UKR-TAZ

There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin.

The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after all, connect within the ranks of the uber-rich masculinist jet set, where sexist pedophilia seems readily appeasable).

The second is psychoanalytical: that Trump is a pathological narcissist with a fragile father-damaged ego, and that he only looks up to other, more “successfully” imperial father figures. Putin is one of the few who fit his criteria.

The third is “realist,” which acknowledges that there are benefits, from Trump’s perspective, to a cozier relationship with Russia. Allying with Russia could, for instance, steer the latter away from China. More importantly, and more specifically these days, is that Russia is a fossil fuel superpower — and Trump’s authority is also reliant on a perpetuation of the global power of fossil fuels. Rehabilitating Putin will enable Trump to “make deals” around Russia’s only assets, which are its oil and gas deposits. When other prices are rising all around Trump, he could at least keep gas prices down by dealing directly with Putin.

The Silicon Curtain podcast — which describes itself as “a channel about propaganda, digital disinformation, politics, corruption, hybrid warfare, weaponised conspiracy theories, social echo chambers and digital dystopias” — is an excellent place to hear astute analyses of all things Russia. Their last few episodes, including “Did the Global Media Fall for a Giant Geopolitical Con?“, “Trump’s Surrender to Putin is Far Worse than Most People Realize,” and “Oil was Greasing the Gears of War, Not Peace at the Alaska Summit” — have covered various angles of the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska. The last is particularly insightful about the fossil-fuel dimensions of the meeting.

A few quotes:

“Russia is a gas station run by a mafia that churns out tanks and other instruments of death. It makes nothing that consumers really want or need. Russia’s war economy runs on black gold and has bloody hands.

“Before the war, oil and gas made up 40% of Russia’s federal budget and more than 50% of export earnings. In 2022, as tanks rolled into Ukraine, Russia earned $211 billion from fossil fuel exports with Europe still buying. […] The Kremlin used these revenues to pay soldiers salaries, to buy foreign tech, to retrofit weapons, to dust off its vast vast stores of Soviet weaponry and to refit those, to fund subsidies that kept domestic unrest in check. And of course, fund […] the intelligence services that keep a lid on any discontent.

“When sanctions hit, Russia adapted. They built a shadow fleet of tankers to move crude through backdoor routes, quasi-legal and illegal transit of oil. They rerouted flows to India, China, Turkey and others. They offered discounts and they cut middlemen deals with unscrupulous interlopers. They cut deals with immoral Greek shipping tycoons to fit out a fleet of vessels that previously were considered worthy only for the scrap heap — Russia’s barely seaworthy junk fleet of zombie vessels toship the blood oil around the world. According to the Economics Observatory, in June 2024, Russia’s adaptation to oil sanctions has extended the war, not constrained it. […] But now, finally, the cracks are showing.”

Host Jonathan Fink makes an interesting point about Ukraine, calling its defense a “war on oil,” which is “striking at the jugular of Putin’s war machine.” He continues:

“Since early 2024, Ukraine has launched a coordinated campaign of drone and sabotage attacks on refineries in Riazan, Nijnikamsk and in fuel depots near logistical hubs and ones that feed major centers of army logistics pipelines used to export to Hungary and Belarus, to Putin’s main allies in the west and the east. […] The campaign has disabled up to 30% of Russia’s refining capacity.”

This goes to the point, which I argue in my introduction to Terra Invicta, that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a fossil fuel war. It doesn’t account fully for the weird psychological dynamics of the Trump-Putin meeting, including Trump’s increasingly disjointed speech and action — distracting from the Epstein file is undoubtedly playing a role there — but it does explain some key material dimensions of the current configuration. The alignment between Trump and Putin is, in turn, an alignment around the continuation of fossil-fuel capitalism for as long as possible.

Ukrainians are, in this sense, at the frontlines of the “war on oil,” which also means the frontlines of climate change. To the extent that fossil-fuel capitalism is united in its front against the changes required for a transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy, the U.S. and Russian governments are now lined up on one side, while the Ukrainian army is aligned with environmentalists and green energy activists on the other.

That’s not to say that Ukrainians wouldn’t sell their own oil if they could; if there’s an eco-alliance here, it’s at this point just a strategic one. Nor is it to suggest that a “green capitalism” could offer any long-term solution to humanity’s ecological predicament. (I discussed that issue here and here, among other places.) But as with Ukrainians’ agreement to set aside political differences in order to oppose the current and obvious enemy — something I wrote about in my previous post — that’s a war for another day.