Introduction

Russia-Ukraine War

Curated By

Socialista Champagne

Political educator, writer, and UX & interface designer for Tech for Palestine.

About this Collection

About this Collection

Understand the history, policies, and dialectics surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war as well as Ukrainian civil war through both a geopolitical and domestic lens.

Ukraine has faced Western interference since 2004, and the US-led NATO bloc has long had its ambitions for total U.S hegemony and subversion of Russia's oil markets. Many citizens of eastern Ukraine rejected the latest 2014 Western Maidan interference and sought separation from Kyiv, establishing independent republics favourable to Russia. Kyiv's collective punishment of the region in the form of trade restrictions, withheld pensions, and direct supremacist warfare only worsened the rift and pushed them closer to Russia for material and economic survival. NATO's profiteering goals for American oil and arms companies, as well as domestic civil war between separatists and Western loyalists created the perfect storm for a deadly war of attrition to wage for years to come between two former brotherly peoples.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/russia-ukraine-war

6 articles · 1 documentary · 8 videos

This ebook is about 107 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

5 pages

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/wgtgma5kj69pbpndjr4wf6aayhrszm

Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs

Economist and UN advisor on how the U.S. provoked the Ukraine War through NATO expansion, which must be addressed diplomatically to achieve peace.

2. Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

8 pages

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/abpd4r6tdaw35jr5eey649kbblx53r

Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs argues the U.S uses Ukraine as a proxy war and AI testing ground to maintain global primacy, driven by the military-industrial complex.

3. The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

32 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-war-in-ukraine-a-history-how-the-u-s-exploited-fractures-in-the-post-soviet-order/

Monthly Review

By Thomas I Palley

The Ukraine conflict stems from both internal fractures in the post-Soviet order and U.S.-led NATO expansion strategies.

4. ICC's Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself

12 pages

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-report/

The Grayzone

By Jeremy Loffredo, Max Blumenthal

The ICC's arrest warrant for Putin was based on a State Department-funded Yale report that contradicted its own findings and lacked field verification. Featuring mini-documentary of GrayZone meeting directly with evacuated youth in Russia to capture their personal testimonies and experiences.

5. The Myth of 'Russian Imperialism': In Defense of Lenin's Analyses

30 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2023/03/07/the-myth-of-russian-imperialism-in-defense-of-lenins-analyses/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis

How Russia is not imperialist but a part of the exploited Global South, using Lenin's Marxist analysis of imperialism.

6. International Political Situation: Evolution of the International Situation and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

20 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2022/10/06/international-political-situation-evolution-of-the-international-situation-and-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Sam King

How the Soviet collapse reshaped global power dynamics and led to current geopolitical tensions including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and U.S-China conflicts.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Documentary

Roses Have Thorns - Casualties of the Ukrainian Revolution

https://www.watchdogmediainstitute.com/p/blog-page.html

Resource Not Added

By Casualties of the Ukrainian Revolution

The Ukrainian Revolution, from the Euromaidan protests of late 2013 through the subsequent war, is covered comprehensively in a 17-part series. The presentation is intended to be neutral, aiming to present events without an explicit perspective or bias, which frames the series's approach to such a contested history.

Videos

The Ukraine War is a US war on Russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhV87G9gXXU

The New Atlas

By Brian Berletic

Analysis of 2019 'Extending Russia' report by RAND, a U.S military thinktank funded by the Department of Defence outlining the strategy for subversion of Russia's markets and national sovereignty to force capitulation to U.S-led global capital.

The EU Is A US Colony: How the Ukraine War Lets the U.S. Plunder Europe & Block BRICS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfd1ukJ0Wfc

Colonial Outcasts

How the Ukraine war enables U.S exploitation of Europe while obstructing BRICS expansion, featuring guest Elina Xenophontos.

Ukraine Update + Understanding the US Proxy War in Ukraine: First Principles vs. Fantasy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lCEdPZOH3k

The New Atlas

By Brian Berletic

Analyzes the conflict as a US proxy war, arguing that Washington controls Kyiv through military and intelligence agencies rather than serving Ukrainian national interests.

Politics of Collapse Has Begun: Kiev's Is Hiding THIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL7jWmCgEVs

Neutrality Studies

By Nicolai Petro

Professor Nicolai Petro analyzes the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, discussing Russia's war strategy, Ukraine's political radicalization, and the potential for continued conflict after the war.

The Ukraine War Is A Giant Ponzi Scheme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9841-EFRI0

Reason2Resist with Dimitri Lascaris

By Dimitri Lascaris

Dimitri Lascaris argues that Western loans to Ukraine constitute a financial scam designed to sustain the military-industrial complex rather than aid recovery.

French monitor: Ukraine, NATO provoked Russia in Donbas war

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7tgwlhXWw

The Grayzone

By Benoit Paré

Former French defence analyst Benoit Paré argues that Ukraine and NATO provoked the conflict in Donbas, blaming Kyiv for failing to implement the Minsk accords.

The Next ESCALATION Against Russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpBTwz1fu5U

Neutrality Studies

By Jeff Rich

Historian Jeff Rich analyzes NATO's evolving role, the historical roots of Russophobia, and the geopolitical risks of a broader conflict between Russia and Europe.

How Ukraine is Accelerating the ‘Collapse of Europe’s Political Center’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLdAIxPac7c

BreakThrough News

By Brian Becker

Brian Becker analyzes how NATO and U.S imperialism drive the Ukraine war while alienating European populations from their governments.

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

Russia-Ukraine War — The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

Article 1 of 6

Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs

Originally published at https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/wgtgma5kj69pbpndjr4wf6aayhrszm

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.

JEFFREY D. SACHS

May 23, 2023 Common Dreams

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. TheNew York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the date of William Burns' 2008 cable warning about NATO enlargment. That error has been fixed.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace

Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

Russia-Ukraine War — Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

Article 2 of 6

Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs

Originally published at https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/abpd4r6tdaw35jr5eey649kbblx53r

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.

By Jeffrey Sachs & Sybil Fares

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-proxy-war-in-ukraine

The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

Russia-Ukraine War — The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

Article 3 of 6

Monthly Review

By Thomas I Palley

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-war-in-ukraine-a-history-how-the-u-s-exploited-fractures-in-the-post-soviet-order/

The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

Thomas Palley is an economist living in Washington DC. He has formerly worked as assistant director of public policy at the AFL-CIO and as chief economist of the U.S.-China Security Review Commission. He is the author of Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism (2000).

This paper was prepared for and presented at a conference held in Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 11, 2024. The conference was organized by the Research Platform: Education for Development and Stability and sponsored by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia.

The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has been driven by internal and external factors. Those factors constitute two blades of a scissors, and explaining the conflict requires taking account of both blades. The external factors center on post-Cold War U.S. geopolitical strategy and the concomitant U.S.-sponsored eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That expansion can only be understood by reference to the fractures (internal factors) created by the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The external factors reveal the role of the United States, which is implicated to the point of provoking the conflict and obstructing peace.

The external and internal factors come into play at different moments and take time to work their full effect, which is why history is so important to understanding the conflict. The two sets of factors play out over a timeline involving three key events. The first is Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. The second is the Maidan coup in February 2014 that overthrew democratically elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who advocated Ukrainian autonomy and a nonaligned defense policy. The third is Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022. This timeline is dramatically revealing. The United States and its NATO allies view the conflict as beginning in February 2022 (though sometimes saying it began when Russia first “invaded” Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014—an event following the coup), enabling them to ignore history. Russia views the conflict, more straightforwardly, as beginning with the February 2014 coup, which makes history and the onset of Civil War in Ukraine central to its political position. That fundamental difference in understanding hinders the possibility of a negotiated political settlement, and it is very hard to see how the difference can be reconciled, as accounting for history (namely the coup and the subsequent Civil War) yields a completely different narrative.

The U.S./NATO denial of history and penchant for explaining the conflict as simply an outgrowth of the February 2022 Russian “invasion,” confers a significant advantage in the accompanying propaganda war. Having the conflict begin with Russia’s military intervention is a simple, easily understood narrative. The Western public has little knowledge of or interest in history; this is especially true in the United States on the other side of the Atlantic, which is completely isolated from the conflict. Nor is Western media interested in history, which is difficult to explain and a commercial dud given a disinterested public. That configuration helps explain the resilience in the West of the U.S./NATO narrative. However, whereas denial of history works well for propaganda, it does not serve the cause of either truth or peace, as it denies the causes of the conflict which must be addressed if peace is to prevail.

Understanding the Ukraine Conflict: Internal and External Drivers

The Western U.S./NATO account of the conflict is history-light. The little bit of history that has managed to surface acknowledges, and then dismisses, NATO’s post-1990 eastward expansion. A proper historical understanding begins with the breakup of the Soviet Union. That breakup is recounted by Vladislav Zubok in his book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. The collapse is critical because it created the terrain for conflict.¹

As noted above, the conflict can be understood via the metaphor of a scissors. One blade is the internal, conflict-prone environment created by the Soviet Union’s breakup. The other blade is the continuing intervention by the United States, including the external eastward expansion of NATO. Both blades are necessary for understanding the causes of the conflict, its gradual escalation, and its political intractability.

The Internal Blade: The Breakup of the Soviet Union

The breakup of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with democratic revolution. Instead, according to Zubok, the seeds were already sprouting by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The center was weakening and, sensing that lessening, the leaders of the various Soviet Republics began to cultivate a resentful nationalist political discourse that claimed each had been economically exploited by the system and the other republics. That discourse gave the leadership of the Soviet Republics legitimacy and sowed the seeds of secession, which explains the domino-like collapse. Once one republic left, all were quickly willing to leave. The existing leadership of the republics became the political inheritors of power, who were then able to entrench and enrich themselves.

A version of that pattern is visible in all the former republics, but it left behind three critical fractures: nascent nationalist animosities, stranded ethnic Russian populations, and contested territories. All three were especially prominent in Ukraine and key drivers of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Of the three, the most important is nascent nationalist animosities because they function as the pivot pin of the scissors, joining together the internal and external scissor blades of conflict.

Nationalist animosities have proven particularly acute in Ukraine, having a long historical root. Ukraine and the Don region were major battlegrounds in the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922, as captured in Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novels And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea. Ukraine’s nationalist animosity was further fueled by Joseph Stalin’s collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture in the 1930s, which contributed to a famine that killed millions. Ukrainian nationalists have sought to politically exploit that famine to spur anti-Russian sentiments, claiming it was a “Holodomor” genocide targeted against Ukraine. The reality is that there is no evidence the famine was the product of an ethnically targeted campaign against Ukraine. Instead, it was a product of the combination of bad harvests and the Stalin regime’s campaign against the entirety of the Soviet Union’s peasant “kulak” class.²

In the 1930s and during the Second World War, there was a virulent underground Ukrainian fascist nationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera. Those forces fought side-by-side with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, and they enthusiastically participated in Ukraine’s Holocaust against its Jewish population.³ After the Second World War and into the early 1950s, they continued a low-level insurgency in Western Ukraine, aided by Britain’s MI6 secret service and, to a lesser degree, by the CIA.⁴

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, those fascist nationalist forces were revived and encouraged. They deepened significantly after the 2014 Maidan coup, and they have strengthened further since the 2022 Russian military intervention. Within Ukraine, Bandera is now a widely and officially celebrated figure who is especially popular in Western Ukraine. Streets are named after him, there are statues in his honor, his portrait is on a postage stamp, and he was declared a hero of the nation.⁵ Moreover, Bandera is celebrated by Ukraine’s military and has special standing within the Azov brigade, which is an elite and celebrated part thereof.⁶ That ugly reality was widely recognized in the United States and the West prior to the 2022 Russian intervention, but it has now been largely suppressed as part of the propaganda effort on behalf of Ukraine and against Russia.⁷

In that regard, the attitude of Israel toward Ukraine is instructive. During the conflict, Israel has shown little inclination to help Ukraine, despite both being closely allied with and supported by the United States. That restraint reflects the fact that Israel has repeatedly complained about the extensive presence of and official support for neo-Nazi activity in Ukraine. Israel’s stance is damning evidence of the ugly reality of the character of animosities within Ukraine.⁸

In sum, revived nationalist animosities were especially severe and especially ugly in Ukraine. For purposes of understanding the war, the important point is those animosities created deep fissures that bled both inward and outward.

A second fracture concerned stranded ethnic Russian populations living in the former Soviet Republics. Once again, the problem was particularly acute in Ukraine, where the borders had been drawn under the Soviet Union to include large chunks of land that were linguistically and culturally Russian.⁹ The population problem was also significant in the former Baltic republics, especially Latvia and Estonia, and in Georgia.

In 1989, ethnic Russians were 22.1 percent of Ukraine’s population of 51.5 million.¹⁰ As shown in Map 1, Russian-language speakers have been heavily concentrated in the east and south of the country, in lands that had historically been part of Russia. That pattern of concentrated numbers of Russian-language speakers meant that Ukraine was politically divided and, in a worst-case scenario, primed for civil war and secession.

Map 1. The Languages of Ukraine

Source: “Languages of Ukraine,” Reconsidering Russia and the Former Soviet Union blog, updated May 15, 2014, reconsideringrussia.org.

The stark political division is illustrated in Map 2, which shows the winning vote share by oblast (province) in the second round of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. The eastern half of the country voted solidly for Yanukovych; the western half solidly for nationalist Yulia Tymoshenko.

Map 2. Second-Round Results of the 2010 Presidential Election

Source: Central Election Commission of Ukraine, “Voting Results: Support for Leaders by Region,” updated January 17, 2010, cvk.gov.ua.

The stranded ethnic Russian population problem then intersected with the problem of national animosities as the newly independent republics pursued nationalist cultural cleansing policies that sought to erase the history and presence of Russian culture and language. Such cultural cleansing constitutes a form of political intimidation and discrimination. Once again, Ukraine was the worst on those counts, followed by the Baltic republics. Ukraine’s cultural cleansing is evident in a series of progressively more intolerant laws making Ukrainian the only official language and banning Russian. It is also evident in the outlawing and tearing down of monuments honoring Russian historical cultural and political figures, which has accelerated in the wake of Russia’s intervention.¹¹

Lastly, the fate and treatment of the stranded populations was also of political concern to Russia for reasons of ethnic identification. These populations had been citizens of the Soviet Union, and they became politically separated from Russia owing to the USSR’s unexpected disintegration. Although they were not Russian citizens under the terms of the breakup, they were historically connected to Russia, by language, culture, and identity, and inclined to think of themselves as Russians. Consequently, the stranded Russian populations provided an opening for Russia to establish a degree of soft power within former republics. Moreover, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East and South had Russian as well as Ukrainian citizenship.¹²

The third fracture concerned contested territories. That fracture was initially the least important, but it has gradually risen to become a defining issue. Russia has always felt territorially shortchanged by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Additions in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine in 1922 and 1954, respectively, were made when Ukraine and Russia were joined at the hip via the Soviet Union and breakup was deemed unimaginable. Despite that, Russia initially accepted the new borders via the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum agreement with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. In return for border recognition, the three former republics returned all nuclear weapons and signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.¹³ Additionally, the problem of Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol was solved by a long-term lease arrangement signed in 1997 and extended in 2010 by the Kharkiv Pact.¹⁴

That fragile territorial equilibrium was shattered by the U.S.-supported 2014 Maidan coup, which overthrew the elected president and installed an anti-Russian nationalist. The Russian response was to annex Crimea with strong Crimean support from its largely Russian-speaking population following a plebiscite. Civil war also erupted within Ukraine, with parts of the four eastern Donbass oblasts refusing to accept the legitimacy of the coup. That fused the territorial fracture with the issue of the stranded ethnic Russian population.

There then followed a second fragile equilibrium, in which Russia sought to work with NATO to resolve the Civil War via the Minsk peace process that was initiated in 2014. The process aimed to end conflict in the Donbass and find a political solution that granted the region a mutually acceptable degree of autonomy.¹⁵ That second equilibrium became increasingly frayed and finally collapsed with Russia’s 2022 military intervention and annexation of the Donbass oblasts. That annexation has elevated the contested territories fracture into a codefining issue, along with Ukraine’s relationship to NATO.

The External Blade: The Geopolitical Drivers of Conflict

The other blade of the conflict scissors is the external drivers of conflict, of which there are four. They consist of the U.S.-led eastward expansion of NATO, U.S. internal intervention in Ukraine, U.S. neoconservative geopolitical strategy (reinforced by the U.S. military-industrial complex), and so-called democracy promotion. The United States is the force behind all four external drivers, which is why it can be legitimately said that Washington has provoked and sustains the conflict.

The first and most important external driver is the U.S.-led eastward expansion of NATO. That expansion is detailed in Map 3, which shows NATO accession dates by country.¹⁶ The expansion agenda emerged out of Washington and was officially greenlit by the Bill Clinton administration in 1994.¹⁷

Map 3. NATO Enlargement since 1949

Source: Congressional Research Service, “NATO Enlargement to Sweden and Finland,” updated March 22, 2024.

An undisputed fact is that, except for East German membership, Russia has persistently objected to this expansion. Its argument has consistently been that eastward NATO expansion poses a threat to Russian national security. Russia also claims that it violates the agreement with and assurances given to Gorbachev as part of ending the Cold War and dissolving the Warsaw Pact.¹⁸ In 1994, President Boris Yeltsin furiously and openly objected to NATO expansion in his summit with Clinton.¹⁹ That episode long precedes the rise of Vladimir Putin, who has been tarred by Western media as a bogeyman, and shows that the consequences of NATO expansion cannot be laid at Putin’s doorstep. Yeltsin was the partner for peace, yet already the United States and Europe had reneged on the understanding struck with Gorbachev that ended the Cold War.²⁰

From a strategic perspective, Map 3 reveals a three-stage process. Stage 1 was the 1999 incorporation of major Central European former Warsaw Pact countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). Stage 2 was the 2004 incorporation of the former Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), which marked a ratcheting up of the process by including elements of the former Soviet Union that bordered Russia. It also created a NATO “iron curtain” running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Stage 3, which remains unfinished, concerns the intensified dialogues with Ukraine and Georgia, which aimed to incorporate those former Soviet Republics into NATO. This would massively expand NATO’s penetration of the former Soviet Union and widen its encirclement of Russia. (A Stage 4, subsequent to the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian War, was the incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively).

Furthermore, Ukraine juts like a spear into the heart of Russia. At its closest point, its border is just three hundred miles from Moscow. Consequently, incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would strip Russia of its historically critical land buffer, and NATO short- and medium-range missiles could threaten the Russian heartland. All those fears have been proven true by the current conflict.

For those reasons, the threat posed by Stage 3 has proven the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thus, Russia responded with military force to prevent further expansion. In 2008, Russia intervened with force to stop a U.S.-encouraged attempt by Georgia to reoccupy South Ossetia and, in 2014, it intervened in Ukraine. The Georgia conflict has gone silent, but in Ukraine it has tragically deepened because of far worse internal fractures and U.S. internal interventions.²¹

The expansion of NATO raises several questions, the first of which is: Did expansion breach the agreement made with Gorbachev? No formal treaty detailing a promise not to expand NATO beyond East Germany was ever signed. That said, there is evidence that promises were made to Gorbachev that there would be no further expansion. The most compelling evidence is that of U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock Jr., who was the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. He reports that at the 1989 Malta Summit—which ended the Cold War—George H. W. Bush gave unambiguous promises that there would be no NATO expansion.²² Swiss journalist Guy Mettan also documents how non-expansion security guarantees were given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and French President François Mitterrand.²³

Even counterfactually, assuming there was no promise of non-expansion, there remains the fundamental question of why NATO was expanded. NATO was founded as a “defensive” alliance, which is its charter mission. It is easy to understand why Poland, Romania, and the former Baltic republics would want to join NATO to secure defensive protection. However, the proper question, which is never asked, is: Why did the United States or the United Kingdom want them to join? The new member countries brought modest military capabilities and bucketloads of conflict risk. In other words, they were a net negative security addition to existing NATO members, measured in terms of NATO’s original stated purpose as a defensive alliance.

In a similar vein, there was no “balance of power” rationale for expanding NATO, as the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved on February 25, 1991. Balance of power considerations have historically motivated the structure of continental European alliances, and the balance had indisputably and comprehensively shifted in favor of NATO. According to that criterion, expanding NATO was unambiguously aggressive.²⁴

Finally, there is the simple question of: how is U.S. national security enhanced by having its military on Russia’s border, six thousand miles away from the eastern United States, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? The answer is it is not. That shows the motive for NATO expansion was never about U.S. national security, but rather U.S. global hegemony. Asking the right question makes crystal clear NATO expansion was an aggressive move against Russia.

A third question is: Was NATO expansion a kind of bumbling error with unanticipated consequences? The answer is that it was not, and that answer is also crystal clear. Russia openly expressed its hostility to NATO expansion, as evident in the 1994 blow-up between Clinton and Yeltsin in Budapest, when Yeltsin furiously objected to plans to expand NATO.²⁵ Likewise, in 2007, Putin openly and vehemently objected to NATO expansion at the Munich security conference.²⁶

The issue of NATO expansion was also debated in the United States, and critics openly stated that a major consequence would be conflict with Russia. The most famous of these critics was George Kennan, founder of the “Containment Doctrine” that guided U.S. Cold War strategy. In a 1997 New York Times op-ed titled “A Fateful Error,” Kennan wrote that NATO expansion was a mistake that would lead to conflict.²⁷ Awareness of these consequences is evident from the scale and standing of the opposition to NATO expansion. This is visible in a 1997 letter to Clinton that was signed by fifty leading U.S. senior politicians, national security and foreign policy experts, and former high-ranking military and intelligence officers. Signatories included Senator Bill Bradley, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, defense expert and former State Department official Paul Nitze, Senator Sam Nunn, and former CIA director Stansfield Turner.²⁸ The letter described NATO expansion as “a policy error of historic proportions” that would lead Russia “to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.” Yet expansion proceeded, with the first batch of new members being admitted in 1999.

The proposed expansion of NATO to include Ukraine was also discussed, and its consequences were also foreseeable and foreseen. The clearest statement of those consequences is in a confidential February 2008 letter (made available via Wikileaks) in which U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns (later to become CIA chief) warned that it would unambiguously cross Russia’s national security red lines.²⁹

The second external driver of conflict is U.S. internal intervention in Ukraine. Much of the evidence for that intervention concerns Victoria Nuland, who in 2014 was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is deeply embedded in the U.S. neoconservative movement. Moreover, she has continuously held important positions in the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administrations, revealing the bipartisan character of U.S. policy on Ukraine. In the second Bush administration, she was U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. In December 2013, Nuland revealed that the United States had spent $5 billion on aid to Ukraine, classified as “democracy building.” During the 2014 Maidan coup, she made several public appearances in Kiev supporting the coup activists, and a telephone call between her and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was recorded. The call suggested the United States was actively intervening in Ukrainian political developments, including actively seeking to obstruct European Union peace efforts, with Nuland declaring “F––k the EU.”³⁰

Five billion dollars was (and is) an extraordinarily large amount of money in a poor country like Ukraine that was also short of foreign currency.³¹ U.S. “democracy-building” money is funneled through government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy, both of which have been widely accused of meddling and political interference abroad.³² USAID has a legal mandate to ensure its economic support is consistent with U.S. geopolitical interests. It has a long history of cooperation with the CIA and works closely with the U.S. State Department with an obligation to promote U.S. foreign policy interests. Consequently, such money tends to be channeled to actors aligned with U.S. geopolitical interests—which, in the case of Ukraine, meant weakening sympathies and links with Russia.

After the Maidan coup, the United States stepped up its weapons deliveries to Ukraine. The Washington-based Stimson Center reported that Ukraine received over $2.7 billion in military assistance between 2014 and 2021. Between 2016 and 2020, Ukraine was the seventh-largest recipient of U.S. military assistance, and the largest European recipient. That assistance had the United States stepping directly into Ukraine’s civil war on behalf of the nationalist government that resulted from the Maidan coup. This assistance was also instrumental in prompting Russia to intervene in Ukraine in February 2022.³³

Eastward expansion of NATO and internal intervention in former Soviet Republics (especially Ukraine) are the “means” whereby the United States has exploited fractures in the post-Soviet order and provoked conflict. The next piece of the puzzle is “why” the United States chose to go in that direction. The answer lies in U.S. politics, the triumph of the neocon movement, and the power of the military-industrial complex.

The third external driver of U.S. intervention in Ukraine is neoconservatism, a U.S. political doctrine that rose to ascendancy in the 1990s. It holds that never again shall there be a foreign power, such as the former Soviet Union, that can challenge U.S. global hegemony. The doctrine gives the United States the right to impose its will anywhere in the world, with the result that the United States has over 750 bases in more than eighty countries, ringing both Russia and China.³⁴

The neocon objective is U.S. global hegemony. That objective has driven both eastward expansion of NATO and interference in former Soviet Republics aimed at fostering anti-Russian sentiment and provoking conflict with Russia. The neocon doctrine initially seeded itself among hardliner Republicans like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and was then adopted in the 1990s by Democrats under the leadership of Clinton. Consequently, it became a bipartisan U.S. consensus. Moreover, the Democrats added insidious cover by claiming the U.S. motivation is promotion of democracy and human rights, which provides a fig-leaf cover for the goal of U.S. global hegemony.³⁵

Regarding Russia, the neocon playbook was explicitly laid out by former U.S. National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997 in a Foreign Affairs article and a book titled The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.³⁶ Brzezinski was a key figure in the formation of both Cold War and post-Cold War U.S. policy. His views reflect his belief in U.S. neoconservative doctrine and his deep animus toward Russia.³⁷ The goal was ensuring U.S. global supremacy. The recommended strategy was incrementally surrounding and isolating Russia via NATO expansion, combined with intentional detachment of Ukraine from Russia. Brzezinski viewed Ukraine as essential to Russian power, writing: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”³⁸

Furthermore, Brzezinski casually floated the idea of dismembering Russia, speciously proposing it to be in Russia’s interests: “A loosely confederated Russia—composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic—would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with Europe, with the new states of Central Asia, and with the Orient, which would thereby accelerate Russia’s own development.”³⁹

Brzezinski’s writing spoke to the level of U.S. aggression against Russia and foreshadowed what has followed with extraordinary detail, to the extent of almost constituting a self-incriminating neoconservative master plan. The short-term plan was NATO expansion; the medium-term plan was turning Ukraine against Russia and detaching it from Russia; and the long-term plan was dismembering Russia. Viewed in that light, U.S. intervention in Ukraine was a stepping-stone to further attacks on Russia.⁴⁰

Neoconservative doctrine guides U.S. geopolitical thinking and strategy, and it is supported by the military-industrial complex. That complex binds the U.S. military, the Defense Department and associated bureaucracies, and the massive defense industry, which supplies the military. This creates a hugely powerful political-economic interest that significantly determines foreign and national security policy. Moreover, the influence of the military-industrial complex ripples deep into U.S. society. It influences Congress via political campaign contributions and promises of jobs and consultancies to politicians. It also exerts a massive influence on public opinion and public understanding of national security via a network of financial sponsorship that includes the mass media, think tanks, universities, and the film and video game industries.⁴¹

The critical point is that the end of the Cold War promised a major reduction in military spending, which posed a huge economic threat to the military-industrial complex. The neocon project defused that threat. It provided a justification for continued Cold War-level military spending and more. Additionally, that spending can continue forever, because maintaining hegemony is a project without end.

An additional piece of the puzzle is European complicity with the U.S. neoconservative project, exemplified by Europe’s willing support of eastward NATO expansion and Europe’s sabotage of the 2014 Minsk peace process. Prima facie, Europe’s support is a puzzle because Europe has lost out economically from the rupture of relations with Russia and has borne the socioeconomic blowback (for example, the flow of refugees) from the conflict.

Further reflection reveals multiple explanations. The most compelling is that Europe’s military and foreign policy apparatus has been hacked by the United States, and it now serves U.S. rather than European interests.⁴² The hacking process has the U.S. government and its corporate partners placing a heavy thumb on the political scales of European countries. They do so by assisting amicable politicians, promoting supportive journalists and academics, and providing friendly political interests with financial and media support. Talking-class professionals (journalists and academics) are helped with career advancement.

Europe also has its own military-industrial complex, which is tied at the hip to the United States via NATO. Additionally, Europe’s defense industry wants to supply the U.S. military, the world’s biggest purchaser of equipment, and that requires supporting U.S. policy. Finally, history should not be neglected. Europe’s elites have their own long-standing animus toward Russia, which is especially acute in the United Kingdom, and, to a lesser degree, in Germany.⁴³

The fourth external driver of conflict has been the myth of democracy promotion, whereby a benevolent United States is dedicated to globally promoting and protecting democracy. As mentioned, that story has been especially embraced by liberal Democrat neocons. The democracy promotion myth traces back to the nineteenth-century notion of American exceptionalism, which promoted the idea that the United States was an exceptional nation measured in terms of its ethical character and having a special mission. That idea is now bipartisan. For Republicans, the special mission is framed in terms of protecting and expanding freedom. For Democrats, it is framed in terms of a duty to safeguard and expand democracy.⁴⁴

The democracy promotion narrative is a myth, and debunking it involves a long history of international relations that is far beyond the scope of this article. For current purposes, what matters is to recognize how the narrative has helped drive conflict in Ukraine. Here, it is important for three reasons. First, it has provided Western public opinion with justification for both eastward expansion of NATO and intervention in Ukraine and former Soviet Republics. Second, it has mobilized U.S. and Western public opinion against Russia, and it keeps public opinion supportive of the war. Third, it has masked the reality of the motives behind the eastward expansion of NATO and internal intervention in Ukraine. Metaphorically speaking, the eastward expansion of NATO and U.S. intervention in Ukraine have both surfed on the back of the democracy promotion narrative.

In effect, the democracy promotion myth has been critical for mobilizing Western public opinion on behalf of the neoconservative project, and here it does double duty. First, it enlists public support for the U.S. project of global hegemony by tricking the public into seeing aggressive U.S. interventionism and militarism through the benevolent lens of democracy promotion.

Second, it suppresses U.S. domestic opposition to such policies, with the myth creating a form of intellectual tunnel vision. The public is inhibited from seeing the reality of pursuit of selfish national interest, despite a long history of such action—some of which violates international law and includes the overthrow of democratic governments. Furthermore, those who challenge the narrative risk being tarred as unpatriotic and undemocratic.

Since the myth facilitates the neoconservative project, the democracy promotion narrative is embraced by the military-industrial complex, which profits from that project. In effect, the narrative greenlights military spending and foreign interventions in the name of protecting and promoting democracy.

Over the last decade, the democracy promotion myth has been joined by a new myth of “Autocracy Inc.,” according to which the United States confronts an existential threat from foreign autocrats who seek to topple Western democracies and establish their own domination thereover. The Autocracy Inc. myth ramps up the case for U.S. interventionism, militarism, and military spending. Now, not only is the United States protecting and promoting democracy (the old “American exceptionalism” trope), but it also faces an existential threat from foreign autocrats. That new narrative creates a scenario of perma-conflict, justifying further increased military spending without a time limit. In the view of the military-industrial complex, this is even better than the Cold War, an end to which could be negotiated. According to the Autocracy Inc. narrative, no such negotiation is possible.⁴⁵

The democracy promotion narrative and its newer Autocracy Inc. sibling are extremely dangerous. The former encourages self-righteous interventionism, while the latter promotes paranoia. Each alone would be dangerous; together they risk being catastrophic. They both encourage foreign policy aggression and military interventionism while cloaking such behaviors as “benevolent selflessness” and “self-defense.” Both are now being employed to drum up public support for sustaining the Ukraine conflict.

The toxic effect of the myths works via their capture of Western public opinion. Shifting public opinion away from support for war is essential to ending the Ukraine conflict and preventing future conflicts. Changing public opinion is also needed as a check on the military-industrial complex and neoconservative dominance of the U.S. political establishment. Unfortunately, public opinion has been captured by the self-righteous crusading narrative of democracy promotion and the paranoid Manichaean “good versus evil” narrative of Autocracy Inc., which pushes policy in the opposite direction. Those twin narratives render compromise almost impossible, encourage conflict intensification, and strengthen the political grip of the neocons and military-industrial complex.

No algebra can discredit such thinking. All that is possible is appeal to logical argument, evidence, and history. Here, disdain for history kicks in again. The lack of interest in history means there is little likelihood of changing public understanding. Furthermore, the U.S. establishment has no interest in doing so. Instead, the opposite is true. The establishment wants to sustain and nurture existing misunderstandings.

Worse yet, the more the United States (with NATO help) seeks to impose global hegemony, the more it prompts other countries to respond and build up their armed forces. Additionally, economic sanctions by the West compel countries to find other economic partners. Consequently, the United States creates a self-fulfilling prophecy as countries under threat from the United States will tend to cluster economically, diplomatically, and militarily. However, that clustering is defensive and not offensive, as claimed by the Autocracy Inc. myth.

The Outbreak of War: Russia’s Military Intervention Explained

I have used the metaphor of a scissors to explain the conflict. The internal fractures in the post-Soviet order constitute one blade. The external factors associated with U.S. intervention constitute the other blade. Nationalist animosities are the pivot point joining the blades together. Those animosities created internal divisions within former republics. They also provided the entry point for the United States to insert NATO into the Baltic republics, as well as for internal interventions in other former Soviet Republics. Thus, these animosities served both blades.

Russia’s 2022 intervention should be understood as an escalation of a conflict that had already been triggered by the 2014 Maidan coup. Pre-2014, Russia persistently opposed the expansion of NATO but reluctantly accepted it. The 2014 coup was the straw that broke the camel’s back, prompting secession in the Donbass oblasts and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Thereafter, the Minsk peace process (2014–2021) created a period of “phony war” that delayed full-blown hostilities. Russia appears to have engaged in the process in good faith, though its critics claim its demands were unacceptable. However, France and Germany (the Normandy Group) who represented the U.S./NATO bloc appear to have acted in bad faith. In a December 7, 2022, interview with Die Zeit, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the Minsk Accord was “an attempt to give Ukraine time” in which to strengthen itself while the United States provided massive military assistance.⁴⁶

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine seems to have been prompted by a double trigger of diplomatic and military developments. On the diplomatic side, there was Clause 69 in NATO’s Brussels Summit declaration of June 14, 2021, which enshrined the hardline U.S. position that Ukraine had a pathway to NATO membership, regardless of Russian objections.⁴⁷ That position was reaffirmed with even stronger language in the November 2021 bilateral strategic partnership signed by the United States and Ukraine.⁴⁸

On the military side, in February 2022, there was evidence of an imminent Ukrainian military offensive against the Donbass secessionists, with Ukrainian forces now equipped with a decade of U.S. military support. Such an offensive might have defeated the secessionists, putting Russia’s hold on the Crimea at risk. Russia’s military intervention preempted that outcome.⁴⁹

A balance sheet accounting of the war has Ukraine and Europe being clear losers. Russia’s situation is complicated but net positive. The United States is a clear winner, at least in the short term. Ukraine is the biggest loser. Its economy and infrastructure have been decimated, large swathes of land have been mined or captured by Russia, millions have fled the country as refugees, tens of thousands have been killed or wounded, democracy is suspended, the proto-fascist extremists are politically in charge, and the country has many of the characteristics of a failed state.

Europe is also a major loser. It is suffering large Ukrainian refugee inflows and the socioeconomic costs and adverse political backlash that they generate. The economic costs have been especially large. European energy prices stand to be permanently higher due to the loss of cheap Russian energy supplies. The jump in energy prices caused temporary inflation and will result in permanently lowered real incomes and loss of international industrial competitiveness, adversely impacting its manufacturing sector. Europe has also forfeited the economic opportunity of capital goods exports to Russia owing to sanctions. Its beneficial trade and investment relationship with China is also being undermined, as the United States is insisting NATO allies move to a war footing vis-à-vis China, which is supportive of Russia and rejects U.S. global hegemony.⁵⁰

Russia’s position is mixed but is net positive. On the one hand, it has suffered tens of thousands of casualties and the destruction of much military hardware. It has also suffered loss of economic opportunity owing to sanctions and severing of trade opportunities with Europe, and there is the unresolved issue of the West’s impounding of its foreign exchange reserves. On the other hand, it has achieved its goal of checking the U.S. project of incremental strategic threat escalation that slowly erodes Russia’s security, and it has also substantially achieved its goal regarding neutralizing the security threat posed by Ukraine joining NATO. The war has also provided a reality check for the Russian military that promises to deliver future military improvements.

Additionally, Russia may reap important economic benefits, as the war has given Putin political power to crack down on corruption and diminish the power of oligarchs.⁵¹ It is also benefiting from an economic pivot to military Keynesianism and social democratic Keynesianism. As argued by James K. Galbraith, the sanctions regime has been a form of policy gift, enabling and prompting Russia to implement a pro-development policy that it might have been politically unable to undertake otherwise.⁵² An open issue is whether China and other countries can step in and supply the advanced technology products that the U.S./NATO bloc refuses to supply.

In the short term, the United States is the chief winner from the conflict, which helps explain the Biden administration’s determination to prolong and escalate the conflict. It has suffered no direct battlefield damage from the conflict, whereas Russia is suffering ongoing military losses. Economic damage to the United States has been limited to some temporary commodity inflation in 2022, and it has been offset by the benefits of military Keynesian stimulus that goes with providing weapons to Ukraine. Most importantly, the United States has stepped into Russia’s shoes as an energy supplier to Europe. That has increased U.S. energy exports and benefited the economies of its Gulf Coast states. Geopolitically, it has also rendered Europe dependent on U.S. energy while separating Europe from Russia, which fits with the U.S. project of global hegemony. Similarly, the accompanying ratcheting up of economic tensions between Europe and China also serves that project, with Europe again bearing large costs from trade and investment losses.

In the long term, the balance sheet looks worse for the United States for geostrategic reasons. First, except for NATO and the Pacific countries allied with the United States, most of the world appears to see some merit in Russia’s security claims. Second, and most importantly, the United States has succeeded in consolidating a comprehensive strategic Sino-Russian alliance that stands to permanently diminish its power and undercut the project of U.S. global hegemony. Unfortunately, those long-term adverse effects have little bearing on the conflict as they are largely irreversible, whereas the short-term benefits continue to flow. That configuration gives the U.S. establishment an incentive to continue the war.

In Ukraine, democracy is suspended and internal opposition to the war is suppressed. The nationalist extremists control the military and are the dominant political force, with President Volodymyr Zelensky as figurehead. That means Ukraine is also locked into conflict, as the nationalists are unwilling to compromise.

Russia is slowly grinding toward a victory of arms, with the risk of a nuclear event ever-present. It deems Ukrainian NATO membership an existential security threat, and its fears have been substantially validated by the war. It has also spent much blood and treasure for its war gains, which it will not surrender.

The above assessment suggests the outlook and prognosis for peace are grim, and the conflict is likely to continue until either the battlefield outcome is decisively settled or Western public opinion changes. The war should never have happened. The United States green-flagged Ukraine’s adoption of positions that would lead to conflict, and it then blocked all attempts to prevent the emerging conflict. The United States at present continues to enable Ukraine to keep fighting by resupplying destroyed weaponry and by providing additional advanced weaponry, technical assistance, and military intelligence.

The fateful 2014 Maidan coup set the ball rolling. The Minsk peace process offered an off-ramp, but it has now been revealed that the United States and NATO were not interested in such a de-escalation. Instead, France and Germany stalled the process, buying time for the United States to arm Ukraine, with the goal being defeat of the Donbass secessionists. Russia’s proposal for a Ukraine treaty settlement in November 2021 offered the last opportunity for peaceful resolution centered on a demilitarized, NATO-free Ukraine, but that proposal was dismissively rejected by the Biden administration. Peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022 offered an opportunity for a quick end to the war, but that was again blocked by NATO, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the U.S. proxy.

The war has not changed attitudes, but negotiation possibilities have narrowed and worsened. Prior to the 2014 Maidan coup d’état, a modus vivendi was possible, with Ukraine retaining its 1922-based borders and Russia holding a lease on the Sevastopol naval base, as per the 2010 Kharkiv Treaty. The 2014 coup took that off the table permanently, with Russia reclaiming Crimea, which Khrushchev had gifted to Ukraine in 1954. The 2022 war has further changed the situation, with Russia annexing the Donbass oblasts that were incorporated in Ukraine in 1922.

Before 2014, Ukraine could have readily negotiated an accord with Russia. Now, that possibility is substantially blocked for both internal and external reasons. Internally, Ukraine’s extremist nationalists have acquired absolute political and military control so that domestic political opposition to the war is impossible. Those extremists are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. Externally, Ukraine’s nationalists are beholden to the United States, as their military and political position would collapse absent continued U.S. support. That dependence gives the United States huge sway, and the United States has wanted the war to continue, since it bears little cost and sees benefits in the damage being inflicted on Russia.

In effect, Ukraine’s nationalists made Ukraine a “sacrificial pawn” in the project of U.S. global hegemony. That role now consigns ordinary Ukrainians to fight a war of attrition against Russia over which they have no say. The war will only end when either Russia prevails on the battlefield, the war goes nuclear, or U.S. policymakers rethink the merits of the war.⁵³ Unfortunately, neocons have ideologically based difficulties compromising or retreating, as that constitutes a tacit surrender of U.S. hegemony. Consequently, if the neoconservative position prevails, that will lock the United States into keeping the conflict going. That means shifting Western public opinion to compel the United States to accept a compromise with Russia, critical for ending the war.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explored the deep causes of the Ukraine war and argued that the war has both internal and external causes. The internal causes are rooted in the way the Soviet Union disintegrated. The external causes relate to how the United States exploited the fractures in the post-Soviet order to advance its neoconservative agenda aimed at establishing U.S. global hegemony.

The war has devastated Ukraine. It has destroyed Ukraine’s economic foundation, triggered mass population flight, caused tens of thousands of deaths, and solidified the fascist nationalist grip on political and military power. Assisted by the United States, Ukrainian nationalists captured Ukrainian politics and refused to compromise with the complicated political and demographic reality of post-Soviet Ukraine. In doing so, they made Ukraine a sacrificial pawn in the U.S. project seeking global hegemony, with fateful consequences that may yet worsen further. Europe has also supported this folly at great cost to itself.

ICC's Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself

Russia-Ukraine War — ICC's Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself

ICC's Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself

Article 4 of 6

The Grayzone

By Jeremy Loffredo, Max Blumenthal

Originally published at https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-report/

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a network of camps inside Russia. The warrant was based on a report by the Yale HRL center, which is funded by the US State Department.

US journalist Jeremy Loffredo visited one of Russian government-sponsored camps in question. At The Donbas Express, located just outside of Moscow, Loffredo met youth from war-torn regions who were flourishing thanks to free music instruction, and grateful to be in a secure environment. This article features his exclusive video report.

A Grayzone review of the Yale HRL report found the paper’s content contradicted many claims contained in the ICC warrant. It also undercut incendiary statements its director, Nathaniel Raymond, issued during media appearances.

In an interview with Loffredo, Yale HRL’s Raymond further contradicted allegations he made in a CNN interview about a massive “hostage situation” underway in Russia, acknowledging that most of the camps he researched were “teddy bear”-like cultural programs. He also disclosed his collaboration with US intelligence.

On March 17, the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, introduced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova. The warrant, which accused Putin and Lolva-Belova of conducting the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a “network of camps” across the Russian Federation, inspired a wave of incendiary commentary in the West.

US Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most aggressive cheerleader in Congress for war with Russia, proclaimed: “The ICC has an arrest warrant for Putin because he has organized the kidnapping of at least 16,000 Ukrainian children from their families and sent them to Russia. It is exactly what Hitler did in World War II.”

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoed Graham, declaring the ICC warrant revealed that Putin “is in fact following parts of Hitler’s playbook.”

The ICC prosecutor appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). Yale HRL’s work was funded and guided by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.

During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Yale HRL’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, claimed his report provided proof that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation.” Invoking the Holocaust, Raymond asserted, “We are dealing with the largest network of children camps seen in the 21st century.”

Yet in an interview with Jeremy Loffredo, the co-author of this report, and in his own paper for Yale HRL, Raymond contradicted many of the bombastic claims he made to the media about child hostages. During a phone conversation with Loffredo, Raymond acknowledged that “a large amount” of the camps his team investigated were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”

Yale HRL’s report similarly acknowledges that most of the camps it profiled provided free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents sought “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.” Nearly all of the campers returned home in a timely manner after attending with the consent of their parents, according to the paper. The State Department-funded report further concedes that it found “no documentation of child mistreatment.”

Yale HRL based its research entirely on Maxar satellite data, Telegram postings, and Russian media reports, relying on Google translate to interpret them and at times misrepresented the articles in its citations. The State Department-funded unit conceded that it performed no field research for its paper, stating that it “does not conduct ground-level investigations and therefore did not request access to the camps.”

Unlike the Yale investigators who inspired the ICC’s arrest warrant, Loffredo gained unfettered access to a Russian government camp in Moscow that houses youth from the war-torn Donbas region. Though it is precisely the kind of center that Yale HRL – and by extension, the ICC – have portrayed as a “re-education camp” for Ukrainian child hostages, he found a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors – a “teddy bear,” as Raymond called it.

At The Donbas Express music camp located just outside of Moscow, youth told Loffredo they were grateful to have found refuge from the Ukrainian army’s years-long campaign of shelling and besiegement of their homeland. By fleeing the war in Donbas, these children had escaped a nightmarish military conflict for which Yale HRL and the ICC have demonstrated little to no concern.

Free music lessons, “spiritual enrichment,” safety from war, and US condemnation: a visit to the Donbas Express

When I, Jeremy Loffredo, visited a youth music camp in Russia in November 2022, I was unaware that the US government would soon exploit altruistic programs such as the one I witnessed to advance political warfare.

At the time, I was in Moscow on assignment for Rebel News, my former employer, to conduct man-on-the-street interviews with average people around the city.

After meeting someone whose wife was influential in the Russian music scene, I was invited 45 miles southwest of Moscow to visit the kind of program that was described by State Department-funded researchers as a “re-education camp.” It was there, at a Soviet-era hotel in the town of Pokrovskoye, that I entered one of the so-called facilities now at the center of the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin.

By the time of my visit, the Russian government had transformed the hotel into a makeshift sleep-away camp for children native to the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The center I visited, dubbed “The Donbas Express,” was focused on providing classical training to children interested in musical arts. Parents who wished to keep their families protected from the conflict back home had enrolled their children in the program.

Peter Lundstrem, a professional violinist and teacher at the Donbas Express, explained to me, “Thanks to the support of the State Presidential Fund, we were able to bring 80 children from Donetsk and Lugansk regions. They are talented young musicians and they’re here for 12 days. They live here and take lessons from outstanding music teachers. They put together concerts. They receive education.”

Despite its glaring flaws and failure to seek on-the-ground corroboration, the State Department-funded Yale HRL report got one thing right about the experience of children enrolled in the Donbas Express: they are likely to keep their involvement in the program secret. In the eyes of Ukrainian authorities, the simple act traveling to Russia — even for free music lessons — is tantamount to collaborating with the enemy.

As the report says, “Many families in Ukraine do not want to publicly share their [camp or school] experiences because they fear they will be seen [by Ukraine] as collaborators with Russia.”

Of the students involved in Donbas Express, Lundstrem said, “So that you understand what is done to children like these in Ukraine… children who receive any kind of help from Russian people or the Russian state… they would be simply killed.”

For much of their lives, these youths lived with the threat of death on a daily basis. For the eight years leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ethnically Russian population of Donbas endured regular shelling at the hands of the US-backed, nationalist government in Kiev. Even before February 2022, that civil conflict had left thousands of civilians, including children like the ones I met at the Donbas Express, dead.

“Of course many of [the young people enrolled in Donbas Express] were greatly affected by this conflict,” Lundstrem said. “Many of them lost houses. Some of them lost their relatives and friends. In the conflict zone, they in fact cannot continue their professional music studies. In Donetsk, philharmonic and general education institutions are not functioning.”

Although the State Department-funded Yale report would have Americans believe that Russia’s move to open camps such as the Donbas Express amounted to war crimes, the students I met there did not want to leave.

“Of course they all want this program to continue. They want to stay and for it to go on and on. But we can do these small things only. We will do this again in the future maybe,” Lundstrem told me.

I spoke with two Donbas Express students on camera. Each expressed effusive gratitude for the program.

“I am here on invitation, on generous invitation,” said one from Donetsk. “I never thought I would get to come to Moscow. I’ve been helping to perform in concerts, which is helpful for spiritual enrichment and soul purification. And I’m here to develop my musical performing skills.”

“Here, we continue our musical studies despite what has been going on around us because it gives us relief,” another kid from the Donbas told me.

Like all other students in the program, these aspiring musicians grew up in a region in open rebellion against a Ukrainian government that has banned their Russian Orthodox religious denomination, sought to outlaw the Russian language, and violently attacked the ethnic Russian population of the country.

Most, if not all, of the students enrolled in the Donbas Express identify with the Russian nation, according to their instructor. “They have this [patriotic] song, ‘My Homeland Is Coming Back,'” Lundstrem commented. “All of these 80 kids were screaming it. Simply screaming this song.”

But the teacher emphasized, “We are not organizing [the Donbas Express] for political reasons. We’re not here to say, ‘Russia forever!’ for example. We’re here to help these children. But of course, we’re Russians.”

The political sympathies and Russian ethnic background of the children who traveled from eastern Ukraine to programs like the Donbas Express is referenced only in passing by Yale HRL’s State Department-funded report.

Content of Yale HRL report contradicts ICC arrest warrant

Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the State Department-sponsored Yale HRL, appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on February 16, 2023 to announce what he called “an Amber Alert for Ukraine’s children.”

Alluding to the Holocaust, Raymond claimed he and his team had uncovered “the largest number of camps seen in the 21st century,” a finding that constituted possible “evidence of genocide.”

“They’re trying to make them into Russians,” Raymond said, asserting that Russian authorities had forcibly removed the Ukrainian children from their families and subjected to coercive military training.

“Thousands of children are in a hostage situation,” the State Department-backed Yale researcher proclaimed.

With an indignant scowl on his face, CNN’s Cooper muttered, ‘This is truly sickening. This is sick.”

However, the actual content of the February 14 2023 investigation Raymond directed on behalf of the State Department conflicts with his claims of a “hostage situation.”

Raymond’s apparent cluelessness about the situation inside many of the youth camps may stem from the fact that neither he nor any of his colleagues sought to visit them. Nor did they attempt to contact any children who attended the camps, their parents, or staff members.

As his report states, “Yale HRL does not conduct interviews with witnesses or victims; only the specific information available in open source is collected. When analysts are unable to identify public information about whether a child has returned home, it can be difficult to ascertain the current status of the child. Similarly, Yale HRL does not conduct ground-level investigations and therefore did not request access to the camps.”

In other words, the researchers that informed the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin conducted no field research, and admit they failed to obtain concrete information regarding the children’s status.

The paper acknowledges that, in fact, “Many of the children who have attended these camps appear to return to their families when scheduled.”

Also buried in the report is the following disclosure: “Many children taken to camps are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled.”

“Many of these parents are low-income and wanted to take advantage of a free trip for their child,” the Yale HRL/State Department paper continues. “Some hoped to protect their children from ongoing fighting, to send them somewhere with intact sanitation, or to ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live. Other parents simply wanted their child to be able to have a vacation.”

So if the children voluntarily attended the camps and were mostly returned on time, while most parents provided “meaningful” consent” and were grateful that their children could be in a safe place with healthy food, where was the “evidence of genocide” that Raymond alleged during his CNN appearance?

According to the Yale HRL/State Department’s paper, “There is no documentation of child mistreatment, including sexual or physical violence, among the camps referenced in this report.”

The report’s citations contain a link to a RIA Novosti article about a two-week summer camp in the Russian town of Magadan. Polina Tsvetkova, a child quoted in the article, provided an unequivocally positive review that mirrored those offered by enrollees of the Donbas Express:

“While we were driving from the airport, we were very impressed with the local landscapes. I like to walk in the fields, pick flowers. It is very interesting to see nature. All kinds of beautiful views. When we were driving, I saw small rivers flowing from the mountains. Very beautiful, the views are simply gorgeous.” 

The Yale HRL/State Department paper omits the testimony of joyful summer camp attendees featured in the RIA Novosti article it cited. Instead, it deploys the article in order to claim: “Children have been transported [to camps] by bus, train, commercial aircraft, and, in at least one case, by Russia’s Aerospace Forces.”

As he did during his CNN appearance, Raymond’s State Department-sponsored report glossed over a single fact that exploded his entire assertion that “thousands of  [Ukrainian] children are in a hostage situation.” That is: nearly all of the children referenced in the Yale HRL/State Department report are ethnic Russians from families and communities that have sided with Russia in its conflict with the nationalist government in Kiev.

The youth who attended the camp referenced in the RIA Novosti article were from Zhdanovka, a town in the Donetsk Republic that separated from Ukraine in 2014, and formally declared its independence in 2022. Yet the ICC and all other official Western sources referred to these youth simply as “Ukrainian,” as though they were forcibly extracted from pro-Kiev communities occupied by Russian forces and subjected to brainwashing inside Russian internment camps.

The Yale HRL/State Department refers to the political and ethnic background of the youth campers only in passing, noting at one point, “Many families in Ukraine do not want to publicly share their experiences [at camp] because they fear they will be seen as collaborators with Russia.”

Not only have the Yale HRL/State Department paper’s authors demonstrated zero concern for the safety of these families, they have inspired calls for their immediate return to a conflict zone where they could be tortured or killed by the Ukrainian government.

Referring to the evacuation of 500 orphans from Donetsk in February 2022 just as Ukrainian forces escalated their attacks on the separatist republics, the authors write, “The reason given publicly by Russia’s government at the time was the supposed threat of an offensive by the Ukrainian armed forces against the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR).”

The citation provided to support this claim is a report by Donbas Insider detailing how the Ukrainian army had intensified its shelling of civilian areas in Donetsk on February 19, 2022, destroying a house, a poultry farm, and an electricity substation, leaving 800 residents without electricity. It was the 43rd Ukrainian violation of a ceasefire in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Five days later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, announcing a mission to “demilitarize” the country.

So does extricating orphans from the Donetsk war zone to safer ground inside the Russian Federation constitute the crime of “kidnapping,” as Raymond alleged?

The Yale HRL/State Department researcher apparently upholds an extremely loose definition of the term. Back in 2020, Raymond approvingly tweeted a Washington Post editorial denouncing the Trump administration’s policy (continued by the Biden administration) of separating minors from migrant parents: “Let’s not mince words. The Trump administration kidnapped children.”

“Teddy bear” camps: in interview, Yale HRL director contradicts “hostage situation” claims, discloses US intel ties

Nathaniel Raymond is a technologist who has worked at various international NGOs and universities, from Oxfam to Harvard’s Signal Project, and claims he served on the ICC’s tech advisory team. Before securing his post as a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, he worked for George Clooney, the Hollywood celebrity who helped make the plight of the Darfur region of Sudan a cause celebre. Clooney, for his part, campaigned alongside the pro-Israel groups and President George W. Bush, who threatened to send US troops to Darfur.

“I count tanks from space for George Clooney,” Raymond quipped to the Guardian in 2012, referring to his pioneering use of Maxar satellite technology to document alleged human rights abuses.

When I, Jeremy Loffredo, learned that Raymond’s Yale HRL had issued a report on Russia government youth programs like the Donbas Express, I emailed him to inform him that I had been to one of these camps back in November 2022. I told him I was open to sharing my experience with him. He agreed to speak to me by phone.

Raymond explained to me that when he arrived at Yale HRL in 2021, he was directing a State Department-sponsored project documenting the Afghan government’s alleged abuses against the country’s Hazara minority. But as US intelligence began warning of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the mission quickly shifted.

“Our initial concept of operations was actually on Afghanistan,” Raymond said. “And we got rerouted to Ukraine. We were going to be watching the Hazara. And, and then we got, we got pulled in on this. And two weeks before the invasion happened, we were told to standby and form a squad, and then by Spring, we knew the good stuff was happening.”

Raymond added that the US National Intelligence Council applied “a lot of pressure” on his team at Yale HRL to document the Russian government’s operations to move citizens from eastern Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

“We were like, ‘Okay, how are we going to do this?'” he recalled. “And so we spent the Summer into the early Fall, trying to figure out our operational concept. And it wasn’t until October [2022], that we really realize how to do it. And the trick was, when we broke it open, it was getting inside Russian VPN networks looking like Russian citizens looking at local mayoral VK [Russian social media] accounts.”

Raymond said his team relied on the Pentagon’s US Indo-Pacific Command to “expand our satellite access in the Pacific Command to get the Siberian and eastern camps.”

When asked why his research team did not attempt to visit any programs inside Russia like the Donbas Express, Raymond said, “We’re persona non grata. We’re considered extensions of US intelligence by the Russians.”

Though he acknowledged working closely with US intelligence and the State Department, Raymond denied that Yale HRL’s focus on alleged Russian atrocities at the exclusion of those committed by Ukraine was driven by US government funding. “The Ukrainian alleged Ukrainian abuses, we probably can’t see through our means,” he insisted. “Because they’re small unit stuff with POW’s mostly. Like, they shot a bunch of guys in the knees allegedly.”

Raymond pointed to his unit’s documentation of a Russian strike on a Ukrainian grain silo as a typical example of “Ukrainian bullshit.” “What we think [the Ukrainians] were doing,” he said, “is they were running an ammonium phosphate lab, underneath that silo, to build munitions.”

Though he said that “the only thing that could have made that [blast] hole is basically a bomb factory,” Raymond claimed it was impossible to confirm his suspicion.

He used a metaphor about traffic violations to explain why Yale HRL was focused exclusively on nailing the Russian government: “We got a parking violation in terms of the laws of armed conflict, like the Ukrainians are double parked in a moving zone, right? At a bus stop. And the Russians, meanwhile, are doing the DUI in the 16-wheeler through a shopping mall.”

While minimizing the Ukrainian military’s documented shooting of defenseless prisoners and use of civilian infrastructure to conceal military installations, Raymond homed in on Russia’s policy of bringing ethnically Russian children to cultural programs, accusing Moscow of a criminal process of “Russification.”

When asked about the fact that most of the children involved in the programs Yale HRL investigated already consider themselves Russian, and come from separatist, ethnic Russian regions that have been targeted with violence by Ukraine’s US-backed government, and that some have no home to return to because they were destroyed in the conflict, Raymond was dismissive.

“Even if that was true, it’s a war crime,” Raymond insisted. “Under the Geneva Convention, one state party to an armed conflict cannot adopt or transfer children from the other state party under any circumstances.”

While Raymond would not consider the ethnic and political backgrounds of the children while determining whether their rights had been violated, he freely acknowledged that the vast majority of camps his team at Yale HRL investigated were, like the Donbas Express, “primarily cultural education, like I would say, teddy bear.”

The Myth of 'Russian Imperialism': In Defense of Lenin's Analyses

Russia-Ukraine War — The Myth of 'Russian Imperialism': In Defense of Lenin's Analyses

The Myth of 'Russian Imperialism': In Defense of Lenin's Analyses

Article 5 of 6

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2023/03/07/the-myth-of-russian-imperialism-in-defense-of-lenins-analyses/

The following in-depth, 8000 word article was originally published in 2016. However, it has become as relevant as ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 27, 2022.

Red Ant republishes it here to contribute to the debate around the nature of the Russian invasion, of Russia itself and its relationship with the bloc of rich, imperialist countries like the USA, UK, Germany and Australia.

The question of the nature of Russian capitalism, and the broader questions of which countries are imperialist and what defines a state as imperialist in the Marxist sense, are crucial for anti-imperialist socialists – especially those based in rich countries like Australia.

If we consider Russia (or indeed China) to be examples of imperialist states, then what differentiates them from the rich, imperialist societies such as Australia? If it is not only the rich countries but also Russia (and China) that are “imperialist” then why not, for example, India? India also has an aggressive foreign policy in many regions and has more overseas military presence than China. Why not Indonesia too? And Morocco? and Iran? and Brazil? And so on.

If every capitalist country can be considered “imperialist”, then the word loses all meaning beyond a basic dictionary definition. The dictionary defines the word in its mainstream or liberal sense. In his 1917 book Imperialist: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin developed a Marxist definition of imperialism. This Marxist theory gave that word a very specific meaning completely distinct from its mainstream or dictionary use.

The theoretical definition of imperialism is also critical for how we understand the Ukraine War. If Russia is imperialist – just like the USA, Germany and Australia – then its invasion should be outright opposed by socialists. On the other hand, if Russia is not imperialist, but in fact remains one of the exploited and oppressed Global South countries, then its invasion of Ukraine has a fundamentally different characteristic – no matter how wrong headed or counterproductive the policy may be.

If Russia is imperialist, then the US, UK and EU military encroachment upon it, including through their long-term military aid and training to Ukraine, has the character of being part of inter-imperialist conflict among imperialist rivals.

By contrast, if Russia remains one of the economically exploited and oppressed Global South nations, then the US, UK, EU imperialist military aggression against it has a reactionary, imperialist and oppressive characteristic: the characteristic of the oppression of an exploited country by the exploiter countries. If that is the context, then the Russian response, including the Ukraine invasion, would have to be understood differently.

The Myth of ‘Russian Imperialism’, In Defense of Lenin’s Analyses

By Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis, A Socialist In Canada, Feb 29, 2016

The following essay (8,200 words) expands on this earlier essay:
Perpetrator or victim? Russia and contemporary imperialism, by Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis, February 2016

A sharp controversy within the international left in recent times has concerned the place occupied by Russia in today’s capitalist world-system. Is Russia an imperialist power, part of the “centre” of global capitalism? Or, do its economic, social and politico-military characteristics mark it as part of the global “periphery” or semi-periphery – that is, as one of the majority of countries that, to one degree or another, are the targets of imperialist bullying and plunder?[1]

Traditionally, the Marxist left has used the term “imperialism” with a high degree of discrimination. Imperialism for Marxists is not something called mysteriously into being when “greed” overcomes political leaders. Nor is it simply external military action, however aggressive. For Marxists, the imperialism of our time arises from specific features of the economies and social orders of the most advanced capitalist countries.

The classic Marxist definition of imperialism in the modern epoch was provided by V.I. Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. As viewed by the Bolshevik leader, the advanced capitalism that had emerged during the preceding decades had these salient characteristics:

“(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”[2]

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, Lenin argued, the economies of the most industrially advanced countries had moved into a new phase of “monopoly capitalism”. Control over economic life by the biggest concentrations of capital had reached the point where in each of these countries, a tightly interlocked group of the most powerful financial and industrial capitalists held unchallenged sway.

Still unable, though, to find fields of investment at home for much of the capital they had accumulated (suffering, in other words, from a chronic surplus of capital), the financial-industrial magnates found themselves compelled to multiply and intensify their operations abroad. Increasingly, the trading operations of the past were augmented and overshadowed by direct investment, a great deal of it in regions where the development of capitalism was in general much weaker. In these regions – the “periphery” of the emerging imperialist system – the new global hegemons could find cheap raw materials, abundant low-wage labour power, and customers for the goods produced in the countries at the system’s “centre”. By the end of the nineteenth century, the need to secure the new investments and fend off competitors had led to the incorporation of most areas of the periphery into vast colonial empires.

Imperialism has evolved a great deal since Lenin’s time, but it is remarkable how apposite his analysis remains. While specific forms have changed, each of the key underlying features noted by the Bolshevik leader is still very much in place. The “international monopolist capitalist associations” of Lenin’s time – the cartels and trusts – have morphed into multinational mega-corporations and their policing agencies, the IMF, World Bank and WTO. The colonial empires have vanished in formal terms, but their essence persists in mechanisms aimed at reinforcing stark global inequalities of power and wealth that are immensely profitable for the global centre. These mechanisms of post-colonial robbery and oppression include the direct remittance of profits by imperialist-owned enterprises; debt dependency; constant political meddling by the centre; and when other methods fail, trade embargoes and armed coercion.

A further mechanism of plunder, less recognised but among the most powerful, is implicit in the underlying structures of global trade. This is the set of phenomena known as “unequal exchange”. In exporting capital, the global capitalist centre has consistently maintained its monopoly over the most advanced and sophisticated (and hence profitable) technologies and economic functions. In the imperialism of colonial times, firms at the centre used their monopoly advantages to sell their manufactured goods at a stiff price premium. The producers of raw materials in the colonies and semi-colonies were forced to compete against one another, and thus to content themselves with much lower margins. The trade between centre and periphery was therefore profoundly unequal. Behind a façade of impartial markets, value was siphoned from the periphery to the centre.

A further “value siphon” was implicit in the difference between the massive capital investment in the factories of the centre and the much lower capitalisation usual for the farms, plantations and other enterprises of the periphery. Between centre and periphery, the gap in labour productivity was huge. In exchanging their raw materials for manufactured goods, the colonies and semi-colonies in effect exchanged large quantities of labour power, and hence value, for much smaller amounts. The industrialists of the centre, despite paying comparatively high wages at home, profited handsomely. Capital accumulation took place overwhelmingly in the countries of the centre, while the periphery remained poor.

Since decolonisation, the forms underlying unequal exchange have evolved extensively, though their purpose and general outcomes remain unchanged. Complexes of investment and production that once were unified are now broken up across national borders. The most specialised and profitable functions – research and development, financing, design, marketing, and the most demanding aspects of production – are still monopolised by the firms of the centre. Low-profit functions are outsourced to the periphery, where local enterprises are forced to compete with one another for contracts to produce components and carry out assembly.

For this system to work, an important degree of industrialisation has had to take place in the more advanced areas of the periphery. Major economic differences have thus opened up within the periphery itself, to the point where it has become necessary to speak of a broad “semi-periphery” of global capitalism.

The semi-periphery, however, is still unmistakeably peripheral in relation to the system as a whole. It remains substantially shut out of the most profitable economic functions, and its industrialisation is of a distorted, narrowly-based, dependent kind whose logic is that of maximising imperialist profits.

Between the centre and semi-periphery, there remains an economic and social chasm. Between the U.S. and Mexico, for example, the effective difference in average living standards is more than three to one, and between Germany and Turkey, well over two to one.[3] The capitalism of the semi-periphery remains underdeveloped, its relatively weak state machines possessing only a limited ability to resist imperialist financial blackmail and politico-military interference.

For Marxists, an ability to distinguish between the imperialist centre and the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery – that is, between advanced capitalism and its prey – is an indispensable tool. Lack of clarity on this division makes gross political errors virtually inevitable.

Lenin and Tsarist Imperialism

Before proceeding to examine the place held by Russia in today’s global capitalism, we need to clarify an issue that has been the source of a good deal of confusion. This relates to characterisations of the tsarist Russian Empire made by Lenin in the period surrounding the outbreak of the First World War.

In 1914, Lenin was among the few European socialist leaders to reject the ruling-class siren song that called on workers to set aside class struggle and join the national war effort. His position of “revolutionary defeatism” rested on the analysis that tsarist Russia was a great imperial power and that Russian workers and peasants had nothing to gain from its victory.

If the Russia of 1914 is measured against the imperialism of our own time, Lenin’s categorisation of his country as imperialist seems highly problematic. Only in a few enclaves was Russian capitalism in 1914 advanced by world standards; in most of the country, production and exchange were primitive. Much less was Russia marked by an over-accumulation of capital; to the contrary, it was a large-scale international borrower. Lenin, however, was not wrong in regarding tsarist Russia as an imperialist power. The country’s colonial possessions ranked with those of France, if not of Britain. With its large population and army, the tsarist empire was a major interventionist force in European politics despite its backwardness. Its relatively recent history included expansionist wars against Turkey.

Lenin was acutely aware of the contradiction implicit in categorising the primitive, backward Russian Empire as an imperialist force alongside the modern imperialisms of Western Europe. In writings in 1916, the Bolshevik leader made clear that he viewed the imperialism of Russia as being of a qualitatively different nature from that of the West, as resting on fundamentally distinct economic and social foundations. He drew a sharp distinction between “crude, medieval, economically backward”[4] tsarist imperialism, and the system in its “advanced capitalist, European” form.[5]

What were the economic and social roots of the “medieval” imperialism to which Lenin referred? In the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires during the first decades of the twentieth century, the traditional feudal-dynastic and mercantile imperialism, based on the extraction of peasant rents and merchants’ profits, retained a certain vitality. It was clearly in respect of this “old” imperialism, a holdover from an earlier historical epoch, that Lenin regarded the Russia of pre-revolutionary times as imperialist.

For practical purposes, the changes that accompanied the end of the First World War marked the end of the “old” imperialism. Today, we seek in vain for some lingering, wraith-like emanation of that old system that might allow us to slip in a characterisation of Russia as “imperialist”. The material basis for such a characterisation has passed into history. Russia’s place in the capitalist world-system must now be plotted strictly on the basis of the modern financial-industrial imperialism whose opening phase Lenin analysed.

So, what is it, within the paradigms of modern imperialism, that marks countries as members of today’s exclusive imperialist club? Apart from the chasm that separates the imperialist world from the developing countries in terms of general prosperity, a series of other criteria can be identified. Of course, individual imperialist countries will not necessarily display all these markers. But if today’s Russia is indeed imperialist, this will show up as a relatively dense “clustering” of the characteristics that will now be examined.

An Advanced Capitalism?

For the purposes of this study, the most general question needing to be posed is whether the system now prevailing in Russia is, in any real sense, “the highest stage of capitalism” – that is, advanced capitalism.[6] To anyone seriously familiar with Russia, the argument that the country’s production and exchange can be described in this way is quaint in the extreme. Russia’s per capita Gross Domestic Product (measured at Purchasing Power Parity) in 2015 was a little under US$24,000 – rather less than half of the U.S. level, significantly behind Malaysia, and similar to the figures for Chile and Argentina.[7]

The gap separating Russia from the most prosperous countries of the developed world is still more striking if we examine wealth, as distinct from income. The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook for 2015 shows that in most of the countries that clearly qualify as imperialist, wealth per adult at current exchange rates in mid-2015 was in excess of $200,000. In Russia, the figure was just $11,726. This was a little above the figures for Jamaica and Paraguay, well below the one for Brazil, and barely half those for South Africa, China, and Mexico.[8]

In 2014 Russian labour productivity, a key indicator of overall economic development, was also low at just under half the European average and about 35 per cent of the level in the U.S.[9]

More will be said in other contexts about the poverty and backwardness of today’s Russian economy. For the present, some general points need to be made on the forms and structures of the country’s capitalism. Left-wing political economists in Russia stress the essential weirdness of a system that has no close analogues except in other countries of the post-Soviet expanse. There is a consensus that Russian capitalism is nothing like the “highest stage” of the system, but is instead a de-developed throwback that perpetuates the managerial culture, as well as key informal structures, of the late Soviet period – that is, of bureaucratised “state socialism” in its final phase.[10]

The classic study of the real functioning of today’s Russian economy is provided by Ruslan Dzarasov of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. Dzarasov describes a system in which the rule of law is haphazard, and entrepreneurs depend for their commercial survival on the favour of corrupt bureaucrats. Control of enterprises is concentrated in the hands of “big insiders”, who for purposes of tax evasion and financial fraud conceal their ownership behind an elaborate “offshore cloud” of fictitious foreign-registered companies. Hostile takeovers are a commonplace, routinely backed by physical violence. In these circumstances, senior managers make up for their insecure tenure by plundering company revenues, using the “offshore cloud” to hide the proceeds abroad.[11]

Phenomena such as these are not unknown in the capitalism of countries much richer than Russia. Capitalist doctrine, of course, condemns them as a danger to the system. In advanced capitalist countries they are not so prevalent as to stop investment and accumulation from going ahead. But in Russia these marks of weakly developed capitalism are not incidental but pervasive, and play a key role in keeping the country’s economy in semi-developed form. Within

Russia’s “Jurassic capitalism”,[12] little of the profit pie is left for investors who are not themselves big insiders, or closely in league with them. Understandably, levels of productive investment are abysmal.[13] Dzarasov cites data showing that the present average age of Russian industrial equipment, at around 21 years, is roughly twice the figure at the end of the Soviet period.[14]

Russian Monopolism

The forms of Russia’s present-day capitalism include a high degree of monopolism. In almost all sectors of the economy, a relative handful of corporations dominate. This might suggest a close match between the processes of Russia’s capitalism and those of the system as found in advanced, imperialist countries, but the analogy is deceptive. Today’s Russian monopolism, to paraphrase Lenin, did not arise out of a “high stage” of capitalist production and accumulation. Typically, Russia’s monopolies have their roots in the large, integrated production complexes that were favoured by Soviet planning. Reinforcing the trend to monopoly has been the fact that in capitalist Russia’s violent, chronically unstable business milieu, medium-sized firms rarely prosper.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that monopolies are no longer unusual in the countries of today’s capitalist semi-periphery. As well as reflecting the process of concentration that occurs in all capitalisms, this situation also stems directly from state initiatives. Developing-country governments have often set up wholly or majority state-owned monopoly corporations, like the Iranian, Saudi and Nigerian state oil corporations. The existence of these corporations does not mean that the countries concerned are imperialist.

Privately-owned monopolies in developing countries tend to differ from their imperialist-world counterparts by being far smaller. Russia has few companies, either private or state-owned, that approach in scale the “hyper-corporations” of the advanced West. In Forbes magazine’s 2015 list of the worlds 2000 largest publicly-traded companies, the highest-placed Russian firm is the gas corporation Gazprom in 27th place, while the oil corporation Rosneft is listed at number 59.[15] Both these companies are majority state-owned. The largest privately-controlled Russian corporation listed by Forbes is LUKOIL, in 109th place. In all, Russia rates 27 firms in the Forbes list – similar to Brazil with 25, and well behind India with 56.

The top tier of Russian corporations is heavily dominated by firms with their base in natural resources extraction or raw materials processing (including metallurgy), and whose output is largely exported. Apart from two state-controlled banks, the largest eight Russian companies listed by Forbes all have this character. For export-oriented extractive industries to have major weight in the economy is unusual for advanced capitalism. But it is encountered frequently among countries of the periphery – and especially among the least developed, most dependent states.

The most powerful privately-controlled Russian company that does not have an obvious link to the resource sector is the retail chain Magnit, at number 701 on the Forbes list. Russia’s non-extractive, non-processing private corporations are thus rather modest in size by world standards.

A Russian Finance Capital?

In his writings on imperialism, Lenin speaks of “the creation, on the basis of…‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy”.[16] But the key positions of today’s Russian business elite are not financial. The fusion of industrial and financial capital that Lenin identifies with modern imperialism is not the major face of Russian capitalism, and has occurred in the country only to a limited degree.

In the literature on Russia’s financial industry, numerous comments and statistics attest that this sector is small and relatively undeveloped. Russia is strikingly poor in financial assets. Credit Suisse in its Global Wealth Databook for 2015 cites the astonishingly low figure for financial assets per adult in Russia in mid-2015 of $2,490, compared to $8,204 in Brazil, $25,962 in Chile, and figures in Western Europe that mostly top $100,000.[17] The low figure for Russia reflects the weak development since Soviet times of the financial instruments, including stocks, bonds, money market funds and bank deposits, that in most parts of the capitalist world make up the bulk of wealth.

Within the finance capital of an imperialist country, a central element is a highly developed banking system. Lenin speaks of “the ever-growing merger, or…coalescence, of bank and industrial capital and…the growth of the banks into institutions of a truly ‘universal character’.”[18] But there is nothing universal about Russia’s banks. A commentary from 2012 has the following note: “Banking-sector assets represent only 75 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with developed economies, in which banking assets typically exceed 100 per cent of GDP.”[19]

Russia’s small banking industry is dominated by two majority state-owned banks descended from Soviet financial institutions. Neither of these two is especially big in world terms. In the SNL Financial list of the world’s largest 100 banks as of 31 March 2015, Sberbank ranks at number 59 while the VTB Group holds 100th place.[20] The remaining Russian banks are much smaller.

With a market capitalisation in May 2015 of $26.9 billion, Sberbank measured on this basis is less than one-tenth the size of the world’s largest bank, the U.S.-based Wells Fargo, and not much more than 40 per cent as big as Brazil’s largest bank, Itaú Unibanco.[21] Brazil, moreover, has four banks in SNL Financial’s top 100, compared to Russia’s two.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia’s banking system has had a chaotic history that reflects the criminality and general dysfunction of Russian business. During the 1990s, many hundreds of small banks were founded by rising business magnates, often as poorly-concealed tools for financial malfeasance. Press reports on the Russian banking industry complain of poor lending practices, lack of transparency, high rates of bad loans, money-laundering and at times, massive fraud. In December 2015 Bloomberg reported that in the course of that year around 100 Russian banks, representing 13 per cent of the industry, had been stripped of their licenses by the Central Bank authorities.[22]

The two top Russian banks are important corporate players, but to try to depict Russia’s small finance capital as a hegemonic sector making up the core of the economy is naïve. The real hegemonic force in the country is a close fusion of top state officials with industrial oligarchs, the latter mainly from the resource-extractive and metals-processing fields. For decisive power to be held by such a cabal of bureaucrats and resource-based, export-dependent business chiefs is a pattern that has many precedents in the history of peripheral countries.

Russia’s finance capital, meanwhile, has never made much impact in the archetypal role played by this sector in modern imperialism – as the cutting edge of economic expansion outside the country’s borders. Unlike major Western banks with their massive international operations, Russian banks focus overwhelmingly on domestic lending. A partial exception is the VTB Group, reconfigured by the Russian government in 1990 to service the country’s international trade. As of the end of 2013, VTB was operating in 23 countries, with notable stakes in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Sberbank entered the international field in 2006 and by 2012 had purchased banks in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and Turkey, stating that it planned to generate about five per cent of its net income outside Russia by 2014.[23]

Russian banks were eventually to gain a foothold in Ukrainian financial markets. But their position in Ukraine has never been dominant, even in relation to other foreign banking interests. In 2014, three Russian banks – Sberbank, AlfaBank and the VTB group – held 3.2%, 2.8% and 2.8% of the Ukrainian banking market respectively, out of total market share of 31 per cent held by foreign banks.[24]

Russian Industry and Trade: Imperialist or Dependent?  

As explained earlier, the top tier of Russian corporations is dominated heavily by firms with their base in raw materials extraction and processing. The industrial sectors in imperialist countries present a sharp contrast, with knowledge-intensive, high value-added functions normally prevailing. Even in imperialist countries where extractive industries are important, as in Canada and Australia, the economies are generally diverse, with a broad range of activities making substantial contributions to GDP.

The Soviet Union in its later decades had a diversified economy, with all important productive sectors at least moderately developed. The return to Russia of capitalism, however, has seen broad areas of production go into catastrophic decline. While the arms industry remains globally competitive, Russia’s civilian industries have been starved of investment. High-tech civilian firms have been among the hardest hit.[25] The relatively backward nature of most industrial production in today’s Russia aligns the country firmly with the developing, not the developed world.

In their export trade, imperialist countries typically show a marked bias toward sales of sophisticated, high-value merchandise; of knowledge-intensive technical services; and also of financial services. Here too, Russia bears the marks of the periphery. Services in 2013 provided a low 11.8 per cent of total Russian export sales, and in this area the country ran a massive deficit.[26] The structure of Russian merchandise exports further reflects the “de-development” of industry since Soviet times; in 2013 energy carriers and mineral products made up 71.5 per cent of the total, with refined metals, basic chemicals, forestry products and foodstuffs accounting for most of the remainder. The category of machines, equipment and vehicles comprised only 5.5 per cent,[27] consisting mostly of weapons and related military supplies.[28] On the other side of the ledger, machines, equipment and vehicles made up 48.5 per cent of merchandise imports.[29]

In absolute terms, World Bank data for 2013 put Russia’s exports of high-technology products at $8.656 billion – roughly half the figure for India, about the same as for Brazil, and less than 30 per cent of the sum for (imperialist) Italy.[30] Brazil and Italy have GDP at current prices close to that of Russia.

The picture of Russia that emerges here is not of an imperialist power but of a petro-state that must pay top prices to import most of its sophisticated equipment, while depending for its solvency on sales of a handful of low value-added generic commodities. In marketing most of its key exports (natural gas is an exception), Russia competes directly with other low-wage, low-productivity countries. When world markets for these commodities are saturated and prices are low – as they very frequently are – the wealthy countries that are often the main purchasers can secure their needs for almost derisory sums.

Significantly, Russia conducts little of its trade with the poorer countries of the periphery, whose trade offerings and purchases tend to replicate its own. Its main sources of imports are countries of the centre (especially the EU) and a range of semi-peripheral states (China, and various countries of the former USSR) that share its general level of economic development.[31] Russia thus gains almost nothing from the lopsided trading relations that siphon value to the imperialist centre at the expense of the world’s poorest inhabitants. Indeed, we have to surmise that the country loses heavily from unequal exchange.

Russia’s Outward Foreign Investment: Behind the ‘Cloud’

All capital must seek to expand, and in their pursuit of profits, capitalists in semi-peripheral countries will frequently search out investment opportunities outside their national borders. This is despite typically acute shortages of capital for tasks of national development at home. Rates of genuine outward investment by non-imperialist countries, however, do not as a rule approach those for countries of the imperialist centre.

Russia’s raw figures for outward foreign investment present a tangle of paradoxes. Suggesting massive capital exports, the figures seem to place the country at the apex of imperialism. But what are we to make of the fact that the Russian Central Bank’s figures for foreign direct investment put the main destination (by far) of Russia’s capital exports as Cyprus, followed by the British Virgin Islands?[32] Both these territories are notorious as tax havens and money-laundering centres.

Russian entrepreneurs often acquire their enterprises for startlingly small sums through hostile raids, backed by corruption and violence. If the businesses are unprofitable, as is often the case, assets will routinely be stripped and sold. The uncertainties of Russian capitalism then make the attractions of capital flight extreme.[33]

Even where the goal of entrepreneurs is not to strip companies and shut them down, large sums that might be used to modernise the enterprises finish up abroad. Plundered by owners and senior managers who know they could at any time be thrown out of their offices by masked gunmen, these funds after laundering are mostly invested in the West – for the most part, reputedly, in low-risk securities or real estate.

Meanwhile, even the routine, day-to-day operations of Russian business require that manoeuvres around the law be made untraceable. For this purpose, large sums are continually “round-tripped” between Russia and the offshore zones, and these transfers register as “foreign investment”. Any attempt to determine how much of Russia’s capital exports can be described as “real” – and claimed, conceivably, as proof of imperialism – thus contains an element of guesswork. But from surveys of particular firms and their identifiable investments, some observations are possible.

A 2013 study of the top 20 non-financial Russian multinational enterprises gives a figure for their total foreign assets at the end of 2011 of $111 billion.[34] For comparison, this total was only about a third of the foreign holdings in 2013 of the world’s largest non-financial multinational, the U.S.-based General Electric Co., alone, and less than half of the foreign assets of Exxon Mobil Corporation.[35]

Globally, none of the Russian non-financial multinationals rates among the top 100 such firms when ranked by foreign assets.[36] The 2013 study cited above puts the share of foreign holdings in the assets of the top 20 non-financial Russian multinationals at a modest 14 per cent. Worldwide, top-ranking multinationals commonly have well over half their holdings outside their “home” countries, and for resource-based firms (most of Russia’s leading capital exporters are in this category) this tendency is especially marked.[37]

The largest Russian foreign investor, LUKOIL, is recorded by the above-cited study as having oil and gas projects in 14 foreign countries, as well as refineries, petrochemical plants and chains of filling stations. But with foreign assets in 2011 of $29.16 billion,[38] LUKOIL in that year had only about one-tenth of the foreign holdings of the world’s largest oil multinational, Royal Dutch Shell.[39] LUKOIL’s foreign assets in 2011 amounted to barely a third of its holdings overall.[40]

Plainly, Russian multinationals are mostly small beer, and their foreign investment tends to be merely an adjunct to their activity within Russia’s borders.

A favourite argument of supporters of the “Russian imperialism” thesis nevertheless concerns plans, headed by the state-controlled conglomerate Rostec, for new Russian investments in Africa. United Nations figures show past Russian investment in Africa as relatively small-scale, with cumulative direct investment in 2011 of about $1 billion.[41] But over the coming decade, Rostec projects building a $4 billion oil refinery in Uganda and a $3 billion platinum complex in Zimbabwe.[42]

Impressive as these plans might seem, they do not compare remotely with the foreign investment activity of real imperialist powers. Canada, for example, has GDP at current prices about the same as Russia’s. But alongside Canada’s foreign investors, Russian firms are stay-at-home skinflints. Canadian mining companies in 2012 operated 80 mining projects in Latin America and had 48 more at the development or feasibility stage.[43] In 2013, Canadian foreign direct investment in Chile amounted to C$18.2 billion; in Mexico to C$12.3 billion; in Brazil to C$11.1 billion, and in Peru to C$8.1 billion.[44] In Africa, the projected Russian investments are almost trivial beside the existing activity of Australian resource firms.[45]

Russian Investment in the CIS

After “Cyprus” and Western Europe, Russian foreign investment has been concentrated in other post-Soviet countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).[46] Quantifying this investment precisely is impossible, since much of it is unquestionably routed through the “offshore cloud”. But with all due allowances, Russian corporate expansion into the CIS countries has to be seen as small by world standards, and minor in terms of overall Russian capital exports.[47]

Russian government figures, for what they are worth, suggest that in terms of accumulated funds, the only one of the CIS countries that in 2011 rated among the top ten global destinations of Russian foreign investment was Belarus, in fifth place.[48] Data for specific transactions reveal a pattern in which major Russian investment deals in the CIS have been few in number. A list of the largest global share purchases by Russian firms between 2005 and 2010 shows that of 24 deals, only four involved assets in CIS countries. The largest of these saw the acquisition by the Russian telecommunications firm Vimpel-Com in 2010 of the Ukrainian mobile phone company Kyivstar, for $5.589 billion. Other Russian share purchases in the CIS countries were much smaller, of $2.5 billion or less.[49] These sums are significant, but it is clear that in their aggregate they lag massively behind, for example, Canadian investment in Latin America.[50]

In Ukraine, government figures at the end of 2012 put Russia well behind Germany and the Netherlands as a source of cumulative foreign direct investment, with a slender seven per cent of the total.[51] The Russian economic presence in Ukraine is in fact more substantial that this would suggest, since investment has also been directed through offshore zones. Russian interests dominate Ukrainian telecommunications, oil refining and aluminium production, with further important stakes in ferrous metallurgy, mechanical engineering, and electricity generation and distribution.

Political developments in the past few years, however, show plainly that the impact of Russian investment in Ukraine has been far from hegemonic. Russia’s economic relations with Ukraine since Soviet times have not been those of an imperial overlord, but rather, have unfolded in the context of economic interpenetration between neighbouring countries on similar levels of technological and social development. The holdings of Ukrainian oligarchs in Russia, it should be noted, are by no means negligible.[52]

Military Potential and Arms Exporting

Only somewhat less fundamental than the dominance by imperialist countries of global economic structures is the role they play in policing the world order. Countries of the centre are typically members of politico-military blocs directed against the periphery and semi-periphery. Leading imperialist powers have important weapons industries, and participate as sellers in the global arms trade.

Does Russia’s military potential, along with its arms production, suggest the country should be seen as part of the imperialist camp? Military potential can fulfil defensive purposes as well as aggressive ones. If we examine Russia’s armed forces not simply as a military aggregate, but as a factor in a broad standoff of international political forces, we find the evidence points in a distinctly un-imperialist direction.

By far the dominant military power in the European region – and indeed, the world – consists of the 28 member states of NATO. In their combined 2014 “defence” spending, NATO members outstripped China by a factor of about 4.4, and Russia by more than ten to one.[53] True, a dollar in low-wage Russia buys more military potential than in Western Europe or the U.S. But if an appropriate adjustment is made, the difference is still arguably at least five to one.[54]

In the decades since the Soviet Union expired, NATO has been expanded to the point where Russia now faces an arc of U.S.-aligned states, on or near its borders, from Turkey to the Gulf of Finland. Anyone who accepts the existence of imperialism ought to concede that as an economically vulnerable country – and as the object of unsubtle armed threats from the world’s most potent military bloc – Russia is entitled to assign relatively large resources to its self-defence.

Part of the cost of Russia’s military defence is defrayed through arms exports. In 2014, the Russian arms production complex sold a record $13.2 billion worth of weaponry on world markets.[55] In the years from 2010 to 2014, Russia commanded 27 per cent of global arms sales, second only to the U.S. with 31 per cent, though with a far narrower spread of customers.[56]

These numbers, however, need to be kept in perspective. In 2013, Russian arms firms enjoyed total sales at home and abroad of $31 billion.[57] But this sum was less than sales that year by the world’s largest single arms corporation, Lockheed Martin, alone.[58] In 2014, seven Russian firms made the list of the world’s top 100 arms producers. But the figure for U.S. corporations was 42, with seven of the top 10 places.[59]

Meanwhile, the weakness of the claim that large-scale weapons exports are in themselves evidence of imperialism is shown by the fact that in 2012 the world’s fourth-largest armaments exporter was Ukraine, supplying weapons under contracts signed with no fewer than 78 countries.[60]

Social Structure and Welfare Provisions

For many non-specialists, economic and even military factors are less important for distinguishing between imperialist and non-imperialist countries than the quality of the daily lives of the masses of ordinary citizens. In imperialist countries, the perception goes, such people live well, and when they do not, they at least benefit from functioning state health and welfare systems.

To be more scientific, imperialist countries possess sizeable middle classes, consisting of betterpaid hired employees, independent professionals, and small and medium entrepreneurs.[61] The “good life” of these layers reflects to a significant extent the success of imperialism in extracting value from developing-world populations. Meanwhile, the relative prosperity of broad middle classes feeds into and sustains imperialism. Middle-class people exercise effective consumer demand that underpins a multitude of national businesses, and their savings make an important contribution to the financial system. Their contentment with their lives feeds conservative attitudes, securing social peace at home and consent to wars abroad.

How does Russia rate according to these criteria? The Russian middle class, as properly understood, is tiny. There is simply no way that the mass of Russian wage workers can be considered “middle-class”. A 2013 dataset, compiled before the steep devaluation of the ruble in the later months of 2014, shows a large majority of Russians with per capita monthly incomes in the range of $300-800.[62] In Russian cities, especially Moscow and St Petersburg, such sums even at their upper-level cover little more than basic food and clothing, together with utility charges and transport fares. Such incomes are bearable for working people only because most do not pay rent, having been able to privatise their previously state-owned apartments.

What amount of income in Russia really confers middle-class status, in the meaningful sense of having appreciable discretionary spending power and an ability, if desired, to save money? As a rather generous rule of thumb, we shall define a middle-class income in Russia as the sum needed to secure a modest Western-style standard of living.

In 2013, U.S. Census data reveal, median per capita income (half below, half above) in the U.S. stood at $1,668 per month. This sum does not buy an opulent life-style in the U.S., and nor does it do so in Russia. Still, a Russian family with a per capita income of $1,668 per month in 2013 could buy a used car and household durables including a large, flat-screen television set, as well as tasteful clothes and furnishings. They could take out a mortgage on a modest apartment, dine occasionally in restaurants, and think about holidays in Turkey.

At what point, in Russia’s 2013 scale of income distribution by population, did the above level of well-being cut in? Data from that year show that only 10.9 per cent of Russians had per capita money incomes greater than 50,000 rubles per month – at that point about $1,520. [63] This indicates strongly that in that relatively prosperous year the proportion of Russians with lifestyles resembling those of median-income Americans, or better, was no more than about 10 per cent.

Clearly, there is nowhere in this picture for a broad, prosperous middle class, exercising substantial consumer demand. Most Russians get to consume little more than essentials, with the result that consumer manufacturing and services remain weak.

In imperialist economies, high labour productivity is underpinned by developed education, health and social security systems. Neo-liberalism in recent decades has seen these systems come under relentless attack, but they remain a distinctive feature of advanced capitalism.

In Russia, social provisions have deteriorated markedly since Soviet times. The country continues to turn out impressive numbers of highly-trained personnel, but spending on education is now well below average OECD levels, both in absolute terms per capita and as a proportion of GDP.[64] Gross spending on research and development fell from two per cent of GDP in 1990 to an essentially developing-world figure of one per cent in 2008,[65] before recovering to 1.5 per cent in 2013. The latter figure compares with 2.8 per cent in the U.S. and Germany, and 3.4 per cent in Japan.[66]

It is in the area of health care, however, that Russian capitalism has caused the country to regress most spectacularly to developing-world status. Acute funding shortages have forced large-scale spontaneous privatisation of health services. In a 2015 world survey of life expectancy, Russia with its average figure of 70.47 years was rated at number 153 of 224 listed countries, behind Honduras and Bangladesh.[67]

Conclusion: the Necessity for Leninist Analysis

Summing up, what causes might be found for admitting Russia to the “gated community” of highly developed capitalist states, the imperialist countries? In essence, none – or perhaps one, if we ignore the specificities of Russia’s arms production and accept this as an “imperialist” characteristic.

On the other hand, Russia exhibits a dense clustering of the characteristics needed to identify it as part of the capitalist semi-periphery.

Russia is not home to an advanced capitalism, or to a broad, prosperous middle class. Its monopolies tend to be puny alongside those of various countries that are clearly part of the semi-periphery, let alone the corporate monsters of the imperialist centre. Russian industrial production has lost much of its past diversity, and its overall technical level is decidedly backward, while in a pattern reminiscent of the least developed areas of the periphery, the extractive sector accounts for a notably large share of output. Russia’s foreign trade has a markedly dependent character, and the country exports mainly basic commodities for which prices are often depressed. Conducting little trade with poorer areas of the periphery, Russia does not benefit significantly from unequal trading exchange. There is no overall surplus of capital in Russia, and while the country nonetheless exports capital, this is for perverse reasons and despite a near-catastrophic lack of investment in infrastructure and productive plant.

With its real foreign investment concentrated in countries of the centre, Russia plays little direct part in the quintessential imperialist activity – the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing-country labour and resources. Russia’s finance capital is small and weak, and the largely criminalised, chaotic nature of the Russian financial sector rules out any possibility that this sector might play a hegemonic role within the economy.

No possible doubt can remain here: in the terms that Lenin defined, present-day Russia is not an imperialist power.

But who was Lenin anyway? And a century after he wrote, does today’s left still have to line up at his mausoleum? Aren’t there alternative analyses, more modern, incorporating the changes imperialism has undergone since 1916?

There are – but not Marxist ones. A materialist analysis of today’s capitalist world-system – and of its salient feature, the staggering global polarisation of wealth between its privileged core and impoverished outlier territories – has to base itself on Lenin’s definitions and methodology. Various modifications to Lenin’s analysis are indeed required, and the concept of the semi-periphery is just one of them. But are we to suppose that there can be an adequate take on modern imperialism that doesn’t rest on monopolism, on the power of finance capital, on the system’s over-accumulation of capital and on its resulting compulsion to expand its sphere of operations? And where all or most of these elements are missing, or are present only in part and ambiguously, doesn’t that mean we’re dealing with a fundamentally different, non-imperialist entity?

Perhaps, though, we’re too hung up on the material realm and the constraints it puts on our thinking. Perhaps the definitions we should be applying are “definitions of the deed”. Maybe the crucial consideration is not what Russia is, but what it does. If a country uses its armed strength to meddle in affairs outside its borders, doesn’t that make it imperialist per se?

The trouble with that line of argument is that it quickly leads to truly bizarre conclusions. Many wars have been fought in the past half-century between countries of the periphery, and if we categorise Russia as imperialist simply on the basis that it has made armed incursions into nearby countries, then logically we should also speak of Pakistani imperialism, or Iraqi imperialism, or even, in recent times, of Sudanese imperialism.

If we categorise as imperialist countries that are clearly part of the developing world, how are we to explain the gulf between the global rich and poor? Used in this impressionistic, essentially liberal fashion, the term “imperialism” loses all potential as a tool for analysis. Understanding the nature and dynamics of present-day world capitalism then becomes impossible.

Specifically, if we reject a materialist analysis, we lose the ability to distinguish between the global hegemons and their victims. In crucial conflicts, we find ourselves displaying a myopic even-handedness that damns the mugged along with the muggers. In these circumstances, international resistance to imperialist violence is confused and blunted. The victims are denied our solidarity. From being opponents of imperialism, we are transformed into something close to its accomplices.

Renfrey Clarke is an Australian writer and political activist who was Moscow correspondent for Green Left Weekly during the 1990s–the chaotic years of the Soviet Union’s reversion to capitalism. Roger Annis is a writer and retired aerospace worker in Canada who made research visits to Crimea (2014) and the Donbass region (2015). They were editors of the website ‘The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond‘  from its founding in October 2014 to end-2017.

Related Readings:

An essay making a similar argument against notions of a ‘Chinese imperialism’ is here: Lenin’s theory of imperialism: A defence of its relevance in the 21st century, by Sam King, Marxist Left Review, winter 2015. British writer John Smith has authored Imperialism In The 21st Century (Monthly Review Press, 2016); an essay abstracted from the book by the same title was published by Monthly Review in July 2015.

Notes:

[some links were broken from the original article, fixed links were supplied in lieu where possible. – Ed.]

[1] Fuelling this debate in particular have been developments in Ukraine since U.S. and Western European imperialism in February 2014 secured the overthrow of the elected administration of Viktor Yanukovych. This overturn had been plotted in some detail by U.S. diplomats, and U.S. agencies had spent billions of dollars on preparing it. When opposition to the new ultra-right Kyiv government surfaced as popular revolts in Crimea and the Donbass, and received support from Moscow, the Western media were quick to accuse Russia of “imperialism”. This meme was then taken up and repeated uncritically by important sections of the Western left.

[2] V.I. Lenin, Selected Works. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970, vol. 1, p. 737.

[3] GDP per capita at PPP, World Bank, 2014, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita

[4] See Lenin’s 1916 essay, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up. In National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism: Selected Writings by V.I. Lenin. N.Y., International Publishers, 1968, 1970, p. 164.

[5] Ibid., p. 147.

[6] See Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 736: “Capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when … the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres.”

[7] http://knoema.com/sijweyg/gdp-per-capita-ranking-2015-data-and-charts

[8] Table 2-4, http://publications.creditsuisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=C26E3824-E868-56E0-CCA04D4BB9B9ADD5 (link broken)

[9] Calculated from https://stats.oecd.org/ figures. See https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/08/10/russians-named-europes-least-productive-workers-a48862

[10] Outstanding exponents of this thesis include Moscow State University political economists Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov.

[11] See Ruslan Dzarasov, The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism (London, Pluto Press, 2014).

[12] This expressive phrase is that of Buzgalin and Kolganov.

[13] According to the World Bank, gross fixed capital formation in Russia in 2013 was 21.47 per cent of GDP, down from more than 30 per cent at the end of the Soviet period (https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gross-fixed-capital-formation)

[14] Dzarasov, op. cit., pp. 203, 204).

[15] https://www.forbes.com/lists/global2000/

[16] Lenin, Selected Works, vol.1, p. 737.

[17] Table 2-4, https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2015.pdf

[18] Lenin, op. cit., p. 701.

[19] https://www.kearney.com/financial-services/article/-/insights/a-chessboard-strategy-for-russia-s-banking-market

[20] https://www.capitaliq.spglobal.com/InteractiveX/Article.aspx?cdid=A-33361429-13866

[21] See www.forbes.com/companies/sberbank; www.relbanks.com/worlds-top-banks/marketcap; www.forbes.com/companies/itau-unibanco-holding/.

[22] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/deutsche-bank-tally-of-suspect-russia-trades-said-at-10-billion

[23] https://www.denizbank.at/en/AboutUs/

[24] CEE Banking Sector Report June 2015, https://www.raiffeisen.hu/web/english/home/-/content/v6BjwlShC3Uq/cee-banking-sector-2015-as-a-transition-year/maximized

[25] In a 2014 article, Moscow economic researcher Olga Koshovets had this comment on the fate of Russia’s civilian high-tech industry: “The existing production and technology capacities is [sic] practically exhausted, since it was created in the USSR and after its fall almost no new factories have been built and the existing production facilities haven’t been developed” (http://www.scientific-publications.net/get/1000007/1409340758352379.pdf

[26] Rosstat, 2013. See http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b14_13/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d04/26-01.htm. (link broken)

[27] http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b14_13/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d04/26-10.htm. (link broken)

[28] Russian arms exports, despite their success on world markets, have not altered the structure of Russia’s export trade substantially. In recent years weapons and military equipment, which make up about 60 per cent of Russia’s high-technology exports, have accounted for only about 3% of the country’s exports overall. See Olga B. Koshovets, https://www.scientific-publications.net/get/1000007/1409340758352379.pdf

[29] http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b14_13/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d04/26-13.htm. (link broken)

[30] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TX.VAL.TECH.CD

[31] See atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/rus/#imports (fixed link: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/rus)

[32] http://www.cbr.ru/eng/statistics/print.aspx?file=credit_statistics/dir_inv_out_country_e.htm&pid=svs&amp; sid=ITM_586. (fixed link: https://www.cbr.ru/vfs/eng/statistics/credit_statistics/direct_investment/65e-dir_inv.xlsx)

[33] The Moscow Times in May 2015 cited Russian government data that put the country’s net capital outflow in 2014 at $154.1 billion, and the total since 1999 at about $550 million. The paper goes on to note that according to independent researchers, the actual total may be greater than $1 trillion (https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/05/01/russia-massive-capital-flight-continues-a46263). An updated article from 2019: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/10/24/russia-capital-outflow-trillion-ussr-putin-economist-a67891

[34] IMEiMO and Vale Columbia Center, “Global Expansion of Russian Multinational after the Crisis: Results of 2011”. ccsi.columbia.edu/files/2013/10/Russia_2013.pdf. (fixed link: https://ccsi.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/docs/publications/Russia_2013.pdf)

[35] https://topforeignstocks.com/2014/09/16/the-worlds-top-100-non-financial-tncs-ranked-by-foreign-assets/

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] IMEiMO and Vale Columbia Center, “Global Expansion of Russian Multinational after the Crisis: Results of 2011”. ccsi.columbia.edu/files/2013/10/Russia_2013.pdf. (fixed link: https://ccsi.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/docs/publications/Russia_2013.pdf)

[39] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2012/07/10/biggest-transnational-companies

[40] LUKOIL’s total assets in 2011 were $84 billion. See https://www.forbes.com/lists/global2000/?sh=4c0c04df5ac0

[41] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/webdiaeia2013d6_en.pdf

[42] www.voanews.com/content/sanctions-hit-russia-looks-to-africa-to-boost-arms-techsales/2709611.html.

[43] http://cidpnsi.ca/Canadian-mining-investments-in-latin-america/

[44] http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/2014-49-3.html; cidpnsi.ca/Canadianforeign-direct-investment-abroad/ (links broken)

[45] Australian resource firms were recorded in 2014 as operating in more than 1000 projects across 30 African nations, and as having discovered almost $A700 billion (about $US650 billion) worth of minerals across the continent over the previous five years (www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-03/miner-look-to-africa-for-new-opportunities/5716934).

[46] An American study notes that of the foreign assets held in 2011 by the 20 largest Russian multinationals, more than 66 per cent were in Europe and in Central Asia, with 28 per cent in former republics of the USSR. See ccsi.columbia.edu/files/2013/10/Russia_2013.pdf. (fixed link: https://ccsi.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/docs/publications/Russia_2013.pdf)

[47] A 2014 study, citing Russian Central Bank data, states that of total Russian foreign assets in 2012 of $1241.4 billion, only $50.4 billion (4.1%) was held in other CIS states. See http://www.kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/DP/DP899.pdf. (fixed link: https://www.kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/DP899.pdf) These figures do not, however, take account of the “Cyprus” factor.

[48] See Rosstat, http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b12_13/Isswww.exe/Stg/d5/24-24.htm. (link broken)

[49] A.V. Buzgalin, A.I. Kolganov and O.V. Barashkova, “Rossiya: novaya imperialisticheskaya derzhava?” Unpublished manuscript, 2015.

[50] The 2005-2010 Russian purchases of CIS assets recorded by Buzgalin, Kolganov and Barashkova (op. cit.) total less than $12 billion.

[51] State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, cited in http://www.e-finanse.com/artykuly_eng/276.pdf. (link broken)

[52] See https://lenta.ru/articles/2014/09/04/property.

[53] Figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (books.sipri.org/files/FS/SIPRIFS1504.pdf). (link broken)

[54] In the case of Russia, the multiplier applied to nominal GDP in US dollars to obtain GDP at PPP is about 2.0 (IMF, World Bank).

[55] http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?id=526366. (link broken)

[56] SIPRI International arms transfers 2014 (books.sipri.org/files/FSSIPRI1503.pdf). Almost 60 per cent of Russian arms sales during these years were to just three countries, India, China and Algeria. (link broken)

[57] http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/russian-arms-exports-hit-13-billion-in2014/513553.html. (fixed link: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2014/12/17/russian-arms-exports-hit-13-billion-in-2014-a42407)

[58] http://www.sipri.org/reseaarch/armaments/production/recent-trends-in-arms-industry/The SIPRI Top 100 2013.pdf (link broken) (similar link: https://sipri.org/publications/2015/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-international-arms-transfers-2014)

[59] https://people.defensenews.com/top-100/

[60] http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/worlds-4th-largest-arms-exporter-in-2012-according-to-sipri-321878.html?flavour=full. (fixed link: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7543)

[61] North American bourgeois sociology, that denies or disputes the concept of a working class, obscures the class structure under advanced capitalism by categorising most employed workers as “middle class”. But when huge numbers of American workers live from pay to pay, or depend on welfare support to get by, this categorisation is plainly absurd.

[62] Figures prepared for this study by Anna Ochkina of Penza State Pedagogical University, on the basis of Rosstat data and surveys of household budgets. Personal e-mail 16 Aug 2015.

[63] Figures prepared by Anna Ochkina from Russian statistical sources.

[64] See https://www.oecd.org/education/Russian%20Federation_EAG2013%20Country%20Note.pdf

[65] https://www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46665671.pdf, accessed 7 Feb 2016.

[66] https://go8.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/publications/policy_note_government_research_funding_in_2014_in_selected_countries_final.pdf, accessed 7 Feb 2016. (link broken)

[67] https://www.infoplease.com/world-statistics/health-and-social-statistics/life-expectancy-by-country, accessed 7 Feb 2016

International Political Situation: Evolution of the International Situation and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Russia-Ukraine War — International Political Situation: Evolution of the International Situation and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

International Political Situation: Evolution of the International Situation and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Article 6 of 6

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Sam King

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2022/10/06/international-political-situation-evolution-of-the-international-situation-and-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/

The following is a report to the inaugural Red Ant conference held in Sydney August 27-29. At the conference Red Ant was formally founded as a new socialist collective in Australia advocating an anti-imperialist Marxist perspective and action.

This month, it is 31 years since the failed August 1991 military coup in Moscow that set off a series of events culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union – the collapse of the so called “communist” system.

Fundamentally, the collapse of the USSR was the final collapse of the state established by the working class’s revolutionary overthrow of the Russian capitalist class in 1917 – the establishment of a workers state. The workers state remained in place until 1991, despite the abuses of power by the bureaucratic caste that had assumed political control over it.

The Russian Revolution was perhaps the most important and globally consequential political event in human history. Its final collapse in 1991 resulted in a disastrous deterioration in the international balance of forces for working people that powerfully shaped the political situation we face today.

The long period of fallout since the collapse has radically weakened almost all sections of the global working class and the left – regardless of their orientation to the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was a major state that often (though not always) stood opposed to US imperialism. In the never-ending stand-off between imperialism and the oppressed nations, the presence of the Soviet state altered the power balance to the benefit of the Global South.

The collapse of Communist Parties (such as the Communist Party of Australia here), as well as of movements or organisations supported by these parties, had a wide-ranging negative impact on mass organising. The collapse also removed the Soviet system as an ideological competitor to the capitalist mode of production.

Prior to 1991, this competition – and the fact that a whole part of the globe had moved beyond capitalism – was a major factor pressuring governments to grant concessions to working people – especially the post-WWII welfare state in the imperialist countries.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was these gains that the economic program of neoliberalism sought to reverse.

Predictably, the triumphalist “end of history” euphoria that gripped capitalist ideologues in 1991 has proven unfounded. History had not ended. However, the next 25 years – until around 2016 – did prove to be one of the toughest periods for the socialist movement internationally.

But even this period of down-turn was not without opportunities and even some breakthroughs against the dominant current. Most notable was the defeat of capitalist state power in Venezuela in 2002.

The Venezuelan revolution – while not comparable in importance to the Russian – opened up space for revolutionaries, even in distant countries like Australia, to convince more people of the possibility of socialist solutions to the capitalist crisis.

While there were many important national variations globally, the overall period after 1991 was characterised by collapsing working class organisation, winding down of sustained mass movements and a decline in trade union density. This was accompanied by redundancies, privatisation, a reduction in public services, the corporatisation of state companies, greater unemployment and casualisation, and a shift in wealth from the working class to the capitalist class, and overall social atomisation and decay.

It was really only in Latin America that there was any sustained and effective resistance, such as the resistance by the block of states organised around the axis of revolutionary Cuba and Venezuela and extending to Bolivia and Nicaragua, and the centre-left electoral victories possible only due to support by popular mass movements (a dynamic that has returned to that region today).

Neoliberal Globalisation and the Economic Bonanza of Super-Exploitation

In addition to its political and ideological impact, the Soviet and Eastern European collapse and the introduction of capitalist market reforms in China had far-reaching economic consequences that shaped the whole period post-1991.

The revolutions in Russia and China (and elsewhere) collectively took around one third of the global population – and a huge part of the global land mass – out of the capitalist system and incorporated them into the socialist block.

Conversely, the reintroduction of capitalism (especially in the People’s Republic of China from the 1980s and accelerating after 1991) hugely increased the size of the capitalist world market – especially the global labour market.

The years 1991-2000 saw what Richard Freedman called the “great doubling” of the global labour force (available for capitalist exploitation) from around 1.5 billion to 3 billion. This figure also includes new workers coming into the global market from India, which like many other countries also adopted neoliberal policies around the same time.

From the 1990s, global production involved exploitation on a massive scale in both Chinese and also, importantly, Eastern European cheap labour, as well as that provided by India and the rest of the Global South.

More “globalised” and even “hyper-globalised” production chains controlled by multi-national corporations headquartered in the imperialist states, was arguably the critical economic ingredient that made the neoliberal period work – at least for capital.

This bonanza in profitability gave the space for imperialism to achieve two key political breakthroughs.

First, by shifting many types of basic production processes away from the imperialist states (all the while retaining key advanced production techniques), neoliberal globalisation undermined working-class power and militancy in the imperialist societies and left Workers worried their jobs would be moved overseas and making them less willing or able to make more ambitious industrial claims.

Second, the increased contribution of Global South labour to global production also brought about a rapid growth of the Global South based capitalist classes. This boom in capitalist accumulation in the poor countries (while dwarfed in size by imperialist accumulation) had an important political effect.

By bringing the Global South capitalists to the table to participate in the global imperialist system of exploitation – albeit as subordinates – neoliberal globalisation resolved the problem of establishing a viable national economic development path within capitalism (particularly in Asia, which is more than half the world’s population) – at least from the perspective of the capitalist classes.

This contrasted sharply with the immediate post-war period of mass revolutionary struggle, sometimes victorious, in many parts of the Third World such as in China, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cuba and Latin America.

And more importantly, defeating or postponing the Third World revolutions (except in Venezuela and Cuba) had another major benefit. It removed one of the major radicalising factors for working people inside the imperialist states – the “Vietnam Syndrome”.

Just as the Russian Revolution had a massive impact on consciousness and combativity of working people across the globe, so too did the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. This was true also for the mass popular struggles across many parts of the Global South, even when these did not result in revolutions.

More aggressive exploitation of cheap Global South labour also increased availability of cheap consumer goods, which to some extent had a corrupting effect on workers in the imperialist states.

Many types of goods are now often ludicrously cheap in relation to wages – such as $10 jeans, $5 T-shirts or a $25 microwave oven. A highly sophisticated smart phone – which takes many days labour to create – can be bought for just one or two day’s wages.

Everyone knows, this cheapening of commodities is only possible by cheapening the lives and wages of working people in the Global South, who contribute most of labour to the production process.

By making a reasonable quality of life (relatively speaking) for the working class in the imperialist societies dependent on the super-exploitation of working people in the Global South, imperialism bolstered by neoliberal ideology organically strengthens the social and material basis for racism, national chauvinism – its political manifestation.

Unwinding of the Neoliberal Boom

Neoliberalism proved to be a boom period for the capitalists – both ideologically and in terms of profit. These good times however, couldn’t last forever. Beginning in around 2011, the new cheap labour bonanza was already running up against its own limits.

Having conquered the entire world, by around 2011 there was no large sources of new cheap labour that could be used to bring about a new bonanza and again raise rates of profit and investment.

Much of the mass migration from village to city in China had already taken place and the earlier growth in China’s working age population started to slow. In 2015 it began to shrink.

As a result, China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate has been falling every year since 2010, dropping from an annual growth rate of around 10 percent to 5 percent or less today.

This new, lower, growth rate is about the same as other rapidly growing Asian economies such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The days of dramatic economic boom periods in China seem to be over. India’s GDP growth rate for example has been about equal to or outpaced China for five of seven years in 2014-2021.

By 2015 the “re-shoring” of industrial production to the United States and other imperialist countries in newly built, more highly automated factories was accelerating. This was given greater impetus during the Covid-19 pandemic and also by imperialist sanctions against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria and other countries.

Imperialism’s new economic policy appears to be one of replacing the previous approach of expanding globalisation, and instead investing in new high-tech production inside the imperialist countries – thereby reversing many aspects of globalisation.

During the pandemic this was promoted as “securing supply lines” and was enforced with Trump’s “trade war” tariffs, sanctions, technology bans, tax breaks and regulations – which have been maintained under the Biden presidency.

It is imperialism’s vice-like grip on the development of productive, high-end technology that makes this feasible. It is not clear however how far this process will go, or whether or not it will become a dominant economic policy or is just a temporary phenomena.

It is crucial to remember that the doubling in the size of the global labour (of very cheap labour) force in the years 1991-2000 provided the material basis for the neoliberal bonanza which followed.

If sanctions, tariffs and automated First World production reduces the exploitation of world labour – by replacing global South labour with machines inside the imperialist states – then the basis for the rapid economic growth in the early years of neoliberalism disappears and capitalism’s tendency towards economic crisis will be intensified.

One political manifestation of this may be the breaking of the unwritten “deal” which brought the capitalist classes of the Global South, particularly China, to the table, which contributed so much to world political stability.

I don’t think it’s yet clear what the root causes of the present increased imperialist aggression towards China and Russia in particular over the last 10 years or so. It is notable however that this increased aggression is both military and economic and that the timing tends to coincide with the end of the neoliberal boom.

Imperialist Aggression Against Russia in the Neoliberal Period

In this section I want to outline how the intensifying conflict between the imperialist states verses Russia and China at the moment is fundamentally a result of imperialist aggression. I will also try to put the current imperialist escalation of aggression into a historical perspective in order to try and better understand what is happening now and what may happen in the future.

Will this imperialist aggression continue to escalate militarily, potentially leading a large-scale war? And if so, why would they pursue this course? Conversely, will they be able to reach some sort of accommodation and on what basis?

I want to start by explaining the underlying motivations for the imperialist aggression against Russia and China. Since WWII the key conflict in the imperialist system has not been – as the groups associated with the International Socialist Tendency (IST) argue – inter-imperialist rivalry.

Rather, post war imperialism has pursued two principle international goals: Defeating socialism and defeating the national liberation struggles in the Global South.

With collapse of most socialist states, the key international contradiction is now reduced to imperialism versus the Global South; imperialist monopoly versus the non-monopoly capitalist societies it exploits.

Russia and China stand out, for now, as the most powerful non-monopoly capitalist countries in the Global South. This makes them a target for imperialist hostility. Control over the most powerful countries is a prerequisite for maintaining control over the entire Global South.

Imperialist economic and military aggression towards China, Russia and other Global South states has been escalating for several years. However, there was never a period when this didn’t exist. Prior to 1991, imperialist aggression was justified by anti-Communism – yet in the post-Communist period this aggression has not relented.

Imperialism took advantage of the USSR’s collapse by immediately going to war against one former Soviet ally. The 1991 US lead invasion of Iraq turned out to be the first in a series of imperialist military interventions.

These included the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the second Iraq War in 2003, NATO attacks on Libya in 2011 and a years-long proxy war against Syria (a Russian ally) from 2011 onwards.

And there were many other coups, plots, assassinations, destabilisation campaigns and imperialist military operations that warrant a mention, such as the Washington-backed coups in Ukraine (twice), Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019, but subsequently defeated), or the failed coups in Venezuela (2019) and Nicaragua (2018).

Imperialist policy towards post-Soviet Russia itself is characterised by a similar unrelenting belligerence. The regime that initially replaced the Soviet government was, perhaps, as close as possible to a client regime for such an important country.

Under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia could not be described as any sort of threat or challenge to imperialist domination. It was reduced in size, weak and in chaos. It was suffering hyper-inflation and deep economic decline. US hostility however was maintained even in this context.

NATO was originally formed by the North Atlantic imperialist powers for conducting their “Cold War” against the Soviet Union.  In February 1990 – just prior to the Soviet collapse, Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev told US secretary of State James Baker:

“You say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is simply a security structure that is adapting to new realities … therefore, we propose to join NATO.”

However, Baker dismissed the possibility as a “dream”.

In late 1991, on the day of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, a letter from President Yeltsin was read to a NATO summit in Brussels, suggesting that Russia’s long-term aim was to join NATO – this was again dismissed.

George Robertson, the former secretary general of NATO from 1999 to 2003, claims that, at their first meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked him, “When are you going to invite us to join NATO?” Rather than accepting the Russian white flag, the imperialist powers continued the cold war policy of isolating and militarily threatening now capitalist Russia.

Crucially, the United States also pursued two new policies: threatening Russia through the eastward expansion of NATO up to the Russian border and pursuing what is call “nuclear primacy” or “counterforce” strategy.

Nuclear primacy means establishing nuclear hegemony by developing systems supposedly able to prevent Russia from using its nuclear arsenal in the event of a nuclear war. In other words, “primacy” means developing the ability to “win” a nuclear war.

The Russian Nuclear arsenal includes an estimated 1588 currently deployed nuclear warheads. US strategy aims to have the ability to destroy most of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and delivery systems before it can be used – through a rapid series of nuclear and conventional missile first strikes.

In addition, the primacy or counterforce strategy requires the establishment of missile defence shields designed to destroy any rouge Russian missiles that survive the NATO first strikes and are still able to be launched. This relies on the placement of advanced offensive weapons, including nuclear warheads (and shields), in the new NATO member countries close to Russia’s border.

This is perhaps the craziest imperialist death-cult imaginable, and threatens to bring about an immediate end to all human life – right now – through an accident or miscalculation.

Even if the US first strikes and missile shields could successfully destroy all 1588 deployed Russian nuclear warheads, which is widely considered unlikely, the impact of NATO nuclear bombs hitting Russia could still potentially wipe out most if not all of humanity.

In the ensuing nuclear winter, planetary temperatures would drop dozens of degrees and most animal species would starve to death.

Eastward expansion of NATO and the nuclear-primacy-counterforce strategy has now been US policy for 30 years. To that end, in 2001, the George Bush (junior) administration unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty signed by the US and the USSR.

As widely predicted at the time, this triggered a Russian counter-move to attempt to neutralise the new threat to Russian security.

Russia began developing new types of nuclear delivery systems that could get around the missile defence shield: the intercontinental hypersonic glider, a nuclear-powered cruise missile, and a nuclear-powered torpedo. After years of research and development the hypersonic glider missiles were finally unveiled in 2018.

In that same year, the White House, now under President Trump, took the further aggressive step of unilaterally withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate Range Forces (INF) Treaty prohibiting land based nuclear missiles with a range of 500-1000 kilometres.

This allows the US to place missiles pointed at Russia in NATO countries like Poland, Latvia and, potentially, Ukraine.

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was presented by the imperialist mass media as an irrational act of aggression by Putin himself. In reality it was preceded by escalating US and UK led aggression against Russia.

Since the 2014 coup that installed of an anti-Russia regime in Ukraine (itself aided and abetted by the United States), the US, UK and Canada have trained 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers annually.

By 27 February 2022, the day of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Army was among the largest in Europe – though it is now being progressively destroyed by the Russian armed forces.

The invasion was also preceded, for example, by a series of naval provocations and one actual confrontation between the UK and Russian Navies in the Black Sea. These appear to have been coordinated with the Ukrainian push for NATO membership.

Imperialist Aggression Against China

US unilateral withdrawal from the INF treaty not only targets Russia, but also China. For example, 500-1000 kilometre range missiles placed in Taiwan or South Korea could potentially hit Chinese targets, including Shanghai and Beijing.

The majority of the international left think rising imperialist aggression against China is because Chinese economic development threatens to upend imperialist hegemony.

However, such a view not only coincides with much of the bourgeois propaganda on China, but it is also difficult to find an analysis anywhere in the world that convincingly argues this in Marxist terms.

If tons of steel, aluminium and cement, watts of electricity and kilometres of rail track were the measures of economic supremacy, then the Soviet Union would have already achieved economic hegemony over the USA in the early 1980s.

In his 1987 book The Waking Giant, Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, Martin Walker points out:

“In 1961, [Communist Party General Secretary] Nikita Khrushchev promised the Soviet people that, by the 1980s, they would be producing more industrial goods than the USA. This was dismissed at the time by Western observers as a grandiose and unrealistic prediction…

The curious thing is that Khrushchev’s economic targets have been met. The Soviet Union produces 80 percent more steel than the USA, 78 percent more cement, 42 percent more oil, 55 percent more fertiliser, more than twice as much pig-iron and six times as much iron ore. It produces five times as many tractors, almost twice as many metal cutting lathes.”

It is exactly these types of statistics (and GDP growth figures) that are most often used to try to substantiate China’s supposed threat to overturn imperialist dominance.

That account of Soviet production was published in 1986 (five years before its collapse) as the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged and tried to address the widespread economic dysfunctionality and paralysis gripping the society – paralysis that had arisen precisely on the basis of the massive expansion described.

The US “Pivot to Asia” announced by Barack Obama in the Australian Parliament in 2011, indicated the start of increased US hostility towards China by building up US military forces in the Pacific region.

Of course, imperialist media invariably paints China as the aggressor. However, current Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is usually blamed for China’s supposed infractions, didn’t assume office until 2013.

The Obama administration’s pivot accelerated the build-up of military forces against China. However, there has never been a period – since 1949 – when US imperialism didn’t represent an aggressive threat to China.

For example, the chain of US military bases that surrounds China – in South Korea, Japan, Philippines and Guam – has remained in place throughout the post-war period. Indeed, the US Navy Seventh Fleet was stationed in the Taiwan Strait from 1950-1979 to prevent the re-unification of China and Taiwan after the Communist victory in the civil war.

Concurrent with Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, the US pursued an aggressive set of economic demands for ever greater opening of China’s economy to US and other foreign capitalist penetration. Then US secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in 2011:

“In particular, we are working with China to end unfair discrimination against U.S. and other foreign companies or against their innovative technologies, remove preferences for domestic firms, and end measures that disadvantage or appropriate foreign intellectual property.”

In other words, the removal of restrictions on imperialist multinational companies’ domination of Chinese domestic markets.

It was in pursuit of these same imperialist demands that China was subject to massive trade tariffs, sanctions, and technology bans, especially under Donald Trump’s so called “trade war”.

Almost none of Trump’s punitive measures have been reversed or eased under Biden. The recent visit to Taiwan by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is an escalation of US aggression on the Taiwan issue.

Pelosi’s visit, and Biden’s repeated statements that the US is prepared to go to war over Taiwan, indicates that growing sections of the US establishment are considering abandoning their existing “One China Policy” – which gives diplomatic recognition only to Beijing and not Taipei.

Former US Secretary of Defense John Bolton, for example, argues for US diplomatic recognition of Taipei and for placing US troops in Taiwan. China made no attempt to prevent Pelosi’s visit – such as by intercepting her plane and diverting it to the mainland.

A key aspect of imperialism’s hostility is its attempts to weaken and divide China by supporting the anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong, the massive international propaganda campaign accusing Beijing of “genocide” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang, continued support for opposition to Beijing in Tibet and increasing levels of imperialist support for formal independence in Taiwan.

To be clear, we are not supporting China’s actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang or Tibet, but rather we want to point out that these claims are hypocritical, the situations are not unique to China, but are massively exaggerated and distorted in imperialist propaganda to create a false perception among working people that China (and all US enemies) are somehow especially bad and far worse human rights abusers than the international actions of the imperialist states. These false perceptions needs to be countered.

The so-called Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the Quad (US, Japan, Australia and India) and the AUKUS military alliance also aggressively target China.

This year, the US appears to be involved in continuous military exercises close to China. Those already held or scheduled to be held involve almost every country on or close to China’s land and sea borders including Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Changes in Russian and Chinese Defensive Posture Facing Imperialism

One of the biggest changes in the global political situation over the last several years has been what seems to be a turn, on the part of both Russia and China, to greater defensive resistance against the ever-increasing imperialist encroachments.

The key turning points for Russia seem to be the 2014 right-wing coup in Ukraine and the imperialist sponsored war aimed at regime change in Syria – which was ultimately defeated after Russian military intervention in 2015.

Both Russia and China are permanent members of the UN Security Council, giving them the right to veto any resolution.

From 1990-2010, China and Russia combined only exercised their veto right seven times in 20 years. They did not oppose Security Council resolutions authorising imperialist invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the 2011 resolution authorising NATO military intervention in Libya, which lead to the overthrow of the Libyan government – a historical Russian ally.

By contrast, over the 11 years from late 2011 to the present, they have vetoed 25 Security Council resolutions. This began in October 2011 with a US resolution on Syria, and almost all the subsequent vetoes have concerned either Syria or Ukraine.

In Syria, the Obama administration and its Persian Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates attempted to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad government from 2011 onwards by arming, funding and politically supporting Syrian opposition groups that also mobilised large numbers of foreign mercenaries to fight the Syrian Arab Army.

Russia intervened militarily in 2015 at the invitation of the Syrian government. Its intervention turned out to be decisive in turning the military situation in favour of the Syrian army and defeating the imperialist sponsored opposition.

In Ukraine, the US, EU and other imperialist states openly supported the Euromaidan uprising and coup in 2014 that brought an anti-Russia government to power.

Russia reacted by militarily annexing the Crimean Peninsula, home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. It also gave military support to opposition groups in Ukraine’s East to fight the new regime in what became the Donbas War.

The Crimean annexation and Donbas War resulted in escalating economic sanctions by imperialist states (including Australia) against Russia from 2014 until the present, with several new rounds of sanctions added this year.

In 2016, Russia was absurdly blamed by the Democrat Party for Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss to Donald Trump – significantly setting the scene for the McCarthyite, Russo-phobic atmosphere whipped up in the imperialist countries, especially after Russia’s February 27 invasion of Ukraine this year.

The most significant issue with the Russian invasion is that it is against the wishes of the imperialist powers and their proxy state military forces. It’s not that Russia invaded a rich European country. In the history of capitalist imperialism poor countries have never invaded rich countries, and Russia remains a poor country. But Ukraine is poorer – even before the war.

The significant character of the Russian invasion is a poor country invading another poor country – against the wishes and policy of imperialism.

That is what is new, and that is why we are seeing all the McCarthyite hysteria in response.

Even this level of resistance – attacking a proxy regime – is too much for the imperialist powers to accept, though they might have to. The other highly significant fact of the Russian invasion is that Russia appears to be winning the war and systematically, if slowly, destroying the armed forces of Ukraine.

While the Imperialist mass media rarely admits it, the Russian army is accumulating territory almost every day. It has secured almost the entire Donbas region and much of the southern coastal region of Ukraine that separates the Donbas from Crimea.

The Ukrainian military by contrast – despite receiving advanced weapons from its NATO backers – seems to be suffering constant and extremely heavy losses, hundreds of military casualties daily, is continuing to lose territory, lacks a coherent strategy and is unable to wage serious offensive operations.

Meanwhile, the short-term effect of imperialist sanctions against Russia has been partly negated by skyrocketing international prices for Russian exports of oil, gas, and agricultural produce. However, what the longer-term effects of imperialist bans on selling high-tech goods to Russia (and China) will be is not yet clear.

China has transitioned from the polite diplomacy of the previous few decades to regular diplomatic condemnation of US or Australian hypocrisy – though in Australia at least, Chinese diplomacy has so far been unable to influence the ideas held by many of working-class people.

Russia and China’s increased defensive assertiveness is being answered not only by massively increased imperialist aggression but also, so far at least, a very high degree of unity among the imperialist powers which support it.

For one, NATO has been strengthened and even unilateral US sanctions against China are not resisted either in Europe or Japan. Why?

Germany even appears prepared to suffer an economic contraction caused by a gas shortage, before questioning the sanctions on Russia, I’ve seen no opposition from France, and the UK and Canada remain the most belligerent of the imperialist powers aligned with the US.

This reflects the real alignment of states in today’s world. We not only can theorise, but also observe for ourselves that this is the rich states against the poor states – the imperialist states versus China, Russia and the rest.

Recent Changes in Consciousness Inside the Imperialist Societies

So much needs to be said about the changes in consciousness that have been developing over the last few years. Here I can make only a few brief comments.

The Venezuelan revolution was a response to neoliberal austerity, triggered by a doubling of bus fares in Caracas. The Caracazo rebellion in 1989 was the first major rebellion against neoliberal austerity globally.

The Caracazo and the conditions that caused it set off a chain of events that ultimately destroyed support for the traditional electoral parties in Venezuela and opened the way to the election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency nine years later in 1998.

If Venezuela’s timeline is any indication, then the ultimate political impacts of the current international economic and social developments, and those of the last several years or decades, may take some time to play out.

Both the ending of the neoliberal bonanza and the new assertive defensiveness by the Russian and Chinese states are relatively new. Their impact on consciousness, whatever that turns out to be, may be important in the coming period.

However, the political ruptures already unfolding in the US and other imperialist countries over the last few years seem not to result primarily from the impacts of this new defensive assertiveness, or economic crisis. Rather, they stem from the impact on working people of the neoliberal expansion itself – the political blow-back taking a few years to crystalise.

As mentioned, the economic engine of the neoliberal period, the increased exploitation of cheap Global South labour had, as one of its important effects, the increased ability of capitalists in the Global North to undermine their own working classes through the threat or reality of job losses.

A good example of this is that in the US, manufacturing employment went from a peak of close to 18 million people in 1998 to a low of 11.5 million in 2010.

That is essentially a loss of one in three manufacturing jobs in just one decade – the decade China was admitted into the World Trade Organization and the globalisation of cheap labour was most rapid.

There seems to be a link between this and other social dislocations of the neoliberal re-ordering and new mass-based political movements that have arisen over the last few years.

Perhaps the most important of the new mass movements is the campaign leading up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, his subsequent hegemonising of the Republican Party even after losing office, and the consolidation of a mass base. As well as being a reactionary and racist mass movement, Trumpism also clearly indicates a weakness in bourgeois establishment politics.

Conversely, new progressive mass movements include Black Lives Matter in the US – a radical movement for basic democratic rights (that are supposed to be guaranteed in bourgeois democracy) to be extended to non-white sections of the US population and especially African Americans – which mobilised tens of millions of people in 2020.

There was also a growing global wave of climate mass actions that became increasingly powerful and coordinated before 2020, when the pandemic tragically put that critical popular movement on hold.

The mass #metoo movement, especially in the US, also seems to have been a precursor the recent wave of mass actions against the Supreme Court’s attack on US women’s right to choose an abortion.

There were also mass-based campaigns to elect a British Labour Party government under leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and to elect Bernie Sanders as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in the US.

In Latin America, a whole series of victories for left electoral candidates backed by popular movements occurred in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. None of these were possible without the backing of powerful mass movements.

In the US there is crisis of both the Republican Party and Democratic parties – with no visible contenders to replace them either.

A similar crisis of legitimacy in bourgeois politics seem to be more or less advanced in most of the imperialist states.  Electorally, there are similar crises facing traditional parties – if less advanced – in the UK and France for example.

The Global South has been hit so much harder by the economic fallout from the pandemic (and now from the imperialist sanctions on Russia which are pushing up global food and fuel prices). We have already seen rebellion in Sri Lanka and Lebanon.

Dozens of countries are considered at risk of soon falling into similar economic paralysis as that which triggered these revolts.

In this context, we must make special note of escalating imperialist attempts to strangle the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions. The imperialist ideologues, with their policy of economic siege and strangulation, are quite clear on the importance of this.

Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union was a huge setback – the survival and further achievements of Cuba, despite losing 80 percent of its trade with the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a testament to the potential of the socialist revolution – even when isolated and under siege.

We must be on alert for this and should be ready to respond to such threats – as the Red Ant website was in July last year with our Cuba coverage (and our coming booklet).

We should also be ready to learn and understand more about those achievements and to help working people and students here to better understand what happened in those struggles. In this way, we can help to convince a new generation of activists that there is an alternative to the unending wars, exploitation and destruction of capitalist imperialism.

Citations

Citations

The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

Notes

Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2021). Branko Milanovic provides a concise review drawing parallels with Yugoslavia’s disintegration. See Branko Milanović, “Collapse—The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok,” Brave New Europe, February 16, 2024.

The famine was the product of the bad harvests of 1931 and 1932, combined with the Stalin regime’s policy of collectivization of agriculture. The regime believed collectivization was the way to secure increased food supplies to support industrialization and increased defense production. The greatest number of deaths in Ukraine was owing to the centrality of agriculture therein, but contemporary Ukrainian claims of seven to ten million Ukrainian deaths are overstated by a factor of between two and three. See R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Industrialisation of Soviet Russia) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 [2009]).

See “Ukraine: Historical Background during the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem, yadvashem.org; G. Rossoliński-Liebe, “Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews,” German Yearbook of Contemporary History, vol. 1 (Lincoln, Nebraska: Nebraska University Press, 2016), 107–43; and Ivan Katchanovski, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine,” paper presented at the Conference on Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, December 5–7, 2013, Vienna, Austria. As part of rehabilitating Ukraine in the eyes of Western public opinion, some historians are trying to downplay Ukraine’s responsibility in the Holocaust. A leading figure in this revisionist history is Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who writes “the majority, probably the vast majority of people who collaborated with the German occupation were not politically motivated. They were collaborating with an occupation that was there, and which is a German responsibility” (Timothy Snyder, “Germans Must Remember the Truth about Ukraine—For Their Own Sake,” Eurozine, July 7, 2017). Balanced against that, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reports Ukraine has never investigated a local Nazi war criminal or prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator (see “Nazi Hunters Give Low Grades to 13 Countries, Including Ukraine,” Associated Press, January 12, 2011).

Casey Michel, “The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA,” Politico, November 11, 2022; Phil Miller, “When MI6 Betrayed Ukraine’s Resistance to Russia,” Declassified UK, March 16, 2023.

Daniel Lazare, “Who Was Stepan Bandera?” Jacobin, September 24, 2015; Ido Vock, “Ukraine’s Problematic Nationalist Heroes,” New Statesman, January 5, 2023.

“Who Are Ukraine’s Far-Right Azov Regiment?” Al Jazeera, March 1, 2022, updated June 12, 2024.

Josh Cohen, “Dear Ukraine: Please Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot,” Foreign Affairs, April 27, 2015; Keith Darden and Lucan Way, “Who Are the Protesters in Ukraine?,” Washington Post, February 12, 2014; Anthony Faiola, “A Ghost of World War II History Haunts Ukraine’s Stand-off with Russia,” Washington Post, March 25, 2014.

“Israel’s Ambassador Shocked by Lviv Region’s Decision to Declare Year of Bandera,” Kyiv Post, December 13, 2018; Jeremy Sharon, “Nazi Collaborators Included in Ukrainian Memorial Project,” Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2021.

The territorial entity that is Ukraine is a product of the Soviet Union. It was created under the 1922 treaty that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ukraine did not formally exist in Tsarist Russia, which was divided into guberniyas (governates) that had minimal correspondence with what became the republics.

State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, “All-Ukrainian Population Census 2001: General Results of Census,” n.d.

Regarding language policy, see Roman Huba, “Why Ukraine’s New Language Law Will Have Long-Term Consequences,” Open Democracy, May 28, 2019, opendemocracy.net. See also Agnes Dinyes, “Caught in the Crossfire: Minority Languages in Ukraine,” Minority Rights Group, October 11, 2023, minorityrights.org. On the destruction of monuments, see Helen Parish, “Soviet Monuments Are Being Toppled—This Gives the Spaces They Occupied a New Meaning,” The Conversation, September 5, 2022; and Sophia Kishkovsky, “Huge Soviet-Era Monument in Kyiv Taken Down as Ukraine Continues ‘Derussification,'” Art Newspaper, May 3, 2024.

Öncel Sencerman, “Russian Diaspora as a Means of Russian Foreign Policy,” Military Review: The Professional Journal of the U.S. Army (March–April 2018): 41–49.

“Ukraine: The Budapest Memorandum of 1994,” Harvard Kennedy School of Government, policymemos.hks.harvard.edu.

Luke Harding, “Ukraine Extends Lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet,” Guardian, April 21, 2010.

“What Are the Minsk Agreements on the Ukraine Conflict?,” Reuters, February 21, 2022.

NATO expansion was U.S.-led, as the United States is the overwhelmingly dominant force in NATO and nothing happens without its affirmative consent.

The White House, “Strengthening NATO and European Security,” Clinton White House Archives, n.d.

There are multiple accounts of the expansion and Russia’s objections. For instance, see Joe Lauria, “Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story,” Consortium News, June 30, 2023; Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The Real History of the War in Ukraine: A Chronology of Events and Case for Diplomacy,” The Kennedy Beacon, July 17, 2023; and Ted Galen Carpenter, “Many Predicted NATO Expansion Would Lead to War. Those Warnings Were Ignored,” Guardian, February 28, 2022.

National Security Archive, “NATO Expansion—The Budapest Blow Up 1994,” George Washington University, November 24, 2021, nsarchive.gwu.edu.

Gorbachev’s aspirations and understanding of the settlement were laid out in his July 6, 1989, speech to the Council of Europe: Mikhail Gorbachev, “Address Given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council of Europe,” Strasbourg, July 6, 1989.

It has been widely observed that the United States would never accept Russian missiles on its borders, as shown by the 1961 Cuban missile crisis. That observation speaks to the rationality of Russia’s objection to incorporation of Ukraine in NATO. It also speaks to the hypocrisy of U.S. actions and criticisms of Russia.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., “Today’s Crisis over Ukraine,” American Committee for US-Russia Accord, February 14, 2022, usrussiaaccord.org.

See Guy Mettan, “Truths and Lies about Pledges Made to Russia,” Swiss Standpoint, February 17, 2022, schweizer-standpunkt.ch.

U.S. State Department “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations: The Warsaw Treaty Organization, 1955,” n.d., history.state.gov/milestones.

National Security Archive, “NATO expansion—The Budapest Blow Up 1994.”

See Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” Munich, February 10, 2007, en.kremlin.ru.

See George Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, February 5, 1997.

See “Opposition to NATO Expansion,” Arms Control Association, June 26, 1997, armscontrol.org

See Wikileaks, “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” memorandum by William J. Burns, January 30, 2018.

See “Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call (with Analysis by Jonathan Marcus),” BBC, February 7, 2014; and Daniel Larison, “Victoria Nuland Never Shook the Mantle of Ideological Meddler,” Responsible Statecraft, Quincy Institute, March 5, 2024.

In 2014, Ukraine’s GDP was approximately $134 billion. Its low point in the modern era was $32 billion in 1999.

See “National Endowment for Democracy,” Influence Watch, n.d., influencewatch.org.

Elias Yousif, “U.S. Military Assistance to Ukraine,” Stimson Center, January 26, 2022.

Mohammed Hussein and Mohammed Haddad, “Infographic: US Military Presence around the World,” Al Jazeera, September 10, 2021.

Neoconservatism is formally identified with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was launched in 1997. The cofounders of PNAC were William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The latter is married to Nuland, who played a leading role in pushing NATO’s eastward expansion and in the Ukraine policy of the Obama and Biden administrations. PNAC founding supporters dominated foreign policy during George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–2009). They included Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, who were instrumental in driving the 2003 invasion of Iraq. See Pierre Bourgois, “The PNAC (1997–2006) and the Post-Cold War ‘Neoconservative Movement,'” E-International Relations, February 1, 2020, e-ir.info. Subsequently, PNAC was replaced by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which was founded in 2007. The creation of CNAS was sponsored by Hillary Clinton and was strongly supported by Obama, showing how Democrats have become the most zealous supporters of neoconservatism and the project of U.S. global hegemony (“Center for a New American Security,” Militarist Monitor, October 13, 2014, militarist-monitor.org). Nuland is a former CEO of CNAS, showing her central role in the neoconservative project, working with both Republicans and Democrats.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 1997); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Foreign Affairs has a special quasi-official standing, being the premier journal of the elite U.S. foreign policy community.

Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland on March 28, 1928.

Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 46.

Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 202.

The United States has faithfully followed this aspect of Brzezinski’s plan, but it has not followed his advice about not antagonizing China. Brzezinski saw a Russia-China alliance as a grave threat to U.S. hegemony and warned against antagonizing China over Taiwan by discarding the accord established by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger regarding ultimate Chinese sovereignty. Instead, the 2012 Obama-Hillary Clinton pivot to Asia threatened China. That was ramped up by the 2016 Donald Trump nationalist-racist turn against China, and the entire Nixon-Kissinger settlement has been irreparably smashed by the embrace by Biden and Nancy Pelosi of Taiwan as an independent, sovereign entity.

For a comprehensive analysis of the military-industrial complex and its activities, see Thomas Palley “The Military-Industrial Complex as a Variety of Capitalism and Threat to Democracy,” Review of Keynesian Economics 12, no. 3 (August 2024): 308–47.

See Thomas Palley, “Europe’s Foreign Policy Has Been Hacked and the Consequences Are Dire,” Brave New Europe, February 15, 2024.

In the nineteenth century, British animus toward Russia was rooted in fear that Russian expansion in Central Asia would threaten Britain’s hold on India. It was also driven by fear of increasing Russian influence in the declining Ottoman empire, which motivated the Crimean War. In the twentieth century through today, British animus toward Russia is rooted in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of a Communist state, the execution of the tsar and his close family, and the Soviet Union’s default on First World War loans from Britain. That animus was drilled into Britain’s political and security apparatus by Winston Churchill, who remains an iconic figure in British politics.

Adam Volle, “American Exceptionalism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.

The Autocracy Inc. hypothesis is associated with journalist-historian Anne Applebaum. See Anne Applebaum, “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” Atlantic, November 15, 2021. This narrative is strikingly inconsistent with the facts. Autocrats tend to keep their countries walled off, and none of the countries in the narrative have the wherewithal to take on the United States and NATO. Instead, the evidence is the other way round, with the United States being the one that has covered the globe with bases, garrisons, and multiple massive fleets based in foreign ports. See Hussein and Haddad, “Infographic: US Military Presence around the World.”

Kevin Liffey, “Putin Says Loss of Trust Will Make Future Ukraine Talks Harder,” Reuters, December 9, 2022.

See NATO, “Brussels Summit Communiqué: Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels 14 June 2021,” press release, June 14, 2021.

U.S. Department of State, “US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership,” press release, November 10, 2021.

Jacques Baud, “The Military Situation in Ukraine,” Postil Magazine, April 1, 2022, thepostil.com.

Michael Hudson has written insightfully about the U.S. attempt to detach Europe from Russia and make Europe economically dependent on the United States. Michael Hudson, “America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies,” CounterPunch, February 11, 2022; and Michael Hudson, “Germany as Collateral Damage in America’s New Cold War,” CounterPunch, April 1, 2024.

Western media have exploited the issue of Russia’s oligarchs to drum up antipathy against both Russia and Putin. The reality is the oligarch class was the creation of the U.S.-sponsored economic reform program imposed immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991–1994). The IMF’s “shock therapy” program privatized the Russian economy before an effective legal system was in place. The goal was to prevent the Russian state from ever resuscitating socialism. The oligarch class was created because it had access to Western credit and could scoop up assets at fire sale prices, assisted by corrupt party bosses and insider management. The oligarch class became extraordinarily politically powerful, enabling it to twist Russian policy. Ironically, the war and sanctions may have undermined the oligarchs’ power, freeing Russia to adopt more productive policies.

James K. Galbraith, “The Gift of Sanctions: An Analysis of Assessments of The Russian Economy, 2022–2023,” Review of Keynesian Economics 12, no. 3 (August 2024): 408–22.

In that regard, Germany is important as it is where public opinion is most likely to change, potentially fracturing NATO and causing the United States to rethink its position. Trump’s return to office also suggests a U.S. rethink. Trump is less antagonistic to Russia and more antagonistic to China, and therefore desirous of rupturing the Russia-China entente that the war has fostered.