An excerpt from Seymour Hersh’s “The Iron-Clad Pinata” published on 3/21/24:

The American official, who is kept abreast of the ongoing talks between leaders of the two armies at war, said that officials of the Biden administration, working with Zelensky, continue to rebuff any chances of significant progress in peace talks. The reality, he said, is “that the lands in dispute”—four oblasts formerly in Ukraine’s control and Crimea—“from north to south and east to west all are Russia’s. So stop talking about it and make a deal.” Right now, “Putin could drive to Lviv”—near the border with Poland in western Ukraine—“but what would he gain in terms of his current dominance? US vacillation and peace at home? He wants Kharkiv, and he will get it when he forces Zalensky to capitulate. 

“We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin’s re-election and Zelensky’s military degradation. The US leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum—‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually]. Biden has staked his presidency on meeting the Russian threat to NATO and outsmarting the monster, and he will not change course now, under any circumstances, and the end is inevitable. There is no road to victory for Ukraine, and it will end with Putin as an historical icon in Russia, having recovered a national jewel[Kharkiv]from the West.” 

By Krishen Mehta, ACURA, 2/23/24

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) was a Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome and tutor to emperors. Known for his philosophic works and essays dealing with thorny moral and political issues, Seneca used philosophy as a compass to navigate the challenging terrain of life. Recently, as I was reading a new translation of Sentences from Seneca, it struck me that some of Seneca’s teachings may apply to the tragic conflict that is still unfolding in Ukraine. In the spirit of bringing the wisdom of the past to bear on the present, I offer four of Seneca’s sentences as ways of illuminating the problems of the war.

Teaching 1: It is not he who has too little, but who craves more, who is poor

On Sept 7, 2023, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament that President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “to prevent more NATO” expansion along Russia’s borders. This was essentially an admission that the war could have been avoided if the West had agreed to Russia’s repeated requests not to expand NATO into Ukraine.

In spite of promises made to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East” if Russia allowed for Germany to be unified, the expansion into Eastern Europe that began under President Clinton only sped up under his successors. Yet the Western powers felt that even the incorporation of Poland and the Baltic states into NATO wasn’t enough — Ukraine had to come next. But has NATO expansion made the world safer and more peaceful? Or has it made it poorer, less safe, and more confrontational?

Perhaps Seneca was right: it is he who craves more who is poor.

Teaching 2: Reason wishes its judgment to be just. Anger wishes its judgment to appear just.

Vladimir Putin reasons that, although the territory of present-day Ukraine has a long history, Russia and Ukraine are like Slavic brothers who “share the same soul.” Left-bank Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) was already incorporated into the Tsardom of Russia in 1667 under the Treaty of Andrusovo. Parts or all of Ukraine remained within the Russian Empire or the USSR through the early 1990s. Allowing Ukraine, formerly an integral part of its empire, to become part of a hostile military alliance right at its border was not something Russia could accept. For that reason, its leaders felt that the special military operation was both just and necessary.

The West, for its part, also wants to justify its response to the war in which billions have been spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and various economies forced into decline. Even though Ukraine has fought valiantly, the war has shattered the established global order, and the countries of the world are more divided than ever before.

US President Joe Biden, at a press conference with the Finnish President on July 13, 2023, said that “Putin’s already lost the war. There is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made similar statements to the effect that “Putin was trying to erase Ukraine from the map, subsume it into Russia, and that has already been a failure.” Maybe, for the sake of global peace, we can concede victory to the West, agree to an armistice-like arrangement based on the current territorial realities, negotiate Ukraine’s neutrality for the foreseeable future, and end this conflict. In this manner, improvising on Seneca’s insight from over two thousand years ago, those who feel just and those who wish to appear just can both be satisfied.

Teaching 3: Those whom they have injured, they also hate. 

Russia was attacked by Germany in World War I and suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914. Further setbacks fueled the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Russian Civil War followed, lasting until 1922, during which time various foreign factions intervened to determine Russia’s political future. Russia was attacked again less than 20 years later, this time by the Nazi war machine. Over 26 million Russians died in the war that ensued.

From Russia’s perspective, it was their sacrifice in World War II that ended up saving Western civilization by smashing almost 80% of Germany’s military force. In comparison, France lost about 600,000 lives and the US only about 400,000. It would be little exaggeration to say that no country experienced more pain, injury, and suffering than Russia did during the Second World War.

Yet after the end of the Cold War, Western powers stifled or denied Russia’s efforts to integrate with their economies. Russia’s offer to join NATO was rejected. Its leaders experimented with capital reforms, as advised by the West, but without the financial support needed for the reforms to succeed, their economy went into a free fall. Living standards collapsed.

Do Western leaders have compassion or understanding for what Russia experienced in World War II and thereafter? No — in fact, Russophobia has never been more widespread in the West than it is right now. Why? Maybe Seneca could tell us: those whom they have injured, they also hate.

Teaching 4: Nothing is ours but time…and time discloses the truth.

No one knows how this war will end. For Ukraine, almost an entire generation has been traumatized, either killed or wounded in battle or forced into exile as refugees. Russia has also suffered painful military and economic losses. One day, historians will write about how the war started, whether it was truly unprovoked, the security guarantees that could have been negotiated while there was still time, the missed opportunity for peace in Istanbul in April, 2022, and how the war changed our world.

Meanwhile, two years into the conflict, we are at a crossroads. Time will test Russia’s belief that this is a civil war and fratricidal conflict that has divided families and friends and relatives. Time may also tell if the war could still have happened without the maleficent, intrusive behavior of the Western powers. And time will tell how the people of Ukraine will survive in a postwar future, living at peace with their fraternal family. If one believes in God, one must believe in the power of healing.

As Seneca says, nothing is ours but time…and time discloses the truth.

Krishen Mehta is a former partner at PwC and now a Senior Global Justice Fellow at Yale University

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 3/17/24

The current situation in the conflict between Ukraine – serving (while being demolished) as a proxy for the West – and Russia, can be sketched in three broad strokes.

First, Russia now clearly has the upper hand on the battlefield and could potentially accelerate its recent advances to achieve an overall military victory soon. The West is being compelled to recognize this fact: as Foreign Affairs put it, in an article titled “Time is Running Out in Ukraine,” Kiev and its Western supporters “are at a critical decision point and face a fundamental question: How can further Russian advances… be stopped, and then reversed?” Just disregard the bit of wishful thinking thrown in at the end to sweeten the bitter pill of reality. The key point is the acknowledgment that it is crunch time for the West and Ukraine – in a bad way.

Second, notwithstanding the above, Ukraine is not yet ready to ask for negotiations to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia, which would be less than easy for Kiev. (Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, reiterated in an important recent interview that Moscow remains principally open to talks, not on the basis of “wishful thinking” but, instead, proceeding from the realities “on the ground.”)

The Kiev regime’s inflexibility is little wonder. Since he jettisoned a virtually complete – and favorable – peace deal in the spring of 2022, President Vladimir Zelensky has gambled everything on an always improbable victory. For him personally, as well as his core team (at least), there is no way to survive – politically or physically – the catastrophic defeat they have brought on their country by leasing it out as a pawn to the Washington neocon strategy.

The Pope, despite the phony brouhaha he triggered in Kiev and the West, was right: a responsible Ukrainian leadership ought to negotiate. But that’s not the leadership Ukraine has. Not yet at least.

Third, the West’s strategy is getting harder to decipher because, in essence, the West cannot figure out how to adjust to the failure of its initial plans for this war. Russia has not been isolated; its military has become stronger, not weaker – and the same is true of its economy, including its arms industry.

And last but not least, the Russian political system’s popular legitimacy and effective control has neither collapsed nor even frayed. As, again, even Foreign Affairs admits, “Putin would likely win a fair election in 2024.” That’s more than could be said for, say, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Olaf Scholz, or Emmanuel Macron (as for Zelensky, he has simply canceled the election).

In other words, the West is facing not only Ukraine’s probable defeat, but also its own strategic failure. The situation, while not a direct military rout (as in Afghanistan in 2021) amounts to a severe political setback.

In fact, this looming Western failure is a historic debacle in the making. Unlike with Afghanistan, the West will not be able to simply walk away from the mess it has made in Ukraine. This time, the geopolitical blowback will be fierce and the costs very high. Instead of isolating Russia, the West has isolated itself, and by losing, it will show itself weakened.

It is one thing to have to finally, belatedly accepted that the deceptive “unipolar” moment of the 1990s has been over for a long time. It is much worse to gratuitously enter the new multipolar order with a stunning, avoidable self-demotion. Yet that is what the EU/NATO-West has managed to fabricate from its needless over-extension in Ukraine. Hubris there has been galore, the fall now is only a matter of time – and not much time at that.

Regarding EU-Europe in particular, on one thing French President Emmanuel Macron is half right. Russia’s victory “would reduce Europe’s credibility to zero.” Except, of course, a mind of greater Cartesian precision would have detected that Moscow’s victory will merely be the last stage in a longer process.

The deeper causes of EU/NATO-Europe’s loss of global standing are threefold. First, its own wanton decision to seek confrontation instead of a clearly feasible compromise and cooperation with Russia (why exactly is a neutral Ukraine impossible to live with again?) Second, the American strategy of systematically diminishing EU/NATO-Europe with a short-sighted policy of late-imperial client cannibalization which takes the shape of aggressive deindustrialization and a “Europeanization” of the war in Ukraine. And third, the European clients’ grotesque acquiescence to the above.

That is the background to a recent wave of mystifying signals coming out of Western, especially EU/NATO elites: First, we have had a wave of scare propaganda to accompany the biggest NATO maneuvers since the end of the Cold War. Next Macron publicly declared and has kept reiterating that the open – not in covert-but-obvious mode, as now – deployment of Western ground troops in Ukraine is an option. He added a cheap demagogic note by calling on Europeans not to be “cowards,” by which he means that they should be ready to follow, in effect, his orders and fight Russia, clearly including inside and on behalf of Ukraine. Never mind that the latter is a not an official member of either NATO or the EU as well as a highly corrupt and anything but democratic state.

In response, a divergence has surfaced inside EU/NATO Europe: The German government has been most outspoken in contradicting Macron. Not only Chancellor Scholz rushed to distance himself. A clearly outraged Boris Pistorius – Berlin’s hapless minister of defense, recently tripped up by his own generals’ stupendously careless indiscretion over the Taurus missiles – has grumbled that there is no need for “talk about boots on the ground or having more courage or less courage.” Perhaps more surprisingly, Poland, the Czech Republic as well as NATO figurehead Jens Stoltenberg (i.e., the US) have been quick to state that they are, in effect, not ready to support Macron’s initiative. The French public, by the way, is not showing any enthusiasm for a Napoleonic escalation either. A Le Figaro poll shows 68 percent against openly sending ground troops to Ukraine.

On the other side, Macron has found some support. He is not entirely isolated, which helps explain why he has dug in his heels: Zelensky does not count in this respect. His bias is obvious, and his usual delusions notwithstanding he is not calling the shots on the matter. The Baltic states, however, while military micro-dwarfs, are, unfortunately, in a position to exert some influence inside the EU and NATO. And true to form, they have sided with the French president, with Estonia and Lithuania taking the lead.

It remains impossible to be certain what we are looking at. To get the most far-fetched hypothesis out of the way first: is this a coordinated bluff with a twist? A complicated Western attempt at playing good-cop bad-cop against Russia, with Macron launching the threats and others signaling that Moscow could find them less extreme, at a diplomatic price, of course? Hardly. For one thing, that scheme would be so hare-brained, even the current West is unlikely to try. No, the crack opening up in Western unity is real.

Regarding Macron himself, too-clever-by-half, counter-productive cunning is his style. We cannot know what exactly he is trying to do; and he may not know himself. In essence, there are two possibilities. Either the French president now is a hard-core escalationist determined to widen the war into an open clash between Russia and NATO, or he is a high-risk gambler who is engaged in a bluff to achieve three purposes. Frighten Moscow into abstaining from pushing its military advantage in Ukraine (a hopeless idea); score nationalist “grandeur” points domestically in France (which is failing already); and increase his weight inside EU/NATO-Europe by “merely” posturing as, once again, a new “Churchill” – whom Macron himself has made sure to allude to, in all his modesty. (And some of his fans, including Zelensky, a grizzled veteran of Churchill live action role play, have already made that de rigueur if stale comparison.) 

While we cannot entirely unriddle the moody sphinx of the Elysée or, for that matter, the murky dealings of EU/NATO-European elites, we can say two things. First, whatever Macron thinks he is doing, it is extremely dangerous. Russia would treat EU/NATO-state troops in Ukraine as targets – and it won’t matter one wit if they turn up labeled “NATO” or under national flags “only.” Russia has also reiterated that it considers its vital interests affected in Ukraine and that if its leadership perceives a vital threat to Russia, nuclear weapons are an option. The warning could not be clearer.

Second, here is the core Western problem that is now – due to Russia undeniably winning the war – becoming acute: Western elites are split between “pragmatists” and “extremists.” The pragmatists are as Russophobic and strategically misguided as the extremists, but they do shy away from World War Three. Yet these pragmatists, who seek to resist hard-core escalationists and reign it at least high-risk gamblers, are brought up short against a crippling contradiction in their own position and messaging: As of now, they still share the same delusional narrative with the extremists. Both groupings keep reiterating that Russia plans to attack all of EU/NATO-Europe once it defeats Ukraine and that, therefore, stopping Russia in Ukraine is, literally, vital (or in Macron’s somewhat Sartrean terms “existential”) to the West.   

That narrative is absurd. Reality works exactly the other way around: The most certain way to get into a war with Russia is to send troops to Ukraine openly. And what is existential for EU/NATO-Europe is to finally liberate itself from American “leadership.” During the Cold War, a case could be made that (then Western) Europe needed the US. After the Cold War, though, that was no longer the case. In response, Washington has implemented a consistent, multi-administration, bipartisan, if often crude, strategy of avoiding what should have been inevitable: the emancipation of Europe from American dominance.

Both the eastward expansion of NATO, programmed – and predicted – to cause a massive conflict with Russia and the current proxy war in Ukraine, obstinately provoked by Washington over decades, are part of that strategy to – to paraphrase a famous saying about NATO – “keep Europe down.” And the European elites have played along as if there’s no tomorrow, which, for them, there really may not be.

We are at a potential breaking-point, a crisis of that long-term trajectory. If the pragmatists in EU/NATO-Europe really want to contain the extremists, who play with triggering an open war between Russia and NATO that would devastate at least Europe, then they must now come clean and, finally, abandon the common, ideological, and entirely unrealistic narrative about an existential threat from Moscow.

As long as the pragmatists dare not challenge the escalationists on how to principally understand the causes of the current catastrophe, the extremists will always have the advantage of consistency: Their policies are foolish, wastefully unnecessary, and extremely risky. And yet, they follow from what the West has made itself believe. It is high time to break that spell of self-hypnosis, and face facts.

YouTube link here.

An old man with dementia can be expected to mix up the names of sons, wives, mistresses. If Iraq and Ukraine are in the same mental sock drawer for President Biden, we have a seriously under-noticed problem. You can watch Orf’s video for laughs, but this one is more horror movie than most of his productions. – Matt Taibbi

By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Medium, 2/22/24

Two years into an SMO that no one expected or wanted, it has become a fact of life with two fronts, the battlefield and economic. The focus here is on economics and life after two years of Western sanctions. The headline is “moving on”.

According to the Levada Center, 75% of respondents look forward to 2024 with “hope”, 8% with uncertainty”, and 13% with “anxiety”. Inflation is real and felt but people are coping in part because of a labor shortage that has forced salary increases in the private sector. Public sector service jobs continue to lag behind, one of the reasons there are 12 vacancies at the Manzherok Village school and no full-time medical staff in the clinic. There are plans to build “social housing” for these professionals but a local entrepreneur does not think this will make a difference, “No one is going to work for that kind of money now”.

Sanctions are rarely mentioned. If they are, it is to reflect on how scary it was when they were announced followed by admiration at the soft landing Central Bank Head Elvira Nabiullina has pulled off. There is no arrogance in this assessment, just pride and a little bit of wonder. One businessman expressed a different kind of wonder, why the Europeans are signaling to investors and depositors around the world that Europe is not a safe place. He moved his money after receiving threatening messages from a Swiss Bank. It is now in Kazakhstan, Dubai, Cyprus and he is also investing in Russia.

During holiday shopping at a mall in Novosibirsk, a 22 year old translates: Pull & Bear = Dub, Maag = Zara, LS = Levi’s, etc. The massive IKEA remains empty but the French Leroy Merlin and Auchan continue on as always although Leroy Merlin appears to be assuming more and more IKEA product lines. The high prices were mitigated by surprisingly great pre-holiday sales up to 70% in most stores.

The Chinese are rapidly cornering the car market as the French, Germans, and Americans, who had factories in Russia, left with options to buy back. Chery was making deals and the dealership was full. The $30,000 + Tiggo ProMax 7 could be had for $11,000 with a Renault Duster trade-in. Haval was not making deals. During the test drive, salesman Emile from Azerbaijian explained the differences between the Haval Dargo (Big Dog in Chinese) made in Tula, 193 km from Moscow, and the Dargo X made in China. The opening of the Tula Great Wall Motor Company factory in June 2019 was a big moment celebrated in person by Xi Jinping and Putin.

Emile, also talked about getting his degree in Novosibirsk and spending two summers in Ocean City Baltimore on the Work and Travel Program. He liked America and considered staying, but decided it wasn’t for him. His family is here and “you can make money in the US but you have to work all the time. Here, you can take a few months off and do other things you want to do.”

Two weeks before the SMO began, the new, improved Tolmachevo International Airport opened. At that time there were regular flights to Prague, Seoul, and various German cities. The expectation was that this major expansion would support growth in the role of Novosibirsk as the human and cargo hub between east and west. Instead, the billowing columns in the massive new entrance hall are now only serving international travelers to and from Central Asia, Yerevan, Baku, China, and the transit gateways to the West, Dubai and Istanbul. They are also welcoming vacationers exploring newly popular domestic tourism destinations like Kamchatka, Vladikavkaz, Kaliningrad, Gorno Altaisk, and Vladivostok.

The weekly flight to one of those destinations, Kaliningrad, now requires a detour over Baltic Sea international waters. The Region is surrounded by Europe (Lithuania and Poland) and the air space was closed in response to the SMO. In June of 22, Lithuania announced a ban on sanctioned goods traveling to Kaliningrad. Russia objected and a month later, the EU issued some new guidelines that allowed the goods to move.

Despite the precarious location and intensification of the conflict, there was no trace of that turbulence or other possible threats in October 2023. In Kaliningrad, people were moving in and moving on. The cab’s children’s car seat and toys were not evidence of a caring grandfather, but a career change. The 50+ driver’s previous lucrative business was transporting goods from Lithuania. He sold his trucks, bought a baby seat, and moved on.

After life as Prussia and Poland, Kaliningrad was the German City of Konigsberg until 1945 when it was given to the Soviet Union in the Potsdam Agreement. Over the next couple of years German residents were expelled and people from other parts of the USSR moved in. That flow has continued generating a steady population increase since 1950. It has long been the destination for Siberians who want to stay in Russia but live in Europe or escape the cold climate. A young cab driver from Novokuznetsk moved three years ago because of the cold and bad environment in his native coal mining region. Initially he wanted to move to Petersburg, but he couldn’t afford an apartment and didn’t want to get a mortgage. He ended up mortgage free and happy in Kaliningrad.

Kaliningrad was a world class destination for tourists before options were limited. 13th century on, pick an era and you will find the most eclectic mix of sites including where Napoleon slept, a Cold War era submarine, Kant’s grave, and Blues Brothers statues outside a café/museum with record players from 1840–1940. There is also the resort town Zelenogradsk. Founded in 1252, in 2010 it branded itself a “cat town” and now features cat murals, cat traffic lights, cat food machines, even the war memorial had a white cat lounging by the flame.

On the way to the Kaliningrad flea market, selling everything from fish shot glasses to German helmets with bullet holes, the cab driver boasted that his Grandmother was one of the first people to move here in 1946. He goes on to say that everything is great. Yes, housing is twice as expensive but there is plenty of work if you are ready to work. He had no negatives about the current development boom. He is proud and excited for his 4th generation daughter’s future with huge investments going into culture, including affiliates of the Tretakov Gallery and Bolshoi Theatre, and education with apartments for teachers.

Others are less enthusiastic complaining about change, getting used to change, and the taming of what once were wild places. The gripes about the prices and congestion that come along with being a booming tourist destination. One cabbie/fisherman cited 4 hour summer traffic jams to get on the Curonian Spit, a 98 km. forested sand dune separating the Baltic Sea from the Curonian Lagoon. Half of the Spit is a National Park in Russia and the other half is in Lithuania.

Even the more ancient relics are coated with references to the Great Patriotic War (WWII). The 14th Century Konigsberg Cathedral was jam packed on a Tuesday night, hundreds of people paid 500 rubles to hear an organ concert. The building was partially destroyed, along with most of the City, by Allied bombing in August 1944. Passing remnants of forts and churches outside the City, the guide explained that none of the old buildings were damaged by bombs. Their semi-demolished state was the result of local inhabitants taking the bricks to build homes after the war. Most haunting are the remains of the Allenberg Psychiatric Hospital. It was the best in Germany before an SS Division affiliated with the Dachau Concentration Camp moved in and used it for experiments.

The path to moving on in Russia is often viscerally informed by national history. Two women reminded me of this when we discussed sanctions. One, born around the time Brezhnev and Nixon signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, is a corporate executive. The other was born during Perestroika and recently moved her yoga business from Novosibirsk to Altai. They both grew up sharing bedrooms with brothers, sleeping on foldout couches with a table to do homework.

“40 jars of cucumbers, that was our record”, the younger woman boasted about summers spent helping her Grandmother in a Kazakhstan village.

The other responded describing her great-grandmother, “She never ever threw anything out. If someone left a little piece of bread, she would take it, dry it into a crouton, store it in a bag hanging from the kitchen door, and when others had bread, she would eat from the bag.”

Moving on is also bounded by the status quo and no one expects the sanctions will end even when the shooting stops. People here are more comfortable with the idea that nothing is perfect, there is always a work around so “Plan B” is built into the hardware, you adapt and keep going. Even today, for many like the corporate executive, the legacy of the impact from past western invasions came first hand, “There were two wars, one after the other, and there were no men so she had to be tough”.

Part Three: The Social Contract and the Next Gen