By Ben Freeman, William Hartung and Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch, 5/4/23

Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn’t just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world’s second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn’t even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays.

None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest – and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds “invested” in its intelligence agencies and what’s still known as “the Department of Homeland Security”), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That’s more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we’re talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn’t won a war of significance since 1945.

With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we’ve reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the – a term he invented – military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style

By Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung

The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. 

The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion – more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. 

This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.

The list goes on – and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”

How sadly of this moment that is.

New Rationales, New Weaponry

Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.

Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players – Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget.  Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.

In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.

Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for the Project on Government Oversight, Washington’s ever more intense focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China’s and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

But for Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it’s fabulous for business. The threat of China’s military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial intelligence.  The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech systems, from President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.

No matter, count on one thing: tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember that they are dangerous and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: “AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis.”

Arsenal of Influence

Despite a seemingly never–ending list of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that’s the only federal agency never to pass an audit, the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever closer to a trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it’s bilking more money from taxpayers than ever before and just about everyone – from lobbyists galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to Hollywood – is in on it.

And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for – Yes!– even more money for their weaponry of choice.

The arms industry as a whole has donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won’t be surprised to learn, are heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, has found, “The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives reported through the same period.”

Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher – more than $247 million in the last two election cycles.  Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more guns, tanks, ships and missiles. Just last month, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reported that nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91% of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report. 

And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once they leave government service.

Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every Main Street in America. The poster child for such jobs as a selling point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin’s F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design flaws, including more than 800 unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon’s independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in 48 states, even if the actual total is less than half of that. 

In reality – though you’d never know this in today’s Washington – the weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation, even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding.  According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.

Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending does.

Shaping the Elite Narrative: The Military-Industrial Complex and Think Tanks

One of the MIC’s most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75% of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.

Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar’s critique of this year’s near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which, she claimed, was “well below inflation,” also included support for increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.

What’s not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders. Although that institute is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming Quincy Institute report, for example, found that they were more than four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal articles about the Ukraine War. In short, when you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.

What’s more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Shaping the Public Narrative: The Military-Entertainment Complex

Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes – and such popular acclaim helped earn the movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided, “equipment – including jets and aircraft carriers – personnel and technical expertise,” and even had the opportunity to make script revisions, according to the Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie’s success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen.”

While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it’s just the latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military propaganda. “The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows,” according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.

“The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military,” explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedly called attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. “And save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits,” argued Sirota, “audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.”

What Next for the MIC?

More than 60 years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve funding for non-military solutions to security problems, and ensure that war is the ever more likely “solution” to this country’s problems.  The question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?

Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.

That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative – an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and pandemics – is simply unacceptable.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Ben Freeman, a TomDispatch regular, is a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of a forthcoming report on Pentagon contractor funding of think tanks.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman

By Elizabeth Vos, Consortium News, 5/2/23

Depleted uranium shells have been sent to Ukraine, as confirmed by U.K. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey last week. Britain announced last month that it would send the munitions for use with Challenger 2 tanks, a move that immediately escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, with President Vladimir Putin threatening to place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus just days later.

The U.K. move comes amid indications that Kiev is increasingly desperate, to the point of being willing to risk scorching the earth it is fighting for.

Over the last few months documents emerging as part of the so-called Pentagon leak allegedly posted online by U.S. National Guardsman Jack Teixera have shown Ukrainian forces are faring far worsethan previously reported by corporate media. As reported by Consortium News, the leaked documents “show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably.”

That the conflict is not going well for Ukraine came as little surprise to those who had been following the story outside of the legacy press echo chamber. However, Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine represents more than a dangerous escalation in the West’s proxy war with a nuclear-armed power.

It is an example of Ukraine’s willingness to target the ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine and poison the land it is attempting to retain. Depleted uranium will have effects not only on Russian fighters but also on the civilian population for years to come.

Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Radio host Randy Credico, who visited Donbass, recently told Consortium News that residents of that region already live in daily fear of U.S.-made missiles used by Ukraine to target civilians and the emergency services that come to help them: now they are to face the additional prospect of depleted uranium shells, which would not simply kill civilians now, but has the potential to poison future generations.  

Russia intervened in Ukraine after eight years of war by Kiev against the ethnic Russians in the east who declared independence from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed 2014 coup.

The U.S. and British corporate media appear to dismiss concerns of Russian nuclear escalation in response to the use of depleted uranium rounds, and the official line in the West is that such weapons represent a low environmental risk.

The Sordid History of Its Use

U.S. sailors checking rounds of depleted uranium aboard the battleship USS Missouri in 1987. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

However, there are compelling reasons to question the official stance. Depleted uranium rounds were used by U.S. forces in both Iraq wars, as well as in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Depleted uranium munitions are heavier than lead and are typically used to pierce the armor of tanks. On impact the metal shears, burns and vaporizes. This process produces toxic radioactive dust. A 2001 report focusing on the health impacts of depleted uranium on U.S. veterans of the Gulf War published by The Nation explains that:

“D.U. is highly toxic and, according to the Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, can cause lung cancer, bone cancer and kidney disease… Scientists point out that D.U. becomes much more dangerous when it burns. When fired, it combusts on impact. As much as 70 percent of the material is released as a radioactive and highly toxic dust that can be inhaled or ingested and then trapped in the lungs or kidneys. ‘This is when it becomes most dangerous,” says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “It becomes a powder in the air that can irradiate you.”

Sites identified by U.N. Environmental Programme as targets for ordinance containing depleted uranium during NATO 1999 bombing of former Yugoslavia. (UNEP 2001 report “Depleted Uranium in Kosovo, Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment)

A 1999 report by The Guardian related the sentiments of scientists speaking in regards to bombing Kosovo with depleted uranium: “One single particle of depleted uranium lodged in the lymph node can devastate the entire immune system.”

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter commented on the news of depleted uranium rounds being sent to Ukraine by citing increases in leukemia where it had previously been used in Kosovo as well as increases in birth defects and cancer in Iraq following the wars there.

He argues that the U.S. suppresses the health effects of depleted uranium “because we don’t want to take ownership for what we have done.”

In John Pilger’s film documenting Iraq after the first Gulf War, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, he spoke with doctors in Basra where they reported a 10-fold increase in cancer deaths. Pilger also spoke with an Iraqi pediatrician who described an influx of congenital deformities never seen before the war.

In the case of the second Iraq War, the most striking reported effects of depleted uranium and other toxic substances were seen in Fallujah, where U.S. forces bombed mercilessly in 2004.

The rise in birth defects in Iraq have been called “catastrophic,” and The Guardian went so far as to publish a piece in 2014 that accused the World Health Organization of covering up the “nuclear nightmare” left behind in Fallujah by the U.S. and U.K.

U.S. soldiers dispose of a simulated depleted uranium round during training IN 2018 on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. (U.S. Army National Gurd/Rory Featherston)

Others have compared the city’s health crisis with that following the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

The specific role of depleted uranium rounds in the sharply increased rate of cancer and serious birth defects remains controversial, but the accounts of doctors on the ground in Fallujah who have documented such birth defects, cancers, and other health problems are staggering.

Is this the future faced by generations of ethnic Russians in Ukraine?

When Ukraine is already set to lose, if slowly, on the battlefield, what is to be gained by taking out a few more Russian tanks if it permanently renders the land a danger to its inhabitants, permeated with toxic dust particles of radioactive heavy metal?

How can this decision be viewed as anything but a spiteful admission that that land is being lost, and that “salting” it is a final act of malice against ethnic Russians in Donbass?

The use of depleted uranium munitions in Ukraine amounts to a last-gasp of desperation and an attempt to contaminate territory Kiev knows it will not regain, for such weapons would not be supplied by Britain and used by Ukraine on land they were confident they would  recapture.

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance journalist and contributor to Consortium News. She co-hosts CN Live! 

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 4/28/23

Talk of peace plans is back in the news after China’s President Xi Jinping and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had a “long and meaningful” telephone call on April 26.

But a workable formula still seems a long way off. The Russian and Ukrainian starting positions are so far apart it seems impossible to close them. The Kremlin is insisting that not only does it keep all the land it has captured but that Kyiv recognises the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in September as Russian. Kyiv says that talks can’t start until all Russian troops have left the country and returned to the 1991 borders. Obviously these two positions are irreconcilable. There is no common ground on which to start talks.

China entered the diplomatic fray on the anniversary of the start of the war with a 12-point peace plan proposal and is trying to position itself as a neutral arbitrator. And it is true that of all the great powers, China is best positioned to bring a deal about. Xi is as close to President Vladimir Putin as a foreign leader can get and, while Beijing’s relations with Washington are less than good, they are at least, for the meantime, still cordial. Moreover, with his trip to Moscow to see Putin in March, Xi has drawn up a chair at the top table of international diplomacy. China’s position on the war can no longer be ignored.

Having said all that, the peace deal that China has proposed is also a non-starter. While the text was full of nice sentiments like “respect for territorial sovereignty”, “an end to hostilities”, and the “prevention of the use of nuclear weapons” the practical part, where the lines of demarcation should be and who controls what territory, are no better than the Russian demands. China’s plan would concede the Donbas, the land bridge and Crimea to Russia and turn the whole of eastern Ukraine into a demilitarised zone.

Nevertheless, it’s a starting gambit that no one expects to be accepted and the goal is to start talks, not draw up an ideal solution at the first pass. What is encouraging is that Xi seems to be genuinely interested in seeing an end to the war.

So what would a possible deal look like? Ukraine and Russia came within a whisker of doing a deal in May, until it was reported that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew into Kyiv and killed it off, saying that the West would not support any peace deal with Russia.

However, during the April process real progress was made and several points were agreed between the Russian and Ukrainian sides that can be built on. The points in a deal would have to deal with the problems listed below. And before proceeding further it should be acknowledged that the atmosphere is currently so toxic it would be a miracle if many of these suggestions could be made to work.

Nato: The first and easiest point to agree on is that Ukraine should give up its Nato ambitions and return to a position of neutrality that was enshrined in its constitution until 2014, when former President Petro Poroshenko changed it and made Nato membership an national ambition.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an eight-point list of demands in December 2021 that in effect only had one demand that really mattered: Ukraine be permanently barred from joining Nato by a “legally binding guarantee” to that effect.

The Ukrainian negotiators conceded the point and suggested that instead Ukraine sign bi-lateral security agreements with all its Western partners – something the Russian delegates accepted.

The US refused to accept Russia’s insistence on locking Ukraine out of Nato in the January round of diplomacy just before the war, but the point here is to ensure Ukraine’s security, not for it to join Nato per se – something that the US seems more keen on that it cares to admit.

Russian security deal: Any security deal for Ukraine needs a similar security deal for Russia if stability is to return to Europe. The problem with Nato, as far as Russia is concerned, is that it is excluded from the treaty, which was specifically set up to protect Europe from the Soviet Union. The Kremlin argues that the Soviet Union no longer exists and in 2008 proposed Europe sign off on a new post-Cold War pan-European security pact that this time includes Russia and takes in the new realities – a proposal that was rejected out of hand.

For security deals with Ukraine to work, this concern of Russia’s over its security also needs to be addressed, and the idea of a new pan-European security pact needs to be revived. However, as Russia has already drawn up a template, this should be relatively easy, as there is plenty of common ground.

At the same time, once peace arrives, the arms control talks that were kicked off with the signing of a new START treaty in January 2021 should be revived and all the lapsed Cold War missile and security agreements put back in place.

Donbas and the land bridge: The question of territory will be much more difficult, as obviously Russia will not want to give up any territory it has captured without being forced to.

Of all the territory that Russia now holds in the southeast, it has the least claim to the land bridge, which was occupied at great military cost, including the destruction of Mariupol, the main city in the region. The referenda held last September as part of the annexation were an even more obviously sham than that held in Crimea in 2014. As part of a lasting deal – one that not only ends this war, but prevents the next one – the land bridge should be returned to Ukraine.

The large numbers of Donbas residents holding Russian passports – some 600,000 people – makes the question of the Donbas region much more complicated to solve. The situation is made even more complicated by the share of the locals that genuinely want to join Russia. Over the last eight years in an underreported story, the Ukraine army has been shelling the towns in the Donbas, including residential areas with civilian casualties, creating local animosity amongst a proportion of the local population.

The Russian constitution obliges the government to protect Russian citizens wherever they are, which has been used as a justification for launching the “special military operation” but is thin grounds for the occupation of the territory, and is no grounds for annexation.

During the April peace talks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered to meet with Putin personally to negotiate on the status of the Donbas. One option on the table was to grant the region some sort of “autonomous” status, but within Ukraine. That would hand political control to Moscow that would clearly back the local regimes, as it has done in South Ossetia and Abkhazia that were hived off Georgia. The Kremlin signalled it was open to this conversation, but it is not clear if it would accept it.

Another choice would be to create a new country, “Donbas Republic”, (without the “the” as the definite article is used for regions but not countries), but for the local economy to be viable it would need to keep Mariupol as a port and access to the sea. It’s unlikely either side would agree to this as, there is no precedent for a country based on the Donbas region.

The most likely outcome is a stalemate where the issue of the Donbas is kicked down the road to be solved “later” by some form of “referendum” or commission and turns into a frozen conflict, similar to northern Cyprus.

Crimea: Russia will never agree to give up Crimea under any circumstances. While the Kremlin can invent some excuses to lay claim to the Donbas, Russians believe Crimea is part of Russia and has been since it was annexed by Catherine the Great in the 16th century. Even the Ukrainians saw it as “Russian,” at least in a cultural sense, according to Gallup polls taken before the war. However, one fix here would be if the Kremlin agreed to pay for it, like the Tsar’s sale of Alaska to the US.

An obvious price would be $300bn – three times more than the value of the entire pre-war economy – which would solve the problem of how to expropriate the frozen Central Bank of Russia (CBR) money that can’t be touched legally thanks to Europe’s strong property rights. There is a chance the Kremlin will agree to this, as it has surely already written that money off anyway. At least another Alaska deal would bring some sort of closure for everyone involved.

Although an ugly solution, it has the benefit of reducing tensions by putting some legitimacy on Russia’s occupation and provides Ukraine some tangible compensation for its loss. Many Ukrainians would accept the deal as a compromise that allows them to rebuild their ruined country, and that would contribute to avoiding a new war in the future. It would provide the ready cash Ukraine needs to rebuild, which is very unlikely to be provided by its Western partners, private investors or multilateral development banks.

Free trade agreements: The final and key part of a peace plan that will last is to sign free trade agreements (FTAs) between the EU, Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine was invited to join the EU last July, but in reality it has no chance of doing so for at least a decade, as the EU is not ready for Ukraine mainly because of the size of Ukraine’s agricultural sector. That was amply illustrated by the recent bans on Ukrainian wheat to Central Europe, which has crashed the local grain markets.

A new FTA, or an expansion of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) already in place, would allow the EU to regulate imports from Ukraine, but also let Ukraine trade its way out of its current economic abyss and so negate, or even eradicate, its dependence on IMF programmes or donor loans.

When Rome finally destroyed Carthage for the first time, the city quickly bounced back by energetically trading with Rome and was able to repay all its reparations to Rome, early and with interest. The fact that Rome destroyed Carthage a second time, and much more thoroughly, only highlights the need to think long term and build a peace that allows for growth and recovery as well as simply stopping the shooting.

Import duties on Ukrainian goods to the EU have been temporarily suspended, but the current DCFTA system of quotas is so small they are used up in the first weeks of every year.

An FTA between Russia and Ukraine would also reopen Ukraine’s eastern border to trade, which would only add to its income. Moreover, entrepreneurial Russians, who already know the market well, would pour into Ukraine, and this is the fastest route to real foreign direct investment (FDI), unsavoury as that may sound.

And if there is a FTA between Ukraine and Russia, there needs to be one between Russia and the EU too, as open borders between Ukraine and EU as well as Ukraine and Russia will simply push Russian goods through Ukraine into the EU and vice versa. The Russians will be as keen to regulate trade with Ukraine crossing its border as the EU. Indeed, it was the EU’s refusal to include Russia in Ukraine’s DCFTA talks that caused the beginning of the worsening of relations between all involved.

The benefits of a new comprehensive trade deal between Russia and the EU would also bring huge new economic benefits for the EU, returning all the cheap and copious raw materials and energy, as well as access to the giant Russian consumer market – increased in size by a third by the addition of the Ukrainian market.

All of this may seem pie in the sky because of the political considerations, but a deal along these lines is inevitable thanks to the proximity of the two countries. As I wrote in another blog, [in] the geography of diplomacy, proximity matters and the geography in this case says Ukraine and Russia should be close commercial partners, even if their ideologies are currently at loggerheads. For example, despite the fact that the two have been at war for more than a year, Russian gas is still transiting Ukraine and the Russian state-owned national gas company Gazprom is still paying hundreds of millions of dollars in transit fee payments to its Ukrainian counterpart Naftogaz, scrupulously sticking to the terms of the 2019 contract. Bottom line: prosperity breeds peace and poverty leads to hate and violence.

By Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Studies Blog, 4/27/23

A series of European developments have demonstrated recently the accelerating dissipation of American hegemony at the hands of the Sino-Russian bandwagon seeking to organize the world’s ‘Rest’ away from the West and the US hegemonic system. Now the leaking has turned into a flood. Chinese president Xi has lassoed Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy for negotiations to end or at least stop the NATO-Russian Ukraine war despite apparent US opposition to any such talks or even a ceasefire as stated by numerous US officials in recent weeks. Ukraine’s defection from the American NATO-Ukraine project-turned Russian regime change by proxy war puts Washington in a tight spot and might produce drastic measures.

As I noted recently, a series of European leaders were preparing for trips to the Forbidden City to consult on economic and political issues with Chinese officials. Brazil’s President added the weight of South America’s most powerful state when he met with Xi and called for for a Ukraine peace conference to be led by China. But it turned out that the most important pilgrimage to Beijing was that of French President Emmanuel Macron. The leader of one of NATO’s and the EU’s key members and contender for leadership in Europe announced what many conservative dissidents from across Europe have been stating for years. After meeting with XI, Macron noted in an interview on his flight back to Paris that Europe should avoid “vassal” and “follower” status in relation with the US and instead seek “strategic autonomy” as a “third pole” in the international system along with the US and China. Such a development would obviously represent the removal of the key building block in the American or Western pole in the international system. Washington and Brussels, which had enjoyed hegemony since the Cold War’s end, would see the end of the unipolar system they sat atop of and begin to vie for Beijing’s favors, even as the last protects the hated Russians.

Now comes Zelenskiy’s call to XI and the latter’s acknowledgement that they discussed involving Ukraine in pursuit of a peace process with Russia and the announcement that Beijing is appointing a special envoy to Kiev to coordinate preparation for talks. The fact that Zelesnkiy initiated the contact with Xi and that it came as Ukraine’s hold on the pivotal Donbass transport hub of Bakhmut was being completely broken suggests that Zelenskiy, understanding that Western aide will be too little too late to prevent a Russian march to the Dnepr River which will force the government’s withdrawal from Kiev, sees the handwriting of Ukraine’s total and utter defeat is on the wall. This is a wise move but what that may be too late for him, the Maidan regime, and even Kiev’s sovereignty over Ukrainian territory–the latter being under threat not just from Russia but also by dint of its dire circumstances by Poland and even the US and NATO.

I recently noted Seymour Hersh’s reports that CIA Director William Burns while in Kiev earlier this month handed Zelenskiy a list of 35 Ukrainian generals who were involved in actions skimming $400 million of Western assistance to Ukraine since the war began. Burns reportedly told Zelenskiy that he, the Ukrainian president, should have been at the top of the list. Zelenskiy was thus forced to fire the most ambitious military corruptionaires on the list. This suggests that Washington has serious hold over Zelenskiy and can control Ukraine’s war policies, putting aside Kiev’s full dependence on Western financing for its state budget. But not only does this mean that Washington and Brussels can now manipulate Zelenskiy even more than they had prior to presenting their intelligence acquired from eavesdropping on Kiev’s internal communications and that more than ever Ukraine is a de facto NATO member and a Western satellite state fully reliant on the alliance, especially Washington, for its survival but that Washington can deploy intelligence to raise the tensions in Ukrainian civilian-military relations and those specifically between Zelenskiy and his generals among others. The compromising materials gathered on Zelenskiy could be deployed in future to peak the temperature and then recruit generals, in particular chief of the Ukrainian General Staff Viktor Zalyuzhniy, ultranationalists, neofascists, or others to mount a coup against and/or an assassination of Zelenskiy for any betrayal of the interests of US President Joe Biden, NATO, and other core Western interests by making peace with Putin under Chinese auspices. This would not only out an end to the Western hopes of parlaying the NATO-Russian Ukraine war into the demise of Putin and his regime but would place Beijing above the ‘indispensable nation’ as the chief arbiter of international politics. In Washington and Brussels avoiding such an outcome is valued far more highly than Zelenskiy’s life and the survival of Ukraine.

It is not exactly clear what connection there is in Zelenskiy’s mind between his reaching out to Beijing…with previous pronouncements made by Zelenskiy and Polish President Andrzej Duda about the ‘dissolution’ of borders between Poland and Ukraine and what I suggested many months ago was the real possibility of Polish or NATO forces [going] into Western Ukraine to black any Russian advance beyond the Dnepr. However, it is clear that such a plan can be carried out without Zelenskiy at Kiev’s helm. In sum, if there is no US imprimatur on Zelenskiy’s contacts with Beijing and feelers for possible talks with the Kremlin, then Zelenskiy has put himself in a very precarious position. Whether its Nord Stream, Trump, his son Hunter, or simply approximation of the truth, Biden has shown he is no less ruthless than any other tyrant. Biden’s audacity and that of those who help determine his policies in Washington, Brussels, Davos, and elsewhere will only be emboldened to take desperate actions, given the rapidly deteriorating situation on the Ukrainian front as the Russian winter offensive slowly and methodically gains steam and now encircling troops in Bakhmut, Avdeevsk, and elsewhere, the beginning of the 2024 presidential campaign, and the high stakes of the presidential and congressional election’s outcome for Biden, his family, patrons, and allies.

By Lee Fang, Website, 4/28/23

Lee Fang is a journalist with a longstanding interest in how public policy is influenced by organized interest groups and money. He has previously written for The Intercept and The Nation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

Indeed, recent reports have focused on the relationship between the two Ukrainian leaders. The German newspaper Bild reported that Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi had argued regarding tactics deployed in the battle over Bakhmut. Vitiuk said that any notion of conflict between Zelenskyy and his military chief, however, is false.

“They try to create problems in Ukraine, and they try to sow the seeds of misunderstanding between Ukraine and our partners that support us,” said Vitiuk.

Vitiuk, a senior official in Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, spoke to me this week at the RSA Convention in San Francisco, an annual gathering that brings together a collection of cyber security firms, law enforcement, and technology giants.

Full article here.