By Kit Klarenberg, Mint Press News, 3/13/24

As January became February, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a pair of legal body blows to Ukraine and its Western backers. First, on January 31, it ruled on a case brought by Kiev against Russia in 2017, which accused Moscow of presiding over a campaign of “terrorism” in Donbas, including the July 2014 downing of MH17. It also charged that Russia racially discriminated against Ukrainian and Tatar residents of Crimea following its reunification with Moscow.

The ICJ summarily rejected most charges. Then, on February 2, the Court made a preliminary judgment in a case where Kiev accused Moscow of exploiting false claims of an ongoing genocide of Russians and Russian speakers in Donbas to justify its invasion. Ukraine further charged the Special Military Operation breached the Genocide Convention despite not itself constituting genocide. Almost unanimously, ICJ judges rejected these arguments.

Western media universally ignored or distorted the substance of the ICJ rulings. When outlets did acknowledge the judgments, they misrepresented the first by focusing prominently on the accepted charges while downplaying all dismissed allegations. The second was wildly spun as a significant loss for Moscow. The BBC and others focused on how the Court agreed that “part” of Ukraine’s case could proceed. That this “part” is the question of whether Kiev itself committed genocide in Donbas post-2014 was unmentioned.

Ukraine’s failed lawfare effort was backed by 47 EU and NATO member states, leading to the farce of 32 separate international legal teams submitting representations to The Hague in September 2023. Among other things, they supported Kiev’s bizarre contention that the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were comparable to Al-Qaeda. Judges comprehensively rejected that assertion. Markedly, in its submitted arguments, Russia drew attention to how the same countries backing Kiev justified their illegal, unilateral destruction of Yugoslavia under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

This may not be the only area where Ukraine and its overseas sponsors are in trouble moving forward. A closer inspection of the Court’s rulings comprehensively discredits the established mainstream narrative of what transpired in Crimea and Donbas following the Western-orchestrated Maidan coup in February 2014.

In sum, the judgments raise serious questions about Kiev’s eight-year-long “anti-terrorist operation” against “pro-Russian separatists,” following months of vast protests and violent clashes throughout eastern Ukraine between Russian-speaking pro-federal activists and authorities.

DAMNING FINDING AFTER DAMNING FINDING

In its first judgment, the ICJ ruled the Donbas and Lugansk People’s Republics were not “terrorist” entities, as “[neither] group has previously been characterized as being terrorist in nature by an organ of the United Nations” and could not be branded such simply because Kiev labeled them so. This gravely undermined Ukraine’s allegations of Russia “funding…terrorist groups” in Donbas, let alone committing “terrorist” acts there itself.

Other revelatory findings reinforced this bombshell. The ICJ held that Moscow wasn’t liable for committing or even failing to prevent terrorism, as the Kremlin had no “reasonable grounds to suspect” material provided by Ukraine, including details of “accounts, bank cards and other financial instruments” allegedly used by accused “terrorists” in Donbas, were used for such purposes. Moscow was also ruled to have launched investigations into “alleged offenders” but concluded they “d[id] not exist… or their location could not be identified”.

Nonetheless, the ICJ ruled that Moscow had failed “to investigate allegations of the commission of terrorism financing offenses by alleged offenders present in its territory.” This was due to the Kremlin not providing “additional information” upon Kiev’s request and failing to “specify to Ukraine what further information may have been required.” Ironically, judges conversely condemned Kiev’s allegations of “terrorism” by Russia as “vague and highly generalized,” based on highly dubious evidence and documentation, including – strikingly – Western media reports:

The Court has held that certain materials, such as press articles and extracts from publications, are regarded ‘not as evidence capable of proving facts.’

The ICJ was also highly condemnatory of the quality of witnesses and witness evidence produced by Kiev to support these charges. Judges were particularly scathing of Ukraine’s reliance on testimony supporting a systematic, state-sanctioned “pattern of racial discrimination” discrimination against Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea since 2014. Statements attesting to this were “collected many years after the relevant events” and “not supported by corroborating documentation”:

The reports relied on by Ukraine are of limited value in confirming that the relevant measures are of a racially discriminatory character…Ukraine has not demonstrated… reasonable grounds to suspect that racial discrimination had taken place, which should have prompted the Russian authorities to investigate.

Elsewhere, Ukraine argued that “legal consequences” for residents of Crimea if they opted to maintain Ukrainian citizenship post-2014 and a “steep decline in the number of students receiving their school education in the Ukrainian language between 2014 and 2016,” amounting to an alleged 80% drop in the first year and a further 50% reduction in 2015, were signifiers of a discriminatory environment for non-Russians in the peninsula.

In support, Kiev submitted witness statements from parents claiming they were “subjected to harassment and manipulative conduct with a view to deterring” their children from receiving “instruction in Ukrainian,” which judges did not accept. By contrast, Moscow provided testimony not only demonstrating that parents made a “genuine” choice “not subject to pressure” to have their children taught in Russian but also “unresponsiveness on the part of parents to some teachers’ active encouragement [emphasis added] to continue having their children receive instruction in Ukrainian.”

The ICJ lent weight to these submissions, noting, “It is undisputed that no such decline has taken place with respect to school education in other languages, including the Crimean Tatar language.” Judges attributed much of the drop in demand for Ukrainian language “school instruction” to “a dominant Russian cultural environment and the departure of thousands of pro-Ukrainian Crimean residents to mainland Ukraine.” Moscow moreover “produced evidence substantiating its attempts at preserving Ukrainian cultural heritage and… explanations for the measures undertaken with respect to that heritage.”

Russia supplied documentation showing that “Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar organizations have been successful in applying to hold events” in the peninsula. In contrast, “multiple events organized by ethnic Russians have been denied.” Evidently, Russian authorities are even-handed towards Crimea’s population – the color of someone’s passport and their mother tongue are immaterial. On the same grounds, judges rejected Kiev’s accusation that “measures taken against Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian media outlets were based on the ethnic origin of the persons affiliated with them.”

Still, the Court contradictorily concluded Russia “violated its obligations of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” as Moscow “[did not demonstrate] that it complied with its duty to protect the rights of ethnic Ukrainians from a disparate adverse effect based on their ethnic origin.”

How US and UK Government Propaganda Specialists Collaborated with Nazis in Ukraine

The prominent role of Banderite Neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s government propaganda operations suggests that Nazi apologism has spread into the core institutions of its government – perhaps more than the dominant Western view is able to admit.

KIEV GOES IN FOR THE KILL

The ICJ has now effectively confirmed that the entire mainstream narrative of what happened in Crimea and Donbas over the previous decade was fraudulent. Some legal scholars have argued Ukraine’s acquittal on charges of genocide to be inevitable. Yet, many statements made by Ukrainian nationalists since Maidan unambiguously indicate such an intent.

Moreover, in June 2020, a British immigration court granted asylum to Ukrainian citizens who fled the country to avoid conscription. They successfully argued that military service in Donbas would necessarily entail perpetrating and being implicated in “acts contrary to the basic rules of human conduct” – in other words, war crimes – against the civilian population.

The Court’s ruling noted the Ukrainian military routinely engaged in “unlawful capture and detention of civilians with no legal or military justification…motivated by the need for ‘currency’ for prisoner exchanges.” It added there was “systemic mistreatment” of detainees during the “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbas. This included “torture and other conduct that is cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.” An “attitude and atmosphere of impunity for those involved in mistreating detainees” was observed.

The judgment also recorded “widespread civilian loss of life and the extensive destruction of residential property” in Donbas, “attributable to poorly targeted and disproportionate attacks carried out by the Ukrainian military.” Water installations, it recorded, “have been a particular and repeated target by Ukrainian armed forces, despite civilian maintenance and transport vehicles being clearly marked…and despite the protected status such installations enjoy” under international law.

All of this could quite reasonably be argued to constitute genocide. Regardless, the British asylum judgment amply underlines who Ukraine was truly fighting all along – its own citizens. Moscow could furthermore reasonably cite recent disclosures from Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande that the 2014-15 Minsk Accords were, in fact, a con, never intended to be implemented, buying Kiev time to bolster its stockpiles of Western weapons, vehicles, and ammunition, as yet further proof of Ukraine’s malign intentions in Donbas.

The Accords did not provide for secession or independence for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics but for their full autonomy within Ukraine. Russia was named a mediator, not a party, to the conflict. Kiev was to resolve the dispute directly with rebel leaders. These were crucial legal distinctions about which Ukraine and its overseas backers were immensely displeased. They repeatedly attempted over subsequent years to compel Moscow to designate itself formally as a party to the conflict despite Russia’s minimal role in the conflict.

As a 2019 report published by the Soros-funded International Crisis Group (ICG), “Rebels Without A Cause” found, “the conflict in eastern Ukraine started as a grassroots movement… Demonstrations were led by local citizens claiming to represent the region’s Russian-speaking majority.” Moscow only began providing financial and material support to the rebels after Ukraine’s “counter-terror” operation in Donbas started in April 2014. And it was meager at that.

The ICG found that Russia’s position was consistent: the two breakaway republics remain autonomous subjects within Ukraine. This frequently put the Kremlin at significant odds with the rebel leadership, who acted in their own interests and rarely followed orders. The report concluded that Moscow was ultimately “beholden” to the breakaway republics, not vice versa. Rebel fighters wouldn’t put down their arms even if Vladimir Putin personally demanded them to.

Given present-day events, the report’s conclusions are eerie. The ICG declared the situation in Donbas “ought not to be narrowly defined as a matter of Russian occupation” and criticized Kiev’s “tendency to conflate” the Kremlin and the rebels. It expressed hope that newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky could “peacefully reunify with the rebel-held territories” and “[engage] the alienated east.”

The 2017 ICJ case explicitly concerned validating allegations of Russia’s direct, active involvement in Donbas. We are left to ponder whether this lawfare effort was intended to secure Kiev’s specious legal grounds for claiming it was invaded in 2014. After all, this could, in turn, have precipitated an all-out Western proxy war in Donbas of the kind that erupted in February 2022.

At the start of that month, French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed his commitment to Minsk, claiming he had Zelensky’s personal assurance it would be implemented. However, on February 11, talks between representatives of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine collapsed after nine hours without tangible results. Notably, Kiev rejected demands for “direct dialogue” with the rebels, insisting Moscow formally designate itself a party to the conflict in keeping with its past obstructionist position.

Then, as documented in multiple contemporary eyewitness reports from OSCE observers, mass Ukrainian artillery shelling of Donbas erupted. On February 15, alarmed representatives of the Duma, led by Russia’s influential Communist Party, formally requested that the Kremlin recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Putin initially refused, reiterating his commitment to Minsk. The shelling intensified. A February 19 OSCE report recorded 591 ceasefire violations over the past 24 hours, including 553 explosions in rebel-held areas.

Civilians were harmed in the strikes, and civilian structures, including schools, were apparently targeted directly. Meanwhile, that same day, Donetsk rebels claimed they thwarted two sabotage attacks by Polish-speaking operatives on ammonia and oil reservoirs in their territory. Perhaps not coincidentally, in January 2022, it was revealed that the CIA had been training a secret paramilitary army in Ukraine to carry out precisely such strikes in the event of a Russian invasion since 2015.

So, on February 21, the Kremlin formally accepted the Duma’s plea from a week earlier to recognize Donetsk and Lugansk as independent republics. And now here we are.

by Ian Proud, Antiwar.com, 4/2/24

Ian Proud is a former British diplomat and was the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to 2019. While in Russia, Ian advised UK Ministers on Russia’s political economy, and that of neighbouring former Soviet states, including Ukraine. He recently published his memoir, a Misfit in Moscow: how British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019.

In his recent article on attritional warfare, Alex Vershinin at the Royal United Services Institute remarked that ‘war is won by economies, not armies’. Put another way, the country that can outspend its rival in military endeavour will ultimately prevail. [https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine]

To defeat Russia, Ukraine would need economic resources that it does not have and will not be able to obtain.

It isn’t just that Ukraine’s economy is now more than ten times smaller than Russia’s. The problem runs much deeper. Since the Ukraine crisis started in 2014, Ukraine has ducked opportunities to enact the structural reforms it needs to tackle deep-seated corruption and diversify/strengthen its economy.

Ukraine needed either to set a course towards an economic model that exports and has spare capital to invest, including overseas, or towards an economic model that is comfortable to import and can attract foreign investment to offset the difference. At the moment, Ukraine is neither and it can’t make the cardinal shift while war is raging. Real economic reform in Ukraine has therefore sat in the pending tray for a decade.

Data from the National Bank of Ukraine shows that the country consistently imports more than it exports. Not since 2022. Since 2006, the year after the Orange revolution. While on average, Ukraine’s yearly trading shortfall was $11bn in the ten years before war broke out, that figure almost tripled to $31.6bn in 2022 and 2023. Yes, exports of goods have fallen since war broke out, by 17% and 30% in 2022 and 2023 respectively compared to the average. But, critically, imports of services have also doubled since 2021. Ukraine’s trading surplus in services amounted to $3bn p.a. between 2012 and 2021; since 2022 it has slumped to a deficit of $9.8bn.

Service imports have in large part been driven by the large scale relocation of Ukrainians to other countries. Ukrainian people spending Ukrainian money in other countries counts as an import, just as spending by foreign tourists in London counts as a service export for Britain. For Ukraine, that imbalance won’t be resolved until war ends and its citizens return en masse.

Why does this matter? When a country imports more than it exports, it burns up supplies of foreign currency. If it runs out of foreign currency, then it can’t pay for imports and external debt. Just look at what happened in Sri Lanka in 2022, which ran out of reserves and defaulted for the first time in its history. Functional economies avoid this trap by attracting foreign investment, look at the US and the UK for example, which consistently run deficits but maintain healthy foreign exchange reserves.

Ukraine, however, isn’t a functional economy. Few foreign companies are making productive investments in Ukraine, and this challenge dates back to 2014, and the onset of the Ukraine crisis. Foreign investment into Ukraine’s private sector since then has averaged a paltry $2.2bn p.a. compared to $15.6bn p.a. from 2010 to 2013. That’s mostly because investors generally avoid zones of conflict and war. But it is also partly driven by the power vertical in Ukraine in which a handful of Oligarchs maintain an iron grip on business interests across the country.

The war hasn’t changed and won’t change that fundamentally negative economic picture. Ukraine can’t attract significant foreign capital while at war. And efforts to boost its exports have run into headwinds, particularly in Europe, with EU farmers rebelling against the flood of cheap imports from Ukraine.

So Ukraine needs to depend on a friendly lender of last resort. In the Soviet Union, that would have been Russia. Today, it is western donor nations. Look at Ukraine’s balance of payments and you’d see that it received on average $5bn p.a. in secondary income between 2010 and 2021; largely hand-outs from other governments. In 2022 and 2023 respectively it received massive inflows of $28bn and $24bn, to help stabilise its current account and prevent a collapse in foreign exchange reserves.

More concerning, with Kyiv now spending an astonishing half of its ballooning budget on defence it has been forced to go to the lenders as well, borrowing a staggering $40bn in the two years since 2022, or almost one quarter of its current GDP. That’s a 2000% increase in central government borrowing compared to the average in the ten years prior to war. After much huffing and puffing, Victor Orban reluctantly agreed the EU’s most recent programme of support to Ukraine, amounting to 50bn Euro which runs to 2027. But 33bn Euro of this is loans, equating to another 19.9% of Ukraine’s current GDP.

Today, Ukraine’s gross external debt is already around 90% of GDP. In a downside scenario, the EU has predicted that Ukrainian debt could hit 140% of GDP as early as 2026. If that doesn’t worry you, it should. With war widening Ukraine’s current account deficit, western nations will need to provide ever greater amounts of macro-financial assistance just to prop up the country’s reserves. Because if Ukraine ran out of reserves and had to devalue the Hryvnia, then it would simply not be able to service its debt and would go into economic meltdown, requiring even greater western assistance.

Across the line of contact, much boiler plate analysis is churned out daily about Russia’s putative economic woes, but what does the data from Russia’s Central Bank tell us? Despite the structural challenges it faces, and notwithstanding the legally questionable freezing of $300bn (or around half) of its foreign exchange reserves, Russia is anything but short of liquidity.

With western journalists blowing a collective raspberry at the rouble’s collapse after war broke out, Russia nevertheless brought in a staggeringly large current account surplus of £238bn in 2022. That’s more than Ukraine’s pre-war yearly economic output, and over two times the value of western financial and military assistance to Ukraine in 2022. It is almost four times larger than Russia’s average current account surplus in the ten preceding years. Russia’s current account surplus stabilised to $50bn in 2023, which is consistent with the long-term trend, and from the first two months of data, may come in slightly higher in 2024.

The Russian economy is trimmed to export and reinvest earnings. The country hasn’t run a yearly current account deficit since 1998, the year it defaulted. Largely because of this, Russia has very low external debt, at less than 20% of GDP. Russia’s military spending could rise to 10% of GDP this year, with defence spending comfortably outstripping Ukraine’s by three times. It doesn’t need to borrow significantly and has enough liquidity left in the tank to fund huge social programmes, which mean consumer spending in the economy remains strong.

Russia’s current economic model brings downside risks in terms of the country’s inability to diversify into new, more value-adding sectors of industry. These risks have been acknowledged by Putin but are too long-term to affect decision making on Ukraine. For now, Russia holds a significantly better economic hand in prosecuting an attritional war.

No credible western military analyst now predicts a complete victory by Ukraine in this war that would push Russia back to its pre-war (let alone pre-2014) lines. But, in any case, it is clear that victory hinges on the balance sheet, more than on the battlefield. Ukraine will never have the economic resources it needs to out gun Russia. So, setting aside issues of weapons’ supplies to Ukraine and, indeed, who will pay the reconstruction bill when war ends, how long are western powers prepared to keep plying Ukraine with more debt as it prosecutes an unwinnable war?

The economic policy no-mans-land that Ukraine has chosen to occupy didn’t start in 2022, but rather in 2014, when the Ukraine crisis began. We were told that Ukraine wanted to make a ‘European choice’ and cast off the rusted-over shackles of Soviet era mismanagement. It is therefore an irony that western assistance has not prompted a genuine and meaningful effort at reform in Ukraine that would speed the process towards eventual EU membership. Rather, it has created and will continue to solidify a state of truculent dependence which weakens Ukraine economically and leaves it as ungrateful for western support as it was for Russian.

Ukraine could still make its European choice. But first that would require painful political choices. A choice to end the war through negotiations and a choice, for the first time, to face down vested interests and undertake meaningful reform in Ukraine. It’s far from clear to me that Zelensky has the power to make either choice. For now, and to paraphrase from the movie Top Gun, I fear Zelensky’s ego is writing cheques his country can’t cash.

By Moss Robeson, Website, 3/6/24

Introduction: The ‘Bandera Lobbyists’

This year’s “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” took place at an event space located one block from the White House. The annual conference is organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), an OUN-B front group established in 2000. According to the program, the executive coordinator of the event was Christine Balko. She is probably still the director of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Statehood Front” in the United States.

The “Front” is a coalition of OUN-B “facade structures,” some of which include Balko in the leadership. For example, Christine Balko is the treasurer of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU) and the secretary of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which according to contemporary OUN-B documents is the financial arm of the Banderite “Land Leadership of America.”

The administrative coordinator of the event was Mykola Hryckowian, who is the Washington bureau chief of CUSUR and the president of ODFFU. He attained the presidency in a pyrrhic coup d’etat in 2019. The technical coordinator was Andrij Dobriansky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which the “Front” has dominated since another damaging coup in 1980. The program coordinator was Walter Zaryckyj, the executive director of CUSUR and the president of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, who has allegedly been replaced as the chairman of the OUN-B’s “Land Leadership of America.”

As always, the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) was the main sponsor of the “security dialogue.” The steering committee for this year’s event consisted of three AFPC leaders, at least four OUN-B members, and three Banderite proxies from the corrupt Ukrainian Congress Committee. The small list of patrons included two additions featured in the latest post of the “Bandera Lobby Blog” — the Vovk Foundation and Civil Military Innovation Institute, based in Morgantown, West Virginia. The Banderite brothers behind this new support for CUSUR have also tried to reactivate the ODFFU in nearby Pittsburgh, and one of them (a subscriber of this newsletter) said that I should be hearing from their attorney.

The illegitimate ODFFU president, Hryckowian from eastern Pennsylvania, accompanied an AFPC delegation that traveled to Ukraine in late January. Ostap Kryvdyk, a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” in Kyiv, arranged their itinerary, which included meetings with the leadership of the ministry of defense (on the eve of Zelensky firing Zaluzhny), the deputy chair of Ukrainian parliament Olena Kondratiuk, deputy minister of foreign affairs Iryna Borovets, deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olha Stefanishyna, and other officials.

AFPC’s president Herman Pirchner and director of external relations Annie Swingen joined the trip to Ukraine and the steering committee of this CUSUR event, which concluded with a reception at the AFPC headquarters in Washington. The front room has a framed picture of the think tank’s leadership with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, who led a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization in the 1990s. When Parubiy played the role of statesman in Ukraine (2014-19), his foreign policy advisor, Ostap Kryvdyk, organized his trips to DC with the Banderite “Statehood Front.”

February 29, 2024: ‘US-Ukraine Security Dialogue’

The livestream started a little late, after Walter Zaryckyj delivered his opening remarks, in which he typically marvels at hosting an event with such distinguished speakers. (He privately boasts of his powerful contacts, for example, “fucking generals.”) In this case, the first speaker, Kyle Parker of the Helsinki Commission that advises Congress, was recently tarnished by a report in the New York Times: “A senior Capitol Hill staff member who is a longtime voice on Russia policy is under congressional investigation over his frequent trips to Ukraine’s war zones and providing what he said was $30,000 in sniper gear to its military.” He spoke at a CUSUR conference in 2022, and served on the steering committee of five of these events by 2005 (usually with Steve Bandera, the Canadian grandson of the infamous OUN-B leader). The livestream started just in time to hear Parker channel the Banderite spirit world: “Helping Ukraine defeat a neo-Stalinist Russia should be seen as unfinished business from the Second World War.”

The first panel discussion was moderated by retired diplomat William B. Taylor, a vice president of the Orwellian-named U.S. Institute of Peace, which is supposedly “an American federal institution tasked with promoting conflict resolution and prevention worldwide.” It was three years ago, shortly after Joe Biden took office, that Taylor and his colleagues from the influential Atlantic Council addressed CUSUR’s “security dialogue” on the eve of publishing a militarist policy paper, Biden and Ukraine: A strategy for the new administration. Taylor reported that they already met with “members of the Biden administration team that’s focused on Ukraine,” and asked the White House to sharply increase military aid for Kyiv to half a billion dollars per year.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States has committed tens of billions of dollars in “security assistance,” the vast majority of which is going to the U.S. arms industry that bankrolls think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Center for European Policy Analysis. The latter employed retired U.S. general Ben Hodges, who commanded the army in Europe from 2014-18. His commentary about World War II — “it was actually millions of Ukrainians, not millions of Russians, that died” — was a highlight of the 2021 “security dialogue.” This year during the first panel discussion, Hodges downplayed the significance of Ukraine losing Avdiivka, but acknowledged his reputation as a “cheerleader.” After the session ended, he returned to his front row seat adjacent to OUN-B member Christine Balko.

Luke Coffey oversaw foreign policy at the far-right Heritage Foundation from 2015 until 2022, when he made the move to the neoconservative Hudson Institute. During the first panel discussion, he said that the U.S. needs to prepare for a long war in Ukraine. “I hear this all the time in Washington about ‘forever wars’ and ‘endless wars,’ I absolutely hate this. I hate these terms,” Coffey said. “Americans are not tired of forever wars. I think this has been a made up, inside the Beltway argument.”

Almost three hours later, Kurt Volker insisted that “we need to have our own people embedded in Ukrainian fighting forces.” Formerly the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine (2017-19), a vocal opponent of the Minsk peace process, and lobbyist for Raytheon, which produces Javelin missiles, Volker turned his head toward his fellow panelist, a Banderite defense contractor, and lamented “the fact that we prohibit uniformed personnel from being present in Ukraine alongside the Ukrainians means that we are not learning, and getting real time feedback, and knowing what we actually ought to be doing.”

During the next Q&A period, Col. Vince Mucker, sitting behind Ben Hodges and Christine Balko, introduced himself as the next U.S. military attaché in Kyiv. Philip Breedlove, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, stressed to Mucker that “a big part of solving the conundrum … is completely about policy, when we get a policy that allows us to shoot the archer [in Russia] … we can put dumb 2000 pound GPS bombs on these sites.”

Volker, the moderator of this panel, chimed in, “I would add to that [analogy], not only shoot the archer, but shoot the arrow factory.” With Breedlove nodding along, Volker chuckled and continued, “or maybe you don’t have to shoot it, maybe you can go right up to it and blow it up, with a little help from some friends in the Middle East.” He laughed again but got serious. “So I think that’s something, frankly, we should be talking with Israel about.”

A few minutes later, Volker said to Mucker in the audience, “as you take up your new duties, I hope you’re able to make a persuasive case about how some active duty [U.S.] personnel embedded in Ukrainian forces as observers—not participants, but observers—would actually help us give much better advice and much better equipment.” After the lunch break, the deputy chief of mission at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington predicted that “American soldiers will have to be engaged, sooner or later.”

The second half of the all-day event inadvertently dedicated about thirty minutes to the scenario that Ukraine collapses, and the West is faced with the question of supporting a nationalist insurgency. The main speaker, Paul Goble, is the Jamestown Foundation’s “specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia.” His apocalyptic obsession with breaking up Russia rivals any Banderite. According to Jamestown, “he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.”

Goble absurdly claimed that “even Stalin couldn’t defeat the UPA,” referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the extremist paramilitary wing of OUN-B that butchered Poles and Jews under Nazi occupation before resisting Soviet control of western Ukraine with death squad brutality. Goble argued that “talking about these things is terribly important,” to let Moscow know that Russia cannot occupy Ukraine. Almost ten minutes later, he said, “I think the most important thing we can do is to encourage the Ukrainians to recover their own tradition” (of Banderite insurgency)….

By John Helmer, Website, 4/1/24

The electric war, which in its first phase commenced in September [3] 2022, has now entered its second and final phase – final, that is, for the Ukraine.

This is strategic; war has never been fought like this in Europe. The US and NATO general staffs and politicians have been taken by complete surprise. “The Ukrainians are building Maginot and Siegfried lines according to the instructions of their foreign advisers,” according to a Moscow analyst, “as if the Russian offensive will be men, artillery and tanks running across the landscape towards Kiev. But they won’t have to. The offensive against Ukrainian electricity cannot be stopped at these lines.”

Without effective defence for its power generating plants, distribution hubs, and grid lines, the Kiev regime’s power is being stopped across the country; the major Novorussian cities in the east – Odessa, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk – are being blacked out and their populations forced to evacuate; the warmaking resupplies of the NATO allies are being cut off at borders which are now exposed to reversal of electricity surges threatening the plants and grids of southern Poland, Romania and Moldova. Even European and American money for President Vladimir Zelensky’s regime needs electricity to move. 

“The Russian General Staff is thinking electrically,” comments a NATO veteran and expert in applying electrical engineering to war. “The way the strikes are unfolding causes the Ukrainians to perform at lot of switching. Anyone who knows anything about high-voltage switching understands that the more it’s done, the greater the likelihood there is of some kind of fault occurring, including surges or transients [4], occurring. So, leaving enough power on today so the Ukrainians can throw switches tomorrow may be part of the plan.”

“Even if the French/NATO plan a deployment in the Ukraine, what will they be deploying to?” the military engineer adds. “If the current Russian plan of attack is causing swings of 300+ volts, it’s not even safe to plug in a cell phone. We can safely assume that all manner of appliances and other expensive electrical or electronic equipment has been destroyed in the affected areas. Indeed, even if the power engineers manage to get the power back on, millions of light fixtures, especially the electronic/LED variety, are burned out. Diagnostic equipment (medical and technical), process instruments, programmable logic controllers, power supplies, inverters, frequency drives, bank machines, computerized checkout, refrigeration equipment, are burned up”

“Who knows what’s happening there. It must be chaos, and if it isn’t, it will be soon.”

The Russian General Staff doesn’t telegraph its punches. The daily Ministry of Defense operations briefing – blocked for many US and allied audiences – concentrates on the five combat groups, Western, Southern, Eastern, Centre, and Dniepr;  and their operational directions along the Donbass line of contact; at present, they are Kupyansk, Donetsk, Avdeyevka, South Donetsk, and Kherson.

Last Friday, for example, the briefing began almost nonchalantly [5]: “Tonight [March 29], the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a group strike with high-precision long-range air, sea and land-based weapons, including aeroballistic hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles, at energy facilities and air defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All objects are affected.”  

The next day, March 30, petroleum and fuel oil storages, which have been dispersed to shield them from attack and are necessary to power the emergency generators, were destroyed in the Poltava region [6]. On Sunday, March 31, the targeting of gas storage and gas production around Lvov was also reported by the Defense Ministry in Moscow. “The Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a group strike with high-precision weapons on the facilities of energy infrastructure and the gas-producing industry of Ukraine. As a result of the strike, the work of the defense industry enterprises for the manufacture and repair of weapons, military equipment and ammunition was disrupted. All targets of the strike have been achieved. The objects are affected.”

The detailed targeting of the electric war campaign can be found in the Russian military bloggers who compile their reports and maps from a range of Russian and Ukrainian sources, including videoclips from residents in the targeted cities.

The westward extension of the missile and drone targeting has included Khmelnitsky, Rivne and Burshtyn, around the Galician capital of Lvov, in this map and summary from Militarist for March 29 [7].  

MAP OF RUSSIAN STRIKES AGAINST UKRAINE POWER PLANT TARGETS, MARCH 29

Source: https://t.me/infantmilitario/123071 [7]

“Ukraine is moving towards a truly definitive energy crisis”, Militarist reported on March 30. “In the east and west, thermal power plants are being eliminated one by one by completely demolishing the main turbine and generator sections. Dams also began to collapse from south to north. It is expected that all dams and thermal power plants will be put out of operation in the near future. The Ukrainian military industry will be destroyed both by direct attacks and by the energy crisis. The possibility of NATO-supported domestic production and maintenance will also be excluded. Thus, the logistics infrastructure in the rear may not be able to cope with events at the front.”

The Russian ordnance used is overwhelming; this is corroborated by Ukrainian reports. Tactically, drones are launched in swarms, the first wave to identify and activate the air defence missile and artillery systems around the electricity targets; in the second wave drones and missiles strike their targets. According to Ukrainian data, in just two days from March 22 to 24, 208 missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were fired at the country’s energy facilities [9]….

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 3/4/24

The pressure of the war in Ukraine has forced the Kremlin to push through a raft of long overdue reforms as its struggles to raise more revenues for the budget, increase the efficiency of the economy and keep the people happy.

Despite Russia’s reputation for crony capitalism and greedy oligarchs, since about 2014 when sanctions were first imposed on Russia after the annexation of the Crimea, the Kremlin has been trying to revamp the economy with some success.

Now the economy is under pressure again as the weight of funding a major full scale war weighs on the federal budget which has pushed the government into improving things further. After two years of fighting, the economy is doing well and grew by 3.6% in 2023, making Russia the fastest growing of any of the G8 wealthy nations.

Russia’s reform programme has been encapsulated in the 12 National Projects that were launched in 2019 and are designed to deal with some of Russia’s biggest social problems and improve the quality of life of the population. With presidential elections looming, Putin announced a National Projects 2.0 update with a raft of new initiatives during his state of the nation speech on February 29 that include swaths of new affordable housing and a renewed push on poverty reduction, amongst other things.

The clash with the West and the extreme sanctions on Russia has had the unintended consequence of focusing the Kremlin on pushing through more effective reforms. After two years of reengineering the economy for war, the Kremlin has now turned its mind back to making sure the population is happy and has the leeway to return to the topic of the national projects.

Wake up call

It seems that Russia only makes deep structural reforms when it is in trouble. Russia boomed in the noughties when growth was running at around 6% a year and the size of the economy doubled in that decade. Russia began to feel like a normal country, until it all started to go wrong. In 2013 annual growth dropped to zero despite the fact oil prices were still over $100 per barrel; the petrodollar-driven catch-up was over and that economic model was exhausted.

The problems came to a head when Russia’s budget was missing RUB2 trillion ($31bn) in 2016 leaving the Finance Ministry scrambling to find more cash and failing. The federal government still had large foreign exchange reserves, but many of Russia’s regions are teetering on the edge of collapse and a major debt crisis was looming.

In the end the Kremlin was saved when it “privatised” 19.5% in oil major Rosneft to Glencore and Qatar in a surprise deal, which later transpired to actually be a bail out loan by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The 2016 budget crisis coupled with the threat of more sanctions was a wakeup call that spurred the Kremlin into action. The reform process began with the so-called May decrees signed by President Vladimir Putin in May 2012 that imposed a heavy social spending plan on Russia’s regions to improve the lives of the average Russian.

With the economy in the middle of a four-year recession and relations with the West rapidly decaying, the government turned its full attention to solving some of its long-standing problems. Putin cracked down on corruption in government with his deoffshorisation program in 2014 that banned government officials from holding offshore bank accounts or assets, that widened into a general anti-corruption drive that resulted in a big reshuffle of the regional administration in 2016. In parallel the government launched a big offensive to reduce the size of the shadow economy and reduce grey payments of wages that grew into a revolutionary overhaul of the tax system starting in 2018 and led by Mikhail Mishustin, who was later appointed Prime Minister in 2020. Mishustin introduced a new and highly efficient tax IT system that put all records and payments online and stamped out the legion of tax scams such as the “fly by night” companies that would accumulate tax obligations but then declare bankruptcy the day before tax payments became due. In two years, Mishustin increased the government’s tax take by 20% while the tax burden only increased by 2% in the same period.

Banking sector clean up

Similar reforms to clean up the banking sector were launched in 2013 when Elvia Nabiullina took over as governor of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). She began closing three banks a week and kept that up for about five years at the same time imposing stricter regulation and reporting requirements on the survivors. Nabiullina’s reforms came to a head in 2017 when she closed several of the so-called Garden Ring banks, some of the largest privately owned commercial banks in the sector, and almost sparked a major financial crisis in the process.

I turned out later that the Garden Ring Banks were compromised by cross ownership and guilty of milking their pension fund assets to fuel side investments in things like real estate. The CBR took most of them over as well as cleaning out the state-owned banking deposit insurance agency (DIA), which was also rife with corruption. From the major commercial banks, only Alfa Bank, owned by oligarch Mikhail Fridman survived the cull, which left the banking sector a lot healthier, more transparent, and well capitalised. The banking reform came to an end before the war in Ukraine started, allowing it to weather the shock the start of war caused and quickly recovered by the summer of 2022.

Plan K

Between 2014 and 2018 the reforms dealt with big and obvious issues such as rampant corruption in the regional administration and commercial banks, but starting in 2016 there was an effort to codify more fundamental root and branch reforms for the whole country.

That task was given to the former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin, who’s claim to fame is to set up the National Reserve Fund that is now the National Welfare Fund (NWF), Russia’s rainy day fund to cover budget deficits in difficult years, and successfully ring fenced hundreds of billions of dollars from the avarice of corrupt Duma deputies.

Based on Putin’s May decrees, Kudrin worked out a comprehensive program, dubbed Plan K, that deal with some of Russia’s biggest social problems such as eradicating poverty and doubling the amount of affordable housing. It took another two years, but this plan was eventually enshrined in the 12 National Projects that were launched in 2019 and remain the government’s official reform programme.

It’s tempting to believe that all these changes were part of Putin’s grand plan to confront the west over Ukraine’s fate and prepare Russia for the inevitable economic war that would start with the West.

Kudrin was sacked as Finance Minister in September 2011 after he objected to Putin’s order to divert the greater part of state spending from investment to modernising the military as Russia began to rearm to get ready for war.

The other piece of the puzzle is around the same time the CBR began to accumulate large amounts of foreign exchange into a cash pile that would eventually reach $600bn as well as pay down most of its external debt. Russia had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 12.4% in 2020, by far the lowest of any major economy in the world, which is expected to rise of 18.1% this year as a result of the war. Putin sanction-proofed the economy by building a Fiscal Fortress that was ready by 2021.

It was only then the Kremlin went on the offense, starting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s ““new rules of the game” speech in February 2020 when he told the West Russia would no long tolerate Western sanctions dished out with one hand and seeking big business deals taken with the other. That culminated with the massing of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border in the autumn of 2021 and a eight-point list of demands issued by Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December that were the precursors to the current war.

New National Projects

The Kremlin is back at the drawing board to continue improving the health of the Russian economy by updating the 12 National Projects, during his state of the nation speech on February 21.

Budget reform: Putin proposed to extend the budget planning from the current three years to six to improve the long-term planning of the state finances. The current three-year planning period and the use of the so-called budget rule to siphon off excess oil and gas revenues to the National Welfare Fund (NWF) has been highly successful.

Progressive taxes: the first thing that Putin did on taking office in 2000 was introduce flat income (13%) and corporate (24%) taxes that brought some order to Yeltsin’s chaos and put the government’s funding back into the black. The Kremlin has been extremely reluctant to raise taxes, but now after more than two decades Putin is finally suggesting that the rich pay and big business carry a bigger share of the load and pay more taxes.

Industrial production: Putin called for the state and private companies to invest more into the production of key goods, that Russia should make for itself. He said that importing somethings was ok, but Russia should expand its production of things like consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, equipment, lathes and motor vehicles, as well as opening 100 new technology parks.

Capital markets: To pay for the investments, Putin set ambitious targets to expand the capital markets. Putin called for accelerated and simplified IPO for Russia’s high-tech companies and the capitalization of the capital market should double by 2030 to 66% of GDP, Putin added. He also called for more than doubling public and private investment in research and development to 2% of GDP by 2030.

Housing: A key element of the projects is the construction of new affordable housing, and during his speech Putin boasted that new residential construction had expanded by 1.5 times in 2023, beating all Soviet records. The government has been promoting the sector’s development with generous subsidised mortgages that have led to a boom in construction.

Family project: A program to support families with lots of children that also a disproportionally represented amongst Russia’s poorest families, as well encourage higher birth rates.

Long and Active Life project: A programme to extend life expectancy in Russia to at least 78 years by 2030, with ambitions to reach over 80 years in the future. Federal projects targeting major health concerns such as cardiovascular and oncological diseases, as well as diabetes are included in the plan.

Russia’s Youth project: A programme to nurture the younger generation’s aspirations, successes and life values, which Putin said are crucial to the country’s sovereignty and historical continuity.

Human Resources project: A programme that focuses on professional development, education, and training, aiming to equip Russia’s growing younger generation with the skills needed for the 21st-century economy.

Data Economy project: With a budget of over RUB700bn ($7.6bn) for the next six years, this programme aims to integrate digital platforms across various social and economic sectors.

How much of this will be implemented. In the past Russia has been famous for having lots of good ideas, but always falling down on the implementation. The 1990s were marred by the chaos of the Yeltsin administration. In the noughties companies began to invest and focus on profitability, especially after oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky started a widely adopted fad of improving corporate governance.

The first serious systematic reforms like the changes to the banking sector and tax system only really began in the following decade, but the more general reforms enshrined in the National Projects have not been a success.

And Russia has some serious obstacle to overcome. While Russian are very good at things like tech – Russian internet giant Yandex is a world class company and still the most valuable the company in Europe even after its market capitalisation was halved after the war started – but on things like precision tools and electronics, Russia remains hopeless far behind the other advanced economies and heavily dependent on imports.

Progress has also been made on rooting out corruption and improving the rule of law, but Putin’s increasingly repressive political system works against more progress as people and companies remain vulnerable to the whims of the state.

As Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, argued in his book The J curve, in the early stages of a country’s transformation the stability an authoritarian government brings allows for more rapid economic development as the president can simply order things to happen. However, despite the chaotic confusion and debate of democracies, the freedoms that comes with it allows for greater innovation and risk taking that ultimate leads to a higher level of prosperity that autocracies can’t achieve. What remains to be seen is where Russia lies on this curve.