ALB
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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.
It looks as if it is rather Zeletsky who is cracking up. Here he is claiming that Russia’s aim to kill all 44 million Ukrainians:
“they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all.”
Completely irrational.
Putin was (re-)elected president in elections in 2018. He was first elected in 2000.
The elections would have been far from ideal by democratic standards (certain candidates were banned, no equal access to publicity) but there is no evidence that the end result would have been different.
In other words, he didn’t seize power illegally or unconstitutionally. And he wouldn’t have been able to exercise the full powers of president without the support of an elected Parliament (even if the elections there were fully democratic either). So he is more like Erdogan of Turkey than a straightforward dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
Just heard the Ukrainian President say that God is on his side. Of course he is. But he is also on the Russian side. He seems to love inciting wars so he can support both sides and enjoy seeing them slaughter each other.
Here’s another, ridiculous piece of war propaganda from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. How could anyone believe that a group of bearded Muslims speaking Russian with a foreign accent would be able to get anywhere near the Ukrainian President? Or perhaps they were supposed to be suicide bombers?
But there is a more sinister aspect. In the USSR people from the Caucasus were internal migrants doing the sort of shitty jobs that immigrants do in Britain, discriminated against and regarded as the lowest of the low, as this article from 2017 pointed out. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence evidently thought that it was a good idea to evoke the spectre of savage Muslim fanatics in order to consolidate Ukrainian nationalism amongst the population.
While we hear a lot about Russian oligarchs and their “ill-gotten gains” we hear rather less about Ukrainian oligarchs and theirs.
“In total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44,5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021.”
“BBC ‘in danger’ if Kremlin TV banned’ is a headline in the paper today. I thought it might be saying that, if RT was banned for being impartial, then Downing Street TV might be in danger of being banned on the same grounds. But it was about something else.
Yes, that article by Michael Roberts is informative. He has identified what might be another reason why the Western capitalist bloc is going to such lengths to bring Ukraine into its sphere of influences:
“Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly in mineral deposits. It possesses the world’s largest reserves of commercial-grade iron ore—30 billion tonnes of ore or around one-fifth of the global total. Ukraine ranks second in terms of known natural gas reserves in Europe, which today remain largely untapped. Ukraine’s mostly flat geography and high-quality soil composition make the country a big regional agricultural player. The country is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of wheat and the world’s largest exporter of seed oils like sunflower and rapeseed. Coal mining, chemicals, mechanical products (aircraft, turbines, locomotives and tractors) and shipbuilding are also important sectors of the Ukrainian economy. All of this remains to be fully exploited. The EU and the US have also been drooling over the prospect of getting hold of these resources.”
So of course is China and why it has friendly relations with both Russia and Ukraine. I am not sure this will be what motivates Russia, though its oligarchs might be interested in having a go at exploiting this. But, whoever it is that is going to do this, it requires stable, peaceful conditions and it is not clear that Russia would be able to maintain this as an occupying power.
But does Russia want to conquer and permanently occupy Ukraine?
I would still say that Russia’s concern is the security as a state. Roberts hints at this when he says:
“All in all, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a huge gamble which if it does not succeed in ‘neutralising’ Ukraine and forcing NATO into an international agreement, will seriously weaken the Russian economy.”
In other words, making Ukraine neutral would be the main aim. Russia might still be able to achieve this but that depends on it winning militarily and decisively. Which is what the Western bloc is doing all it can to prevent short of sending its own troops in. A dangerous situation, I admit.
The Western capitalist bloc and the Russian capitalist state are already virtually at war, with the West using the Ukrainian armed forces as their proxies who it is arming and treating as “our boys”.
At stake is which side should be the dominating influence over the territory that is called Ukraine but also has come to involve trade routes (pipelines but also at some point the Arctic route from the Atlantic to the pacific will come into it) and supplies of raw materials (oil and gas).
The economic sanctions against Russia — seizure of assets, blocking access to finance, airports, ports, trade, even sporting events — are those normally applied against a state that another state is at war with.
These sanctions and counter-sanctions will have the economic effect in the Western bloc of diverting resources from profit-making and slowing down capital accumulation, as happens when a state is concentrating on winning a war. But their leaders have evidently decided that this is a price worth paying to bring the Ukraine into their sphere of influence.
Of the people that they wheel out to explain the government’s position on this matter, this bloke, James Heappey, a junior minister at the ministry of war, seems to know what he is talking about, much more than his boss, Ben Wally, the minister of war himself. No gaffes about Munich or about going to war with Russia.
But of course, as you say, they are all careerist lickspittles, including those on the “Opposition” benches (the Outs for the time being before the roles are reversed and they become the Ins).
This is sort of funny. I always thought that Truss was out of her depth as Foreign Secretary, not understanding anything about capitalist diplomacy (or any diplomacy, actually). Where do the capitalists find these second-raters to look after their political affairs?
