Young Master Smeet
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Anyone who supported the communist party after 1956 when the tanks rolled in and crushed the Hungarian Uprising:
Russia dips into financial reserves
I’m not sure about this, either it is a sign of economic sanctions hitting home, or Russia is bigging up its financial resilience:
“Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Wednesday that the National Wealth Fund (NWF), which accumulates revenue from oil exports, will be the main source of financing for a budget deficit expected to reach 1.6 trillion rubles ($21.6 billion) in 2022.” Calling it a ‘rainy day fund’ doesn’t help distract that they are going into choppy financial waters.
We know they had stockpiled gold over recent years, and with the moves to actually cut off Poland and Bulgaria from gas, they clearly see the gas revenue as the way of funding the state in the near future: so the tug-of-war now is how long Europe can hold off from cutting down purchasing gas from Russia.
Overall, I think this is a bad sign.
This is curious:
2,000 militants, loyal to Kiev, still remain entrenched at the Azovstal steel plant in the city“President Vladimir Putin has called Shoigu’s plan of storming the area “inadvisable” and instead ordered him to “safely block” the area while extending to those inside another offer to lay down their arms. The last hold outs are cut off from supplies.” All the propaganda up till now was that the Ukrainian forces in the steelworks would be bombed out, it seems a longer term siege is the plan (maybe it would be too costly to dig them out)?
A good statement from the Zapatistas:
“Fifth: In short, our friends there, who raise the anarchist flag of freedom, stand firm: there are those in Donbas in Ukraine in resistance, and those who walk and work the streets and fields of Russia in rebellion. There are people in Russia who have been arrested and beaten up for protesting the war. There are people in Ukraine who have been murdered by the Russian army.
This unites them amongst themselves as well as with us, not just in saying NO to war, but also in the refusal to “align themselves” with governments that oppress their own people.
In the midst of the confusion and chaos on both sides, they remain firm in their convictions: their fight for freedom, their repudiation of borders and their Nation-States, and their respective oppressions that only differ in the color of their flags.
Our duty is to support them to the best of our ability. A word, an image, a tune, a dance, a raised fist, or a hug that even from distant geographies provide support that will lift their hearts.”
From the sounds of it, there’s not going to be much of the Azovstal works left, considering it’s where the Azov Battalion are making their last stand.
“It very soon became clear that not only was Zelensky’s party not a real party, that this populist leader never had a populist movement behind him, but that he didn’t even have a real team that was capable of proceeding with any consistent policies. His first government lasted for about half a year. He then fired his chief of staff and there was continual turnover in ministerial positions. The lack of a serious team meant that Zelensky quite quickly fell into the same trap as Poroshenko, prey to the most powerful agents in Ukrainian politics: the oligarchic clans, the radical-nationalists, liberal civil society and the Western governments, all pushing for their specific agendas, and the inflated mass expectations about radical changes after an ‘electoral Maidan’ that finally brought ‘new faces’ to the government. Within this trap, Zelensky was trying to build his own ‘vertical of power’, a typical informal ‘chain of command’ in post-Soviet politics. But he was not especially successful in that.”
A Ukrainian sociologist talks in an interesting way about the back story to what has been going on, it’s well worth a read.
This video Is interesting. it proposes three Russian war aims:
1: Secure water for Crimea (I hadn’t known Ukraine had cut off the water supply). This sounds plausible.
2: Secure eastern gas fields (I think, actually, the whole of the natural resources in the East are the goal, and a partitioned Ukraine with only the agricultural area to the East still being ‘Ukraine’
3: Grab all the Black Sea coast, landlocking Ukraine: I think this is plausible, it would weaken the state.I hadn’t heard about the water, but this does all paint the war in even grubbier colours…
I’ve only just run across this post by Alan on the Socialist Banner Blog
“Mali troops and Russian mercenaries allegedly executed around 300 civilian men over five days during a military operation in a central town, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. The killings took place between March 27 and 31 in Moura, a rural town of around 10,000 inhabitants in the Mopti region.”
This brings starkly to light the doctrine of worthy versus unworthy victims: the horrors of Bucha are (justly) emblazoned over the world, but slaughter in Mali is not by an official enemy (nor within UK colonial spheres of influence) so it is quietly ignored: much as the recent murderous attack in Tigray.
The UK press can bring a laser light focus to the doings of official enemies, and a studied silence over friends and neutrals. I’m almost surprised that the presence of Russian mercenaries hasn’t been used to make up a story of what bestial devils the Russians really are. Give it time.
Open Access Ukrainian Studies ebooks
An academic publisher has made these available to help people interested in the broader background. (A lot seem like under used backlist they don’t mind making available, but there might be something of interest there for people).
Ee, the Greens failed to fill in their nomination papers properly, and presumably failed to have enough time to correct.
In the light of the Bucha atrocities the claim is arising that Russia has openly genocidal aims (note, Russia has been claiming a potential genocide against Russian Ukrainians, it seems to be a standard claim these days in which all actions are justified against the supreme crime.)
People are pointing to an op-ed in a Russian state backed paper:
Translation here : of course, in war, a jingo can always be found, and this could just be sabre rattling by the regime, depending on whether more sensible heads might prevail (certainly, I don’t think the programme presented is remotely realistic, it’s a recipe for perpetual guerrilla war – then again, I didn’t think invasion was realistic, so what do I know).“The duration of denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which must be born, grow up and reach maturity under the conditions of denazification. The nazification of Ukraine continued for more than 30 years, beginning at least in 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism received legal and legitimate forms of political expression and led the movement for “independence” towards Nazism.”
“The name “Ukraine” apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity in a territory liberated from the Nazi regime. The people’s republics newly created in the space free from Nazism should and will grow on the basis of economic self-government and social security, restoration and modernization of the life support systems of the population.”
“— lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);
— adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of primary normative acts of denazification “from below”, a ban on all types and forms of the revival of Nazi ideology;
— Establishment of memorials, commemorative signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
— the inclusion of a complex of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people’s republics;
— creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.”<ahref=”https://www.rt.com/business/553099-gold-backed-ruble-gamechanger-west/”> Russia pegging the Ruble to gold
So, this is the economic front of the war:”By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5,000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar.”
“The fixed peg between the ruble and gold puts a floor on the RUB/USD rate but also a quasi-floor on the US dollar gold price. But beyond this, the linking of gold to energy payments is the main event. While increased demand for rubles should continue to strengthen the RUB/USD rate and show up as a higher gold price, due to the fixed ruble – gold linkage, if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price. ”
We know Russia has been stockpiling gold for such a situation, so this move makes sense: of course, Russia will have to watch its balance of gold net transactions, but as an exporter country, that shouldn’t be a problem short term. Of course, also, appreciating gold values would mean domestic inflation.
Couple of articles: Russian treatment of evacuated Ukrainians
An interesting first hand account of a Mariupol resident: filtered and questioned (which is standard urban warfare/counter insurgency practice) and then she managed to reach family in Russia: “When we were on the Rostov-to-Moscow train, it was such a strange feeling to hear everyone discussing Mariupol. People on the train were claiming that, in Mariupol, biological weapons were being developed [by the West] to destroy the reproductive systems of Russian women. It felt like a kind of collective dream. Before the war, I really had believed that Russians were not the same as Putin. I was sure that no one wanted war with Ukraine. Now I think that even sensible people in Russian society are a part of this and are also responsible for it.”
And then this from Paul Rogers:”The appalling Russian bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities is broadcast to Western audiences thanks to near-24/7 coverage in the Western media. What is not realised by many of these audiences, is that this kind of coverage was also available, around the clock, during the Iraq War. Channels such as Al-Jazeera gave full accounts, including graphic images, of the injuries and deaths caused by Western forces, much of which was withheld on Western channels.
In short, there is rightly much anger across the West at what Putin’s forces have been doing and will continue to do in Ukraine. Many people living outside Western states are also appalled but, for them, what Russia is doing is not desperately different from what has been done by US-led coalitions in wars in South Asia, North Africa and especially the Middle East. If people are at a loss to understand why much of the world is not more forthright in its condemnation of Russia, that is where to look.”
Ukrainian pacifists
“On February 7, Kotsaba was detained, charged with “high treason” and “obstructing the lawful activities of the Ukrainian military.” He spent 16 months in appalling pre-trial conditions, during which Amnesty International named him their first prisoner-of-conscience in Ukraine since the Revolution, decrying his “treatment” as “a brazen restriction on the right to freedom of expression…one of the fundamental rallying cries of the [2014] protestors.””“As he says, this is a war pitting white supremacists against each other — the Azov Brigade, for example, versus the notorious Russian-funded Wagner Group — and while the spectacle of mutual neo-Nazi slaughter might say something about their strategic acumen, the bigger issue is the damage such a ‘brilliant green light’ for violence may wreak, however the war officially ‘ends,’ on an already deeply-damaged nation. As early as February 27, in an article for World Beyond War, Sheliazhenko was witnessing scenes bordering on social psychosis:”
Peace in our time, or peace off?
“A Ukrainian negotiator said the country is seeking international security guarantees for territory that doesn’t include the separatist-controlled areas of Donbas and Crimea.”So, assuming Russia has been seeking partition of Ukraine all along, as well as ensuring no NATO membership (but apparently fine with EU membership) this nightmare could soon be over. Germany would be happy with that deal, if EU can get the grain lands, Russia gets the minerals of Donbas.
