Darya Tsymbalyuk’s Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Books, 2025) is the most important book to come out on the topic of the environmental consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the first English-language volume to examine the topic comprehensively.
The Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group recently published a review of it by Bern University geographer Alexander Vorbrugg. I recommend reading the review, then buying the book. (For full disclosure, Darya authored one of the chapters in Terra Invicta, the anthology I’ve edited which will be coming out in a few months.)
By now it should be clear that the Ukrainian struggle against Russia is an anti-authoritarian and, frankly, anti-imperialist struggle. It is a struggle for collective political agency against an invading force that denies that agency. It is consistent with the series of revolutions that have marked the last 35 years of Ukrainian history: the Granite Revolution of 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. And while there’s been plenty of debate around how satisfactorily those three revolutions ended (Volodymyr Ishchenko’s term “deficient revolutions” is not entirely off the mark, despite my critiques of his position), they have given millions of Ukrainians a real sense that their own actions matter in the making of a better society.
The only social change worth fighting for, to my mind, is the kind that establishes a wider and more satisfying circulation of agency — a sense of “self-determination” of each among many, within a larger world for which that self-determination is suitable, sensible, and socially and ecologically appropriate. As most political philosophies recognize (libertarianism, at least in its right-wing variant, being an exception), the self cannot exist without the relations and differences that enable it to function.
Ukrainians’ gravitation toward Europe results from the perception that European institutions, in stark contrast to Russian or “Eurasian” ones, provide the mechanisms of mutual recognition that allow democratically organized national collectivities to function best. This gravitation has a history that goes back centuries, both at elite levels (as with philosophers like Hryhoriy Skovoroda, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and their latter-day followers and interpreters) and in popular discourse (for instance, surrounding the Cossacks).
Unfortunately, it’s that European drift, along with the perception of the West’s — and especially the U.S.’s — support for Ukraine, that has weakened most of the potential support for Ukraine’s position in the Global South. That, of course, is because of the history of relations between “the West” and “the rest.” As anti-colonial thinkers have long recognized, the U.S., despite its rhetoric, has not been a genuine friend to democracy in the Global South. Its history of military interventions around the world is a long one, and the current bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities is easily interpreted as just another in that line. In Iran, of course, it’s continuous with the CIA-arranged coup in 1953 that ousted democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
As for the rest of “the West,” the history of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and other colonialisms are all too well known in the non-European world. The history of Russian colonialism, by contrast, is only (“only”) known directly in eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the vast expanses of northern Asia (all the way to Alaska). And it’s obscured by the duplicitous role, at once anti-colonial (in its rhetorical support for anti-Western movements around the world) and colonial (in its relations to Eastern Europe and the entirety of the Russian colonial world), played by the USSR for 70 years.
As I’ve argued here repeatedly, U.S.-led Western imperialism is no longer the only imperialism (if it ever was). In an increasingly “multipolar world disorder,” anti-imperial struggles must at times rely on support from forces perceived to be imperial by someone or other. This has been the case with the Kurds in Rojava, and it is the case in Ukraine. The Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukrainian security in exchange for its nukes was, after all, signed by the U.S. and U.K., so the latter have a direct responsibility to protect Ukraine from its invader, the fourth signatory (Russia).
Ultimately, of course, that reliance — perceived by some to be a “cozying up” to unworthy powers — will never be entirely reliable, as Trump is demonstrating daily. To be true to its own anti-imperialism, it can only ever be a reliance on democratic institutions, not on rulers, and certainly not on kings or dictators. In that sense, Bill Brown’s wonderful poster, designed for No Kings Day, is a perfectly apt summation of where many Ukrainians, and supporters of Ukraine, stand (or should stand) on the question of authority.
This forum, happening today and tomorrow in Moscow and organized by the Tsargrad Institute, led by Russian far-right ideologues Aleksandr Dugin and Konstantin Malofeev, is like a fever dream of the worst Putinist enablers and propagandists: Malofeev, Putin mouthpieces Sergei Lavrov and Ekaterina Andreeva, and many others of their ilk… plus: Infowars’ Alex Jones, Jeffrey Sachs (no kidding), Max Blumenthal, Elon Musk’s father Errol (characterized as abusive by both Elon’s mother and Elon’s biographers), et al.
Wicked-ass liars and genocide-enablers, all feeling free (with Trump’s tacit approval) to pursue their dream of a reinvigorated Great Russia and a re-imperialized world.
My time in Kyïv1 last week was both enlightening and reassuring, even as it featured some of the most dramatic events of the 3+ year full-scale war — Operation Spider Web being one of them (see my previous post on that), the ramping up of Russian drone and missile attacks being the other. The latter — sometimes reaching up to 500 drones and ballistic or cruise missiles in a 24-hour period — reflects the utter vacuousness of Donald Trump’s oft-stated goal of a peaceful end to the conflict. (For an astute recent analysis of the reasons behind Trump’s favoritism toward Russia, see Arthur Snell’s recent piece “Let’s Talk About Krasnov.“)
I have tried to make a habit of visiting Kyïv every 4 to 5 years or so on average, since my year spent as a youthful Canada-USSR Scholar in 1989-90, when everything was beginning to come apart (the USSR, at least) and to seem very much up for grabs. Over that 35 year time period, the city has changed dramatically, not always for the better (uncontrolled development being a problem), but certainly for the more colorful, dynamic, and lively.
My impressions this time were that the city remains as vibrant as ever, its music, arts, and cultural scenes remaining quite active, and plenty of reading and informal discussion adding to the edginess of wartime to make it feel rather more alive than most places. Kyïv, in fact, seems to have more bookstores and bookstore-cafés per capita than almost any city I’ve been to — despite the fact that you can get 30 to 60 rides on the metro (8 UAH per ride) for the price of a single book. For anyone considering visiting, I especially recommend seeing the Pinchuk Art Centre’s current exhibition, which features a few of the artists in my forthcoming book, Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (they include Kateryna Aliinyk, Kateryna Lysovenko, and Yuri Yefanov), and the remarkable exhibition “ProZori” at the Ukrainian House (former Lenin Museum), which is the first exhibition to adequately feature the work of five of the most fascinating late Soviet era Ukrainian artists, all “futurists” or “cosmists” of a sort that’s quite different from the Russia-based movement known by that name.
One thing that has changed, probably more since the full-scale invasion of 2022 than during any of my other between-visit intervals, is that the city’s background hum, its thought processes, now take place largely in Ukrainian, not in the Russian that had been the dominant language back in 1989. This has been a remarkable shift, all but entirely creditable to Putin’s onslaught, which has made Russian the language not of “high culture” (virtually guaranteed by the Russian empire’s and then the USSR’s Russification policies), but of the senseless barbarian invader.
Admittedly, my impression of the city was shaped in part by my own activities attending and participating in the Knyzhkovyi Arsenal (International Book Arsenal Festival), held at the country’s largest museum-gallery complex. The festival featured over 200 events and was attended by nearly 30,000 visitors, including by President Zelensky, whom I apparently walked by at one point (I was told), though I was too busy talking to notice. (See photo below.) I found the number of Ukrainian book publishers to be remarkable, and some of the panels and conversations I heard, as well as the ones I participated in — one on the war’s impact on cultural and ecological landscapes, the other on decoloniality and art, with a focus on Kateryna Botanova’s excellent anthology Reclaiming History, which I’ve got a chapter in — were enlightening.
Historian Marci Shore, recent relocatee from Yale University to the University to Toronto alongside her partner Timothy Snyder and fellow fascism scholar Jason Stanley, commented that in contrast to her experiences traveling around North America, she was finding visiting Kyïv a profoundly “uplifting” experience. That despite the daily and especially nightly air raids — which many Kyïvans ignore because they have to in order to sleep and live their lives, but which visitors like me were hardly able to ignore. I lost a few nights of sound sleep, but lucked out in that my visit followed Russia’s massive three-night bombing campaign of the previous weekend and preceded its recent, even more massive “response” to Operation Spider Web. All of that is nothing compared to what other Ukrainians have faced for over three years now, and in some places for over a decade.
For all the difficulties posed by the continuing military aggression, Ukrainians, or at least the Kyïvans, Lvivans (I spent a few days there), and displaced others that I met, seem to be holding up well in spirit, in ways consistent with what I describe in Terra Invicta, which will be coming out later this year. That’s not to say that Ukrainians aren’t also exhausted by the war, its viciousness, and the loss of faith in getting the kind of support they need from the West anytime soon. That they continue to broadly support the war effort, and Zelensky’s leadership (irrespective of whether they’re Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking), speaks volumes.
Here’s a photo of Zelensky posing alongside Marci Shore (second from the right) at the Arsenal Book Festival:
And here’s Canada’s former ambassador to Ukraine Roman Waschuk (an old friend of mine from Toronto days) posting about the festival’s “Canadian content”:
On why I spell Kyïv the way I do: Following the Ukrainian spelling of “Kиїв” rather than the Russian “Киев,” the customary spelling has now become “Kyiv,” but that too often ends up sounding as a monosyllabic “Keev.” The double-dotted diaeresis over “i” is available in English, as in the word “naïve” — The New Yorker even uses the same diaeresis to separate syllables in words like “coöperate” — and it enables a closer approximation to the bisyllabic Ukrainian pronunciation, which sounds more like “Ki-” as in “kit,” followed by “yeev.” Similarly, the writer Леся Українка is best spelled Lesia Ukraïnka. ↩︎
Recall that Ukraine disarmed in 1994 in exchange for security assurances by Russia, the US, and the UK, assurances that ultimately weren’t kept. By reportedly damaging about a third of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers, Sunday’s Operation Spider’s Web (Павутина) began the process of disarming Russia. (Follow-up analyses can be read here, here, here, and here.)
Memes circulating about the event — such as Zelensky showing Trump the hand of cards he actually had up his sleeve, or asking Trump and Vance (or Big and Little TACO, as some are calling them) for a “thank you” — can easily be found. (Here’s a good sample.)
Roman Sheremeta, writing on Facebook, notes insightfully about why Ukraine disclosed the information as rapidly as it did:
By revealing how the operation was executed — including the use of concealed drones inside decoy trucks driven across 5,000 kilometers of russian territory — Ukraine isn’t just celebrating a tactical success. It’s imposing a psychological and economic cost on russia.
Now, every russian cargo truck becomes a potential threat. Every driver is suspect. As a result, russian authorities will be forced to:
Divert resources to inspect and monitor domestic transport routes.
Increase surveillance and internal security along tens of thousands of kilometers of highways.
Slow down military and civilian logistics across the entire country.
Mistrust their own citizens — especially private drivers and contractors — creating paranoia and bottlenecks.
This will drive up the cost of russian supply chains, strain already stretched infrastructure, and potentially cause internal friction. Ukraine didn’t just destroy aircraft — it weaponized uncertainty within the russian system.
This is how modern asymmetric warfare works: you don’t need to match your enemy plane-for-plane. You just need to make their whole system start doubting itself.
The last point deserves more consideration, as it holds a lesson for the U.S. and everyone else. As Noah Smith writes, Chinese drones could bring down America in a similar way.
As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.
Assessing the military significance of Operation Spider’s Web will take some time. Calling it a “Pearl Harbor moment” for Russia, however, as some have been doing, plays into the hands of their anticipated propaganda.
A more appropriate analogy than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor might be Kyïvan Grand Princess (Kniahynia) Olha’s revenge against the Derevliany, a story Russians and Ukrainians should both know well. In particular, one might think of the brilliant tactic of sending back “tribute” homing pigeons to their houses carrying sulfur, which subsequently burned the homes of their owners (pigeons coming home to roost, indeed). You can read the full version of the story in English here: https://museumhack.com/olga-of-kiev/ (I’m describing “phase four”).
That, combined with a David-vs.-Goliath switch in expectations.
For now, I’m happy to share my sentiment through Odilon Redon’s 1887 lithograph “Smiling Spider” (L’Araignée):
In “Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order,” Peter Pomerantsev is as astute as ever in his analysis of Russia’s potential weaknesses, which he enumerates lucidly. They include inflation, polarization between regions and ethnic groups, reliance on unreliable partners and unstable supply chains, a botched mobilization, unceasing paranoia, and the constant need to pretend to a strength that isn’t there.
He then presents an absolutely sensible approach to containing Putin’s imperial ambitions:
None of Putin’s issues are in themselves a silver bullet to knock out the Kremlin. The trick would be to apply pressure on them simultaneously to stop the President misbehaving. Hit him by seizing frozen Russian assets in the West or undermining Russian oil sales, then follow with a campaign to sow dissent among Russian soldiers, depress his domestic popularity rating, launch military exercises in the Baltics, undermine Russian mercenaries in Mali, give the Ukrainians the right to hit deep inside Russia, make the cost of doing business with Russia higher for the Chinese, cut vital supply chains for the Russian military to signal that we know every front company they use. Pile on the dilemmas until the Kremlin feels it runs the risk of not being in control. Raise the specter of 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to get the Kremlin to recalculate the level of belligerence it can afford. Some of the moves can be smaller, others larger. Destabilizing the Kremlin is about the rate and pace of those moves.
And then he brings reality to bear on the situation:
This is something that, so far, has not been tried. Instead the opposite is happening. As Putin looks at how America is alienating allies, damaging its own economy and retreating from global leadership, he must wonder whether it’s going through a self-imposed breakdown. Even as Putin engages in friendly phone calls with Trump, he’s strengthening military exercises with Iran and China.
Russia is also able to sweet-talk America while secretly stabbing at it. In his war on the “Deep State,” Trump has disbanded some of the entities that deal with Russian cyberattacks and covert campaigns in the US. It’s easier than ever to hit America using proxies. Dark Storm, the cyber-criminals who recently took down X to express their support for Palestine, have previously aligned their hacks with Russia as well as Iran. Similar groups have taken out the websites of American water companies and hospitals. Russia’s secret services aren’t likely to have seen an America this vulnerable.
Putin’s dream of destroying the world order America upheld is so close he must feel he cannot fail to grasp it.
In the end, he offers up an olive branch, though it turns out to be a rather tainted one:
But there may be a twist in the tail for Russia. As we enter a world of global lawlessness, countries and coalitions will be thinking about turning the Kremlin’s hybrid toolkit of economic and information war, cyber and sabotage back on Russia.
Up until now, with America guaranteeing security, many showed restraint. With the “international-rules based order” gone, everyone can try the hooligan role Russia has so far played unimpeded. Moscow yearns to carve up the world. But it will be a world where everybody’s knives come out.
I’ve been negligent on this blog, again, as I travel (in Ukraine right now; I’ll be at the Knyzhkovyi Arsenal book festival in Kyïv this coming weekend).
Meanwhile, three of the worst nights of bombardment just passed this last weekend, with a total of 903 drones and 92 ballistic missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities from Friday through Sunday nights. (These are figures provided by the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which are pretty verifiable, including by the physical experience of Ukrainians.)
Kyïv experienced a total of 20 hours and 42 minutes of air raid alerts over those three nights. I have to admit that the thought of bombs and drone débris raining down on people, who’ve become so numbed to the air raid alerts that many now sleep through them, remind me of the scenes of the comic-futurist television series Max Headroom when people would wear metal umbrellas to protect themselves from the periodic satellite débris showers that would rain down on them from the stratosphere. You can get used to anything.
Of course, the Ukrainian reality is hardly the stuff of comedy. Ukrainian-American artist and translator Larissa Babij has been keeping a Substack diary of her visceral experience of living in Ukraine at a Kind of Refugee; her latest piece, “This is War,” is worth reading.
Meanwhile, I still sometimes get curmudgeonly responses from leftist friends about NATO blah blah blah. The Kyiv Independent’s Andrea Januta summarizes the wrongness of those responses in her piece of yesterday, “Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Debunking Putin’s ‘root causes’ claims.”
Essentially, the argument is that anyone claiming that NATO’s expansion was the, or an important, cause of the Russian war on Ukraine should be reminded that (1) Putin said almost nothing about the Baltic countries joining NATO in 2004, or about Finland, its next largest bordering European country, joining it in 2023; and that (2) before Russia’s 2014 invasion, less than 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO; today that number is 85%.
The root cause is simply Russia’s desire to maintain control over Ukraine. That root cause should be eliminated at its root, which is Russian imperialism, an imperialism with centuries of barely questioned history (barely questioned by Russians or most westerners) backed by the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal, and by a geographically massive klepto-capitalist authoritarian petro-state regime, which today spouts ethno-fascist rhetoric to keep its Russian population in tow behind it (and that continues to subject its non-Russian peoples the way it has for centuries). Repeating its claims is indeed nothing but “useful idiotism” for imperialism.
More in the coming days.
Quick update: It seems the Max Headroom scenes were actually of a “Sky Clearance Festival,” so a bit more celebratory and less predictable than I had recalled… Here’s a clip (others have been taken down by the copyright holders, so I’ll leave a screen-shot below it in case this comes down, too):
The original version of Risk, the Parker Brothers board game of strategic territorial conquest first known euphemistically as “the Continental Game,” had Ukraine occupying Russia, or at least the historically pre-imperial territory of Russia, along with Belarus, the Baltic Republics, and much of eastern Europe (see below). As a kid, I used to play the game with siblings and cousins; I don’t recall us making too much of that reversal — it made sense to us diaspora Ukrainians. But it also meant that defending Ukraine was really difficult, as it could be attacked from six directions.
I’ve been trying to find out how that huge Ukraine got into the design. The game was created in the early 1950s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, best known for the dreamy 1956 film The Red Balloon (a beautiful film made even more so by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2007 remake The Flight of the Red Balloon; in retrospect, to us diaspora Ukrainians “Ukraine” was a bit like a red balloon, floating of its own accord like an imagined utopia well away from the world’s realpolitik). From what I’ve seen, the original version of the game, called La conquête du monde, had multiple names within territories; the one that became Ukraine had five names.
The game was redesigned by French game designer and philosopher Jean-René Vernes, and then bought out by Parker Brothers, a family-owned, Salem, Massachusetts based company famous for Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Ouija (acquired in 1966), and others, which created the original English-language version of Risk (the one we played, with the large Ukraine) in 1959. That was before the Cuban missile crisis, when westerners mostly knew Ukraine as a Soviet republic whose representation at the UN was fully subordinate to Russia.
I’ve heard theories that someone involved in the game design was Ukrainian (no doubt a diasporic one), but have not found anything to substantiate that. Was it a flight of fancy on the part of Lamorisse (a Persophile who died in a helicopter crash while making a documentary in Iran in 1970) or Vernes, who had spent a few years in a German PoW camp during world war two? According to Philip Orbanes’ book-length history of Parker Brothers, The Game Makers, the game’s tiny wooden armies were made by a Czechoslovak company, but Czechoslovakia’s location on the game board would have been an unidentified borderland of “Ukraine” and/or “Northern Europe.” Heading Parker Brothers at the time of the Risk acquisition was the company’s founder’s son-in-law Robert Barker, and a nephew, Eddie Parker, apparently played a key role in the game’s redesign (though the territorial map was hardly altered, from what I can tell). Neither of them seemed to show much interest in things Ukrainian.
Perhaps it was just the fact that Russia’s huge landmass would have been too large on the map of conquerable territories, and calling one piece of the six or seven that made it up “Russia” didn’t make much sense. “Ukraine” it was.
Timothy Snyder’s piece on US Vice-President Vance’s visit to Greenland has more insights in it than all the other coverage you’re likely to see of that visit combined. (Yale should be mourning its loss of Snyder to the University of Toronto.) Even choosing a few to quote is difficult without quoting the entirety. I recommend reading the original, but here are some selections.
“When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the NATO alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of NATO, and it is already [America’s] job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend the United States.
“Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked Article 5, the mutual defense obligation of the NATO treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita more Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war than were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?
“The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the NATO mission. But right now the United States is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire NATO mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. But Vance opposes helping Ukraine, spreads Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and is best known for yelling at Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office.
“On the base, Vance blamed the killing in Ukraine on Biden rather than on Putin, which is grotesque. Vance claimed that there is now an energy cease-fire in place between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, Russia violated it immediately. Russia is now preparing a massive spring offensive against Ukraine; the response of Musk-Trump has been to ignore this larger reality completely while allowing Biden-era aid to Ukraine to come to an end. Denmark meanwhile has given more than four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as does the United States.
“There are only a couple hundred Americans at Pituffik where once there were ten thousand; there is only that one US base on the island where once there were a dozen; but that is American policy, not Denmark’s fault.
“We really do have a problem taking responsibility. The United States has fallen well behind its allies and its rivals in the Arctic, in part because members of Vance’s political party denied for decades the reality of global warming, which has made it hard for the U.S. Navy to persuade Congress of the need to commission icebreakers. [. . .]
“As with everything Musk-Trump does, however, the cui bono question about imperialism in Greenland is easy to answer: Russia benefits. Putin cannot contain his delight with American imperialism over Greenland. In generating artificial crises in relations with both Denmark and Canada, America’s two closest allies these last eighty years, the Trump people cut America loose from security gains and create a chaos in which Russia benefits.
“The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The United States has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last eighty years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations. Musk-Trump are creating the bloodily moronic situation in which the United States will have to fight wars to get the things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking. And of course wars rarely turn out the way one expects.
“As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. [. . .]
“So consider. The US is is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five.”
As U.S. media have been softening their critical tool-kits under fear of retribution from the Trump administration, the lead in critical reporting seems to have been taken by a mix of individual bloggers (some of which I list here) and formerly secondary publications like Wired and Rolling Stone. The former has been doing brilliant reporting on the Musk-Trump axis. Now Rolling Stone has published an excellent cover story by Antonia Juhasz on the proposed U.S.-Ukraine “Minerals Deal.”
In “Is Trump’s ‘Minerals Deal’ a Fossil Fuel Shakedown?” Juhasz probes the details of the deal and interviews some well positioned experts — including the Brookings Institution’s Samantha Gross, who calls the deal “extortionist,” Maria Popova, author of Russia and Ukraine: Engangled Histories, Diverging States, and Ukrainian environmental lawyer and climate campaigner Svitlana Romanko. The article is paywalled, but Juhasz urges her readers in Facebook to “Please read, share, and act!”, so my sharing of large parts of it is an honoring of her request.
In that Facebook post, Juhasz notes that “Zelensky is on his way to Saudi Arabia next week, being forced into a corner by the unholy alliance of Putin and Trump and to sign an “extortionist” “neocolonial plundering” of Ukraine’s vast natural resource riches, giving Trump and Putin unprecedented control of fossil fuels and minerals.”
In the article, she writes:
The deal would cut open Ukraine’s natural resource veins, and could leave the majority of its key resources — including fossil fuels — under Russian control. Fifty percent of Ukraine’s future earnings from its remaining natural resource wealth would go into a new fund under U.S. direction into which the United States would contribute nothing. The deal could benefit American and other Western companies but would provide few economic and no security guarantees to Ukraine.
It’s a steep price to pay for peace, but Ukraine may be forced to accept the deal given how closely aligned the Trump regime has become with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is also laying the groundwork for the full reentry of Russia into the global economy, opening the door to a return of U.S. fossil fuel giants into one of the largest pools of oil and gas in the world.
