By Lily Lynch, UnHerd, 5/16/23

Lily Lynch is a writer and journalist based in Belgrade, Serbia.

In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a leader in this effort.”

This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership. Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war­ — that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be singing is “Give War a Chance”.

The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call “Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new technologies, and youth influencers.

Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts” and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or the 2007 feature film HQ, produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions and identities.

No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the “Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The “Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.

Predictably, the Fundis believed that European peace would be best served by West Germany’s withdrawal from the alliance and tended to favour military neutrality. Meanwhile, the Realos believed that West Germany needed Nato. They even argued that withdrawal would return matters of security to the German nation-state and risk rekindling militaristic nationalism. Their Nato was a post-national, cosmopolitan alliance, speaking numerous languages and flying a multitude of flags, protecting Europe from Germany’s most destructive impulses. But Nato membership at the end of history was one thing. Germany going to war again — the most forbidden of taboos after World War II — was something else entirely.

Kosovo changed everything. In 1999 — the 50th anniversary of Nato’s founding — the alliance began what academic Merje Kuus has called a “discursive metamorphosis”. From the mere defensive alliance it was during the Cold War, it was becoming an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom well beyond the borders of its member states. The 78-day Nato bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens.

At a chaotic May 1999 party conference in Bielefeld, the Realos and Fundis fought bitterly over the bombing. Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Realo, supported Nato’s war; for this, conference attendees pelted him with red paint. The Fundis’ proposal called for an unconditional cessation of the bombing, which would have also meant the collapse of the Green-Social Democratic Party (SDP) coalition government. The peace proposal failed, crushing the anti-war faction of the party, who would leave the Greens in droves. Instead, the Realos’ moderate resolution triumphed by a comfortable margin. After a brief pause, the bombing of Yugoslavia was allowed to continue. With the Greens’ crucial support, the Luftwaffe flew sorties over Belgrade, 58 years after their last aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital. It was the first German military operation undertaken in Europe since the Second World War.

Following the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the German Greens’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has continued in Fischer’s tradition, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality and imploring them to join Nato. She has invoked Desmond Tutu’s line: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And the Greens have even ventriloquised their own dead members, including Petra Kelly, an anti-war icon and longtime advocate for non-alignment who died in 1992. Last year, Greens co-founder Eva Quistorp wrote an imaginary letter to Petra Kelly in the newspaper FAZ. The letter borrows Kelly’s moral stances and inverts them to justify the Greens’ embrace of war. Quistorp wants us to think that if Kelly were alive today, she would have been a Nato supporter. Addressing the long-dead Kelly, Quistorp asserts, “I bet you would shout out that radical pacifism makes blackmail possible.”

Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”, the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.

Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

The academic Merje Kuus has written that Nato enlargement involves “a two-fold legitimation” strategy. First, Nato is rendered ordinary and unremarkable, pedestrian and everyday, and second, it is portrayed as above reproach, vital, an absolute moral good. The effect of this, she says, is the simultaneous banalisation and glorification of Nato: it becomes so blandly bureaucratic that it is below debate, and so “existential and essential”, that it is above debate. And this legitimation strategy has been evident in the limited, tightly-controlled debate about Euro-Atlantic integration in the Nordic countries, neither of which held referendums on membership. After decades of popular resistance to the alliance, Nato, it seems, is above democracy. But as Kuss writes, that does not mean that Nato is imposed on a society. The aim is instead “to integrate it into entertainment, education, and civic life more broadly”.

Evidence of this is everywhere. In February, Nato held its first ever gaming event. A young employee of the alliance joined popular Twitch streamer ZeRoyalViking to play Among Us and casually chat about the danger disinformation poses to democracy. With them was a mountaineer influencer and environmental activist named Caroline Gleich. As their astronaut avatars navigated a cartoon spaceship, they spoke about Nato in glowing terms. By the event’s end, the stream had turned into a recruitment effort: the alliance employee talked about the perks of his job and encouraged viewers to check the Nato website for employment opportunities in fields such as graphic design and video editing.

The event was part of Nato’s “Protect the Future” campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.

The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left organised mass protests attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute.

By Blaise Malley, Responsible Statecraft, 5/17/23

An open letter calling for a swift diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine was published on Tuesday [May 16th] in the New York Times. The letter’s 14 signatories consisted mostly of former U.S. military officers and other national security officials, including Jack Matlock, Washington’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat; Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official; and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff. [https://eisenhowermedianetwork.org/russia-ukraine-war-peace/]

Many are longtime critics of U.S. foreign policy and post-9/11 war policies.

The letter calls the war an “unmitigated disaster” and cautions that “future devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war.”

While condemning Vladimir Putin’s “criminal invasion and occupation,” the letter, which notes the serial invasions of Russia by foreign adversaries, encourages readers to understand the war “through Russia’s eyes.”

“In diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to understand one’s adversaries,” according to the letter. “This is not weakness: it is wisdom.”

“Since 2007, Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the U.S. now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962,” the letter reads. “Russia further singled out NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative.” 

The missive, which appeared on page 5 of the Times’ print edition, lays out the history of warnings by key U.S. national security officials, politicians, and others about the dangers of NATO expansion in the late 1990s, and again in 2008 when then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia and current CIA director William Burns cautioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against pushing for NATO membership for Ukraine.

Accompanying the text is a timeline of the deterioration in relations between Moscow and the West that begins in 1990, when Secretary of State James Baker assured Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards, until Russia’s invasion in February of last year.

“NATO expansion, in sum, is a key feature of a militarized U.S. foreign policy characterized by unilateralism featuring regime change and preemptive wars,” according to the letter, which suggests that Washington’s “failed wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan have been two of the results.

President Joe Biden has vowed that Washington will continue to aid Kyiv “as long as it takes.” The letter’s signers fear that this is a recipe for escalation that could result in catastrophe.

“As Dan Ellsberg has warned courageously and unceasingly, we — the world — are at the nuclear brink again, perhaps closer to the edge than ever before. It only requires one step to go over and then our steps end forever,” Wilkerson said in the statement released by the Eisenhower Media Network, which funded the full-page advertisement. “If that’s not sufficient reason for a return to diplomacy, our extinction is at hand; the timing is all that is in question.”

To date, the United States has sent $37 billion worth of military aid to Kyiv. High-level discussions with officials in Moscow have been rare, and a number of other entities, including China, Brazil, and the Pope, have taken on the mantle of pushing for a diplomatic solution.

What Washington’s role will look like going forward is more uncertain, with recent reporting as well as revelations from Pentagon leaks suggesting that the administration will continue supporting Ukraine through the anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces before possibly reassessing, although officials have disputed that narrative.

The letter, entitled “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World,” urges the Biden administration to pivot towards pursuing a negotiated solution to end the war “speedily.”

“This reality is not entirely of our own making, yet it may well be our undoing,” the letter concludes, “unless we dedicate ourselves to forging a diplomatic settlement that stops the killing and defuses tensions.”

Emphasis via bolding below is mine. – Natylie

By Richard Falk, Counterpunch, 4/26/23

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.

If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’

At first glance ‘rule-governed’ might be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that had guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a different perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’

Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, March 00, 2022, by a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions (including China and India) although without comparable support for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations.

What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is not so clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek a peaceful settlement of all international disputes.

The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch ‘wars of choice’ and accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside of the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.

These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises (1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).

Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe, could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).

These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East  Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.

This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaging in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.

Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.

The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result in severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.

The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict.

It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than conflictually. Perhaps, the Ukraine War can yet be interpreted to produce such a transition in outlook and behavior.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 5/28/23

His insight helps better understand the Kremlin’s position towards sensitive issues, which can in turn enable one to more accurately predict how these situations might evolve.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin gave an interview to TASS over the weekend where he shared a detailed update about regional developments in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. It’s in Russian but can be read by anyone using Google Translate. His insight helps better understand the Kremlin’s position towards sensitive issues, which can in turn enable one to more accurately predict how these situations might evolve. Here are the points from his interview that deserve the most attention:

1. Russia No Longer Blames The West’s For Kiev’s Drone Attack Against The Kremlin

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier blamed the West for Kiev’s drone attack against the Kremlin, yet Galuzin just clarified that “As we understand, these steps of the Ukrainian authorities were not coordinated with their Western masters”.

2. Moscow’s End Game In The Ongoing Conflict Remains Unchanged

The Deputy Foreign Minister reaffirmed that his side continues to insist on Ukraine’s neutral non-aligned status, its demilitarization and denazification, keeping it out of NATO and the EU, Kiev’s recognition of the on-the-ground territorial realities, and the regime’s respect of its Russian minority’s human rights.

3. The Anglo-American Axis Is Pressuring Kiev To Commence Its Counteroffensive

Galuzin is of the opinion that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will have catastrophic consequences for that country and its people, but the Anglo-American Axis is still pressuring its proxies to go through with this anyhow in order to prolong the conflict and continue fighting Russia “until the last Ukrainian”. 

4. Russia Is Adamantly Against Kiev’s Persecution Of The Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Kiev’s persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church represents a grave violation of its Russian minority’s human rights, which is why Moscow remains adamantly against it and will continue reminding international institutions about these crimes with the hope that they’ll pressure the regime to stop.

5. Any Provocation Against Russian Peacekeepers In Transnistria Will Be Immediately Responded To

Galuzin warned that the prior reports of Kiev’s reportedly planned provocations against his country’s peacekeepers in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria will be immediately responded to, which should hopefully prompt them to think twice about targeting it during their upcoming counteroffensive.

6. Moldova Is Dangerously Following In Ukraine’s Footsteps Via Aggressive De-Russification

Even if no provocations against Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria are forthcoming, Moldova will still remain troublesome for Moscow due to its aggressive Ukrainian-inspired de-Russification policies, thus suggesting that it could become the next regional crisis in the worst-case scenario.

7. The Kremlin Will Continue Facilitating The Armenian-Azerbaijani Peace Process

On a positive note, Galuzin ended his interview by expressing cautious optimism about the Kremlin-facilitated Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process, which he believes has a credible chance of succeeding and thus ending one of the former Soviet Union’s longest-running conflicts.

In sum, Russia remains committed to achieving the goals set out at the start of its special operation despite speculation of ceasefire talks by year’s end. Nevertheless, by clarifying that Moscow no longer believes that Kiev coordinated its bombing of the Kremlin with the West, the possibility exists in theory of holding talks with the latter’s US leader aimed at some sort of compromise. Amidst this uncertainty, Moldova is becoming more problematic while the situation in the South Caucasus might soon improve.

By Dmitry Lascaris, Website, 5/17/23

Last month, after visiting Moscow for the first time, I published an account of what I saw and experienced there.

In my account, one of the subjects on which I commented was the extent of visible homelessness in central Moscow. I wrote that:

It is always a challenge to estimate the level of homelessness in a society, especially when one relies principally upon one’s personal observations in the street. Many homeless persons might not be apparent to a casual observer. Also, local authorities might have taken steps to conceal the level of homelessness by, for example, confining the homeless to districts that are rarely visited by outsiders. It is therefore possible that Moscow suffers from a far higher rate of homelessness than was apparent to me.

All I can say is that, based on the criteria I normally apply in Western societies when I try to gauge the level of homelessness in a city, the number of homeless persons whom I encountered while walking the streets of central Moscow was far below what I am accustomed to seeing in Canadian and other Western cities. In ten days, during which time I walked well over 120 kilometres in central Moscow, I saw, at most, five persons who appeared to me to be homeless. Typically, when I walk for just thirty minutes in the central areas of Toronto and Montreal, I see far more homeless persons than I saw in Moscow over a ten-day period.

Prior to visiting Russia in April of this year, I served for eight years as a board member for the Unity Project for the Relief of Homelessness in London, an NGO-operated homeless shelter in London, Canada.

One of the many lessons I drew from my experiences as a Unity Project board member is that homelessness is a feature, not a bug, of capitalist systems.

Another important lesson was that many homeless persons are invisible to ordinary citizens, and that the problem of homelessness tends to be far more pervasive than a superficial inquiry might reveal.

With those lessons in mind, I decided to delve deeper into the problem of homelessness in Russia.

To that end, I visited the Nochlezhka homeless shelter in Moscow. Nochlezhka describes itself as Russia’s oldest charity providing assistance to homeless people.

I was given a tour of the shelter by Dasha Amosova, Nochlezhka’s PR specialist. At the conclusion of the tour, Dasha kindly agreed to be interviewed. The video of her interview can be viewed below. I also have posted below some of the photographs I took during my tour of the shelter.