ALB
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Extracts from a report from the Financial Times about what is happening in the towns in the south that the Russian forces have captured. There doesn’t seem to be any killing, looting and raping and basic municipal services are still operating under local control. The report all says there have even been public protests.This wary peaceful co-existence will hopefully continue unless some idiot takes a pot shot at a Russian soldier or throws a Molotov cocktail at a tank. Which neither side, nor the working class in general, has an interest in happening.
In the two-day battle for Kherson, Russian tanks shelled a school and troops shot dead residents seeking to repel the attack with Molotov cocktails. But once the city was captured, the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag kept flying above its main official building as part of life under Russian occupation.
Mayor Ihor Kolykhaiev laid out the new rules in a Facebook post. His constituents could leave home in groups no bigger than two. Cars should drive at low speed. Arrangements were made to collect corpses of Ukrainians killed in the main square and other parts of town, which the city said numbered at least 49, mainly civilians.
“We are experiencing colossal difficulties with collecting and burying the dead, delivering food and medicines, rubbish removal, accidents removal, etc,” Kolykhaiev said.
Alongside Kherson, smaller cities that fell to Russian forces this week are Berdyansk and Melitopol, which were captured on Sunday and Monday, respectively.
However, Ukrainians say the Russian hold on these cities has been incomplete and that the occupiers have shown little sign they are equipped to run them, or interested in doing so.
(…)
After the initial panic and run to the ATMs, groceries and pharmacies, Melitopol residents began organising online chat groups to secure food and emergency medications such as insulin, said Olga, a 29-year-old resident. They also set up volunteer patrols to stop looting.
While Russian troops were stationed in the city’s administrative buildings, Ukrainian government officials were working to keep heating, water, electricity and health services running from other locations, she added.
(…)
Unlike Kherson and Mariupol to its east, Berdyansk has not faced severe fighting. Alexander Svidlo, the town’s mayor, told his constituents that after armed Russian troops stormed city hall on Sunday he was now working on keeping local services running remotely.
“Until the last moment, I remained in my office in the administration building . . . co-ordinating the work of all communal services,” Svidlo said on his Facebook page.
Residents contacted by phone by the FT said Berdyansk was calm, with only the rare volley of artillery to be heard.
“They’ve set up some checkpoints inside the city and on its exit and entry points,” said Maksim Goncharuk, head of the town’s chamber of commerce and industry. He said there were sporadic stop and search checks. Mobile internet continues to operate, shops are open, and the lights are on.
Zelentsky’s attack on NATO for not agreeing to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine is very harsh, saying that they will be responsible for all the deaths that occur because they refused to do this. Perhaps he is beginning to realise that he has been used as a pawn by NATO in its conflict of interest with Russia as under whose sphere of influence Ukraine should be.
I wouldn’t think that most people in the world would agree that it would be worth risking a Third World War to save Ukraine from being defeated by Russia.
Here’s an article from the February 1933 Socialist Standrd on the Technocracy movement:
The article is using the term “technocracy” (power in the hands of technical experts) in the sense of those who coined the term in the 1930s.
“Technocracy demands that the activity of every citizen be continually recorded and controlled. It requires constant surveillance of the population.
This enables the Technate’s total energy expenditure to be calculated in real time. The data is then collated and analysed in order for the central committee of technocrats to manage and distribute the Technate’s resources right down to the level of the individual.
Scott and Hubbert planned a new monetary system based upon energy consumption, with goods and services priced according to the energy cost of production. Citizens would be allocated the new currency in the form of ‘energy certificates.’”They got one thing right — that society is capable of producing an abundance of what people need but is held back by the capitalist system of production for profit. But they were wrong in thinking that the production of this abundance could and should be organised by a elite of engineers.
Today’s Zeitgeist Movement is in a direct line of descent, via Jacque Fresco, of the Technocrat movement though they have abandoned the idea of energy-time vouchers in favour of no money, but still don’t really accept democratic control (one of our criticisms of them).
I don’t think that China can be described as a technocracy in the original sense. Politically, it’s a one-party dictatorship; economically it is capitalist.
ps the new world order will of course be world socialism !
A contribution to the discussion but it is not clear where The Grayzone is coming from. According to Wikipedia it seems to be pro-Russia, not that their point of view should not be presented.
In view of what is happening in Mariupol — water and energy cut off, food running out — the claim that the defence of the city is in the hands of neo-Nazi Azov Battalion would, if true, be disturbing. It could mean that they are making a last stand there and prepared to take the population down with them. Also disturbing is the statement from one of the Greek-speaking minority there that people are being prevented from leaving. It would also explain why the Russian forces are being so ruthless as they would would want to eliminate the Azov Battalion in particular. The only independent reference I could find on this is the Wikipedia entry on them that says Mariupol is the headquarters of the Azov Battalion.
That story is a typical example of the propaganda lies churned out by the Ukrainian authorities and confirms my view that you shouldn’t believe a word they say. Good thing, though, that there are people around prepared to expose this sort of thing.
Here’s another likely story.
More on Ukrainian oligarchs here. I expect they would like to have their description changed to plain billionaire in case their yachts, luxury apartments and private jets get seized by mistake. They are the people who Western politicians, from their armchairs, are asking Ukrainian workers to fight and die for.
I wonder if the ICC (not them, the one in The Hague) will be investigating possible war crimes by the Ukrainian authorities like parading captured soldiers on TV for propaganda purposes. Or have they, too, like all the world’s sporting bodies, been enrolled in the NATO anti-Russia campaign?
I knew it was coming. The next will be babies on bayonets.
An interesting article on what a peace deal might look like — Ukraine can join the EU but not NATO. But why was this not put on the table before? Why did NATO choose to call Russia’s bluff? I suppose the answer is that what decides what happens is not logic but ‘might is right’. The West thought it was mightier and was therefore right and Russia had to try to show that it was.
It is very hard to know who is telling the truth
The answer will be that neither is. As Russia is saying less about how their war is going it is telling less lies. Ukraine is saying so much that it is the bigger liar if only by default. Personally I don’t believe a word that the Ukrainian authorities say. Even tame and biased Western war correspondents have had to take saying that something is ‘claimed’ or ‘reported’. Everything that the Ukrainian authorities turn out is either a fabrication or an exaggeration. Russia is out to erase all Ukrainians. Russia is out to blow up all Europe. I am just waiting for them claim that Russian troops are bayoneting babies.
It would be nice to think that Russian troops were mutinying and refusing to kill their fellow workers but the sources you give don’t seem too reliable. One is a report of a report of a report. The other is reported as a “claim” and is attributed to a retired Ukrainian diplomat. These claims seem more like Ukrainian propaganda lies.
The population of Kharkov are mostly Russians, as are those on the Ukrainian side of the eastern border.
Are you sure about that? According to the Wikipedia entry on “Kharkiv” (as we have to spell it now), only 33% of the population of Kharkov classified themselves as Russian in the 2001 Ukrainian census. The figure for the whole of Ukraine was 17% which, at one out of every six inhabitants, is quite high.
More hypocrisy, double standards and lack of historical knowledge, this time over the vote today in the UN General Assembly to condemn the Russian invasion.
The media were emphasising how rare such emergency sessions are, this being only the 11th since the UN was set up in 1946. No mention that the two previous ones were aimed at Israel following its occupation and virtual annexation of the Golan Heights in 1982 and East Jerusalem in 1998. These sessions were held following the USA using its veto in the Security Council.
Politicians have been saying that the Russian annexation of Crimea marked the end of the principle of the UN that no member state should annex the territory of another. Israel did this in annexing the Golan heights from Syria. Not only did Israel use the resolution condemning this as toilet paper but the US ignored it too; in fact defied it in 2019 when it recognised this annexation.
The UN (Security Council and General Assembly) is a talking shop incapable of preventing wars as it was was intended to. It is also a producer of toilet paper and Russia can add the latest resolution to its stock.
Amid the talk of war crimes in Ukraine, a reminder of what happened when NATO bombed cities in Yugoslavia in from March to June 1999:
“The NATO bombing killed about 1,000 members of the Yugoslav security forces in addition to between 489 and 528 civilians. It destroyed or damaged bridges, industrial plants, hospitals, schools, cultural monuments, private businesses as well as barracks and military installations.”
“‘Dual-use’ targets, used by civilians and military, were attacked, including bridges across the Danube, factories, power stations, telecommunications facilities, the headquarters of Yugoslav Leftists, a political party led by Milošević’s wife, and the Avala TV Tower. Some protested that these actions were violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions. NATO argued these facilities were potentially useful to the Yugoslav military and thus their bombing was justified.”
And got away with it.
