Intellinews: Two thirds of Russians earn under $415 a month, income inequality rising, survey says

Intellinews, 10/15/24

A new study led by prominent Russian economists at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) found a significant underestimation of the country’s wealthy population and rising property inequality, The Bell reported on October 15.

The research, carried out by Alexander Surinov, the former head of Rosstat and now director of HSE’s Centre for Economic Measurement and Statistics, alongside his colleague Sergei Kuzin. The results show that there are nearly twice as many relatively affluent Russians as previously thought, further exacerbating the nation’s income disparity, and that two thirds (66%) of Russian made under RUB40,000 ($415) a month, less than the national average wage of RUB70,000 ($725).

The study employed an innovative approach to reassess income distribution, blending two methods that traditionally has skewed the results in the past.

Survey-based data tends to underrepresent wealthier individuals, who are reluctant to disclose their true income, while administrative data from the Federal Tax Service (FTS) omits lower-income groups, many of whom avoid formal tax systems altogether as they are so poor.

The HSE scientists addressed these limitations by mixing the results from the two surveys, including the data from tax declarations for 2022, to get a more accurate picture of income stratification in Russia.

Key findings showed that individuals earning over RUB150,000 per month accounted for 1.1% of the population – more than double the previous estimate of 0.5%. Similarly, those with monthly incomes exceeding RUB200,000 represented 0.5% of the population, up from the earlier figure of 0.3%.

For comparison, a Siberian bus driver has recently seen salaries increased from RUB70,000 to RUB100,000 to persuade them to remain in their jobs, but many have been enticed away by military salaries where they can earn over RUB200,000 a month as a driver behind the line of contact in Ukraine.

These adjustments primarily came from a recalibration of the cohort earning RUB100,000-150,000, which dropped from 2.3% to 1.8%. Meanwhile, 66% of Russians continue to earn less than RUB40,000 per month, with 18% earning between RUB40,000 and RUB60,000, and 8% earning between RUB60,000 and RUB80,000.

The recalculation has also heightened Russia’s already high levels of income inequality. The country’s Gini coefficient – a standard measure of inequality – rose from 0.34 to 0.36, indicating a sharper divide between rich and poor. The coefficient of funds, which compares average incomes of the wealthiest and poorest deciles, also increased from 9.1 to 9.9.

Moscow’s wealth gap stood out in particular. In the capital, the average income of the top 1% was found to be underreported by a quarter, rising to RUB356,000 from a previously estimated RUB285,000. In other regions, incomes of the top 1% were underestimated by 11%, reaching an adjusted average of RUB128,000.

Conflicting pictures

The results of the HSE’s survey confuse the picture as another survey found Russia’s poorest regions have been the biggest winners from the war, as heavy military spending on the war provided full time employment in military industrial factors in Russia’s far flung regions. At the same time a study of regional bank deposits showed that deposit accounts have swelled in poor regions thanks to military pay, as the bulk of Russia’s recruitment and the partial mobilisation in September 2023 was focused on Russia’s poorest regions.

At the same time a chronic labour shortage has driven up nominal wages far faster than inflation leading to a spike in real disposable incomes up to a record 9.6% in July. As bne IntelliNews reported, the soaring real disposable incomes have created a new War middle class, for whom life has never been better, The Bell reported earlier this year.

Russia’s income distribution has always been distorted by its Soviet legacy and the country’s vast size. As bne IntelliNews reported in 2018, incomes in some of the monotown mining towns deep in the tundra continue to outstrip those of Moscow, although the cost of living there is also considerably higher. At the other end of the scale, the incomes in the southern regions of the Caucuses and in the centre of the country remain at rock bottom.

Despite these gains that have been to the benefit of millions of people in the lower strata of society, Russian income inequality remains a serious problem.

However, overall the lot of Russians has improved over the last year. As reported by bne IntelliNews in its last despair index – the addition of poverty, inflation and unemployment – that captures a picture of what life is like in the lower third of society, the index value is currently at its lowest level ever. In particular, Russia’s poverty rate is currently 10.5%, or approximately 15.3mn from a total population of circa 150mn people, including immigrants. The poverty line is currently RUB13,600 ($140) monthly income.

Russia’s poverty rate compares favourably with most of the EU where poverty rates are typically in the low teens. The average poverty rate in the European Union is currently around 16-17%, according to Eurostat, but varies widely by region inside the EU. The picture is further confused as poverty is a relative concept and what constitutes poverty in Denmark is very different to what it means in Russia. At the same time, President Vladimir Putin has pledged to bring Russia’s poverty rate down to 8.5% as part of his National Projects 2.1 programme.

The incomes should be adjusted for PPP (purchase power parity), and on this basis Russia’s economy looks much stronger, after it overtook Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world this year in adjusted perms. Russia also overtook Germany in PPP GDP terms two years ago.

Adjusting the average income of RUB70,000 for PPP (using an exchange rate of RUB27 to the dollar, rather than the current RUB95 to the dollar) and the average income rises to $2,590, on a par with the average income in the EU, although it is still half the average income in Germany, but twice those in Central Europe.

Implications of recalibrating income data

HSE’s updated income figures could bolster the Russian government’s narrative around its progressive tax reforms. In May Putin announced the end of the flat tax regime, which he put in place almost as soon as he took office in 2000, with higher taxes for most affluent Russians.

As of next year, higher earners will face a new tax structure: a 15% tax rate on annual incomes over RUB2.4mn, which will progressively rise to 22% for those earning over RUB50mn. While these reforms may appear to target the wealthiest, analysts suggest they will likely bypass the true elite who derive much of their income from dividends and share sales, which are exempted from income taxes, The Bell reports.

In reality, the reforms may have the most significant impact on workers in the defence industry, whose incomes have risen sharply due to the ongoing war effort in Ukraine. As Kommersant reports, the anticipated increase in revenues from higher personal income tax (estimated at RUB533bn per year) is expected to pale in comparison to the financial injection required for Russia’s military build-up. By 2027-28, the government may introduce additional income redistribution measures in response to these financial pressures.

As reported by bne IntelliNews, instead of cutting military spending in 2025, the new three year budget, currently under debate, will be increased by a quarter in 2025. Indeed, the increase was so extreme, the Kremlin ordered the media to bury the story; those that did report the increase cited only the raw spending numbers and did not provide year-on-year comparisons.

The threshold for when the new progressive tax regime kicks in remains extremely high and barely affects Russia’s elite, nor will it make a big difference to Russia’s tax revenues. However, after refusing to touch the flat tax regime for three decades, the Kremlin is now moving cautiously to finally increase taxes on Russia’s prosperous middle class and rich and introduce a more equitable tax regime.

Bloomberg’s Russia economist Alexander Isakov warns that the wealthiest Russians should prepare for more substantial tax hikes, predicting that rates could rise to 30-35% by the next election cycle.

This recalibration of income distribution highlights the challenges facing the Russian economy, where regional inequality remains stark despite the recent military spending rebalancing. The benefits of economic growth remains too concentrated among a small, affluent segment of the population in the richer regions. As military spending continues to soar, pressure on the tax system may prompt further reforms that could significantly alter the financial landscape for Russia’s upper-income earners.

Wendell Berry: Against killing children

By Wendell Berry, The Christian Century, October 2024

Soon enough, and somewhat to my surprise, I have become an aged man. For many years I have been an advocate for the good and goods in which I have invested my heart. I am a patriot but not a nationalist. Since the Vietnam years, I have opposed our wars of national adventure, and I have opposed the extractive industrialism that passes with us for a national economy. I have opposed the dominant attitudes and technologies by which we are destroying, and have too nearly destroyed, the economic landscapes of our country, our country itself, our land. The different manifestations of our destructiveness are all parts of one thing: a global corporate economy concentrated upon the effort to turn to profit everything that can be subdued to its methods. Whatever cannot be made directly profitable—the lives and needs of children, let us say—it ignores and thus draws into the vortex of its destruction.

And so, as a “late” essay, I want to address a problem, in fact a disaster, that I have not heretofore said enough about: our destruction of children. We of the United States of America have now grown accustomed to the killing of children. We still regard it as sensational, with a remnant revulsion; it is often a “news item.” But sensation wears out fast. The roving eyes of the media hesitate a due moment over the current sensation and hurry on to the next. Perhaps experts may devote an article or column to the matter, but they also must hurry on, for disasters continue to happen, child killing is only one of them, and all must be given their moment in the schedule of sensations.

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We all agree that we are living in an exceedingly troubled time, and it finally occurs to me that we ought to think of child killing not as a part or a symptom but instead as the center, the nucleus, the very eye of our trouble: the plainest measure of our betrayal of what we used to call our humanity. I know that I am drawn to this labor by my tenderness and fear for my four great-granddaughters. But I am drawn to it also because I was once a child, and like many children of my generation, I enjoyed a freedom that has become rare, almost extinct. The best part of my early education was the free, unsupervised playing and rambling with other children in our small towns and the freedom to wander in fields and woods. We were to a degree endangered, of course, by the world’s native hazards and our inexperience, but we acquired experience, too, the kind of experience that supervision excludes, and thus something in the way of caution.

Today in our not very free country, children are first in line to be unfree. They are enclosed in specialized child worlds constructed for them by frightened and mostly absent adults. And yet they are in danger, now not so much from nature and accident as from an industrial instrument made expressly for death-dealing, wielded against them by an irate or maddened gunslinger. They are not safe in their schools, and if not there then obviously not in any public place.

A new and most acute pain comes into the heart with the thought of little children learning in school their poor means of protecting themselves against a gunman come to kill them. It is convenient, a relief of sorts, to look upon this as anomalous, supposing that this killing of children in school is perpetrated by people exceptionally crazed or maddened, or to blame it on the proliferation of guns or the inadequacy of gun laws. There may be some truth in these explanations. It seems that people are becoming more likely to be crazed by a popular anger or hatred or some extremity of politics. It is true that people in general own too many guns.

It is certainly true, moreover, that our political representatives are now measuring up to remarkably low standards. The dumbfoundment of many of them by awe and fear of the Second Amendment is abject and cowardly. As is clear in its language, the Second Amendment does not confer a right that is absolute or unlimited. Like any other right, like any freedom, the right to bear arms must have its encounter with responsibility and make its submission. Billionaires should not be allowed to own a personal air force or nuclear bomb. No more should any other private citizen have a right to sell or buy or use in any way an assault rifle, a weapon whose only purpose is to kill a lot of people in a hurry.

But I am attempting to talk here about a radical reduction of childhood, which can happen only by way of a radical reduction of parenthood, of adulthood, of what it means to be a grown-up human being. It is not enough to single out offenders or groups of offenders, as I have been doing, and lay blame. These reductions are national in scope. In one way or another they involve us all, and among their implications is the killing of children. I dread to say so, but we have become a child-killing nation. The kindest way to put this is to say that we have become a society of people who cannot prevent our own children from being killed in their classrooms or in other gathering places and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war that we have made and assigned to that purpose. Sooner or later, we will have to ask how we can so disvalue the lives of other people’s children without, by the same willingness, disvaluing the lives of our own.

Child killing is the plainest measure of our betrayal of what we used to call our humanity.

The history of war making against civilian populations, from our Civil War to our bombing of Hiroshima, is well known. It follows one of the routes of technological progress. Perhaps, because the scale so far has been smaller, it is easier to overlook or forget the continuation of this progress in the succession of foreign wars of so-called national defense, from Korea to Afghanistan to our (so far) indirect participation in Ukraine and in Israel and Gaza. It has continued also in our now-and-then-remembered stockpiling of nuclear weapons. I saw in the New York Times of June 6, 2023, that Hanford, in Washington State, “was part of a network of plants that made more than 60,000 nuclear bombs.”

The smaller of our wars, using conventional weapons and “smart weapons” aimed only, supposedly, at combatants, may permit us to think that children are killed only accidently, that their sufferings and deaths are only collateral damage, for which the perpetrator may be in some fashion innocent. But bombings meant to destroy whole cities offer no such convenience. Those can only be the result of official policy—policy that presumes public consent—intending to kill a whole population, including of course all the innocent small children, as well as all the innocent birds, animals, and plants, as well as the entire built structure of human life. The intention, in short, is total destruction. (And now, the chickens as ever are coming home to roost. Israel invokes the US history of child-killing war to justify its own child-killing war, as perhaps Hamas does also.) Our nuclear stockpile can exist only by the same intention, with the same consent, which has belonged to us now for more than three-quarters of a century. The value of the lives of the children killed by such a mode of warfare has thus been reduced, by us, to nothing.

We have assumed, evidently, that we can commit or tolerate so great a depreciation of life at no cost to ourselves. But how do we preserve the wholeness of our hearts against the force and effect of that nothing? How do we keep it from reducing our valuation of our own children?

And to so much difficulty we have added a dimension of absurdity that baffles and degrades us even further: 60,000 nuclear bombs? Who can look upon such an extravagance as good? Only those, I guess, who gain from the production and maintenance of so much “national defense” a wage of power and money to enjoy for a good while, as they must hope, before the stroke of the doom they have prepared. The absurdity of this is revealed by questions that are merely obvious. How many times does a nation need to destroy civilization or the human race or the world as we have known it in order to win a war? What does any nation possess that is worth defending by so much destruction? Or that can be so defended, or that can survive such a defense? What that is good can survive the employment of so much evil in its defense?

I fear that in saying these terrible things, I am giving the impression that this problem is offensive only according to some measure devised by me, not by any external standard. In fact I have so far been attempting, by habit, to speak as a Christian. I would like now to make this explicit—and to do so by taking as seriously as I can the conventional claim that this is a Christian nation and therefore submitted and accountable to the laws of God as set forth in the Bible.

I am aware of course of the numerous people in this nation who are not Christians, or who dispute the claim that the nation is Christian, or who are hostile to religious belief of any kind. I am aware, above all, of the sometimes scandalous differences between the teaching and example of Christ and the behavior of Christians in most of the Years of Our Lord. But I am aware also of the prominence of Christianity, in its several versions, in our history and our cultural and artistic inheritance. For a standard by which to measure the consistency and quality of our shared or public life at this time, I don’t know where else to look. Though I am not a cleric or a scholar but only an amateur reader of books, I mean to use the Bible’s laws, and what I take to be its sense, as a practical standard to examine the ways we think and act in the 21st century.

About here, it seems to me, I come under the necessity to answer those who think that, from the perspective of the science and civilization of the 21st century, the teachings of the Bible are outdated and irrelevant—which is to say, pretty much, that old truth cannot be true and that one now reads old books to learn about them but not from them. This supposes that there is such a thing as a purely modern human mind, free of history and superstition, free of all antiquated views of nature and human nature, entirely materialist and mechanical, factual and true if not now then soon. This is a mind entirely resident in the human brain, famously big, that can make up out of thin air any rules needed for the guidance of human behavior.

There have always been, on the contrary, people learned and intelligent who have engaged the Bible and Christian tradition seriously and with an awareness of the trial and the testing it must be for themselves and for humankind.

Of these I will offer as an example the distinguished diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. In 1982, Kennan published The Nuclear Delusion, which includes his essay “A Christian’s View of the Arms Race.” This man’s thinking about the great problems of modern warfare, so far as I am acquainted with it, is intelligent, informed, and thorough. He saw clearly the urgency of the crisis of nuclear weapons. But he saw too that the “conventional” technology of modern war was, like the nuclear bomb, incapable of distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants, and therefore that “war itself . . . will have to be in some way ruled out.”

In his essay he presents himself with appropriate modesty: “I hold myself to be a Christian, in the imperfect way that so many others do.” He speaks of the ethical confusion in which history has placed us with respect to the possible use of a nuclear bomb:

One of the rules of warfare was the prescription that weapons should be employed in a manner calculated to bring an absolute minimum of hardship to noncombatants and to the entire infrastructure of civilian life. This principle was of course offended against in the most serious way in World War II; and our nuclear strategists seem to assume that, this being the case, it has now been sanctioned and legitimized by precedent.

But, he says, even if that rule of war were not “prescribed by law and treaty, it should . . . be prescribed by Christian conscience.” And then he goes to what—for him as for me and I assume still for many people—is the very quick of the issue: “Victory, as the consequences of recent wars have taught us, is ephemeral, but the killing of even one innocent child is an irremediable fact, the reality of which can never be eradicated.”

This sentence is crucial both to Kennan’s essay and to this essay of mine. Kennan could have told us, as we have been told many times, that a nuclear bombing of a large city would kill thousands of children, and we would read right on—because the human imagination does not respond to large numbers, to statistics. When he instead asks us to consider the killing of one innocent child, we stop, and we imagine what would be the absolute finality of the death of a child we love; we imagine unending sorrow. By this immensity of the intentional killing of one child, Kennan makes the technology of mass destruction subject to Christian conscience. And Christian conscience, which subjects the events of time to the judgment of eternity, seems to speak for itself in Kennan’s conclusion:

The readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings—against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish—and, in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and the perceived interests of our own generation were more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity—an indignity of monstrous dimensions—offered to God!

I believe that this is fairly exactly what Christian conscience would say in response to this jeopardy of our souls that has only grown worse in the 42 years since Kennan wrote his essay.

In a Christian nation one might reasonably expect Christian conscience to have a lively part in the national conversation, so that no policy of war making could be made without hearing the voice of that conscience and so coming under pressure to respond. But Kennan’s statement, lonely enough when it was written, still seeks for hearers, and it enforces several questions: Who now in our prominent institutions would have the courage to repeat it? Who in the high places of our government would have ears to hear it? Who in public life could quote without fear or embarrassment any saying of Jesus on the subject of peace? Martin Luther King Jr. could do so, and did so. But who now?

I don’t know. Somebody, I hope. What I do know is that our official policy now rests, apparently with no second thought, upon the doctrine of preparedness—preparedness, that is to say, for the worst, only for the worst—which requires the means and the will to annihilate an enemy at the cost only of being annihilated ourselves. Our thousands of nuclear warheads prepare us for a victory that is perfectly and hopelessly absurd. Not only do we risk unspeakable horror by the intentional use of these weapons, but we run the same risk in possessing them, because of the possibility that they may be exploded by error or accident.

And so we have got to ask if there is a point at which Christian conscience, or any conscience, can say no to a technological “advance” of any kind. I will mention again, as I have done often before, the Old Order Amish, who have maintained an effective freedom of choice for themselves by limiting the economic scale of their lives and by asking of any proposed innovation a single question: “What will this do to our community?” Otherwise, the conscience of our country, Christian though it may be, is at one with or more or less surrendered to the doctrine of technological progress, which apparently reduces to the assumption that what can be done must be done.

Moral choice and even moral refusal are possible in relation to nuclear weapons. We know this not from the example of a community but from that of highly principled individuals. Physicist I. I. Rabi refused J. Robert Oppenheimer’s invitation to join the Manhattan Project because he could not bear the idea of a nuclear weapon as “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” According to the New York Times (October 3, 2023), another physicist, Lise Meitner, refused the same invitation: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.”

In a 1998 letter to historian John Lukacs, Kennan offers a reasoned dissent from the dominion of technological progress:

There will now come what I would expect to be a long period of virtual enslavement. . . . The automobile, television . . . drugs, and now the computer culture, have become not the enlargers of life they were originally seen to be, but the restrictors of it—forms of entrapment, all of them, from which people no longer know how to extract themselves.

It may surprise us to recognize that none of those commodities came about by popular demand or to answer a perceived need. Most people did not desire or think of them until they were available. The supply brought forth the demand. This inversion of the natural order seems to be the rule of the industrial economy. Trainability, as we know from our dealings with parrots and dogs, is a mark of intelligence. Perhaps because of our big brains, we were easily trained to want television sets and computers. As for Kennan’s prophecy of virtual enslavement, we now hear, only 26 years later, the voices of experts advising us of our need to know how to brand ourselves—the better, obviously, to sell ourselves. Although in this arrangement the money is paid to ourselves, we have nonetheless been sold and bought, as slaves always have been sold and bought.

How comes it that we who inherited a tradition of freedom—who once knew that within obvious limits we were free to choose between good and evil, truth and falsehood, yes and no—now submit our conscience, of whatever design, to the inevitability of whatever has happened and whatever will happen? How do we answer the scientists who, on the one hand, advise us that freedom of choice is a superstition or a self-coddling delusion and, on the other hand, beg us to choose the remedy that they prescribe for whichever calamity they have presently in view? What do we say to the university intellectuals who, to avoid the subjectivity of a moral stand, speak of the inevitability of what is morally indefensible?

To answer, let us remove these questions from the thin air that now surrounds our public talk about freedom and place them in the force field of the Bible, and let us begin at the beginning. Genesis 1:27 declares that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them.” I would like to read that for what it is: not history or science, as we understand those terms, but a part of the King James translation of a Hebrew poem about the origin of everything. As religious statements often do, this one places us between two perfectly symmetrical impossibilities: nobody can prove that God created us in his own image, and nobody can prove that he did not.

This verse follows immediately the verse granting us dominion over the other creatures—the verse, read alone, that is so scandalous among environmentalists looking for somebody to blame. But “dominion” does not imply permission or a right to destroy things. As I am going to try to show, it is the peril of dominion that calls forth the biblical laws. As I read them, the two verses are closely related, and the second imposes a stark qualification upon the first. God made us in his image—as his likenesses, not his equals. That our dominion, which it seems we have fearfully and without limit, is subject to the condition of the next verse becomes, even before the Fall, an extreme difficulty. To be like God but not God is to be free to choose and to choose wrong. After the Fall, our likeness to God makes us free to work and to work badly.

To be made in the image of God is to be made unique among the other creatures, to be made especially uncomfortable in our dealings with them and therefore especially in need of instruction. Unlike the other creatures, we need laws to keep us in harmony with heaven and earth and with one another. And so God reveals himself from the first as a lawgiver. His laws come as light in darkness, allowing us even when we disobey them—which we are free of course to do and often have done—to see what we are doing and to know what is expected of us. This is why the blessed man of the first Psalm delights “in the law of the Lord.” He recognizes the relief and the immense privilege of knowing the difference between right and wrong.

It is remarkable that after the Fall expectations are not adjusted downward to suit our condition. God doesn’t say, like an indulgent parent or a bad teacher, “You’re doing pretty well for fallen people.” He says with terrible simplicity: “Be perfect.” That confers a dignity upon us that is hard to bear. For many of us it is not bearable, and so we don’t try to bear it. But I have read of people, heard of people, even known one or two, who have stood up to the burden and borne it well. And it seems to me that such people offer to the rest of us an authentic solace and source of hope. If not them, then who?

From the beginning, Jews and Christians are given a definition of ourselves—made in the image of God—which imposes upon us a burden, requiring much but not too much if the best of us have becomingly borne it, and by its requiring it teaches us much about the world and about ourselves. The problem with this, in addition to its hardship in an age devoted to comfort, is the mystery of it. It belongs to the mystery of existence, ours and that of everything else. Why are we here, in a world somewhat uglified by us but still to many of us mainly beautiful? That it was once said on highest authority to be good is, even now, not an opinion altogether lonely. But such perceptions do not lead to questions that lead to answers. They simply stall us in the presence of mystery.

In a materialist age, mysteries are embarrassing, even threatening, and they have to be ignored or worked around. And materialism, it seems, is subtly infectious. Though we may not have tried to be, though we may not have realized that we were learning to be, we all are materialists now, entrapped in our determined need to find a material cause for every perceived effect. For materialists, life becomes a sort of detective story: What is the cause of this effect? And then: What is the cause of the cause, and the cause of the cause of the cause?—until we come to the Big Bang, of which everything is an effect but which so far has not been found to have caused itself.

“Made in the image of God” clearly is not acceptable to this way of thought. And so by way of progress and to accommodate our fear of mystery, scientists at first replaced our old definition with one they thought we could understand: we are only human, which is to say a kind of animal. To account for our difference from the other animals, the scientists specified that we have big brains. But once a reduction of this sort has begun, it apparently cannot be kept from going as far as science or some scientists can take it. In their 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow take it as far, I assume, as was possible at that time: “It seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”

I mean no harm to scientists, some of whom I admire and depend on. But it happens that this comedown from the image of God to biological machines is the work entirely of scientists. This final (so far) reduction by Hawking and Mlodinow requires our thanks for the honesty of their way of wording it. “It seems,” they are obliged to say because of their inability to prove what they are going to say. And if we are, as they say, “biological machines,” then it follows, as it must, “that free will is just an illusion.” They have brought themselves to a perfect determinism. We are left to conclude that the two of them wrote their book because, as biological machines, they could not do otherwise. Thus they have replaced an immense and mysterious complexity with a simplicity as tidy and small as it (so far) can be made. And who among us materialists can avoid some sense of their relief? For with one logical heave they have shrugged off the whole burden and agony of moral choice and moral failure, freedom and responsibility, along with the tangle and trouble of human history so far.

In the descent of our understanding of ourselves from “made in the image of God” to only humans to animals to machines, I don’t know exactly when or how free will begins to be replaced by determinism. It is clear to me only that materialism itself is deterministic to the extent that it disables the high principles and ideals that we once looked to as motives—love, reverence, beauty, mercy, faith, sympathy, compassion, kindness, and the rest—which are not materials and do not necessarily lead to material results. Under the rule of materialism, we are motivated by what we perceive as the goodness or the good consequences of material commodities—ease, comfort, speed, facts, wealth, power, and so on—with which we are now obsessed.

Meanwhile, we Americans along with the people of several other nations are “protected” by our stockpiles of nuclear weapons—from which we are protected in truth only by the world’s rulers’ fear, so far, of using them. So far as I know, the accumulation and dispersal of these weapons cannot be openly opposed by a political or governmental insider. Only an outsider, such as Kennan came to be, can speak in opposition. Kennan devoted a good part of his life to demonstrating over and over again the sheer absurdity of these weapons. He was eminently prepared by intelligence, learning, and experience for this argument. He died in 2005. Who are his successors?

I am sure that he has successors. I believe that there always will be people sane enough and compassionate enough to trouble themselves in behalf of peace. I am not a politician or a journalist, and so my sense of the state of things is somewhat impressionistic. My impression is that Kennan has no successor as distinguished and capable as he was. My further impression is that there is in the United States no peace establishment. We have a war (or “defense”) establishment, involving a huge annual outlay of money, a huge arsenal of military technology, a huge staff of officials and bureaucrats, and a huge payroll. But we have no secretary of peace, no department of peace, no academy or curriculum of peace. If a war breaks out, provided it is not one of our own, our leaders offer as a way of restoring peace mainly a supply of the most advanced weapons to their preferred side. It’s not clear that anyone tries to compute the worth of destroyed lives or of destroyed dwellings or of damages to the human infrastructure and the natural world. Nobody weighs these damages against the worth of the proposed victory.

If one is not convinced of the inevitability of war or of war as a necessary and acceptable solution or of victory as a final good, then one may notice that the only real winners of these industrial wars are the war industries. One may notice that in the background of these wars of national defense are people for whom a war is a part of business, the payoff of an economy in many ways violent even should there be no war. And then one may begin to suspect that peace may be so little a matter of political interest because there is no money in it. War clearly is good for such an economy as ours, but who is investing in peace? Peace is in many ways a bargain for mere people and other creatures and the earth they inhabit. But peace is cheap. It requires the disuse of technologies of violence, of which the misuse is preferred by the people who count.

Should we not ask if war imposes any cost upon the war industries, or upon any industry to which war is profitable? In time of war mere people are expected to put their lives at risk. This is taken for granted; it is normal. But in recent years I have been asking people who ought to know, including an army general with whom I spoke at some length, if during a war it were not normal, as a part of patriotism, for the great corporations of national defense to reduce their charges for weapons and other products sold to the government. Not one of my witnesses so far has ever heard of such a sacrifice. No, war is the business of businesses immune to the penalties paid to war by citizenship. To further baffle us there is the international arms trade, which conducts itself according to the rules merely of business in the interest merely of business.

As a matter of course, we the people of the United States observe our world of active and potential violence, paying day by day our share of the cost of it, consuming the news of it, suffering the outbreak of it at times in the classrooms of our children. And where is the prominent peace movement that would normally be expected of a Christian country, or even of a sane country? How can we remember “But I say unto you, Love your enemies” and not see that we are involved in a world-destroying, life-destroying betrayal? How can we hear “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” and, looking at our own little children, merely regret that they may be killed by an assault rifle in the hands of a fellow citizen, or be merely sorry that thousands of little children like our own have been and are being killed by weapons made and paid for by us? Can we not speak at least an audible no to the meaningless suffering and death of these most precious and helpless ones given in trust into our care? 

Newsweek: At War in Ukraine, Putin Emerges as Potential Peace Broker in Middle East

By Tom O’Connor, Newsweek, 10/31/24

Russia is being considered as a potential player in a deal to halt the conflict raging between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, leveraging its unique position to prevent an even larger-scale war from erupting across a region consumed by crisis for more than a year.

As a ceasefire agreement is drafted with the backing of U.S. presidential advisers Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, international outlets such as Israel’s Ynet News and the Saudi-owned, United Kingdom-based Asharq Al-Awsat have cited sources in recent days saying that Russia has been asked by Israel to take part in the arrangement.

Uncertainties surround Moscow’s capacity to play an effective role as it contends with a war of its own in Ukraine, but the buy-in of a world power with ties to nearly every major stakeholder could provide crucial support to the initiative at a time when Washington’s leadership in the Middle East has been increasingly called into question.

“We always prefer the Americans,” Orna Mizrahi, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser now serving as senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, told Newsweek. “But we understand that, because of [the Russians’] really good relations nowadays with the Iranians, maybe they can provide something that will contribute to this for the stability of any arrangement in the future.

“Another point is the fact that they are part of the United Nations Security Council five and if we get to the point that we have some kind of a new resolution about the ceasefire in the United Nations Security Council, we would like that the Russians will approve it.”

Moreover, Mizrahi said the latest developments came at a time when Russia “wants to be involved, they want to be relevant to what’s going on in the region.”

A Dual Approach

Moscow has a long history of power plays in the Middle East dating back to the days of the Soviet Union, as the already ideologically fractured region emerging from its colonial era was thrust into the crosshairs of the Cold War. For decades, the USSR was a key supporter of a number of Arab states that clashed with U.S.-backed Israel in support of Palestinian statehood.

Just months before its ultimate collapse, however, the Soviet Union reestablished ties with Israel in 1991 and the newly formed Russian Federation doubled down on this path, particularly after President Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000. Putin would go on to reassert Russia’s influence across the Middle East and take it a step further by conducting an unprecedented intervention on behalf of longtime partner Syria in the midst of its civil war in 2015.

The conflict set the stage for a substantial boost in Russia’s relationship with Iran, which also backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against rebels and jihadis, including the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Moscow and Tehran have since further bolstered their partnership, with Russian forces even utilizing Iranian drones in the ongoing war in Ukraine launched by Putin in February 2022.

The Russian leader has also forged a close, personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These bonds have been complicated by Moscow’s increasingly harsh criticism of Israeli wartime actions in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, yet Netanyahu has rarely responded in kind and the two sides have managed to keep their channels open.

Having dealt with Russian officials directly in her past roles in government, Mizrahi testified to an “astonishing” level of “their appreciation of Israeli military capabilities,” something she said has helped drive a pragmatic approach on issues such as Syria, where advanced Russian air defenses have been silent in the face of hundreds of Israeli strikes against positions tied to Iran and its militia allies.

She said: “I think that this plays a very significant role in their policy towards Israel and this is one of the reasons that they are not doing anything against the Israeli attacks in Syria, although they could do a lot, of course.”

The region’s focus has since shifted from Syria to Gaza, however, where war erupted in October of last year following an attack led by the Palestinian Hamas movement against Israel. Even more recently, the spotlight has been on Lebanon, where the Israeli military is now waging a combined air and land campaign against Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran, over its continuous cross-border strikes in solidarity with Hamas.

Hezbollah has been dealt severe blows as a result of the conflict, including the loss of large amounts of equipment and the deaths of senior commanders, including longtime Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. But as the powerful paramilitary organization regroups and Israel and Iran reel from their recent exchange of direct strikes, the latest ceasefire talks have emerged as a potential off-ramp.

Among the discussed components of the deal, an apparent U.S. draft of which was leaked earlier this week by Israeli broadcaster Kan and confirmed by two sources cited by Reuters, is a plan to hamper the flow of weapons to Hezbollah via the presence of foreign troops at the Syria-Lebanon border.

Yeghia Tashjian, regional and international affairs cluster coordinator at the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, pointed out that Russia was in the best position to aid in this effort given the presence of its forces in Syria.

“Here, we should ask, is it in Russia’s interest to see Hezbollah dismantled?” Tashjian, who recently participated in a conference held by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies discussing Moscow’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean, asked.

“Russia does not want to see Hezbollah weakened to a degree that would increase the U.S. influence in Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah and Iran have been useful in containing the American influence,” he said. “However, instability is not in the interest of Russia if it extends to Syria.”

Allies and Competitors

Today, Tashjian said, Moscow’s attention has been diverted to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, where Putin is overseeing a massive war effort against Kyiv, which is receiving increasingly advanced aid from Washington and its NATO allies.

Tashjian said this shift was most notably demonstrated by Russia’s lack of intervention in support of ally Armenia when Azerbaijan seized control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region last year. The large-scale offensive came just three years after the establishment of a ceasefire agreement meant to be enforced by Russian peacekeeping units.

Russia and Iran, which also borders the volatile South Caucasus region, have since diverged on their positions in the strategically located area as the former backs the opening of a corridor through Armenian territory to Azerbaijani lands and Iran opposes it.

In Syria, too, the two powers have differed in their long-term approaches, with Moscow looking to bring the war-torn nation back into the Arab fold while Tehran views it as a key component of the Axis of Resistance coalition that also includes Hezbollah and an array of other non-state actors in the region. Critical for both players is access to the Mediterranean.

“Within this context, there seems to be an agreement between Tel Aviv and Moscow that the former would not sell weapons to Kyiv and in return, Russia would close an eye for Israel’s airstrikes on Iranian and Hezbollah assets in Syria,” Tashjian said. “The weakening of Iran and Hezbollah in Syria would also provide additional flexibility for President Bashar al-Assad to open to the Gulf countries.”

The Syrian conflict has also had a profound impact in Lebanon because of refugee flows, security concerns and the often-polarizing history between the neighboring nations, among other factors. Since the end of the civil war in 1991 and the withdrawal of Syrian forces in 2005, Lebanon’s sectarian politics have largely been divided into two blocs, one supportive of Assad and the other opposed to him.

Iran’s influence in the country has traditionally been rooted in its close ties to fellow Shiite Muslims, predominantly Hezbollah, the dominant military force in the country and also a powerful political entity.

Russia, too, has established a rapport with Hezbollah. Moscow has also fostered support among different segments of society, including the Orthodox Christian community and other key figures such as Maronite Christian Marada Movement leader Suleiman Frangieh, who has been considered a potential candidate to assume the vacant Lebanese presidency, thus breaking a two-year deadlock.

“Its soft power over the years has built bridges with many actors both in the Christian and Muslim communities, something that Iran lacks,” Tashjian said. “Hence, the Israeli media outlets hinting on the issue that Russia is being asked and has expressed willingness to play a role in a ceasefire in Lebanon means we may see greater Russian involvement in Lebanon, at the expense of Iran.”

“I am not sure if the U.S. will agree on such an idea,” he added. “This depends on the future administration in Washington and its willingness to compartmentalize its relations with Moscow.”

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told Newsweek that “we don’t have comment on Russian diplomatic efforts” and spoke instead to the U.S. approach to the ongoing talks.

“The United States is committed to regional stability,” the State Department spokesperson said. “We continue to support a diplomatic solution to current hostilities between Israel and Hizballah—one that restores lasting calm and allows residents in both countries to return safely to their homes.”

Newsweek has also reached out to the Lebanese Embassy to the U.S., the Israeli Consulate General in New York, the Iranian Mission to the United Nations and the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment.

A Precarious Pivot

Mona Yacoubian, a former U.S. State Department analyst now serving as vice president of the United States Institute of Peace’s Middle East and North Africa center, expressed doubts regarding Russia’s potential to play a major role in the outcome of the conflict in Lebanon.

“Russia’s strategy in Lebanon has largely been opportunistic, seeking to exploit opportunities wherever they arise without investing significant resources,” Yacoubian told Newsweek. “As such, Moscow’s influence in Lebanon is fairly limited and certainly pales in comparison to the role it plays in Syria.”

Unlike in Syria, where Russia capitalized on a Cold War-era relationship with the central government to great effect, Lebanon’s complex constellation of sectarian factions would demand a more comprehensive campaign of maneuvering.

“Under the current circumstances, it’s difficult to imagine Russia exploiting the current crisis to play a bigger role in Lebanon,” Yacoubian said. “It does not have the requisite influence across Lebanon’s political spectrum, leverage among key regional players or leading influence in the United Nations to take on ceasefire diplomacy in Lebanon.”

While Russia’s soft power moves have gained a degree of foothold in Lebanon, Moscow’s more ambitious projects have had mixed results.

In 2018, Russia offered a $5 billion military assistance deal to Lebanon only for the agreement to later be turned down amid U.S. and European pressure. That same year, Russian energy giants Novatek and Rosneft signed contracts for the exploration of Lebanese maritime gas fields but the former ultimately ceded the contract to QatarEnergy last year amid Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.

Karim Emile Bitar, a professor of international relations at Saint Joseph University of Beirut, also felt the major players in Lebanon at this stage remained the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia, which continues to hold the greatest influence among the Sunni Muslim community in Lebanon amid competition with another regional player, Turkey.

He told Newsweek that Moscow and Ankara do exert degrees of influence in Lebanon “but they cannot be considered as key stakeholders, unless the solution to the Israeli-Lebanese war is part of a wider package deal that would involve a detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between the United States and Iran, and if it includes the Syrian dossier, if Bashar al-Assad can be forced to make certain concessions.”

“In that case, Putin could be a broker, a middleman between the Sunni Arab states and Bashar al-Assad,” he said.

Still, as Russian International Affairs Council expert Kirill Semenov told Newsweek: “Russia does not cease to conduct dialogue with Lebanese political forces.” He said the current discussions come as “Moscow is trying to understand Israel’s motives in order to find common ground between them in order to develop a formula for a possible ceasefire.”

Others, too, would need to be convinced of the final initiative.

“Moscow’s efforts alone on this track will not be enough and informal consultations with Western countries are necessary, as well as close coordination with Moscow’s Arab partners, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” Semenov said.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have called for a ceasefire since the regional crisis first erupted more than a year ago, but they have so far been hesitant to play a larger role. Moscow has had success in the past on this front, however, notably playing a significant part in mending their ties with Damascus, which returned to the Arab League last year after being shut out at the onset of the civil war in 2011.

Assad’s comeback on the battlefield and diplomatic arena with help from Moscow was widely viewed as a victory against Washington’s waning influence in the region. But replicating this win in Lebanon may prove an even bigger challenge for the Kremlin, even with the many inroads it has sought to foster.

“Moscow and Beirut maintain close relations and contacts, just as Russia maintains relations with various political forces in the country, both with Hezbollah’s allies and opponents, so Russia still has certain levers of influence in Lebanon,” Semenov said. “But they are limited.

“Nevertheless, many political forces in Lebanon are ready to listen to Moscow’s advice but this does not mean that they will follow this advice.”

Russia Matters: Russia’s October Gains Exceed Any Month Since July 2022 as Focus Shifts to Ukraine’s Survival

Russia Matters, 11/1/24

  1. Russia gained more territory in October, including 160+ square miles in the Donetsk region, than in any month since July 2022, according to NYT’s analysis of ISW maps. According to estimates, which ISW itself shared with RM, the Russian armed forces have made a net gain of 206 square miles between Sept. 30, 2024, and Oct. 31, 2024. Just this week, Russian gains acknowledged by Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT project included the seizures of LevadneHirnykBohoyavlenkaNovoukrainkaSelydoveVyshneve, and Zoryane. Capture of Selydove can give the Russian army a tactical exit to Pokrovsk, which is a key logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, according to Ukrainian Gen. Dmytro Marchenko. “This is very bad for us,” he said, according to the Daily Telegraph. “I won’t be revealing a military secret if I say that our front has crumbled,” said the general. While Ukrainian forces have so far managed to hold on to Pokrovsk, Russia is slicing its way through Ukrainian defenses elsewhere, according to an Oct. 29 story in the EconomistRussia cannot fight forever, but the worry is that, on current trends, Ukraine’s breaking point will come first, according to this U.K. newspaperThose involved in the guts of planning in the Pentagon say the narrow focus is on preventing defeat. “At this point we are thinking more and more about how Ukraine can survive,” a person involved in that planning told the Economist. Interestingly, the headline on this story, which The Economist ran on Oct. 29 and which RM staff accessed on that day and wrote about in a post on X, said “Ukraine is now struggling to survive, not to win.”1 On Oct. 31, however, that story’s headline already read “Ukraine is now struggling to cling on, not to win.”*   
  2. Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists this week that the Ukrainian forces have received only 10% of a $61 billion U.S. aid package pledged in April, blaming delays on bureaucracy and logistics. He has repeatedly asked the U.S., so far without success, to provide long-range weapons so that Ukraine can strike military targets in Russia, per his victory plan, according to Bloomberg. In one part of his victory plan, Zelenskyy proposed a “nonnuclear deterrence package,” in which Ukraine would get Tomahawk missiles, a totally unfeasible request, a senior U.S. official told NYT.Ukrainian Gen. Dmytro Marchenko said that Zelenskyy’s victory plan was too heavily focused on pleading with Western allies for more support. “This plan lacks any points addressing Ukraine or our needs,” Marchenko said of Zelenskyy’s plan, according to the Daily Telegraph. Referring to Western supplies of arms to Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin wrote in FA, “There is no silver bullet. No single capability will turn the tide. No one system will end Putin’s assault. What matters is the combined effects of Ukraine’s military capabilities—and staying focused on what works.”   
  3. More than two-thirds of Ukrainians believe it’s time to start peace talks with Russia, according to a recent survey by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center cited by Bloomberg. This represents an increase of 14 percentage points on the same period last year. As for Russians’ attitudes toward peace, a majority of them support ending hostilities and launching peace negotiations, according to the results of a recent poll by the Levada Center. However, when asked by Levada if Russia should make concessions in such negotiations, a vast majority answered in the negative.
  4. In a recent interview, Zelenskyy reiterated that he was still against ceding territory, but he also talked about diplomatic steps on the protection of energy infrastructure and safe shipping in the Black Sea. He also hinted at one approach that might allow Ukraine to save face if it does not reclaim all the land Russia has captured, NYT reported. “No one will legally recognize the occupied territories as belonging to other states,” he said. Zelenskyy may also strive to show Ukrainians that he has done all he can, prepare them for the possibility that Ukraine might have to make a deal and give Ukrainians a convenient scapegoat: the West, according to NYT. Meanwhile, some in Moscow hope Vladimir Putin will be ready to open peace talks once Russian troops reach the administrative border of the Donetsk region, Sergei Markov, a political consultant close to the Kremlin, told Bloomberg. So far, however, Putin would not even discuss the mutual non-targeting of energy infrastructure with Ukraine, to say less of a peace deal, until the Ukrainian army loses control of over 600 square kilometers of Russian land in the Kursk region, according to a Kremlin insider. Ukraine needs a deal on non-targeting of energy infrastructure more than Russia does, given Russia’s vast energy resources and that some 60% of Ukraine’s power generation has been knocked out by Russian attacks.

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