USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Russophobia is not OK II

How Western media propaganda machine magically came out with the same headlines on Bucha within minutes and with zero evidence. This isn't the first nor will it be the last time they manipulate information to servee their narrative in order to vilify an ebtire country. Syria comes to mind....

“Vladimir Putin adores Fyodor Dostoevsky,” I recently read in an article. “A close reading of the legendary author’s texts reveals the feeling might have been mutual.”

Before long in Italy a university had cancelled a literature course on Dostoyevsky over the Ukraine crisis. If the world is left at the mercy of such acts of juvenile barbaric lunacy, we will sooner lose the moral parameters of our earthly existence than we do the environmental conditions of human survival. What has Dostoyevsky to do with Putin? We might as well ban Faulkner because we oppose USA's plundering claws around the world – or stop reading Emile Zola because we do not like Macron. What sheer sophomoric puerility is this, or… sorry, Bush and Netanyahu don’t read.

People around the world aghast at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (as they were with Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq?) must be very careful not to fall into this trap. “A plague on both your houses,” we should instead we should reach for our copies of the masterpieces of Russian literature to reread in protest, beginning of course with Dostoyevsky.

Years ago, in St Petersburg, Russia, a Russian colleague generously gave me a tour of the neighbourhood in which Dostoyevsky had lived when writing Crime and Punishment (1866), a book I second read when I was a graduate student in Brasil, not too dissimilar to the main character of the novel, Rodion Raskolnikov – minus, of course, murdering any pawnbroker Iranian counterpart of Alyona Ivanovna.

I was walking through that neighbourhood like a pilgrim retracing every inch of it graced by the memories of a lasting monument to a man’s literary genius, a novelist whom Nietzsche had praised as “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn”, the towering moral figure on whom Freud wrote his iconic essay, “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”.

Extract Dostoyevsky from our moral memories and we will be one step closer to Dante’s Inferno. Dostoyevsky is irreplaceable. Please leave him alone.

The issue however is not just Dostoevsky. There is an alarming, pathetic, rise and resurgence of Russophobia in Europe and the United States – almost instantly following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Blame Putin for Ukraine, as you blame George W Bush and Tony Blair for Afghanistan and Iraq or anywhere else on his map of the “War on Terror”.

Take Blair, Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Putin, if you may, and a whole gang of kindred thugs together, put a leash around their necks as you dispatch them all to the International Criminal Court and charge them with war crimes, and crimes against humanity. But this stupid demonisation of one of world’s greatest, if not the greatest, cultures of the is pathetic.

I recall how back in January 2020, US President Donald Trump threatened to bomb 52 Iranian sites, including many that are considered world heritage monuments. The barbaric mentality that just a while ago was targeting Iran and Islam, has now turned to Russia.

It is one thing for European and US media to shed their thin veneer of journalistic ‘neutralit’ and be utterly vulgar in their partisan coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is an entirely different thing for the classic European and American Russophobia to rear its ugly head and reconnect to its fascist roots to demonise Russians with dizzying speed and insidious tenacity.

Denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, if you want, but keep on reading Dostoyevsky’s novels, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, and marvelling at Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical brilliance. Repeat these few phrases three times a day and leave the world be.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a naked act of military campaign straight out of the American playbook. With some of its brutality and vulgarity, the Russians have done a lot less nothing that the US and its European and regional allies have not done for decades and centuries – most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere‌ – or what their client Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have not done in Yemen. So what is the big deal? Everything is in order when they do it to Black and brown people around the globe. The world is coming to an end if someone does the same thing to white people with blue eyes and blonde hair.

The US and its European allies are the last entities on planet earth with any moral authority to point fingers at Russia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has achieved the highest admiration of people around the globe for, backed by Nato military power, staying put and leading his country in a battle of against Russia – but this is the same man who is walking hand in hand with Neo-nazis and who is a solid Zionist fully behind the continued Israeli theft of Palestine and murder of Palestinians. Wherefore this failure to see the larger global picture?

If we were to remain free of the political propaganda and focus on the human costs of such follies, the demonisation of regional and global cultures is revealed for the nonsensical gibberish that it is. The best of Russia is the best of our humanity. The worst of Russia has an uncanny similarity with the worst we have seen of Europe and the US. We did not stop reading Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen when the US and its European partners unleashed their barbarism on Afghanistan and Iraq. We will not stop reading Leo Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev or Nikolai Gogol now that Russia has done the same in Ukraine.

The malignant (generic) anti-Russian sentiments in Europe and by extension the US goes back at least to the Napoleonic Wars when Russia was pictured as the barbaric antithesis of “Europe”. The fictitious document known as “The Will of Peter the Great” (forged early in the nineteenth century and repeatedly revived any time there is a war in Crimea) has attributed to the Russian emperor the desire to conquer Europe and subjugate its people. The same delusional phobia would later be recycled for Arabs and Muslims “reconquering Europe”.

Delusional Europeans and their American counterparts are very limited in their conspiratorial imagination and not so clever in making up newer fearful fantasies so keep recycling the old ones. According to them, Arabs want to conquer Europe, Muslims want to conquer Europe, Turks, Africans, Russians, ad absurdum, want to conquer Europe – all the while they do not seem to notice that they are the ones who are bombing Asia, Africa and Arab nations at will, besides installing puppet dictators wherever they want, and can.

It is impossible to exaggerate how gullible a whole spectrum of Americans is at such moments, drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid without the slightest doubt or hesitation, acting like robots commanded in one direction or another. “Russian Restaurants Feel War’s Impact,” reports The New York Times, “most owners are antiwar, and many of them are from Ukraine. But customer numbers are down all the same.” What did Beef Stroganoff, Borscht, or Pirozhki do to you anyway? They are delicious. Much better, in fact, than the ghastly hamburgers that McDonald’s has evidently decided to stop bad-feeding the Russians supposedly in retaliation for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Whereas the truth is that their “restaurants” were emptied before they decided to cut back the losses.

Like many other cultures around the world, American no-culture cannot understand itself except by demonising a constellation of others. A fictive white interlocutor stands at the epicentre of all these systematic acts of alienation and tireless demonisation of others. All that is needed is a hint to trigger the machinery into action.

Over the course of its history, Hollywood has emerged as the main barometer of American propaganda, consistently marking and targeting the presumed enemies of “the American way of life”.

As I said previously, from Hollywood blockbusters like the Rocky series and Diehard to spy thrillers of successive generations, Hollywood thrives on demonising Russians.

“In Hollywood,” Michael Idov recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “the ‘evil Russian’ stereotype isn’t back. It never left.” Nina Khrushcheva, a scholar of cinema at New York University even makes the perfectly plausible claim that Putin’s self-image is in fact influenced by Hollywood’s portrait of evil Russians. In the movie Equalizer (2014), the chief Russian villain is called Vladimir Pushkin. Any relation to Alexander Pushkin perhaps – the greatest Russian Romantic poet and playwright of all time?

Any time Hollywood as the chief propaganda machinery of the US and Europe goes low, the world must go high. Today is the best time to rediscover the masters of Russian Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Verlov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov - and countless other masters are waiting for you. While you are at it, get to know a few Ukrainian artists too. Begin with Taras Shevchenko, their glorious Kobzqr - then discover their many other poets, artists and folklorists. As Russia is not just Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is not just Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

By the way, The difference being that Vladimir Putin is well-read and knows all about Russian culture. Whereas Zelenskyy is an uncultured comedian who landed in the presidency thanks to whom? To the Russian voters with the promise of listening to thei concerns about being attacked for eight years and their will of independency, mainly in the Donbass.

Worth Following: THE GRAYZONE

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Russophobia is not OK

 

All around the world we have been carefully programmed to hate Russians by an American culture machine that engaged in an aggressive campaign to demonize all things and all people Russian. In every mainstream movie and TV show that addresses their “malign” existence, even after the Cold War, Russians are consistently presented as the enemy, a race of duplicitous villains who hate freedom for no other reason than because they do, because evil defines their national character without meaning. Growing up, I watched Sylvester Stallone and the Brat Pack murder scores of these people like they weren’t even human, just soulless props to highlight the blood-spattered glory of American exceptionalism with their primitive inferiority. Their slaughter was comedy.

And all the politicians and history books seemed to take their cues directly from the action movies. There was never any reason provided to explain the deep-seated hostility of our eastern adversaries. There was no Western invasion to strangle their revolution against Czarist tyranny in the cradle as Winston Churchill so eloquently put it. There were no Jupiter missiles on Khrushchev’s borders beckoning him to Cuba. They just hated us – according to the USA and our military dictators installed by Washington in South America - because we were “free” and they were evil, and we should hate them too, even the ones who escaped communist tyranny, even their children.

I had to grow up a little before I could realize that at the end of the day Russians were just people like anyone else.

Today we find ourselves living at the height of a whole new Cold War and even in an era where perceived wokeness reigns supreme it has never been hipper to hate people just because they’re Russian. As the news media hovers with a magnifying glass over every gruesome detail of Putin’s complicated war in Ukraine, Russophobia has once again taken the West by storm. Russian restaurants and Orthodox churches are being vandalized and harassed with death threats. Children with Russian names are being taunted and bullied. Sporting events like the Paralympics are barring Russian and Belarussian athletes from competing even as neutrals. Cultural institutions from the Munich Philharmonic to the Met are canceling Russian performers and pressuring others to pass purity tests on their proper hatred for Putin just to remain on stage. Even those sanctimonious self-appointed scions of tolerance at social media conglomerates like Facebook and Instagram have all but greenlit anti-Russian hate-speech and removed their previous ban on neo-Nazi death squads like the Azov Battalion just so long as they exterminate the right variety of untermenschen.

And once again, the US and the European Union  can’t pretend like they’re innocent, as if provoking this heinous bloodbath with decades of reckless NATO expansion wasn’t bad enough. The combined forces of the so-called free world have united to punish Putin’s first victims within Russia’s own borders en masse with a crippling embargo that just keeps tightening like a noose around their throats. Sanctions like the kind being lobbed at Russia from the United States and being celebrated and encouraged by everyone from late night talk show hosts to self-anointed antiwar activists essentially amount to the collective punishment of an entire nation for the crimes of its crooked government.

These measures won’t deprive Putin or the oligarchs of a single spoon of caviar, but they will cause great stress for millions of Russians. Sanctions are a form of economic terrorism designed to torture the already desperate into affecting American-approved regime change. These actions are every bit as evil and indiscriminate as Russia’s bombs and I fear that they and the Russophobic propaganda barrage that goes with them are only the beginning of something far more sadistic.

The United States of America has long used its corporate tentacles across the mass media to soften up it’s natural intolerance for total war by systematically demonizing entire races of people. As Japan embraced imperialism in a gruesome attempt to defend their own rich culture from western expansion in the Pacific during the 1930s, everyone from Tinseltown to Dr. Seuss jumped on the bandwagon to demonize the Japanese people themselves as being senseless Oriental savages killing for amusement while the American government upped the ante with crippling sanctions that eventually resulted in a full-blown embargo that provoked the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

It’s not being a conspiracy nut to believe that this was as intentional as USA&NATO’s provocation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Navy admirals lost their jobs just trying to warn FDR of the storm he was reaping with arms wide open. I shouldn’t have to tell people the results of this frighteningly familiar racist campaign of synergistic propaganda and economic warfare. 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps, whole cities roasted alive with napalm, and 226,000 innocent civilians obliterated by two nuclear bombs after their nation had already thrown in the towel. I don’t want this nightmare to repeat itself, but I can’t ignore the growing signs all around me. They keep me up at night.

The Russian people are not the enemy. Russian history and culture is alive with resistance to tyranny and resilience under oppression. Russia won World War II on the ground, with the Red Army marching towards Berlin liberating Poland, Ukraine and the Concentration camps to the very end. You can feel it breathing inside your chest when you read the prose of Tolstoy or listen to the wild mood swings of Tchaikovsky. There are still those who despise NATO and their puppet regime in Kyiv. The USA & Nato don’t really care about all those lost lives. To them, they are just cannon fodder to excuse their own war crimes to come. Imperialism thrives on racism and Europeans and Americans all need to fight the racism of Russophobia before it gives our own “devils” in power the license they seek for atrocity.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Putin is capitalist Russia

It has now been over a month since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian military forces to invade Ukraine in order to provide some relief to the Russian population of Ukraine.  In this short amount of time, a tidal wave of sentimental gush has emerged from America and Europe that has glossed over even the most modest criticism of the Ukrainian government while vilifying Putin and his country to an extent that is increasingly trespassing into the realm of the absurd. This narrative, disseminated by Washington, its allies, and its minions in the corporate-owned media, has been so predictable as to be bordering on self-parody, with some going so far as to draw parallels between Putin and Adolf Hitler. In the wake of this flagrantly one-sided presentation of the conflict, Russia has been subjected to sanctions from the US and its allies, the withdrawal of multiple major corporations from Russian soil, and a series of boycotts by a cornucopia of universities, NGOS and social media companies.

It has been left to independent media, therefore, to provide some modicum of balance and nuance in the face of this growing tide of Russophobia and willful distortion. Thankfully, many others have addressed issues such as: president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s integration of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group into Ukraine’s national armed forces; NATO encroachment onto Russia’s borders; the West’s failure to honor agreements that Ukraine would not join NATO in the post-Cold War era; the fact that Putin’s actions are supported by (overwhelmingly Russian-speaking) secessionist movements in Ukraine’s eastern provinces due to the Kiev government’s failure to honor the Minsk Agreements; and, perhaps most importantly, the incredible hypocrisy of US sanctions policy given Washington’s not just passive ignoring but active enabling of similar wars waged by its allies such as Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, not to mention its own disastrous debacles in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.

But one aspect of the situation that has seemingly received little attention is the background of how and why a man like Putin could have become Russia’s leader in the first place. My intention is not to defend Putin nor to discount the many criticisms one might have of him and his actions in Ukraine. But there is nonetheless a historical context that created the conditions that led to his rise to power. In order to understand this context, we must travel back much further in time than those pushing the Western narrative dare go. We must examine the formation of the present Russian state, which took shape in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic conditions that prevailed in its wake.

The story begins in November 1989. The fall of the Berlin wall was heralded as the end of the Cold War and a victory for the West. The triumphalism on the part of Washington and its allies culminated in the famous essay by political scientist Francis Fukuyama that declared “the end of history.” Fukuyama essentially argued that the debate over what economic system and political structures nation states should adopt had ended, with capitalism and liberal democracy emerging as the pinnacle to which all countries ought to aspire.

Central to this narrative was the notion that the socialist system of the USSR and allied Soviet republics had ultimately proven to be a failure. Western population was told that the people of these countries had struggled to overthrow this system and break the “chains of oppression” to which they had been subjected to by the “tyrannical regimes” under which they lived. Images of East Germans celebrating as they literally tore down the Berlin Wall adorned television screens as part of a steady stream of self-congratulatory bromides. The message was loud and clear: the political and economic systems in these countries created a living hell that never should be repeated.

The leaders of these “pro-freedom, pro-democracy” movements, meanwhile, were beatified in Western political and intellectual circles – a message that was dutifully repeated by the corporate media scribes of the time. Figures like Václav Havel and Lech Walesa were hailed as champions of their people and to this day receive gushing hagiographies in the media and the literature of prominent NGOs. The prevailing narrative was Washington’s, that former Soviet bloc countries have transitioned swimmingly to capitalist liberal democracies just like ours and now enjoy the freedoms, prosperity, and civil and political rights that we and our forebears have taken for granted. At the same time, that Putin is an aberration, some kind of 21^st century Stalin who has defiled a budding capitalist democracy and turned it into a neo-Soviet hellscape.

All of the above seems so plausible when placed in the context of the post-Cold War narrative Western population has been fed in the more than three decades since 1989. The reality, however, is that this entire narrative is not just a whole-cloth, unalloyed fabrication but also obscures the true reasons for Putin’s rise to power. The truth is that the imposition of capitalism and liberal democratic political frameworks onto the former Soviet states has been an unmitigated disaster that’s left many of these countries impoverished basket cases with declining living standards, unstable economies, and extensive corruption of their political institutions. And Russia is perhaps the paradigmatic example of how this sad story has played out.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition to so-called “free” markets was not remotely the exercise in energetic entrepreneurialism driven forward by enterprising Eastern Europeans that the Western narrative claims. Rather, the transition was largely a free-for-all in which Western corporations aggressively swooped in and wrapped their tentacles around the local economies of these nations in what became perhaps the biggest fire sale in human history. Across the region, German, American, French, or British investors purchased entire industries with the sole intention of shutting them down in order to create new markets for their own goods. In other cases, factories, airlines, or entire resorts were purchased, broken up, and sold off for parts.

Predictably, domestic industry atrophied because it simply couldn’t compete with the new class of buccaneer capitalists. Whatever protective measures that were implemented in the hope of preventing the buy-out/shut-down model, meanwhile, were easily skirted. In almost all cases, privatization contracts had stipulated that [privatized] enterprises should continue operation for at least two years. But with renationalization as the only punitive measure, it was politically impossible to prevent the abrogation of these contracts. Any government attempts to regulate the market, even in cases of blatant fraud, were coded as “communist.”

Running parallel to this mass privatization of former Soviet bloc economies was a gutting of the state welfare systems that had been implemented by the ousted socialist governments. At the time of the collapse of the USSR and allied Soviet republics, East Germans wanted to keep some of the social supports of socialism in place: guaranteed employment, free education and health care, state-supported maternity leave, and kindergartens that allowed women to better combine work and family life.

Together, these two factors have led to declining living standards for the vast majority of people in these countries. Yet in Western discourse it is usually taken as given that everyone prefers the new dispensation. The reality, however, is that there has always been a diversity of views about the socialist system both before, during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, running from strong opposition to strong support along with all kinds of positions in between. This nuance gets obscured by the elevation of those most opposed to this system in the Western media along with a deliberate exclusion of every other point of view.

As Zsuzsanna Clark, who grew up in socialist Hungary, put it in a 2009 essay, “the accounts we hear in the West are nearly always from the perspectives of wealthy emigrés or anti-communist dissidents with an axe to grind.” Conversely, Clark explains: “Our voice – the voice of those whose lives were improved by communism – is seldom heard when it comes to discussions of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain.” Clark points out that many were neither in favor of the demise of the old system nor enthusiastic about the introduction of the new. She recalls: “When communism in Hungary ended in 1989, I was not only surprised, but saddened, as were many others. Yes, there were people marching against the government, but the majority of ordinary people – me and my family included – did not take part in the protests.”

Russia has proven to be a particularly egregious case of the twin disasters of rapid privatization and the stripping down of the social safety net. In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the country’s economy was essentially sold off to whoever could buy it up on the condition of being Russian. There were admittedly some schemes to try to “spread the wealth around” such as a voucher system in which the government dispensed “privatization checks” to large swathes of the population, which could then be used to purchase shares of former state-owned companies at public auctions. But the system was easily abused by an emerging class of conniving businessmen who amassed huge quantities of the vouchers by tricking people into selling them to them or exchanging them for mundane consumer goods. This process culminated in the emergence Russia’s “oligarchs” who now own and control many of the country’s major industries, just like the Western oligarchs.

The consequence has been the same as in the United States, Russia’s degeneration into a highly unequal society plagued by rampant poverty. In addition to its contribution to this situation, the rise of the oligarchs has also given lie to Fukuyama’s naïve view that liberal democracy always yields the best results in terms of stability, good governance, and the rule of law. On the contrary, the oligarchs’ power has meant a comprehensive corruption of Russia’s political system, which itself has been a significant factor in Putin’s rise and consolidation of power. This fits within a broader trend of capitalist liberal democracies’ tendency to end up with a form of state capture in which political institutions are manipulated by private interests to such an extent that elected leaders govern to the benefit of these interests more than to the benefit of their voters. Just like in the US. The difference being who controls who. In the US the corporations elects and controls the president. In Russia, it is the president, Putin, who controls the corporations. And that is too much for American presidents and corporations to swallow.  

As a result of the above factors, recent survey evidence shows that many Russians now believe that they were better off before the fall of the Berlin Wall. An opinion poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in 2020, for example, found that 75 percent of Russians feel that the “greatest time in the country’s history” was during the Soviet era. Another Levada Center poll taken the previous year found that 59 percent of Russians believe that the USSR government “took care of ordinary people.” Polls in other former Soviet bloc countries tend to yield similar results. There is even evidence that a reformed model of socialism was exactly what most people in these countries wanted in the first place. A 1989 opinion poll in East Germany found that 89 percent of the country’s residents wished for a transition toward a “better, reformed socialism” while just 5 percent said they would prefer a “capitalist path.”

Indeed, there is also evidence to suggest that most Russians also would have preferred a continuation of socialism even before the degeneration of Russia into today’s quagmire. Many forget that in the year before the 1996 presidential elections, the US-backed Boris Yeltsin was polling at below three percent, well behind Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin’s unpopularity stemmed in large part from his role in overseeing the imposition of neoliberal capitalism that had by then already led to the demise of domestic industry, crumbling infrastructure and falling living standards.

Zyuganov was on course to victory. But Washington, fearing a reversal of Yeltsin’s neoliberal policies and a return to socialism, intervened to make sure its favored candidate won. In addition to assisting Yeltsin’s political campaign, the Clinton administration instructed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to issue his government with what was then the second-largest loan in its history. This allowed Yeltsin to pay wage arrears to public sector workers as well as splash on a series of vote-courting spending sprees, which gave him a sudden surge in the polls. With the playing field so severely tilted, Zyuganov ultimately couldn’t close the gap and Yeltsin won the election with just over 50 percent of the vote.

With a second term in office secured, he then proceeded to oversee the completion of the West’s plan to “liberalize” Russia’s economy. As his second term in office came to an end, the damage was so great that male life expectancy in Russia had fallen to 58 years. As a result, to this day Yeltsin remains a widely despised figure amongst ordinary Russians. In 1999 Putin began his first campaign for the Russian presidency in this context of foreign intervention, economic chaos and increasing social insecurity.

This entire episode, of course, demonstrates just how dishonest and self-serving the Western narrative about the Soviet system was and continues to be, whether it be with respect to Russian people’s views about that system or their views about what should replace it. But in addition, it also exposes that Washington’s purported motive of wanting to “liberate” them and bestow them with a “democratic system” was a complete lie. Clearly, Washington was never interested in whether Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries became democratic or not, but rather they whether or not they were compliant in opening up their markets to Western corporate interests.

And ironically, though Washington characterized the prospect of a Zyuganov victory as a regression to (largely fictitious) breadlines and empty shelves, his policy platform was not even proposing an all-out return to the Soviet era but rather a more moderate, decentralized, and democratized form of socialism. Moreover, the Russian Communist Party had actually already been undergoing a process of reform and moderation even before the collapse of the USSR. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the party had begun moving toward a model of socialism based on the concepts of “Perestroika” and “Glasnost.”

Of course, we never got to see how these reformist trends would have panned out given that they were stopped in their tracks just as they were getting off the ground. But in any case, evidently the Soviet system was far more popular than is generally understood in the West and, whatever its faults, the imposition of unfettered capitalism has patently been much worse.

Though still reeling from its defeat in the 1996 election and subsequent failures to win back power, the Communist Party remains both the largest opposition party in the Russian Duma (parliament) and the second largest party overall in terms of seats after Putin’s own United Russia party. It is also the only party other than United Russia that has experience in government at the national level. The most likely alternative to Putin, therefore, is a Communist Party-led government that would both threaten the interests of Western corporations and, worst still from Washington’s perspective, risk the reemergence of a system that provides an alternative to the Western model of unfettered globalized capitalism.

Given the above facts, Putin’s rise to power makes perfect sense. His voters can hardly be blamed for wanting a strongman as their leader who can at least impose some kind of order onto the chaotic situation that Russia has found itself in in the decades following the collapse of the USSR. Having created this situation and the corresponding rise of the oligarchs (who have a vested interest in continuation of the status quo), the West has only itself to blame for Putin’s rise. And in a stunning irony, as much as Washington and its allies say they despise him, it’s all but certain that they would like the alternative even less.

USA vs Russia in Ukraine: Will Japan join the Wargame?

 

Each year, Japan’s Foreign Ministry releases a Diplomatic Bluebook, a guide to the government’s views on the world. Kyodo News, a reputed Japanese wire service, reports that the 2022 Bluebook will have strong language against Russia. This Bluebook will be released to the public before the end of April, but Kyodo News’ reporters have seen a leaked text. The text that the news agency has seen has not been finally vetted by the government of Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Two startling changes appear in this draft text. First, the Bluebook refers to the Russian control over some islands north of Hokkaido as an “illegal occupation.” The last time the annual Bluebooks used this phrase was in 2003. Then, the Bluebook pointed out that Japan “renounced its right to the Kuril Islands” in the 1951 Treaty of Peace with Japan, signed in San Francisco (Chapter II, Article 2[c]); these islands were then part of the USSR. Nonetheless, the 2003 Bluebook said, “In the Four Northern Islands, the illegal occupation by the Soviet Union and Russia continues today.” Japan calls these “Four Northern Islands” Etorofu, Habomai, Kunashiri, and Shikotan (Russia calls the “Southern Kurils” Iturup, Khabomai, Kunashir, and Shikotan, respectively). Second, the 2006 Bluebook called the islands “inherently Japanese.” This phrase has not been used since then but has reappeared in the 2022 draft Bluebook. Phrases such as “illegal occupation” and “inherently Japanese” in the Bluebook suggest that the tensions between Japan and Russia will certainly increase.

On February 24, 2022, as Russian forces entered Ukraine, Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa released a statement to condemn the action and to demand that Russian military forces return to their territory. The next day, Japan, in line with its fellow G-7 countries, announced measures against Russia. These included the freezing of Japan-based assets of three Russian banks, Bank Rossiya, Promsvyazbank, and VEB (Russia’s development bank). Not long afterward, Japan agreed with the European Union position to exclude seven major Russian banks (including the three already sanctioned by Japan) from the SWIFT system. These four other banks are Bank Otkritie, Novikombank, Sovcombank, and VTB.

In addition, Japan’s finance ministry said that it would prevent the major Japanese banks from doing business with Russia’s largest financial institution, Sberbank. Three of Japan’s principal banks—Mizuho Bank, MUFG, and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation—have considerable exposure inside Russia since these banks have provided long-term financing for oil and natural gas projects; they are set to lose $4.69 billion, 20 percent of these banks’ expected net annual profits. The government’s Japan Bank for International Cooperation has large investments in Russian gas fields and gas pipelines (including with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund). This exposure will pose problems for its balance sheets.

Russia retaliated by placing Japan on its list of “unfriendly countries,” whose diplomatic staff must be reduced and whose citizens will have a difficult time getting a visa into Russia.

On March 31, 2022, as his government pledged to sanction Russian banks, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida told Japan’s parliament, the Diet, that his government would remain involved with Russia’s Sakhalin 2 natural gas and oil project. This project, Kishida said, will provide Japan with “long-term, inexpensive, and stable LNG [liquefied natural gas] supplies.” “It is an extremely important project in terms of our energy security,” he said. “Our plan is not to withdraw.”

Japan’s government owns a significant part of Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development Co (SODECO), which has built and manages the Sakhalin 1 and Sakhalin 2 projects. Four of the investors in Sakhalin 2 are Gazprom (the Russian energy company), Shell, and two Japanese firms (Mitsubishi and Mitsui). About 60 percent of the 9.6 million tons of LNG produced by Sakhalin 2, located on Sakhalin Island (about 28 miles off the coast of Japan), is delivered to Japan. Japanese investment in the oil fields of Sakhalin 1 had been intended to reduce its crude oil reliance on the Middle East (now 80 percent of Japan’s oil comes from the Gulf).

Last December, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation partnered with banks from China (China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China) as well as from Russia (Gazprombank, Sberbank, and VEB) to finance the Arctic LNG 2 Project in Russia’s Gydan Peninsula on the Kara Sea (Arctic Ocean). When this plant comes online, it will provide 19.8 million tons of LNG, twice the current production from Sakhalin 2.

rime Minister Kishida’s hesitancy to walk away from Russian energy imports requires explanation. Japan imports most of its energy from countries other than Russia. In 2019, Japan imported 88 percent of its energy needs, mostly fossil fuels. These fuels come from a range of countries, which includes Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for 58 percent of its crude oil, Australia for 65 percent of its coal, and Australia and Malaysia for 40 percent of its liquefied natural gas. Russia is a small, but important provider of crude oil (9 percent), coal (8.7 percent) and LNG (9 percent). Due to the proximity of Russia’s fuels, and to the price of Russian gas on the spot market, the overall cost of Russian energy is much less than that of energy from the Gulf States. If Japan stopped importing LNG from Sakhalin 2, its bills would immediately go up by between $15 and $25 billion. That is the reason why Prime Minister Kishida has refused to cease energy imports from Russia. Whether Russia will stop exports to Japan or whether it will insist on the trade being denominated in rubles is to be seen (thus far, Russia has only insisted that payment for the gaseous form of national gas be made in rubles).

In 1956, the USSR and Japan signed a declaration that promised to settle outstanding issues between the two countries. The USSR agreed that it would hand over two of the four islands (Habomai and Shikotan) “after the conclusion of a Peace Treaty” between the two countries. No such treaty was completed. Each Bluebook over the past decades notes that these small islands form “the most outstanding issue in Japan-Russia relations.” The previous prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin more than 20 times, but they were not able to make a breakthrough.

These small islands in the Sea of Okhotsk allow Russia to extend its territorial waters into the Pacific Ocean. It is from these passages that Russia’s Pacific and Northern Fleets—based in Fokino and Severomorsk, respectively—traverse the increasingly important Arctic waters and the northern waters of the Pacific (where Russia rubs shoulders with an increased NATO presence). The loss of these islands will be an issue not merely of prestige, but also of Russian commercial ambitions in its northern waters.

It is unlikely that these islands will draw these two countries into any kind of conflict beyond the sanctions that Japan has placed upon Russian banks. But these are dangerous times, and under American pressure, it is impossible to guess exactly what comes next. Any accidental clash between Japan and Russia could trigger Article V of the 1960 treaty that Japan signed with the United States; if that were to happen, it would be a catastrophe.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: How and When will it end?

 

People keep asking me: How and when will the Ukrainian war end? A tough call, right now.

In the wake of Ukraine’s stunning and stubborn resistance to Putin’s invasion, thanks to the flow of weapons and mercenaries, the question whose answer once seemed preordained now can be asked in all seriousness. The war, now a month old, might go on for many more months, or negotiations going on right now could result in an agreement between Moscow and Kyiv. No outcome, however, will spare the Ukraine people and government the pain of sacrifice and rebuilding—nor the enmity between Ukrainians and Russians.

Four considerations influence all the potential outcomes.

One is Putin’s character. He is uncompromising and self-assured. He has already fired a handful of his top intelligence people for failures on the battlefield. Most relevant to this war: Putin demands a win. No matter what, Russia needs to end this whole story with some kind of victory. As it has already lost the propaganda war for the cunning USA and the mainstream media.

Second, quick victory is no longer possible for Russia; even victory after prolonged bombing and occupation of some territory seems implausible. The Russian military has taken heavy losses of life and equipment.

Third, international sanctions on Russia have taken a steep toll on its economy and its reputation. We have it from Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, that “When the reserves of the Central Bank were frozen, no one would think, out of those who made predictions, what sanctions the West might apply.” The sanctions have dramatically reduced the ruble’s value, cut Russia’s roughly $625 billion in foreign exchange reserves in half, and caused most Western businesses in Russia to flee. However, it also opens a door to do business with new partners.

Fourth, there are no voices against the war around Putin: no major resignations of officials, no backlash from the military, no oligarchs protesting, no Chinese pressure, and of course no truly mass popular protests.

With those four circumstances in mind, what outcomes are possible? One is a unilateral step by Putin that would be coupled with a triumphant statement. We should keep in mind that not all wars end in agreement; exhaustion on one or both sides can lead to withdrawal of forces without a settlement, or, as in the Korean War staged by the USA, the parties can create an indefinite cease-fire (an armistice). Putin might remove his forces from most of Ukraine but hold on to the Donbas and its two people’s republics without ever signing an agreement.

Diplomacy is much the preferred way to end this war. But any possibility of an agreed ending is likely to require concessions by President Zelenskyy in order to rid Ukraine of Russian military forces, which he is not willing to make at this stage. The concessions would include a declaration of neutrality and acknowledgment of Russian control of Crimea. They will also require Ukraine’s acceptance of formal autonomy for at least the two Donbas provinces.

All these terms would probably be legitimized in the Ukraine constitution. The tougher issue is, What will Ukraine be able to extract from Putin in return? What it should extract is Putin’s agreement to withdraw completely from occupied territory and formally declare (as Russia once did, in the Budapest Declaration of 1994) respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. Putin would hardly agree to remove all regular or irregular military forces from Donbas, and not place military installations anywhere near Ukraine’s border with Russia. And in a fair world, Russia should provide compensation for the damage it has caused to property in Ukraine as part of a UN-administered relief fund that would also enable Ukrainian refugees to return home. However, as Israel has never been forced to do that after repeatedly destroying Gaza nor the USA after destroying and occupying Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth, it would be hard and unfair to ask Russia to do what others have never done.

Would Putin agree to these terms? Would Zelenskyy? Obviously, Ukrainian neutrality and an end to the NATO membership issue would be fine with Putin. Legitimizing his seizure of Crimea and Donbas would give him a significant victory.

As for Zelenskyy, instead of continually asking for more weapons, he must determine the degree of compromise he can condone and that Ukrainian citizens will accept. He will have to measure the imperatives of an “unjust” peace against those of a “just” but devastating war. US and NATO must offer security guarantees to Ukraine in place of NATO membership and of relying on Russian good faith as happened after the Budapest Declaration. Ukraine is betting in a membership in the European Union.

Three items should be off the table in any Ukraine-Russia agreement.

One is Russian war crimes, another is prosecution of Putin and other Russian officials before the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, and a third is sanctions relief. The first two are legal matters that may not be pursued, though the ICJ has already made a preliminary ruling that Russia must stop its military operations in Ukraine. Despite never having done the same for Israel, or the UK, or Israel for their recurrent war crimes.

As to sanctions relief, any discussion of them should only come in separate talks between the European Union, NATO, and Russia. Sanctions should be lifted the soon as possible to stop the unjust collective punishment that Russian people is suffering.