept­able iden­ti­ties. Who is guilty here? Rus­sia. But this does not make it any eas­i­er for the “super­flu­ous” cit­i­zens.

We will see many grotesque per­for­mances of reject­ing “the lan­guage of the invaders,” as many peo­ple fol­low either the direc­tion of the pre­vail­ing winds or the log­ic “since my grand­moth­er was Rus­si­fied, I will now rape myself in pub­lic.”

Ukraini­ans who sur­vived the war in Ukraine will nat­u­ral­ly feel more enti­tled than those who sur­vived it in Berlin, but peo­ple in Lviv or Kiev won’t apply this log­ic to the IDPs and res­i­dents of the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, who had the most imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence of the war. Because it’s “them” who have to find a com­mon lan­guage with “us”.

Any appeals to pro­tect the rights of “super­flu­ous” cit­i­zens will be declared some­thing sus­pi­cious, fake, Krem­lin-backed, and arti­fi­cial, unre­al­is­tic or even dan­ger­ous. Some­thing that the Ukrain­ian state had tol­er­at­ed far too long, some­thing that led to the cur­rent war, so now is the time to deal with it once and for­ev­er.
...

And let’s not for­get that it’s going to be groups like Azov and oth­er mod­ern-day off­shoots of the OUN‑B/UPA per­pe­tra­tors of Holo­caust in Ukraine who are like­ly to be play­ing increas­ing­ly promi­nent roles in Ukraine’s nation­al secu­ri­ty state for the fore­see­able future.

So while it may seem like there’s no plan for these ‘super­flu­ous’ pop­u­la­tions, we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent that groups like Azov or polit­i­cal par­ties like Svo­bo­da have a plan for deal­ing with pop­u­la­tions they would rather just dis­ap­pear. That’s all part of the grim con­text of this sto­ry: just because we aren’t hear­ing from Ukraine’s lead­er­ship about plans for the rein­te­gra­tion of the Don­bass and Crimea, that does­n’t mean there aren’t plans. These move­ments do have a his­to­ry of get­ting away with unspeak­ably hor­rif­ic plans no one was open­ly talk­ing about, after all.

With Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin declar­ing a nation­al mobi­liza­tion for the war in Ukraine and the prospects of years-long con­flict grow­ing by the day, here’s a pair of arti­cles to keep in mind regard­ing the grow­ing role of the US as Europe’s ener­gy-sup­pli­er of choice. Because as the arti­cles make clear, the longer this war in Ukraine goes, the greater the fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tions to both the Euro­pean and US economies. Because the longer the con­flict goes, the more we should expect to see Euro­pean heavy indus­tries lit­er­al­ly relo­cate their long-term oper­a­tions to the US in search of steady cheap ener­gy. Euro­pean indus­tries can han­dle a cou­ple of years of ele­vat­ed ener­gy prices, but beyond that they’re going to to start look­ing else­where.

And with the recent pas­sage of the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, the US is an even more tempt­ing long-term des­ti­na­tion. That’s large­ly thanks to the indus­tri­al sub­si­dies for ‘blue hydro­gen’ — hydro­gen pro­duced from fos­sil fuels where the car­bon pro­duced is cap­ture — that form one of the cen­ter­pieces of the bill. Sub­si­dies for pro­duc­tion of blue car­bon are guar­an­teed for the next decade and will obvi­ous­ly like­ly be extend­ed. And thanks to those sub­si­dies, there’s an expect­ed explo­sion of invest­ments in US hydro­gen pro­duc­tion. Hydro­gen that is pro­ject­ed to be dom­i­nat­ed by use in the trans­porta­tion indus­try (to pow­er elec­tric vehi­cles) but can also be used for every­thing from elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion to cok­ing coal in steel pro­duc­tion. In oth­er words, thanks to a war with no end, the new­ly sub­si­dized US hydro­gen econ­o­my is exact­ly what ener­gy-hun­gry Euro­pean indus­tries are increas­ing­ly look­ing for:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

High Nat­ur­al-Gas Prices Push Euro­pean Man­u­fac­tur­ers to Shift to the U.S.

The Ukraine war is dri­ving up ener­gy costs in Europe, while rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble prices and green-ener­gy incen­tives are lur­ing com­pa­nies to the U.S.

By David Uber­ti
Sept. 21, 2022 7:00 am ET

AMSTERDAM—A big win­ner from the ener­gy cri­sis in Europe: the U.S. econ­o­my.

Bat­tered by sky­rock­et­ing gas prices, com­pa­nies in Europe that make steel, fer­til­iz­er and oth­er feed­stocks of eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty are shift­ing oper­a­tions to the U.S., attract­ed by more sta­ble ener­gy prices and mus­cu­lar gov­ern­ment sup­port.

As wild swings in ener­gy prices and per­sis­tent sup­ply-chain trou­bles threat­en Europe with what some econ­o­mists warn could be a new era of dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, Wash­ing­ton has unveiled a raft of incen­tives for man­u­fac­tur­ing and green ener­gy. The upshot is a play­ing field increas­ing­ly tilt­ed in the U.S.’s favor, exec­u­tives say, par­tic­u­lar­ly for com­pa­nies plac­ing bets on projects to make chem­i­cals, bat­ter­ies and oth­er ener­gy-inten­sive prod­ucts.

“It’s a no-brain­er to go and do that in the Unit­ed States,” said Ahmed El-Hoshy, chief exec­u­tive of Ams­ter­dam-based chem­i­cal firm OCI NV, which this month announced an expan­sion of an ammo­nia plant in Texas.

...

Dan­ish jew­el­ry com­pa­ny Pan­do­ra A/S and Ger­man auto mak­er Volk­swa­gen AG announced U.S. expan­sions ear­li­er this year. Last week, The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed Tes­la Inc. is paus­ing its plans to make bat­tery cells in Ger­many as it looks at qual­i­fy­ing for tax cred­its under the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act signed by Pres­i­dent Biden in August.

Europe remains a desir­able mar­ket for advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and boasts a skilled indus­tri­al work­force, ana­lysts and investors say. With pent-up demand from the pan­dem­ic, many com­pa­nies that have seen explod­ing ener­gy prices in recent months have passed them on to cus­tomers. The ques­tion is how long the high­er nat­ur­al-gas prices will last.

Some econ­o­mists have warned that nat­ur­al-gas pro­duc­ers from Cana­da to the U.S. and Qatar may strug­gle to ful­ly replace Rus­sia as a sup­pli­er for Europe in the medi­um term. If so, the con­ti­nent could face high prices, at least for gas, well into 2024, threat­en­ing to make the scar­ring on Europe’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor per­ma­nent.

“I think we’ll mud­dle through two win­ters,” said Ste­fan Bor­gas, chief exec­u­tive of RHI Mag­ne­si­ta NV. If the con­ti­nent can’t find cheap­er gas or ramp up renew­able ener­gy, he added, “com­pa­nies will start to look else­where.”

The Aus­tri­an busi­ness, which makes mate­ri­als used by firms such as steel­mak­ers to with­stand intense heat, is spend­ing about 8 mil­lion euros, equiv­a­lent to about $8 mil­lion, on its Euro­pean plants so cer­tain process­es run on alter­na­tive fuel such as coal or oil. It is also stor­ing nat­ur­al gas in a rent­ed under­ground facil­i­ty for­mer­ly owned by Krem­lin-con­trolled Gazprom and seized by the Aus­tri­an gov­ern­ment.

Mr. Bor­gas is bull­ish on steel demand in the U.S., where incen­tives have also bright­ened the green-ener­gy out­look. Man­u­fac­tur­ers like RHI Mag­ne­si­ta see hydro­gen as key to replac­ing fos­sil fuels and reduc­ing emis­sions in plants across Europe, the U.S. and else­where. Promised spend­ing on such projects by Wash­ing­ton is expect­ed to boost the pro­duc­tion of hydro­gen and even­tu­al­ly low­er its price.

“We are increas­ing our invest­ments [in the U.S.] also in order to stay with all of our part­ners who are invest­ing,” he said. “We are very, very pos­i­tive on the U.S.”

Lux­em­bourg-based Arcelor­Mit­tal SA, which this month said it would cut pro­duc­tion at two Ger­man plants, report­ed bet­ter-than-expect­ed per­for­mance by an invest­ment this year in a Texas facil­i­ty that makes hot bri­quet­ted iron, a raw mate­r­i­al for steel pro­duc­tion. In a July earn­ings call, Chief Exec­u­tive Aditya Mit­tal attrib­uted the facility’s val­ue in part to being in a “region that offers high­ly com­pet­i­tive ener­gy and, ulti­mate­ly, com­pet­i­tive hydro­gen.”

“I would just add that we also own 100% of future expan­sion in that facil­i­ty,” Mr. Mit­tal said.

Many com­pa­nies remain cau­tious about chang­ing their strate­gies because of the dif­fi­cul­ty of build­ing projects such as alu­minum smelters, which can cost bil­lions and take years to com­plete.

“It remains to be seen whether this will be a struc­tur­al change or one of a tem­po­rary nature,” said a spokes­woman for Ger­man chem­i­cal giant BASF, one of Europe’s largest buy­ers of nat­ur­al gas, which has cut pro­duc­tion in Bel­gian and Ger­man plants.

OCI, which has slashed its Euro­pean ammo­nia out­put, has instead ramped up imports to its facil­i­ty at the Dutch port of Rot­ter­dam. To facil­i­tate such ship­ments, OCI is expand­ing its Beau­mont, Texas, plant with an invest­ment val­ued in the “high hun­dreds of mil­lions” of dol­lars, said Mr. El-Hoshy, the chief exec­u­tive.

At the new facil­i­ty, OCI will make ammo­nia derived from so-called blue hydro­gen, which relies on nat­ur­al gas, and then cap­ture car­bon diox­ide giv­en off by the process. Mr. El-Hoshy said the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act made the deal more appeal­ing by offer­ing cred­its for stor­ing such emis­sions.

“That, cou­pled with what’s hap­pen­ing with Rus­sia, are two rea­sons to say, well, maybe over time you don’t need to con­sume nat­ur­al gas [in Europe] and pro­duce the prod­uct,” he said.

Euro­pean man­u­fac­tur­ers may strug­gle to stay com­pet­i­tive with­out the low­er ener­gy prices or green incen­tives cur­rent­ly offered in the U.S., said Svein Tore Holsether, chief exec­u­tive of Nor­we­gian fer­til­iz­er giant Yara Inter­na­tion­al ASA.

“Some indus­tries, as a result of that, will per­ma­nent­ly relo­cate,” he said.

————-

“High Nat­ur­al-Gas Prices Push Euro­pean Man­u­fac­tur­ers to Shift to the U.S.” By David Uber­ti; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 09/21/2022

“Dan­ish jew­el­ry com­pa­ny Pan­do­ra A/S and Ger­man auto mak­er Volk­swa­gen AG announced U.S. expan­sions ear­li­er this year. Last week, The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed Tes­la Inc. is paus­ing its plans to make bat­tery cells in Ger­many as it looks at qual­i­fy­ing for tax cred­its under the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act signed by Pres­i­dent Biden in August.”

The US isn’t just becom­ing Europe’s new nat­ur­al gas provider of choice as a result of the war in Ukraine. With the pas­sage of the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act, and with the war in Ukraine look­ing like it could last for years, the US is increas­ing­ly being viewed as the loca­tion for future major indus­tri­al invest­ments under the premise of more sta­ble of afford­able long-term ener­gy costs. Euro­pean man­u­fac­tur­ers can han­dle a cou­ple of years of ele­vat­ed ener­gy prices. But if this goes on much longer than that, the US starts look­ing more and more like the place for major future indus­tri­al invest­ments. Invest­ments backed by the new US gov­ern­ment ‘blue hydro­gen’ sub­si­dies found in the new­ly-passed Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act. In oth­er words, the longer the war in Ukraine keeps ener­gy prices ele­vat­ed in Europe, the bet­ter the prospects for the US econ­o­my. It’s not exact­ly a healthy dynam­ic:

...
Europe remains a desir­able mar­ket for advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and boasts a skilled indus­tri­al work­force, ana­lysts and investors say. With pent-up demand from the pan­dem­ic, many com­pa­nies that have seen explod­ing ener­gy prices in recent months have passed them on to cus­tomers. The ques­tion is how long the high­er nat­ur­al-gas prices will last.

Some econ­o­mists have warned that nat­ur­al-gas pro­duc­ers from Cana­da to the U.S. and Qatar may strug­gle to ful­ly replace Rus­sia as a sup­pli­er for Europe in the medi­um term. If so, the con­ti­nent could face high prices, at least for gas, well into 2024, threat­en­ing to make the scar­ring on Europe’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor per­ma­nent.

“I think we’ll mud­dle through two win­ters,” said Ste­fan Bor­gas, chief exec­u­tive of RHI Mag­ne­si­ta NV. If the con­ti­nent can’t find cheap­er gas or ramp up renew­able ener­gy, he added, “com­pa­nies will start to look else­where.”

...

Many com­pa­nies remain cau­tious about chang­ing their strate­gies because of the dif­fi­cul­ty of build­ing projects such as alu­minum smelters, which can cost bil­lions and take years to com­plete.

...

OCI, which has slashed its Euro­pean ammo­nia out­put, has instead ramped up imports to its facil­i­ty at the Dutch port of Rot­ter­dam. To facil­i­tate such ship­ments, OCI is expand­ing its Beau­mont, Texas, plant with an invest­ment val­ued in the “high hun­dreds of mil­lions” of dol­lars, said Mr. El-Hoshy, the chief exec­u­tive.

At the new facil­i­ty, OCI will make ammo­nia derived from so-called blue hydro­gen, which relies on nat­ur­al gas, and then cap­ture car­bon diox­ide giv­en off by the process. Mr. El-Hoshy said the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act made the deal more appeal­ing by offer­ing cred­its for stor­ing such emis­sions.

...

Euro­pean man­u­fac­tur­ers may strug­gle to stay com­pet­i­tive with­out the low­er ener­gy prices or green incen­tives cur­rent­ly offered in the U.S., said Svein Tore Holsether, chief exec­u­tive of Nor­we­gian fer­til­iz­er giant Yara Inter­na­tion­al ASA.

“Some indus­tries, as a result of that, will per­ma­nent­ly relo­cate,” he said.
...

As we can see, the US made a very big bet on hydro­gen and this is coin­cid­ing with a Euro­pean ener­gy cri­sis with no end in sight. And the worse the sit­u­a­tion gets for Euro­pean indus­tries, the more tan­ta­liz­ing the ener­gy-sub­si­dized US-econ­o­my looks for those indus­tries. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle excerpt describes, the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act is grant­i­ng these sub­si­dies for 10 years, although we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent they’ll be extend­ed. Sub­si­dies for the ener­gy indus­try tend to linger. But that’s just part of what is expect­ed to be a mas­sive nation­al invest­ment in the hydro­gen econ­o­my and all of the infra­struc­ture need­ed for this econ­o­my. It’s a long-term agen­da. The kind of long-term agen­da that aligns well with the kinds of long-term decades-long invest­ments major indus­tries make when decid­ing where to locate their pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties. That’s part of the con­text of the temp­ta­tion the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in Europe cre­ates for Euro­pean indus­tries: Europe’s war-dri­ven ener­gy cri­sis is tempt­ing these indus­tries to make very long-term deci­sions to relo­cate at the same time the US promis­ing long-term sub­si­dies to indus­tries:

CNBC

The clean hydro­gen ener­gy econ­o­my was a dream. The cli­mate bill could make it a real­i­ty this decade

Cather­ine Clif­ford
Pub­lished Thu, Sep 8 2022 1:26 PM EDT
Updat­ed Fri, Sep 9 20223:13 PM EDT

* Hydro­gen could help decar­bonize some very large sec­tors of the econ­o­my that are oth­er­wise a real chal­lenge, like long haul truck­ing and mak­ing iron and steel.
* But hydro­gen has to be syn­the­sized with zero car­bon emis­sions, oth­er­wise it’s not a clean ener­gy source.
* A tax cred­it tucked into the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act gives the max­i­mum tax cred­it, $3 per kilo­gram, to hydro­gen pro­duced with renew­able ener­gy and nuclear ener­gy.

A tax cred­it tucked into Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act could tur­bocharge the nascent clean hydro­gen indus­try and turn it into a mul­ti­tril­lion-dol­lar busi­ness in the com­ing decades.

The tax cred­it will spur hydro­gen pro­duc­ers to devel­op clean­er ways to syn­the­size hydro­gen, which is used to make fer­til­iz­er and in oth­er indus­tri­al process­es. But it could also cat­alyze a whole new cat­e­go­ry of com­pa­nies look­ing to use clean hydro­gen as a replace­ment for fos­sil fuels in areas such as ship­ping, avi­a­tion, heavy indus­try, and as a way to store and trans­port ener­gy.

Cur­rent­ly, 98 per­cent of hydro­gen is made in a way that uses fos­sil fuels, accord­ing to the Cen­ter on Glob­al Ener­gy Pol­i­cy at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. But “all the cur­rent hydro­gen pro­duc­ers are look­ing to pro­duce clean hydro­gen,” explained Eli­na Teplin­sky, a lawyer who serves as the spokesper­son for the Nuclear Hydro­gen Ini­tia­tive, a group work­ing to advance the devel­op­ment of the nuclear hydro­gen indus­try.

The law will make it more eco­nom­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble to use car­bon cap­ture and stor­age tech­nol­o­gy to reduce the car­bon emis­sions from hydro­gen cre­ation. It will also open the door to a whole range of com­pa­nies look­ing for clean­er ways to make hydro­gen, and to use hydro­gen as a replace­ment for fos­sil fuels in cer­tain areas.

By 2050, between 60 and 80 per­cent of hydro­gen pro­duc­tion will be pow­ered by renew­ables, accord­ing to a Novem­ber report on the indus­try pub­lished by the Hydro­gen Coun­cil, an indus­try group, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with McK­in­sey & Co. (This pre­dic­tion was pub­lished before the tax cred­it was passed.)

This kind of indus­try tran­si­tion will require a lot of invest­ment — as much as $7 tril­lion to $8 tril­lion through 2050. But on the plus side, by that date the hydro­gen econ­o­my could gen­er­ate about $3 tril­lion in annu­al rev­enue, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Coun­cil and McK­in­sey report.

What is hydro­gen used for today, and how could it fight cli­mate change?

Cur­rent­ly, rough­ly half of the hydro­gen pro­duced is used to make fer­til­iz­er and ammo­nia, with the bal­ance used in petro­chem­i­cal refiner­ies or pro­duc­tion, accord­ing to the Cen­ter on Glob­al Ener­gy Pol­i­cy. The push for clean hydro­gen is moti­vat­ed both by a need to decar­bonize cur­rent process­es and because the use cas­es for hydro­gen are expand­ing.

Indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions, which make up near­ly all the demand for hydro­gen today, will rep­re­sent only 15% of total hydro­gen demand by 2050, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report.

Hydro­gen has the high­est ener­gy per mass of any fuel and does not release any car­bon emis­sions when it is burned or turned to elec­tric­i­ty in a fuel cell. Entre­pre­neurs and advo­cates believe hydro­gen could be use­ful to decar­bonize some very large sec­tors of the econ­o­my like long-haul truck­ing and indus­tri­al process­es includ­ing mak­ing iron and steel, mar­itime car­go ship­ping, and avi­a­tion.

“If it weren’t for cli­mate change, we prob­a­bly wouldn’t be expand­ing into all of these new use cas­es” for hydro­gen, Emi­ly Kent, the U.S. direc­tor of zero-car­bon fuels at Clean Air Task Force, a glob­al cli­mate non­prof­it, told CNBC.

The largest end use for hydro­gen by 2050 is expect­ed to be mobil­i­ty, includ­ing heavy truck­ing, long-range flights and con­tain­er ships, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report. In these cas­es, hydro­gen would pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty through a fuel cell, in which hydro­gen atoms and oxy­gen atoms are com­bined in an elec­tro­chem­i­cal reac­tion to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty, heat and water.

Cur­rent elec­tric bat­tery-pow­ered vehi­cles can’t meet this need because bat­ter­ies that could store enough ener­gy for long-haul jour­neys would be too heavy and would take too long to recharge, Kent explained. A hydro­gen tank and fuel cell would weigh less, take up less space and have the refu­el­ing time sim­i­lar to gas or diesel.

“It’s pos­si­ble that there’ll be huge break­throughs and bat­ter­ies or some­thing else that would change things. But as it stands today, there aren’t great solu­tions,” Kent told CNBC.

Hydro­gen can also be burned to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty in a tur­bine, sim­i­lar to nat­ur­al gas. Cur­rent­ly, up to 20% hydro­gen can be blend­ed with nat­ur­al gas burned in con­ven­tion­al nat­ur­al gas tur­bines with­out need­ing to do any infra­struc­ture changes, accord­ing to Kent.

“For high­er blends of hydro­gen or pure hydro­gen, we’ll like­ly need adjust­ments to the tur­bines and infra­struc­ture,” Kent told CNBC. “There are com­pa­nies work­ing on 100% hydro­gen-ready infra­struc­ture where pure hydro­gen can be burned in a tur­bine to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty.”

Hydro­gen can be a way to store ener­gy, which is going to be crit­i­cal as renew­able ener­gy like wind and solar are ramped up and deployed across the coun­try. Wind and solar ener­gy don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, and so ener­gy has to be stored some­how to be able to pro­vide con­tin­u­ous, reli­able ener­gy. Mean­while, bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy is being ramped up, but bat­ter­ies are not yet at the point in their devel­op­ment where they can store enough ener­gy for long enough to make them suf­fi­cient back­up for a ful­ly renew­able grid.

“If you pro­duce a ton of solar in the sum­mer, and you want to store a bunch of it away for the win­ter, hydro­gen can be stored for sort of that many month­s­long sea­son­al peri­ods, and pro­vide elec­tric­i­ty back to the sys­tem when it’s need­ed,” Kent said.

Clean­ly pro­duced hydro­gen is also being con­sid­ered as a replace­ment for cok­ing coal in a key part of the process in pro­duc­ing steel, a heavy-emis­sions indus­try which is con­sid­ered a real chal­lenge to decar­bonize. And clean hydro­gen will be need­ed for indus­tri­al process­es that require espe­cial­ly high-grade heat, tem­per­a­tures above 752 degrees Fahren­heit, like cement plants, glass­mak­ing, and alu­minum remelt­ing, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report.

What is clean hydro­gen?

...

Cur­rent­ly, it only exists in com­pound forms, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), a bipar­ti­san, non­prof­it pol­i­cy research orga­ni­za­tion. Of the hydro­gen that Chi­na makes, 60 per­cent is made using coal and about 25 per­cent comes from using nat­ur­al gas, accord­ing to CSIS. Out­side of Chi­na, the largest hydro­gen pro­duc­ers are indus­tri­al gas com­pa­nies like Linde and Air­Prod­ucts, accord­ing to Teplin­sky.

Sev­en­ty-six per­cent of hydro­gen pro­duced glob­al­ly and 95% in the U.S. is pro­duced with a process called steam methane reform­ing, in which a source of methane, like nat­ur­al gas, reacts with steam at very high tem­per­a­tures, accord­ing to the Cen­ter on Glob­al Ener­gy Pol­i­cy. Nat­ur­al gas releas­es green­house gas emis­sions when burned, and also from so-called fugi­tive methane leaks as it’s extract­ed and trans­port­ed.

Glob­al­ly, 22% (and 4% in the U.S.) is made with a process called coal gasi­fi­ca­tion, where coal reacts with oxy­gen and steam in hot tem­per­a­ture and high pres­sure.

Some com­pa­nies are work­ing to cap­ture the car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from these process­es and store it in tanks under­ground. Hydro­gen made this way is some­times called “blue hydro­gen.”

More promis­ing­ly from an emis­sions per­spec­tive, an elec­trolyz­er can be used to split a water mol­e­cule into hydro­gen and oxy­gen, and it can be pow­ered with almost any ener­gy source — includ­ing zero-emis­sions sources like solar or wind, cre­at­ing what is known as “green hydro­gen.”

Today, two per­cent of the hydro­gen made glob­al­ly and 1 per­cent in the U.S. is made with an elec­trolyz­er.

Nuclear ener­gy can also be used to pow­er hydro­gen syn­the­sis with almost no addi­tion­al CO2 emis­sions (this is some­times called “pink hydro­gen,” but the nomen­cla­ture varies). As a bonus, the steam and heat pro­duced as byprod­ucts of nuclear ener­gy can be used in a high tem­per­a­ture elec­trol­y­sis process, which is much more effi­cient. And with the advanced nuclear reac­tors in devel­op­ment that run at even hot­ter tem­per­a­tures than con­ven­tion­al nuclear reac­tors, hydro­gen can be pro­duced in a ther­mo-chem­i­cal water-split­ting process that doesn’t use an elec­trolyz­er at all.

Because the major­i­ty of the cost of pro­duc­ing hydro­gen with elec­trol­y­sis is the cost of the elec­tric­i­ty that goes into it, mak­ing hydro­gen with nuclear ener­gy and steam “real­ly could have a tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tion on low­er­ing the costs of clean hydro­gen pro­duc­tion,” Teplin­sky told CNBC.

The cost of pro­duc­ing hydro­gen with these dif­fer­ent meth­ods varies tremen­dous­ly and swings based on input costs, like nat­ur­al gas and the source of pow­er. Because of the Russ­ian war in Ukraine and cli­mate change, these input costs have them­selves been swing­ing. A report pub­lished by non­par­ti­san non­prof­it Resources for the Future in Decem­ber 2020 said a kilo­gram of hydro­gen made with steam methane reform­ing cost between $1 and $2 (includ­ing the costs of some car­bon cap­ture). Hydro­gen made with elec­trol­y­sis pow­ered by wind and solar ranged from between $3 and $7 per kilo­gram.

That’s where the tax cred­it comes in.

How does the new bill help?

The tax cred­it in the IRA is avail­able for 10 years and scales depend­ing on how clean the hydro­gen pro­duc­tion is. If hydro­gen is pro­duced with­out releas­ing any car­bon emis­sions, the tax cred­it is maxed out at $3 per kilo­gram of hydro­gen pro­duced. It then scales down pro­por­tion­al­ly based on the amount of emis­sions released, as long as it’s less than cur­rent pro­duc­tion tech­niques.

If hydro­gen is pro­duced with some car­bon emis­sions, but few­er than are emit­ted in cur­rent pro­duc­tion tech­niques, the tax cred­it is incre­men­tal­ly small­er, pro­por­tion­al to the emis­sions reduc­tions.

The tax cred­it is “an absolute game-chang­er,” Akshay Hon­nat­ti, the leader of EY’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty tax divi­sion for the Unit­ed States, told CNBC. “There was no incen­tive to have hydro­gen be clean­er. It costs to get hydro­gen to be clean­er,” Hon­nat­ti added. “Now there’s a cred­it avail­able for some­one to make that addi­tion­al lev­el of invest­ment and be able to jus­ti­fy that lev­el of invest­ment to their stake­hold­ers and share­hold­ers.”

The $3 per kilo­gram cred­it makes nuclear hydro­gen high­ly com­pet­i­tive with fos­sil fuel pro­duced hydro­gen, Teplin­sky said. The U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy has as a goal, one of its Ener­gy Earth­shots Ini­tia­tives, to reduce the cost of clean hydro­gen to $1 per kilo­gram in a decade.

For many of these bur­geon­ing use cas­es for clean hydro­gen, the tax cred­it includ­ed in the cli­mate bill is going to give com­pa­nies the chance to enter the mar­ket for mak­ing clean hydro­gen with­out los­ing mon­ey. “They could go back to their share­hold­ers, and they can say, ‘Look, we can we can do this eco­nom­i­cal­ly — today. We don’t have to project a loss for the next five years to enter this mar­ket. We can actu­al­ly enter this and have it be eco­nom­ic, or at least a breakeven project in the near future,’” Teplin­sky said.

The Bipar­ti­san Infra­struc­ture Law passed in Novem­ber also includ­ed $8 bil­lion to devel­op region­al clean hydro­gen hubs in the U.S. Between the two laws, the U.S. should be able to devel­op a clean hydro­gen econ­o­my in sev­en to eight years, Teplin­sky said.

———–

“The clean hydro­gen ener­gy econ­o­my was a dream. The cli­mate bill could make it a real­i­ty this decade” Cather­ine Clif­ford; CNBC; 09/08/2022

“The tax cred­it will spur hydro­gen pro­duc­ers to devel­op clean­er ways to syn­the­size hydro­gen, which is used to make fer­til­iz­er and in oth­er indus­tri­al process­es. But it could also cat­alyze a whole new cat­e­go­ry of com­pa­nies look­ing to use clean hydro­gen as a replace­ment for fos­sil fuels in areas such as ship­ping, avi­a­tion, heavy indus­try, and as a way to store and trans­port ener­gy.”

It’s an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. At least that’s the hype/promise of the next-gen­er­a­tion hydro­gen econ­o­my get­ting tur­bo-charged with by the new­ly-passed Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act, with a 10 year tax cred­it that will pre­sum­ably be extend­ed for decades to come. As long as com­pa­nies cap­ture the car­bon released in the process­es used to make the hydro­gen, they get the sub­si­dies. And expec­ta­tions are that these incen­tives are enough to get the kind of infra­struc­ture need­ed for this tech­nol­o­gy in 7–8 years. So at the same time Europe is see­ing its indus­tries face a mul­ti-year freeze, the US is dou­ble-down on a major invest­ments poised to lure those Euro­pean indus­tries away. The key ingre­di­ent is an extend­ed war in Ukraine and extend­ed high Euro­pean ener­gy prices:

...
The tax cred­it in the IRA is avail­able for 10 years and scales depend­ing on how clean the hydro­gen pro­duc­tion is. If hydro­gen is pro­duced with­out releas­ing any car­bon emis­sions, the tax cred­it is maxed out at $3 per kilo­gram of hydro­gen pro­duced. It then scales down pro­por­tion­al­ly based on the amount of emis­sions released, as long as it’s less than cur­rent pro­duc­tion tech­niques.

...
For many of these bur­geon­ing use cas­es for clean hydro­gen, the tax cred­it includ­ed in the cli­mate bill is going to give com­pa­nies the chance to enter the mar­ket for mak­ing clean hydro­gen with­out los­ing mon­ey. “They could go back to their share­hold­ers, and they can say, ‘Look, we can we can do this eco­nom­i­cal­ly — today. We don’t have to project a loss for the next five years to enter this mar­ket. We can actu­al­ly enter this and have it be eco­nom­ic, or at least a breakeven project in the near future,’” Teplin­sky said.

The Bipar­ti­san Infra­struc­ture Law passed in Novem­ber also includ­ed $8 bil­lion to devel­op region­al clean hydro­gen hubs in the U.S. Between the two laws, the U.S. should be able to devel­op a clean hydro­gen econ­o­my in sev­en to eight years, Teplin­sky said....

The appeal to heavy indus­try includes using hydro­gen as a replace­ment for ener­gy inten­sive indus­tri­al process­es like cok­ing coal in the pro­duc­tion of steal. And yet note how heavy indus­try is still only viewed as a minor con­sumer of the hydro­gen-based econ­o­my. It’s trans­porta­tion where the usage is expect­ed to be exten­sive. That’s part of the con­text of this over­all sto­ry: the emer­gence of the US hydro­gen econ­o­my that could lure away Euro­pean heavy indus­try is real­ly just a sub-chap­ter in a much larg­er sto­ry of a planned indus­tri­al trans­for­ma­tion across the trans­porta­tion econ­o­my:

...
Indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions, which make up near­ly all the demand for hydro­gen today, will rep­re­sent only 15% of total hydro­gen demand by 2050, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report.

...

The largest end use for hydro­gen by 2050 is expect­ed to be mobil­i­ty, includ­ing heavy truck­ing, long-range flights and con­tain­er ships, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report. In these cas­es, hydro­gen would pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty through a fuel cell, in which hydro­gen atoms and oxy­gen atoms are com­bined in an elec­tro­chem­i­cal reac­tion to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty, heat and water.

...

Clean­ly pro­duced hydro­gen is also being con­sid­ered as a replace­ment for cok­ing coal in a key part of the process in pro­duc­ing steel, a heavy-emis­sions indus­try which is con­sid­ered a real chal­lenge to decar­bonize. And clean hydro­gen will be need­ed for indus­tri­al process­es that require espe­cial­ly high-grade heat, tem­per­a­tures above 752 degrees Fahren­heit, like cement plants, glass­mak­ing, and alu­minum remelt­ing, accord­ing to the Hydro­gen Council/McKinsey report.
...

Anoth­er part of this sto­ry is how it relates to the dis­as­ter-prone Texas elec­tric­i­ty grid. 95% of the hydro­gen pro­duced in the US is based on a process called steam methane reform­ing, based on a source like nat­ur­al gas. At the same time, hydro­gen can be used to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty in tur­bine sim­i­lar to nat­ur­al gas and can even by spiked into exist­ing nat­ur­al gas tur­bines. It’s a sit­u­a­tion that sug­gests Texas is going to be cen­tral in both pro­duc­ing and con­sum­ing hydro­gen-based ener­gy. With all of the night­mare this such a sit­u­a­tion entails. So good luck to the res­i­dents of Texas as they are increas­ing­ly liv­ing in the mid­dle of giant ener­gy-indus­try prof­it-cen­ter. A prof­it cen­ter focused on export­ing as much of that ener­gy out of the area as pos­si­ble:

...
Hydro­gen can also be burned to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty in a tur­bine, sim­i­lar to nat­ur­al gas. Cur­rent­ly, up to 20% hydro­gen can be blend­ed with nat­ur­al gas burned in con­ven­tion­al nat­ur­al gas tur­bines with­out need­ing to do any infra­struc­ture changes, accord­ing to Kent.

“For high­er blends of hydro­gen or pure hydro­gen, we’ll like­ly need adjust­ments to the tur­bines and infra­struc­ture,” Kent told CNBC. “There are com­pa­nies work­ing on 100% hydro­gen-ready infra­struc­ture where pure hydro­gen can be burned in a tur­bine to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty.”

...

Sev­en­ty-six per­cent of hydro­gen pro­duced glob­al­ly and 95% in the U.S. is pro­duced with a process called steam methane reform­ing, in which a source of methane, like nat­ur­al gas, reacts with steam at very high tem­per­a­tures, accord­ing to the Cen­ter on Glob­al Ener­gy Pol­i­cy. Nat­ur­al gas releas­es green­house gas emis­sions when burned, and also from so-called fugi­tive methane leaks as it’s extract­ed and trans­port­ed.
...

Also note how the hydro­gen pro­duced in Chi­na is, cur­rent­ly, pri­mar­i­ly based on coal gasi­fi­ca­tion. In oth­er words, some sort of vari­a­tion on the Fischer–Tropsch reac­tion. It will be inter­est­ing to see if the US attempts to devel­op its own Fis­ch­er-Tropsh indus­try in response as this hydro­gen econ­o­my is fleshed out:

...
Cur­rent­ly, it only exists in com­pound forms, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), a bipar­ti­san, non­prof­it pol­i­cy research orga­ni­za­tion. Of the hydro­gen that Chi­na makes, 60 per­cent is made using coal and about 25 per­cent comes from using nat­ur­al gas, accord­ing to CSIS. Out­side of Chi­na, the largest hydro­gen pro­duc­ers are indus­tri­al gas com­pa­nies like Linde and Air­Prod­ucts, accord­ing to Teplin­sky.

...

Glob­al­ly, 22% (and 4% in the U.S.) is made with a process called coal gasi­fi­ca­tion, where coal reacts with oxy­gen and steam in hot tem­per­a­ture and high pres­sure.
...

As long as the hydro­gen gen­er­at­ed from fos­sil fuels is cap­ture, it’s con­sid­ered ‘blue hydro­gen’ and open to these sub­si­dies. But the hydro­gen does­n’t just have to come from fos­sil fuels. Elec­tric­i­ty from any source is all that’s required to gen­er­ate hydro­gen from sim­ply water. Solar, wind, and any oth­er renew­able can pro­duce hydro­gen. Still, with just 1 per­cent of hydro­gen in the US pro­duced using green elec­tric­i­ty, it’s clear that the fos­sil fuels have a huge advan­tage in this sec­tor. Hope­ful­ly the sub­si­dies shift that bal­ance:

...
Some com­pa­nies are work­ing to cap­ture the car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from these process­es and store it in tanks under­ground. Hydro­gen made this way is some­times called “blue hydro­gen.”

More promis­ing­ly from an emis­sions per­spec­tive, an elec­trolyz­er can be used to split a water mol­e­cule into hydro­gen and oxy­gen, and it can be pow­ered with almost any ener­gy source — includ­ing zero-emis­sions sources like solar or wind, cre­at­ing what is known as “green hydro­gen.”

Today, two per­cent of the hydro­gen made glob­al­ly and 1 per­cent in the U.S. is made with an elec­trolyz­er.
...

But then there’s the pal­pa­ble inter­est in nuclear-pow­ered hydro­gen, or ‘pink hydro­gen’. Recall how a group of US bil­lion­aires includ­ing Bill Gates have been aggres­sive­ly push­ing next-gen­er­a­tion ‘cheap’ nuclear reac­tor designs for US elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion. It sounds like hydro­gen-pro­duc­tion could be the end-use for some of that ‘cheap’ nuclear pow­er:

...
Nuclear ener­gy can also be used to pow­er hydro­gen syn­the­sis with almost no addi­tion­al CO2 emis­sions (this is some­times called “pink hydro­gen,” but the nomen­cla­ture varies). As a bonus, the steam and heat pro­duced as byprod­ucts of nuclear ener­gy can be used in a high tem­per­a­ture elec­trol­y­sis process, which is much more effi­cient. And with the advanced nuclear reac­tors in devel­op­ment that run at even hot­ter tem­per­a­tures than con­ven­tion­al nuclear reac­tors, hydro­gen can be pro­duced in a ther­mo-chem­i­cal water-split­ting process that doesn’t use an elec­trolyz­er at all.

Because the major­i­ty of the cost of pro­duc­ing hydro­gen with elec­trol­y­sis is the cost of the elec­tric­i­ty that goes into it, mak­ing hydro­gen with nuclear ener­gy and steam “real­ly could have a tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tion on low­er­ing the costs of clean hydro­gen pro­duc­tion,” Teplin­sky told CNBC.

...

The $3 per kilo­gram cred­it makes nuclear hydro­gen high­ly com­pet­i­tive with fos­sil fuel pro­duced hydro­gen, Teplin­sky said. The U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy has as a goal, one of its Ener­gy Earth­shots Ini­tia­tives, to reduce the cost of clean hydro­gen to $1 per kilo­gram in a decade.
...

Let’s hope this does­n’t end up becom­ing a nuclear ‘boom’. Don’t for­get one of the major down­sides of those new Natri­um sodi­um-cooled nuclear reac­tors Bill Gates keeps pro­mot­ing: they run on Ura­ni­um so high­ly enriched it could poten­tial­ly be used to make nuclear weapons. Pro­mot­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of indus­tri­al uses for weapons-grade nuclear weapons seems like a rather high price to pay for clean ener­gy.

And along those lines, we had bet­ter not hope WWIII devel­ops as a result of war that’s going to be dri­ving this his­toric trans­for­ma­tion to both the US and Euro­pean economies. Plen­ty of nuclear-weapons-relat­ed risks there too.

With infla­tion caused by the glob­al ener­gy cri­sis and sanc­tions against Russ­ian gas poten­tial­ly remain­ing ele­vat­ed for years to come, here’s a pair of arti­cle that under­score one of the big deci­sions the EU has to make soon. Big deci­sions with poten­tial­ly big long-term com­mit­ments behind them. Deci­sions like whether or not to focus on expand­ing the EU’s renew­able ener­gy capac­i­ty vs sign­ing up for new decades-long LNG invest­ments with exporters like Qatar.

It’s not going to be an easy deci­sion. As we’re going to see, the EU is already gen­er­at­ing record lev­els of renew­able ener­gy, which is played a sig­nif­i­cant role in tamp­ing down infla­tion this year. But there’s been anoth­er fac­tor help­ing to keep a lid on ener­gy prices as Europe enters the win­ter months: the con­ti­nent man­aged to near­ly fill up its nat­ur­al gas stor­age capac­i­ty this year.

And as we’re also going to see, there’s no guar­an­tee the EU is going to be able to repeat that goal of top­ping off the tanks next year. That’s the pre­dic­tion we’re get­ting from Qatar’s ener­gy min­is­ter, Saad al-Kaabi, who is pre­dict­ing that the EU isn’t going to be able to refill those stor­age tanks next year with­out Russ­ian gas. It’s just not pos­si­ble, in al-Kaabi’s view, even with a renewed empha­sis on renew­ables. With­out Russ­ian gas, the EU is going to be forced to restart nuclear pow­er plants and deep­en its reliance on coal and oth­er dirty fos­sil fuels. That’s just the real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion, as Qatar sees it.

In addi­tion, al-Kaabi is warn­ing that Qatar isn’t inter­est­ed in short-term con­tracts. It prefers to deal in con­tracts that last decades. So if EU mem­bers want to use Qatar gas to fill in the gap cre­at­ed by lost sup­plies of Russ­ian gas, they might have to make mul­ti-decade-long con­tracts.

This is a good time to recall how Rus­sia and Iran are report­ed­ly eye­ing Qatar for the cre­ation of a ‘gas OPEC’ and Qatar has indi­cat­ed some inter­est in the idea. Will the EU be refill­ing its stor­age tanks in the face of a new ‘gas OPEC’ this time next year? It sounds pos­si­ble.

Also recall how we’ve been hear­ing warn­ings about Euro­pean gas short­ages for years to come from the petro­le­um indus­try itself. Recall how the chief of Shell was pre­dict­ing Euro­pean gas short­ages for “sev­er­al win­ters” back in August.

Final­ly, recall how Chi­na accounts for near­ly half of the world’s renew­able ener­gy capac­i­ty. That’s also a fac­tor in this sit­u­a­tion: Chi­na is mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to renew­able ener­gy. And as Europe and cur­rent learn­ing, renew­ables have a lot of advan­tages.

That’s all part of the what makes the deci­sions the EU needs to make soon incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult deci­sions to make. The EU is locked in a short-term cri­sis that threat­ens to become a per­ma­nent cri­sis. How should the con­ti­nent respond? Are decades-long Qatari LNG con­tracts a good response to what might be a short-term con­flict in Ukraine? Should the con­ti­nent use this as an excuse to build for the future with an empha­sis on renew­ables? Those deci­sions have to be made and made soon. Because as cold as this win­ter is look­ing for Europe, it’s going to be a warm cozy delight com­pared to what’s com­ing next year:

CNN

EU pro­duces record wind and solar ener­gy as it shirks Russ­ian gas

By Chris­t­ian Edwards,
Pub­lished 6:01 PM EDT, Mon Octo­ber 17, 2022

Wind and solar pow­er have made up a record 24% of the Euro­pean Union’s elec­tric­i­ty mix since Rus­sia launched its war on Ukraine, a new report says, a boost that has also helped the bloc bat­tle soar­ing infla­tion.

The growth in renew­able pow­er capac­i­ty has saved the 27-nation bloc €99 bil­lion ($97 bil­lion) in avoid­ed gas imports between March and Sep­tem­ber, which is €11 bil­lion ($10.8 bil­lion) more when com­pared with the same peri­od from last year, accord­ing to the report pub­lished by cli­mate think tanks E3G and Ember.

The boost in renew­ables comes as Europe tries to wean itself off Russ­ian gas, as Moscow reduces, even cuts off, , Euro­pean nations’ ener­gy sup­plies to gain lever­age in the con­flict. The war has forced the the EU to con­front its cost­ly depen­dence on Russ­ian gas, which in 2020 account­ed for 41% of the EU’s imports of the fos­sil fuel.

Nine­teen of the EU’s 27 mem­ber states have achieved record wind and solar gen­er­a­tion since March, the report found.

Poland had the great­est per­cent­age year-on-year increase of 48.5%, while Spain record­ed the great­est absolute gen­er­a­tion increase with 7.4 ter­awatt hours (TWh). Spain’s renew­able gen­er­a­tion alone avoid­ed €1.7 bil­lion ($1.7 bil­lion) in import­ed gas costs.

The think tanks warned, how­ev­er, that there was still a long way to go in reach­ing the bloc’s renew­ables poten­tial. Fos­sil gas still made up around 20% of the EU’s elec­tric­i­ty in the same peri­od, at a cost of around €82 bil­lion ($80.7 bil­lion).

“Wind and solar are already help­ing Euro­pean cit­i­zens,” Chris Ross­lowe, senior ana­lyst at Ember, said in a state­ment. “But the future poten­tial is even greater.”

‘More renew­ables, less infla­tion’

Wind and solar gen­er­at­ed 345 TWh of elec­tric­i­ty across the EU from March to Sep­tem­ber this year – a record year-on-year increase of 13%. Total renew­able capac­i­ty would have been far high­er, had hydro­elec­tric­i­ty not been down 21% due to droughts this sum­mer, which sci­en­tists say have been made worse by the human-caused cli­mate cri­sis.

The report’s key mes­sage is sim­ply: “More renew­ables, less infla­tion.”

Nonethe­less, Euro­pean ener­gy prices are still high. Russia’s gas restric­tions to Europe have result­ed in “the largest infla­tion­ary shocks in Europe since World War II, beat­ing that of the oil cri­sis in the 1970s,” the report said. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, ener­gy costs were up 40.8% on last year, account­ing for 36% of the EU’s over­all infla­tion fig­ures.

Some EU coun­tries have announced fis­cal sup­port pack­ages worth hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars to try to lim­it this infla­tion, large­ly through sub­si­diz­ing the use of fos­sil fuels for heat­ing – but many busi­ness­es and house­holds are still left with bills they can­not afford to pay.

The report warns that gov­ern­ments will be unable to sus­tain such cost­ly pro­grams “to com­pen­sate for high fos­sil ener­gy prices over a long peri­od of time.”

The EU has man­aged to fill its gas stor­age con­tain­ers to get through the win­ter, but ques­tions have been raised over how the bloc will fill the gap the fol­low­ing warm­ing sea­son. Accord­ing to the report’s authors, this makes it “even more impor­tant now to shift the focus to mea­sures that go beyond the 2022/23 win­ter.”

...

———–

“EU pro­duces record wind and solar ener­gy as it shirks Russ­ian gas” By Chris­t­ian Edwards; CNN; 10/17/2022

“Nine­teen of the EU’s 27 mem­ber states have achieved record wind and solar gen­er­a­tion since March, the report found.”

Record renew­ables across Europe. It’s unam­bigu­ous­ly good news, even if this good news is hap­pen­ing with­in the con­text of the war in Ukraine. Increased renew­ables may not be enough to fill the gap cre­at­ed by the sanc­tions on Russ­ian gas. But its unde­ni­able that the EU’s untapped renew­able ener­gy capac­i­ty — which is final­ly being tapped this years — has been play­ing a major role in coun­ter­ing the mas­sive infla­tion sweep­ing the con­ti­nent. It’s a valu­able les­son: renew­ables aren’t just vital for com­bat­ing the exis­ten­tial long-term risk of cli­mate change. They’re great hedges against ener­gy-relat­ed infla­tion:

...
The growth in renew­able pow­er capac­i­ty has saved the 27-nation bloc €99 bil­lion ($97 bil­lion) in avoid­ed gas imports between March and Sep­tem­ber, which is €11 bil­lion ($10.8 bil­lion) more when com­pared with the same peri­od from last year, accord­ing to the report pub­lished by cli­mate think tanks E3G and Ember.

...

The think tanks warned, how­ev­er, that there was still a long way to go in reach­ing the bloc’s renew­ables poten­tial. Fos­sil gas still made up around 20% of the EU’s elec­tric­i­ty in the same peri­od, at a cost of around €82 bil­lion ($80.7 bil­lion).

“Wind and solar are already help­ing Euro­pean cit­i­zens,” Chris Ross­lowe, senior ana­lyst at Ember, said in a state­ment. “But the future poten­tial is even greater.”

‘More renew­ables, less infla­tion’

Wind and solar gen­er­at­ed 345 TWh of elec­tric­i­ty across the EU from March to Sep­tem­ber this year – a record year-on-year increase of 13%. Total renew­able capac­i­ty would have been far high­er, had hydro­elec­tric­i­ty not been down 21% due to droughts this sum­mer, which sci­en­tists say have been made worse by the human-caused cli­mate cri­sis.

The report’s key mes­sage is sim­ply: “More renew­ables, less infla­tion.”
...

Let’s hope Europe inter­nal­izes this les­son, but let’s also hope it’s not just Europe. The whole world needs to be tran­si­tion­ing to renew­ables, after all.

And also note the impor­tant detail that has helped the EU avoid even high­er ener­gy prices head­ing into this win­ter: the EU’s LNG stor­age capac­i­ty is near­ly full. A sit­u­a­tion that’s obvi­ous­ly not going be main­tained through­out the win­ter:

...
The EU has man­aged to fill its gas stor­age con­tain­ers to get through the win­ter, but ques­tions have been raised over how the bloc will fill the gap the fol­low­ing warm­ing sea­son. Accord­ing to the report’s authors, this makes it “even more impor­tant now to shift the focus to mea­sures that go beyond the 2022/23 win­ter.”
...

And that brings us to the fol­low­ing Finan­cial Times arti­cle with an omi­nous warn­ing from Qatar’s ener­gy min­is­ter Saad al-Kaabi. Recall how Rus­sia and Iran are report­ed­ly eye­ing Qatar for the cre­ation of a ‘gas OPEC’ and Qatar has indi­cat­ed some inter­est in the idea. That loom­ing ‘gas OPEC’ should be kept in mind when inter­pret­ing al-Kaabi’s pre­dic­tions for the EU’s ener­gy cri­sis head­ing into next win­ter. Pre­dic­tions that the EU won’t actu­al­ly be able to refill its gas stor­age tanks by this time next year. At least not with­out Russ­ian gas:

Finan­cial Times

Europe at risk of ‘much worse’ ener­gy cri­sis next year, warns Qatar
Sup­ply prob­lem could last until 2025 if Ukraine war con­tin­ues and Russ­ian gas does not return, says ener­gy min­is­ter

Andrew Eng­land and Tom Wil­son in Lon­don
10/18/2022 6:24 am

Stay across the lat­est Ukraine coverage.Join the FT’s Telegram chan­nel

Qatar’s ener­gy min­is­ter has warned that while Europe should have suf­fi­cient gas for pow­er and heat­ing this win­ter, the tougher chal­lenge will come in 2023 as reserves are deplet­ed.

Saad al-Kaabi said it would be “much worse next year” if there was a harsh win­ter, adding that the ener­gy cri­sis could extend to the mid­dle of the decade if Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine con­tin­ued and gas “does not start flow­ing back again” from Rus­sia.

“This com­ing win­ter, because of the stor­age capac­i­ty being full, it’s fine,” said Kaabi, who is head of state gas com­pa­ny QatarEn­er­gy. “It’s real­ly replen­ish­ing the reserves, or the stor­age, for next year that’s going to be the issue.

“So . . . next year and the fol­low­ing year, even up to 2025, are going to be the issue.”

Many Euro­pean coun­tries have held talks with Qatar, the world’s largest exporter of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas, as they seek to wean them­selves off Russ­ian fos­sil fuels. But Kaabi warned that he could not envis­age a future where “zero Russ­ian gas” flowed to Europe.

“If that’s the case, then I think the prob­lem is going to be huge and for a very long time,” he said. “You just don’t have enough vol­ume to bring [in] to replace that gas for the long term, unless you’re say­ing ‘I’m going to be build­ing huge nuclear [plants], I’m going to allow coal, I’m going to burn fuel oils.’”

...

How­ev­er, replac­ing all Russ­ian gas into Europe would need an annu­al 112mn tonnes of LNG, equiv­a­lent to almost a third of today’s entire mar­ket, accord­ing to Bern­stein Research.

Qatar, which tra­di­tion­al­ly ships 70 per cent of its LNG to Asian clients on long-term fixed con­tracts, said it would be able to divert only 10–15 per cent of cur­rent pro­duc­tion to Europe until new projects come online.

But Kaabi said no new, size­able gas projects glob­al­ly would start pro­duc­ing until 2025, when QatarEnergy’s Gold­en Pass joint ven­ture with Exxon­Mo­bil is expect­ed to add 16mn tonnes of LNG per annum to the mar­ket.

...

Qatar signed a pro­vi­sion­al agree­ment with Ger­many in March, but those talks have been dogged by dis­agree­ments over the length of the con­tracts. Doha has also been in dis­cus­sions with France, Spain, Italy, Bel­gium, Poland and Slo­va­kia about expand­ing exports to those coun­tries.

QatarEn­er­gy prefers to sell its gas via long-term con­tracts, which offer it cer­tain­ty as it invests bil­lions of dol­lars in ener­gy infra­struc­ture. Qatar’s state-affil­i­at­ed Asian buy­ers typ­i­cal­ly agree to sup­ply con­tracts of 15 to 20 years.

Kaabi said the main issue affect­ing Qatar’s nego­ti­a­tions with Euro­pean states was relat­ed to the chal­lenges gov­ern­ments face in work­ing out how best to pro­cure the gas through fixed con­tracts in an envi­ron­ment where the ener­gy com­pa­nies are pri­vate­ly owned.

He also cau­tioned that Europe had to “get off the dis­cus­sion that gas is not need­ed for a long time”, a ref­er­ence to hopes that the con­ti­nent can move away from fos­sil fuels and tran­si­tion to renew­able sources.

“Because every­body who’s going to invest in the gas sec­tor, they’re look­ing at 25, 30, 40-year hori­zons to invest and to get rea­son­able returns on the invest­ments,” he said. “If gov­ern­ments are not going to be sup­port­ive of that, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult for investors to come in.”

Kaabi added that Euro­pean nego­ti­a­tions for Qatari gas had cre­at­ed “huge com­pe­ti­tion” with Asian importers seek­ing to lock in long-term sup­plies as Qatar expands it out­put.

“Because of this pull of Europe want­i­ng addi­tion­al gas . . . the Asian buy­ers are look­ing at the same thing and say­ing ‘hold on, we need to be able to secure our future devel­op­ment needs,’” he said. “We’re talk­ing to almost every cus­tomer in Asia where they are very seri­ous­ly try­ing to close deals.”

LNG prices have soared glob­al­ly since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine. Bench­mark prices for north Asia hit $70 per mil­lion British ther­mal units (mmb­tu) in August, more than twice the price at the start of the year. TTF, the Euro­pean bench­mark for pipeline gas and LNG, reached €311 per megawatt hour ($88.5/mmbtu) in August, up near­ly 250 per cent com­pared with the start of the year. Prices have since fall­en in both Europe and Asia because of milder weath­er and Europe’s gas stor­age reach­ing near­ly full capac­i­ty.

———-

“Europe at risk of ‘much worse’ ener­gy cri­sis next year, warns Qatar” by Andrew Eng­land and Tom Wil­son; Finan­cial Times; 10/18/2022

“LNG prices have soared glob­al­ly since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine. Bench­mark prices for north Asia hit $70 per mil­lion British ther­mal units (mmb­tu) in August, more than twice the price at the start of the year. TTF, the Euro­pean bench­mark for pipeline gas and LNG, reached €311 per megawatt hour ($88.5/mmbtu) in August, up near­ly 250 per cent com­pared with the start of the year. Prices have since fall­en in both Europe and Asia because of milder weath­er and Europe’s gas stor­age reach­ing near­ly full capac­i­ty.”

It could be worse. That’s the omi­nous assess­ment of the EU’s dis­as­trous ener­gy mar­kets. It could be a lot worse if the EU had­n’t man­aged to top off its gas stor­age capac­i­ty and the weath­er was­n’t rel­a­tive­ly mild. It could have been worse and will be worse next year if Qatari ener­gy min­is­ter Saad al-Kaabi’s pre­dic­tion is cor­rect. A pre­dic­tion that Europe isn’t going to be able to repeat the goal of fill­ing up those stor­age tanks. In oth­er words, next win­ter could be an excep­tion­al­ly cold one for the EU. Bru­tal­ly cold if it hap­pens to be a cold­er-than-aver­age win­ter:

...
Saad al-Kaabi said it would be “much worse next year” if there was a harsh win­ter, adding that the ener­gy cri­sis could extend to the mid­dle of the decade if Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine con­tin­ued and gas “does not start flow­ing back again” from Rus­sia.

“This com­ing win­ter, because of the stor­age capac­i­ty being full, it’s fine,” said Kaabi, who is head of state gas com­pa­ny QatarEn­er­gy. “It’s real­ly replen­ish­ing the reserves, or the stor­age, for next year that’s going to be the issue.

“So . . . next year and the fol­low­ing year, even up to 2025, are going to be the issue.”

Many Euro­pean coun­tries have held talks with Qatar, the world’s largest exporter of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas, as they seek to wean them­selves off Russ­ian fos­sil fuels. But Kaabi warned that he could not envis­age a future where “zero Russ­ian gas” flowed to Europe.

“If that’s the case, then I think the prob­lem is going to be huge and for a very long time,” he said. “You just don’t have enough vol­ume to bring [in] to replace that gas for the long term, unless you’re say­ing ‘I’m going to be build­ing huge nuclear [plants], I’m going to allow coal, I’m going to burn fuel oils.’”
...

So what’s the EU going to do in prepa­ra­tion for next win­ter? This is where al-Kaabi’s warn­ings get par­tic­u­lar­ly omi­nous. Because it does­n’t sound like there’s a lot the EU can in the short-run. Ener­gy infra­struc­ture takes years to build. The short-term deci­sions are large­ly lim­it­ed to fight­ing over exist­ing gas sup­plies in the glob­al mar­kets and/or approv­ing the use of read­i­ly avail­able ener­gy alter­na­tives that aren’t already being used at max­i­mum capac­i­ty like coal, nuclear, and oth­er fos­sil fuels. And with renew­ables already get­ting maxed out it’s not like there’s read­i­ly avail­able extra renew­able capac­i­ty to tap. New renew­able infra­struc­ture will have to be invest­ed in, which takes time.

At the same time, as EU nations are dis­cov­er­ing, LNG sup­pli­ers like Qatar aren’t inter­est­ed in short-term con­tracts. If the EU wants to secure new LNG sup­plies from Qatar its going to have to make mul­ti-decade com­mit­ments for sup­plies that aren’t going to be avail­able for years. And as al-Kaabi also warned, all of this new Euro­pean inter­est in secur­ing new LNG con­tracts has Asian nations scram­bling to secure their own long-term con­tracts with sup­pli­ers like Qatar:

...
Kaabi said the main issue affect­ing Qatar’s nego­ti­a­tions with Euro­pean states was relat­ed to the chal­lenges gov­ern­ments face in work­ing out how best to pro­cure the gas through fixed con­tracts in an envi­ron­ment where the ener­gy com­pa­nies are pri­vate­ly owned.

He also cau­tioned that Europe had to “get off the dis­cus­sion that gas is not need­ed for a long time”, a ref­er­ence to hopes that the con­ti­nent can move away from fos­sil fuels and tran­si­tion to renew­able sources.

“Because every­body who’s going to invest in the gas sec­tor, they’re look­ing at 25, 30, 40-year hori­zons to invest and to get rea­son­able returns on the invest­ments,” he said. “If gov­ern­ments are not going to be sup­port­ive of that, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult for investors to come in.”

Kaabi added that Euro­pean nego­ti­a­tions for Qatari gas had cre­at­ed “huge com­pe­ti­tion” with Asian importers seek­ing to lock in long-term sup­plies as Qatar expands it out­put.

“Because of this pull of Europe want­i­ng addi­tion­al gas . . . the Asian buy­ers are look­ing at the same thing and say­ing ‘hold on, we need to be able to secure our future devel­op­ment needs,’” he said. “We’re talk­ing to almost every cus­tomer in Asia where they are very seri­ous­ly try­ing to close deals.”
...

The EU has some major deci­sions to make with the war in Ukraine show­ing no sign of abat­ing and the grow­ing prospect of no Russ­ian gas for years to come. Short-term and long-term deci­sions. With the con­ti­nent refo­cus on expand­ing its renew­ables capac­i­ty? Open the flood gates to nuclear and coal? Or com­mit to decades of LNG sup­plies from places like Qatar? The answer will pre­sum­ably be a mix of all of the above. But it’s still going to be inter­est­ing to see how that mix is allo­cat­ed. Grim­ly inter­est­ing as the case may be.

Is a new ‘Iron Cur­tain’ on the way for Europe? Yes, if Poland has any­thing to say about it. At least that’s the con­clu­sion that’s hard to avoid arriv­ing at when watch­ing the bor­der spat between Poland and the Russ­ian enclave of Kalin­ingrad play out. As we’re going to see, Poland is rais­ing the alarm about a new form of Russ­ian war­fare that’s about be launched against it out of Kalin­ingrad. Hybrid war­fare in the form of swarms of Mid­dle East and North African refugees who are going to be forced into Poland by Russ­ian author­i­ties. Yep, Poland is lay­ing down razor wire across its entire bor­der with Kalin­ingrad over fears that hordes of peo­ple from the Mid­dle East and North Africa are going to invade Poland from the enclave.

So how exact­ly are peo­ple from the Mid­dle East and North Africa going to reach this Russ­ian enclave in the first place? Rus­sia is going to fly them all in. That’s the accu­sa­tion Poland’s gov­ern­ment is mak­ing fol­low­ing the deci­sion by Rus­si­a’s avi­a­tion author­i­ties to allow flights from the Mid­dle East and North Africa into Kalin­ingrad. It’s all part of a giant plot to fly in thou­sands of refugees who will be unleashed on Poland. Hence the need for razor wire across the entire Poland-Kalningrad bor­der.

Keep in mind that Kalin­ingrad only shares bor­ders with two coun­tries: Poland and Lithua­nia. Also recall how Lithua­nia cut off rail access to Kalin­ingrad over the sum­mer, only lift­ing the block­ade in July after EU courts order a rever­sal of the pol­i­cy. So both of Kalin­ingrad’s direct neigh­bors appear to be very keen to cut of land access to the Russ­ian enclave.

How is this going to play out? As the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, Poland has already built a high steel wall on its bor­der with Belarus in responds to refugees from the Mid­dle East flow­ing to Poland from Belarus. Is the razor wire along the bor­der of Kalin­ingrad set to be replaced with a steel wall? We’ll see, but Poland is clear­ly in a wall-build­ing mood.

And let’s not for­get that the under­ly­ing fac­tor dri­ving all this wall-build­ing fer­vor — the con­flict with Rus­sia — does­n’t look like­ly to end any time soon. In oth­er words, Poland and Lithua­nia are both going to have plen­ty of time to fin­ish any desired walls before the under­ly­ing ten­sions are allowed to dis­si­pate. And that’s all why we have to start ask­ing whether or not we’re in store for a new kind of ‘reverse-Berlin-Wall’ built by the West designed to keep peo­ple from reach­ing the West and impose and eco­nom­ic stran­gle­hold on that enclave:

Asso­ci­at­ed Press

Poland lays razor wire on bor­der with Russia’s Kalin­ingrad

By VANESSA GERA
Novem­ber 2, 2022

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Pol­ish sol­diers began lay­ing razor wire Wednes­day along Poland’s bor­der with the Russ­ian exclave of Kalin­ingrad after the gov­ern­ment ordered the con­struc­tion of a bar­ri­er to pre­vent what it fears could become anoth­er migra­tion cri­sis.

Defense Min­is­ter Mar­iusz Blaszczak said a recent deci­sion by Russia’s avi­a­tion author­i­ty to launch flights from the Mid­dle East and North Africa to Kalin­ingrad led him to rein­force Poland’s 210-kilo­me­ter (130-mile) bor­der with Kalin­ingrad.

“Due to the dis­turb­ing infor­ma­tion regard­ing the launch of flights from the Mid­dle East and North Africa to Kalin­ingrad, I have decid­ed to take mea­sures that will strength­en the secu­ri­ty on the Pol­ish bor­der with the Kalin­ingrad oblast by seal­ing this bor­der,” Blaszczak said.

Blaszczak said the bar­ri­er along the bor­der would be made of three rows of razor wire mea­sur­ing 2½ meters (eight feet) high and 3 meters (10 feet) wide and fea­ture an elec­tron­ic mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem and cam­eras. The Pol­ish side also will have a fence to keep ani­mals away from the razor wire.

Before now, the sparse­ly inhab­it­ed bor­der area was patrolled but had no phys­i­cal bar­ri­er.

To the south, Poland’s bor­der with Belarus became the site of a major migra­tion cri­sis last year, with large num­bers of peo­ple from the Mid­dle East enter­ing ille­gal­ly. Pol­ish and oth­er EU lead­ers accused the Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment — an ally of Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin — of mas­ter­mind­ing the migra­tion to cre­ate chaos and divi­sion with­in the 27-nation bloc.

Poland erect­ed sim­i­lar rolls of razor wire before build­ing a per­ma­nent high steel wall on the bor­der with Belarus, which was com­plet­ed in June.

Blaszczak, the defense min­is­ter, said the gov­ern­ment was per­suad­ed to install fenc­ing near Kalin­ingrad because of Poland’s expe­ri­ence at the Belarus bor­der, where a sim­i­lar action “pre­vent­ed a hybrid attack from Belarus or sig­nif­i­cant­ly slowed down this attack.”

The chief exec­u­tive of Khrabro­vo Air­port in Kalin­ingrad, Alexan­der Kory­t­nyi, told Russia’s Inter­fax news agency on Oct. 3 that the facil­i­ty would seek to “attract air­lines from coun­tries in the Per­sian Gulf and Asia,” includ­ing the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates and Qatar.

In the last month, Poland’s Bor­der Guard agency has not detect­ed any­one attempt­ing to enter the coun­try ille­gal­ly from Kalin­ingrad, although a few mush­room pick­ers wan­dered into the area by mis­take, agency spokes­woman Miroslawa Alek­sandrow­icz told state news agency PAP.

...

Zuzan­na Dabrows­ka, a com­men­ta­tor writ­ing for the con­ser­v­a­tive dai­ly new­pa­per Rzecz­pospoli­ta, wrote Wednes­day that the bar­ri­er would be inef­fec­tive and a haz­ard because razor wire is dan­ger­ous for ani­mals and peo­ple who try to cross it.

She argued that peo­ple from the Mid­dle East and Africa were still try­ing to ille­gal­ly enter Poland from Belarus despite the bor­der wall.

“The bar­ri­er did not scare them away, because they have no safe retreat, pres­sured by Belaru­sian bor­der guards,” Dabrows­ka wrote.

Poland’s gov­ern­ment has strong­ly crit­i­cized crit­ics of the Belarus bor­der wall, depict­ing them as help­ing those who seek to harm Poland.

...

Sol­diers began lay­ing the razor wire in Wisz­tyniec, the place where the bor­ders of Poland, Rus­sia and Lithua­nia meet. Lithua­nia, like Poland, is a mem­ber of both NATO and the Euro­pean Union.

Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov declined Wednes­day to com­ment on the Kalin­ingrad bor­der bar­ri­er, describ­ing it as “a Pol­ish mat­ter.”

———-

“Poland lays razor wire on bor­der with Russia’s Kalin­ingrad” By VANESSA GERA; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 11/02/2022

“Defense Min­is­ter Mar­iusz Blaszczak said a recent deci­sion by Russia’s avi­a­tion author­i­ty to launch flights from the Mid­dle East and North Africa to Kalin­ingrad led him to rein­force Poland’s 210-kilo­me­ter (130-mile) bor­der with Kalin­ingrad.”

Kalin­ingrad is allow­ing peo­ple from the Mid­dle East and North Africa to fly into the coun­try. WE BETTER BUILD A WALL! That’s the over-the-top antics Poland’s gov­ern­ment has been engag­ing in over the past few weeks. And that’s on top of the high steel wall Poland built on its bor­der with Belarus over the past year. It’s the era of ‘Fortress Poland’, appar­ent­ly:

...
To the south, Poland’s bor­der with Belarus became the site of a major migra­tion cri­sis last year, with large num­bers of peo­ple from the Mid­dle East enter­ing ille­gal­ly. Pol­ish and oth­er EU lead­ers accused the Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment — an ally of Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin — of mas­ter­mind­ing the migra­tion to cre­ate chaos and divi­sion with­in the 27-nation bloc.

Poland erect­ed sim­i­lar rolls of razor wire before build­ing a per­ma­nent high steel wall on the bor­der with Belarus, which was com­plet­ed in June.

Blaszczak, the defense min­is­ter, said the gov­ern­ment was per­suad­ed to install fenc­ing near Kalin­ingrad because of Poland’s expe­ri­ence at the Belarus bor­der, where a sim­i­lar action “pre­vent­ed a hybrid attack from Belarus or sig­nif­i­cant­ly slowed down this attack.”

...

Poland’s gov­ern­ment has strong­ly crit­i­cized crit­ics of the Belarus bor­der wall, depict­ing them as help­ing those who seek to harm Poland.
...

First we had Lithua­nia cut­ting off Kalin­ingrad’s rail access until the EU forced the coun­try to lift the block­ade back in July. And now we have Poland lay­ing down razor wire across the entire bor­der, with the prospects for build­ing a full steel wall. What’s next?

Beyond the ques­tion of ‘what’s next’ is are all the ques­tions of what’s after ‘what’s next’? This is a con­flict that could go on for years. These kinds bor­der games are pre­sum­ably only going to get ampli­fied over time. Both of Kalin­ingrads direct neigh­bors have an appetite for some sort of Kalin­i­grad block­ade. So what are the odds that we aren’t going to see a full block­ade by the time this con­flict is over?

And with the prospects for a ‘steel cur­tain’ ring­ing Kalin­ingrad grow­ing as this con­flict deep­ens, it’s worth tak­ing a look at what kinds of lessons we can take from the Berlin Wall expe­ri­ence. Europe is is build­ing itself a new political/economic enclave. What can we learn from that last enclave of this nature? So here’s a recent­ly repub­lished piece by William Blum — first pub­lished in 2011 — look­ing back on the gen­er­al mis­un­der­stand­ing in the West about the nature of why the Berlin Wall was put up in the first place. Con­trary to the pop­u­lar myths, the wall was­n’t set up to pre­vent the oppressed cit­i­zens of East Ger­many from get­ting exposed to West­ern free­doms. Thou­sands of East Ger­mans rou­tine­ly com­mut­ed to jobs in the West only to return home in the East in the evening and many went back and forth for shop­ping or oth­er rea­sons. There were con­cerns about East Ger­mans ‘flee­ing’ to the West, although it was­n’t so much flee as get­ting aggres­sive­ly recruit­ed as part of a West­ern cam­paign of recruit­ing as many East Ger­man skilled pro­fes­sion­als. Pro­fes­sion­als whose val­ue to the West Ger­man econ­o­my became very appar­ent after the Wall was put up and West Berlin suf­fered eco­nom­i­cal­ly after expe­ri­enc­ing the loss of ~60,000 skilled work­ers who made dai­ly com­mutes.

But beyond this aggres­sive recruit­ment cam­paign of East Ger­man skilled pro­fes­sion­als was an out­right sab­o­tage cam­paign being orches­trat­ed by the CIA and oth­er US intel­li­gence agen­cies. Agents report­ed­ly used explo­sives, arson, short cir­cuit­ing, and oth­er meth­ods to dam­age pow­er sta­tions, ship­yards, canals, docks, pub­lic build­ings, gas sta­tions, pub­lic trans­porta­tion, bridges, etc. The Berlin Wall less about pre­vent­ing the East Ger­man pub­lic was get­ting seduced by the allure of the West than it was an eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty move dri­ven by an active sab­o­tage cam­paign. The sab­o­tage made free com­merce too expen­sive. It’s a rather salient fact giv­en that Poland is now basi­cal­ly jus­ti­fy­ing its walls on the pre­text of pre­vent­ing Russ­ian ‘hybrid war­fare’. It was lit­er­al­ly hybrid eco­nom­ic war­fare that the East Ger­mans were deal­ing with. Real eco­nom­ic war­fare, as opposed to Poland’s hyped claims.

And as Blum also points out, flash for­ward to 1999 — 10 years after the fall of the Berlin wall — polls found East Ger­mans were large­ly dis­ap­point­ed with life under cap­i­tal­ism and look­ing back fond­ly on what com­mu­nism pro­vid­ed. A major­i­ty of East Ger­mans at the time said their lives were hap­pi­er under com­mu­nism. It’s not exact­ly the sto­ry the West tells itself about why the Berlin Wall went up in the first place and what hap­pened after it fell. So with a new political/economic ‘wall’/blockade pop­ping up in Europe look­ing increas­ing­ly pos­si­ble, it’s worth recall how we still don’t real­ly under­stand why the last ‘wall’ hap­pened in the first place:

Con­sor­tium News

The Oth­er Side of the Berlin Wall

Novem­ber 9, 2022

On the 33rd anniver­sary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, we look back on why the wall was built in this essay by the late William Blum, pub­lished on July 28, 2011 on Con­sor­tium News.

The Berlin Wall became the icon­ic sym­bol of the Cold War, sup­pos­ed­ly prov­ing the supe­ri­or­i­ty of cap­i­tal­ism over com­mu­nism. How­ev­er, there is anoth­er, lit­tle under­stood side to the sto­ry regard­ing why the wall was erect­ed a half cen­tu­ry ago, writes his­to­ri­an William Blum.

By William Blum
Con­sor­tium News
July 28, 2011

The West­ern media will soon be revving up their pro­pa­gan­da motors to sol­em­nize the 50th anniver­sary of the erect­ing of the Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961.

All the Cold War clich­es about The Free World vs. Com­mu­nist Tyran­ny will be trot­ted out and the sim­ple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeat­ed: In 1961, the East Berlin com­mu­nists built a wall to keep their oppressed cit­i­zens from escap­ing to West Berlin and free­dom.

Why? Because com­mies don’t like peo­ple to be free, to learn the “truth.” What oth­er rea­son could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thou­sands of East Ger­mans had been com­mut­ing to the West for jobs each day and then return­ing to the East in the evening; many oth­ers went back and forth for shop­ping or oth­er rea­sons. So they were clear­ly not being held in the East against their will.

Why then was the wall built? There were two major rea­sons:

First, the West was bedev­il­ing the East with a vig­or­ous cam­paign of recruit­ing East Ger­man pro­fes­sion­als and skilled work­ers, who had been edu­cat­ed at the expense of the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment. This even­tu­al­ly led to a seri­ous labor and pro­duc­tion cri­sis in the East.

As one indi­ca­tion of this, The New York Times report­ed in 1963: “West Berlin suf­fered eco­nom­i­cal­ly from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled work­men who had com­mut­ed dai­ly from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” [New York Times, June 27, 1963]

In 1999, USA Today report­ed: “When the Berlin Wall crum­bled [1989], East Ger­mans imag­ined a life of free­dom where con­sumer goods were abun­dant and hard­ships would fade. Ten years lat­er, a remark­able 51 per­cent say they were hap­pi­er with com­mu­nism.” [USA Today, Octo­ber 11, 1999]

Ear­li­er polls would like­ly have shown even more than 51 per­cent express­ing such a sen­ti­ment, for in the ten years many of those who remem­bered life in East Ger­many with some fond­ness had passed away; although even 10 years lat­er, in 2009, The Wash­ing­ton Post could report:

“West­ern­ers say they are fed up with the ten­den­cy of their east­ern coun­ter­parts to wax nos­tal­gic about com­mu­nist times.” [Wash­ing­ton Post, May 12, 2009]

It was in the post-uni­fi­ca­tion peri­od that a new Russ­ian and East­ern Europe proverb was born: “Every­thing the Com­mu­nists said about Com­mu­nism was a lie, but every­thing they said about cap­i­tal­ism turned out to be the truth.”

It should also be not­ed that the divi­sion of Ger­many into two states in 1949, set­ting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hos­til­i­ty, was an Amer­i­can deci­sion, not a Sovi­et one: Car­olyn Eisen­berg, Draw­ing the Line: The Amer­i­can Deci­sion to Divide Ger­many, 1944–1949 (1996); or see a con­cise review of this book by Kai Bird in The Nation, Decem­ber 16, 1996]

Sec­ond, dur­ing the 1950s, Amer­i­can cold war­riors in West Ger­many insti­tut­ed a crude cam­paign of sab­o­tage and sub­ver­sion against East Ger­many designed to throw that country’s eco­nom­ic and admin­is­tra­tive machin­ery out of gear.

The C.I.A. and oth­er U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary ser­vices recruit­ed, equipped, trained and financed Ger­man activist groups and indi­vid­u­als, of West and East, to car­ry out actions which ran the spec­trum from juve­nile delin­quen­cy to ter­ror­ism; any­thing to make life dif­fi­cult for the East Ger­man peo­ple and weak­en their sup­port of the gov­ern­ment; any­thing to make the com­mies look bad.

It was a remark­able under­tak­ing.

“The Unit­ed States and its agents used explo­sives, arson, short cir­cuit­ing, and oth­er meth­ods to dam­age pow­er sta­tions, ship­yards, canals, docks, pub­lic build­ings, gas sta­tions, pub­lic trans­porta­tion, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seri­ous­ly injur­ing work­ers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pres­sure hoses of oth­ers; used acids to dam­age vital fac­to­ry machin­ery; put sand in the tur­bine of a fac­to­ry, bring­ing it to a stand­still; set fire to a tile-pro­duc­ing fac­to­ry; pro­mot­ed work slow-downs in fac­to­ries; killed 7,000 cows of a co-oper­a­tive dairy through poi­son­ing; added soap to pow­dered milk des­tined for East Ger­man schools; were in pos­ses­sion, when arrest­ed, of a large quan­ti­ty of the poi­son can­tharidin with which it was planned to pro­duce poi­soned cig­a­rettes to kill lead­ing East Ger­mans; set off stink bombs to dis­rupt polit­i­cal meet­ings; attempt­ed to dis­rupt the World Youth Fes­ti­val in East Berlin by send­ing out forged invi­ta­tions, false promis­es of free bed and board, false notices of can­cel­la­tions, etc.; car­ried out attacks on par­tic­i­pants with explo­sives, fire­bombs, and tire-punc­tur­ing equip­ment; forged and dis­trib­uted large quan­ti­ties of food ration cards to cause con­fu­sion, short­ages and resent­ment; sent out forged tax notices and oth­er gov­ern­ment direc­tives and doc­u­ments to fos­ter dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion and inef­fi­cien­cy with­in indus­try and unions … all this and much more.” [See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Mil­i­tary and CIA Inter­ven­tions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sab­o­tage and sub­ver­sion. ]

The Woodrow Wil­son Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter for Schol­ars, of Wash­ing­ton, DC, con­ser­v­a­tive cold war­riors, in one of their Cold War Inter­na­tion­al His­to­ry Project Work­ing Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open bor­der in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Ger­many] to mas­sive espi­onage and sub­ver­sion and, as the two doc­u­ments in the appen­dices show, its clo­sure gave the Com­mu­nist state greater secu­ri­ty.”

Through­out the 1950s, the East Ger­mans and the Sovi­et Union repeat­ed­ly lodged com­plaints with the Sovi­ets’ erst­while allies in the West and with the Unit­ed Nations about spe­cif­ic sab­o­tage and espi­onage activ­i­ties and called for the clo­sure of the offices in West Ger­many they claimed were respon­si­ble, and for which they pro­vid­ed names and address­es.

Their com­plaints fell on deaf ears.

Inevitably, the East Ger­mans began to tight­en up entry into the coun­try from the West, lead­ing even­tu­al­ly to the infa­mous Wall. How­ev­er, even after the wall was built there was reg­u­lar, albeit lim­it­ed, legal emi­gra­tion from east to west.

In 1984, for exam­ple, East Ger­many allowed 40,000 peo­ple to leave. In 1985, East Ger­man news­pa­pers claimed that more than 20,000 for­mer cit­i­zens who had set­tled in the West want­ed to return home after becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. The West Ger­man gov­ern­ment said that 14,300 East Ger­mans had gone back over the pre­vi­ous 10 years. [The Guardian (Lon­don), March 7, 1985]

...

————-

“The Oth­er Side of the Berlin Wall” By William Blum; Con­sor­tium News; 11/09/2022 [orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished 07/28/2011]

“It was in the post-uni­fi­ca­tion peri­od that a new Russ­ian and East­ern Europe proverb was born: “Every­thing the Com­mu­nists said about Com­mu­nism was a lie, but every­thing they said about cap­i­tal­ism turned out to be the truth.””

It’s one of the West­’s best kept and worst kept secrets: life under cap­i­tal­ism actu­al­ly sucks for most peo­ple. At least sucks in com­par­i­son to what it could be. Sure, it could be worse. But it could be so much bet­ter. And was bet­ter for the peo­ple of East Ger­many. The long­ing for that bet­ter life was still pal­pa­bly there in 2009, 20 years after the fall:

...
In 1999, USA Today report­ed: “When the Berlin Wall crum­bled [1989], East Ger­mans imag­ined a life of free­dom where con­sumer goods were abun­dant and hard­ships would fade. Ten years lat­er, a remark­able 51 per­cent say they were hap­pi­er with com­mu­nism.” [USA Today, Octo­ber 11, 1999]

Ear­li­er polls would like­ly have shown even more than 51 per­cent express­ing such a sen­ti­ment, for in the ten years many of those who remem­bered life in East Ger­many with some fond­ness had passed away; although even 10 years lat­er, in 2009, The Wash­ing­ton Post could report:

“West­ern­ers say they are fed up with the ten­den­cy of their east­ern coun­ter­parts to wax nos­tal­gic about com­mu­nist times.” [Wash­ing­ton Post, May 12, 2009]
...

But beyond a gen­er­al mis­un­der­stand­ing of what the qual­i­ty of life was like under com­mu­nism — a col­lec­tive mis­un­der­stand­ing that assures valid cri­tiques of how cap­i­tal­ism is prac­tice are nev­er real­ly learned — is the mis­un­der­stand­ing of why the Wall was put up in the first place. It was a response to sab­o­tage. Dead­ly sab­o­tage in some cas­es includ­ing arson and mass poi­son­ings:

...
Why then was the wall built? There were two major rea­sons:

First, the West was bedev­il­ing the East with a vig­or­ous cam­paign of recruit­ing East Ger­man pro­fes­sion­als and skilled work­ers, who had been edu­cat­ed at the expense of the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment. This even­tu­al­ly led to a seri­ous labor and pro­duc­tion cri­sis in the East.

As one indi­ca­tion of this, The New York Times report­ed in 1963: “West Berlin suf­fered eco­nom­i­cal­ly from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled work­men who had com­mut­ed dai­ly from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” [New York Times, June 27, 1963]

...

Sec­ond, dur­ing the 1950s, Amer­i­can cold war­riors in West Ger­many insti­tut­ed a crude cam­paign of sab­o­tage and sub­ver­sion against East Ger­many designed to throw that country’s eco­nom­ic and admin­is­tra­tive machin­ery out of gear.

The C.I.A. and oth­er U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary ser­vices recruit­ed, equipped, trained and financed Ger­man activist groups and indi­vid­u­als, of West and East, to car­ry out actions which ran the spec­trum from juve­nile delin­quen­cy to ter­ror­ism; any­thing to make life dif­fi­cult for the East Ger­man peo­ple and weak­en their sup­port of the gov­ern­ment; any­thing to make the com­mies look bad.

It was a remark­able under­tak­ing.

“The Unit­ed States and its agents used explo­sives, arson, short cir­cuit­ing, and oth­er meth­ods to dam­age pow­er sta­tions, ship­yards, canals, docks, pub­lic build­ings, gas sta­tions, pub­lic trans­porta­tion, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seri­ous­ly injur­ing work­ers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pres­sure hoses of oth­ers; used acids to dam­age vital fac­to­ry machin­ery; put sand in the tur­bine of a fac­to­ry, bring­ing it to a stand­still; set fire to a tile-pro­duc­ing fac­to­ry; pro­mot­ed work slow-downs in fac­to­ries; killed 7,000 cows of a co-oper­a­tive dairy through poi­son­ing; added soap to pow­dered milk des­tined for East Ger­man schools; were in pos­ses­sion, when arrest­ed, of a large quan­ti­ty of the poi­son can­tharidin with which it was planned to pro­duce poi­soned cig­a­rettes to kill lead­ing East Ger­mans; set off stink bombs to dis­rupt polit­i­cal meet­ings; attempt­ed to dis­rupt the World Youth Fes­ti­val in East Berlin by send­ing out forged invi­ta­tions, false promis­es of free bed and board, false notices of can­cel­la­tions, etc.; car­ried out attacks on par­tic­i­pants with explo­sives, fire­bombs, and tire-punc­tur­ing equip­ment; forged and dis­trib­uted large quan­ti­ties of food ration cards to cause con­fu­sion, short­ages and resent­ment; sent out forged tax notices and oth­er gov­ern­ment direc­tives and doc­u­ments to fos­ter dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion and inef­fi­cien­cy with­in indus­try and unions … all this and much more.” [See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Mil­i­tary and CIA Inter­ven­tions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sab­o­tage and sub­ver­sion. ]

...

Inevitably, the East Ger­mans began to tight­en up entry into the coun­try from the West, lead­ing even­tu­al­ly to the infa­mous Wall. How­ev­er, even after the wall was built there was reg­u­lar, albeit lim­it­ed, legal emi­gra­tion from east to west.

In 1984, for exam­ple, East Ger­many allowed 40,000 peo­ple to leave. In 1985, East Ger­man news­pa­pers claimed that more than 20,000 for­mer cit­i­zens who had set­tled in the West want­ed to return home after becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. The West Ger­man gov­ern­ment said that 14,300 East Ger­mans had gone back over the pre­vi­ous 10 years. [The Guardian (Lon­don), March 7, 1985]
...

Full-spec­trum eco­nom­ic sab­o­tage. That was the West­’s actu­al covert pol­i­cy and the under­ly­ing rea­son for the Wall in the first place. Flash for­ward to 2022, and we have Poland jus­ti­fy­ing the con­struc­tion of walls across two of its bor­ders based entire­ly on accu­sa­tions of Rus­sia and Belaru­sian ‘hybrid-war­fare’. The kind of ‘hybrid-war­fare’ that requires a wall to stop it. As they say, his­to­ry does­n’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. So it’s also worth recall­ing that it was the side that built the wall last time that ulti­mate­ly end­ed up tear­ing it down in an act of col­lec­tive pub­lic defi­ance fueled by a sense of pro­found dis­il­lu­sioned with the gov­ern­ment. It will be inter­est­ing to see how much rhyming of that nature we end up hear­ing this time around.

Here’s a set of sto­ries that are par­tic­u­lar­ly alarm­ing in light of the bust of the “Order of Hagal” Ital­ian ter­ror plot by neo-Nazi group with close ties to Ukrain­ian Nazi bat­tal­ions and a mem­ber cur­rent­ly fight­ing with Azov. The kind of sto­ry that rais­es the ques­tion, “what if those Ital­ian neo-Nazis plan­ning the ter­ror plot also had weaponized drones capa­ble of drop­ping bombs?” Ques­tions like that. Along with ques­tions about the gen­er­al bud­get of Nazi ter­ror cells because it sounds like the weaponized drones they’re using in Ukraine to drop bombs can be put togeth­er for around $20k. And that’s only going to get cheap­er.

The threat of drone-based ter­ror­ism isn’t new for the US. We’ve been get­ting warn­ings about that grow­ing threat for years, includ­ing an attack on the elec­tri­cal grid at a Penn­syl­va­nia elec­tric sub­sta­tion last year with a cheap com­mer­cial­ly avail­able drone. A still-anony­mous attack.

But as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing set of arti­cles, there is some­thing new about today’s drone-based threat envi­ron­ment. Com­mer­cial­ly-avail­able drones haven’t always being heav­i­ly used as weapons of war on the bat­tle­field. But they are now. Drones are turn­ing out to be cen­tral to Ukraine’s war effort. Mil­i­tary-grade drones but increas­ing­ly com­mer­cial­ly avail­able drones too. Mod­i­fied com­mer­cial­ly avail­able drones that are being turned into sophis­ti­cat­ed bomb-deliv­ery sys­tems proven capa­ble of tak­ing out hun­dreds of Russ­ian armor vehi­cles. In addi­tion­al to pow­er­ful bat­tle­field intel­li­gence tools.

And as we’re also going to see, the sophis­ti­cat­ed mod­ern bat­tle­field infor­ma­tion sys­tems Ukraine is using — a sys­tem that shares real-time bat­tle­field intel­li­gence from dis­parate sources that helps makes deci­sions on when and where to attack — was devel­oped with NATO and rep­re­sents a cut­ting-edge bat­tle­field plat­form that NATO is increas­ing­ly learn­ing from. In oth­er words, Ukraine is turn­ing into a next-gen­er­a­tion weapons-test­ing giant exper­i­ment. Lessons that will shape NATO mil­i­tary invest­ments for decades to come are being learned. And it sure sounds like those lessons are that drones are increas­ing­ly the future.

Sure, we already knew drones are the future of war­fare. But that future is look­ing even more drone-cen­tric thanks to the lessons being learned in Ukraine. Lessons like the pow­er of remote-con­trolled boats packed with explo­sives. And also lessons about the mil­i­tary util­i­ty of Elon Musk’s Star­link satel­lite clus­ter. There’s going to be a lot more satel­lite clus­ters in the future. Drone war­fare will depend on them. At least until there’s a cat­a­stroph­ic ‘Kessler’s Syn­drome’ chain-reac­tion event that takes the clus­ters out.

That’s all part of the con­text of the lat­est warn­ing issued by the US gov­ern­ment about the grow­ing domes­tic ter­ror posed by drones. As FBI direc­tor Christo­pher Wray acknowl­edge dur­ing a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing, “As the threat con­tin­ues to grow, we’re inves­ti­gat­ing, even as we speak, sev­er­al instances with­in the US, of attempts to weaponize drones with home­made IEDs [impro­vised explo­sive devices], and that is the future that is here now.” The future of home­made IED drones is here now. That was Wray’s com­ment dur­ing a hear­ing about a bill co-spon­sored by Sen­a­tors Gary Peters and Ron John­son that would renew and expand author­i­ty under the Jus­tice Depart­ment and Home­land Secu­ri­ty to track, seize, or even destroy an unmanned drone when it pos­es a cred­i­ble threat. Sen­a­tor Peters specif­i­cal­ly expressed con­cern about the use of com­mer­cial drones in Ukraine to drop bombs and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of that com­ing home to the US.

The US government’s exist­ing author­i­ty to counter mali­cious drones is set to expire on Dec. 16, so we’re pre­sum­ably going to see some sort of reau­tho­riza­tion of that author­i­ty. It’s kind of hard to imag­ine that not hap­pen­ing at this point. Meth­ods for weaponiz­ing com­mer­cial drones into lethal anony­mous­ly con­trolled weapons sys­tems are being honed in Ukraine, today’s inter­na­tion­al hub for white suprema­cist ter­ror net­works. It’s the kind of threat is pre­sum­ably freak­ing out gov­ern­ments around the world. And espe­cial­ly gov­ern­ments in the West where so many of the for­eign fight­ers who are going to be bring­ing home these drone-mod­i­fi­ca­tion skills hail from. The killer-drone future is now thanks to the war in Ukraine:

PC Mag­a­zine

FBI Prob­ing Cas­es of Weaponized Drones Car­ry­ing Bombs in US

FBI Direc­tor Christo­pher Wray urges Con­gress to pass leg­is­la­tion designed to help fed­er­al author­i­ties counter mali­cious drone activ­i­ty.

By Michael Kan
Novem­ber 17, 2022

The FBI has been inves­ti­gat­ing sev­er­al cas­es in the US where drones were weaponized to car­ry home­made bombs. 

In a Con­gres­sion­al hear­ing on Thurs­day, FBI Direc­tor Christo­pher Wray men­tioned the inves­ti­ga­tions while dis­cussing the dan­ger of drones being used for attacks on US soil.  

‚“As the threat con­tin­ues to grow, we’re inves­ti­gat­ing, even as we speak, sev­er­al instances with­in the US, of attempts to weaponize drones with home­made IEDs [impro­vised explo­sive devices], and that is the future that is here now,” he said. 

Wray didn’t elab­o­rate on the inves­ti­ga­tions. But he said the FBI has also “locat­ed hun­dreds of drones” act­ing in vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law while pro­tect­ing major pub­lic events, such as the Super Bowl and New Year’s Eve in Times Square. 

Wray made the state­ment to urge US law­mak­ers to pass leg­is­la­tion designed to help fed­er­al author­i­ties counter mali­cious drone activ­i­ty. US Sen­a­tors Gary Peters (D‑Michigan) and Ron John­son (R‑Wisconsin) have spon­sored a bill to renew and expand author­i­ty under the Jus­tice Depart­ment and Home­land Secu­ri­ty to track, seize, or even destroy an unmanned drone when it pos­es a cred­i­ble threat. 

Com­mer­cial drones are already being used in the war in Ukraine for both sur­veil­lance and to drop drop bombs. Sen. Peters is now wor­ried the same could take place in the US.

“Small drones, which can be pur­chased off the shelf at any elec­tron­ic store can be weaponized by mali­cious actors to dam­age our nation’s crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, or inflict mass casu­al­ties,” he said dur­ing the hear­ing, adding that the US’s exist­ing author­i­ty to counter mali­cious drones is set to expire on Dec. 16.

...

———-

“FBI Prob­ing Cas­es of Weaponized Drones Car­ry­ing Bombs in US” By Michael Kan; PC Mag­a­zine; 11/17/2022

“Com­mer­cial drones are already being used in the war in Ukraine for both sur­veil­lance and to drop drop bombs. Sen. Peters is now wor­ried the same could take place in the US.”

Yeah, that’s quite an alarm­ing warn­ing to get from the head of the FBI: com­mer­cial drones might be used in the US the same way they’re cur­rent­ly being used in Ukraine. As lethal weapons of war. Afford­able DIY weapons of war.

The kind of weapons that are per­fect for a domes­tic desta­bi­liza­tion cam­paign. This is a good time how the US was report­ed­ly work­ing with the Venezue­lan mil­i­tants that car­ried out a drone assas­si­na­tion attempt against Nico­las Maduro that near­ly worked.

And, of course, there’s the fact that the US has already been sup­ply­ing Ukraine with mil­i­tary-grade drones like the qua­si-autonomous Switch­blade drones and Phoenix Ghost drones, with min­i­mal abil­i­ty to track where these weapons go after they reach the bat­tle­field. So while the cur­rent warn­ings from the FBI are specif­i­cal­ly relat­ed to cheap lethal com­mer­cial­ly-avail­able drones being used in the US, there’s also the very real risks of these mil­i­tary-grade drones falling into the wrong hands.

But as the fol­low­ing Busi­ness Insid­er arti­cle from back in April makes clear, these com­mer­cial­ly avail­able drones are plen­ty lethal. At least if you know what you’re doing. That’s been one of the pow­er­ful lessons mil­i­tary observers are draw­ing from the fight­ing in Ukraine. In par­tic­u­lar, the fight­ing done by Aero­rozvid­ka, a unit of vol­un­teers spe­cial­iz­ing in tak­ing com­mer­cial­ly avail­able drones and con­vert­ing them in lethal bat­tle­field weapons. For exam­ple, the octo­copter R‑18 built from scratch has a range of 4km, a 40 minute flight time, and can drop 5kg bombs. It cost ~$20k to build and can be reused over and over.

As the arti­cle describes, Aero­rozvid­ka is bro­ken up into three units: the drone team, a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty team, and the Delta team. Delta is a NATO-sup­port­ed web-based sit­u­a­tion aware­ness sys­tem that cre­ates a map of Russ­ian tar­gets using infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources. Drone recon­nais­sance data from the drone team is part of the Delta infor­ma­tion streams. So when it comes to the ques­tion of what types of intel­li­gence the FBI is work­ing from when it issued its warn­ings about drone-based IEDs, the fact that NATO is work­ing with a Ukrain­ian unit that spe­cial­izes in mak­ing bomb-drop­ping drones is pre­sum­ably one of the alarm­ing pieces of intel­li­gence they were work­ing with:

Busi­ness Insid­er

Inside the elite Ukrain­ian drone unit found­ed by vol­un­teer IT experts: ‘We are all sol­diers now.’

Alia Shoaib
Apr 9, 2022, 3:19 AM

* Aero­rozvid­ka is an elite Ukrain­ian drone unit found­ed by vol­un­teer IT experts.
* The unit cus­tom-builds or mod­i­fies off-the-shelf con­sumer drones to bomb Russ­ian tanks and armor.
* The unit is a key part of the Ukrain­ian resis­tance against invad­ing Russ­ian forces.

An elite Ukrain­ian drone unit found­ed by vol­un­teer IT experts is becom­ing a cru­cial part of the resis­tance against invad­ing Russ­ian forces.

Aero­rozvid­ka cus­tom-builds or mod­i­fies off-the-shelf con­sumer drones to work in a mil­i­tary con­text and drop bombs on Russ­ian vehi­cles under the cov­er of night.

“Now, we are all sol­diers, but our roots are very dif­fer­ent,” Mykhai­lo, a board mem­ber and head of com­mu­ni­ca­tions for Aero­rozvid­ka, told Insid­er.

“Some of us have PhDs. Some have mas­ters. Some are from the IT indus­try and many oth­er indus­tries. The main thing which unites us is a desire to win this war.”

The unit was found­ed in 2014 in response to Rus­si­a’s annex­a­tion of Crimea and Russ­ian-backed groups launch­ing a sep­a­ratist insur­gency in the Don­bas region.

Tech-savvy vol­un­teers came togeth­er to design machines for drone-based aer­i­al recon­nais­sance to sup­port the Ukrain­ian army.

Aero­rozvid­ka’s founder, an invest­ment banker, and father of four, Volodymyr Kochetkov-Sukach, was killed in action in Don­bas in 2015.

“The inva­sion began not months ago. It began in 2014,” Mykhai­lo said.

Aero­rozvid­ka now oper­ates as a non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion that close­ly sup­ports Ukraine’s mil­i­tary.

The unit uses a range of drones, many of which are com­mon­ly avail­able store-bought drones that they mod­i­fy and mil­i­ta­rize, includ­ing Chi­nese DJI drones and Autel drones, French Par­rot drones, and more.

Its most prized drone is the octo­copter R‑18, which they build from scratch. It has a range of 4km, a 40 minute flight time, and can drop 5kg bombs.

Each R‑18 costs $20,000 to build, mak­ing them much cheap­er than anti-tank mis­siles such as NLAWs, or New gen­er­a­tion Light Anti-tank Weapons, cost­ing $40,000 per unit.

Unlike NLAWs, which are sin­gle-use, the R‑18s can also be used repeat­ed­ly– unless they suf­fer dam­age by Russ­ian fire.

The team has drones fly­ing 20 hours of the day on recon­nais­sance or com­bat mis­sions, Mykhai­lo said.

Aero­rozvid­ka is divid­ed into the drone team, the Delta team, and a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty team.

Delta is a NATO-sup­port­ed web-based sit­u­a­tion aware­ness sys­tem that cre­ates a map of Russ­ian tar­gets using infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources, includ­ing agents on land and recon­nais­sance data from the drone team.

The unit also uses Elon Musk’s Star­link satel­lite sys­tem, which helps ensure con­nec­tiv­i­ty even if there are inter­net or pow­er out­ages.

The unit car­ries out around 300 recon­nais­sance mis­sions dai­ly and has destroyed “dozens, pos­si­bly hun­dreds”” of Russ­ian vehi­cles, Mykhai­lo said.

Aero­rozvid­ka typ­i­cal­ly car­ries out mis­sions under cov­er of night because their drones’ ther­mal imag­ing cam­eras give them an advan­tage. Equipped with night-vision gog­gles and sniper rifles, the drone sol­diers would use quad bikes to move stealth­ily through the forests and get in posi­tion to attack the Russ­ian forces.

Its most sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ry was help­ing to halt the 40-mile Russ­ian con­voy head­ing to attack the cap­i­tal Kyiv.

‘I think it’s log­i­cal to say they are adapt­ing. But they are still Rus­sians’

The unit typ­i­cal­ly tar­gets the most valu­able vehi­cle in a con­voy to make the most effec­tive use of their lim­it­ed bombs.

In this case, the team tar­get­ed vehi­cles at the head of the con­voy, which suc­ceed­ed in block­ing the con­voy and demor­al­iz­ing Russ­ian forces.

...

Mykhai­lo said that he could not dis­close exact­ly how many peo­ple are part of the orga­ni­za­tion, but that there are “dozens.”

The unit often shares videos of their mis­sions on social media, occa­sion­al­ly set to the back­drop of music by Ukrain­ian rap artist Skof­ka.

#Ukraine: A Ukrain­ian drone drop­ping muni­tions onto Russ­ian vehi­cles. A seri­ous toll; cir­ca 4x Command/Comms/EW Trucks, 3x Sup­ply Trucks, 2x BMP/MT-LB armoured vehi­cles, 1x BMP‑2 and 2S19 Msta‑S 152mm SPG (Pre­vi­ous­ly posted).Usually RKG-1600 or adapt­ed RPG muni­tions are used. pic.twitter.com/W5fp5tIGoV— ???? Ukraine Weapons Track­er (@UAWeapons) March 30, 2022

A sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge fac­ing Aero­rozvid­ka is fund­ing and sup­ply issues. It relies upon crowd­fund­ing and dona­tions to get hold of much-need­ed com­po­nents such as advanced modems and ther­mal imag­ing cam­eras.

Many US and Cana­da-made parts are sub­ject to export con­trols pro­hibit­ing them from being sent to Ukraine.

...

————

“Inside the elite Ukrain­ian drone unit found­ed by vol­un­teer IT experts: ‘We are all sol­diers now.’ ” by Alia Shoaib; Busi­ness Insid­er; 04/09/2022

“The unit uses a range of drones, many of which are com­mon­ly avail­able store-bought drones that they mod­i­fy and mil­i­ta­rize, includ­ing Chi­nese DJI drones and Autel drones, French Par­rot drones, and more.”

The weaponiza­tion of com­mer­cial­ly-avail­able drones. It’s quite a skillset. And that skillset is get­ting honed with each pass­ing month in Ukraine, and has been devel­op­ing since the Aero­rozvid­ka group’s start in 2014. They had eight years already to learn how to do this:

...
The unit was found­ed in 2014 in response to Rus­si­a’s annex­a­tion of Crimea and Russ­ian-backed groups launch­ing a sep­a­ratist insur­gency in the Don­bas region.

Tech-savvy vol­un­teers came togeth­er to design machines for drone-based aer­i­al recon­nais­sance to sup­port the Ukrain­ian army.

Aero­rozvid­ka’s founder, an invest­ment banker, and father of four, Volodymyr Kochetkov-Sukach, was killed in action in Don­bas in 2015.

“The inva­sion began not months ago. It began in 2014,” Mykhai­lo said.

Aero­rozvid­ka now oper­ates as a non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion that close­ly sup­ports Ukraine’s mil­i­tary.
...

For just $20k, you can build a drone capa­ble of drop­ping 5 kg bombs, which have proven to be enough to destroy Russ­ian vehi­cles. Imag­ine the ter­ror poten­tial from such a device. How many peo­ple know how do build these things by now? It’s unclear, but what is unam­bigu­ous is that Ukraine has an incen­tive to ensure a large num­ber of peo­ple know how to build them. In oth­er words, this is pre­sum­ably a skill that pro­lif­er­at­ing in Ukraine right now:

...
Its most prized drone is the octo­copter R‑18, which they build from scratch. It has a range of 4km, a 40 minute flight time, and can drop 5kg bombs.

Each R‑18 costs $20,000 to build, mak­ing them much cheap­er than anti-tank mis­siles such as NLAWs, or New gen­er­a­tion Light Anti-tank Weapons, cost­ing $40,000 per unit.

Unlike NLAWs, which are sin­gle-use, the R‑18s can also be used repeat­ed­ly– unless they suf­fer dam­age by Russ­ian fire.

The team has drones fly­ing 20 hours of the day on recon­nais­sance or com­bat mis­sions, Mykhai­lo said.
...

But the bomb-drop­ping drones are just one part of what Aero­rozvid­ka does. There’s also the Delta team, which works with the NATO-devel­oped Delta bat­tle­field sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness sys­tem:

...
Aero­rozvid­ka is divid­ed into the drone team, the Delta team, and a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty team.

Delta is a NATO-sup­port­ed web-based sit­u­a­tion aware­ness sys­tem that cre­ates a map of Russ­ian tar­gets using infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources, includ­ing agents on land and recon­nais­sance data from the drone team.

The unit also uses Elon Musk’s Star­link satel­lite sys­tem, which helps ensure con­nec­tiv­i­ty even if there are inter­net or pow­er out­ages.

The unit car­ries out around 300 recon­nais­sance mis­sions dai­ly and has destroyed “dozens, pos­si­bly hun­dreds”” of Russ­ian vehi­cles, Mykhai­lo said.
...

And that ref­er­ence to the Aero­rozvid­ka’s Delta team brings us to the fol­low­ing New York Times arti­cle about the trans­for­ma­tion of Ukraine into a next-gen­er­a­tion weapons-test­ing plat­form that could shape the nature of mil­i­tary invest­ments by mil­i­tary pow­ers around the world for years to come. Pow­er­ful lessons are being learned about the next gen­er­a­tion of war­fare. And as the arti­cle makes clear, one of those pow­er­ful lessons is vital impor­tance of drones in mod­ern com­bat. Whether it’s intel­li­gence-col­lect­ing drones or bomb-drop­ping drones, or even drone-boats capa­ble of attack­ing large ships, the future if war­fare is remote­ly con­trolled:

The New York Times

For West­ern Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test

Though the bat­tle for Ukraine remains large­ly a grind­ing artillery war, new advances in tech­nol­o­gy and train­ing there are being close­ly mon­i­tored for the ways they are start­ing to shape com­bat.

By Lara Jakes
Nov. 15, 2022 Updat­ed 2:00 p.m. ET

Three months ago, as Ukrain­ian troops were strug­gling to advance against Russ­ian forces in the south, the military’s head­quar­ters in Kyiv qui­et­ly deployed a valu­able new weapon to the bat­tle­field.

It was not a rock­et launch­er, can­non or anoth­er kind of heavy arms from West­ern allies. Instead, it was a real-time infor­ma­tion sys­tem known as Delta — an online net­work that mil­i­tary troops, civil­ian offi­cials and even vet­ted bystanders could use to track and share des­per­ate­ly need­ed details about Russ­ian forces.

The soft­ware, devel­oped in coor­di­na­tion with NATO, had bare­ly been test­ed in bat­tle.

But as they moved across the Kher­son region in a major coun­terof­fen­sive, Ukraine’s forces employed Delta, as well as pow­er­ful weapon­ry sup­plied by the West, to push the Rus­sians out of towns and vil­lages they had occu­pied for months.

The big pay­off came on Fri­day with the retreat of Russ­ian forces from Kher­son City — a major prize in the near­ly nine-month war.

Delta is one exam­ple of how Ukraine has become a test­ing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and new ways to use them, that West­ern polit­i­cal offi­cials and mil­i­tary com­man­ders pre­dict could shape war­fare for gen­er­a­tions to come.

The bat­tle for Ukraine, to be sure, remains large­ly a grind­ing war of attri­tion, with relent­less artillery attacks and oth­er World War II-era tac­tics. Both sides pri­mar­i­ly rely on Sovi­et-era weapons, and Ukraine has report­ed run­ning low on ammu­ni­tion for them.

But even as the tra­di­tion­al war­fare is under­way, new advances in tech­nol­o­gy and train­ing in Ukraine are being close­ly mon­i­tored for the ways they are chang­ing the face of the fight. Beyond Delta, they include remote-con­trolled boats, anti-drone weapons known as Sky­Wipers and an updat­ed ver­sion of an air-defense sys­tem built in Ger­many that the Ger­man mil­i­tary itself has yet to use.

“Ukraine is the best test ground, as we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to test all hypothe­ses in bat­tle and intro­duce rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in mil­i­tary tech and mod­ern war­fare,” said Mykhai­lo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime min­is­ter and min­is­ter of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

He was speak­ing in Octo­ber at a NATO con­fer­ence in Nor­folk, Va., where he pub­licly dis­cussed Delta for the first time.

He also empha­sized the grow­ing reliance on the remote-con­trolled air­craft and boats that offi­cials and mil­i­tary experts said have become weapons of choice like those in no pre­vi­ous war.

“In the last two weeks, we have been con­vinced once again the wars of the future will be about max­i­mum drones and min­i­mal humans,” Mr. Federov said.

Since last sum­mer, Ukraine and its allies have been test­ing remote-con­trolled boats packed with explo­sives in the Black Sea, cul­mi­nat­ing in a bold attack in Octo­ber against Russia’s fleet off the coast of Sev­astopol.

Mil­i­tary offi­cials large­ly have declined to dis­cuss the attack or pro­vide details about the boats, but both the Unit­ed States and Ger­many have sup­plied Ukraine with sim­i­lar ships this year. Shau­rav Gairo­la, a naval weapons ana­lyst for Janes, a defense intel­li­gence firm, said the Black Sea strike showed a sophis­ti­cat­ed lev­el of plan­ning, giv­en the appar­ent suc­cess of the small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive boats against Russia’s might­i­er war ships.

The attack “has pushed the con­flict enve­lope,” Mr. Gairo­la said. He said it “impos­es a par­a­digm shift in naval war doc­trines and sym­bol­izes an expres­sion of futur­is­tic war­fare tac­tics.”

The use of remote-con­trolled boats could become par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, mil­i­tary experts said, show­ing how war­fare at sea might play out as the Unit­ed States and its allies brace for poten­tial future naval aggres­sions by Chi­na in the East and South Chi­na Seas, and against Tai­wan.

Inevitably, the Rus­sians’ increased use of drones has spurred Ukraine’s allies to send new tech­nol­o­gy to stop them.

Late last year, Ukraine’s mil­i­tary began using the new­ly devel­oped drone-jam­ming guns known as Sky­Wipers to thwart Russ­ian sep­a­ratists in the east­ern Don­bas region. The Sky­Wipers, which can divert or dis­rupt drones by block­ing their com­mu­ni­ca­tion sig­nals, were devel­oped in Lithua­nia and had been on the mar­ket for only two years before they were giv­en to Ukraine through a NATO secu­ri­ty assis­tance pro­gram.

Near­ly nine months into the war, the Sky­Wipers are now only one kind of drone jam­mer being used in Ukraine. But they have been sin­gled out as a high­ly cov­et­ed bat­tle­field asset — both for Ukrain­ian troops and ene­my forces that hope to cap­ture them.

It is not known how many Sky­Wipers have been sent to Ukraine, although Lithua­nia report­ed­ly sent sev­er­al dozen in Octo­ber 2021. In a state­ment to The New York Times, Lithuania’s defense min­istry said it sent 50 Sky­Wipers in August after Ukrain­ian offi­cials called it “one of the top pri­or­i­ties.”

Dalia Gry­bauskaite, who was Lithuania’s pres­i­dent when the Sky­Wipers were being designed, said her country’s defense indus­try made a cal­cu­lat­ed turn toward pro­duc­ing high-tech equip­ment dur­ing her time in office, from 2009 to 2019, to update a stock­pile of weapons that “were main­ly Kalash­nikovs” and oth­er Sovi­et-era arms.

“We’re learn­ing in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learn­ing how to use our NATO equip­ment,” Ms. Gry­bauskaite said in an inter­view last week. “And, yes, it is a teach­ing bat­tle­ground.”

She paused, then added: “It is shame­ful for me because Ukraini­ans are pay­ing with their lives for these exer­cis­es for us.”

The West­ern lethal aid that is being sent to Ukraine con­sists, for the most part, of recent­ly updat­ed ver­sions of old­er weapons. That was the case with the Ger­man-made infrared, medi­um-range hom­ing mis­siles and launch­ers known as IRIS‑T, which pro­tect against Russ­ian rock­et attacks.

They have a longer range than the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of air-defense sys­tems that debuted in 2015. Germany’s own mil­i­tary has not yet used the updat­ed ver­sion of the sys­tems, which were shipped to Ukraine last month. Addi­tion­al mis­siles were deliv­ered last week.

...

More than an ear­ly alert sys­tem, Delta com­bines real-time maps and pic­tures of ene­my assets, down to how many sol­diers are on the move and what kinds of weapons they are car­ry­ing, offi­cials said.

That is com­bined with intel­li­gence — includ­ing from sur­veil­lance satel­lites, drones and oth­er gov­ern­ment sources — to decide where and how Ukrain­ian troops should attack.

Ukraine and West­ern pow­ers deter­mined they need­ed the sys­tem after Rus­sia insti­gat­ed a sep­a­ratist-backed war in Ukraine’s east in 2014. It was devel­oped by Ukraine’s Defense Min­istry with NATO assis­tance and first test­ed in 2017, in part to wean troops off Russ­ian stan­dards of silo­ing infor­ma­tion among ground units instead of shar­ing it.

It has been includ­ed in train­ing exer­cis­es between Ukraine’s mil­i­tary and oth­er NATO plan­ners in the years since.

Infor­ma­tion shar­ing has long been a sta­ple for Amer­i­can and oth­er NATO forces. What NATO offi­cials said was sur­pris­ing about the Delta sys­tem was that the net­work was so broad­ly acces­si­ble to troops that it helped them make bat­tle­field deci­sions even faster than some more mod­ern mil­i­taries. In Kher­son, Delta helped Ukrain­ian troops quick­ly iden­ti­fy Russ­ian sup­ply lines to attack, Inna Hon­char, com­man­der of the non­govern­ment group Aero­rozvid­ka, which devel­ops drones and oth­er tech­nol­o­gy for Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, said in a state­ment on Sun­day.

“Bridges were cer­tain­ly key points,” Ms. Hon­char added. “Ware­hous­es and con­trol points were dam­aged, and the pro­vi­sion of troops became crit­i­cal” as Rus­sians became increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed, she said.

Delta’s first real test had come in the weeks imme­di­ate­ly after the Feb­ru­ary inva­sion as a Russ­ian con­voy stretch­ing 40 miles long head­ed toward Kyiv. Ukrain­ian drones over­head tracked its advance, and troops assessed the best places to inter­cept it. Res­i­dents texted up-to-the-minute reports to the gov­ern­ment with details that could have been seen only up close.

All the infor­ma­tion was col­lect­ed, ana­lyzed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed through Delta to help Ukraine’s mil­i­tary force a Russ­ian retreat, Ukrain­ian offi­cials said.

“That was the very first moment when Delta capa­bil­i­ties were real­ized at max,” the Ukrain­ian Defense Min­istry said in a state­ment. It said Delta had since helped iden­ti­fy 1,500 con­firmed Russ­ian tar­gets across the coun­try on any giv­en day — with “hun­dreds of them being elim­i­nat­ed” with­in 48 hours.

The test runs in Ukraine are help­ing senior offi­cials and defense plan­ners in the Unit­ed States and its allies decide how to invest mil­i­tary spend­ing over the next two decades.

...

———-

“For West­ern Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test” by Lara Jakes; The New York Times; 11/15/2022

“Delta is one exam­ple of how Ukraine has become a test­ing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and new ways to use them, that West­ern polit­i­cal offi­cials and mil­i­tary com­man­ders pre­dict could shape war­fare for gen­er­a­tions to come.”

Delta isn’t just a new weapons plat­form build for Ukraine. It’s a cut­ting edge state-of-the-art infor­ma­tion sys­tem. One of many NATO-devel­oped plat­forms get­ting test­ed on the Ukrain­ian bat­tle­field. Wild­ly suc­cess­ful­ly test­ed in the case of the drone use against the columns of Russ­ian vehi­cles advanc­ing towards Kiev:

...
The soft­ware, devel­oped in coor­di­na­tion with NATO, had bare­ly been test­ed in bat­tle.

...

More than an ear­ly alert sys­tem, Delta com­bines real-time maps and pic­tures of ene­my assets, down to how many sol­diers are on the move and what kinds of weapons they are car­ry­ing, offi­cials said.

That is com­bined with intel­li­gence — includ­ing from sur­veil­lance satel­lites, drones and oth­er gov­ern­ment sources — to decide where and how Ukrain­ian troops should attack.

Ukraine and West­ern pow­ers deter­mined they need­ed the sys­tem after Rus­sia insti­gat­ed a sep­a­ratist-backed war in Ukraine’s east in 2014. It was devel­oped by Ukraine’s Defense Min­istry with NATO assis­tance and first test­ed in 2017, in part to wean troops off Russ­ian stan­dards of silo­ing infor­ma­tion among ground units instead of shar­ing it.

It has been includ­ed in train­ing exer­cis­es between Ukraine’s mil­i­tary and oth­er NATO plan­ners in the years since.

...

Delta’s first real test had come in the weeks imme­di­ate­ly after the Feb­ru­ary inva­sion as a Russ­ian con­voy stretch­ing 40 miles long head­ed toward Kyiv. Ukrain­ian drones over­head tracked its advance, and troops assessed the best places to inter­cept it. Res­i­dents texted up-to-the-minute reports to the gov­ern­ment with details that could have been seen only up close.

All the infor­ma­tion was col­lect­ed, ana­lyzed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed through Delta to help Ukraine’s mil­i­tary force a Russ­ian retreat, Ukrain­ian offi­cials said.

“That was the very first moment when Delta capa­bil­i­ties were real­ized at max,” the Ukrain­ian Defense Min­istry said in a state­ment. It said Delta had since helped iden­ti­fy 1,500 con­firmed Russ­ian tar­gets across the coun­try on any giv­en day — with “hun­dreds of them being elim­i­nat­ed” with­in 48 hours.

The test runs in Ukraine are help­ing senior offi­cials and defense plan­ners in the Unit­ed States and its allies decide how to invest mil­i­tary spend­ing over the next two decades.
...

It’s also worth not­ing how much Delta resem­bles the orig­i­nal mis­sion of the inter­net’s ARPANET pre­de­ces­sor built for col­lect­ing dis­parate intel­li­gence sources for the Viet­nam war. Delta is like an advanced ARPANET, with addi­tion­al bomb-drop­ping capa­bil­i­ties.

And then there’s the remote-con­trolled boats pro­vid­ed to Ukraine by the US and Ger­many. Remote con­trolled boats packed with explo­sives. It’s a reminder that the domes­tic ter­ror threat from drones includes a lot more than just the fly­ing drones every­one is now famil­iar with. Boat drones are an option too. And you can pack a lot more explo­sives onto a boat than you can into a fly­ing drone:

...
But even as the tra­di­tion­al war­fare is under­way, new advances in tech­nol­o­gy and train­ing in Ukraine are being close­ly mon­i­tored for the ways they are chang­ing the face of the fight. Beyond Delta, they include remote-con­trolled boats, anti-drone weapons known as Sky­Wipers and an updat­ed ver­sion of an air-defense sys­tem built in Ger­many that the Ger­man mil­i­tary itself has yet to use.

...

Since last sum­mer, Ukraine and its allies have been test­ing remote-con­trolled boats packed with explo­sives in the Black Sea, cul­mi­nat­ing in a bold attack in Octo­ber against Russia’s fleet off the coast of Sev­astopol.

Mil­i­tary offi­cials large­ly have declined to dis­cuss the attack or pro­vide details about the boats, but both the Unit­ed States and Ger­many have sup­plied Ukraine with sim­i­lar ships this year. Shau­rav Gairo­la, a naval weapons ana­lyst for Janes, a defense intel­li­gence firm, said the Black Sea strike showed a sophis­ti­cat­ed lev­el of plan­ning, giv­en the appar­ent suc­cess of the small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive boats against Russia’s might­i­er war ships.

The attack “has pushed the con­flict enve­lope,” Mr. Gairo­la said. He said it “impos­es a par­a­digm shift in naval war doc­trines and sym­bol­izes an expres­sion of futur­is­tic war­fare tac­tics.”

The use of remote-con­trolled boats could become par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, mil­i­tary experts said, show­ing how war­fare at sea might play out as the Unit­ed States and its allies brace for poten­tial future naval aggres­sions by Chi­na in the East and South Chi­na Seas, and against Tai­wan.
...

And if the words of Mykhai­lo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime min­is­ter and min­is­ter of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, are any indi­ca­tion of what to expect as this war plays out, Ukraine is only going to be more and more invest­ed in mil­i­tary drone tech­nol­o­gy for years to come. Pre­sum­ably with NATO’s assis­tance:

...
“Ukraine is the best test ground, as we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to test all hypothe­ses in bat­tle and intro­duce rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in mil­i­tary tech and mod­ern war­fare,” said Mykhai­lo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime min­is­ter and min­is­ter of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

He was speak­ing in Octo­ber at a NATO con­fer­ence in Nor­folk, Va., where he pub­licly dis­cussed Delta for the first time.

He also empha­sized the grow­ing reliance on the remote-con­trolled air­craft and boats that offi­cials and mil­i­tary experts said have become weapons of choice like those in no pre­vi­ous war.

“In the last two weeks, we have been con­vinced once again the wars of the future will be about max­i­mum drones and min­i­mal humans,” Mr. Federov said.
...

Ukraine sees the “max­i­mum drones and min­i­mal humans” future because it’s liv­ing it. From the mil­i­tary-grade drone donat­ed by the US and oth­er NATO allies to the DIY com­mer­cial drone, the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary is going to want all things drone and will for the fore­see­able future.

Of course, ter­ror­ists of all stripes are also going to be sali­vat­ing over weaponized drones as these tech­nolo­gies become more and more acces­si­ble, which is what Christo­pher Wray was tes­ti­fy­ing about before Sen­a­tors wor­ried about drone tech in Ukraine com­ing home. We can be pret­ty con­fi­dent the US is going to extend its autho­riza­tion to take down sus­pi­cious drones. Drone defens­es are going to increas­ing­ly seen as vital to not just nation secu­ri­ty but pri­vate secu­ri­ty. Drones are only going to get more and more pow­er­ful. Along with all the tech­nolo­gies drones are going to be capa­ble of car­ry­ing. Today it’s cam­eras, bombs and mis­siles. Who knows what tomor­row will bring for the world of weaponized drones. But DIY drone weaponiza­tion tech­niques are get­ting tur­bo-charged in Ukraine right now so we can also be pret­ty con­fi­dent drone-deliv­ered ter­ror is com­ing home to a NATO mem­ber at some point.

It’s just a mat­ter of time. Yes, it was always just a mat­ter of time. It’s just a lot less time thanks to all the inevitable blow­back.

What are the impli­ca­tions of a transat­lantic trade war giv­en the going fight­ing in Ukraine? As the fol­low­ing pair of arti­cles describe, it’s a ques­tion we might get an answer to soon­er rather than lat­er. Because there’s an eco­nom­ic dis­pute brew­ing between the US and EU and it’s unclear what’s going to resolve it out­side of an end to the con­flict in Ukraine and a resump­tion of Russ­ian oil and gas flows to Europe.

As we’ve seen, US oil and gas com­pa­nies are mak­ing incred­i­ble prof­its as a result of the war in Ukraine and result­ing sanc­tions on Russ­ian gas. But it’s not just US ener­gy firms record­ing these record prof­its. EU firms are expe­ri­enc­ing them too. As we’ve also seen, ener­gy prices are so much cheap­er in the US and look like­ly to remain cheap­er far enough into the future that EU firms are increas­ing­ly con­sid­er­ing relo­cat­ing to the US.

Those record prof­its are very much still irk­ing EU gov­ern­ments. Large prof­its for US defense man­u­fac­tur­ers mak­ing a killing from the war in Ukraine are also part of the dis­pute. But as the arti­cles describe, there’s anoth­er grow­ing rea­son for EU anger at the US that’s not direct­ly relat­ed to the war in Ukraine although very much tied into the over­all ener­gy cri­sis: the “Buy Amer­i­can” pro­vi­sions in the Democ­rats’ his­toric Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act (IRA). As the EU sees it, the IRA’s sub­si­dies for green ener­gy — includ­ing a $7,500 for elec­tric vehi­cles built in the US — are dis­crim­i­na­to­ry against EU car man­u­fac­tur­ers. France and Ger­many appear to be par­tic­u­lar­ly angered by the new law.

But as we’re also going to see, the Democ­rats have no appetite for mod­i­fy­ing their sig­na­ture leg­is­la­tion that was designed to cre­ate new green man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs in the US. So how is this dis­pute going to be resolved? Duel­ing sub­si­dies, it appears. At least that’s what EU lead­ers are hint­ing at. A new transat­lantic indus­try sub­sidy ‘race’.

So that’s the fas­ci­nat­ing new dynam­ic unfold­ing as the war in Ukraine plays out. The longer the con­flict goes, keep­ing ener­gy prices sky high in the EU, the more intense­ly that sub­sidy ‘race’ is going to get. Which pre­sum­ably also means the record prof­its cur­rent­ly expe­ri­enced by the US and EU ener­gy sec­tor will be even greater for years to come. At least that’s the dynam­ic in play as long as the EU remains firm­ly com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing the war in Ukraine and the ener­gy sanc­tions that come with that sup­port:

Politico.eu

Europe accus­es US of prof­it­ing from war

EU offi­cials attack Joe Biden over sky-high gas prices, weapons sales and trade as Vladimir Putin’s war threat­ens to destroy West­ern uni­ty.

By Bar­bara Moens, Jakob Han­ke Vela and Jacopo Barigazzi
Novem­ber 24, 2022 7:09 pm CET

Nine months after invad­ing Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is begin­ning to frac­ture the West. 

Top Euro­pean offi­cials are furi­ous with Joe Biden’s admin­is­tra­tion and now accuse the Amer­i­cans of mak­ing a for­tune from the war, while EU coun­tries suf­fer. 

“The fact is, if you look at it sober­ly, the coun­try that is most prof­it­ing from this war is the U.S. because they are sell­ing more gas and at high­er prices, and because they are sell­ing more weapons,” one senior offi­cial told POLITICO. 

The explo­sive com­ments — backed in pub­lic and pri­vate by offi­cials, diplo­mats and min­is­ters else­where — fol­low mount­ing anger in Europe over Amer­i­can sub­si­dies that threat­en to wreck Euro­pean indus­try. The Krem­lin is like­ly to wel­come the poi­son­ing of the atmos­phere among West­ern allies. 

“We are real­ly at a his­toric junc­ture,” the senior EU offi­cial said, argu­ing that the dou­ble hit of trade dis­rup­tion from U.S. sub­si­dies and high ener­gy prices risks turn­ing pub­lic opin­ion against both the war effort and the transat­lantic alliance. “Amer­i­ca needs to real­ize that pub­lic opin­ion is shift­ing in many EU coun­tries.”

Anoth­er top offi­cial, the EU’s chief diplo­mat Josep Bor­rell, called on Wash­ing­ton to respond to Euro­pean con­cerns. “Amer­i­cans — our friends — take deci­sions which have an eco­nom­ic impact on us,” he said in an inter­view with POLITICO.

The U.S. reject­ed Europe’s com­plaints. “The rise in gas prices in Europe is caused by Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine and Putin’s ener­gy war against Europe, peri­od,” a spokesper­son for Biden’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil said. Exports of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas from the U.S. to Europe “increased dra­mat­i­cal­ly and enabled Europe to diver­si­fy away from Rus­sia,” the NSC spokesper­son said.

The biggest point of ten­sion in recent weeks has been Biden’s green sub­si­dies and tax­es that Brus­sels says unfair­ly tilt trade away from the EU and threat­en to destroy Euro­pean indus­tries. Despite for­mal objec­tions from Europe, Wash­ing­ton has so far shown no sign of back­ing down. 

...

As they attempt to reduce their reliance on Russ­ian ener­gy, EU coun­tries are turn­ing to gas from the U.S. instead — but the price Euro­peans pay is almost four times as high as the same fuel costs in Amer­i­ca. Then there’s the like­ly surge in orders for Amer­i­can-made mil­i­tary kit as Euro­pean armies run short after send­ing weapons to Ukraine. 

... 

When EU lead­ers tack­led Biden over high U.S. gas prices at the G20 meet­ing in Bali last week, the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent sim­ply seemed unaware of the issue, accord­ing to the senior offi­cial quot­ed above. Oth­er EU offi­cials and diplo­mats agreed that Amer­i­can igno­rance about the con­se­quences for Europe was a major prob­lem. 

...

Offi­cials on both sides of the Atlantic rec­og­nize the risks that the increas­ing­ly tox­ic atmos­phere will have for the West­ern alliance. The bick­er­ing is exact­ly what Putin would wish for, EU and U.S. diplo­mats agreed. 

The grow­ing dis­pute over Biden’s Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act (IRA) — a huge tax, cli­mate and health care pack­age — has put fears over a transat­lantic trade war high on the polit­i­cal agen­da again. EU trade min­is­ters are due to dis­cuss their response on Fri­day as offi­cials in Brus­sels draw up plans for an emer­gency war chest of sub­si­dies to save Euro­pean indus­tries from col­lapse. 

“The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act is very wor­ry­ing,” said Dutch Trade Min­is­ter Lies­je Schreinemach­er. “The poten­tial impact on the Euro­pean econ­o­my is very big.”

“The U.S. is fol­low­ing a domes­tic agen­da, which is regret­tably pro­tec­tion­ist and dis­crim­i­nates against U.S. allies,” said Toni­no Pic­u­la, the Euro­pean Par­lia­men­t’s lead per­son on the transat­lantic rela­tion­ship.

An Amer­i­can offi­cial stressed the price set­ting for Euro­pean buy­ers of gas reflects pri­vate mar­ket deci­sions and is not the result of any U.S. gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy or action. “U.S. com­pa­nies have been trans­par­ent and reli­able sup­pli­ers of nat­ur­al gas to Europe,” the offi­cial said. Export­ing capac­i­ty has also been lim­it­ed by an acci­dent in June that forced a key facil­i­ty to shut down.

In most cas­es, the offi­cial added, the dif­fer­ence between the export and import prices does­n’t go to U.S. LNG exporters, but to com­pa­nies reselling the gas with­in the EU. The largest Euro­pean hold­er of long-term U.S. gas con­tracts is France’s Total­En­er­gies for exam­ple. 

The NSC spokesper­son quot­ed above added: “The increase in glob­al LNG sup­plies, led by the Unit­ed States, helped Euro­pean allies and part­ners get stor­age lev­els to an encour­ag­ing place ahead of this win­ter, and we will con­tin­ue to work with the EU, its mem­bers, and oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries to ensure suf­fi­cient sup­plies will be avail­able for win­ter and beyond.”

It’s not a new argu­ment from the Amer­i­can side but it doesn’t seem to be con­vinc­ing the Euro­peans. “The Unit­ed States sells us its gas with a mul­ti­pli­er effect of four when it cross­es the Atlantic,” Euro­pean Com­mis­sion­er for the Inter­nal Mar­ket Thier­ry Bre­ton said on French TV on Wednes­day. “Of course the Amer­i­cans are our allies ... but when some­thing goes wrong it is nec­es­sary also between allies to say it.”

Cheap­er ener­gy has quick­ly become a huge com­pet­i­tive advan­tage for Amer­i­can com­pa­nies, too. Busi­ness­es are plan­ning new invest­ments in the U.S. or even relo­cat­ing their exist­ing busi­ness­es away from Europe to Amer­i­can fac­to­ries. Just this week, chem­i­cal multi­na­tion­al Solvay announced it is choos­ing the U.S. over Europe for new invest­ments, in the lat­est of a series of sim­i­lar announce­ments from key EU indus­tri­al giants. 

Allies or not?

Despite the ener­gy dis­agree­ments, it was­n’t until Wash­ing­ton announced a $369 bil­lion indus­tri­al sub­sidy scheme to sup­port green indus­tries under the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act that Brus­sels went into full-blown pan­ic mode.

“The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act has changed every­thing,” one EU diplo­mat said. “Is Wash­ing­ton still our ally or not?”

For Biden, the leg­is­la­tion is a his­toric cli­mate achieve­ment. “While we under­stand that some trad­ing part­ners have con­cerns with how the [elec­tric vehi­cle] tax cred­it pro­vi­sions in the IRA will oper­ate in prac­tice with respect to their pro­duc­ers, we are com­mit­ted to con­tin­u­ing to work with them to bet­ter under­stand and do what we can to address their con­cerns,” the NSC spokesper­son said. “This is not a zero-sum game. The IRA will grow the pie for clean ener­gy invest­ments, not split it.” 

But the EU sees that dif­fer­ent­ly. An offi­cial from France’s for­eign affairs min­istry said the diag­no­sis is clear: These are “dis­crim­i­na­to­ry sub­si­dies that will dis­tort com­pe­ti­tion.” French Econ­o­my Min­is­ter Bruno Le Maire this week even accused the U.S. of going down Chi­na’s path of eco­nom­ic iso­la­tion­ism, urg­ing Brus­sels to repli­cate such an approach. “Europe must not be the last of the Mohi­cans,” he said.

The EU is prepar­ing its respons­es, such as a big sub­sidy push to pre­vent Euro­pean indus­try from being wiped out by Amer­i­can rivals. “We are expe­ri­enc­ing a creep­ing cri­sis of trust on trade issues in this rela­tion­ship,” said Ger­man MEP Rein­hard Bütikofer. 

“At some point, you have to assert your­self,” said French MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne. “We are in a world of pow­er strug­gles. When you arm-wres­tle, if you are not mus­cu­lar, if you are not pre­pared both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly, you lose.”

Behind the scenes, there is also grow­ing irri­ta­tion about the mon­ey flow­ing into the Amer­i­can defense sec­tor.

The U.S. has by far been the largest provider of mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine, sup­ply­ing more than $15.2 bil­lion in weapons and equip­ment since the start of the war. The EU has so far pro­vid­ed about €8 bil­lion of mil­i­tary equip­ment to Ukraine, accord­ing to Bor­rell.

Accord­ing to one senior offi­cial from a Euro­pean cap­i­tal, restock­ing of some sophis­ti­cat­ed weapons may take “years” because of prob­lems in the sup­ply chain and the pro­duc­tion of chips. This has fueled fears that the U.S. defense indus­try can prof­it even more from the war. 

The Pen­ta­gon is already devel­op­ing a roadmap to speed up arms sales, as the pres­sure from allies to respond to greater demands for weapons and equip­ment grows.

Anoth­er EU diplo­mat argued that “the mon­ey they are mak­ing on weapons” could help Amer­i­cans under­stand that mak­ing “all this cash on gas” might be “a bit too much.” 

The diplo­mat argued that a dis­count on gas prices could help us to “keep unit­ed our pub­lic opin­ions” and to nego­ti­ate with third coun­tries on gas sup­plies. “It’s not good, in terms of optics, to give the impres­sion that your best ally is actu­al­ly mak­ing huge prof­its out of your trou­bles,” the diplo­mat said.

————-

“Europe accus­es US of prof­it­ing from war” By Bar­bara Moens, Jakob Han­ke Vela and Jacopo Barigazzi; Politico.eu; 11/24/2022

““The fact is, if you look at it sober­ly, the coun­try that is most prof­it­ing from this war is the U.S. because they are sell­ing more gas and at high­er prices, and because they are sell­ing more weapons,” one senior offi­cial told POLITICO. ”

All’s fair in love and war. But exces­sive prof­it tak­ing between allies is just unseem­ly. That appears to be the gist of the EU’s sim­mer­ing anger over the grow­ing num­ber of ways the US has been prof­it­ing hand­some­ly at the expense of the EU late­ly. First, there’s the imme­di­ate issue of the war in Ukraine and sub­se­quent sanc­tions on Russ­ian gas forc­ing the EU to buy expen­sive US LNG that some­how ends up cost­ing four times as much by the time it reach­es EU con­sumers. The US points the fin­ger at EU mid­dle­men, but EU offi­cials don’t seem to find that expla­na­tion con­vinc­ing:

...
The explo­sive com­ments — backed in pub­lic and pri­vate by offi­cials, diplo­mats and min­is­ters else­where — fol­low mount­ing anger in Europe over Amer­i­can sub­si­dies that threat­en to wreck Euro­pean indus­try. The Krem­lin is like­ly to wel­come the poi­son­ing of the atmos­phere among West­ern allies. 

“We are real­ly at a his­toric junc­ture,” the senior EU offi­cial said, argu­ing that the dou­ble hit of trade dis­rup­tion from U.S. sub­si­dies and high ener­gy prices risks turn­ing pub­lic opin­ion against both the war effort and the transat­lantic alliance. “Amer­i­ca needs to real­ize that pub­lic opin­ion is shift­ing in many EU coun­tries.”

Anoth­er top offi­cial, the EU’s chief diplo­mat Josep Bor­rell, called on Wash­ing­ton to respond to Euro­pean con­cerns. “Amer­i­cans — our friends — take deci­sions which have an eco­nom­ic impact on us,” he said in an inter­view with POLITICO.

...

As they attempt to reduce their reliance on Russ­ian ener­gy, EU coun­tries are turn­ing to gas from the U.S. instead — but the price Euro­peans pay is almost four times as high as the same fuel costs in Amer­i­ca. Then there’s the like­ly surge in orders for Amer­i­can-made mil­i­tary kit as Euro­pean armies run short after send­ing weapons to Ukraine. 

... 

When EU lead­ers tack­led Biden over high U.S. gas prices at the G20 meet­ing in Bali last week, the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent sim­ply seemed unaware of the issue, accord­ing to the senior offi­cial quot­ed above. Oth­er EU offi­cials and diplo­mats agreed that Amer­i­can igno­rance about the con­se­quences for Europe was a major prob­lem. 

...

An Amer­i­can offi­cial stressed the price set­ting for Euro­pean buy­ers of gas reflects pri­vate mar­ket deci­sions and is not the result of any U.S. gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy or action. “U.S. com­pa­nies have been trans­par­ent and reli­able sup­pli­ers of nat­ur­al gas to Europe,” the offi­cial said. Export­ing capac­i­ty has also been lim­it­ed by an acci­dent in June that forced a key facil­i­ty to shut down.

In most cas­es, the offi­cial added, the dif­fer­ence between the export and import prices does­n’t go to U.S. LNG exporters, but to com­pa­nies reselling the gas with­in the EU. The largest Euro­pean hold­er of long-term U.S. gas con­tracts is France’s Total­En­er­gies for exam­ple. 
...

There’s also the obvi­ous prof­i­teer­ing tak­ing in the US defense sec­tor. Prof­i­teer­ing that could go on for years as the deplet­ed stocks of mil­i­tary equip­ment are slow­ly replaced with US-made hard­ware:

...
Behind the scenes, there is also grow­ing irri­ta­tion about the mon­ey flow­ing into the Amer­i­can defense sec­tor.

The U.S. has by far been the largest provider of mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine, sup­ply­ing more than $15.2 bil­lion in weapons and equip­ment since the start of the war. The EU has so far pro­vid­ed about €8 bil­lion of mil­i­tary equip­ment to Ukraine, accord­ing to Bor­rell.

Accord­ing to one senior offi­cial from a Euro­pean cap­i­tal, restock­ing of some sophis­ti­cat­ed weapons may take “years” because of prob­lems in the sup­ply chain and the pro­duc­tion of chips. This has fueled fears that the U.S. defense indus­try can prof­it even more from the war. 
...

But it’s an issue that has noth­ing direct­ly to do with the war in Ukraine that appears to be most anger­ing the US’s EU allies, although it’s very tan­gen­tial­ly-relat­ed: the “Buy Amer­i­can” sub­si­dies for elec­tric vehi­cles in the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act (IRA) that only applies to cars built in the US. Recall how the prospects of high ener­gy prices for years to come in the EU, cou­pled with the new sub­si­dies for green ener­gy in the IRA that has a grow­ing num­ber of EU busi­ness­es con­sid­er­ing relo­cat­ing their oper­a­tions to the US. That incen­tive to relo­cate to the US is poten­tial­ly even high­er for EU car man­u­fac­tur­ers. That’s what the EU is freak­ing out about:

...
The biggest point of ten­sion in recent weeks has been Biden’s green sub­si­dies and tax­es that Brus­sels says unfair­ly tilt trade away from the EU and threat­en to destroy Euro­pean indus­tries. Despite for­mal objec­tions from Europe, Wash­ing­ton has so far shown no sign of back­ing down. 

...

The grow­ing dis­pute over Biden’s Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act (IRA) — a huge tax, cli­mate and health care pack­age — has put fears over a transat­lantic trade war high on the polit­i­cal agen­da again. EU trade min­is­ters are due to dis­cuss their response on Fri­day as offi­cials in Brus­sels draw up plans for an emer­gency war chest of sub­si­dies to save Euro­pean indus­tries from col­lapse. 

“The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act is very wor­ry­ing,” said Dutch Trade Min­is­ter Lies­je Schreinemach­er. “The poten­tial impact on the Euro­pean econ­o­my is very big.”

“The U.S. is fol­low­ing a domes­tic agen­da, which is regret­tably pro­tec­tion­ist and dis­crim­i­nates against U.S. allies,” said Toni­no Pic­u­la, the Euro­pean Par­lia­men­t’s lead per­son on the transat­lantic rela­tion­ship.

...

Cheap­er ener­gy has quick­ly become a huge com­pet­i­tive advan­tage for Amer­i­can com­pa­nies, too. Busi­ness­es are plan­ning new invest­ments in the U.S. or even relo­cat­ing their exist­ing busi­ness­es away from Europe to Amer­i­can fac­to­ries. Just this week, chem­i­cal multi­na­tion­al Solvay announced it is choos­ing the U.S. over Europe for new invest­ments, in the lat­est of a series of sim­i­lar announce­ments from key EU indus­tri­al giants. 

...

Despite the ener­gy dis­agree­ments, it was­n’t until Wash­ing­ton announced a $369 bil­lion indus­tri­al sub­sidy scheme to sup­port green indus­tries under the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act that Brus­sels went into full-blown pan­ic mode.

“The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act has changed every­thing,” one EU diplo­mat said. “Is Wash­ing­ton still our ally or not?”
...

And that EU pan­ic could end up man­i­fest­ing into a new trade war. A trade war of duel­ing ener­gy sub­si­dies for indus­try. It points towards a poten­tial dynam­ic as the war in Ukraine con­tin­ues: the longer the war goes and the worse the eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion gets for EU indus­tries, the greater the pub­lic sub­si­dies for indus­tries. Sub­si­dies that could eas­i­ly end up stay­ing in place long after the war in Ukraine in over:

...
But the EU sees that dif­fer­ent­ly. An offi­cial from France’s for­eign affairs min­istry said the diag­no­sis is clear: These are “dis­crim­i­na­to­ry sub­si­dies that will dis­tort com­pe­ti­tion.” French Econ­o­my Min­is­ter Bruno Le Maire this week even accused the U.S. of going down Chi­na’s path of eco­nom­ic iso­la­tion­ism, urg­ing Brus­sels to repli­cate such an approach. “Europe must not be the last of the Mohi­cans,” he said.

The EU is prepar­ing its respons­es, such as a big sub­sidy push to pre­vent Euro­pean indus­try from being wiped out by Amer­i­can rivals. “We are expe­ri­enc­ing a creep­ing cri­sis of trust on trade issues in this rela­tion­ship,” said Ger­man MEP Rein­hard Bütikofer. 

“At some point, you have to assert your­self,” said French MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne. “We are in a world of pow­er strug­gles. When you arm-wres­tle, if you are not mus­cu­lar, if you are not pre­pared both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly, you lose.”
...

So what are the odds of the US relent­ing and mod­i­fy­ing the IRA to include EU man­u­fac­tur­ers in the green sub­si­dies? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, the Democ­rats have basi­cal­ly zero appetite for the idea of reopen­ing and mod­i­fy­ing their his­toric leg­is­la­tion. Which means a fight is prob­a­bly what we should expect. The kind of fight that will like­ly result in a new race. A race over duel­ing ener­gy sub­si­dies for indus­try:

Politi­co

Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats: Not a chance of reopen­ing cli­mate law

The pres­i­dent has been clear about his sup­port for estab­lish­ing a U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing base for elec­tric vehi­cles.

By Gavin Bade and Doug Palmer
11/30/2022 05:03 PM EST

Mem­bers of Con­gress have an answer for French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron’s pleas for a relax­ation of U.S. green-ener­gy sub­si­dies: “Non mer­ci.”

Macron is using his vis­it to Wash­ing­ton this week to ask Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to back off the “Made in Amer­i­ca” require­ments of the new U.S. cli­mate law. Euro­pean lead­ers say those pro­vi­sions dis­crim­i­nate against the EU elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers and oth­er clean indus­tries — and raise the dan­ger of a transat­lantic trade war.

But key Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers have lit­tle appetite for amend­ing the land­mark law.

The legislation’s $369 bil­lion in cli­mate invest­ments pro­vide sub­si­dies for U.S. green indus­try and offer a hefty con­sumer tax cred­it for elec­tric vehi­cles built in North Amer­i­ca. And that’s exact­ly how it should work, the Democ­rats say.

“I’m not reopen­ing this law. We’re not going to reopen the text of it,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D‑Ore.), the Senate’s chief tax and trade law­mak­er. He said the leg­is­la­tion was meant to cre­ate “more good-pay­ing Amer­i­can jobs.”

Sen. Deb­bie Stabenow (D‑Mich.) also dis­missed the chances of Con­gress amend­ing the law to accom­mo­date automak­ers based in the EU and oth­er U.S. allies, which want the elec­tric vehi­cles they make over­seas to qual­i­fy for the max­i­mum $7,500-a-vehicle tax cred­it.

Those import­ed elec­tric vehi­cles qual­i­fied for U.S. clean ener­gy tax cred­its for years, before Biden signed his prized Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act. The legislation’s explic­it goal was to cre­ate more U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs.

“We’d love to have them come and build plants here and then be a part of it,” Stabenow said of the for­eign automak­ers. But “we’re not going to be” chang­ing the law.

...

The brew­ing fight over U.S. elec­tric vehi­cle tax cred­its and oth­er pro­vi­sions in the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act is pos­ing a new threat to transat­lantic trade rela­tions not seen since for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump was in the White House. Even as Democ­rats talk up the need for bet­ter eco­nom­ic coop­er­a­tion with allies post-Trump, the EU and oth­er economies with sub­stan­tial auto indus­tries will be hard-pressed to find a sym­pa­thet­ic ear on Capi­tol Hill.

Democ­rats, who will main­tain con­trol of the Sen­ate next year, will not want to reopen one of the Biden administration’s great­est leg­isla­tive achieve­ments. Repub­li­cans, set to take nar­row con­trol of the House and gen­er­al­ly opposed to the broad­er cli­mate leg­is­la­tion, could be reluc­tant to push for an amend­ment at the behest of for­eign inter­ests.

Biden has been clear about his sup­port for estab­lish­ing a U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing base for elec­tric vehi­cles.

...

The Unit­ed States and France will issue a joint state­ment from the Biden-Macron meet­ing, but bar­ring a major sur­prise it is not expect­ed to include a break­through on Europe’s con­cerns. Still, the U.S. and EU will con­tin­ue a bilat­er­al dia­logue on the issue that Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials insist has been “pro­duc­tive,” even though no res­o­lu­tion has emerged yet.

France and oth­er Euro­pean nations are mean­while coa­lesc­ing around their own response. Macron argues that the IRA is “not in line with the rules of the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion,” as he put it in ear­ly Novem­ber in France dur­ing a meet­ing with indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

And French Trade Min­is­ter Olivi­er Becht said the Euro­pean Union, which sets trade pol­i­cy for the 27-nation bloc, may resort to “coer­cive” trade mea­sures if the U.S. doesn’t mod­i­fy or rein­ter­pret the law so that “Euro­pean com­pa­nies ben­e­fit from the same con­di­tions as Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.”

Wyden said Europe only has to look in the mir­ror, espe­cial­ly when it comes to how the EU has tar­get­ed Amer­i­can big tech firms with dig­i­tal tax­a­tion rules.

“If any­body is talk­ing about coer­cion, what I’ve seen is what they’ve been doing in terms of dig­i­tal tax­es and harm­ing our high-skill, high-wage job sec­tor,” he said. “So if you want to talk about exam­ples, that’ll be the first one that comes to mind.”

The White House has said it is ready to hear Macron out.

“The bot­tom line for us, is first of all we want to under­stand the con­cern,” said White House Nation­al Secu­ri­ty spokesper­son John Kir­by. “We’re absolute­ly will­ing to have that con­ver­sa­tion and to find a way to work through those issues of con­cern.”

But in the face of what is shap­ing up to be a clean ener­gy sub­sidy race, the Biden administration’s line is that there’s no down­side to more gov­ern­ment sup­port for cli­mate ini­tia­tives.

“Our per­spec­tive is if you look at the eco­nom­ics of this, if you look at the amount of need around clean ener­gy invest­ments, around renew­ables invest­ments, around EVs, there’s just a huge amount to be done — and more, frankly, to be done than the mar­ket would pro­vide for on its own,” a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said on a call with reporters.

For­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore weighed in on the Amer­i­can side Tues­day, telling a POLITICO sus­tain­abil­i­ty sum­mit in Brus­sels that the EU and oth­er gov­ern­ments should “match what the U.S. has done.”

The num­bers on auto trade also ham­per the case for the U.S. to amend the law.

In 2021, EU nations, led by Ger­many, shipped about $22 bil­lion more auto­mo­bile exports to the U.S. than Amer­i­ca sent to Europe.

The EU, as a bloc, also impos­es a 10 per­cent tar­iff on cars from the U.S. while the U.S. impos­es only a 2.5 per­cent tar­iff on Euro­pean car imports. The U.S. auto trade deficit is one rea­son Trump threat­ened to impose a 25 per­cent tar­iff on Euro­pean autos, although he nev­er fol­lowed through on that.

A big break­through for Macron would be some kind of con­ces­sion that allows Euro­pean com­pa­nies the same IRA tax ben­e­fits as Amer­i­can, Cana­di­an and Mex­i­can com­pa­nies enjoy. But for now, that seems unlike­ly.

A French offi­cial con­firmed they are work­ing with the EU to per­suade Biden to make changes, while mov­ing ahead with efforts to forge a “Buy Euro­pean Act” back home to respond to the increased U.S. com­pe­ti­tion. “We don’t expect these con­ces­sions to be announced soon or dur­ing the vis­it. But it is what we are advo­cat­ing,” the offi­cial said.

In the­o­ry, the Trea­sury Depart­ment, which is imple­ment­ing the law, could come up with an inter­pre­ta­tion of the law’s text that allows Euro­pean vehi­cles to access the sub­si­dies. But that would sure­ly anger U.S. unions, whose sup­port Biden needs going into reelec­tion. And Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Janet Yellen has down­played the chances of that, say­ing in Octo­ber that the law “is what it is.”

Still, Europe is not the only ally that is upset. Both Japan and South Korea are urg­ing the admin­is­tra­tion to imple­ment the law in a way that min­i­mizes the impact on for­eign sup­pli­ers who have made invest­ments to build facil­i­ties in the Unit­ed States.

South Kore­an automak­er Hyundai, for exam­ple, announced plans in May to invest $5.54 bil­lion to build new elec­tric vehi­cle and bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ing plants in Geor­gia that are expect­ed to cre­ate 8,100 new full-time jobs.

But that facil­i­ty won’t begin pro­duc­ing elec­tric vehi­cles until 2025, so it wants the Trea­sury Depart­ment to either delay imple­men­ta­tion of a North Amer­i­can final assem­bly require­ment or pro­vide a waiv­er for com­pa­nies that announced invest­ment plans before the new law went into effect.

Toy­ota, which says it has invest­ed more than $36 bil­lion in U.S. auto­mo­tive pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties since 1998, is spend­ing $3.8 bil­lion on a new plant in North Car­oli­na that is expect­ed to cre­ate 2,100 jobs build­ing bat­ter­ies for about 1.2 mil­lion vehi­cles each year. But it also is not expect­ed to become oper­a­tional until 2025.

The automak­ers may have more luck on that front with Trea­sury. “There’s dis­cus­sions about giv­ing them more time,” Stabenow con­firmed on Capi­tol Hill.

...

————

“Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats: Not a chance of reopen­ing cli­mate law” By Gavin Bade and Doug Palmer; Politi­co; 11/30/2022

“The legislation’s $369 bil­lion in cli­mate invest­ments pro­vide sub­si­dies for U.S. green indus­try and offer a hefty con­sumer tax cred­it for elec­tric vehi­cles built in North Amer­i­ca. And that’s exact­ly how it should work, the Democ­rats say.”

The $369 bil­lion green ener­gy cen­ter­piece of the Democ­rats’ his­toric leg­is­la­tion
. Sub­si­dies designed to encour­age elec­tric vehi­cle and oth­er green ener­gy invest­ments are built in the US. That’s the thing that the EU is demand­ing be mod­i­fied. And while it does appear that there are options that could sat­is­fy the EU — like grant­i­ng the $7,500 per vehi­cle sub­sidy to EVs built in the EU — it does­n’t sound like Democ­rats have any appetite for these pro­pos­als. It’s no mys­tery as to why. The IRA is great pol­i­tics, at least domes­ti­cal­ly speak­ing:

...
Macron is using his vis­it to Wash­ing­ton this week to ask Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to back off the “Made in Amer­i­ca” require­ments of the new U.S. cli­mate law. Euro­pean lead­ers say those pro­vi­sions dis­crim­i­nate against the EU elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers and oth­er clean indus­tries — and raise the dan­ger of a transat­lantic trade war.

But key Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers have lit­tle appetite for amend­ing the land­mark law.

...

“I’m not reopen­ing this law. We’re not going to reopen the text of it,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D‑Ore.), the Senate’s chief tax and trade law­mak­er. He said the leg­is­la­tion was meant to cre­ate “more good-pay­ing Amer­i­can jobs.”

Sen. Deb­bie Stabenow (D‑Mich.) also dis­missed the chances of Con­gress amend­ing the law to accom­mo­date automak­ers based in the EU and oth­er U.S. allies, which want the elec­tric vehi­cles they make over­seas to qual­i­fy for the max­i­mum $7,500-a-vehicle tax cred­it.

Those import­ed elec­tric vehi­cles qual­i­fied for U.S. clean ener­gy tax cred­its for years, before Biden signed his prized Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act. The legislation’s explic­it goal was to cre­ate more U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs.

“We’d love to have them come and build plants here and then be a part of it,” Stabenow said of the for­eign automak­ers. But “we’re not going to be” chang­ing the law.
...

And then there’s the real­i­ty that the exist­ing trade rela­tion­ship between the US and EU was­n’t exact­ly fair and bal­anced. As we’ve seen, the euro­zone mon­e­tary union — and the Ordolib­er­al eco­nom­ic phi­los­o­phy guid­ing it — is effec­tive­ly a giant boon for EU exporters in coun­tries like Ger­many due to the rel­a­tive­ly cheap val­ue of the euro vs Deutschmark or oth­er high-val­ue domes­tic cur­ren­cies. Plus there’s all the oth­er asym­met­ric pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures tilt­ed in favor the EU. In oth­er words, the pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures in the IRA that has the EU all riled up is arguably long over­due:

...
The num­bers on auto trade also ham­per the case for the U.S. to amend the law.

In 2021, EU nations, led by Ger­many, shipped about $22 bil­lion more auto­mo­bile exports to the U.S. than Amer­i­ca sent to Europe.

The EU, as a bloc, also impos­es a 10 per­cent tar­iff on cars from the U.S. while the U.S. impos­es only a 2.5 per­cent tar­iff on Euro­pean car imports. The U.S. auto trade deficit is one rea­son Trump threat­ened to impose a 25 per­cent tar­iff on Euro­pean autos, although he nev­er fol­lowed through on that.
...

So how will the EU respond? It appears it’s going to use both a car­rot and stick approach, with the stick being the threat of a “Buy Euro­pean Act” unless the US agrees to include EU-built cars in the IRA’s sub­si­dies:

...
France and oth­er Euro­pean nations are mean­while coa­lesc­ing around their own response. Macron argues that the IRA is “not in line with the rules of the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion,” as he put it in ear­ly Novem­ber in France dur­ing a meet­ing with indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

And French Trade Min­is­ter Olivi­er Becht said the Euro­pean Union, which sets trade pol­i­cy for the 27-nation bloc, may resort to “coer­cive” trade mea­sures if the U.S. doesn’t mod­i­fy or rein­ter­pret the law so that “Euro­pean com­pa­nies ben­e­fit from the same con­di­tions as Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.”

...

A big break­through for Macron would be some kind of con­ces­sion that allows Euro­pean com­pa­nies the same IRA tax ben­e­fits as Amer­i­can, Cana­di­an and Mex­i­can com­pa­nies enjoy. But for now, that seems unlike­ly.

A French offi­cial con­firmed they are work­ing with the EU to per­suade Biden to make changes, while mov­ing ahead with efforts to forge a “Buy Euro­pean Act” back home to respond to the increased U.S. com­pe­ti­tion. “We don’t expect these con­ces­sions to be announced soon or dur­ing the vis­it. But it is what we are advo­cat­ing,” the offi­cial said.

In the­o­ry, the Trea­sury Depart­ment, which is imple­ment­ing the law, could come up with an inter­pre­ta­tion of the law’s text that allows Euro­pean vehi­cles to access the sub­si­dies. But that would sure­ly anger U.S. unions, whose sup­port Biden needs going into reelec­tion. And Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Janet Yellen has down­played the chances of that, say­ing in Octo­ber that the law “is what it is.”
...

But it’s the ‘car­rot’ threat of set­ting up duel­ing EU indus­try sub­si­dies intend­ed to keep EU indus­tries from relo­cat­ing that appears to be what we should expect at this point. A clean ener­gy sub­sidy race:

...
Wyden said Europe only has to look in the mir­ror, espe­cial­ly when it comes to how the EU has tar­get­ed Amer­i­can big tech firms with dig­i­tal tax­a­tion rules.

“If any­body is talk­ing about coer­cion, what I’ve seen is what they’ve been doing in terms of dig­i­tal tax­es and harm­ing our high-skill, high-wage job sec­tor,” he said. “So if you want to talk about exam­ples, that’ll be the first one that comes to mind.”

The White House has said it is ready to hear Macron out.

“The bot­tom line for us, is first of all we want to under­stand the con­cern,” said White House Nation­al Secu­ri­ty spokesper­son John Kir­by. “We’re absolute­ly will­ing to have that con­ver­sa­tion and to find a way to work through those issues of con­cern.”

But in the face of what is shap­ing up to be a clean ener­gy sub­sidy race, the Biden administration’s line is that there’s no down­side to more gov­ern­ment sup­port for cli­mate ini­tia­tives.

“Our per­spec­tive is if you look at the eco­nom­ics of this, if you look at the amount of need around clean ener­gy invest­ments, around renew­ables invest­ments, around EVs, there’s just a huge amount to be done — and more, frankly, to be done than the mar­ket would pro­vide for on its own,” a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said on a call with reporters.

...

Who’s going to ulti­mate­ly win this sub­sidy race? The US or the EU? Nei­ther, of course. The win­ners are the indus­tries that are going to be get­ting all these sub­si­dies. As well as the ener­gy sec­tor on both sides of the Atlantic, which will pre­sum­ably con­tin­ue rak­ing in exor­bi­tant now-sub­si­dized prof­its. And, hope­ful­ly, the envi­ron­ment the future gen­er­a­tions will end up win­ners. At least in the long, run should these sub­si­dies actu­al­ly result in the explo­sion of green ener­gy tech­nolo­gies as intend­ed. We’ll see if that’s what actu­al­ly hap­pens. It’s a gam­ble. The kind of gam­ble that the most prof­itable indus­tries on the plan­et are guar­an­teed to win no mat­ter how it plays out, as per usu­al.

The Ukrain­ian neolib­er­al par­adise isn’t just con­tin­u­ing to take shape, but accel­er­at­ing, one rushed rad­i­cal new set of laws at a time. That’s the grim mes­sage deliv­ered in the fol­low­ing open­Democ­ra­cy report on the recent­ly passed bill that promis­es to put pri­vate prop­er­ty devel­op­ers in con­trol of urban plan­ning for Ukraine. A bill that was filled with so many last minute amend­ments that stan­dard leg­isla­tive pro­ce­dures were bypassed and the final ver­sion of the bill was­n’t even pub­licly avail­able dur­ing the Decem­ber 13th vote. A vote that only passed by two votes, which was remark­able for a bill that pre­vi­ous­ly had much stronger sup­port. It’s a reflec­tion of just how awful a bill it ulti­mate­ly end­ed up being.

Remark­ably, it appears the bill was only passed with the sup­port of a num­ber of MPs from the ‘pro-Russ­ian’ par­ties banned by the Zelen­skiy gov­ern­ment ear­li­er this year. The very next day, a vote was done to strip those MPs of their seats (the strip­ping of MPs’ seats is some­thing that’s been going on through­out the year). So this abom­i­na­tion of a prop­er­ty devel­op­ment bill was bare­ly passed with the sup­port of MPs who were poised to have their seats stripped the very next day.

But it’s also impor­tant to keep some oth­er impor­tant tim­ing here: that is bill was passed one week before Zelen­skiy made a trip to DC where he implored the US gov­ern­ment for more mil­i­tary aid. And it’s hard to imag­ine the rushed pas­sage of that prop­er­ty devel­op­er bill the week before was­n’t done with Zelen­skiy’s upcom­ing trip in mind. Because while that bill was a boon for Ukraine’s domes­tic prop­er­ty devel­op­ers, it’s also obvi­ous­ly the kind of ‘pro-inter­na­tion­al investor’ law the that US and IMF has impos­ing on Ukraine for close to a decade now. Step by step, Ukraine real­ly is being turned into a neolib­er­al par­adise. A par­adise for inter­na­tion­al investors. Not so much for Ukraini­ans, who are poised to lose the right to protest at con­struc­tion sites to pro­tect his­toric build­ings as a result of this law.

As we’ve seen, col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing is no longer an option for most Ukrain­ian work­ers thanks to the recent­ly passed bill, Bill 5371. A bill devel­oped by a Ukrain­ian NGO, the Office of Sim­ple Solu­tions and Results, which was set up by for­mer Geor­gian pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili, togeth­er with Ukrain­ian employ­ers’ asso­ci­a­tions and a USAID pro­gramme. The inter­na­tion­al investor com­mu­ni­ty is being giv­en an offer it can’t refuse in the form of a com­plete­ly dis­em­pow­ered and impov­er­ished work­force with no oth­er options.

Then there’s the report from back in May where the head of the Euro­pean Invest­ment Bank (EIB), Wern­er Hoy­er, called for a mul­ti-tril­lion-euro “Marshall”-style plan to rebuild Ukraine. Hoy­er also warned that Europe alone can­not be left foot­ing that bill and called for the inter­na­tion­al investor com­mu­ni­ty to play a major role in that effort. Along those lines, Hoy­er said a crit­i­cal part of the plan would be for the West’s large state-spon­sored banks to pro­vide “guar­an­tees” to under­write Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment once the war ends. “If we want to entice the investor com­mu­ni­ty to give us their mon­ey... we need to give them reas­sur­ances,” Hoy­er said, refer­ring to the guar­an­tees against heavy loss­es for investors. So the head of the EIB is basi­cal­ly call­ing for tax-pay­er-backed sub­si­dies for inter­na­tion­al investors in Ukraine.

Final­ly, there’s the oth­er major lure being dan­gle before the inter­na­tion­al investor com­mu­ni­ty: the tril­lions of dol­lars in min­er­al wealth. Recall the report from a month ago about how Ukraine is a trea­sure trove of tens of tril­lions of dol­lars in min­er­al wealth. But much of that min­er­al wealth is now under Russ­ian con­trol. So those tril­lions of dol­lars in wealth are being made avail­able to the inter­na­tion­al investor com­mu­ni­ty, but only if Ukraine expels Russ­ian from all of that ter­ri­to­ry. It’s pre­sum­ably going to be that much eas­i­er to over­come any reg­u­la­to­ry bar­ri­ers or protests over access­ing that min­er­al wealth as a result of this new law.

And as we’ll going to see in the sec­ond arti­cle excerpt below, the per­son lead­ing a del­e­ga­tion of influ­en­tial DC oper­a­tives who com­pro­mised a kind of ‘Zelen­skiy cheer squad’ dur­ing his trip to DC was none oth­er than Natal­ie Jaresko, some­one who played a major ‘eco­nom­ic hit­man’ role as Ukraine’s finance min­ster from Decem­ber 2014 to April 2016. Jaresko went on to lead the aus­ter­i­ty efforts imposed by the US on Puer­to Rico, but stepped down from that post in Feb­ru­ary of this year. So at this point Jaresko is pre­sum­ably again focused on Ukraine. And pre­sum­ably very pleased that the ‘eco­nom­ic hit­man’ poli­cies she began back in 2014 are clear­ly still being duti­ful­ly imposed, whether those poli­cies are pop­u­lar or not:

open­Democ­ra­cy

Ukraine pre­pares to give free rein to prop­er­ty devel­op­ers

Crit­ics fear a new plan­ning law will hand pow­er to prop­er­ty devel­op­ers and put Ukraine’s his­toric build­ings at risk

Olek­san­dr Kolesnichenko
28 Decem­ber 2022, 12.00am

At first, Dmytro Per­ov didn’t believe his grandmother’s sto­ries about ancient caves beneath the court­yard of the 19th-cen­tu­ry build­ing where his fam­i­ly had once lived in Kyiv.

“I thought some­one had just made it up,” the lawyer and activist told open­Democ­ra­cy.

But plans to build a new res­i­den­tial com­plex on the site spurred him to inves­ti­gate his grandmother’s sto­ry.

He had good rea­son to wor­ry. Ukrain­ian offi­cials’ ‘fast-track’ approach to devel­op­ers’ plans – which is not with­out a whiff of cor­rup­tion – has con­tin­ued since Rus­sia invad­ed the coun­try. Indeed, activists say that the demo­li­tion of Kyiv’s his­toric sites has sped up dur­ing the war.

On 13 Decem­ber, the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment rushed through rad­i­cal amend­ments to plan­ning laws. The vast major­i­ty of prop­er­ty devel­op­ers sup­port­ed them, but jour­nal­ists, archi­tects and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures have sound­ed the alarm.

These new reg­u­la­tions, which were drawn up before the war, will hand unprece­dent­ed pow­ers to Ukraine’s con­struc­tion indus­try, crit­ics say.

In Novem­ber, Per­ov – who works for a group ded­i­cat­ed to the city’s her­itage and often oppos­es the demo­li­tion of old build­ings in court – and a group of friends found a com­plex of four caves at the aban­doned and most­ly ruined house where his grand­moth­er had lived. It stands on the city’s cen­tral Voz­ne­sen­skyi Uzviz, a street which con­nects two his­toric dis­tricts, Podil and Verkhne Mis­to.

Archae­ol­o­gists have pro­vi­sion­al­ly dat­ed the caves to the era of Kyi­van Rus – a state that exist­ed from the ninth to the mid-13th cen­turies – or even to Ukraine’s pre-Chris­t­ian peri­od.

The caves’ dis­cov­ery and sub­se­quent pub­lic pres­sure has forced Kyiv city coun­cil to post­pone its deci­sion to lease the land to pri­vate devel­op­ers.

...

Build­ing boom

This rare, per­haps tem­po­rary, vic­to­ry in the stand-off between activists and prop­er­ty devel­op­ers over Kyiv’s his­toric sites stands in stark con­trast to the norm in recent years.

Over the past decade, hous­ing con­struc­tion in Ukraine’s big cities has become one of the most prof­itable sec­tors in the country’s econ­o­my.

As a result, prop­er­ty devel­op­ers have gained influ­ence with city author­i­ties and the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment, find­ing them­selves able to lob­by suc­cess­ful­ly for land allo­ca­tion to main­tain their inten­sive build­ing pro­grammes.

In response, activist groups across Ukraine, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in the cap­i­tal, have fought back to pro­tect 19th-cen­tu­ry and Sovi­et-era build­ings under threat of demo­li­tion. Green spaces, parks and even pub­lic access to Kyiv’s beach­es on the Dnipro Riv­er are also under threat.

Pub­lic con­cern over the unchecked pow­er of Ukrain­ian con­struc­tion firms dur­ing wartime has even trans­lat­ed into pop­u­lar humour. Accord­ing to one joke: “No one in Ukraine believes in the armed forces as much as prop­er­ty devel­op­ers.”

...

Com­mu­nist author­i­ties evict­ed Perov’s fam­i­ly some 40 years ago, in 1979, from their apart­ment in the three-storey build­ing on Voz­ne­sen­skyi Uzviz, because the land had been ear­marked for new con­struc­tion, but the work nev­er took place. In the fol­low­ing years, the 1898 build­ing fell into ruin. Today, only its facade remains.

In 2019, a Kyiv prop­er­ty com­pa­ny, Cap­i­tal Real Estate, asked the city author­i­ties to lease the land on which the remains of the build­ing stand for the con­struc­tion of a new mul­ti-storey res­i­den­tial com­plex.

The com­pa­ny not­ed that it owned the ruined build­ing. But Kyiv’s offi­cial prop­er­ty reg­is­ter has no infor­ma­tion about the prop­er­ty on Voz­ne­sen­skyi Uzviz – a ruin by the time the Ukrain­ian author­i­ties took over land records from the Sovi­et Union. And the Kyiv city administration’s munic­i­pal prop­er­ty depart­ment said that it had nev­er issued a cer­tifi­cate of own­er­ship for this address.

On this basis, Per­ov claims that the com­pa­ny received own­er­ship doc­u­ments unlaw­ful­ly. The issue is cur­rent­ly under inves­ti­ga­tion by local police.

Cap­i­tal Real Estate did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for com­ment. How­ev­er, accord­ing to Per­ov, Cap­i­tal Real Estate claims that the prop­er­ty was reg­is­tered in 2017 and so the crim­i­nal case is ille­gal because the three-year time lim­it for fil­ing a law­suit has expired

Out with the old

Today, Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens can chal­lenge poten­tial­ly ille­gal con­struc­tion through the courts. Activists also used to protest at con­struc­tion sites, but that is for­bid­den under mar­tial law at present.

But in six months’ time, Ukraini­ans could lose their right to take legal action too, when the new law on urban plan­ning reform comes into force.

This law sig­nif­i­cant­ly restricts the routes for grant­i­ng pro­tect­ed sta­tus to a his­toric build­ing or return­ing a prop­er­ty to munic­i­pal own­er­ship. Under the new leg­is­la­tion, such actions will be inter­pret­ed as an infringe­ment of the owner’s rights.

Per­ov fears that all cur­rent court cas­es on prop­er­ty con­flicts will be annulled, as devel­op­ers will use the new law to appeal for cas­es to be thrown out.

He is also con­cerned about the long-term impact of this law. He told open­Democ­ra­cy that out of 3,000 his­toric build­ings in the Ukrain­ian cap­i­tal, only a third have pro­tect­ed sta­tus.

“This means that 2,000 his­toric build­ings, most of which are pri­vate­ly owned, are under threat of destruc­tion. [Under the new law] any­one will be able to buy a lit­tle old house, demol­ish it and build a sky­scraper,” he said.

Per­ov not­ed that it’s like­ly that more his­toric build­ings were demol­ished in Kyiv this year than in 2021.

“Before the war, his­toric build­ings were destroyed to make way for spe­cif­ic devel­op­ments. Now it is done as a proac­tive step,” he explained. “It will be much eas­i­er to work with plots of land rather than build­ings after the war. [Land] is a more liq­uid asset.”

Archi­tects under attack

Ukrain­ian activists keen to pro­tect his­toric build­ings are not the only ones who appear to have fall­en out with the country’s prop­er­ty devel­op­ers, keen to restore rev­enues that have fall­en dra­mat­i­cal­ly as a result of the eco­nom­ic col­lapse brought about by the inva­sion.

In Novem­ber, the Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice of Ukraine (SBU) searched the premis­es of Ukraine’s Nation­al Union of Archi­tects, as well as the com­pa­nies and homes of the union’s man­age­ment. The SBU said the search was part of an inves­ti­ga­tion into alleged inter­fer­ence with a nation­al dig­i­tal plan­ning sys­tem and that the union had alleged­ly issued pro­fes­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tions to unqual­i­fied per­sons.

One of the direc­tors of the archi­tects’ union, Anna Kyrii, believes that the law enforce­ment atten­tion amounts to Ukrain­ian politi­cians’ “revenge” against archi­tects over their crit­i­cism of the new urban plan­ning reform.

Kyrii said the new law passed on 13 Decem­ber has been adopt­ed in an attempt to “redis­trib­ute the levers of influ­ence” in Ukraine’s con­struc­tion and plan­ning indus­try.

Under cur­rent reg­u­la­tions, if the archi­tect respon­si­ble for a prop­er­ty devel­op­ment dis­agrees with a devel­op­er over sig­nif­i­cant changes – such as using cheap­er mate­ri­als or efforts to bypass build­ing codes – then they can report the dis­pute to a state inspec­torate, which can con­duct an inves­ti­ga­tion.

The new law will change the pro­ce­dure for solv­ing such dis­putes: if an archi­tect refus­es to make the changes a devel­op­er wants, under the new law the devel­op­er would be able to apply to a new urban plan­ning cham­ber attached to Ukraine’s new­ly cre­at­ed Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ties, Ter­ri­to­ries and Infra­struc­ture Devel­op­ment.

If the devel­op­er does not receive con­sent or refusal with­in 30 days, they receive approval for their changes by default.

“In fact, there is noth­ing about urban plan­ning in this bill,” Kyrii said.

Indeed, oppo­nents of the law argue that it sim­ply strength­ens the role of the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ties, Ter­ri­to­ries and Infra­struc­ture Devel­op­ment. The min­istry will have the sole author­i­ty to issue ten­ders for con­struc­tion and set con­di­tions for those ten­ders, decide who will have access to the mar­ket, cer­ti­fy archi­tects and resolve dis­putes.

What is more, under the new law pri­vate inspec­tors will replace state plan­ning offi­cials in issu­ing plan­ning per­mits and cer­ti­fy­ing that a build­ing is ready for use. It is feared that this could lead to devel­op­ers reg­is­ter­ing their own per­mit com­pa­nies – for exam­ple, via friends or fam­i­ly mem­bers.

“The worst thing in this sit­u­a­tion is that the state is remov­ing any form of respon­si­bil­i­ty over prop­er­ty devel­op­ment,” Kyrii con­tends. “Pri­vate devel­op­ers, pri­vate build­ing eval­u­a­tions and pri­vate over­sight – with­out a sin­gle form of over­sight on devel­op­ers from the state.”

Most in the con­struc­tion indus­try sup­port the new law. Ser­hiy Pylypenko, CEO of the largest pro­duc­er of con­crete in the Kyiv region, the Koval­s­ka Group, believes that the new law will com­plete a long-await­ed reform of how state agen­cies mon­i­tor and reg­u­late urban plan­ning and con­struc­tion – and elim­i­nate cor­rup­tion in the sec­tor.

He points out that the new pro­vi­sions will devolve deci­sion-mak­ing on con­struc­tion issues to low­er lev­els of gov­ern­ment, while intro­duc­ing crim­i­nal lia­bil­i­ty for unlaw­ful con­struc­tion or vio­lat­ing con­di­tions of land use.

“[The law] will make it pos­si­ble to speed up all the process­es that arti­fi­cial­ly hin­dered the devel­op­ment of the con­struc­tion indus­try and had a neg­a­tive impact on the econ­o­my,” Pylypenko said. He described crit­i­cism of the law from Ukrain­ian archi­tects and pub­lic organ­i­sa­tions as “far-fetched” and “unfair”.

Hasty law­mak­ing

Like oth­er poten­tial­ly con­tro­ver­sial laws passed dur­ing wartime, Ukraine’s new law on urban plan­ning was devel­oped before the Russ­ian inva­sion – and then rushed through Par­lia­ment with appar­ent­ly lit­tle over­sight.

Prop­er­ty devel­op­ers con­tributed to its writ­ing through their lob­by­ing organ­i­sa­tion, the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Builders of Ukraine, organ­is­ing meet­ings with indi­vid­ual par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and attend­ing spe­cial meet­ings at Par­lia­ment.

Before the war, the leg­is­la­tion had sig­nif­i­cant sup­port in the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment, but recent­ly the num­bers of MPs ready to sup­port it had dwin­dled to only 228 (the law requires 226 votes – half of the cham­ber – to pass).

Orig­i­nal­ly a bill with 300 pages of amend­ments to four dif­fer­ent exist­ing laws, and a com­par­a­tive table of changes run­ning to 2,000 pages, the final draft was not pub­lished on the Ukrain­ian parliament’s web­site before the final vote on 13 Decem­ber – nor after the vote. Stan­dard pro­ce­dures, such as pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion or amend­ments from the cham­ber floor, were also not observed. As of 28 Decem­ber, the law has still not been pub­lished.

open­Democ­ra­cy attempt­ed to con­tact the bill’s main author, MP Ole­na Shulyak, to under­stand why the law had to be passed so quick­ly, but did not receive a response.

Writ­ing online, Shulyak, who heads the rul­ing Ser­vant of the Peo­ple par­ty, claims that the law will dig­i­talise and sim­pli­fy the con­struc­tion pro­ce­dures for Ukraine’s post-war recon­struc­tion.

“We don’t have the moral right to leave urban plan­ning in the state it has been in. Par­tic­u­lar­ly ahead of [post-war] recon­struc­tion, using state funds and the funds of inter­na­tion­al part­ners,” Shulyak wrote.

But Anna Kyrii, from the archi­tects’ union, is con­vinced that the plan­ning law was rushed through Par­lia­ment and passed on 13 Decem­ber because the rul­ing par­ty could still rely on votes from MPs from pro-Russ­ian par­ties that were banned ear­li­er this year on that date. The vot­ing records show that the law could not have been passed with­out votes from these MPs.

The fol­low­ing day, MPs from the rul­ing par­ty start­ed col­lect­ing sig­na­tures in sup­port of remov­ing man­dates from MPs belong­ing to pro-Russ­ian par­ties – a move that the Ukrain­ian pub­lic has called for since the Feb­ru­ary inva­sion.

Changes of heart

Mean­while, some of Shulyak’s par­ty col­leagues who jour­nal­ists have pre­vi­ous­ly linked to prop­er­ty devel­op­er inter­ests changed their posi­tion on the eve of the vote, pub­licly call­ing on MPs to oppose the bill.

Anna Bon­dar, a for­mer build­ing offi­cial who is also an MP from Ukraine’s rul­ing par­ty, with­drew her sig­na­ture from the draft law. She claimed it would lead to pri­vate com­pa­nies being in con­trol of issu­ing most build­ing per­mits, and that local gov­ern­ment would have its plan­ning pow­ers reduced.

The leg­is­la­tion has now been passed to Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyi to sign into law – or veto, as more than 42,000 peo­ple have asked via an online peti­tion.

But Ukraine’s min­is­ter of com­mu­ni­ties, ter­ri­to­ries and infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment, Olek­san­dr Kubrakov, sup­ports the law, and is believed to have a good rela­tion­ship with Zelen­skyi: media reports tip him as a pos­si­ble can­di­date as a future prime min­is­ter.

...

MP Dmytro Hurin, anoth­er dis­senter from the Ser­vant of the Peo­ple par­ty who jour­nal­ists have pre­vi­ous­ly linked to prop­er­ty devel­op­er inter­ests, argued that the new law has lit­tle to do with post-war recon­struc­tion.

“This is def­i­nite­ly not how vic­tors should rebuild,” he said.

———-

“Ukraine pre­pares to give free rein to prop­er­ty devel­op­ers” by Olek­san­dr Kolesnichenko; open­Democ­ra­cy; 12/28/2020

“On 13 Decem­ber, the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment rushed through rad­i­cal amend­ments to plan­ning laws. The vast major­i­ty of prop­er­ty devel­op­ers sup­port­ed them, but jour­nal­ists, archi­tects and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures have sound­ed the alarm.”

A rushed fren­zy of rad­i­cal amend­ments pushed through at the last minute on Decem­ber 13, the day of the vote, result­ing in the kind of bill only the prop­er­ty devel­op­ers seemed to love. It’s what pass­es for ‘democ­ra­cy in action’ in war torn Ukraine. And as a result of this new law, his­toric build­ings are at risk of set to be being destroyed proac­tive­ly, whether or not there’s a planned devel­op­ment. Hence pop­u­lar joke: “No one in Ukraine believes in the armed forces as much as prop­er­ty devel­op­ers”:

...
These new reg­u­la­tions, which were drawn up before the war, will hand unprece­dent­ed pow­ers to Ukraine’s con­struc­tion indus­try, crit­ics say.

...

Pub­lic con­cern over the unchecked pow­er of Ukrain­ian con­struc­tion firms dur­ing wartime has even trans­lat­ed into pop­u­lar humour. Accord­ing to one joke: “No one in Ukraine believes in the armed forces as much as prop­er­ty devel­op­ers.”

...

Per­ov not­ed that it’s like­ly that more his­toric build­ings were demol­ished in Kyiv this year than in 2021.

“Before the war, his­toric build­ings were destroyed to make way for spe­cif­ic devel­op­ments. Now it is done as a proac­tive step,” he explained. “It will be much eas­i­er to work with plots of land rather than build­ings after the war. [Land] is a more liq­uid asset.”
...

The bill was appar­ent­ly so cor­rupt that it only bare­ly passed after pre­vi­ous­ly hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant sup­port. It’s a sign of just how bad a bill it became: stan­dard pro­ce­dures were not observed, the final draft of the bill was­n’t even made pub­lic before the vote, and the whole thing was rushed through at the last minute with mas­sive rad­i­cal amend­ments:

...
Hasty law­mak­ing

Like oth­er poten­tial­ly con­tro­ver­sial laws passed dur­ing wartime, Ukraine’s new law on urban plan­ning was devel­oped before the Russ­ian inva­sion – and then rushed through Par­lia­ment with appar­ent­ly lit­tle over­sight.

Prop­er­ty devel­op­ers con­tributed to its writ­ing through their lob­by­ing organ­i­sa­tion, the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Builders of Ukraine, organ­is­ing meet­ings with indi­vid­ual par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and attend­ing spe­cial meet­ings at Par­lia­ment.

Before the war, the leg­is­la­tion had sig­nif­i­cant sup­port in the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment, but recent­ly the num­bers of MPs ready to sup­port it had dwin­dled to only 228 (the law requires 226 votes – half of the cham­ber – to pass).

Orig­i­nal­ly a bill with 300 pages of amend­ments to four dif­fer­ent exist­ing laws, and a com­par­a­tive table of changes run­ning to 2,000 pages, the final draft was not pub­lished on the Ukrain­ian parliament’s web­site before the final vote on 13 Decem­ber – nor after the vote. Stan­dard pro­ce­dures, such as pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion or amend­ments from the cham­ber floor, were also not observed. As of 28 Decem­ber, the law has still not been pub­lished.
...

Cast­ing a fur­ther shad­ow on the bare min­i­mum sup­port need­ed to pass the bill is the fact that some of the sup­port came from the mem­bers of ‘pro-Russ­ian’ par­ties banned ear­li­er this year. Moves to for­mal­ly remove those mem­bers were ini­ti­at­ed by mem­bers of Zelen­sky’s par­ty lit­er­al­ly one day after this fate­ful Decem­ber 13 vote where the law bare­ly passed by just two votes. It’s just a bizarre twist in this sor­did sto­ry: this wild­ly cor­rupt law got so cor­rupt that it almost did­n’t pass, but still man­aged to pass thanks to the sup­port from law­mak­ers sched­uled to be kicked out of the par­lia­ment the next day:

...
open­Democ­ra­cy attempt­ed to con­tact the bill’s main author, MP Ole­na Shulyak, to under­stand why the law had to be passed so quick­ly, but did not receive a response.

Writ­ing online, Shulyak, who heads the rul­ing Ser­vant of the Peo­ple par­ty, claims that the law will dig­i­talise and sim­pli­fy the con­struc­tion pro­ce­dures for Ukraine’s post-war recon­struc­tion.

“We don’t have the moral right to leave urban plan­ning in the state it has been in. Par­tic­u­lar­ly ahead of [post-war] recon­struc­tion, using state funds and the funds of inter­na­tion­al part­ners,” Shulyak wrote.

But Anna Kyrii, from the archi­tects’ union, is con­vinced that the plan­ning law was rushed through Par­lia­ment and passed on 13 Decem­ber because the rul­ing par­ty could still rely on votes from MPs from pro-Russ­ian par­ties that were banned ear­li­er this year on that date. The vot­ing records show that the law could not have been passed with­out votes from these MPs.

The fol­low­ing day, MPs from the rul­ing par­ty start­ed col­lect­ing sig­na­tures in sup­port of remov­ing man­dates from MPs belong­ing to pro-Russ­ian par­ties – a move that the Ukrain­ian pub­lic has called for since the Feb­ru­ary inva­sion.
...

Also note how Ukraine’s intel­li­gence ser­vice, the SBU, appears to have been engaged in some sort of intim­i­da­tion cam­paign tar­get­ing the union of archi­tects who oppose the bill over con­cerns that it will hand the pow­er to make major changes to pro­posed devel­op­ments — such as using cheap­er mate­ri­als or efforts to bypass build­ing codes — out of the hands of the archi­tects design­ing these struc­tures and into the hands of prop­er­ty devel­op­ers. That’s some omi­nous state intim­i­da­tion. Ukraine is set­ting itself up for an extra shod­dy rebuild­ing peri­od. Extra prof­itable too, pre­sum­ably:

...
What is more, under the new law pri­vate inspec­tors will replace state plan­ning offi­cials in issu­ing plan­ning per­mits and cer­ti­fy­ing that a build­ing is ready for use. It is feared that this could lead to devel­op­ers reg­is­ter­ing their own per­mit com­pa­nies – for exam­ple, via friends or fam­i­ly mem­bers.

“The worst thing in this sit­u­a­tion is that the state is remov­ing any form of respon­si­bil­i­ty over prop­er­ty devel­op­ment,” Kyrii con­tends. “Pri­vate devel­op­ers, pri­vate build­ing eval­u­a­tions and pri­vate over­sight – with­out a sin­gle form of over­sight on devel­op­ers from the state.”

...

In Novem­ber, the Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice of Ukraine (SBU) searched the premis­es of Ukraine’s Nation­al Union of Archi­tects, as well as the com­pa­nies and homes of the union’s man­age­ment. The SBU said the search was part of an inves­ti­ga­tion into alleged inter­fer­ence with a nation­al dig­i­tal plan­ning sys­tem and that the union had alleged­ly issued pro­fes­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tions to unqual­i­fied per­sons.

One of the direc­tors of the archi­tects’ union, Anna Kyrii, believes that the law enforce­ment atten­tion amounts to Ukrain­ian politi­cians’ “revenge” against archi­tects over their crit­i­cism of the new urban plan­ning reform.

Kyrii said the new law passed on 13 Decem­ber has been adopt­ed in an attempt to “redis­trib­ute the levers of influ­ence” in Ukraine’s con­struc­tion and plan­ning indus­try.

Under cur­rent reg­u­la­tions, if the archi­tect respon­si­ble for a prop­er­ty devel­op­ment dis­agrees with a devel­op­er over sig­nif­i­cant changes – such as using cheap­er mate­ri­als or efforts to bypass build­ing codes – then they can report the dis­pute to a state inspec­torate, which can con­duct an inves­ti­ga­tion.

The new law will change the pro­ce­dure for solv­ing such dis­putes: if an archi­tect refus­es to make the changes a devel­op­er wants, under the new law the devel­op­er would be able to apply to a new urban plan­ning cham­ber attached to Ukraine’s new­ly cre­at­ed Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ties, Ter­ri­to­ries and Infra­struc­ture Devel­op­ment.

If the devel­op­er does not receive con­sent or refusal with­in 30 days, they receive approval for their changes by default.

“In fact, there is noth­ing about urban plan­ning in this bill,” Kyrii said.
...

And don’t assume Ukraine’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions will be capa­ble of address­ing any poten­tial abus­es of this new law. Protests at con­struc­tion sites are also banned as part of the law. As a result, near­ly two thirds of Ukraine’s his­toric build­ings are at risk of being demol­ished in com­ing years:

...
Today, Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens can chal­lenge poten­tial­ly ille­gal con­struc­tion through the courts. Activists also used to protest at con­struc­tion sites, but that is for­bid­den under mar­tial law at present.

But in six months’ time, Ukraini­ans could lose their right to take legal action too, when the new law on urban plan­ning reform comes into force.

This law sig­nif­i­cant­ly restricts the routes for grant­i­ng pro­tect­ed sta­tus to a his­toric build­ing or return­ing a prop­er­ty to munic­i­pal own­er­ship. Under the new leg­is­la­tion, such actions will be inter­pret­ed as an infringe­ment of the owner’s rights.

Per­ov fears that all cur­rent court cas­es on prop­er­ty con­flicts will be annulled, as devel­op­ers will use the new law to appeal for cas­es to be thrown out.

He is also con­cerned about the long-term impact of this law. He told open­Democ­ra­cy that out of 3,000 his­toric build­ings in the Ukrain­ian cap­i­tal, only a third have pro­tect­ed sta­tus.

“This means that 2,000 his­toric build­ings, most of which are pri­vate­ly owned, are under threat of destruc­tion. [Under the new law] any­one will be able to buy a lit­tle old house, demol­ish it and build a sky­scraper,” he said.
...

Final­ly, note how one of pri­ma­ry sup­port­ers for the bill — which crit­ics claim would lead to pri­vate com­pa­nies being in con­trol of issu­ing most per­mits — is Ukraine’s min­is­ter of com­mu­ni­ties, ter­ri­to­ries and infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment, Olek­san­dr Kubrakov, some­one seen as a pos­si­ble can­di­date as a future prime min­ster. It’s anoth­er reflec­tion of the state of Ukraine’s democ­ra­cy:

...
Mean­while, some of Shulyak’s par­ty col­leagues who jour­nal­ists have pre­vi­ous­ly linked to prop­er­ty devel­op­er inter­ests changed their posi­tion on the eve of the vote, pub­licly call­ing on MPs to oppose the bill.

Anna Bon­dar, a for­mer build­ing offi­cial who is also an MP from Ukraine’s rul­ing par­ty, with­drew her sig­na­ture from the draft law. She claimed it would lead to pri­vate com­pa­nies being in con­trol of issu­ing most build­ing per­mits, and that local gov­ern­ment would have its plan­ning pow­ers reduced.

The leg­is­la­tion has now been passed to Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyi to sign into law – or veto, as more than 42,000 peo­ple have asked via an online peti­tion.

But Ukraine’s min­is­ter of com­mu­ni­ties, ter­ri­to­ries and infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment, Olek­san­dr Kubrakov, sup­ports the law, and is believed to have a good rela­tion­ship with Zelen­skyi: media reports tip him as a pos­si­ble can­di­date as a future prime min­is­ter.
...

As we can see, the ‘eco­nom­ic hit­man’ treat­ment Ukraine has been receiv­ing since 2014 has accel­er­at­ed in a big way since the start of the war in Feb­ru­ary
. A war with no end in sight. Which rais­es the grim ques­tion: so what’s the next ‘rad­i­cal reform’ slat­ed to be imposed on Ukraine under the pre­tense of wartime emer­gency action? Time will tell, but as the fol­low­ing Gray­zone piece reminds us, the ‘eco­nom­ic hit­men’ tar­get­ing Ukraine aren’t just resid­ing in Kyiv. It was a les­son con­ve­nient put on dis­play dur­ing Pres­i­dent Zelen­skiy’s trip to DC last month when Max Blu­men­thal spot­ted a del­e­ga­tion of what would be Zelen­skiy’s offi­cial cheer­ing squad at the mak­ing made its way to the Capi­tol. It was like a ‘Who’s who’ of the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra in DC, with none oth­er than Natal­ie Jaresko act­ing as a kind of spokesper­son for the group. As we’ve seen, Jaresko is like the ‘OG’ of Ukraine’s ‘eco­nom­ic hit­men’, serv­ing as Min­is­ter of Finance from Decem­ber 2014 to April 2016, a peri­od dur­ing which Ukraine suf­fered from bru­tal aus­ter­i­ty imposed by its West­ern part­ners. Fol­low­ing that posi­tion, Jaresko went on to over­see the neolib­er­al pil­lag­ing of Puer­to Rico. So, at least sym­bol­i­cal­ly, Natal­ie Jarestko was kind of the per­fect per­son to lead this del­e­ga­tion. Espe­cial­ly see­ing as it was days after Ukraine’s par­lia­ment passed a bill only a prop­er­ty devel­op­er could love:

The Gray­zone

Zelensky’s dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion led by eco­nom­ic hit-woman who led plun­der of Ukraine

Max Blu­men­thal
Decem­ber 23, 2022

The Gray­zone inter­cept­ed Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion out­side the US Capi­tol and encoun­tered Natal­ie Jaresko, the cor­po­rate oper­a­tive who helped guide Wall Street’s pil­lag­ing from Kiev to Puer­to Rico. Jaresko indig­nant­ly jus­ti­fied Zelensky’s ban­ning of his polit­i­cal rivals as a nec­es­sary wartime mea­sure.

Steel fenc­ing and police bar­ri­cades ringed the perime­ter of the US Capi­tol Build­ing hours ahead of the arrival of Volodymyr Zelen­sky. The Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent appeared in Wash­ing­ton DC in the ear­ly after­noon on Decem­ber 21, 2022, emerg­ing from a US mil­i­tary jet clad in an olive drab sweat­shirt and car­go pants, and charged with a sin­gu­lar mis­sion: con­vince Con­gress and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion to send his gov­ern­ment more than the whop­ping $45 bil­lion in mil­i­tary and human­i­tar­i­an aid it had already allo­cat­ed for 2023.

Just out­side the police bar­ri­cades, at the east­ern side of the Capi­tol grounds, as a demon­stra­tion by a small but ded­i­cat­ed group of anti­war activists wound down, a group of around 20 Ukraini­ans in dark busi­ness attire gath­ered for a pho­to. They were on their way into the Capi­tol, where they were to func­tion as Zelensky’s per­son­al cheer­ing sec­tion, rep­re­sent­ing the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra before a nation­al­ly tele­vised audi­ence.

I approached mem­bers of the del­e­ga­tion to chal­lenge them on Zelensky’s lob­by­ing push and the planned expan­sion of the NATO proxy war he is lead­ing against Rus­sia. My ques­tions were met with a tor­rent of worn-out talk­ing points about Ukraine’s cru­sade to defend democ­ra­cy, accu­sa­tions that Moscow was spon­sor­ing my report­ing, and a com­plaint that $45 bil­lion in US aid was too lit­tle.

Caught up w/ the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion on their way into the Capi­tol to cheer for Zelen­sky
They told me $45 bil­lion was­n’t enough, neo-Nazis do not exist in Ukraine and the ban­ning of the Russ­ian wing of the Ortho­dox Church & oppo par­ties was jus­ti­fied bc “mar­tial law” pic.twitter.com/pFE2wmWaH9

— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) Decem­ber 22, 2022

Sev­er­al of the Ukrain­ian del­e­gates I encoun­tered on the way into the US Capi­tol hap­pened to have played sig­nif­i­cant roles in the trans­for­ma­tion of Ukraine from a neu­tral state into a hyper-mil­i­ta­rized vas­sal of the US and the IMF.

The most vol­u­ble among them, act­ing as a de fac­to spokesper­son for the group, was Natal­ie Jaresko. A Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can finan­cial indus­try oper­a­tive, Jaresko presided over sev­er­al IMF aus­ter­i­ty pack­ages and the ram­pant pri­va­ti­za­tion of Ukraine’s econ­o­my as the country’s Min­is­ter of Finance in its post-coup gov­ern­ment.

The eco­nom­ic hit-woman

In our exchange, Jaresko unabashed­ly defend­ed Zelensky’s out­law­ing of 11 oppo­si­tion polit­i­cal par­ties, his ban­ning of oppo­si­tion media, and his plans to black­list the Russ­ian wing of the Ortho­dox Churchz. “It’s mar­tial law!” Jaresko exclaimed, jus­ti­fy­ing Kiev’s author­i­tar­i­an crack­down as a nec­es­sary wartime mea­sure.

Jaresko has seen the cor­rup­tion and de-democ­ra­ti­za­tion of Ukraine from with­in. She helped open up the country’s econ­o­my to West­ern multi­na­tion­als after being appoint­ed to the For­eign Investors Advi­so­ry Coun­cil of Vic­tor Yuschenko, a neolib­er­al pres­i­dent who gained pow­er thanks to the “Orange Rev­o­lu­tion” backed by US intel­li­gence and West­ern-aligned oli­garchs George Soros and Boris Berisovsky in 2005.

Under Yuschenko’s reign, Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment offi­cial­ly hero­ized the World War Two-era Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor Stepan Ban­dera. Dur­ing our exchange, Jaresko deflect­ed when asked if she sup­port­ed Ban­dera. How­ev­er, her broth­er, John, has presided over the con­struc­tion of a memo­r­i­al in Bloom­ing­dale, New Jer­sey to “Heroes of Ukraine” includ­ing World War Two-era Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors, accord­ing to researcher Moss Robe­son.

Nine years lat­er, fol­low­ing the Euro­maid­an coup also engi­neered by Wash­ing­ton, Jaresko rose to Min­is­ter of Finance. She was grant­ed Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship on the day of her appoint­ment.

Through her new post, Jaresko assumed con­trol of Data­group, the com­pa­ny that over­sees Ukraine’s tele­com sec­tor. As for­mer invest­ment exec­u­tive Tim Duff recount­ed, Jaresko “imme­di­ate­ly pro­ceed­ed to squeeze her com­peti­tor, the own­er of Data­group, out of busi­ness using the kind of for­eign cur­ren­cy loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and eco­nom­ic hit­men employed by the CIA.”

While in Kiev, steer­ing the gov­ern­ment along­side a cadre of Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can oper­a­tives, Jaresko grum­bled about her salary while angling for oppor­tu­ni­ties to sup­ple­ment it. In a with­er­ing analy­sis of her finan­cial self-deal­ing, the late inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Robert Par­ry found that Jaresko “col­lect­ed $1.77 mil­lion in bonus­es from a U.S.-taxpayer-financed invest­ment fund where her annu­al com­pen­sa­tion was sup­posed to be lim­it­ed to $150,000”

As Jaresko lapped up praise from Belt­way cor­po­rate media, the NATO-spon­sored Atlantic Coun­cil that employed her as a vis­it­ing fel­low acknowl­edged that under her watch, “the aver­age month­ly wage in Ukraine is only $194, an infla­tion rate of 55 per­cent is dec­i­mat­ing cit­i­zens’ pur­chas­ing pow­er, and a painful IMF-man­dat­ed aus­ter­i­ty pro­gram involv­ing sweep­ing cuts to social pro­grams is being imple­ment­ed.”

In 2017, Jaresko was reward­ed with an appoint­ment and $625,000 salary as direc­tor of Prome­sa, the unelect­ed US board charged with restruc­tur­ing Puer­to Rico’s debt – and which aver­age Puer­to Ricans refer to deri­sive­ly as “La Jun­ta.” Jaresko resigned rom her posi­tion this April after leav­ing Puer­to Rico’s econ­o­my firm­ly in the hands of Wall Street cred­i­tors.

Natal­ie Jaresko of the ?@FOMBPR? is resigning.She was nev­er wel­comed in Puer­to Rico.Her poli­cies will leave peo­ple on the island suf­fer­ing for decades while ensur­ing huge prof­its for wall street.Its time to #abol­ish­la­jun­ta https://t.co/6GuvLfmqwb— Julio E. (@jlopezvarona) Feb­ru­ary 3, 2022

The all-encom­pass­ing shock ther­a­py that Jaresko pre­scribed from Puer­to Rico to Ukraine was only pos­si­ble thanks to soci­ety-wide dis­as­ters. In San Juan, it was Hur­ri­cane Maria that placed neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism on over­drive; in Kiev, it was a coup and a proxy war. Indeed, the con­flict with Rus­sia has pro­vid­ed Zelen­sky with jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to strip 70 per­cent of Ukraine’s work­ers of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights and arrest every­one from his polit­i­cal rivals to social­ist orga­niz­ers – a wave of repres­sion that Jaresko explic­it­ly jus­ti­fied in her exchange with me.

The Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent accom­pa­nied his Pinochet-style crack­down with an appeal this Octo­ber at the NYSE Stock Exchange for multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions to deep­en their exploita­tion of his country’s econ­o­my and resources. As The Grayzone’s Alex Rubin­stein report­ed, Zelensky’s for­eign invest­ment ini­tia­tive plas­tered the word “dereg­u­la­tion” across the home­page of its web­site.

The dias­po­ra lob­by­ist

As I chal­lenged the Ukrain­ian del­e­ga­tion on the near­ly $100 bil­lion of mil­i­tary aid the US has forked over to Kiev, a bespec­ta­cled mid­dle-aged man inter­ject­ed, demand­ing to know why I sup­pos­ed­ly sup­port­ed an “unpro­voked” assault on an “inno­cent peo­ple.”

I coun­tered that I opposed the Ukrain­ian military’s 8‑year-long attack on the eth­nic Russ­ian pop­u­la­tion of Donet­sk and Lugan­sk, where thou­sands had been killed before the Russ­ian mil­i­tary ever entered Ukraine in Feb­ru­ary 2022. I then asked the indig­nant char­ac­ter if he also opposed the shelling of civil­ians in the east­ern republics.

His reply came in the form of a firm “no!”

That per­son turns out to be a mem­ber of the US Com­mis­sion on Secu­ri­ty and Coop­er­a­tion in Europe named Orest Dey­chaki­wsky. His com­mis­sion is charged with mon­i­tor­ing Ukrain­ian com­pli­ance with OSCE com­mit­ments, includ­ing those Kiev made – and relent­less­ly vio­lat­ed –– to the Min­sk Accords. As for­mer Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel con­fessed this Decem­ber, Ukraine’s West­ern back­ers used the Min­sk Accords as a stalling tac­tic to pre­pare it for mil­i­tary con­flict with Rus­sia.

So the guy at :39 who says the Ukrain­ian shelling of Donet­sk and Lugan­sk should not stop appears to be Orest Dey­chaki­wsky, who was a mem­ber of the US Com­mis­sion on Secu­ri­ty and Coop­er­a­tion in Europe https://t.co/MJYkLN1JXP pic.twitter.com/H6jrfPhjol— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) Decem­ber 22, 2022

The son of a for­mer mem­ber of Stepan Bandera’s OUN‑B orga­ni­za­tion that col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nazi Ger­many towards the end of World War II, Dey­chaki­wsky serves as the Vice Pres­i­dent of the US-Ukraine Foun­da­tion. He pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Helsin­ki Com­mis­sion under Sen. Ben Cardin, the pro-war Demo­c­rat who spon­sored the Mag­nit­sky Act impos­ing the first set of harsh post-Cold War sanc­tions on Rus­sia and help­ing set the stage for the cur­rent con­flict.

The Maid­an infowar­rior

A mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian del­e­ga­tion who remained in the back­ground while her fel­low del­e­gates jawed at me strong­ly resem­bled a promi­nent func­tionary of the post-Maid­an media com­plex spawned with hun­dreds of mil­lions in West­ern dona­tions.

She close­ly resem­bled Anas­ta­sia Stanko, the deputy edi­tor of Hro­madske, a broad­cast net­work she helped to found on the eve of the Maid­an coup. Stanko was hon­ored by the cor­po­rate-fund­ed Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists with its 2018 press free­dom award.

While oppo­si­tion and Russ­ian-lan­guage out­lets have been banned by Zelen­sky, pro-NATO infowar instru­ments like Hro­madske have flour­ished thanks to mas­sive dona­tions from the EU, USAID, the Thom­son Foun­da­tion and transna­tion­al elites like Pay­pal founder Pierre Omid­yar.

Though Hro­madske has attempt­ed to strike the lib­er­al tone its bene­fac­tors pre­fer, it has occa­sion­al­ly pro­vid­ed a plat­form for geno­cide-lev­el anti-Russ­ian nation­al­ism.

This March, days after Rus­sia launched its mil­i­tary oper­a­tion inside Ukraine, a guest on Hro­madske rant­ed that the eth­nic Russ­ian pop­u­la­tion of Donet­sk was filled “super­flu­ous” and “absolute­ly use­less peo­ple” who “must be killed.”

Pierre Omid­yar part­nered w/the US Embassy in Kiev to found Hro­madske & advance the Euro­maid­an col­or rev­o­lu­tion As @RealAlexRubi and I report­ed, Hro­madske has host­ed a radio show that was part of the Omid­yar-spon­sored Inter­na­tion­al Fact-Check­ing Net­work https://t.co/dh0DhilRxL https://t.co/RH6vz5smg4— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 20, 2022

Researcher Moss Robe­son not­ed in his analy­sis of Zelensky’s Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion that it also includ­ed Andrew Mac, an unpaid advi­sor to Zelen­sky described by Politi­co as “one of the biggest Wash­ing­ton pow­er play­ers for Ukraine.”

...

————

“Zelensky’s dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion led by eco­nom­ic hit-woman who led plun­der of Ukraine” by Max Blu­men­thal; The Gray­zone; 12/23/2022

“Just out­side the police bar­ri­cades, at the east­ern side of the Capi­tol grounds, as a demon­stra­tion by a small but ded­i­cat­ed group of anti­war activists wound down, a group of around 20 Ukraini­ans in dark busi­ness attire gath­ered for a pho­to. They were on their way into the Capi­tol, where they were to func­tion as Zelensky’s per­son­al cheer­ing sec­tion, rep­re­sent­ing the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra before a nation­al­ly tele­vised audi­ence.”

Zelen­sky’s per­son­al cheer­ing sec­tion on their way to the Capi­tol. That’s the scene Max Blu­men­thal came across dur­ing Zelen­sky’s recent vis­it to DC where he implored the con­gress to increase its mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine. And as the arti­cle describes, this group of elite cheer­lead­ers has done a lot more than just cheer­lead­ing for Ukraine. It was a ‘Who’s Who’ of the most influ­en­tial mem­bers of the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra in the US. Most notably, Natal­ie Jaresko, the Ukain­ian-Amer­i­can who actu­al­ly received Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship in 2014 on the same day she was appoint­ed to become the post-Maid­an gov­ern­men­t’s new Min­is­ter of Finance, a posi­tion where she over­saw the dec­i­ma­tion of Ukrain­ian liv­ing stan­dards as Ukraine embraced . As we’ve seen, Jaresko’s résumé to be finance min­is­ter includ­ed her pri­or work as a US State Depart­ment offi­cer and the head of a USAID-backed fund for Ukraine that was report­ed­ly involved with sub­stan­tial insid­er deal­ings, includ­ing $1 mil­lion-plus in fees to a man­age­ment com­pa­ny Jaresko also con­trolled. Before that, Jaresko was an appointee of Vik­tor Yushchenko’s For­eign Investors Advi­so­ry Coun­cil and the Advi­so­ry Board of the Ukrain­ian Cen­ter for Pro­mo­tion of For­eign Invest­ment. It was all trag­i­cal­ly fit­ting expe­ri­ence for the rad­i­cal IMF-imposed neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic shock doc­trine she helped unleash on the Ukrain­ian pub­lic as Finance Min­is­ter. A rad­i­cal neolib­er­al tem­plate for ‘reform’ pred­i­cat­ed on max­i­miz­ing for­eign investor prof­its that Ukraine is still in the process of imple­ment­ing under the Zelen­skiy gov­ern­ment. So when we see Jaresko in this crew of Zelen­skiy super cheer­lead­ers dur­ing his trip to DC, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Zelen­skiy has been duti­ful­ly imple­ment­ing the same rad­i­cal eco­nom­ic shock doc­trine the US first imposed on Ukraine back in 2014 under Jaresko:

...
Sev­er­al of the Ukrain­ian del­e­gates I encoun­tered on the way into the US Capi­tol hap­pened to have played sig­nif­i­cant roles in the trans­for­ma­tion of Ukraine from a neu­tral state into a hyper-mil­i­ta­rized vas­sal of the US and the IMF.

The most vol­u­ble among them, act­ing as a de fac­to spokesper­son for the group, was Natal­ie Jaresko. A Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can finan­cial indus­try oper­a­tive, Jaresko presided over sev­er­al IMF aus­ter­i­ty pack­ages and the ram­pant pri­va­ti­za­tion of Ukraine’s econ­o­my as the country’s Min­is­ter of Finance in its post-coup gov­ern­ment.

The eco­nom­ic hit-woman

In our exchange, Jaresko unabashed­ly defend­ed Zelensky’s out­law­ing of 11 oppo­si­tion polit­i­cal par­ties, his ban­ning of oppo­si­tion media, and his plans to black­list the Russ­ian wing of the Ortho­dox Churchz. “It’s mar­tial law!” Jaresko exclaimed, jus­ti­fy­ing Kiev’s author­i­tar­i­an crack­down as a nec­es­sary wartime mea­sure.

Jaresko has seen the cor­rup­tion and de-democ­ra­ti­za­tion of Ukraine from with­in. She helped open up the country’s econ­o­my to West­ern multi­na­tion­als after being appoint­ed to the For­eign Investors Advi­so­ry Coun­cil of Vic­tor Yuschenko, a neolib­er­al pres­i­dent who gained pow­er thanks to the “Orange Rev­o­lu­tion” backed by US intel­li­gence and West­ern-aligned oli­garchs George Soros and Boris Berisovsky in 2005.

...

Nine years lat­er, fol­low­ing the Euro­maid­an coup also engi­neered by Wash­ing­ton, Jaresko rose to Min­is­ter of Finance. She was grant­ed Ukrain­ian cit­i­zen­ship on the day of her appoint­ment.

Through her new post, Jaresko assumed con­trol of Data­group, the com­pa­ny that over­sees Ukraine’s tele­com sec­tor. As for­mer invest­ment exec­u­tive Tim Duff recount­ed, Jaresko “imme­di­ate­ly pro­ceed­ed to squeeze her com­peti­tor, the own­er of Data­group, out of busi­ness using the kind of for­eign cur­ren­cy loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and eco­nom­ic hit­men employed by the CIA.”

...

As Jaresko lapped up praise from Belt­way cor­po­rate media, the NATO-spon­sored Atlantic Coun­cil that employed her as a vis­it­ing fel­low acknowl­edged that under her watch, “the aver­age month­ly wage in Ukraine is only $194, an infla­tion rate of 55 per­cent is dec­i­mat­ing cit­i­zens’ pur­chas­ing pow­er, and a painful IMF-man­dat­ed aus­ter­i­ty pro­gram involv­ing sweep­ing cuts to social pro­grams is being imple­ment­ed.”
...

And when we see how Jaresko went on from her posi­tion as Ukraine’s Finance Min­is­ter to lead­ing the eco­nom­ic shock doc­trine imposed by the US on Puer­to Rico, don’t for­get that the rad­i­cal gut­ting of Ukraine’s labor laws signed into law by Pres­i­dent Zelen­skiy back in August did­n’t hap­pen until after the out­break of war months ear­li­er that made the sit­u­a­tion in Ukraine even more des­per­ate and dire than before. The worse it gets the more rad­i­cal the ‘reforms’:

...
In 2017, Jaresko was reward­ed with an appoint­ment and $625,000 salary as direc­tor of Prome­sa, the unelect­ed US board charged with restruc­tur­ing Puer­to Rico’s debt – and which aver­age Puer­to Ricans refer to deri­sive­ly as “La Jun­ta.” Jaresko resigned rom her posi­tion this April after leav­ing Puer­to Rico’s econ­o­my firm­ly in the hands of Wall Street cred­i­tors.

Natal­ie Jaresko of the ?@FOMBPR? is resigning.She was nev­er wel­comed in Puer­to Rico.Her poli­cies will leave peo­ple on the island suf­fer­ing for decades while ensur­ing huge prof­its for wall street.Its time to #abol­ish­la­jun­ta https://t.co/6GuvLfmqwb— Julio E. (@jlopezvarona) Feb­ru­ary 3, 2022

The all-encom­pass­ing shock ther­a­py that Jaresko pre­scribed from Puer­to Rico to Ukraine was only pos­si­ble thanks to soci­ety-wide dis­as­ters. In San Juan, it was Hur­ri­cane Maria that placed neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism on over­drive; in Kiev, it was a coup and a proxy war. Indeed, the con­flict with Rus­sia has pro­vid­ed Zelen­sky with jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to strip 70 per­cent of Ukraine’s work­ers of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights and arrest every­one from his polit­i­cal rivals to social­ist orga­niz­ers – a wave of repres­sion that Jaresko explic­it­ly jus­ti­fied in her exchange with me.

The Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent accom­pa­nied his Pinochet-style crack­down with an appeal this Octo­ber at the NYSE Stock Exchange for multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions to deep­en their exploita­tion of his country’s econ­o­my and resources. As The Grayzone’s Alex Rubin­stein report­ed, Zelensky’s for­eign invest­ment ini­tia­tive plas­tered the word “dereg­u­la­tion” across the home­page of its web­site.
...

Now, regard­ing the per­son who indig­nant­ly replied “no!” when asked whether or not he also opposed the shelling of civil­ians in the sep­a­ratist republics, it’s worth not­ing that Orest Dey­chaki­wsky is report­ed­ly the broth­er of Yuri Dey­chaki­wsky, the fig­ure fea­tured in a Jan­u­ary 2019 arti­cle in Bloomberg Busi­ness Week about the pri­vate fundrais­ing net­works in the US financ­ing weapons like drones for Ukraine’s forces. Yuri is described as express­ing dis­com­fort when shown a video of one of the drones his net­work helped to finance drop­ping a bomb on a sep­a­ratist, telling the reporter, “It gives me an uneasy feel­ing as a physi­cian and a Chris­t­ian that I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in this,” Dey­chaki­wsky says. “I try not to step on ants. I don’t hunt. I couldn’t shoot Bam­bi. But of course I eat ham­burg­ers, too.” So Orest’s broth­er Yuri appears to have more mis­giv­ings about killing or maim­ing sep­a­ratists:

...
As I chal­lenged the Ukrain­ian del­e­ga­tion on the near­ly $100 bil­lion of mil­i­tary aid the US has forked over to Kiev, a bespec­ta­cled mid­dle-aged man inter­ject­ed, demand­ing to know why I sup­pos­ed­ly sup­port­ed an “unpro­voked” assault on an “inno­cent peo­ple.”

I coun­tered that I opposed the Ukrain­ian military’s 8‑year-long attack on the eth­nic Russ­ian pop­u­la­tion of Donet­sk and Lugan­sk, where thou­sands had been killed before the Russ­ian mil­i­tary ever entered Ukraine in Feb­ru­ary 2022. I then asked the indig­nant char­ac­ter if he also opposed the shelling of civil­ians in the east­ern republics.

His reply came in the form of a firm “no!”

That per­son turns out to be a mem­ber of the US Com­mis­sion on Secu­ri­ty and Coop­er­a­tion in Europe named Orest Dey­chaki­wsky. His com­mis­sion is charged with mon­i­tor­ing Ukrain­ian com­pli­ance with OSCE com­mit­ments, includ­ing those Kiev made – and relent­less­ly vio­lat­ed –– to the Min­sk Accords. As for­mer Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel con­fessed this Decem­ber, Ukraine’s West­ern back­ers used the Min­sk Accords as a stalling tac­tic to pre­pare it for mil­i­tary con­flict with Rus­sia.

...

The son of a for­mer mem­ber of Stepan Bandera’s OUN‑B orga­ni­za­tion that col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nazi Ger­many towards the end of World War II, Dey­chaki­wsky serves as the Vice Pres­i­dent of the US-Ukraine Foun­da­tion. He pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Helsin­ki Com­mis­sion under Sen. Ben Cardin, the pro-war Demo­c­rat who spon­sored the Mag­nit­sky Act impos­ing the first set of harsh post-Cold War sanc­tions on Rus­sia and help­ing set the stage for the cur­rent con­flict.
...

It’s also worth recall­ing that the civil­ians liv­ing in the sep­a­ratist republics of Donet­sk the Luhan­sk have been broad­ly ignored or treat­ed as ‘super­flu­ous’ pop­u­la­tions since the out­break of the civ­il war in 2014. In oth­er words, Orest Dey­chaki­wsky’s views on the bomb­ing of the peo­ple of the Don­bass may be cru­el, but it’s a pret­ty com­mon cru­el­ty these days, as echoed by the Hro­madske guest back in March:

...

A mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian del­e­ga­tion who remained in the back­ground while her fel­low del­e­gates jawed at me strong­ly resem­bled a promi­nent func­tionary of the post-Maid­an media com­plex spawned with hun­dreds of mil­lions in West­ern dona­tions.

She close­ly resem­bled Anas­ta­sia Stanko, the deputy edi­tor of Hro­madske, a broad­cast net­work she helped to found on the eve of the Maid­an coup. Stanko was hon­ored by the cor­po­rate-fund­ed Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists with its 2018 press free­dom award.

While oppo­si­tion and Russ­ian-lan­guage out­lets have been banned by Zelen­sky, pro-NATO infowar instru­ments like Hro­madske have flour­ished thanks to mas­sive dona­tions from the EU, USAID, the Thom­son Foun­da­tion and transna­tion­al elites like Pay­pal founder Pierre Omid­yar.

Though Hro­madske has attempt­ed to strike the lib­er­al tone its bene­fac­tors pre­fer, it has occa­sion­al­ly pro­vid­ed a plat­form for geno­cide-lev­el anti-Russ­ian nation­al­ism.

This March, days after Rus­sia launched its mil­i­tary oper­a­tion inside Ukraine, a guest on Hro­madske rant­ed that the eth­nic Russ­ian pop­u­la­tion of Donet­sk was filled “super­flu­ous” and “absolute­ly use­less peo­ple” who “must be killed.”
...

Final­ly, regard­ing the pres­ence of Andrew Mac — described as “one of the biggest Wash­ing­ton pow­er play­ers for Ukraine” — it’s worth recall­ing how Mac was one of the sources about Erik Prince’s attempts in late 2019 and ear­ly 2020 to pur­chase three Ukrain­ian air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ing firms, two of which were owned by the state. It was none oth­er than Andreii Arte­menko who Prince was work­ing with to make the pur­chas­es hap­pen. While he did­n’t ulti­mate­ly suc­ceed in buy­ing any of the firms, prince appar­ent­ly got as far as meet­ing with offi­cials close to Zelen­sky. It was the kind of sto­ry that hints at Andrew Mac’s influ­ence in Kyiv too:

...
Researcher Moss Robe­son not­ed in his analy­sis of Zelensky’s Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra del­e­ga­tion that it also includ­ed Andrew Mac, an unpaid advi­sor to Zelen­sky described by Politi­co as “one of the biggest Wash­ing­ton pow­er play­ers for Ukraine.”
...

All in all, you have to won­der how many of the mem­bers and that cheer squad had clients or asso­ciates who had been avid­ly wait­ing for that prop­er­ty devel­op­ment ‘reform’ bill rushed through Ukraine’s par­lia­ment a week ear­li­er. Either way, this is clear­ly a group that views Ukraine’s cri­sis as a grand oppor­tu­ni­ty. A wartime oppor­tu­ni­ty to reshape Ukraine into the neolib­er­al par­adise its peo­ple nev­er actu­al­ly want­ed it to become.

How much esca­la­tion can a proxy war between Rus­sia and NATO under­go before it’s no longer just a proxy war? That’s the omi­nous ques­tion that’s been raised this week as lines pre­vi­ous uncrossed over fears of esca­lat­ing the con­flict into WWIII are sud­den­ly crossed.

First, the line against send­ing West­ern amour to Ukraine was not only crossed last week with the appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed announce­ments by the US, Ger­many, and France of plans to donate a range of armored vehi­cles that are seen as one-step below the heavy armor of, for exam­ple, the US Abrams tank or the UK’s Chal­lenger 2. Those announce­ments were then fol­lowed up with reports that the UK is con­sid­er send­ing Chal­lenger 2s. So the line against armored vehi­cles was just crossed with the high prospects of heavy armor com­ing soon.

Then there’s the oth­er lines crossed. The kind of rhetor­i­cal lines that you real­ly don’t want to cross if avoid­ing WWIII is to remain a goal: the defense min­is­ter of Ukraine, Olek­sii Reznikov, not only pre­dict­ed Ukraine’s accep­tance into NATO but declared that Ukraine has “already become a de fac­to mem­ber of the NATO alliance.” Reznikov went on to make a num­ber of com­ments about how Ukraine is spilling its own blood on behalf of NATO.

Those com­ments were again echoed by mul­ti­ple sources in the Krem­lin who made the same con­clu­sion: Russ­ian Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Sec­re­tary Niko­lai Patru­shev declared dur­ing an inter­view that the “events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv — this is a mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion between Rus­sia and NATO, and above all the Unit­ed States and Britain.” Krem­lin spokesper­son Dmitri Peskov large­ly con­curred when asked about the Patru­shev’s com­ments.

That cross­ing of rhetor­i­cal lines is part of the con­text of the push to arm Ukraine with tanks: Ukraine’s grow­ing sta­tus as a proxy NATO army is becom­ing so unde­ni­able that they aren’t both­er­ing to deny it any­more. It’s a sea­son for esca­la­tion:

The Guardian

UK con­sid­ers sup­ply­ing hand­ful of Chal­lenger 2 tanks to Ukraine

Sources say Kyiv hopes move may encour­age Berlin to sup­ply Leop­ard 2s as it seeks 300 tanks in war against Rus­sia

Dan Sab­bagh Defence and secu­ri­ty edi­tor
Mon 9 Jan 2023 10.54 EST
Last mod­i­fied on Mon 9 Jan 2023 16.48 EST

Britain is con­sid­er­ing sup­ply­ing a hand­ful of Chal­lenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, the first time a west­ern coun­try has indi­cat­ed it may sup­ply its home­made heavy armour to Kyiv in the war against Rus­sia.

No final deci­sion by Down­ing Street has been made, British sources added, but Ukraine is hop­ing a pos­i­tive move by the UK could help per­suade Ger­many to fol­low suit lat­er this month with its Leop­ard 2 bat­tle tanks.

Ukraine has been ask­ing for British tanks “since sum­mer”, a sec­ond source said. But the real­i­ty is that the UK, with a total fleet of 227, has a small sup­ply com­pared with what is made by Ger­many and the US.

An ini­tial report from Sky News sug­gest­ed the UK was con­sid­er­ing sup­ply­ing about 10 Chal­lenger 2s, only a frac­tion of the 300 Kyiv wants as it tries to build up a mech­a­nised force in pur­suit of vic­to­ry after more than 10 months of war.

There are about 2,000 Leop­ard 2s in ser­vice in Europe with 13 dif­fer­ent coun­tries, but because they were orig­i­nal­ly made in Ger­many, the approval of Berlin would be required if any are to be re-export­ed to Ukraine.

West­ern coun­tries have already announced a step-up in their mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine this year. Last week, the US and Ger­many said they would pro­vide 50 Bradley and 40 Marder fight­ing vehi­cles respec­tive­ly.

That fol­lowed an announce­ment by France that it would pro­vide a num­ber – esti­mat­ed at about 30 – of light AMX-10 RC armoured vehi­cles in what appeared to be a coor­di­nat­ed sequence of announce­ments.

Kyiv is hop­ing for a fur­ther break­through at or in the run-up to the next meet­ing of the “Ram­stein” con­tact group of west­ern defence min­is­ters, which is sched­uled for 20 Jan­u­ary. Chaired by the US, the group coor­di­nates mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine.

Last week, Ukraine’s pres­i­dent, Volodymyr Zelen­skiy, said: “There is no ratio­nal rea­son why Ukraine has not yet been sup­plied with west­ern-type tanks.” He high­light­ed the next Ram­stein meet­ing as a key point where a deci­sion could be made.

At the end of last year, the com­man­der in chief of the Ukrain­ian armed forces, Gen Valeriy Zaluzh­ny, called for 300 tanks and 600–700 fight­ing vehi­cles to help Ukraine defeat the Russ­ian invaders. But until last week Nato coun­tries had been unwill­ing to pro­vide west­ern made armour to Kyiv, fear­ing it would be inter­pret­ed by Moscow as esca­la­to­ry.

Instead efforts were made to send Sovi­et-era weapon­ry, more famil­iar to Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, from for­mer cen­tral and east­ern bloc coun­tries. Last year, Poland and the Czech Repub­lic sent more than 200 Sovi­et-era T‑72 tanks to Ukraine.

Infantry fight­ing vehi­cles like the Bradleys and the Marders are con­sid­ered one step down below main bat­tle tanks such as the Chal­lenger 2s, Leop­ards and the US Abrams, which car­ry a heavy gun and thick­er armour.

...

Two and a half years ago the UK briefly con­sid­ered scrap­ping its entire fleet of age­ing Chal­lenger 2 tanks. Instead it decid­ed to upgrade two-thirds, or 148 of them, as part of the inte­grat­ed review of defence and for­eign pol­i­cy.

...

————

“UK con­sid­ers sup­ply­ing hand­ful of Chal­lenger 2 tanks to Ukraine” Dan Sab­bagh; The Guardian; 01/09/2023

“At the end of last year, the com­man­der in chief of the Ukrain­ian armed forces, Gen Valeriy Zaluzh­ny, called for 300 tanks and 600–700 fight­ing vehi­cles to help Ukraine defeat the Russ­ian invaders. But until last week Nato coun­tries had been unwill­ing to pro­vide west­ern made armour to Kyiv, fear­ing it would be inter­pret­ed by Moscow as esca­la­to­ry.”

That sure sounds like an esca­la­tion: west­ern made armour is now flow­ing into Ukraine, over­com­ing pre­vi­ous fears that such a move would be seen as esca­la­to­ry. Those fears were appar­ent­ly over­come with the joint announce­ments last week by the US, Ger­many, and France. But even then, the line on heavy armor had yet to be crossed. And now we’re learn­ing that the UK is think­ing about cross­ing that line with Chal­lenger 2 tanks:

...
Britain is con­sid­er­ing sup­ply­ing a hand­ful of Chal­lenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, the first time a west­ern coun­try has indi­cat­ed it may sup­ply its home­made heavy armour to Kyiv in the war against Rus­sia.

...

West­ern coun­tries have already announced a step-up in their mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine this year. Last week, the US and Ger­many said they would pro­vide 50 Bradley and 40 Marder fight­ing vehi­cles respec­tive­ly.

That fol­lowed an announce­ment by France that it would pro­vide a num­ber – esti­mat­ed at about 30 – of light AMX-10 RC armoured vehi­cles in what appeared to be a coor­di­nat­ed sequence of announce­ments.

Kyiv is hop­ing for a fur­ther break­through at or in the run-up to the next meet­ing of the “Ram­stein” con­tact group of west­ern defence min­is­ters, which is sched­uled for 20 Jan­u­ary. Chaired by the US, the group coor­di­nates mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine.
...

So with the cross­ing of more esca­la­to­ry lines on the mil­i­tary aid front, it’s worth not­ing anoth­er line that was just crossed by Ukraine’s defense min­ster Olek­sii Reznikov. A rhetor­i­cal line that Ukraine has been pret­ty dis­ci­plined about not cross­ing: As Reznikov put it in an inter­view, Ukraine is fight­ing NATO’s war against Rus­sia and has “already become a de fac­to mem­ber of the NATO alliance.” It was a point Reznikov made in the con­text of ask­ing the West for more mil­i­tary aid and a rare point of agree­ment between the Krem­lin and Kyiv. As Russ­ian Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Sec­re­tary Niko­lai Patru­shev put it in a recent inter­view, “The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv — this is a mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion between Rus­sia and NATO, and above all the Unit­ed States and Britain.” Krem­lin spokesper­son Dmit­ry Peskov con­curred when asked about Patru­shev’s com­ments, “De fac­to they have already become an indi­rect par­ty to this con­flict, pump­ing Ukraine with weapons, tech­nolo­gies, intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion and so on”:

Moon of Alaba­ma

Ukraine And Rus­sia Agree — Rus­sia Is Fight­ing NATO

by b
Jan­u­ary 10, 2023

Rus­sia and Ukraine have pub­licly agreed on a fun­da­men­tal and impor­tant issue.

The ques­tion is who Rus­sia is fight­ing in Ukraine.

Dur­ing an inter­view with a Ukrain­ian TV sta­tion the Olek­sii Reznikov, the defense min­is­ter of Ukraine, answered that the Ukraine has “already become a de fac­to mem­ber of the NATO alliance.”

The inter­view, giv­en four days ago, is avail­able on Youtube. Eng­lish lan­guage sub­ti­tles can be gen­er­at­ed by auto­trans­late. The sen­tence pic­tured above comes at about 1:25 min­utes in.

Sput­nik, which seems to be the only inter­na­tion­al out­let that has picked up on this, has more (from ~11:05 min):

“At the NATO Sum­mit in Madrid” in June 2022, “it was clear­ly delin­eat­ed that over the com­ing decade, the main threat to the alliance would be the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion. Today Ukraine is elim­i­nat­ing this threat. We are car­ry­ing out NATO’s mis­sion today. They aren’t shed­ding their blood. We’re shed­ding ours. That’s why they’re required to sup­ply us with weapons,” Reznikov said ...

The offi­cial said Kiev was being con­stant­ly remind­ed by its “West­ern part­ners” that it, “like a real shield, is defend­ing the entire civ­i­lized world, the entire West,” from the Rus­sians, and said that he per­son­al­ly has recent­ly received hol­i­day greet­ing cards and text mes­sages from West­ern defense min­is­ters to that effect.

Reznikov expressed “absolute” cer­tain­ty in Ukraine’s even­tu­al entry into NATO, say­ing he was “con­vinced that this is an absolute­ly real­is­tic pos­si­bil­i­ty... Of course they won’t accept this polit­i­cal deci­sion via con­sen­sus before our vic­to­ry. This is clear. But after the vic­to­ry, after all this ends and some kind of peace arrives, NATO coun­tries, first and fore­most, will be inter­est­ed in the con­struc­tion of this secu­ri­ty archi­tec­ture. They have seen their own weak spots, they have seen who is strong and pow­er­ful. Today they are teach­ing us but tomor­row our offi­cers, sergeants and even pri­vates will be teach­ing them how to fight the Rus­sians. Rus­sia remains one of the threats to NATO, and for Europe as a whole.”

Reuters reports today that the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment agrees with the core of Reznikov’s view:

Russ­ian Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Sec­re­tary Niko­lai Patru­shev is seen by diplo­mats as one of the major hard­line influ­ences on Putin, who has promised vic­to­ry in Ukraine despite a series of bat­tle­field set­backs.

“The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv — this is a mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion between Rus­sia and NATO, and above all the Unit­ed States and Britain,” Patru­shev told the Argu­men­ti i Fak­ti news­pa­per in an inter­view.

“The West­ern­ers’ plans are to con­tin­ue to pull Rus­sia apart, and even­tu­al­ly just erase it from the polit­i­cal map of the world,” Patru­shev said.

...

Asked about Patru­shev’s remarks, Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov said NATO and the Unit­ed States were part of the Ukraine con­flict.

“De fac­to they have already become an indi­rect par­ty to this con­flict, pump­ing Ukraine with weapons, tech­nolo­gies, intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion and so on,” Peskov told a reg­u­lar news brief­ing.

As both sides now seem to agree on the real par­tic­i­pants of the con­flict we can assume that they will lat­er also come to an agree­ment about its out­come. That how­ev­er will still take a while.

...

———–

“Ukraine And Rus­sia Agree — Rus­sia Is Fight­ing NATO”
by b; Moon of Alaba­ma; 01/10/2023

“Dur­ing an inter­view with a Ukrain­ian TV sta­tion the Olek­sii Reznikov, the defense min­is­ter of Ukraine, answered that the Ukraine has “already become a de fac­to mem­ber of the NATO alliance.””

We’ve long been hear­ing memes about how Ukraine is ‘fight­ing Rus­sia on the West­’s behalf’, but this kind of blunt lan­guage from the Ukrain­ian Defense Min­is­ter is some­thing new. It was a sig­nif­i­cant rhetor­i­cal esca­la­tion. An esca­la­tion echoed in the sen­ti­ments com­ing out of the Krem­lin. All sides seem to be edg­ing towards an acknowl­edg­ment that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between Rus­sia and NATO:

...
Reuters reports today that the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment agrees with the core of Reznikov’s view:

Russ­ian Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Sec­re­tary Niko­lai Patru­shev is seen by diplo­mats as one of the major hard­line influ­ences on Putin, who has promised vic­to­ry in Ukraine despite a series of bat­tle­field set­backs.

“The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv — this is a mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion between Rus­sia and NATO, and above all the Unit­ed States and Britain,” Patru­shev told the Argu­men­ti i Fak­ti news­pa­per in an inter­view.

“The West­ern­ers’ plans are to con­tin­ue to pull Rus­sia apart, and even­tu­al­ly just erase it from the polit­i­cal map of the world,” Patru­shev said.

...

Asked about Patru­shev’s remarks, Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov said NATO and the Unit­ed States were part of the Ukraine con­flict.

“De fac­to they have already become an indi­rect par­ty to this con­flict, pump­ing Ukraine with weapons, tech­nolo­gies, intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion and so on,” Peskov told a reg­u­lar news brief­ing.

As both sides now seem to agree on the real par­tic­i­pants of the con­flict we can assume that they will lat­er also come to an agree­ment about its out­come. That how­ev­er will still take a while.
...

Will acknowl­edg­ing the proxy-war real­i­ties of this con­flict only result in an accel­er­at­ing esca­la­tion of the sit­u­a­tion? Or might this injec­tion of blunt rhetor­i­cal real­ism prompt the par­ties to final­ly make attempts to arrive at a real­is­tic set­tle­ment? Hope­ful­ly it will be the lat­ter sce­nario. But when your best shot at avoid­ing WWIII is to final­ly acknowl­edge that you’re effec­tive­ly already in WWIII, it’s hard to opti­mistic.

With the war in Ukraine increas­ing­ly look­ing like a bat­tle and attri­tion, here’s a set of arti­cles describ­ing how the US is plan­ning on win­ning that bat­tle. As we’re going to see, the US has big plans to increase its capac­i­ty to pro­duce a range of muni­tions, but espe­cial­ly the 155mm artillery shells that have become cen­tral to how the war is being fought. Big plans that, if ful­filled, will see the US dwarf Rus­si­a’s artillery muni­tions man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty. Big plans will take at least 3–5 years to ramp up. And it’s that time­frame — mul­ti­year plans to dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase muni­tions pro­duc­tion capac­i­ties for the pur­pose of win­ning a war of attri­tion — that’s real­ly the big sto­ry here. Because we’re talk­ing about plans that envi­sion the war in Ukraine con­tin­u­ing for years to come with major increas­es in fight­ing yet to come as the man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty comes online.

But as we’re also going to see, those big long-term plans have to deal with the imme­di­ate real­i­ty that the Ukraini­ans are using those 155mm shells at twice the rates they can cur­rent­ly be pro­duced. As a result, the US has been force to deplete the muni­tions reserves in two major region­al muni­tions hubs. One in Israel and the oth­er in South Korea. Pledges by the US to resup­ply those hubs lat­er were part of the deal.

And let’s not for­get the oth­er major piece of con­text here: the US is prepar­ing to fight a war with Chi­na too. So at the same time we’re see­ing a mas­sive com­mit­ment by the US to a sus­tain war of attri­tion with Rus­sia, the US is ramp­ing up for a par­al­lel con­flict in the Pacif­ic. Prepa­ra­tions for war with Chi­na that will pre­sum­ably have quite a bit of syn­er­gy with the ongo­ing plans for Ukraine.

It’s that dynam­ic — an imme­di­ate sup­ply chain issue for the key muni­tions Ukraine needs to fight today, cou­pled with big plans for major sup­plies but not for a few years and even big­ger plans for war with Chi­na — that could prove to be piv­otal in terms of how the war in Ukraine evolves in the com­ing years. What kinds of weapons sys­tems will the US and oth­er allies sup­ply to Ukraine in the inter­im while these sup­ply chain issues are worked out? We’ll see, but it’s clear at this point that the plan is to keep Ukraine in the fight long enough for the big plans for a much larg­er war effort in the future to come to fruition.

Ok, first, here’s a report about how the Navy Sec­re­tary is warn­ing that the US defense indus­try is run­ning into so many sup­ply chain issues that, should the war in Ukraine con­tin­ue for even anoth­er six months to a year, the US Navy is going to have to start decid­ing whether or not to arm Ukraine or arm itself:

Defense One

Navy Sec­re­tary Warns: If Defense Indus­try Can’t Boost Pro­duc­tion, Arm­ing Both Ukraine and the US May Become ‘Chal­leng­ing’

Car­los Del Toro’s com­ments come as an admi­ral accus­es weapons mak­ers of using the pan­dem­ic as an excuse for not deliv­er­ing arms on time.

Mar­cus Weis­ger­ber | Jan­u­ary 11, 2023

If weapons mak­ers can’t boost pro­duc­tion in the next six to 12 months, the Unit­ed States may find it “chal­leng­ing” to con­tin­ue arm­ing itself and help­ing Ukraine, the Navy sec­re­tary said Wednes­day.

Car­los Del Toro was speak­ing to a group of reporters on the side­lines of a Sur­face Navy Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence in Arling­ton, Vir­ginia, just days after the Biden admin­is­tra­tion announced it would send armored fight­ing vehi­cles to Ukraine. Some Repub­li­cans are push­ing for the U.S. to stop giv­ing weapons to Kyiv.

The sec­re­tary was asked to respond to com­ments made at the con­fer­ence by Adm. Daryl Cau­dle, com­man­der of U.S. Fleet Forces Com­mand. Cau­dle, the reporter said, wor­ried that “the Navy might get to the point where it has to make the deci­sion whether it needs to arm itself or arm Ukraine, and has the Navy got­ten to that point yet?”

Del Toro replied, “With regards to deliv­er­ies of weapons sys­tems for the fight in Ukraine…Yeah, that’s always a con­cern for us. And we mon­i­tor that very, very close­ly. I would­n’t say we’re quite there yet, but if the con­flict does go on for anoth­er six months, for anoth­er year, it cer­tain­ly con­tin­ues to stress the sup­ply chain in ways that are chal­leng­ing.”

The Navy sec­re­tary said that Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Kath­leen Hicks has been work­ing “very close­ly with [the defense] indus­try, to moti­vate them to find out what their chal­lenges or obsta­cles are to be able to increase their own pro­duc­tion rates.”

“It’s obvi­ous that you know, these com­pa­nies have a sub­stan­tial pipeline for the future,” Del Toro said. “They now need to invest in their work­force, as well as the cap­i­tal invest­ments that they have to make with­in their own com­pa­nies to get their pro­duc­tion rates up.”

Most U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine are com­ing from Army, not Navy stock­piles. Still, U.S. offi­cials recent­ly announced they would start send­ing Sea Spar­row mis­siles to Ukraine. Last year, Den­mark gave Ukraine U.S.-made Har­poon mis­siles.

Speak­ing ear­li­er at the SNA con­fer­ence, Cau­dle said that the time­li­ness of weapons deliv­er­ies have real impli­ca­tions both for the Ukrain­ian and U.S. mil­i­taries.

“I’m not...talking about what it’s doing to me, I’m talk­ing about of course, we’re going to help a country—deliver the stuff we need—so they can win that con­flict against Rus­sia and it’s not going to destroy and set me back into the dark ages,” he said.

Over the past three years, com­pa­nies have blamed weapons pro­duc­tion delays on the sup­ply chain issues and work­er short­ages stem­ming from the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Still, Cau­dle accused defense com­pa­nies of using the pan­dem­ic as an excuse for miss­ing weapons deliv­ery dead­lines.

“I’m not as for­giv­ing of the defense indus­tri­al base. I’m just not,” he said. “I am not for­giv­ing of the fact that you’re not deliv­er­ing the ord­nance we need. All this stuff about COVID this, parts, sup­ply chain this, I just don’t real­ly care. We’ve all got tough jobs.”

Cau­dle specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned tor­pe­does and Stan­dard Missile‑6 inter­cep­tors being late. Deliv­er­ies of the SM‑6, which are made by Raytheon Tech­nolo­gies, have been slowed, in part, due to prob­lems get­ting the rock­et motors from Aero­jet Rock­et­dyne, a key sup­pli­er.

“We’re talk­ing about war fight­ing and nation secu­ri­ty and going against a com­peti­tor here and a poten­tial adver­sary that is like noth­ing we’ve ever seen and we keep dil­ly dal­ly­ing around with these deliv­er­ies,” the admi­ral said. “I don’t see good account­abil­i­ty and I don’t get to see good return on invest­ment from the gov­ern­ment [side], I real­ly don’t.”

———-

” Navy Sec­re­tary Warns: If Defense Indus­try Can’t Boost Pro­duc­tion, Arm­ing Both Ukraine and the US May Become ‘Chal­leng­ing’” by Mar­cus Weis­ger­ber; Defense One; 01/11/2023

“Del Toro replied, “With regards to deliv­er­ies of weapons sys­tems for the fight in Ukraine…Yeah, that’s always a con­cern for us. And we mon­i­tor that very, very close­ly. I would­n’t say we’re quite there yet, but if the con­flict does go on for anoth­er six months, for anoth­er year, it cer­tain­ly con­tin­ues to stress the sup­ply chain in ways that are chal­leng­ing.””

The US has about six months to a year before major sup­ply chain issues begin to impact not just the US’s abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue sup­ply­ing Ukraine’s mil­i­tary but the US’s own abil­i­ty to sup­ply the its own mil­i­tary. Again, this is all hap­pen­ing in the mid­dle of an unof­fi­cial build-up for a major con­flict with Chi­na in com­ing years. These aren’t just ‘Ukraine’-related issues. These are major WWI­II-plan­ning issues.

And that brings us to this inter­est­ing cri­tique from Adm. Daryl Cau­dle, com­man­der of U.S. Fleet Forces Com­mand: Cau­dle isn’t buy­ing the excus­es from US defense con­trac­tors about COVID being a valid rea­son for a range of sup­ply-chain issues. It rais­es the ques­tion about what else might be snarling the US’s sup­ply chains for high-end weapons like inter­cep­tor mis­siles. Which is the kind of ques­tion that could loom ever larg­er as this con­flict becomes more and more of a bat­tle of attri­tion:

...
The sec­re­tary was asked to respond to com­ments made at the con­fer­ence by Adm. Daryl Cau­dle, com­man­der of U.S. Fleet Forces Com­mand. Cau­dle, the reporter said, wor­ried that “the Navy might get to the point where it has to make the deci­sion whether it needs to arm itself or arm Ukraine, and has the Navy got­ten to that point yet?”

...

Over the past three years, com­pa­nies have blamed weapons pro­duc­tion delays on the sup­ply chain issues and work­er short­ages stem­ming from the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Still, Cau­dle accused defense com­pa­nies of using the pan­dem­ic as an excuse for miss­ing weapons deliv­ery dead­lines.

“I’m not as for­giv­ing of the defense indus­tri­al base. I’m just not,” he said. “I am not for­giv­ing of the fact that you’re not deliv­er­ing the ord­nance we need. All this stuff about COVID this, parts, sup­ply chain this, I just don’t real­ly care. We’ve all got tough jobs.”

Cau­dle specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned tor­pe­does and Stan­dard Missile‑6 inter­cep­tors being late. Deliv­er­ies of the SM‑6, which are made by Raytheon Tech­nolo­gies, have been slowed, in part, due to prob­lems get­ting the rock­et motors from Aero­jet Rock­et­dyne, a key sup­pli­er.
...

But let’s not for­get about one of the oth­er major poten­tial impli­ca­tions that could arise from the US sim­ply being unable to pro­vide Ukraine with the weapons and ammu­ni­tion need­ed to sus­tain the war effort: the US might be forced to start giv­ing dif­fer­ent, poten­tial­ly more advanced, weapons sys­tems that it still has in stock.

And that brings us to the fol­low­ing NY Times piece about the ongo­ing strug­gles to main­tain sup­plies of a much more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sim­ple, but vital, part of the war effort: artillery shells. As the arti­cle describes, Ukraine is cur­rent burn­ing through artillery at rough­ly twice the rate at which US defense con­trac­tors can resup­ply them. It’s a supply/demand imbal­ance that has required the US to resort to deplet­ing to major muni­tions stock­piles: one in Israel and a sec­ond stock­pile in South Korea. Stock­piles that have been deplet­ed for months now, with US pledges to resup­ply them lat­er.

As the arti­cle also notes, artillery has become even more impor­tant for both sides of the con­flict as defen­sive lines have solid­i­fied. It’s a bat­tle of artillery attri­tion at this point and the clock is tick­ing:

The New York Times

Pen­ta­gon Sends U.S. Arms Stored in Israel to Ukraine

Israeli offi­cials had ini­tial­ly expressed con­cerns that the move could dam­age its rela­tions with Rus­sia.

By Eric Schmitt, Adam Entous, Ronen Bergman, John Ismay and Thomas Gib­bons-Neff
Jan. 17, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Pen­ta­gon is tap­ping into a vast but lit­tle-known stock­pile of Amer­i­can ammu­ni­tion in Israel to help meet Ukraine’s dire need for artillery shells in the war with Rus­sia, Amer­i­can and Israeli offi­cials say.

The stock­pile pro­vides arms and ammu­ni­tion for the Pen­ta­gon to use in Mid­dle East con­flicts. The Unit­ed States has also allowed Israel to access the sup­plies in emer­gen­cies.

The Ukraine con­flict has become an artillery-dri­ven war of attri­tion, with each side lob­bing thou­sands of shells every day. Ukraine has run low on muni­tions for its Sovi­et-era weapon­ry and has large­ly shift­ed to fir­ing artillery and rounds donat­ed by the Unit­ed States and oth­er West­ern allies.

Artillery con­sti­tutes the back­bone of ground com­bat fire­pow­er for both Ukraine and Rus­sia, and the war’s out­come may hinge on which side runs out of ammu­ni­tion first, mil­i­tary ana­lysts say. With stock­piles in the Unit­ed States strained and Amer­i­can arms mak­ers not yet able to keep up with the pace of Ukraine’s bat­tle­field oper­a­tions, the Pen­ta­gon has turned to two alter­na­tive sup­plies of shells to bridge the gap: one in South Korea and the one in Israel, whose use in the Ukraine war has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

The ship­ment of hun­dreds of thou­sands of artillery shells from the two stock­piles to help sus­tain Ukraine’s war effort is a sto­ry about the lim­its of America’s indus­tri­al base and the diplo­mat­ic sen­si­tiv­i­ties of two vital U.S. allies that have pub­licly com­mit­ted not to send lethal mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine.

Israel has con­sis­tent­ly refused to sup­ply weapons to Ukraine out of fear of dam­ag­ing rela­tions with Moscow and ini­tial­ly expressed con­cerns about appear­ing com­plic­it in arm­ing Ukraine if the Pen­ta­gon drew its muni­tions from the stock­pile. About half of the 300,000 rounds des­tined for Ukraine have already been shipped to Europe and will even­tu­al­ly be deliv­ered through Poland, Israeli and Amer­i­can offi­cials said.

...

“With the front line now most­ly sta­tion­ary, artillery has become the most impor­tant com­bat arm,” Mark F. Can­cian, a for­mer White House weapons strate­gist, said in a new study for the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies in Wash­ing­ton, where he is a senior advis­er.

Anoth­er analy­sis pub­lished last month by the For­eign Pol­i­cy Research Insti­tute said that if Ukraine con­tin­ued to receive a steady sup­ply of ammu­ni­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly for artillery, as well as spare parts, it would stand a good chance of wrest­ing back more ter­ri­to­ry that Rus­sia had seized.

“The ques­tion is whether these advan­tages will prove suf­fi­cient for Ukrain­ian forces to retake ter­ri­to­ry from entrenched Russ­ian troops,” wrote Rob Lee and Michael Kof­man, lead­ing mil­i­tary ana­lysts.

Arm­ing the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary with enough artillery ammu­ni­tion is part of a larg­er Amer­i­can-led effort to increase its over­all com­bat pow­er by also pro­vid­ing more pre­ci­sion long-range weapons, West­ern tanks and armored fight­ing vehi­cles, and com­bined arms train­ing.

The Unit­ed States has so far sent or pledged to send Ukraine just over one mil­lion 155-mil­lime­ter shells. A siz­able por­tion of that — though less than half — has come from the stock­piles in Israel and South Korea, a senior U.S. offi­cial said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss oper­a­tional mat­ters.

Oth­er West­ern coun­tries, includ­ing Ger­many, Cana­da, Esto­nia and Italy, have sent 155-mil­lime­ter shells to Ukraine.

The Ukrain­ian army uses about 90,000 artillery rounds a month, about twice the rate they are being man­u­fac­tured by the Unit­ed States and Euro­pean coun­tries com­bined, U.S. and West­ern offi­cials say. The rest must come from oth­er sources, includ­ing exist­ing stock­piles or com­mer­cial sales.

Mr. Kof­man said in an inter­view that with­out adjust­ments to how the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary fights, future Ukrain­ian offen­sives might require sig­nif­i­cant­ly more artillery ammu­ni­tion to make progress against entrenched Russ­ian defens­es.

“The U.S. is mak­ing up the dif­fer­ence from its stock­piles, but that’s doubt­ful­ly a sus­tain­able solu­tion,” said Mr. Kof­man, who is the direc­tor of Russ­ian stud­ies at CNA, a research insti­tute in Arling­ton, Va. “It means the U.S. is tak­ing on risk else­where.”

Pen­ta­gon offi­cials say they must ensure that even as they arm Ukraine, Amer­i­can stock­piles do not dip to dan­ger­ous­ly low lev­els. Accord­ing to two senior Israeli offi­cials, the Unit­ed States has promised Israel that it will replen­ish what it takes from the ware­hous­es in its ter­ri­to­ry and would imme­di­ate­ly ship ammu­ni­tion in a severe emer­gency.

“We are con­fi­dent that we will con­tin­ue to be able to sup­port Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pen­ta­gon spokesman, told reporters last week. “And we’re con­fi­dent that we’ll be able to con­tin­ue to main­tain the readi­ness lev­els that are vital to defend­ing our nation.”

...

Israel has imposed a near-total embar­go on sell­ing weapons to Ukraine, fear­ing that Rus­sia might retal­i­ate by using its forces in Syr­ia to lim­it Israeli airstrikes aimed at Iran­ian and Hezbol­lah forces there.

Israel’s rela­tion­ship with Rus­sia has come under close scruti­ny since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine last Feb­ru­ary, and Ukrain­ian offi­cials have called out Israel’s gov­ern­ment for offer­ing their coun­try only lim­it­ed sup­port and bow­ing to Russ­ian pres­sure.

As the war dragged on, the Pen­ta­gon and the Israelis reached an agree­ment to move about 300,000 155-mil­lime­ter shells, Israeli and Amer­i­can offi­cials said.

The Amer­i­can desire to move the muni­tions was offi­cial­ly sub­mit­ted in an encrypt­ed phone con­ver­sa­tion between the U.S. sec­re­tary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Ben­ny Gantz, the Israeli min­is­ter of defense at the time, accord­ing to an Israeli offi­cial who was briefed on the details of the con­ver­sa­tion.

Mr. Gantz brought the issue to the Israeli cab­i­net. The offi­cials asked to hear the opin­ion of the defense estab­lish­ment, whose rep­re­sen­ta­tives rec­om­mend­ed accept­ing the plan to avoid ten­sion with the Unit­ed States, in part because the ammu­ni­tion was Amer­i­can prop­er­ty. Yair Lapid, then the prime min­is­ter, approved the request at the end of the dis­cus­sion.

The Israeli offi­cials said that Israel had not changed its pol­i­cy of not pro­vid­ing Ukraine with lethal weapons and rather was acced­ing to an Amer­i­can deci­sion to use its own ammu­ni­tion as it saw fit.

“Based on a U.S. request, cer­tain equip­ment was trans­ferred to the U.S. D.O.D. from its stock­piles” in Israel, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said in a state­ment, refer­ring to the Depart­ment of Defense.

The stock­pile of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary hard­ware and muni­tions in Israel has its ori­gins in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which saw the Unit­ed States air­lift­ing weapons to resup­ply Israeli forces.

After the war, the Unit­ed States estab­lished ware­hous­es in Israel so that it could rely on them if it were again caught in a cri­sis. A strate­gic mem­o­ran­dum signed by the two coun­tries in the 1980s paved the way for the “pre-posi­tion­ing” of Pen­ta­gon assets in Israel, accord­ing to two for­mer U.S. offi­cials and a for­mer senior Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cer with direct knowl­edge of the agree­ment.

Amer­i­can tanks and armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers were ini­tial­ly moved to Israel’s south­ern desert with the under­stand­ing that they would be used by U.S. forces in the region if need­ed, said the offi­cials, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive inter­nal delib­er­a­tions.

In the 2000s, the pro­gram was expand­ed to include muni­tions for the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force — all stored in sep­a­rate loca­tions acces­si­ble only to Amer­i­can mil­i­tary per­son­nel, accord­ing to a for­mer U.S. arms inspec­tor.

At the time, the stock­pile, offi­cial­ly called the WRSA‑I, or War Reserve Stocks for Allies-Israel, was over­seen by the U.S. Euro­pean Com­mand. But it is now man­aged by the U.S. Cen­tral Com­mand, fol­low­ing a redraw­ing of its area of respon­si­bil­i­ty in Sep­tem­ber 2021.

Israel was allowed to with­draw Amer­i­can muni­tions from the stock­pile dur­ing its war with Hezbol­lah in the sum­mer of 2006 and again dur­ing oper­a­tions against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2014, accord­ing to a Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice report released in Feb­ru­ary 2022.

The Pen­ta­gon also approached South Korea last year about trans­fer­ring muni­tions in the U.S. stock­pile there to Ukraine.

The South Kore­ans were more will­ing than the Israelis to work with the Unit­ed States on using the stocks, a senior U.S. offi­cial said. But they also object­ed to ship­ping artillery shells direct­ly to Ukraine, though for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, the offi­cial said. The South Kore­an gov­ern­ment did not want artillery rounds marked R.O.K. (Repub­lic of Korea) show­ing up in Ukraine in vio­la­tion of South Kore­an arms export rules.

A com­pro­mise was reached. Artillery shells from the Kore­an stock­pile would be sent to replen­ish Amer­i­can stocks else­where.

The Unit­ed States has also agreed to buy 100,000 new artillery shells from South Korea, a deal pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed by The Wall Street Jour­nal.

U.S. offi­cials say that access­ing the over­seas stocks will help tide over the Ukraini­ans until Amer­i­can ammu­ni­tion mak­ers can ramp up their pro­duc­tion.

Oth­er fac­tors may ease the pres­sure for more shells. Russia’s artillery fire has reduced sharply in recent weeks, Pen­ta­gon offi­cials said, pos­si­bly reflect­ing rationing of rounds because of low sup­plies. White House offi­cials said in Novem­ber that North Korea was ship­ping artillery shells to Rus­sia, anoth­er sign of like­ly muni­tions short­ages, U.S. offi­cials said.

Final­ly, the Unit­ed States is help­ing Ukraine use ammu­ni­tion more effi­cient­ly. The Ukraini­ans have been fir­ing so many artillery bar­rages that about a third of the 155-mil­lime­ter how­itzers pro­vid­ed by the Unit­ed States and oth­er West­ern nations are out of com­mis­sion for repairs.

...

————–

“Pen­ta­gon Sends U.S. Arms Stored in Israel to Ukraine” by Eric Schmitt, Adam Entous, Ronen Bergman, John Ismay and Thomas Gib­bons-Neff; The New York Times; 01/17/2023

“Artillery con­sti­tutes the back­bone of ground com­bat fire­pow­er for both Ukraine and Rus­sia, and the war’s out­come may hinge on which side runs out of ammu­ni­tion first, mil­i­tary ana­lysts say. With stock­piles in the Unit­ed States strained and Amer­i­can arms mak­ers not yet able to keep up with the pace of Ukraine’s bat­tle­field oper­a­tions, the Pen­ta­gon has turned to two alter­na­tive sup­plies of shells to bridge the gap: one in South Korea and the one in Israel, whose use in the Ukraine war has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.”

The side that main­tains an artillery sup­ply wins. That’s the dynam­ic that’s emerg­ing in this con­flict. A dynam­ic that has required the US to tap two major region­al muni­tion depots. Along with pledges to resup­ply those depots lat­er. In oth­er words, it’s a plan that relies on US defense con­trac­tors actu­al­ly suc­ceed­ing in ramp­ing up their pro­duc­tion in a sus­tained man­ner in com­ing years. A ramp up in pro­duc­tion that appar­ent­ly has yet to hap­pen:

...
The Ukraine con­flict has become an artillery-dri­ven war of attri­tion, with each side lob­bing thou­sands of shells every day. Ukraine has run low on muni­tions for its Sovi­et-era weapon­ry and has large­ly shift­ed to fir­ing artillery and rounds donat­ed by the Unit­ed States and oth­er West­ern allies.

...

“With the front line now most­ly sta­tion­ary, artillery has become the most impor­tant com­bat arm,” Mark F. Can­cian, a for­mer White House weapons strate­gist, said in a new study for the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies in Wash­ing­ton, where he is a senior advis­er.

Anoth­er analy­sis pub­lished last month by the For­eign Pol­i­cy Research Insti­tute said that if Ukraine con­tin­ued to receive a steady sup­ply of ammu­ni­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly for artillery, as well as spare parts, it would stand a good chance of wrest­ing back more ter­ri­to­ry that Rus­sia had seized.

“The ques­tion is whether these advan­tages will prove suf­fi­cient for Ukrain­ian forces to retake ter­ri­to­ry from entrenched Russ­ian troops,” wrote Rob Lee and Michael Kof­man, lead­ing mil­i­tary ana­lysts.

...

The Unit­ed States has so far sent or pledged to send Ukraine just over one mil­lion 155-mil­lime­ter shells. A siz­able por­tion of that — though less than half — has come from the stock­piles in Israel and South Korea, a senior U.S. offi­cial said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss oper­a­tional mat­ters.

...

The Ukrain­ian army uses about 90,000 artillery rounds a month, about twice the rate they are being man­u­fac­tured by the Unit­ed States and Euro­pean coun­tries com­bined, U.S. and West­ern offi­cials say. The rest must come from oth­er sources, includ­ing exist­ing stock­piles or com­mer­cial sales.

Mr. Kof­man said in an inter­view that with­out adjust­ments to how the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary fights, future Ukrain­ian offen­sives might require sig­nif­i­cant­ly more artillery ammu­ni­tion to make progress against entrenched Russ­ian defens­es.

“The U.S. is mak­ing up the dif­fer­ence from its stock­piles, but that’s doubt­ful­ly a sus­tain­able solu­tion,” said Mr. Kof­man, who is the direc­tor of Russ­ian stud­ies at CNA, a research insti­tute in Arling­ton, Va. “It means the U.S. is tak­ing on risk else­where.”

...

U.S. offi­cials say that access­ing the over­seas stocks will help tide over the Ukraini­ans until Amer­i­can ammu­ni­tion mak­ers can ramp up their pro­duc­tion.

...

Final­ly, the Unit­ed States is help­ing Ukraine use ammu­ni­tion more effi­cient­ly. The Ukraini­ans have been fir­ing so many artillery bar­rages that about a third of the 155-mil­lime­ter how­itzers pro­vid­ed by the Unit­ed States and oth­er West­ern nations are out of com­mis­sion for repairs.
...

So how is the US plan­ning on actu­al­ly address­ing this giant sup­ply gap? We got an answer last month, with the announce­ment of a dra­mat­ic new plan to triple, and then dou­ble again, the US’s capac­i­ty to pro­duce 155mm artillery muni­tions over the next few years. Or as Doug Bush, the assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Army for acqui­si­tion, tech­nol­o­gy and logis­tics, put it, “We are in a posi­tion to sup­port Ukraine, but it’s more the mid and long term...By cre­at­ing this capac­i­ty ... if this war goes three or four years, we’ll be in a posi­tion to just vast­ly out­pro­duce the Rus­sians all by our­selves — and if you com­bine that with our allies, then we’re just dwarf­ing their capa­bil­i­ty. They won’t be able to keep up.” That’s the plan: to dwarf Rus­si­a’s artillery man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty to win the war of attri­tion. In a few years:

Defense News

Army plans ‘dra­mat­ic’ ammo pro­duc­tion boost as Ukraine drains stocks

By Joe Gould
Dec 5, 2022

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — As dona­tions to Ukraine strain allied muni­tions stock­piles, the U.S. Army is seek­ing a “dra­mat­ic” ramp up in month­ly pro­duc­tion of 155mm artillery shells over the next three years, its chief weapons buy­er said Sat­ur­day.

Those plans hinge on emer­gency spend­ing for Ukraine that Con­gress already approved, but also on the more than $600 mil­lion in indus­tri­al invest­ments in the next tranche of aid and mul­ti­year author­i­ties in the annu­al defense pol­i­cy bill still under debate in Con­gress, accord­ing to Doug Bush, the assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Army for acqui­si­tion, tech­nol­o­gy and logis­tics.

“Fund­ing is already in place, con­tracts are under­way to basi­cal­ly triple 155mm pro­duc­tion,” Bush told Defense News on the side­lines of the Rea­gan Nation­al Defense Forum. “There’s fund­ing on the Hill, in the sup­ple­men­tal, to more than dou­ble that again. That would take a peri­od of years.

“We want to be able to build our stocks not just where we start­ed the war, but high­er. We’re pos­tur­ing for a pret­ty — over a peri­od of three years — a dra­mat­ic increase in con­ven­tion­al artillery ammu­ni­tion pro­duc­tion.”

Army Sec­re­tary Chris­tine Wor­muth sep­a­rate­ly told reporters that the U.S. will go from mak­ing 14,000 155mm shells each month to 20,000 by the spring and 40,000 by 2025.

The ser­vice in recent days award­ed con­tracts to three pri­vate com­pa­nies to pro­duce and deliv­er 155mm artillery: Gen­er­al Dynam­ics Ord­nance and Tac­ti­cal Sys­tems, Amer­i­can Ord­nance, and IMT Defense.

The push comes as the U.S. has sup­plied Ukraine with more than 1 mil­lion artillery rounds, and as Pen­ta­gon offi­cials see the war in Ukraine con­tin­u­ing indef­i­nite­ly, fur­ther drain­ing stocks for the U.S. and allies. Bush said it’s unclear what the Ukrain­ian military’s mid- and long-term needs will be, and the U.S. Army wants to be ready.

“We are in a posi­tion to sup­port Ukraine, but it’s more the mid and long term,” Bush said. “By cre­at­ing this capac­i­ty ... if this war goes three or four years, we’ll be in a posi­tion to just vast­ly out­pro­duce the Rus­sians all by our­selves — and if you com­bine that with our allies, then we’re just dwarf­ing their capa­bil­i­ty. They won’t be able to keep up.”

Bush not­ed the Army is pay­ing to expand and improve pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty at its ammu­ni­tion plants in Scran­ton, Penn­syl­va­nia; Kingsport, Ten­nessee; and Mid­dle­town, Iowa. Army offi­cials also aim to con­tract with defense firms out­side the U.S. for artillery shells for Ukraine, a step in line with talks between senior Pen­ta­gon offi­cials and their for­eign coun­ter­parts about greater indus­tri­al coop­er­a­tion.

Beyond artillery shells, Bush said he is push­ing to dou­ble pro­duc­tion for the most in-demand pre­ci­sion muni­tions for Ukraine: Guid­ed Mul­ti­ple Launch Rock­et Sys­tem rounds for the Lock­heed Mar­tin-made High Mobil­i­ty Artillery Rock­et Sys­tem and Javelins, the portable anti-tank weapon joint­ly made by Lock­heed and Raytheon Tech­nolo­gies.

The Sen­ate-passed ver­sion of the sweep­ing 2023 Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act aims to autho­rize mas­sive pur­chas­es of high-pri­or­i­ty muni­tions using mul­ti­year con­tracts to help Ukraine fight Rus­sia and to refill U.S. stock­piles; the bill would also pro­vide waivers to speed up the process. A com­pro­mise bill was still under nego­ti­a­tions between the House and Sen­ate on Mon­day.

While approval for mul­ti­year pur­chas­ing author­i­ties for muni­tions through the NDAA would be the start­ing gun for the Army to begin plan­ning those buys, the effort must also get approval in next year’s appro­pri­a­tions leg­is­la­tion, Bush said.

The defense industry’s lack of robust pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty for ammu­ni­tion is a prod­uct of his­tor­i­cal­ly “lumpy” pur­chas­es by the mil­i­tary, Ellen Lord, a for­mer Pen­ta­gon acqui­si­tions chief, told reporters. She said that with­out steady demand over time, defense firms haven’t been mak­ing cap­i­tal invest­ments in their plants.

“So we have to be clear about the demand sig­nal and the vol­umes over mul­ti­ple years, and then indus­try will devel­op that capac­i­ty,” said Lord, who now works in the pri­vate defense sec­tor. “But indus­try [exec­u­tives] can’t go to their board of direc­tors and say: ‘Hey, I think there’s going to be a lot of orders out there, so let’s spend $50 mil­lion to build a plant and hope.’ ”

At the con­fer­ence, Raytheon’s chief exec­u­tive, Greg Hayes, said that the war’s con­sump­tion rates so far have vast­ly out­stripped indus­tri­al capac­i­ty. Since the start of Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine in Feb­ru­ary, dona­tion efforts have used up five years of Javelin pro­duc­tion and 13 years of pro­duc­tion for portable anti-air­craft Stinger sys­tems, he said.

“So the ques­tion is: How are we going to resup­ply, restock the inven­to­ries?” Hayes said.

Speak­ing on a pan­el with Hayes, Wor­muth said the con­tracts for a pro­duc­tion boost have already begun. She point­ed to the ser­vice ‘s $1.2 bil­lion award to Raytheon for six Nation­al Advanced Sur­face-to-Air Mis­sile Sys­tem bat­ter­ies for Ukraine and a $431 mil­lion award to Lock­heed to replen­ish donat­ed HIMARS launch­ers.

“Thanks to Con­gress ... we’ve actu­al­ly pushed $6 bil­lion out to indus­try to help us with replen­ish­ment, which is going to enable us to not only con­tin­ue to sup­ply Ukraine but also to replen­ish our own stocks,” Wor­muth said.

...

————-

“Army plans ‘dra­mat­ic’ ammo pro­duc­tion boost as Ukraine drains stocks” By Joe Gould; Defense News; 12/05/2022

““Fund­ing is already in place, con­tracts are under­way to basi­cal­ly triple 155mm pro­duc­tion,” Bush told Defense News on the side­lines of the Rea­gan Nation­al Defense Forum. “There’s fund­ing on the Hill, in the sup­ple­men­tal, to more than dou­ble that again. That would take a peri­od of years.”

A tripling of 155mm muni­tion pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by a anoth­er dou­bling. That sounds like a planned six-fold increase in the US’s capac­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture artillery muni­tions over just the next few years. Or as Doug Bush, the assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Army for acqui­si­tion, tech­nol­o­gy and logis­tics, put it, the US is plan­ning on hav­ing the capac­i­ty to out­pro­duce Russ­ian artillery man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty all on its own:

...
“We want to be able to build our stocks not just where we start­ed the war, but high­er. We’re pos­tur­ing for a pret­ty — over a peri­od of three years — a dra­mat­ic increase in con­ven­tion­al artillery ammu­ni­tion pro­duc­tion.”

Army Sec­re­tary Chris­tine Wor­muth sep­a­rate­ly told reporters that the U.S. will go from mak­ing 14,000 155mm shells each month to 20,000 by the spring and 40,000 by 2025.

The ser­vice in recent days award­ed con­tracts to three pri­vate com­pa­nies to pro­duce and deliv­er 155mm artillery: Gen­er­al Dynam­ics Ord­nance and Tac­ti­cal Sys­tems, Amer­i­can Ord­nance, and IMT Defense.

...

“We are in a posi­tion to sup­port Ukraine, but it’s more the mid and long term,” Bush said. “By cre­at­ing this capac­i­ty ... if this war goes three or four years, we’ll be in a posi­tion to just vast­ly out­pro­duce the Rus­sians all by our­selves — and if you com­bine that with our allies, then we’re just dwarf­ing their capa­bil­i­ty. They won’t be able to keep up.”
...

Is Ukraine going to be giv­en so much artillery that it can effec­tive­ly bom­bard Russ­ian forces out of the annexed regions? We’ll see, but that’s the plan. Just over­whelm Rus­si­a’s indus­tri­al capac­i­ty while run­ning a long-war of attri­tion. This is a good time to recall the report by Jack Mur­phy about exten­sive CIA-led sab­o­tage efforts hit­ting inside Rus­sia. It’s a good bet that the facil­i­ties involved with this indus­tri­al war-capac­i­ty race are going to be prime sab­o­tage tar­gets.

And how about the sep­a­ratist regions that don’t want to be part of Ukraine, which remains one of the root cause of the con­flict? Is the plan to just bom­bard those pop­u­la­tions into sub­mis­sion? It’s hard to see how that would­n’t be the plan. The years-long shelling of the ‘super­flu­ous’ eth­nic Russ­ian pop­u­la­tions will be tak­en to anoth­er lev­el.

Final­ly, keep in mind that we’re get­ting these reports about these big plans for the future at the same time we’re see­ing a sig­nif­i­cant ‘loos­en­ing’ on the types of weapons plat­forms deliv­ered to Ukraine, most notably the UK’s deliv­ery of Chal­lenger 2 heavy tanks. That’s along with reports about the Biden admin­is­tra­tion warm­ing to the idea of pro­vid­ing Ukraine with the kinds of weapons that can hit Crimea. So at the same time the West is plan­ning for a mas­sive increase in its abil­i­ty to sup­ply Ukraine with tra­di­tion­al weapons like artillery muni­tions in com­ing years, we’re also see­ing the West offer Ukraine more and more advanced weapons sys­tems in the imme­di­ate future as the West strug­gles to keep Ukraine sup­plied today. In oth­er words, the plans are for a sig­nif­i­cant increase in Ukraine’s imme­di­ate war-fight­ing capa­bil­i­ties cou­pled with an even more dra­mat­ic increase in those mil­i­tary sup­plies in com­ing years with an over­all goal of swamp­ing Rus­si­a’s mil­i­tary man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty and, even­tu­al­ly, win­ning a war of attri­tion that will dri­ve Rus­sia out of Ukraine entire­ly through over­whelm­ing mil­i­tary force. At the same time prepa­ra­tions for war with Chi­na become ever more intense. That’s the plan. Which is a grim reminder that if you’re going to wage WWIII, you bet­ter have your sup­ply-chain issues worked out in advance. They’re clear­ly work­ing on it.

That was unex­pect­ed: the Atlantic Coun­cil just made a series of long-over­due acknowl­edge­ments. Con­flict of inter­est acknowl­edge­ments. Now, in this case, the acknowl­edge­ments were trig­gered by the enor­mous cli­mate-change-relat­ed con­flicts of inter­est cre­at­ed by the think tank’s donors list that includes a num­ber of petro-state gov­ern­ments. But as we’re going to see, those con­flicts and inter­est go far beyond petro-states and include dona­tions from an array of West­ern oil giant like Exxon­mo­bile, BP, and Chevron. Oil giants who had major decades-long oper­a­tions in Rus­sia until the out­break of war last year. That’s on top of all the dona­tions from major defense con­trac­tors look Lock­heed Mar­tin, Raytheon, and Boe­ing.

It’s that much broad­er range of the Atlantic Coun­cil’s con­flicts of inter­est that’s the big sto­ry here. A sto­ry still large­ly unac­knowl­edged by the Atlantic Coun­cil itself and bare­ly acknowl­edged by the rest of press. But at least when it came to a slew of columns cel­e­brat­ing the appoint­ment of Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Company’s CEO Sul­tan Al Jaber as pres­i­dent-des­ig­nate of the COP28 Cli­mate Sum­mit to be host­ed by the UAE from Novem­ber 30 to Decem­ber 12 this year. Three Atlantic Coun­cil columns were pub­lished last week prais­ing Al Jaber, includ­ing a Jan 14th col­umn writ­ten by Atlantic Coun­cil CEO and Pres­i­dent Fred­er­ick Kempe. And it was only after get­ting called out on the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny and Mas­dar, where Sul­tan Al Jaber serves as CEO and chair­man, respec­tive­ly, are spon­sors of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum that we find con­flict-of-inter­est dis­clo­sures belat­ed­ly appear­ing on these columns:

Respon­si­ble State­craft

DC think tank address­es undis­closed con­flicts of inter­est

The Atlantic Coun­cil retroac­tive­ly acknowl­edged con­tent it was pro­duc­ing on ener­gy and cli­mate change had a con­nec­tion to a major fun­der.

Jan­u­ary 19, 2023
Writ­ten by
Eli Clifton

Wash­ing­ton-based think tanks have been noto­ri­ous­ly slow to imple­ment the same con­flict of inter­est poli­cies and dis­clo­sures com­mon­ly imple­ment­ed by jour­nal­ists, aca­d­e­mics, and sci­en­tists. But a rush of retroac­tive dis­clo­sures of con­flicts of inter­est in writ­ten mate­ri­als pub­lished by Atlantic Coun­cil CEO and Pres­i­dent Fred­er­ick Kempe, anoth­er Coun­cil staffer, and an un-bylined col­umn pub­lished by the Coun­cil over the past week, rais­es ques­tions about whether the Coun­cil and oth­er think tanks are poised to more vig­i­lant­ly dis­close poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est between their fun­ders and work prod­ucts.

The Atlantic Coun­cil receives fund­ing from for­eign coun­tries — includ­ing the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Bahrain, Japan, and South Korea — and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers — includ­ing Lock­heed Mar­tin, Raytheon and Boe­ing — which pos­es numer­ous poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est for a think tank that char­ac­ter­izes itself as “a non­par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion that gal­va­nizes US lead­er­ship and engage­ment in the world.”

Dis­clos­ing some of those con­flicts of inter­est appeared to become an insti­tu­tion­al pri­or­i­ty for the Atlantic Coun­cil start­ing on Jan­u­ary 16.

On Jan­u­ary 14, Kempe pub­lished a col­umn heap­ing praise on Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Company’s CEO Sul­tan Al Jaber who was appoint­ed pres­i­dent-des­ig­nate of the COP28 Cli­mate Sum­mit to be host­ed by the UAE from Novem­ber 30 to Decem­ber 12. Al Jaber’s appoint­ment was met with con­cern by cli­mate activists, includ­ing ActionAid’s Tere­sa Ander­son who told CNBC, “This appoint­ment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the hen­house.”

“Like last year’s sum­mit, we’re increas­ing­ly see­ing fos­sil fuel inter­ests tak­ing con­trol of the process and shap­ing it to meet their own needs,” she added.

Kempe pushed back on Anderson’s crit­i­cisms in his col­umn on the 14th, writ­ing, “What that over­looks is that Al Jaber’s rich back­ground in both renew­ables and fos­sil fuels makes him an ide­al choice at a time when efforts to address cli­mate change have been far too slow, lack­ing the inclu­siv­i­ty to pro­duce more trans­for­ma­tive results.”

Two days lat­er, the Coun­cil updat­ed his arti­cle with an editor’s note at the top that read, “This arti­cle was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 16 to reflect the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny and Mas­dar, where Sul­tan Al Jaber serves as CEO and chair­man, respec­tive­ly, are spon­sors of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum.”

Also on the 16th, an arti­cle by Coun­cil Deputy Man­ag­ing Edi­tor Daniel Mal­loy high­light­ing remarks made by Al Juber at the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum, received a sim­i­lar update two days after its Jan­u­ary 14 pub­li­ca­tion date. “This arti­cle was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 16 to reflect the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny, where Sul­tan Al Jaber serves as CEO, is a spon­sor of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum,” said the update.

Yet anoth­er arti­cle on the Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 14, this one with­out a byline, was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 18 with 10 editor’s notes retroac­tive­ly dis­clos­ing to read­ers that numer­ous pan­el par­tic­i­pants were also spon­sors of the event.

While the three updates on the Council’s web­site were rel­a­tive­ly short and sim­ply pro­vid­ed the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion that had been with­held from read­ers, a Jan­u­ary 14 col­umn by Kempe on CNBC.com titled, “Mak­ing the case for oil CEO Sul­tan Al Jaber to lead the UN Cli­mate con­fer­ence this year,” received a far harsh­er cor­rec­tion by CNBC after the net­work became aware of finan­cial con­flicts between Kempe and the recip­i­ent of his praise.

A Jan­u­ary 17th update said:

Editor’s note: This arti­cle and head­line were updat­ed to reflect the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny and Mas­dar are major spon­sors of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum. Sul­tan Al Jaber is CEO of ADNOC and chair­man of renew­able ener­gy invest­ing firm Mas­dar. The finan­cial rela­tion­ship between the com­pa­nies and Atlantic Coun­cil as well as the obvi­ous con­flict of inter­est were not dis­closed to CNBC pri­or to pub­li­ca­tion of this col­umn and does not meet our stan­dards of trans­paren­cy.

When reached for com­ment, the Council’s direc­tor of strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Richard David­son, told Respon­si­ble State­craft:

We’ve been trans­par­ent about our donors on our web­site, annu­al report and in Glob­al Ener­gy Forum col­lat­er­al and sig­nage at the event. No effort to con­ceal — the oppo­site.

Along with our rig­or­ous intel­lec­tu­al inde­pen­dence and edi­to­r­i­al stan­dards, our finan­cial trans­paren­cy has been con­sis­tent­ly rec­og­nized with the industry’s high­est four-star-rat­ing in Char­i­ty Nav­i­ga­tor. Like every­one, we make mis­takes, and when we do we cor­rect them.

...

The Atlantic Coun­cil, for its part, is less than com­plete­ly trans­par­ent about its sources of fund­ing. The think tank’s 2021 “hon­or roll of con­trib­u­tors” list three “anony­mous” $250,000-$499,999 con­tri­bu­tions, two “anony­mous” $50,000-$99,999 con­tri­bu­tions, one “anony­mous” $10,000-$24,999 con­tri­bu­tion, one “anony­mous” $5,000-$9,999 con­tri­bu­tion, and two “anony­mous” con­tri­bu­tions less than $1,000.

————

“DC think tank address­es undis­closed con­flicts of inter­est” by Eli Clifton; Respon­si­ble State­craft; 01/19/2023

“The Atlantic Coun­cil receives fund­ing from for­eign coun­tries — includ­ing the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Bahrain, Japan, and South Korea — and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers — includ­ing Lock­heed Mar­tin, Raytheon and Boe­ing — which pos­es numer­ous poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est for a think tank that char­ac­ter­izes itself as “a non­par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion that gal­va­nizes US lead­er­ship and engage­ment in the world.””

Petro-gov­ern­ments and major defense con­trac­tors. In terms of con­flicts of inter­est it’s hard to find a more con­flict­ed list of donors. All the more con­flict­ed giv­en the Atlantic Coun­cil’s hard­line stance on the con­flict in Ukraine. A con­flict that’s proven to be great for both defense con­trac­tors and petro-states and promis­es to be even greater the longer it goes.

So when we read that the Atlantic Coun­cil was pump­ing out columns heap­ing praise on Sul­tan Al Jaber — the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Company’s CEO who was appoint­ed pres­i­dent-des­ig­nate of the COP28 Cli­mate Sum­mit to be host­ed by the UAE from Novem­ber 30 to Decem­ber 12 — and then sud­den­ly decid­ed to issue a series of belat­ed con­flict-of-inter­est dis­clo­sures after get­ting called out for it, it’s appar­ent that the Atlantic Coun­cil is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly aware of its pal­pa­ble con­flicts of inter­est but also still intent on main­tain­ing those con­flicts of inter­est. It’s effec­tive­ly act­ing as a lob­by­ing group. Lob­by­ing for the inter­ests of its donors that include pet­rostates and major defense con­trac­tors:

...
Dis­clos­ing some of those con­flicts of inter­est appeared to become an insti­tu­tion­al pri­or­i­ty for the Atlantic Coun­cil start­ing on Jan­u­ary 16.

On Jan­u­ary 14, Kempe pub­lished a col­umn heap­ing praise on Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Company’s CEO Sul­tan Al Jaber who was appoint­ed pres­i­dent-des­ig­nate of the COP28 Cli­mate Sum­mit to be host­ed by the UAE from Novem­ber 30 to Decem­ber 12. Al Jaber’s appoint­ment was met with con­cern by cli­mate activists, includ­ing ActionAid’s Tere­sa Ander­son who told CNBC, “This appoint­ment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the hen­house.”

“Like last year’s sum­mit, we’re increas­ing­ly see­ing fos­sil fuel inter­ests tak­ing con­trol of the process and shap­ing it to meet their own needs,” she added.

Kempe pushed back on Anderson’s crit­i­cisms in his col­umn on the 14th, writ­ing, “What that over­looks is that Al Jaber’s rich back­ground in both renew­ables and fos­sil fuels makes him an ide­al choice at a time when efforts to address cli­mate change have been far too slow, lack­ing the inclu­siv­i­ty to pro­duce more trans­for­ma­tive results.”

Two days lat­er, the Coun­cil updat­ed his arti­cle with an editor’s note at the top that read, “This arti­cle was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 16 to reflect the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny and Mas­dar, where Sul­tan Al Jaber serves as CEO and chair­man, respec­tive­ly, are spon­sors of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum.”

Also on the 16th, an arti­cle by Coun­cil Deputy Man­ag­ing Edi­tor Daniel Mal­loy high­light­ing remarks made by Al Juber at the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum, received a sim­i­lar update two days after its Jan­u­ary 14 pub­li­ca­tion date. “This arti­cle was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 16 to reflect the fact that the Abu Dhabi Nation­al Oil Com­pa­ny, where Sul­tan Al Jaber serves as CEO, is a spon­sor of the Atlantic Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum,” said the update.

Yet anoth­er arti­cle on the Council’s Glob­al Ener­gy Forum pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 14, this one with­out a byline, was updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 18 with 10 editor’s notes retroac­tive­ly dis­clos­ing to read­ers that numer­ous pan­el par­tic­i­pants were also spon­sors of the event.
...

And with all these gross con­flicts of inter­ests involv­ing petro-states final­ly get­ting called out, we have to also note that it’s not just the petro-states. And Big Oil giants also show up on the Atlantic Coun­cil’s donors list, includ­ing Chevron, Exon­n­Mo­bil, and BP. So it’s worth not­ing the extra spe­cial con­flicts of inter­est posed by those dona­tions from BP and Exxon­Mo­bile: the two oil giants, along with Shell, have been oper­at­ing in Rus­sia for decades. Until the war, which effec­tive­ly forced them to shut down their oper­a­tions:

The Con­ver­sa­tion

Shell, BP and Exxon­Mo­bil have done busi­ness in Rus­sia for decades – here’s why they’re leav­ing now

Author Yan Anthea Zhang
pub­lished: march 3, 2022 8.26am est

Pro­fes­sor and Fayez Sarofim Van­guard Chair of Strate­gic Man­age­ment, Rice Uni­ver­si­ty

Dis­clo­sure state­ment

Yan Anthea Zhang is affil­i­at­ed with the Strate­gic Man­age­ment Soci­ety and the Acad­e­my of Man­age­ment.
Part­ners

In response to Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, British ener­gy giant BP announced on Feb. 27, 2022, that it will sell its near­ly 20% own­er­ship in Russ­ian state-owned ener­gy giant Ros­neft. BP’s rival Shell is also pulling out of all of its oper­a­tions in Rus­sia, as are U.S. ener­gy giant Exxon­Mo­bil and Norway’s state-con­trolled com­pa­ny, Equinor.
These breakups will not be cheap. BP’s stake in Ros­neft is worth US$14 bil­lion. In var­i­ous projects, Shell has about $3 bil­lion in assets in Rus­sia. Exxon­Mo­bil has over 1,000 employ­ees and more than $4 bil­lion in assets there. Pulling out will inflict sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial hits on all of these com­pa­nies.

West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies have invest­ed and oper­at­ed in Rus­sia for a long time – over 30 years for BP and more than 25 years for Exxon­Mo­bil. They are accus­tomed to man­ag­ing inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal risks.

In my view, Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine has com­plete­ly changed West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies’ cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis of doing busi­ness in Rus­sia. I have researched multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies’ for­eign direct invest­ments for over two decades and have close­ly fol­lowed West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies’ invest­ments in Rus­sia. I expect that oth­er West­ern oil majors, such as French com­pa­ny Total­En­er­gies, are also like­ly to pull out of Rus­sia, and that it may take many years for these com­pa­nies to reen­gage there.

Big risks, big pay­offs

For­eign invest­ment in Rus­sia has nev­er been easy. For exam­ple, in 2003, BP and a con­sor­tium of Russ­ian oli­garchs formed the joint ven­ture TNK-BP, which became one of the largest oil pro­duc­ers in Rus­sia. How­ev­er, dis­putes ensued over the venture’s lead­er­ship, oper­a­tions and inter­na­tion­al expan­sion.

The sit­u­a­tion became so fraught that Bob Dud­ley, then the head of TNK-BP and lat­er BP’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, was forced to flee from Rus­sia in 2008. To resolve the dis­putes, BP sold its 50% equi­ty in TNK-BP to Ros­neft in 2013 for $12.5 bil­lion in cash and a near­ly 20% share in Ros­neft.

Shell got involved in the ear­ly 1990s in the Sakhalin‑2 project to devel­op nat­ur­al gas reserves in Russia’s Far East, and built Russia’s first liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas facil­i­ty there. As the project neared com­ple­tion in 2006, at a cost of more than $20 bil­lion, Shell and its Japan­ese part­ners were forced to sell a 50% share to Russia’s state-owned nat­ur­al gas giant, Gazprom, for $7.45 bil­lion because Putin’s gov­ern­ment was unhap­py with the easy terms pre­vi­ous­ly offered by the Yeltsin admin­is­tra­tion.

Dur­ing crises like these, West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies weighed the poten­tial gains and costs of oper­at­ing in Rus­sia and con­clud­ed that stay­ing in was worth it. It’s easy to see why: Rus­sia holds 24% of the world’s total nat­ur­al gas reserves. It has com­pre­hen­sive pipeline net­works to the west to move nat­ur­al gas to Euro­pean coun­tries, and large reserves to its east that are close to some of the world’s hun­gri­est ener­gy mar­kets, includ­ing Japan, South Korea and Chi­na.

...

Rep­u­ta­tions mat­ter

Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine has changed those cal­cu­la­tions. Now, exec­u­tives at oil majors need to assess pos­si­ble broad­er dam­age to their cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tions and to rela­tion­ships with their home coun­try gov­ern­ments, share­hold­ers and oth­er inter­est groups if they stay in Rus­sia. Unlike con­tro­ver­sies with­in the ener­gy indus­try, invad­ing an inde­pen­dent sov­er­eign nation is much too high pro­file of a devel­op­ment for com­pa­nies to ignore.

Aca­d­e­m­ic research shows that there is a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between com­pa­nies’ social­ly respon­si­ble behav­iors and finan­cial per­for­mance. Sim­ply put, com­pa­nies that do good tend to do well finan­cial­ly. The inva­sion of Ukraine rep­re­sents a crit­i­cal shift in Russia’s busi­ness envi­ron­ment. As BP Chief Exec­u­tive Bernard Looney stat­ed on Feb. 26, the sit­u­a­tion unfold­ing in Ukraine “has caused us to fun­da­men­tal­ly rethink BP’s posi­tion with Ros­neft”

In par­tic­u­lar, West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies that part­ner with the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment now may be per­ceived as weak­en­ing their own gov­ern­ments’ sanc­tions and help­ing to finance Russia’s war in Ukraine. Rus­sia owns 40% of BP’s Russ­ian part­ner, Ros­neft; the company’s CEO and board chair, Igor Sechin, Russia’s for­mer deputy prime min­is­ter and a close Putin ally. Shell’s pri­ma­ry part­ner in Rus­sia is Gazprom, the state-run nat­ur­al gas giant.

To main­tain their cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tions and rela­tion­ships with key inter­est groups, BP, Shell, Equinor and Exxon­Mo­bil clear­ly have decid­ed that it is impor­tant to cut their ties in Rus­sia com­plete­ly, imme­di­ate­ly and pub­licly. BP’s cur­rent and for­mer chief exec­u­tive offi­cers resigned from Rosneft’s board of direc­tors on Feb. 27, three days after the inva­sion began, “with imme­di­ate effect.

Italy’s Eni will end a decades-long pipeline joint ven­ture with Gazprom, as the com­pa­ny joins oth­er oil majors in mov­ing to iso­late Rus­sia over its inva­sion of Ukraine https://t.co/LFQRrHPbzy— Bloomberg (@business) March 2, 2022

While the West­ern world is impos­ing severe and unit­ed sanc­tions on Rus­sia in sec­tors rang­ing from finance to avi­a­tion, West­ern gov­ern­ments have avoid­ed sanc­tion­ing ener­gy exports from Rus­sia, seek­ing to pro­tect their cit­i­zens from price spikes. Nonethe­less, if West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies remain in Rus­sia and con­tin­ue part­ner­ing with Russ­ian state-owned com­pa­nies, they could be per­ceived as under­min­ing the West­ern response. Indeed, BP’s exit deci­sion report­ed­ly came under pres­sure from the British gov­ern­ment.

None of these com­pa­nies have many viable poten­tial buy­ers for their Russ­ian hold­ings. Russ­ian firms, fac­ing sanc­tions, don’t have the resources to acquire for­eign investors’ assets, and oth­er West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies are unlike­ly to pur­sue them. The only poten­tial investors are pri­vate equi­ty firms that face less scruti­ny than pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies, or com­pa­nies from coun­tries that don’t join West­ern sanc­tions on Rus­sia.

Russia’s ener­gy sec­tor depends heav­i­ly upon West­ern com­pa­nies’ tech­nolo­gies, espe­cial­ly for hard-to-recov­er oil projects and off­shore projects. BP, Shell and Exxon­Mo­bil will leave sig­nif­i­cant tech­no­log­i­cal voids that could be hard for new­com­ers to fill.

Cor­po­rate lead­ers are used to mak­ing high-lev­el strate­gic deci­sions that require weigh­ing costs and ben­e­fits. What has changed the cal­cu­lus for West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies is the broad poten­tial dam­age to their com­pa­nies’ rep­u­ta­tions and rela­tion­ships with var­i­ous inter­est groups if they stay in Rus­sia. Clear­ly, exec­u­tives can­not lim­it ben­e­fit-cost cal­cu­la­tions to spe­cif­ic invest­ments. Their over­all cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tions can be worth bil­lions of dol­lars.

———–

“Shell, BP and Exxon­Mo­bil have done busi­ness in Rus­sia for decades – here’s why they’re leav­ing now” by Yan Anthea Zhang; The Con­ver­sa­tion; 03/03/2022

“To main­tain their cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tions and rela­tion­ships with key inter­est groups, BP, Shell, Equinor and Exxon­Mo­bil clear­ly have decid­ed that it is impor­tant to cut their ties in Rus­sia com­plete­ly, imme­di­ate­ly and pub­licly. BP’s cur­rent and for­mer chief exec­u­tive offi­cers resigned from Rosneft’s board of direc­tors on Feb. 27, three days after the inva­sion began, “with imme­di­ate effect.”

A line was final­ly crossed for the West­ern oil giants last Feb­ru­ary. Their decades of oper­a­tions inside Rus­sia were com­ing to a close. At least until the con­flict is over or some sort of regime change takes place inside Rus­sia. Also note that while Chevron — an Atlantic Coun­cil donor — was­n’t ref­er­ence in that arti­cle, Chevron also has major oper­a­tions in Rus­sia.

So we have to ask: just how much of a finan­cial stake do these oil giants have in regime change for Rus­sia after all this? Will they be allowed back into a Rus­sia — allowed by their own gov­ern­ments — after the war is over or are we look­ing at a future where West­ern invest­ments in Rus­sia are ver­boten until Rus­sia expe­ri­ences some sort of pro-West­ern regime change? That’s unclear, but it’s hard to imag­ine that these pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions aren’t keen­ly inter­est­ed in both resum­ing their oper­a­tions in Rus­sia and, ide­al­ly, replac­ing the Rus­sia gov­ern­ment with the kind of high­ly com­pli­ant pup­py-dog gov­ern­ments that defined their expe­ri­ences with Rus­sia in the 90s:

...
West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies have invest­ed and oper­at­ed in Rus­sia for a long time – over 30 years for BP and more than 25 years for Exxon­Mo­bil. They are accus­tomed to man­ag­ing inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal risks.

...

For­eign invest­ment in Rus­sia has nev­er been easy. For exam­ple, in 2003, BP and a con­sor­tium of Russ­ian oli­garchs formed the joint ven­ture TNK-BP, which became one of the largest oil pro­duc­ers in Rus­sia. How­ev­er, dis­putes ensued over the venture’s lead­er­ship, oper­a­tions and inter­na­tion­al expan­sion.

The sit­u­a­tion became so fraught that Bob Dud­ley, then the head of TNK-BP and lat­er BP’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, was forced to flee from Rus­sia in 2008. To resolve the dis­putes, BP sold its 50% equi­ty in TNK-BP to Ros­neft in 2013 for $12.5 bil­lion in cash and a near­ly 20% share in Ros­neft.

Shell got involved in the ear­ly 1990s in the Sakhalin‑2 project to devel­op nat­ur­al gas reserves in Russia’s Far East, and built Russia’s first liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas facil­i­ty there. As the project neared com­ple­tion in 2006, at a cost of more than $20 bil­lion, Shell and its Japan­ese part­ners were forced to sell a 50% share to Russia’s state-owned nat­ur­al gas giant, Gazprom, for $7.45 bil­lion because Putin’s gov­ern­ment was unhap­py with the easy terms pre­vi­ous­ly offered by the Yeltsin admin­is­tra­tion.

Dur­ing crises like these, West­ern ener­gy com­pa­nies weighed the poten­tial gains and costs of oper­at­ing in Rus­sia and con­clud­ed that stay­ing in was worth it. It’s easy to see why: Rus­sia holds 24% of the world’s total nat­ur­al gas reserves. It has com­pre­hen­sive pipeline net­works to the west to move nat­ur­al gas to Euro­pean coun­tries, and large reserves to its east that are close to some of the world’s hun­gri­est ener­gy mar­kets, includ­ing Japan, South Korea and Chi­na.
...

And let’s not for­get that chill­ing report by Jack Mur­phy about the grow­ing CIA-direct­ed sab­o­tage oper­a­tions get­ting run by an unnamed major NATO part­ner. As we saw, the sab­o­tage cam­paign was described as being less like a GLAD­IO-style stay-behind oper­a­tion involv­ing local sleep­er cells and more like the sab­o­tage oper­a­tions run my the CIA in Iraq in 2003, where Kur­dish teams were sent in to ter­ri­to­ry held by the Iraqi gov­ern­ment forces. In addi­tion, we were told that net­works of front com­pa­nies — some set up almost two decades ago — are play­ing a role in this. So it’s worth keep­ing in mind the expe­ri­ences of BP, for exam­ple, and the tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship its had with the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment going back to 2003 when the TNK-BP dis­putes first boiled over.

It points towards one of the poten­tial­ly under-rec­og­nized fac­tors fuel­ing this con­flict: the immense prof­it poten­tial Rus­si­a’s oil and gas reserves pre­sent­ed to West­ern oil giants paired with their decades of strained rela­tion­ships with the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. On the one hand, the fact these oil giants were still oper­at­ing in Russ­ian up to 2022 is a sign of their strong desire to main­tain those oper­a­tions. On the oth­er hand, it’s hard to imag­ine these oil giants would­n’t love to see Rus­sia expe­ri­ence some sort of pro-West­ern regime change oper­a­tion that results in far more favor­able part­ner­ships. And now that they’re effec­tive­ly forced out of Rus­sia alto­geth­er, what are the stances of these oil giants when it comes to the West­’s poli­cies on the war in Ukraine and the rela­tion­ship with Rus­sia in gen­er­al? Are Exxon­Mo­bil, BP, Chevron, and Shell clam­or­ing for some sort of peace deal that will cre­ate the polit­i­cal con­di­tions that would facil­i­tate their return to Rus­sia? Or, instead, are they dou­bling and tripling down on the war in Ukraine and the much more ambi­tious agen­da of regime change in Rus­sia? That’s unclear at this point, but it’s going to be a fac­tor worth keep­ing an eye on as this nuclear-pow­er show­down plays out.

It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that the inter­ests of com­pa­nies like Exxon­mo­bile and BP that have been oper­at­ing inside Rus­sia may not align exact­ly with the inter­ests of petro-states like the UAE when it comes to a shared stance on Rus­sia. For exam­ple, while BP might want to be allowed back into Rus­sia ASAP to resume oper­a­tions along with a nor­mal­iza­tion and Rus­si­a’s rela­tions with the West, it’s not hard to imag­ine the pet­rostates being large­ly fine with see­ing the per­ma-ele­vat­ed petro-prices as a result of the West­’s sanc­tions on Rus­sia. In oth­er words, it’s going to be grim­ly inter­est­ing to see how the Atlantic Coun­cil nav­i­gates its var­i­ous con­flicts of inter­ests’ own con­flicts of inter­est.

You know you’re head­ing in a dark direc­tion when one side of a con­flict feels the need to remind every­one that they have the capac­i­ty to wage a nuclear war if they feel ade­quate­ly threat­ened. An “esca­late to deesca­late” doc­trine in the face of over­whelm­ing con­ven­tion­al forces. But we got anoth­er reminder. This time it was from for­mer Russ­ian pres­i­dent Dmit­ry Medvedev, who sent the fol­low­ing reminder to the world via Telegram:

“The loss of a nuclear pow­er in a con­ven­tion­al war can pro­voke the out­break of a nuclear war. Nuclear pow­ers do not lose major con­flicts on which their fate depends”

And that mes­sage was, of course, deliv­ered just days before West­ern lead­ers met in Ger­many to decide on a new round of mil­i­tary aid for Ukraine. But as we’re going to see in the NY Times piece below, there was anoth­er cru­cial piece of con­text for Medvede­v’s mes­sage: it sounds like the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has come around to the idea that Ukraine needs to be giv­en the capac­i­ty to attack Crimea direct­ly. Not that the admin­is­tra­tion is con­vinced that Rus­sia can be dis­lodged from Crimea. No, instead, It’s a plan to esca­late the con­flict, but esca­late with an eye on end­ing it soon­er rather than lat­er. That’s a poten­tial­ly key detail here. The esca­la­tion is being ratio­nal­ized as a means of enhanc­ing Ukraine’s lever­age dur­ing upcom­ing nego­ti­a­tions. The idea being that Ukraine will have greater lever­age in any upcom­ing nego­ti­a­tions should it have the abil­i­ty to attack Crimea. It’s the kind of strat­e­gy that had bet­ter work. Because oth­er­wise all you did was esca­late the con­flict with an adver­sary that already has a “esca­late to deesca­late” doc­trine in response to over­whelm­ing con­ven­tion­al forces.

But beyond that, we’re told that part of the rea­son the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has come around to this esca­la­to­ry strat­e­gy is due to a grow­ing con­clu­sion that Rus­si­a’s pri­or nuclear threats were a bluff. So what has giv­en rise to this new ‘nuclear bluff’ con­sen­sus? Well, it sounds like the rel­a­tive­ly lack of a response by Rus­sia to the var­i­ous attacks inside Rus­sia prop­er are what led to this assess­ment. Yep. That’s the rea­son­ing at work here.

This is a good time to recall the report by Jack Mur­phy about exten­sive CIA-led sab­o­tage efforts hit­ting inside Rus­sia involv­ing anoth­er unnamed key NATO part­ner. This is also a good time to the damn­ing Gray­zone report about the secret British intel­li­gence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch bridge. Final­ly, recall that opin­ion piece pub­lished back in April by for­mer Reagan/Bush Deputy Under­sec­re­tary of the Navy Seth Cropsey. As Cropsey saw it, the risk of a Russ­ian use of tac­ti­cal nukes is very real, in part because a Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary win in the east­ern half of the coun­try still seemed very plau­si­ble at the time giv­en the rel­a­tive­ly poor per­for­mance of Rus­si­a’s force. Cropsey then had some rec­om­men­da­tion for the US in response to a Russ­ian tac­ti­cal nuke: the US shouldn’t respond with the use of nukes of its own, but it can’t back down either. Instead, the US should take steps that give the Krem­lin pause about the via­bil­i­ty of a full-scale nuclear war with the West. Specif­i­cal­ly, Cropsey rec­om­mend­ed rearm­ing the US Navy’s sur­face ships with nuclear weapons, as was done dur­ing the Cold War. Also, US should hunt down and sink Russ­ian nuclear subs in response to the Russ­ian use of nukes. The idea being that those nuclear subs are crit­i­cal for Russia’s sec­ond-strike capac­i­ty, and if that sec­ond-strike capac­i­ty is tak­en out the Krem­lin would be much more wary of esca­lat­ing the sit­u­a­tion. In oth­er words, if Rus­sia uses a tac­ti­cal nuke, the West should knock out Russia’s sec­ond-strike capac­i­ty, leav­ing Rus­sia with its first-strike capac­i­ty alone! And that is appar­ent­ly what would prompt the Krem­lin to back down and avoid a nuclear cat­a­stro­phe. Tak­ing out Rus­si­a’s sec­ond-strike capac­i­ty and hop­ing that some­how does­n’t end in a nuclear exchange but instead pre­vents one.

That’s the dis­turb­ing direc­tion of the con­flict. A grow­ing sense that Ukraine can’t con­tin­ue this con­flict indef­i­nite­ly and that it some­how needs to be brought to an end. And the way to bring about that end is to increase the num­ber of mil­i­tary strikes inside Russ­ian ter­ri­to­ry. At the same time, let’s not for­get those recent reports describ­ing a mul­ti-year war plan by the US strate­gists that involv­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly increas­ing the US’s artillery shell man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty by 2025 with the goal of effec­tive­ly out­pro­duc­ing Rus­si­a’s mil­i­tary capac­i­ty. In oth­er words, a mul­ti-year bat­tle of attri­tion.

So what are we look­ing at here? Plans for a mul­ti-year bat­tle of attri­tion? Or plans for a short-term esca­la­tion with the intent on forc­ing as nego­ti­at­ed set­tle­ment by giv­ing Ukraine the capac­i­ty to strike Rus­sia? Keep in mind that there’s no rea­son these plans can’t be car­ried out simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. And that’s the real­ly dis­turb­ing dynam­ic at work here: the plans for a war of attri­tion are over­lap­ping with the ‘esca­late to bring it to an end’ plan. And one of the key things in com­mon in both of these plans is a con­vic­tion that we’re look­ing at a Russ­ian nuclear bluff no mat­ter much things esca­late. Hence Dmit­ry Medvede­v’s omi­nous reminder:

Insid­er

Rus­sia could resort to nuclear weapons if it los­es in Ukraine, says for­mer Russ­ian pres­i­dent

Sinéad Bak­er
Jan 20, 2023, 5:31 AM

* Rus­si­a’s for­mer pres­i­dent said his coun­try could use nuclear weapons if it los­es in Ukraine.
* “Nuclear pow­ers do not lose major con­flicts on which their fate depends,” Dmit­ry Medvedev said.
* His com­ments came one day before Ukraine’s allies meet to dis­cuss giv­ing it fur­ther mil­i­tary aid.

Rus­si­a’s for­mer pres­i­dent, Dmit­ry Medvedev, said on Thurs­day that Rus­sia could resort to using nuclear weapons if it is defeat­ed in Ukraine.

“The loss of a nuclear pow­er in a con­ven­tion­al war can pro­voke the out­break of a nuclear war. Nuclear pow­ers do not lose major con­flicts on which their fate depends,” he said, accord­ing to a trans­la­tion by CNN.

Medvedev also added, point­ed­ly: “This should be obvi­ous to any­one. Even to a West­ern politi­cian who has retained at least some trace of intel­li­gence.”

Medvedev, who is the cur­rent­ly deputy chair­man of Rus­si­a’s secu­ri­ty coun­cil, and has also served as the coun­try’s prime min­is­ter, made his com­ments on the Telegram mes­sag­ing app in advance of West­ern lead­ers meet­ing in Ger­many to pledge more mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine.

...

Rus­si­a’s Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin, as well as some of his offi­cials, have, in the past, threat­ened the use of nuclear weapons. But those threats have cooled off in recent months, with experts say­ing at the time that Rus­sia was like­ly bluff­ing.

Putin said in Decem­ber that Rus­sia would not use nuclear weapons unpro­voked, adding that Rus­sia had not “gone mad” and would not be the first coun­try to use them, as the BBC report­ed.

———–

“Rus­sia could resort to nuclear weapons if it los­es in Ukraine, says for­mer Russ­ian pres­i­dent” by Sinéad Bak­er; Insid­er; 01/20/2023

“Medvedev, who is the cur­rent­ly deputy chair­man of Rus­si­a’s secu­ri­ty coun­cil, and has also served as the coun­try’s prime min­is­ter, made his com­ments on the Telegram mes­sag­ing app in advance of West­ern lead­ers meet­ing in Ger­many to pledge more mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine.”

The reit­er­a­tion of Rus­si­a’s warn­ing about the use of nuclear weapons to avoid loss­es in “major con­flict on which their fate depends” was­n’t a ran­dom com­ment. It was deliv­ered in advance of the meet­ing of West­ern lead­ers in Ger­many where West­ern lead­ers were set to ham­mer our the next round of mil­i­tary aid and Ukraine. And, cru­cial­ly, two days after the New York Times pub­lished the fol­low­ing piece describ­ing a shift in the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s think­ing on the lim­its of that aid. Specif­i­cal­ly, new think­ing about ‘loos­en­ing’ those lim­its and giv­ing Ukraine the abil­i­ty to strike Crimea direct­ly. Along with new think­ing about the seri­ous­ness of Rus­si­a’s threats to use tac­ti­cal nuclear weapons. It appears that Rus­si­a’s respons­es to the var­i­ous strikes inside Rus­sia by Ukrain­ian forces has been inter­pret­ed by West­ern war plan­ners as a sign that Rus­si­a’s nuclear threats were a bluff.

So is the West plan­ning on arm­ing Ukraine with the kinds of weapons that will effec­tive­ly dri­ve Rus­sia out of Crimea? Nope. Instead, it sounds like the Biden admin­is­tra­tion still does­n’t think Ukraine has a real chance of dis­lodg­ing Rus­sia from Crimea, but has con­clud­ed that giv­ing Ukraine the capac­i­ty to attack Crimea will give Ukraine more lever­age in any upcom­ing nego­ti­a­tions.

In addi­tion, with the deliv­ery of Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles and oth­er equip­ment that can pro­tect troops as they move clos­er to Russ­ian defen­sive posi­tions, the expec­ta­tion is that Ukraine will be in a posi­tion to threat­en Rus­si­a’s con­trol of the “land bridge” area con­nect­ing Rus­sia with Crimea some time in the Spring. So the plans we’re hear­ing from Ukraine’s west­ern spon­sors include giv­ing Ukraine the abil­i­ty to attack Crimea direct­ly at the same time the land bridge is tak­en back. Plans to give Ukraine as much lever­age as pos­si­ble in advance of the expec­ta­tion of nego­ti­a­tions. That’s the con­text of Medvede­v’s nuclear threat. A threat that the West appears to no longer be tak­ing seri­ous­ly. So on the one hand, it’s good to hear talk about prepa­ra­tions for nego­ti­a­tions. But on the oth­er hand, it’s not super great when those nego­ti­a­tion plans involve the inten­tion­al cross­ing of nuclear red lines as a form of nego­ti­at­ing lever­age:

The New York Times

U.S. Warms to Help­ing Ukraine Tar­get Crimea

The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is con­sid­er­ing the argu­ment that Kyiv needs the pow­er to strike at the Ukrain­ian penin­su­la annexed by Rus­sia in 2014.

By Helene Coop­er, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes
Jan. 18, 2023

WASHINGTON — For years, the Unit­ed States has insist­ed that Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Yet the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has held to a hard line since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, refus­ing to pro­vide Kyiv with the weapons it needs to tar­get the Crimean Penin­su­la, which Rus­sia has been using as a base for launch­ing dev­as­tat­ing strikes.

Now that line is start­ing to soft­en.

After months of dis­cus­sions with Ukrain­ian offi­cials, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is final­ly start­ing to con­cede that Kyiv may need the pow­er to strike the Russ­ian sanc­tu­ary, even if such a move increas­es the risk of esca­la­tion, accord­ing to sev­er­al U.S. offi­cials who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss the sen­si­tive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thou­sands of dug-in Russ­ian troops and numer­ous Russ­ian mil­i­tary bases.

White House offi­cials insist there is no change in posi­tion. Crimea, they say, belongs to Ukraine.

“We have said through­out the war that Crimea is Ukraine, and Ukraine has the right to defend them­selves and their sov­er­eign ter­ri­to­ry in their inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized bor­ders,” said Adri­enne Wat­son, a spokes­woman for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

Pri­vate­ly, mil­i­tary and admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials had ques­tioned the util­i­ty of Ukraine focus­ing attacks on Crimea, argu­ing Kyiv’s mil­i­tary had bet­ter tar­gets else­where on the bat­tle­field.

But the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has come to believe that if the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary can show Rus­sia that its con­trol of Crimea can be threat­ened, that would strength­en Kyiv’s posi­tion in any future nego­ti­a­tions. In addi­tion, fears that the Krem­lin would retal­i­ate using a tac­ti­cal nuclear weapon have dimmed, U.S. offi­cials and experts said — though they cau­tioned that the risk remained.

The new think­ing on Crimea — annexed ille­gal­ly by Rus­sia in 2014 — shows how far Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have come from the start of the war, when they were wary of even acknowl­edg­ing pub­licly that the Unit­ed States was pro­vid­ing Stinger anti­air­craft mis­siles for Ukrain­ian troops.

But over the course of the con­flict, the Unit­ed States and its NATO allies have been steadi­ly loos­en­ing the hand­cuffs they put on them­selves, mov­ing from pro­vid­ing Javelins and Stingers to advanced mis­sile sys­tems, Patri­ot air defense sys­tems, armored fight­ing vehi­cles and even some West­ern tanks to give Ukraine the capac­i­ty to strike against Russia’s onslaught.

Now, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is con­sid­er­ing what would be one of its bold­est moves yet, help­ing Ukraine to attack the penin­su­la that Pres­i­dent Vladimir V. Putin views as an inte­gral part of his quest to restore past Russ­ian glo­ry.

Amer­i­can offi­cials are dis­cussing with their Ukrain­ian coun­ter­parts the use of Amer­i­can-sup­plied weapons, from HIMARS rock­et sys­tems to Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles, to pos­si­bly tar­get Mr. Putin’s hard-fought con­trol over a land bridge that func­tions as a crit­i­cal sup­ply route con­nect­ing Crimea to Rus­sia via the Russ­ian-occu­pied cities of Meli­topol and Mar­i­upol.

How­ev­er, Pres­i­dent Biden is not yet ready to give Ukraine the long-range mis­sile sys­tems that Kyiv would need to attack Russ­ian instal­la­tions on the penin­su­la.

...

In decid­ing to give the Bradleys to Ukraine, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion moved clos­er to pro­vid­ing Kyiv with some­thing for which senior Ukrain­ian offi­cials have been implor­ing the Unit­ed States for months: direct Amer­i­can help for Ukraine to go on the offense — includ­ing tar­get­ing Crimea.

The Bradleys are armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers mount­ed with pow­er­ful 25-mil­lime­ter guns and guid­ed mis­siles that can take on Russ­ian tanks.

Fred­er­ick B. Hodges, a retired lieu­tenant gen­er­al and for­mer top U.S. Army com­man­der in Europe, said that in the com­ing months the Bradleys could be used by Ukrain­ian troops to help sev­er the land bridge.

Being able to rely on mil­i­tary bases in Crimea for stag­ing was the pri­ma­ry rea­son Russ­ian forces were able to seize land in south­ern Ukraine last year, a U.S. offi­cial said. Mak­ing those forces less capa­ble is a key bat­tle­field goal of the Ukraini­ans.

“Ukraine could use Bradleys to move forces down major roads, such as the M14, which con­nects Kher­son, Meli­topol and Mar­i­upol,” added Seth G. Jones, a senior vice pres­i­dent at the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies. “Any Ukrain­ian infantry advanc­ing through these areas would face sig­nif­i­cant fire from Russ­ian posi­tions, and Bradleys offer help­ful fire­pow­er and pro­tec­tion for troops.”

The Bradleys, along with British tanks and the armored com­bat vehi­cles that France and Ger­many have agreed to send, could be the van­guard of an armored force that Ukraine could employ in a coun­terof­fen­sive this win­ter or spring, gov­ern­ment and inde­pen­dent ana­lysts say.

“We think now is the right time to inten­si­fy our sup­port for Ukraine,” Britain’s for­eign sec­re­tary, James Clev­er­ly, said Tues­day while on a vis­it to Wash­ing­ton. “We can’t allow this to drag on and become a kind of First World War attri­tion­al-type stale­mate.”

The British Defense Min­istry said in a Twit­ter mes­sage last week that in recent weeks, Rus­sia had bol­stered defen­sive for­ti­fi­ca­tions in cen­tral Zapor­izhzhia, a province in south­ern Ukraine near the land bridge, and where Rus­sia main­tains a large force.

If Ukraine does focus on reclaim­ing Zapor­izhzhia, then pre­lim­i­nary attacks could include hit­ting tar­gets in near­by Crimea. “A major Ukrain­ian break­through in Zapor­izhzhia would seri­ous­ly chal­lenge the via­bil­i­ty of Russia’s ‘land bridge,’” the British assess­ment said.

Ukraine also has Amer­i­can-pro­vid­ed HIMARS, long-range rock­et sys­tems. With the reclaim­ing last year of Kher­son in the south, Ukrain­ian for­ward lines can now use them to hit the main sup­ply routes com­ing out of Crimea, one Amer­i­can mil­i­tary offi­cial said in an inter­view.

This week, top U.S. and Ukrain­ian com­man­ders will hold a high-lev­el plan­ning meet­ing in Ger­many to game out the offen­sive plan­ning, anoth­er senior U.S. offi­cial said. The drill, the offi­cial said, is meant to align Ukraine’s bat­tle plans with the kinds of weapons and sup­plies NATO allies are con­tribut­ing.

Ukrain­ian offi­cials fear their coun­try can­not sur­vive years of a stale­mat­ed con­flict while Rus­sia con­tin­ues to pound cities and towns. So they see lit­tle choice but to tar­get Crimea and put it in jeop­ardy, a senior U.S. offi­cial said, not­ing that the issue has come up at recent high-lev­el meet­ings at the White House.

Still, despite the addi­tion­al weapon­ry, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea mil­i­tar­i­ly — and indeed, there are still wor­ries that such a move could dri­ve Mr. Putin to retal­i­ate with an esca­la­to­ry response. But, offi­cials said, their assess­ment now is that Rus­sia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strength­en Ukraine’s posi­tion in any future nego­ti­a­tions.

By demon­strat­ing an abil­i­ty to strike in Crimea, Amer­i­can offi­cials say, Ukraine could show that Russ­ian con­trol is not estab­lished. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion also increas­ing­ly believes that hit­ting Russia’s rear lines com­ing out of Crimea could severe­ly dam­age Moscow’s abil­i­ty to push its front lines fur­ther, offi­cials say.

“With­out Crimea, the whole thing falls apart,” said Eve­lyn Farkas, the top Pen­ta­gon offi­cial for Ukraine dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

Con­tribut­ing to the shift­ing think­ing is a damp­en­ing of fears that tar­get­ing Crimea would dri­ve Mr. Putin to use a tac­ti­cal nuclear weapon, offi­cials say. “It feels to me like increas­ing­ly, the admin­is­tra­tion is rec­og­niz­ing that the threat of Russ­ian esca­la­tion is per­haps not what they thought it was ear­li­er,” Gen­er­al Hodges said.

While Ukrain­ian strikes inside Rus­sia prop­er still bring esca­la­to­ry con­cerns from U.S. offi­cials, Moscow’s reac­tion to peri­od­ic Ukrain­ian spe­cial oper­a­tions or covert attacks in Crimea, includ­ing against Russ­ian air bases, com­mand posts and ships in the Black Sea fleet, has been tem­pered.

“There is more clar­i­ty on their tol­er­ance for dam­age and attacks,” said Dara Mas­si­cot, a senior pol­i­cy researcher at the RAND Cor­po­ra­tion. “Crimea has already been hit many times with­out a mas­sive esca­la­tion from the Krem­lin.”

Still, Mr. Putin and the Russ­ian pub­lic view Crimea as part of Rus­sia, so strikes there could solid­i­fy Russ­ian sup­port for the war.

For their part, U.S. offi­cials say they do not know how Mr. Putin will react if Ukraine attacks Crimea using Amer­i­can-sup­plied weapons.

Ms. Mas­si­cot said none of Ukraine’s hand­ful of attacks on Crimea so far have threat­ened Russia’s abil­i­ty to main­tain its claim on the penin­su­la. “So they may not be an accu­rate test of Russia’s resolve on this point,” she said.

Last month, Sec­re­tary of State Antony J. Blinken reit­er­at­ed stand­ing Amer­i­can pol­i­cy on Ukraine — that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion was seek­ing to help the coun­try take back ter­ri­to­ry seized dur­ing and after the Russ­ian inva­sion last year.

“Our focus is on con­tin­u­ing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russ­ian aggres­sion, to take back ter­ri­to­ry that’s been seized from it since Feb. 24,” Mr. Blinken told the Wall Street Jour­nal CEO Coun­cil sum­mit. By Mr. Blinken’s def­i­n­i­tion, that ter­ri­to­ry does not include Crimea.

That posi­tion, crit­ics say, has large­ly giv­en the Russ­ian mil­i­tary an untouch­able sanc­tu­ary from which to attack Ukraine.

“We have in essence put lim­its on Ukraine, say­ing this war is going to be fought on your soil and not on Russ­ian soil,” said Philip Breedlove, a retired four-star Air Force gen­er­al who was NATO’s supreme allied com­man­der for Europe when Rus­sia invad­ed Crimea in 2014. “To give Rus­sia sanc­tu­ary from which to fight, with­out fear of reproach, is absolute­ly absurd. It makes no mil­i­tary sense.”

———-

“U.S. Warms to Help­ing Ukraine Tar­get Crimea” By Helene Coop­er, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes; The New York Times; 01/18/2023

“After months of dis­cus­sions with Ukrain­ian offi­cials, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is final­ly start­ing to con­cede that Kyiv may need the pow­er to strike the Russ­ian sanc­tu­ary, even if such a move increas­es the risk of esca­la­tion, accord­ing to sev­er­al U.S. offi­cials who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss the sen­si­tive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thou­sands of dug-in Russ­ian troops and numer­ous Russ­ian mil­i­tary bases.”

Ukraine needs the pow­er to strike Crimea even if it risk an esca­la­tion of the con­flict. That’s the rea­son­ing we are told the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has “con­ced­ed” in recent weeks. Rea­son­ing that appears to include a roll back in nuclear retal­i­a­tion fears. The West can esca­la­tion by giv­ing Ukraine the weapons it needs to attack Crimea with­out fears of a dan­ger­ous counter esca­la­tion. That was the mes­sage deliv­ered to the world via the anony­mous gov­ern­ment sources in this arti­cle. Days before Medvede­v’s com­ments:

...
Pri­vate­ly, mil­i­tary and admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials had ques­tioned the util­i­ty of Ukraine focus­ing attacks on Crimea, argu­ing Kyiv’s mil­i­tary had bet­ter tar­gets else­where on the bat­tle­field.

But the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has come to believe that if the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary can show Rus­sia that its con­trol of Crimea can be threat­ened, that would strength­en Kyiv’s posi­tion in any future nego­ti­a­tions. In addi­tion, fears that the Krem­lin would retal­i­ate using a tac­ti­cal nuclear weapon have dimmed, U.S. offi­cials and experts said — though they cau­tioned that the risk remained.

The new think­ing on Crimea — annexed ille­gal­ly by Rus­sia in 2014 — shows how far Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have come from the start of the war, when they were wary of even acknowl­edg­ing pub­licly that the Unit­ed States was pro­vid­ing Stinger anti­air­craft mis­siles for Ukrain­ian troops.

...

Amer­i­can offi­cials are dis­cussing with their Ukrain­ian coun­ter­parts the use of Amer­i­can-sup­plied weapons, from HIMARS rock­et sys­tems to Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles, to pos­si­bly tar­get Mr. Putin’s hard-fought con­trol over a land bridge that func­tions as a crit­i­cal sup­ply route con­nect­ing Crimea to Rus­sia via the Russ­ian-occu­pied cities of Meli­topol and Mar­i­upol.

How­ev­er, Pres­i­dent Biden is not yet ready to give Ukraine the long-range mis­sile sys­tems that Kyiv would need to attack Russ­ian instal­la­tions on the penin­su­la.

...

In decid­ing to give the Bradleys to Ukraine, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion moved clos­er to pro­vid­ing Kyiv with some­thing for which senior Ukrain­ian offi­cials have been implor­ing the Unit­ed States for months: direct Amer­i­can help for Ukraine to go on the offense — includ­ing tar­get­ing Crimea.

The Bradleys are armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers mount­ed with pow­er­ful 25-mil­lime­ter guns and guid­ed mis­siles that can take on Russ­ian tanks.

Fred­er­ick B. Hodges, a retired lieu­tenant gen­er­al and for­mer top U.S. Army com­man­der in Europe, said that in the com­ing months the Bradleys could be used by Ukrain­ian troops to help sev­er the land bridge.

...
The Bradleys, along with British tanks and the armored com­bat vehi­cles that France and Ger­many have agreed to send, could be the van­guard of an armored force that Ukraine could employ in a coun­terof­fen­sive this win­ter or spring, gov­ern­ment and inde­pen­dent ana­lysts say.

...

Ukraine also has Amer­i­can-pro­vid­ed HIMARS, long-range rock­et sys­tems. With the reclaim­ing last year of Kher­son in the south, Ukrain­ian for­ward lines can now use them to hit the main sup­ply routes com­ing out of Crimea, one Amer­i­can mil­i­tary offi­cial said in an inter­view.
...

And this plan to attack Crimea and the land bridge in com­ing months is com­ing at the same time we’re told that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion remains con­vinced that Ukraine still can’t actu­al­ly take back Crimea. It’s all about nego­ti­at­ing lever­age. It points towards one of the dynam­ics at work here: West­ern lead­ers are fol­low­ing an appar­ent plan of esca­la­tion in antic­i­pa­tion of nego­ti­a­tions. Let’s hope the plan works! Because oth­er­wise you just have esca­la­tion. Poten­tial nuclear esca­la­tion:

...
Still, despite the addi­tion­al weapon­ry, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea mil­i­tar­i­ly — and indeed, there are still wor­ries that such a move could dri­ve Mr. Putin to retal­i­ate with an esca­la­to­ry response. But, offi­cials said, their assess­ment now is that Rus­sia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strength­en Ukraine’s posi­tion in any future nego­ti­a­tions.

By demon­strat­ing an abil­i­ty to strike in Crimea, Amer­i­can offi­cials say, Ukraine could show that Russ­ian con­trol is not estab­lished. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion also increas­ing­ly believes that hit­ting Russia’s rear lines com­ing out of Crimea could severe­ly dam­age Moscow’s abil­i­ty to push its front lines fur­ther, offi­cials say.

“With­out Crimea, the whole thing falls apart,” said Eve­lyn Farkas, the top Pen­ta­gon offi­cial for Ukraine dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

Con­tribut­ing to the shift­ing think­ing is a damp­en­ing of fears that tar­get­ing Crimea would dri­ve Mr. Putin to use a tac­ti­cal nuclear weapon, offi­cials say. “It feels to me like increas­ing­ly, the admin­is­tra­tion is rec­og­niz­ing that the threat of Russ­ian esca­la­tion is per­haps not what they thought it was ear­li­er,” Gen­er­al Hodges said.

While Ukrain­ian strikes inside Rus­sia prop­er still bring esca­la­to­ry con­cerns from U.S. offi­cials, Moscow’s reac­tion to peri­od­ic Ukrain­ian spe­cial oper­a­tions or covert attacks in Crimea, includ­ing against Russ­ian air bases, com­mand posts and ships in the Black Sea fleet, has been tem­pered.

“There is more clar­i­ty on their tol­er­ance for dam­age and attacks,” said Dara Mas­si­cot, a senior pol­i­cy researcher at the RAND Cor­po­ra­tion. “Crimea has already been hit many times with­out a mas­sive esca­la­tion from the Krem­lin.”

Still, Mr. Putin and the Russ­ian pub­lic view Crimea as part of Rus­sia, so strikes there could solid­i­fy Russ­ian sup­port for the war.

For their part, U.S. offi­cials say they do not know how Mr. Putin will react if Ukraine attacks Crimea using Amer­i­can-sup­plied weapons.
...

And that ‘esca­late to bring this con­flict to a quick­er res­o­lu­tion’ think­ing more or less echoes the calls Ukrain­ian offi­cials have been mak­ing. Attack­ing Crimea to force a nego­ti­a­tion is the plan. At least, that’s the pub­licly stat­ed plan that assumes this esca­la­tion does­n’t result in an even worse con­flict:

...
This week, top U.S. and Ukrain­ian com­man­ders will hold a high-lev­el plan­ning meet­ing in Ger­many to game out the offen­sive plan­ning, anoth­er senior U.S. offi­cial said. The drill, the offi­cial said, is meant to align Ukraine’s bat­tle plans with the kinds of weapons and sup­plies NATO allies are con­tribut­ing.

Ukrain­ian offi­cials fear their coun­try can­not sur­vive years of a stale­mat­ed con­flict while Rus­sia con­tin­ues to pound cities and towns. So they see lit­tle choice but to tar­get Crimea and put it in jeop­ardy, a senior U.S. offi­cial said, not­ing that the issue has come up at recent high-lev­el meet­ings at the White House.
...

But it’s not just the White House push­ing the ‘esca­late to the nego­ti­at­ing table’ strat­e­gy. This is a good time to recall that Gray­zone report doc­u­ment­ing the British intel­li­gence role in plot­ting attacks on the Kerch bridge con­nect­ing Crimea to Rus­sia. Are more attacks on that bridge planned for com­ing months? It sure sounds like it:

...
“We think now is the right time to inten­si­fy our sup­port for Ukraine,” Britain’s for­eign sec­re­tary, James Clev­er­ly, said Tues­day while on a vis­it to Wash­ing­ton. “We can’t allow this to drag on and become a kind of First World War attri­tion­al-type stale­mate.”

The British Defense Min­istry said in a Twit­ter mes­sage last week that in recent weeks, Rus­sia had bol­stered defen­sive for­ti­fi­ca­tions in cen­tral Zapor­izhzhia, a province in south­ern Ukraine near the land bridge, and where Rus­sia main­tains a large force.

If Ukraine does focus on reclaim­ing Zapor­izhzhia, then pre­lim­i­nary attacks could include hit­ting tar­gets in near­by Crimea. “A major Ukrain­ian break­through in Zapor­izhzhia would seri­ous­ly chal­lenge the via­bil­i­ty of Russia’s ‘land bridge,’” the British assess­ment said.
...

Final­ly, note the omi­nous words from Philip Breedlove, the retired four-star Air Force gen­er­al who was NATO’s supreme allied com­man­der for Europe: “To give Rus­sia sanc­tu­ary from which to fight, with­out fear of reproach, is absolute­ly absurd. It makes no mil­i­tary sense.” Trans­la­tion: the path to end­ing the con­flict is to turn it into a war on Russ­ian soil. That’s the under­ly­ing strate­gic log­ic at work here:

...
Ms. Mas­si­cot said none of Ukraine’s hand­ful of attacks on Crimea so far have threat­ened Russia’s abil­i­ty to main­tain its claim on the penin­su­la. “So they may not be an accu­rate test of Russia’s resolve on this point,” she said.

Last month, Sec­re­tary of State Antony J. Blinken reit­er­at­ed stand­ing Amer­i­can pol­i­cy on Ukraine — that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion was seek­ing to help the coun­try take back ter­ri­to­ry seized dur­ing and after the Russ­ian inva­sion last year.

“Our focus is on con­tin­u­ing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russ­ian aggres­sion, to take back ter­ri­to­ry that’s been seized from it since Feb. 24,” Mr. Blinken told the Wall Street Jour­nal CEO Coun­cil sum­mit. By Mr. Blinken’s def­i­n­i­tion, that ter­ri­to­ry does not include Crimea.

That posi­tion, crit­ics say, has large­ly giv­en the Russ­ian mil­i­tary an untouch­able sanc­tu­ary from which to attack Ukraine.

“We have in essence put lim­its on Ukraine, say­ing this war is going to be fought on your soil and not on Russ­ian soil,” said Philip Breedlove, a retired four-star Air Force gen­er­al who was NATO’s supreme allied com­man­der for Europe when Rus­sia invad­ed Crimea in 2014. “To give Rus­sia sanc­tu­ary from which to fight, with­out fear of reproach, is absolute­ly absurd. It makes no mil­i­tary sense.”
...

It makes no mil­i­tary sense to “give Rus­sia sanc­tu­ary from which to fight, with­out fear of reproach” accord­ing to the for­mer NATO supreme allied com­man­der for Europe. That sure sounds like plans for end­ing the war in Ukraine by turn­ing it into a war on Crimea, along with more and more attacks inside Rus­sia prop­er. A plan, in the not-too-dis­tant past, would have sound­ed like a plan for WWIII.

It’s that time again. Time for anoth­er Dooms­day Clock update. Doom is clos­er than ever. It’s the usu­al update.

But as we’re going to see, that Dooms­day update might need anoth­er update. Or two. First, we had Ste­fano San­ni­no, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Euro­pean Union’s Euro­pean Exter­nal Action Ser­vice announce that Vladimir Putin “moved from a con­cept of spe­cial oper­a­tion to a con­cept now of a war against NATO and the West.” Those were his com­ments in defense of the US and Ger­many agree­ing to send Ukraine heavy tanks. It’s Rus­sia vs NATO now, accord­ing to senior EU offi­cials.

But Dooms­day isn’t just lick­ing its chops over the grow­ing prospects of nuclear war between Rus­sia and the West. War with Chi­na got its own boost thanks to a top US Air Force gen­er­al Gen. Michael A. Mini­han, who just pre­dict­ed war between the US and Chi­na break­ing out as ear­ly as 2025. And that accel­er­at­ing time­line made prepar­ing for war with Chi­na all the more urgent, as Mini­han sees it.

And those were just two of the apoc­a­lyp­tic sto­ries pub­lished after the Dooms­day Clock update. Tick Tock:

Reuters

‘Dooms­day Clock’ moves to 90 sec­onds to mid­night as nuclear threat ris­es

By Katharine Jack­son
Jan­u­ary 24, 2023 12:07 PM CST
Updat­ed

WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) — Atom­ic sci­en­tists set the “Dooms­day Clock” clos­er to mid­night than ever before on Tues­day, say­ing threats of nuclear war, dis­ease, and cli­mate volatil­i­ty have been exac­er­bat­ed by Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine, putting human­i­ty at greater risk of anni­hi­la­tion.

The “Dooms­day Clock,” cre­at­ed by the Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists to illus­trate how close human­i­ty has come to the end of the world, moved its “time” in 2023 to 90 sec­onds to mid­night, 10 sec­onds clos­er than it has been for the past three years.

Mid­night on this clock marks the the­o­ret­i­cal point of anni­hi­la­tion. The clock­’s hands are moved clos­er to or fur­ther away from mid­night based on sci­en­tists’ read­ing of exis­ten­tial threats at a par­tic­u­lar time.

The new time reflects a world in which Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine has revived fears of nuclear war.

“Rus­si­a’s thin­ly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that esca­la­tion of the con­flict by acci­dent, inten­tion or mis­cal­cu­la­tion is a ter­ri­ble risk. The pos­si­bil­i­ties that the con­flict could spin out of any­one’s con­trol remains high,” Rachel Bron­son, the bul­let­in’s pres­i­dent and CEO told a news con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton on Tues­day.

The bul­let­in’s announce­ment will for the first time be trans­lat­ed from Eng­lish into Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian to gar­ner rel­e­vant atten­tion, Bron­son said.

A Chica­go-based non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion, the bul­letin updates the clock­’s time annu­al­ly based on infor­ma­tion regard­ing cat­a­stroph­ic risks to the plan­et and human­i­ty.

The orga­ni­za­tion’s board of sci­en­tists and oth­er experts in nuclear tech­nol­o­gy and cli­mate sci­ence, includ­ing 13 Nobel Lau­re­ates, dis­cuss world events and deter­mine where to place the hands of the clock each year.

Apoc­a­lyp­tic threats reflect­ed by the clock include pol­i­tics, weapons, tech­nol­o­gy, cli­mate change and pan­demics.

The clock had been set to 100 sec­onds to mid­night since 2020, which was already the clos­est it had ever come to mid­night.

The board said the war in Ukraine had also height­ened the risk that bio­log­i­cal weapons could be deployed if the con­flict con­tin­ued.

“The con­tin­u­ing stream of dis­in­for­ma­tion about bioweapons’ lab­o­ra­to­ries in Ukraine rais­es con­cerns that Rus­sia itself may be think­ing of deploy­ing such weapons,” Bron­son said.

Sivan Kartha, a bul­letin board mem­ber and sci­en­tist at the Stock­holm Envi­ron­men­tal Insti­tute, said nat­ur­al gas prices pushed to new heights by the war had also spurred com­pa­nies to devel­op sources of nat­ur­al gas out­side of Rus­sia and turned pow­er plants to coal as an alter­na­tive pow­er source.

“Glob­al car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from burn­ing fos­sil fuels, after hav­ing rebound­ed from the COVID eco­nom­ic decline to an all-time-high in 2021, con­tin­ue to rise in 2022 and hit anoth­er record high... With emis­sions still ris­ing, weath­er extremes con­tin­ue, and were even more clear­ly attrib­ut­able to cli­mate change,” Kartha said, point­ing to the dev­as­tat­ing flood­ing in Pak­istan in 2022 as an exam­ple.

...

At 17 min­utes to mid­night, the clock was fur­thest from “dooms­day” in 1991, as the Cold War end­ed and the Unit­ed States and Sovi­et Union signed a treaty that sub­stan­tial­ly reduced both coun­tries’ nuclear weapons arse­nals.

———–

“The “Dooms­day Clock,” cre­at­ed by the Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists to illus­trate how close human­i­ty has come to the end of the world, moved its “time” in 2023 to 90 sec­onds to mid­night, 10 sec­onds clos­er than it has been for the past three years.”

A new dooms­day record. Go team. And it’s not just a grow­ing threat of nuclear war. Bio­log­i­cal war­fare is also seen as a grow­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty as a result of the con­flict in Ukraine. And giv­en that the Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists report was specif­i­cal­ly refer­ring to a grow­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of some sort of Russ­ian bio­log­i­cal war­fare attack, this is a good time to recall how Ukraine real­ly does have a net­work of US-affil­i­at­ed bio­log­i­cal research insti­tutes known to work on pathogens like bird flu. Which is a remind that the dis­missal of the risks those labs pose in the mid­dle of a war zone area all the more enhanced by a denial of their exis­tence:

...
The clock had been set to 100 sec­onds to mid­night since 2020, which was already the clos­est it had ever come to mid­night.

The board said the war in Ukraine had also height­ened the risk that bio­log­i­cal weapons could be deployed if the con­flict con­tin­ued.

“The con­tin­u­ing stream of dis­in­for­ma­tion about bioweapons’ lab­o­ra­to­ries in Ukraine rais­es con­cerns that Rus­sia itself may be think­ing of deploy­ing such weapons,” Bron­son said.
...

And that was just last week. So here’s a pair of arti­cle from just the last few days that sug­gest the Dooms­day Clock may not have been nudged enough.

First, here’s a report on the recent apoc­a­lyp­tic dec­la­ra­tion made by Ste­fano San­ni­no, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Euro­pean Union’s Euro­pean Exter­nal Action Ser­vice. Accord­ing to San­ni­no, Vladimir Putin “moved from a con­cept of spe­cial oper­a­tion to a con­cept now of a war against NATO and the West.” Yep, the ‘Rus­sia is already at war with NATO’ stage of the con­flict is for­mal­ly get­ting under­way:

Asso­ci­at­ed Press

EU offi­cial: Rus­sia shifts war focus to ‘NATO and the West’

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Jan­u­ary 27, 2023

TOKYO (AP) — A senior EU offi­cial said Fri­day that Rus­sia has tak­en its war against Ukraine to “a dif­fer­ent st