The Bell is a non-establishment investigative media outlet in Russia.

The Bell, Weekly Roundup, 3/20/22

A statement from The Bell: The risks for journalists working in Russia rose exponentially last week after a law was passed that punishes the spread of ‘fake news’ with up to 15 years in jail. It’s already well known that Russian officials refuse to describe events in Ukraine as a ‘war’, preferring the term ‘special military operation’. As a result, we are halting all direct coverage of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine until further notice — although we will, of course, continue to report on its far-reaching economic, political and social consequences. If you notice that we’re being circumspect about our choice of language and topics — you’re right. We are. At the moment we believe that’s the only way we can protect our journalists, and continue to function as a media outlet.

Scum & traitors

Since the start of the ‘special military operation, almost every one of Putin’s speeches has been chilling. But the speech he gave on Wednesday at a government meeting still stands out. No head of state in post-Soviet Russia has ever made such threatening allusions to the possibility of mass repression.

• The first part of Putin’s speech was devoted to bolstering the Russian narrative of the past week: claims that Ukraine is developing biological and chemical weapons. “With foreign technical support, the pro-Nazi Kyiv regime would have obtained weapons of mass destruction in the foreseeable future and, of course, would have used them against Russia,” Putin said. “There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases”.Putin said three times that Russia had no choice about how to act in Ukraine: it “simply had to” start a “military operation”, that it “had no right to act differently” and that “we were left with no option but to defend ourselves”.
• Another section of the speech was devoted to one of Putin’s favorite theories — the apparent decline of the West. “The truth is that the problems faced by millions of people in the West are the result of many years of actions by the ruling elite of your respective countries, their mistakes, and short-sighted policies and ambitions. This elite is not thinking about how to improve the lives of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own self-serving interests and super profits… the whole planet is now paying for the West’s ambitions.”
• According to Putin, Russia will never allow itself to be brow-beaten. “Russia will never sink to such miserable humiliation,” he said. “The battle we are fighting is a battle for our sovereignty, for the future of our country and our children. We will fight for the right to be and remain Russia.”
• But the most attention-grabbing section was when Putin focused on a “fifth column of national traitors.” He said: “They [the collective West] will back the so-called fifth column of national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and “live” not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality. I do not in the least condemn those who have villas in Miami or on the French Riviera, who cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender freedom. That is not the problem, not at all. The problem, again, is that many of these people are, essentially, over there in their minds and not here with our people and with Russia. In their opinion it is a sign of belonging to the superior caste, the superior race. People like this would sell their own mothers just to be allowed to sit in the entrance hall of the superior caste.”
• Putin alleged that the “collective West” was trying to divide Russia, provoke civil unrest and, ultimately, destroy the country. “But any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors — who will simply be spat out like a mosquito… I am convinced that a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society like this will strengthen our country, our solidarity and cohesion, and our readiness to respond to any challenge.”

Criminal cases

Putin’s comments about a “fifth column” sent shockwaves through Russian society. “This statement by the president of my country shocked, insulted and offended me,” a retired high-ranked KGB foreign intelligence operative wrote on Facebook. “I served for 30 years and I don’t want to be ‘spat out’ along with 25 million others who don’t agree.”

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had to explain Thursday that the president did not have mass repression in mind. But he repeated the same chilling rhetoric: “A lot of people show themselves, in Russian terms, as traitors. They themselves disappear from our lives, some quit their jobs, some leave the services, others leave the country and go to live in different states. This is how a cleansing happens,” he said.

Russian officials understand how to read the signals from the top. A couple of hours after Putin’s speech, the Investigative Committee said it had opened the first case under a new law that criminalizes the publishing of ‘fake news’ about the Russian army (that can be p[unished by up to 15 years in jail). Their first target was a woman who fits Putin’s words about those who “cannot make do without foie gras”: Instagram star Veronika Belotserkovskaya, the ex-wife of a gambling tycoon who has long lived in France. Clearly, Belotserkovskaya cannot be sent to jail, but there are also new cases against people currently in Russia: two were recently opened in the Tomsk Region of Siberia.

So far, there are relatively few criminal cases linked to the fighting in Ukraine. However, there are already dozens of ‘administrative cases’ that could entail fines of up to 50,000 rubles ($500) and lead to jail time for repeat offenses. One such case was opened by investigators in the southern city of Krasnodar after a man waiting in a traffic jam got out of his car and spat at an advertising hoarding with the now-infamous ‘Z’ symbol. One of the more alarming things about this video is that the man was almost certainly only arrested after being denounced by a motorist behind him — likely the one who filmed the incident. 

At the same time, the authorities are piling pressure on Russia’s remaining opposition. Police raided the homes of politicians from the liberal Yabloko Party and independent journalists in the north-western city of Pskov early Friday morning. Their targets included prominent Yabloko politician Lev Shlosberg, and local journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva (who is not a member of Yabloko). In the case of Prokopyeva, police broke down her door, hauled her out of bed and held her face-down on the floor while she was handcuffed.  

A court will announce its verdict Tuesday in the trial of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The prosecution is asking for him to receive a 13-year prison sentence.

Support for the ‘special military operation’

Surveys show that Russians support the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’. State-owned pollster VTsIOM said at the start of the month that 71 percent of Russians support the operation, 70 percent think it’s going well and 84 percent trust the military.

Even independent polling outfits, which cannot be accused of bias, give similar figures. One independent poll published by Kirill Sukhotsky, European bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, showed that 75 percent of people get their news about the ‘special military operation’ from the television and 75 percent support military action. Moreover, from late February to mid-March, Sukhotsky wrote, the amount of support has grown.

The Bell obtained figures from another independent survey in which Russians were asked to identify the aims of the ‘special military operations’. A total of 32 percent said it was to “assist the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics”, 15 percent said it was to “protect Russia’s security” and a further 15 percent offered various other positive explanations (including “we’re saving everyone”). However, 27 percent said that they did not understand the aims of the military action. Only 3.7 percent described it as “Russian aggression”.

Obviously, it’s impossible to entirely trust the words of those taking part in surveys in an authoritarian country during a period of military conflict. At the same time, though, this is the sort of sociological data that the Kremlin is likely using when making decisions.

Limited opposition and protest

There is no mass opposition movement in Russia. Demonstrations against the ‘special military operation’ have been sporadic and uncoordinated. Even so, protest-monitoring group OVD-Info said more than 15,000 people have been detained by police in three weeks.

The most high-profile protest in Russia came from Marina Ovsyannikova, a member of the production team at state-owned Channel One who burst onto the set of a news broadcast waving an anti-war poster. She has since been fined 30,000 rubles ($250), and she may yet face a criminal prosecution and jail time.

The only member of the Russian political elite to openly speak out against the ‘special military operation’ is Arkady Dvorkovich, a former deputy deputy prime minister and the current president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Dvorkovich is also head of the Skolkovo Foundation, a high-tech fund that was set-up when Dmitry Medvedev was president to build bridges between Russia and the West. The day after Dvorkovich’s initial comments, the Skolkovo Foundation published a second statement from Dvorkovich — this time without any anti-war sentiment but with condemnations of Western sanctions and a world order in which “Nazism and the domination of one nation over others is possible”.

It seems likely Dvorkovich was hoping to remain president of FIDE (a position he is unlikely to continue to hold without condemnation of Russia) and keep his role at Skolkovo. But his gambit failed: after Putin made his ‘fifth column’ speech, a top official from the ruling United Russia party, Andrei Turchak, publicly accused Dvorkovich of “treason” and demanded his dismissal. Dvorkovich announced his departure Friday.

The most influential group of Russians suffering in the current circumstances are the country’s super-rich. Western sanctions have deprived them of money, yachts and private jets. However, there have been few public statements of dissent. The most outspoken billionaire so far has been Mikhail Fridman, the founder of Alfa-Group who is worth $12.1 billion (prior to sanctions). In an interview to Bloomberg, Fridman complained that he was having to live in London on the €2,500 ($2,768) a month that the U.K. government will allow him to withdraw from his bank. Fridman also stated that Russian billionaires have no way of influencing Putin. On the latter point at least, he is right: in the past (which Fridman prefers not to discuss) such opportunities existed — but those days are over. Billionaires today are one of the biggest losers from Russia’s ‘special military operation’, and have no instruments to try and change the situation. Not one big business owner or prominent entrepreneur in Russia has spoken out against what the Kremlin is currently doing in Ukraine.

Peter Mironenko

Translated by Andy Potts, edited by Howard Amos

This is an interview with the author (Prabhat Patnaik) of the article of the same name, excerpted and linked to below. The IMF’s role in the events of 2014 in Ukraine isn’t talked about as much as the EU Association agreement. – Natylie

The IMF Connection with the Ukraine Crisis by Prabhat Patnaik, 3/7/22, Network Ideas Blog

The security concerns of Russia arising from Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO have been widely discussed in the media. But the IMF’s link with Ukraine which is a parallel issue has scarcely received much attention. The IMF, as is well-known, “opens up” economies around the world for the penetration of metropolitan capital by making them “investor-friendly” through the adoption of a host of anti-working class and anti-people (“austerity”) measures; and such “opening up” typically involves the taking over of natural resources of the countries and also their land areas by metropolitan capital. The mechanism that the IMF typically uses towards this end is the imposition of “conditionalities” for giving loans to countries that are in need of balance of payments support.

In addition, however, to this general role that the IMF plays, there are occasions when it plays a specific role, namely, that of supporting the US government’s cold war objectives. And in the case of Ukraine, it has played this specific role almost from the very beginning, apart from its general role of opening up the Ukrainian economy to metropolitan capital.

Prior to 2014 when Viktor Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine, that country had been in negotiations with the IMF as part of its trade integration with the European Union. The IMF had asked Ukraine to undertake a number of “reforms”: to cut wages; to “reform” and “reduce” the health and education sectors, which in Ukraine were major employment-generating areas; and to cut the subsidy on natural gas that was provided by the State to all Ukrainian citizens which made energy affordable for them (Bryce Green, FAIR, February 24). President Yanukovych was reluctant to implement these “reforms” which would have imposed a heavy burden on the people; he stopped negotiating with the IMF and started negotiating with Russia instead…

Read full article here.

By Connor Freeman, The Libertarian Institute, 3/17/22

Social media oligarchs and the corporate press are flooding Americans’ minds with Ukrainian officials’ pleas, most notably from President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling for the U.S. and NATO to “close the sky.” That is to implement a No-Fly-Zone over Ukraine, shoot down Russian planes, strike Moscow’s air defenses inside Russia, and otherwise start World War III. Even Senator Marco Rubio, the neoconservative spokesman, opposes this. Yes, we oversee and cheer on weapons transfers to keep the war going without any care for how much it costs in blood or treasure. But it is not enough. Zelensky says this reluctance to plunge the globe into what would almost certainly be a nuclear war shows we are losing our “humanity.”

These criticisms ring hollow, but he almost has a point. It does seem that we have lost touch with our ability to be self-aware, to empathize with the overseas victims of America’s world empire. We love projecting our collective guilt, fear, shame, and complicity in mass atrocities onto the despised Russian people.

Perhaps our humanity is lost each day we continue to allow our ruling class war criminals to knowingly commit and facilitate a genocide in Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country. We know from the UN’s conservative estimates that some 377,000 people have been killed or starved. The vast majority of the victims are babies and children less than five years old deprived to death by the U.S.-backed, Saudi naval blockade. But we do not see mass resignations in the armed forces. Americans here at home do not launch general strikes, refuse to pay our taxes, or blast car horns at the capitol until the U.S. stops selling weapons to Riyadh and maintaining their warplanes. Instead, we let the blood-soaked war pigs parade around as champions of liberal values and human rights.

Or maybe our humanity was lost when we permitted President Barack Obama, the original butcher of Yemen, to support neo-Nazis to overthrow a duly elected government in Kiev and then kill thousands of the eastern Donbas region’s people. It certainly did not enhance our humanity when Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden chose to arm these fascists.

Is it not a blight on our putatively humanitarian spirits that homeless Americans, including veterans, languish in our streets? Instead of helping them, we are sending billions of dollars in military aid to a hostile government on Russia’s borders whose National Guard openly incorporated the Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group.

As Libertarian Institute news editors Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter have reported, “Azov was recently photographed toting Western weapons, as the US, UK and a long list of allies flood the Ukrainian warzone with rocket launchers, missiles and other lethal military aid.”

No, that is not what Zelensky means, that is not what the neocons or liberal hawks are talking about either, our Empire’s crimes and victims do not matter. As Hillary Clinton recently made clear, she and her class consider the deaths and displacement of millions during the terror wars, including thousands of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks her husband provoked, as mere “unintended consequences” to be brushed off with a telegenic smile.

On to Hillary’s real point here, which is that prolonging Russia’s war in Ukraine with continued influxes of foreign fighters and NATO weapons would be a marvelous way to bleed Russia and send their sons home in countless body bags. Come on Rachel Maddow, it will be just like Afghanistan in the 1980s! So what if a million Afghans were killed and the ensuing blowback ripped apart millions of people’s families and lives, this was a huge success, not a tragedy. We won.

To Mrs. Clinton, the only real tragedy here is that she was never elected Madame President and was robbed of the opportunity to give that agonizing acceptance speech. God damn Russians again!

This is a big deal to the hawks, they hate Russia. They want to cut it off from the rest of the world and destroy their people. We have been kicking them while they were down since the Soviet Union fell. For years, we have been encircling them with NATO warships, missiles, troops, bombers, jets, and bases. Why stop now? This is our world, not theirs.

Biden’s administration assures us that though the U.S. led sanctions blitzkrieg will come at a heavy cost to the American people – already suffering under crippling debt, skyrocketing energy prices, and the worst inflation in decades – the price is worth it.

Where have we heard this rhetoric before?

We claim to be a tolerant society and our social media kingpins ensure liberal soccer moms and sensitive college kids that the deplorables will be de-platformed for spreading hate and bile. We have been endlessly warned by the right-wing that bleeding heart lefty corporations run America and we are becoming dangerously soft, hopelessly woke. The Chinese will eat us for breakfast!

But now that mask is coming off in all its Nazi glory. Twitter and Facebook have given users the green light to praise Azov with impunity!

On Facebook, you can safely proclaim your support for these “real heroes,” you can salute their “patriotic role” in the war, promote them as they “courageously defend” Ukraine. Now you can even call for violence against “Russians” and get away with it.

We are indulging our blood lust. It has not been this bad for years. We used to do this with Iraq every decade or so. We kill several hundred thousand of them or maybe a million until we get bored and move on to another country we can throw “against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

Americans live inside a prison where they have more humans locked up than anywhere else in the world. We are surveilled constantly. We are subjected to a trans-media propaganda network that would make all the tyrants of the twentieth-century blush. We might as well have big screens in the sky spooking us with myriad Emmanuel Goldsteins. We have so many: Vladimir Putin, the Specter of Trump, COVID-19, the Ayatollah, Xi Jinping, ISIS, truckers, the un-vaxxed, the un-boosted, the Taliban, Maduro, Assad, North Korea, Hamas rockets, drug dealers, Communists, immigrants, RT, etc.

Unfortunately, this would cost a lot of money. We need those tax-dollars for Israel, the coming war with China, arms for our brave neo-Nazi proxies, and beefing up our nuclear weapons arsenal. Besides, TV and the social media feeds still work just as good.

Zelensky is wrong. We lost our humanity a while ago. Before it’s too late, we should get it back. Kicking off World War III would be a catastrophic detour.

This video was recorded on 3/18/22.