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Ed Webb

The Ukraine War: A Global Crisis? | Crisis Group - 0 views

www.crisisgroup.org/...ukraine-war-global-crisis

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shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 22 - Cached
  • The Ukraine conflict may be a matter of global concern, but states’ responses to it continue to be conditioned by internal political debates and foreign policy priorities.
  • China has hewed to a non-position on Russian aggression – neither condemning nor supporting the act, and declining to label it as an invasion – while lamenting the current situation as “something we do not want to see”. With an eye to the West, Beijing abstained on rather than vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, and reports indicate that two major Chinese state banks are restricting financing for Russian commodities. Beijing now emphasises the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty in its statements, a point that had either been absent from earlier statements or more ambiguously discussed as “principles of the UN Charter”.
  • the worldview that major powers can and do occasionally break the rules
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  • Beijing’s opposition to U.S. coalition building and expansion of military cooperation with Indo-Pacific countries. Overall, Beijing’s instinct is to understand the Ukraine crisis largely through the lens of its confrontation with Washington.
  • Beijing will want to ensure its position is not overly exposed to Western criticism and to safeguard its moral standing in the eyes of developing countries
  • Khan returned home with little to show from the trip, the first by a Pakistani prime minister in over two decades. He signed no agreements or memoranda of understanding with his Russian counterpart. Widening Western sanctions on Russia have also sunk Pakistani hopes of energy cooperation with Moscow, casting particular doubt on the fate of a proposed multi-billion-dollar gas pipeline project.
  • “military-technical cooperation”, which has resulted in more than 60 per cent of India’s arms and defence systems being of Russian origin
  • India also depends on Russia to counterbalance China, which has become its primary security and foreign policy concern, especially given its unresolved border tensions with Beijing. With Pakistan, India’s main rival, already close to China and cosying up to Russia, India’s worst fear is that China, Pakistan and Russia will come together
  • Relations with Washington are already strained largely because of Islamabad’s seemingly unconditional support for the Afghan Taliban. To give his government diplomatic space, Khan has sought to forge closer ties with Moscow. Those efforts could not have come at a less opportune time.
  • When Russia invaded Ukraine, India immediately came under the spotlight as at once a consequential friend of Moscow and a country traditionally keen to portray itself as the world’s largest democracy and a champion of peace. The U.S. and European countries pressured India not to side with Moscow and the Ukrainian ambassador in New Delhi pleaded for India to halt its political support for Russia. Yet under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has responded to the invasion with the blunt realism of a rising, aspirational power that does not want to get caught between Russia and what Modi calls the “NATO group”. India chose the well-trodden non-alignment path and hid behind diplomatic language with a not-so-subtle tilt toward Russia.
  • concerned that the fallout from the war could lead Putin to increase arms sales to anti-Western proxies along its borders, chiefly Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon, or step up electronic measures to disrupt NATO operations in the Mediterranean Sea, affecting Israel’s own navigation systems. Thus far, Russia has assured Israel that it will continue coordination on Syria, though reiterating that it does not recognise Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and later annexed
  • The Gulf Arab countries have so far adopted an ambiguous position on the Russian aggression in Ukraine. As close U.S. partners that also have increasing ties to Russia, they sit between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to openly antagonise either side. They have landed in this conundrum because of what they perceive as a growing U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. In response, they embarked on an effort to diversify their security relations, moving away from sole reliance on Washington. Russia is one of these new partners.
  • No Gulf power wants to give the impression of siding with the Kremlin, for fear of aggravating the U.S. – their primary security guarantor. But as international support for Ukraine and anger at those seen to support (or at least not publicly oppose) Russia grows, the damage may already have been done: the U.S. and its European allies were appalled at the Gulf states’ reticence to get in line with immediate condemnations of the Russian invasion
  • despite Iran’s own experience of losing large swaths of territory to Czarist Russia in the nineteenth century and facing Soviet occupation during and immediately after World War II, the Islamic Republic today can claim few major allies beyond Russia. Tehran sees few upsides in breaking ranks with Moscow. In comparison to the possible results of provoking the Kremlin with anything less than fulsome support, the diplomatic opprobrium it may receive from the U.S. and Europe is of little consequence.
  • Israel has substantive relations with both Russia and Ukraine: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has spoken to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the war began, and has offered to act as mediator; Israel sees itself as, in effect, sharing a border with Russia to its north east in Syria, relying on Putin’s continued tacit approval of its airstrikes on Iranian targets there; large Jewish and Israeli populations reside in both Russia and Ukraine and over 1.5 million Russian and Ukrainian expatriates live in Israel; and Israel is a major U.S. ally and beneficiary that identifies with the Western “liberal democratic order”.
  • Israel has offered humanitarian aid to Ukraine but has refused to sell it arms or provide it with military assistance.
  • African leaders and elites generally oppose sanctions, seeing them as blunt tools that tend to punish the general population more than national leaders. In the meantime, African officials are concerned that the war will have a deleterious impact on the continent’s economies and food security, both by driving up energy prices and by restricting grain supplies from Russia and Ukraine (a particular concern after a period of poor rainfall and weak harvests in parts of the continent). These shocks are liable to be severe in African countries that are still only beginning to recover from the downturn prompted by COVID-19, although oil producers such as Nigeria, Congo and Equatorial Guinea may benefit from a hike in energy prices.
  • President Zelenskyy is the only elected Jewish head of state outside Israel. He lost family in the Holocaust. As such, Israel’s silence on Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric, such as his claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine with the invasion, is noteworthy. That said, Israel has some track record – vis-à-vis Hungary and Poland, for example – of placing what its leaders view as national security or foreign relations concerns above taking a strong stand against antisemitism.
  • In contrast to Russia, with which Pakistan’s commerce is miniscule, the U.S. and EU states are its main trading partners. The war in Ukraine could further undermine Pakistan’s economy. The rise in global fuel prices is already fuelling record-high inflation and putting food security at risk, since before the invasion Ukraine provided Pakistan with more than 39 per cent of its wheat imports. With a trade deficit estimated by one analyst at around $40 billion, Islamabad’s reliance on external sources of funding will inevitably grow. A Russia under heavy sanctions will be in no position to assist. In such a scenario, Pakistan’s powerful military, which Khan depends on for his own political survival, could question his foreign posture.
  • Since 2014, Turkish defence companies have been increasingly engaged in Ukraine, and in 2019 they sold the country drones that Ukrainians see as significant in slowing the Russian advance.
  • On 27 February, Ankara announced that it would block warships from Russia and other littoral states from entering the Black Sea via the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits as long as the war continues, in line with the Montreux Convention (though Russian vessels normally based in Black Sea ports are exempt from the restriction, under the convention’s terms). But it also requested other states, implicitly including NATO members, to avoid sending their ships through the straits, in an apparent effort to limit the risks of escalation and maintain a balanced approach to the conflict.
  • Some fear, for instance, that Russia and its Syrian regime ally will ratchet up pressure on Idlib, the rebel-held enclave in Syria’s north west, forcing large numbers of refugees into Turkey, from where they might try to proceed to Europe. This worry persists though it is unclear that Russia would want to heat up the Syrian front while facing resilient Ukrainian resistance.
  • A prolonged war will only exacerbate Turkey’s security and economic concerns, and if Russia consolidates control of Ukraine’s coastline, it will also deal a significant blow to Turkey in terms of the naval balance of power in the Black Sea. It is likely that Turkey will draw closer to NATO as a result of this war, and less likely that Turkey will buy a second batch of S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia
  • Kenya, currently a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, has taken a more strident stance in opposition to Russia’s invasion than most non-NATO members of the Council. This position springs in part from the country’s history. Nairobi was one of the strongest supporters of a founding principle of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) prescribing respect for territorial integrity and the inviolability of member states’ colonial-era borders.
  • As in many African countries, a deep current of public opinion is critical of Western behaviour in the post-Cold War era, emphasising the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as the double standards that many Kenyans perceive in Washington’s democracy promotion on the continent.
  • What Nairobi saw as Washington’s endorsement of the 2013 coup in Egypt particularly rankled Kenyan authorities, who took an especially vocal public position against that putsch
  • Kenya will also push for the strengthening of multilateralism in Africa to confront what many expect to be difficult days ahead in the international arena. “We are entering an age of global disorder”, Peter Kagwanja, a political scientist and adviser to successive Kenyan presidents, told Crisis Group. “The African Union must band together or we will all hang separately”.
  • longstanding solidarity between South Africa and Russia. In the Soviet era, Moscow offered South Africans support in the anti-apartheid struggle and actively backed liberation movements across southern Africa.
  • Although just over half of African states backed the UN General Assembly resolution on Ukraine, many governments in the region have responded to the war with caution. Few have voiced open support for Russia, with the exception of Eritrea. But many have avoided taking strong public positions on the crisis, and some have explicitly declared themselves neutral.
  • Ghana, which joined the UN Security Council in January, has consistently backed the government in Kyiv. The West African bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), released a statement condemning Russia’s actions. Nonetheless, not all ECOWAS members voted for the General Assembly resolution. Mali, which has drawn closer to Russia as France pulled its military forces out of the country, abstained. Burkina Faso did not vote, perhaps reflecting the fact that Russia watered down a Security Council statement condemning the January coup in Ouagadougou.
  • Russia has many friends in Africa due in part to the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements during the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. Many also appreciated Moscow’s strident opposition to the more recent disastrous Western interventions in Iraq and Libya. Furthermore, a number of African leaders studied in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries and Moscow has done a good job of maintaining these ties over the years. Numerous African security figures also received their training in Russia.
  • The Ukraine conflict is a major problem for Turkey. It threatens not only to damage Ankara’s relations with Moscow, but also to hurt the Turkish economy, pushing up energy costs and stopping Russian and Ukrainian tourists from visiting Turkey. Some analysts estimate that a decline in tourism could mean up to $6 billion in lost revenue.
  • Since the invasion began, Bolsonaro’s affinities with Moscow have exposed the divisions within his hard-right government. From the outset, Brazil’s foreign ministry has vowed to maintain a position of neutrality, urging a diplomatic solution. But a day after the invasion, Hamilton Mourão, the vice president and a retired army general, said “there must be a real use of force to support Ukraine”, arguing that “if the Western countries let Ukraine fall, then it will be Bulgaria, then the Baltic states and so on”, drawing an analogy to the conquests of Nazi Germany. Hours later, Bolsonaro said only he could speak about the crisis, declaring that Mourão had no authority to comment on the issue.
  • Calls for neutrality nevertheless enjoy traction in Brazil. Within the government, there is concern that Western sanctions against Moscow will harm the economy, in particular its agricultural sector, which relies heavily on imports of Russian-made fertilisers. Brazil’s soya production, one of the country’s main sources of income, would suffer considerably from a sanctioned Russia.
  • Mexico depends on the U.S for its natural gas supply, and the prospect of rising prices is spurring the government to consider other means of generating electricity
  • Relations between Russia and Venezuela flourished under the late president, Hugo Chávez, who set the relationship with Washington on an antagonistic course. Under Maduro, Venezuela’s links to Russia have intensified, especially through the provision of technical military assistance as well as diplomatic backing from Moscow after Maduro faced a major challenge from the U.S.-linked opposition in early 2019.
Ed Webb

'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...war-iii-already-there-00012340

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shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 22 - Cached
  • “Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
  • Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
  • It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.
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  • This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin
  • The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.
  • just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.
  • what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that.
  • If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.
  • what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.
  • In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.
  • Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.
  • Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing
  • Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again
  • If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin?
  • We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.
  • Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.
  • The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
  • The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
  • if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
  • similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?
  • there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom, there was a whole host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his power, for doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz and the Holocaust finally penetrated.
  • Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.
  • we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again
  • Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  • If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it.
  • our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.
  • India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”
  • Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.
  • What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.
  • We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.
  • All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.
  • this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time.
  • What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.
Ed Webb

Romanian port struggles to handle flow of Ukrainian grain | AP News - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • With Ukraine’s seaports blockaded or captured by Russian forces, neighboring Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta has emerged as a main conduit for the war-torn country’s grain exports amid a growing world food crisis.It’s Romania’s biggest port, home to Europe’s fastest-loading grain terminal, and has processed nearly a million tons of grain from Ukraine — one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and corn — since the Feb. 24 invasion.But port operators say that maintaining, let alone increasing, the volume they handle could soon be impossible without concerted European Union support and investment.
  • Constanta’s proximity by land to Ukraine, and by sea to the Suez Canal, make it the best current route for Ukrainian agricultural exports. Other alternatives include road and rail shipments across Ukraine’s western border into Poland and its Baltic Sea ports.
  • U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization projects up to 181 million people in 41 countries could face food crisis or worse levels of hunger this year in connection with the Ukraine war.
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  • enabled the port over the past four months to ship close to a million tons of Ukrainian grain, most of it arriving by barge down the Danube River. But with 20 times that amount still blocked in Ukraine and the summer harvest season fast approaching in Romania itself and other countries that use Constanta for their exports, Dolghin said it’s likely the pace of Ukrainian grain shipping through his port will slow
  • solutions discussed in Kyiv, Iohannis said, included speeding up Danube barge shipments, increasing the speed of their unloading at Romanian ports, new border crossings for trucks with Ukrainian grain and reopening a decommissioned railway linking Romania with Ukraine and Moldova
Arabica Robusta

Fukushima and Crimea - Crisis Mis-Management 101 by William Boardman | Dandelion Salad - 0 views

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  • That’s not to predict an end-of-the-world scenario for either disaster, just to remind people that, at the extreme end of these uncontrolled events, there are horrendous logical risks that our leaders are amiably accepting (or urging) on behalf of the rest of us. And they seem to expect our gratitude for their efforts in Ukraine or their lack of efforts in Fukushima, more or less equally.
  • By stark contrast, the history of Crimea’s integration with Ukraine is all but non-existent in history. In the mid-1400s, Crimea was a Tatar state founded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. In 1478, Crimea became a tributary of the Ottoman Empire until 1774, when it became an independent state, essentially liberated by Russia (until Russia annexed it in 1783). Crimea remained part of Russia until 1917, when it declared its independence again (which lasted about a year before it was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the Germans, then the Soviet Union again). In 1921, Crimea was granted “autonomy,” which was interrupted by the German occupation (1941-1943), then stripped by the Soviet Union in 1945. Still part of the Soviet Union in 1954, Crimea was organizationally transferred to Ukraine, also part of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Crimea became the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, within the Soviet Union, followed by a power struggle with the Kiev government in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s break-up. In early 1992, the Crimean Parliament proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Crimea and adopted its first constitution (which it amended the same day to say Crimea was part of Ukraine); within weeks, Crimea dropped its proclamation of self-government in an apparent trade-off for greater autonomy from Kiev, but the dispute over the status of Crimea continued to feed political turmoil until Ukraine executed a constitutional coup. On March 17, 1995, the Kiev government scrapped the Crimean constitution, sacked the Crimean president and eventually established, with obvious irony, the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” – which still had periodic anti-Kiev eruptions and now (as of March 16) has voted to join the Russian Federation.
Ed Webb

Food crisis looms as Ukrainian wheat shipments grind to halt | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...9e-f29b-4677-b69e-a6e5b973cad6

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shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 22 - Cached
  • Russia and Ukraine supply almost a third of the world’s wheat exports and since the Russian assault on its neighbour, ports on the Black Sea have come to a virtual standstill. As a result, wheat prices have soared to record highs, overtaking levels seen during the food crisis of 2007-08.
  • agricultural experts and policymakers have warned of the impact of delayed shipments on countries reliant on the region for wheat, grain, sunflower oil and barley
  • The surge in prices will fuel soaring food inflation — already at a seven-year high of 7.8 per cent in January — and the biggest impact will be on the food security of poorer grain importers, warned analysts and food aid organisations
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  • Ukraine accounts for 90 per cent of Lebanon’s wheat imports and is a leading supplier for countries including Somalia, Syria and Libya. Lebanon is “really struggling with an already high import bill and this is only going to make things worse,”
  • Russia also provides its Black Sea neighbour Turkey with more than 70 per cent of its wheat imports
  • Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation in Turkey had had hit a 20-year high of 54.4 per cent in February. “The war is only going to exacerbate the cost of food,”
  • “What’s critical here is that the Black Sea offers a logistical and price advantage . . . Costs will rise significantly when [Turkey] buys from the US or Australia,” he said. “Even if the war ends tomorrow, Ukraine’s planting season has already been disrupted and it will impact the 2022 harvest regardless.”
  • The UN World Food Programme, which procures grains and food to distribute to poorer countries, bought just under 1.4m tonnes of wheat last year of which 70 per cent came from Ukraine and Russia.
  • The last time wheat prices spiked to these levels in 2007 and 2008 because of severe production declines in leading producing countries such as Australia and Russia, protests spread through nearly 40 countries from Haiti to the Ivory Coast, while a jump in grain prices in 2009-10 is regarded as one of the triggers of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East.
  • Egyptian authorities say their wheat inventories will last until mid June and the Egyptian local harvest should start coming in by mid April. Any rise in subsidised bread prices and further increase in food inflation in Egypt “increases the threat of social unrest,”
  • Wheat inventories are tight everywhere and as Chinese and South Korean buyers of Ukrainian corn, used to feed livestock, sought sellers elsewhere, EU agricultural ministers on Wednesday discussed allowing farmers to boost production using the 10 per cent of land they usually leave fallow in response to the war in Ukraine.
  • “The supply chain is broken,”
Ed Webb

Infowars: Putin's propaganda permeates Italian media - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.eu/...opaganda-permeates-italy-media

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shared by Ed Webb on 20 May 22 - No Cached
  • Since the invasion of Ukraine, Nadana Fridrikhson, a TV host on a Russian ministry of defense-owned channel, has been a repeat guest on Italy’s talk shows, claiming that Ukraine “has a Nazi problem,” and denying that Russian forces were behind the atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians in Bucha.
  • numerous Kremlin mouthpieces and apologists for President Vladimir Putin regularly hosted on Italian networks in the name of balance
  • what is perceived as the Italian media’s soft treatment of the Kremlin, and their embarrassing tendency to roll out the red carpet for Putin’s accomplices
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  • Italy’s parliamentary committee for security, Copasir, last week opened a probe into disinformation, in response to widespread concerns that Italian news outlets are being used to spread the pro-Putin line.
  • In perhaps the most egregious example of a top Russian official exploiting western media for disinformation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared in an interview on a privately-owned TV channel founded by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He used the occasion to assert falsehoods virtually unchallenged, including an inflammatory assertion that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood” — a remark for which Putin ultimately had to apologize to Israel. The European Commission was forced to remind EU broadcasters that they “must not allow incitement to violence, hatred and Russian propaganda in their talk shows.”
  • Italy is often seen as a soft touch for Kremlin disinformation and a potential Trojan horse in Europe because of historic ties to Russia based on strong economic ties and the largest Communist party in the west.
  • Putin built a warm relationship with Berlusconi, based on shared economic interests. Over the past decade, and even after the annexation of Crimea, Putin has engaged with the rise in populist and anti-establishment parties — and especially the far-right League party — who saw him as a fellow adversary of the EU and global western elites
  • The Italy media landscape is more polluted than other countries, she said. “The talk shows fail to give context, distinguish between opinion and facts. They care more about creating a show and ratings.”
  • Italian TV stations were forced to apologize after publishing a graphic that apparently showed NATO biological laboratories underneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, but was in reality drawn from an apocalypse-themed board game.  
  • The Fatto Quotidiano newspaper published a full-page article blaming the U.S. and the EU for “the massacre that is taking place in Ukraine” so favorable to Russia it was retweeted by the Russian Embassy in Italy.
  • Italy’s distinctive political talk show tradition, strong on melodrama and orchestrated arguments and light on fact-checking and tough interviews, that is causing the most commotion. The all-in-one politics and show-business format began with shows such as Rita Dalla Chiesa’s Parlamento In, on Berlusconi’s private TV channels in the 1980s, but was soon imitated by the state broadcaster Rai.
  • The talk shows “are a kind of infotainment,” said Romano. “The objective is to create a row not inform.”
  • The parliamentary investigation will look at how talk show guests are selected and whether they had been paid by the Kremlin
  • As far as Lavrov’s appearance goes, Berlusconi’s Mediaset defended the interview saying it confirmed Putin’s unwillingness to arrive at a diplomatic solution and therefore allowed us to learn something about the Russian leadership. On the same evening, another channel interviewed Vladimir Soloviev, a presenter on Russian state TV, who is subject to sanctions, and described by the U.S. State department as the Kremlin’s most energetic propagandist today.
  • Romano, the MP, agrees. “We cannot treat facts and opinions with equal value, you wouldn’t have Goebbels debate Anne Frank about the Holocaust.”
  • Russia’s efforts to disorient Italians seem to be working. According to a recent poll, half of Italians think coverage of Ukraine is distorted. And 25 percent say they don’t believe the media on Ukraine. Italians are also far less supportive of arming Ukrainians than other Western allies, with only around 30 percent in favor of sending more weapons compared to around 60 percent in the U.K. and U.S., according to polls.
  • Head of Rai Carlo Fuortes has suggested it may finally be time to rethink the talk show format, to avoid inflammatory debates at the expense of serious and informed exchanges.
Ed Webb

How Putin's worldview may be shaping his response in Crimea - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...shaping-his-response-in-crimea

Ukraine Russia Putin clash IR civilizations media

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The recent literature on Putin is correctly in drawing attention to his pro-Soviet imperialistic views: remember, to Putin the collapse of the USSR the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of 20th century. But what exactly this pro-Soviet worldview means is fairly poorly understood. To get a grasp on one needs to check what Putin’s preferred readings are. Putin’s favorites include a bunch of Russian nationalist philosophers of early 20th century – Berdyaev, Solovyev, Ilyin — whom he often quotes in his public speeches. Moreover, recently the Kremlin has specifically assigned Russia’s regional governors to read the works by these philosophers during 2014 winter holidays. The main message of these authors is Russia’s messianic role in world history, preservation and restoration of Russia’s historical borders and Orthodoxy.
  • the concept of cultural clash has been deeply ingrained in the minds of today’s Russians
  • Again, it may sound implausible but that is exactly what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order“: alignments and wars among various civilizations — Western, Islamic, Chinese, Orthodox/Russian Latin etc. Notice that the Orthodox/Russian unity has already been restored in Russia. In response to the Ukrainian Church’s call to stop the Russian troops, Saturday a representative of Russia’s Orthodox Church suggested that Ukrainians shouldn’t resist the Russian military “peacekeepers.” Their mission – as was pointed out – is “to restore Russia’s historical unity.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This helps us to understand why western analysts keep misreading the motivation behind Putin’s actions. His reality is very different from the reality in which these analysts live. His goal is primarily to “recollect Russia’s historical territories” (which specific version of historical Russia he has in mind is for us to rediscover in the next episodes)
  • another Putin’s favorite that was rumored to be very popular in his close circles a few years ago: “The Third Empire: Russia that Ought to Be” by Michael Yuriev. It’s a utopian fantasy written as a history book from a perspective of a 2054 Latin American narrator. The book describes how 2054 world order was established, and the process has a striking resemblance with contemporary Ukrainian events. It begins with a Recovery period of 2000-12, when the Great Russia starts its resurgence under the rule of Vladimir II the Restorer. Importantly the First Expansion that leads to reunification of significant territory occurs when Eastern and Southern Ukrainian regions rebel against west-organized Orange revolution (supported by western Ukraine). To help the revolting Ukrainians (that want to rejoin Russia) Vladimir II offers to include their Eastern territories into Russia. He then passes a referendum on those territories, and replaces the Russian Federation with the Russian Union (refer to the Custom Union) that also includes Belarus, Prednestrovie, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia
  • Surveys show that 88 percent of Kiev’s Euromaidan participants came from outside of the capital. Of those only half originated from the country’s western regions, while the other half came from the central and eastern Ukraine. Specifically as many as one fifth (20 percent) of protesters came from the eastern regions alone
  • country-level data is also against the Ukrainian cultural divide concept. A survey from the Razumkov Center, shows that as of late December 2013 an absolute majority of the population in both the Center (two thirds) and West (80 percent) of Ukraine supported the Euromaidan; this is in contrast to about 20-30 percent in the East and South. However, the share of population that did not express support for the Euromaidan protests remained undecided regarding the alternative option: not supporting the Maidan did not automatically equal supporting the Russian vector or Yanukovych
  • the preponderance of pro-Russia oriented media in the Russian-speaking East
  • these media actively emphasized the cultural divide. If anything, the notorious divide exists primarily within Eastern Ukraine alone
Arabica Robusta

Ukraine crisis: Crimea is lost, but there is a deal waiting to be done - Commentators -... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...aiting-to-be-done-9210169.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • If we are to stop this dangerous escalation we must understand where Russia is coming from. I saw a fair amount of Mr Putin when I was British Ambassador in Moscow. Like most politicians he is ready to manipulate the truth when necessary. But in most of his public utterances he is strikingly faithful to what he genuinely believes.
  • In his view we lied to Russia about the expansion of Nato. We have backed every recent Russian enemy from Chechnya's Dudayev to Georgia's Saakashvili.
  • The most likely immediate outcome is stasis; the present level of sanctions, Russia firmly in control of Crimea, and Ukraine limping on as a troubled cockpit for East/West competition. But even if the West "wins", with rising levels of sanctions eventually forcing Russia into ignominious retreat, would it have been worth it? The fissures and misgovernment which have dogged Ukraine since independence would only grow deeper. And an embittered Russia would become even more of a thorn in the West's side.
Arabica Robusta

Pro-Russian and Pro-Kiev Camps Dig In Amid Uneasy Calm in Eastern Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-calm-in-eastern-ukraine.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia putin fascism crimea

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “As far as I believe, nobody is going to protect us except for Russia,” Mr. Sopin said. “Do you think that he would have died if they were here?”
  • The instability set off by the revolution in Kiev last month and a wave of pro-Russian demonstrations in eastern cities has produced a split among local politicians and businessmen, including fabulously wealthy oligarchs like Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, who warily supports the government in Kiev.One of those rich men is Gennady A. Kernes, the eccentric mayor of Kharkiv, who has publicly opposed talk of separatism here, theoretically allying himself with Kiev.
Ed Webb

Tensions Rise in Ukraine Conflict Amid Russian Military Build-Up - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...onflict-security-blinken-biden

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shared by Ed Webb on 01 Apr 21 - Cached
  • While most analysts agree that an all-out conflict between Russia and NATO members is very unlikely, the conflict in Ukraine is a reminder that “a quarrel in a faraway country” often ends poorly.
  • Smaller nations are better equipped than ever to rule the skies with cheap airpower—like off-the-shelf drones and kamikaze munitions—and the United States had better learn to cover up.
  • Russia never lets a good crisis go to waste, and Myanmar is no exception. Russia’s deputy defense minister, Alexander Fomin, visited Myanmar to shore up support for the military junta amid its sweeping and deadly crackdowns on protesters who opposed the country’s military coup
Ed Webb

Putin's annexation speech: more angry taxi driver than head of state | Vladimir Putin |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ver-than-head-of-state-ukraine

Russia military politics diplomacy analysis Ukraine territory Libya Iraq

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Sep 22 - Cached
  • Putin railed at the west for a litany of sins, ranging from destabilising Russia in the 17th century to allowing gender reassignment surgery.
  • Then, Putin carried much of Russia’s elite and society with him, on a wave of patriotic fervour boosted by state television propaganda. Outside Russia, while many were shocked at the naked land grab, others felt Putin had a point: after Iraq and Libya, how could the west lecture others on violating sovereignty? Many European politicians wanted to get back to business as usual with Russia as quickly as possible.
  • Since February, the Russian leader has become an international outcast, with even non-western leaders rebuking his blatant aggression in Ukraine, undermining his claims on Friday to speak for the whole non-western world.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • he offered an angrier but less coherent denunciation of the west, more angry taxi driver than head of state. “They don’t want us to be free, they want us to be a colony; they don’t want equal partnership, they want to steal from us,”
  • “Putin’s speech is a set of unbelievably illiterate conspiracy cliches that 30 years ago could be read in marginal national-patriotic newspapers.“Now it has become the policy of the former superpower, which even in the days of the Soviet leaders could not afford such a discourse.”
  • in his March 2014 speech, Putin explicitly ruled out seizing more territory: “Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea … We do not need this.”
  • annexation involves more than pieces of paper, and while in 2014 Russia had just carried out a swift and stealthy military operation to seize Crimea, this time things are far less clear-cut. Fighting continues in and around all four of the regions Russia is claiming, prompting the mobilisation order.
  • While Putin has talked for two decades about the west’s desire to destroy Russia, the intensity and repetition with which he tackled the subject on Friday suggests this is not just political theatre: he has become a true believer.
  • “Nobody knows. I doubt if he knows yet either, to be honest,”
Ed Webb

While the world watches Ukraine, Putin is quietly occupying Belarus - Atlantic Council - 0 views

mail.atlanticcouncil.org/aS-TT5EcRrnQjVj79NAsHFqlYd-F8=

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • phenomenons
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 03 Feb 22
       
      phenomena
  • Belarus’s disputed August 2020 presidential election, the massive street protests it sparked, and Lukashenka's ensuing brutal crackdown on dissent led the dictator in Minsk to conclude that his only chance of political survival was to embrace Putin as tightly as possible.
  • Embracing Putin for one's survival does not come free. One of the costs of Putin's bailout is Belarus becoming a platform for the Russian military. In recent months, Lukashenka has recognized Moscow's annexation of Crimea, made it explicit that he would support Russia in a war with Ukraine, offered to host Russian nuclear weapons, and acquiesced to regular military exercises and troop rotations that amount to a permanent Russian military presence in Belarus. Lukashenka has also agreed to host a joint military training center in Hrodna near the Belarusian border with Poland and Lithuania which will effectively serve as a Russian military base.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "regardless of whether Russia invades Ukraine again, Belarus’s territory will increasingly become a source of military threats to all its western neighbors, not just Ukraine."
Ed Webb

Hunger Games | CEPA - 0 views

cepa.org/hunger-games

opinion war hunger trade Russia Ukraine Yemen famine migration

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 22 - Cached
  • Vladimir Putin’s most powerful weapon is not in his military arsenal. It is the threat of migration and unrest provoked by disrupting food supplies to Africa and the Middle East.
  • directly affects 1.7 billion people in more than 100 countries, according to the United Nations. Of these 43 million are on the brink of famine, and 570,000 face starvation
  • Spooked by the specter of another migration wave, European leaders may urge Ukraine to sign a ceasefire — any ceasefire — so that food moves and people do not
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Russia put pressure on Finland in 2015 by encouraging illegal migration. We saw the same tactic deployed against Poland from Belarus in 2021.
  • The immediate answer to Putin’s weaponization of hunger is to use military, economic and other means to halt and reverse Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and to open Black Sea freight routes.
  • forcing Ukraine to surrender to Russia would not bring peace. It will merely postpone the Kremlin’s next military adventure.
  • The planting season is disrupted. Ukrainian farms have been pillaged and destroyed by the occupiers. Many of the men are fighting. Many women are in exile. Full reconstruction will take years, not weeks. Famine already stalks Yemen
  • weaponized migration works because of the gulf between the rich and poor worlds. Given that Western decision-makers have had thirty unhindered years after the collapse of communism to sort out the world economy and trading system, the blame for this must largely land with them. Instead of reform, they pursued selfish protectionist policies that hobbled poor countries’ growth. Instead of sensible, fair policies on migration and asylum, they created horrible physical and bureaucratic hurdles that enrich people-smugglers.
Ed Webb

Iran and World Powers Resume Nuclear Talks as Tensions Rise Over Ukraine Crisis - 0 views

mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/...sions_rise_over_ukraine_crisis

Iran nukes Ukraine UNSC

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Iran and six world powers are meeting in Vienna Tuesday resuming talks over Tehran's disputed nuclear program aiming to reach a comprehensive agreement by mid-July. However, tension between western countries and Russia over events in Ukraine and Crimea's succession vote on Sunday, which overwhelmingly approved reunification with Russia, may threaten the second round of talks.
  • disagreements between the permanent U.N. Security Council member states may reduce pressure on Iran to make a deal
Arabica Robusta

Samir Amin, "Russia and the Ukraine Crisis: The Eurasian Project in Conflict with the T... - 0 views

mrzine.monthlyreview.org/...amin240314.html

russia ukraine crisis samir amin us intervention neoliberalism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The authentic Russian socialist revolution produced a state socialism which was the only possible first step toward socialism; after Stalin that state socialism moved towards becoming state capitalism (explaining the difference between the two concepts is important but not the subject of this short paper).  As of 1991 state capitalism was dismantled and replaced by "normal" capitalism based on private property, which, as in all countries of contemporary capitalism, is basically the property of financial monopolies, owned by the oligarchy (similar to, not different from, the oligarchies running capitalism in the Triad), many coming out of the former nomenklatura, and some newcomers.
  • Neo-liberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of "lumpen development" and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order.  Russia would provide to the Triad oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies. In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by "sanctions" which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the Triad.  The current outflow of "Russian capital" associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger.  Re-establishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.
Arabica Robusta

Ukraine and Other People-Powered Revolutions Are Overrated | New Republic - 0 views

www.newrepublic.com/...ered-revolutions-are-overrated

ukraine social movements us intervention russia putin fascism crimea

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Tales of those who stood for months in the square will be told and retold. But that doesn’t mean that the protesters will necessarily have triumphed. On the contrary, Ukrainians are about to learn that the exhilaration of “people power”—mass marches, big demonstrations, songs, and banners—is always an illusion. And sooner or later, the illusion wears off.
  • In both Thailand and Turkey, an educated middle class has recently taken to the streets to protest against democratically elected leaders who have grown increasingly corrupt and autocratic, but who might well be voted back into office tomorrow. In Venezuela, elections are not fair and the media is not free, but the president is supported by many Venezuelans who still have faith in his far-left rhetoric, however much his policies may be damaging the country.
  • The suited Ukrainians in the room, none of whom looked remotely revolutionary, all asked the same kinds of questions: What laws do we need? What rules must we have? How can we make sure that this time the changes are real? That conversation won’t attract photographers, but it holds out the promise of something permanent.
Arabica Robusta

LENIN'S TOMB: Against imperialist intervention in Ukraine - 0 views

www.leninology.com/...perialist-intervention-in.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • If you want to know how it came to be that a popular movement against a thuggish government of the oligarchs, resulted in a right-wing nationalist government with fascists in leading positions, you need as part of your explanation the role of Russian imperialism in supporting Ukraine's stupendously wealthy ruling class.  Whoever does not want to speak of Russian imperialism should be equally silent on Ukrainian fascism.  You see, Lindsey German was right after all: it's a messy situation that imperialist intervention will only make worse.
Arabica Robusta

Pro-Russian and Pro-Kiev Camps Dig In Amid Uneasy Calm in Eastern Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-calm-in-eastern-ukraine.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • While the bloody events and clashes that left more than a hundred dead in Kiev a month ago have not been repeated in eastern cities like Kharkiv and Donetsk, occasional violence and a powerful propaganda war have created entrenched pro-Russian and pro-Western camps that scarcely existed before.
  • For the fledgling pro-Western central government in Kiev, which is warily keeping one eye toward a possible invasion from Russia, the growing rift among ordinary Ukrainians and among political elites has laid bare the difficulties of establishing political order even if the unsteady peace lasts.
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