UKR-TAZ

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kavita Krishnan, Indian civil rights activist and former long-time member of the Indian Communist Party, has written something that astutely captures a large part of the international Left’s reaction to the Russo-Ukrainian war.

It’s less true for the liberal left, but still the case for many on the Marxist hard left. Her article in today’s The Hindu, “Multiple bullies at work, our to create a ‘multipolar world,'” expands on it (and the title captures the argument well; see below for the article). In a Facebook post yesterday she wrote the following:

If Zelenskyy were Chavez, he would be a hero for the left all over the world. Instead we have some on the left giggling at what they think is his humiliation. While others are silent, scrambling to come up with a line that won’t require them to say they were dead wrong for the past three years.

They insisted the conflict in Ukraine was between unipolar West vs Multipolar Russia & Rest where the latter was the lesser evil “regardless of their regressive character”. Today when the thugs ruling the two “poles” joined up to bully a brave Ukraine, they are confused but can’t admit they’re wrong (the left “Bro” culture can never say they were wrong).

The Ukraine war and the rise of the illiberal multipolar world order (with Trumpist West as well as Putin, Xi, Modi etc as “poles”) will be the stuff of history books of the future. The left will cut a sorry figure – a clueless and complicit one – in those books.

“Regardless of the internal character of competing global powers, a multipolar world is certainly more advantageous to progressive forces and movements worldwide in their quest for reversal of neoliberal policies, social transformation and political advance.” – this quote from an Indian Left leader in the immediate wake of my leaving his party over Ukraine sums up the Realist folly of the left globally.

I was asked to leave my party of 30 years for predicting this very moment where two poles would beat up on the scrappy fighter of a democracy that’s Ukraine. Was told that I couldn’t remain in the party if I wanted to defend and cheer for Ukraine’s right to armed resistance.

Decent people everywhere in the world cheer Ukraine’s courageous resistance to two fascist bullies. The left is silent, trying to find a way not to.

(This article was amended slightly on March 3, to incorporate Krishnan’s op-ed.)

This blog has been quiet since before the inauguration of Donald Trump, but I’ve been writing things at my other blog, Immanence, which are as relevant to Ukraine as they are to the topics explored there (ecology, philosophy, politics, media). That’s because all of these issues have become rolled into one.

Edgar Morin’s term “polycrisis” is sometimes used to get at the ways in which numerous cascading crises — ecological, climatic, economic, technological (e.g., misinformation and echo-chambered social media, artificial intelligence getting out of hand), biological (e.g., viral outbreaks like the Covid pandemic), et al. — combine to make a kind of perfect storm. With the takeover of the U.S. by Trump, Musk (his unelected co-leader), and the Project 2025 folks, and now their seemingly emergent alliance with Russia against Ukraine (how else to explain Vance’s comments in Munich and now Trump’s declaration that Zelensky “should never have started” the war with Russia?), we clearly have a dramatic destabilization of the world-system into a new configuration.

I describe that configuration here as a “multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their ‘spheres of influence’ in whatever way they like,” with democracy having “nothing to do with it” and power having everything. (On that same page I provide a resource guide to writers and web sites to follow in these rapidly changing times.)

More recently I’ve written about the importance of media, and specifically the importance for people to regain control of social media from the tech oligarchs who are squelching any possibility for useful information to triumph over useless information, disinformation, and misinformation. (Pekka Kallioniemi’s thread on X about Elon Musk’s Election Interference Machine is a pretty good summary of one of the most powerful prongs of that squelching.)

In any case, I am likely to be posting much more there than here for the simple reason that Ukraine is now the unmistakable victim of this new configuration of political, economic, and media power that we might call “emergent global techno-authoritarian neo-imperialism,” or something like that. To keep it simple, we could call it “technofascism,” or “kleptofascism,” or one of the other terms being thrown around.

It’s all evolving very rapidly (see Christina Pagel’s running summary of the U.S. wing of that neo-imperialism, and also of resistance against it), but eventually we’ll see what sticks. And how resistance will build. It’s the only hope not only for Ukraine, but for all of us.

Ukraine’s Left movement Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) recently held a conference in Kyiv, at which members adopted a resolution entitled “The path to victory and the tasks of the Ukrainian left.” The resolution has now appeared in English translation here. I reproduce it below.

(Founded in 2015 by “Ukrainian leftists of different backgrounds who participated in the revolutionary events of the so-called Euromaidan of 2013-14,” Sotsialnyi Rukh calls itself a movement based on “principles of democratic anti-capitalism, feminism, and ecosocialism,” including “radical deoligarchization of Ukraine.”)

Here’s the resolution. (Thanks to LINKS for the translation.)

Nathan Greenfield has compiled an excellent set of current and recent observations from scholars on the continuing ecocide occurring as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine. I’m in there, among others, but the more first-hand information comes from environmental scientists working in Ukraine, like Kseniia Bondar, Viktor Vyshnevskyi, Anna Kuzemko, and Mykhailo Yatsiuk.

You can read the full article, “Ukrainian scholars track war-related ecocide in real time,” at University World News.

As announced last fall, a group of prominent historians are launching what may be the largest scholarly mega-project in Ukraine’s history.

With initial funding from Ukrainian billionnaire (and oligarch) Viktor Pinchuk and support from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Ukrainian History Global Initiative‘s list of advisors and researchers reads like a “who’s who” of Ukrainian academe. It features not only several of the leading historians of modern and contemporary Ukraine — Serhii Plokhy, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and Timothy Snyder among others — but also leading period/area specialists (Christian Raffensberger writing on diplomacy in medieval Rus’, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern on Jewish history in Ukraine, Frank Sysyn on the Cossack era, Daniel Beauvois on Black Earth, Yuliya Yurchenko on inequality, and Phillips O’Brien on “wars for Ukraine”), world-renowned scholars not known for their work on Ukraine (such as environmental historian John McNeill and archaeologist David Wengrow), and well-known figures in arts and letters including Yuval Harari, Fareed Zakaria, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, “forensic architect” Eyal Weizman, Ukraine-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, and renowned Ukrainian poet Serhii Zhadan.

Some 50 of the project’s 90 scholars are Ukrainians, and the planned three-year collaborative research project will result in scholarly as well as popular texts in English and Ukrainian on almost every aspect of Ukrainian history: from deep prehistory through Rus’ and the Cossack state to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, with plenty of attention to wars of the past and the present, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, regional distinctions, and culture and the arts. If it succeeds in its goals, many of the topics discussed on this blog will have an additional, and hopefully authoritative, set of references to cite and refer to.

Further information can be read at the Ukrainian History Global Initiative web site.

Military historian Phillips Payson O’Brien provides a good summary here of where things are at, strategically, with the Russia-Ukraine war.

“So in a nutshell, Russian strategy is take whatever you can now, no matter how small an area and no matter how much it costs, on the assumption Trump wins, and you get to keep it. You then have four years to basically recover and come again when you are ready. The strategy is based around the longer term degradation of Ukraine as a power, the friendship of Trump, and the weakness of Europe.”

Meanwhile, “Ukrainian strategy at present has settled into a pattern of trying to maximize Russian losses, to lead to a steady degradation of Russian fighting capabilities for 2025.”

Longer term, so much depends on whether the Trump-Orban-Putin (and techbro?) axis wins the U.S. election. O’Brien’s quote of a long rambling passage from Trump’s acceptance speech provides the justification for how and why that intersection of interests (of at least the first three) can rightfully be called an axis – a case also made by Byline Supplement, co-authored by the team at the investigative media site Byline Times. Anne Applebaum correctly notes that “axis” is too strong a word; she prefers “network of convenience.” I agree with her caution and will share my own thoughts on her new book soon.

I would go further than O’Brien does in his piece, however, and would say that every significant national election today, especially in a country like the U.S., is an international election involving external players – in this case Russia, China, and other countries and transnational groups (corporate-industrial lobbies, among others) exercising influence via media and other channels (just as U.S. interests play a role in foreign elections when those interests are at stake). When Americans vote for authoritarians like Trump, they are also voting for authoritarians like Putin — and for a carve-up of international power among neo-empires still largely driven by old-energy plus new-tech interests. The opening up of the Arctic, for instance, is also opening up geopolitical competition over the Arctic and its resources, which are particularly attractive to old-energy (fossil fuel) interests, as they may keep them afloat for a significant time longer.

And voting is just the tip of the iceberg of political action – still an essential step, in countries like the U.S., but also just a cog in a much larger set of wheels. That said, the very likely emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential nominee has certainly invigorated U.S. politics, with the differences between the two candidates — in style now (as she differs little from Biden in policy) — being exactly the kind of thing the Democrats needed to whip up some enthusiasm. We’ll soon see how ugly things get as the racism of Trump’s far-right supporters (and their international backers — tech, fossil fuel, and media moguls — and autocrat/info-war facilitators) goes into high gear.

Further reading:

Phillips Payson O’Brien, “Strategic Update for Ukraine and Russia,” Phillips’s Newsletter, July 21, 2024, https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-90-strategic-update  O’Brien’s Substack newsletter is worth subscribing to.

Byline Supplement, “Fascism Redux: A New Axis Takes Shape,” July 20, 2024, https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/fascism-redux-a-new-axis-takes-shape

Tonya Mosley, “Expert on dictators warns — Don’t lose hope, that’s what they want” (interview with Anne Applebaum), Fresh Air, July 23, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049021/expert-on-dictators-warns-dont-lose-hope-thats-what-they-want I;’ll have more to say about Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc., soon.

by Kate Bossert (UKR-TAZ intern; see her UKR-TAZ piece on Russian cyber threats here)

In all armed conflicts, land and nature are among the most immediate casualties, yet these devastating effects on the environment never seem to be prioritized in mass media or in conversations about wars. The environment is often the silent victim of war. In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the natural world has endured ongoing widespread and long-term environmental damage that could continue to negatively affect the country for centuries.

A recent article in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology (Hryhorczuk et al) provides an in-depth analysis of the environmental health impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine, including coverage of air and water pollution, chemical contamination, habitat destruction, and much more. And the excellent first issue of the London Ukrainian Review, published in March, focused on various dimensions of this topic. Other coverage of it can be found here, here, here, and here, and see the bibliography of sources below.

One of the most devastating events affecting Ukrainian territory was the well-known destruction of Ukraine’s largest dam, Kakhovka, on June 6th, 2023, by Russian forces. This tragedy qualified as ecocide and the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl. Russian troops blew up the dam and the hydroelectric infrastructure, destroying it and releasing massive amounts of water. Impacts of the event included leaving 700,000 people without clean drinking water, demolishing wildlife and natural habitats, and unleashing more than a thousand potential sources of pollution from flooded sites. (For further reading on its impacts, see here, here, here, here, here and here.) 

The attack elicited great controversy over whether or not to rebuild the Kakhovka dam. In the month following the flood, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine passed a decree on the reconstruction of the reservoir and dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP). Ukrhydroenergo, the biggest hydro power generating company in Ukraine, is in strong support of this bill as the company wants to build a new HPP with an output of 550-600 megawatts. From an economic perspective, rebuilding the reservoir could entice residents back to abandoned homes, weekend dachas, and fishing boats along the former shoreline. And considering the inconceivable social and environmental costs this catastrophe has had on Ukraine, it can appear to be logical and necessary to rebuild the dam. 

But the solution to this disaster is not so black and white, and many environmentalists have argued against restoring the reservoir. Environmental activist Eugene Simonov stated that the previous reservoir already produced “very low-quality water with a lot of pollution“, and so the 2,000 square kilometers of land could be used in a much more environmentally and economically productive way. Additionally, if the Kakhovka reservoir restoration project goes ahead, it will be necessary to destroy all of these 1,800 square kilometers of natural ecosystems that have now begun to form. To learn more about the Kakhovka dam debate, see here, here and here. 

Despite all the chaos and environmental damage that has and continues to occur in this war-stricken country, plans are being formed and action has been taken to improve the current environmental crisis in Ukraine. The international Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) has been covering the climate crisis in Ukraine and discussing progress as well as necessary steps forward for Ukraine, including climate mainstreaming and building capacity for a green transition. 

But these eco-friendly transitions can only happen with extensive funding and support from other countries (especially the U.S.). As highlighted in the Ten-Step plan to address environmental impact of war in Ukraine, Ukrainian “organizations are calling on the international community to act now.” There are also conservation groups in Ukraine making headway, including the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group and other supportive organizations (e.g. see here). 

For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:

“Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my — this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

While nothing Trump says should be taken at face value, Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis of that note is worth reading. Political historian Richardson, who remains one of the most perceptive daily commentators on U.S. news, connects Trump’s version of “Putin’s dream” to Trump (and previously Yanukovich) advisor Paul Manafort’s so-called “Mariupol Plan,” cooked up with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnick — a “‘peace’ plan” Putin purportedly proposed in 2016 to carve off much of Ukraine. The plan is, of course, not so different from Putin’s recently proposed “peace plan” that involves Ukraine giving up what it controls of the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, which with Crimea amount to between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s land area.

Trump’s mention of Putin’s “dream” suggested he would happily indulge Putin in enabling its realization.

Richardson’s full piece can be read here.