UKR-TAZ

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):

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):

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.