By Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe, 7/23/22

Make way for the Abstainers. It’s the new band in town, though they play geopolitics, not music.

When the United Nations voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 35 countries, representing half the world’s population, abstained. Soon afterward the UN passed an American-backed resolution to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. Fifty-eight countries abstained.

War in Ukraine has galvanized the US-led NATO. It has also, however, led a growing number of countries to conclude that they have no stake in a European conflict or a confrontation with Russia. President Biden summons them to “the battle between democracy and autocracy,” but they remain noncombatants. When pressed to support NATO’s campaign against Russia, they reply, like Bartleby the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to.”

There have always been countries unwilling to follow America’s lead in the world. What is new is their eagerness to join together. A bloc is emerging that may become a robust global force in coming decades. The recent meeting of Russian, Turkish, and Iranian leaders foreshadows it. This would be one of the farthest-reaching consequences of the Ukraine war.

One new axis of power is likely to be the partnership known as BRICS, which groups together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Founded in 2006 to promote trade among its members, it is morphing into a political bloc and planning its first expansion. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, and Iran want to join.

Iran is also set to join Eurasia’s other major axis of Abstainers, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its original members were China, Russia, and four Central Asian republics. Pakistan joined in 2017, and Iran is to be admitted next year. The combined size and strength of these quasi-alliances makes them potent challengers to American power in the world.

Even some countries whose support we have usually had in the past, like Israel, Mexico, and Indonesia, have refused to join us in sanctioning Russia. So have almost all African and Latin American countries. The Ukraine war has made them more skeptical of the United States and more reluctant to support American positions in the world.

Many countries recoil from us-versus-them confrontations like the one Biden is now promoting. They prefer to resolve disputes through compromise and to maintain good ties even with countries they fear or dislike. Besides, Biden’s insistence that he is leading a global war against autocracy is hard to take seriously as he kowtows to Saudi Arabia, where dissent is punished by beheading or dismemberment.

A second reason more countries are drifting away from the United States is that to many of them, we seem unreliable. In recent years our foreign policies have zigzagged wildly. Written accords with other countries appear and disappear according to election results. Add our acute domestic problems to this mix, and it’s easy to understand why some countries feel reluctant to hitch their wagon to our star.

One recent American step has especially spooked several large countries. As soon as war broke out in Ukraine, we and our allies froze billions of dollars that Russia keeps in Western banks. Other countries fear they might suffer the same fate if they one day fall afoul of the United States. To prevent that, they are looking for other places to park their money and imagining banking networks outside of Washington’s control. Saudi Arabia is negotiating with China to price its oil in yuan as well as dollars. Iran’s stock market opened a legal exchange this month for trading the Iranian and Russian currencies.

Perhaps most important, few countries want to weaken their relations with Russia or China. Russia provides many countries with vital goods from oil to fertilizer. China is reaping the fruits of two decades of intense engagement with countries the United States either ignores or takes for granted. China is now the largest trading partner of both Africa and Latin America. Its multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative aims to draw more than 70 countries into its sphere. Biden’s counter-project was something he called Build Back Better World, which the White House said “will collectively catalyze hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure investment for low- and middle-income countries.” Since that announcement a year ago, Congress killed the idea, and the White House no longer mentions it.

Few countries among the Abstainers support Russia’s action in Ukraine. They simply want to pursue their own national interests and stay out of big-power conflicts. This is hardly a new impulse. In 1954, leaders of 29 African and Asian countries representing most of the world’s people met in Bandung, Indonesia, to form what became the Non-Aligned Movement. The United States refused to recognize or acknowledge the conference, but it unleashed forces that still reverberate around much of the world.

Throughout the Cold War, American leaders sought to crush the threat they called “neutralism.” They failed. Today the United States confronts a similar challenge, but we are less powerful and perhaps less attractive than we were then. We face a difficult choice.

One option would be to curb our overseas crusades, compromise with Russia and China, and concentrate on rebuilding our own country. That would mean accepting a new world order in which we would be less dominant than at any time in the last 75 years — quite unpalatable both politically and strategically. Yet if we insist on trying to maintain our top-dog status forever, we will periodically have to use the kinds of coercion that much of the world now rejects. Either course is likely to strengthen the Abstainers.

By Thomas Rowley and Serhiy Guz, Consortium News, 7/20/22

These labor policies reflect the tendency by the Zelensky government to pass unpopular neoliberal economic policies ever since it came to power, as expressed in my interview with Olga Baysha. Emphasis via bolding is mine. – Natylie

Thomas Rowley is lead editor at oDR. Follow him on Twitter at @te_rowley. Contact email: tom.rowley[at]opendemocracy.net Serhiy Guz is a Ukrainian journalist and one of the founders of the country’s journalism trade union movement. He headed Ukraine’s independent media union between 2004 and 2008 and is currently a member of Ukraine’s Commission on Journalistic Ethics, a self-regulation body for the country’s media. He is also a council member of the Voice of Nature NGO and editor-in-chief of the Clever City Kamianske newspaper.

The Ukrainian parliament has passed two new radical measures on labour liberalisation, prompting fears of Ukrainians losing workplace rights permanently as Russia’s war puts huge pressure on the country’s economy.

In two laws passed on Monday and Tuesday, MPs voted to legalise “zero-hours contracts” and made moves towards removing up to 70 percent of the country’s workforce from protections guaranteed by national labour law.

The latter measure means the national labour code no longer applies to employees of small- and medium-sized enterprises; instead, it is proposed that each worker strikes an individual labour agreement with their employer. It also removes the legal authority of trade unions to veto workplace dismissals.

Draft law 5371 had previously been criticised by the International Labor Organization, as well as Ukrainian and European trade unions, on the basis that it could “infringe international labour standards.”

Ukraine’s ruling Servant of the People party argued that the “extreme over-regulation of employment contradicts the principles of market self-regulation [and] modern personnel management.”

Red tape in Ukraine’s HR laws, it suggested, “creates bureaucratic barriers both for the self-realisation of employees and for raising the competitiveness of employers.”

The Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine will now ask President Volodymyr Zelensky to veto draft law 5371 when it goes to him for signature — but will not make the same request over the proposed law on zero-hours contracts, Ukrainian MP Vadym Ivchenko told openDemocracy.

Nataliia Lomonosova, an analyst at Ukrainian think tank Cedos, warned that the two laws could further deteriorate an already difficult socio-economic situation for Ukrainians suffering from Russia’s military campaign.

According to the U.N.’s latest numbers, Russia’s invasion has led to at least 7 million people becoming displaced inside Ukraine itself, which has been compounded by a severe economic crisis hitting families and individuals hard. At the same time, the World Bank has predicted that Ukraine’s economy will contract by 45 percent this year.

With these factors in mind, Lomonosova argued that Ukrainians have little choice or bargaining power when it comes to employers — the number of available vacancies is vastly disproportionate to the number of people now looking for work in the country. “People right now have no bargaining power, and trade unions cannot protect them,” she said.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Lomonosova expressed a fear that, as a result of the displacement, “many people will find themselves in the situation of Ukrainian migrant workers” in their own country — meaning, for instance, people will have little choice but to accept poor conditions and to be ever more dependent on their employers.

‘Window of Opportunity’

A leading member of Zelensky’s party promised further liberalisation of Ukraine’s labour legislation earlier this month.

“These are draft laws that business is waiting for, draft laws that will protect the interests of all entrepreneurs. And workers, too, by the way,” wrote MP Danylo Hetmantsev on Telegram on 9 July.

“A worker should be able to regulate his relationship with an employer himself. Without the state,” noted Hetmantsev, who is head of the Ukrainian parliament’s finance committee.

“This is what happens in a state if it’s free, European and market-oriented. Otherwise, the country will be travelling with one leg on an express train to the EU, and with another inside a Soviet-era train going in the other direction.”

Ukrainian labour lawyer George Sandul previously told openDemocracy that MPs had used Russia’s invasion of the country as a “window of opportunity” in which to try to push through drastic changes to labour legislation.

Lomonosova, of Cedos, agreed with Sandul, arguing that deregulation and the stripping back of social guarantees was a long-term policy of the Ukrainian government even before the war and was likely part of an effort to attract foreign investors.

She pointed to the fact that both of the laws passed this week date to an early attempt by the Zelensky administration and the ruling party to deregulate labour legislation in 2020-21. This attempt was beaten back as a result of a protest campaign by Ukrainian trade unions, a prospect now hard to imagine due to the war and martial law, Lomonsova said.

As she put it, the Ukrainian government and ruling party are also now increasingly talking about the fact that the state “cannot afford welfare, employment benefits or protection of labour rights” because of the war.

In contrast to the deregulation trend, Lomonsova says that there is clear support among the Ukrainian public for social democracy.

“Year on year, opinion surveys have shown that Ukrainians have strong social democratic attitudes, including in favour of welfare,” Lomonosova said. “They expect the government to protect their labour rights and offer a complete social package. Not even war can change this.”

Zero-Hours Contracts

Under Ukraine’s new zero-hours legislation, employers who choose to use the contract option will be able to call up workers at will, though contracts must define the method and minimum timeframe for informing an employee of work, and the response time of the worker to agree or refuse to work.

The legislation also says people employed on these new contracts must be guaranteed a minimum of 32 hours’ work a month, and that the percentage of employees on zero-hours contracts at company can’t be more than 10 percent.

In its explanation of the law, the Ukrainian government stated that people involved in irregular work are currently employed “without any social or labour guarantees.”

Therefore, it says, zero-hours contracts — a term the government used — will help “legalise the work of freelancers, who mostly work on short-term projects and are not limited to working for a single client.”

Labour lawyer and activist Vitaliy Dudin told openDemocracy that, as a result of the economic crisis caused by the war, Ukrainians are facing ever greater “economic risks” and poverty — and this means that Ukrainian employers “will be able to radically reduce labour costs”.

The new contracts proposed under zero-hours legislation, he suggested, could also lead to two-tier workplaces, where employers offer secure jobs to loyal or non-unionised staff, while others face precarious employment or immediate dismissal for reasons manufactured by the employers.

This could affect workplaces with hundreds of workers, including public sector jobs at risk of austerity policies, such as hospitals, railway depots, post offices and infrastructure maintenance, Dudin said.

“This is a disastrous step towards precarisation,” Dudin said, and one that “calls into question the very right of Ukrainians who have been affected by the war to get a means of living.”

What Happens After the War?

European trade union groups have long criticised the growing trend towards labour liberalisation in Ukraine since Zelensky and his political party, Servant of the People, came to power in 2019.

On July 14, as rumours of a new vote on draft law 5371 spread, three European trade union confederations expressed their concern that the Ukrainian government and ruling party “continue to reject the E.U.’s values of social dialogue and social rights” with its labour liberalisation programme.

“We are strongly concerned about regressive labour reforms continuing after the emergency of war is over,” the unions’ letter said, claiming the reforms “go in the opposite direction to E.U. principles and values”.

Ukrainian parliamentarians have previously criticised draft law 5371 as a potential danger to the country’s integration into the European Union. Ukraine was granted E.U. candidate status in late June.

Both Ukraine’s 2014 Association Agreement with the E.U. and its 2020 Political, Free Trade and Strategic Partnership Agreement with the U.K. contain provisions on ensuring workplace protections — including against attempts to attract international investment.

László Andor, a former E.U. commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion between 2010 and 2014, told openDemocracy that he believed this new legislation suggested that Ukraine was going in a “completely different direction” from E.U. norms on decent work.

“This case is a big dose of opportunism,” said Andor, now secretary general of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, a Brussels think tank. “Ukrainian lawmakers need to understand better what the difference is between a continental European model and these moves towards a very precarious labour market. Ukrainian trade unions are not being listened to sufficiently. This would be elementary in the European Union.“

“There is an enormous amount of national cohesion in Ukraine, which the rest of the world admires,“ Andor continued. “But these moves, in my opinion, can also undermine national unity — something very much needed for resisting a foreign invasion.“

Proponents of the law consider Ukrainian trade unions’ efforts at defeating labour liberalisation an attempt to “preserve their influence“ and that ILO conventions on workplace protections are “out of step“ with the modern labour market and the needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

While ruling party MPs have suggested that draft law 5371 will be passed as a temporary, wartime measure, MP Mykhailo Volynets, a member of the same Batkivshchyna party as Ivchenko, argued in a post on Facebook that “it is clear that no one will be able to undo this situation later.”

“The labour code will no longer apply, collective agreements will be eliminated, and even those mechanisms of employee protection that are in place today will not work. This is a brazen violation of international norms and standards in the field of labour,” he said.

This article is from openDemocracy.

By Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Politics Blog, 7/21/22

It is very likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin tipped his hand months ago regarding one of the end-of-war scenarios that at least he would accept as having achieved an important goal or even victory in his Ukrainian ‘special military operation’ otherwise known as the Russo-Ukrainian War. In his February 2022 speech, signaling his decision to take military action, Putin discussed Ukrainian decommunization efforts and condemned them, retorting: “You want decommunization, we will show you decommunization”.

A look at the map below shows the regions of Ukraine that were handed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukraine SSR) by Bolshevik Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in 1922 as the territorial-administrative formation of the USSR after the Red victory over the Whites in the civil war was implemented.

The map’s area in pink and gray display the regions Lenin gave to the new Ukraine SSR in 1922 and the Crimea which Khrushchev handed Kiev in 1954, respectively. It is no coincidence that it was Crimea in 2014 and the Donbass regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine’s far east in 2014 and that it is the remainder of those regions’ territories plus Kharkiv in the north and Zaporozhia, Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa now that have been at the spearhead of Putin’s military moves in Ukraine. The war map as of June 12 shows Russian forces (red-colored portion of the map) having occupied much of the very same pink area (‘Novorossiya’), adding to plus gray shaded Crimea annexed in 2014. The red

areas of Russian-occupied territory include all of the the pink and gray areas incorporated into Ukraine by Lenin in 1922 and Khrushchev in 1954 except for Kharkov (Kharkiv) in the northeast, Nikolaev, where Russian have entered but not moved deep into the region, and Odessa, which is rumored to be on Putin’s target list should Zelenskiy continue to reject peace talks.

The move towards Kiev at the beginning of the war may have been a feint — Edward Littwak argues credibly that its was a failed coup de main or coup de etat by a foreign power) designed to hold troops there and make the Lenin-added east and south easier for the taking. Putin may have seen the present goals in the east and south as part of Plan A along with Kiev as a target and then backed off and accepted Plan A minus Kiev as Plan B, which is to complete the ‘de-Leninization’ or ‘de-communization’ of Ukraine begun in effect in 2014 by annexing Crimea gifted to Ukraine SSR by Lenin’s ultimate second successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the original plan, Russian forces continue to press slowly forward and could occupy the 1922 territories by summer’s end should negotiations continue to be rejected or stall again. Thus, the direction of the present Russian war offensive suggests a goal of returning the territories given to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. To be sure, this will bring several other benefits should Moscow decide to hold these territories as independent protectorates or as members of the Russian Federation, which is likely since the casualties, sanctions, and false propaganda being leveled by the West and Kiev need to be compensated for in the Russian mind. The benefits include: numerous natural and labor resources in these regions ranging from coal to natural gas to mining and steel production and other labor; the formation of a land bridge from Donbass to Moldova’s pro-Russian breakaway republic of Transdnistria; a bridgehead threatening to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea; and the incorporation of a significantly pro-Russian population back into the Russian fold.

Putin has no love lost for Lenin and his communist experiment, especially the aspect of the latter that ignored indeed denigrated Russian nationality and bourgeois patriotism in service of the global socialist revolution to which Lenin was solely dedicated. Lenin was famous for condemning ‘Russian chauvinism’, and figures as diverse as Lenin’s fellow Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and American historian Richard Pipes noted that Lenin hardly knew Russia, especially after having spent nearly two decades in European exile before his German-sponsored return in April 1917.

For his part, Putin has not been shy about criticizing Lenin and the Soviet experiment. Putin is especially repulsed by Lenin’s collusion and treason in cooperating with and receiving financial and logistical support form the Central Powers in order to foment revolution and then organize the October coup while Russia was besieged during a failing war effort. Putin seemed to accuse Lenin of “treason” twice in 2012, and he has been highly critical of Lenin, the Bolshviks, and at times even Soviet power. Like many Party-state apparatchiki who jumped the sinking Soviet ship of state in 1990-91, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg Putin rejected “that person” and Marxism-Leninism in a 1991 interview, saying he came to understand as he matured “more and more clearly the obvious truth” that communism was but “a beautiful but harmful fairy tale; harmful because its implementation or any attempt to carry it out in life in our country brought in the end enormous damage.”[1] At the beginning of his third-term, Putin accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of “national treason” in World War I. At the July 2012 ‘Seliger’ Youth Forum, Putin accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of “a unique, major example of national treason” for having “wished the defeat of their own country in the First World War,” making “their own contribution to the extent they could in Russia’s defeat,” and for the “amazing situation” of having “capitulated” so that “Russia lost to the losing side, Germany.”[2] At a June 2012 session of the Russian legislature’s upper house, he repeated the accusation of “national treason” and capitulation in war to the losing side, which, he exclaimed, was “a unique situation in all of mankind’s history.”[3] А year later, Putin again castigated Marxism-Leninism and by implication Lenin himself, telling a meeting at the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance that the Soviet regime was “guided by false ideological thinking, they moved to arrests and repression of both Jews and Orthodox, representatives of other faiths, Muslims. They raked them all in together. Now these ideological blinders and false ideological constructions, thank God, have collapsed.”[4]

More pertinently, in his long June 2021 article on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine and Russians and Ukrainians, Putin indirectly mentioned Lenin’s transfer from Russia of the regions noted above in forming the Ukraine SSR in 1922. He noted – incidentally quite accurately: “(M)odern Ukraine is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era. We know and remember that to a large extent it was created at the expense of historical Russia. It is enough to compare which lands were reunited with the Russian state in the XVII century and with which territories of the Ukrainian SSR seceded from the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for social experiments. They dreamed of a world revolution, which, in their opinion, would abolish nation-states altogether. Therefore, borders were arbitrarily cut, generous territorial ‘gifts’ were given out. Ultimately, what exactly guided the leaders of the Bolsheviks who were shredding the country no longer matters. You can argue about the details, the background and the logic of certain decisions. One thing is obvious: Russia in fact was robbed.”[5] Finally, three days before the February 24^th invasion Putin warned in a speech signaling that he had already decided on military action: “As a result of the Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine emerged. Which even in our day can by all rights be named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Ukraine.” He then warned Kiev that if it wants decommunization represented by its dismantling of Lenin statues, then “We will show Ukraine real decommunization.” [6] Putin had essentially declared war (special military operation), perhaps only in his own mind at that point until the official declaration three days later. He did so in part for this territorial ‘decommunization’ as much as he did in the name of ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarization’ of Ukraine and of course of stopping eternal NATO expansion to Russian borders. It is the last factor, its provocations in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s ultranationalist defiance of a great powers’ perceived self-interest and security that have sparked Putin’s desire to return these territories to Russia.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] In 2002, he stated to the same interviewer that his views had not changed and he was ready to repeat what he had said “word for word.” See excerpts from both interviews at “EXCLUSIVE: Young Putin denounces communism and Lenin in 1991,” You Tube, 2016, https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&p=Putin+on+Lenin#id=6&vid=ceb78447964994fe4ecd979eb450edb9&action=view, last accessed 11 October 2019.

[2] “Vstrecha s uchastnikami foruma ‘Seliger-2012’,” Kremlin.ru, July 2012, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/16106, last accessed 11 October 2019.

[3] “Otvety na voprosy chlenov Soveta Federatsii,” Kremlin.ru, 27 June 2012, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/15781#sel=39:1:yBw,49:3:XfF, last accessed on 10 October 2019.

[4] “Poseshanie Yevreiskogo muzeya i Tsentr tolerantnosti,” Kremlin.ru, 13 June 2013, www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/18336, last accessed on 10 October 2019. In January 2016 Putin ridiculed Lenin’s aspirations for “world revolution” and having “planted an atomic bomb under the building called Russia,” that “later blew up,” by creating national-territorial autonomies in the USSR. “Zasedanie Soveta nauki i obrazovaniya,” Kremlin.ru, 21 January 2016, www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51190, last accessed on 11 October 2019.

[5] https://wsem.ru/publications/vladimir-putin-ob-istoricheskom-edinstve-russkikh-i-ukraintsev_191/.

[6] https://wsem.ru/publications/vladimir-putin-ob-istoricheskom-edinstve-russkikh-i-ukraintsev_191/.

By Prof. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/23/22

Mainstream media are focusing on a Russian hit against Odessa which they are interpreting, on the basis of no evidence that I have yet seen , as a reneging on their agreement to facilitate Ukraine grain exports (an agreement that I do not believe is limited to any particular port and has to do with port facilities not with entire cities!). Almost inevitably, further contextualizing information has yet to come and we will shall see what sense to make of it, and some of this clarification is provided by Mercouris (see my summary below):

In the meantime, Mercouris sees a possibility that the war is shifting, and the West, very grudgingly, is making concessions. There was talk yesterday that the great Ukrainian counteroffensive was starting, and that 2000 Russian troops had been encircled. It now seems clear that the Ukrainians did indeed attempt an offensive on Kherson but that this was repulsed after a few hours. The encirclement had probably not happened, another invention of Zelenskiy’s media spokesman.

Also in Kherson the Ukrainians have launched further HIMARS in an attempt to disrupt Russian communications across the Dnieper. They further attacked the road bridge they hit earlier in the week, and attacked a railway bridge across the dam. Russia claims to have shot down 12 HIMARS missiles, but some got through. No serious damage has yet occurred and repairs have commenced.

It is the British, particularly, says Mercouris, that are goading Ukrainians to attack with HIMARS. British media have been consistently harping on about the counteroffensive, encouraging a maneuver that is misconceived. The British are obsessed about the Kherson area, whereas the Russians are concentrating on the move southwards in Donetsk. The Ukrainian strategy is to simply stay on in the Donbas for as long as possible to give them more time to build defenses beyond Donbass. But the British want a big firework display.Russia is still fighting Ukrainians close to Seversk, and has reached central areas of the town of Solidar (not the correct spelling), preparatory to a major Russian offensive. Russians have captured half the forested area north of Slaviansk.

On the Istanbul meeting yesterday regarding the facilitation of Ukrainian grain from Ukrainian ports:

As part of the agreement the Western powers, specifically the EU, have had to reduce restrictions on Russian agricultural and other exports. The EU has accordingly announced a seventh sanctions package. But when you look at this package there is very little in it. There are further restrictions (unenforceable) on Russian exports of gold. Such restrictions have already been exercised. There is an extension in the list of prohibited items, more of the same, some new measures extending the import ban to locks in addition to ports.

Then, the major steps: relaxation of restrictions on public procurement, aviation, and justice. It will be easier for Russian to bring legal action in western countries. In aviation there may be more freedom to provide spare parts. Russians have been able to cannibalize existing aircraft for this purpose and have also found spare parts in China. And the EU may be getting worried about extension of sanctions to China. There may be swap of parts for titanium?

The most important thing is that for food and energy purposes, certain prohibitions on Russian public institutions, including to do with transportation of oil, wheat etc., have been lifted, and EU measures do not prevent purchase of pharmaceutical or medical productions from Russia. Previously food, fertilizer etc., even when not specifically identified, had been affected for fear of sanctions. Food, agricultural products including wheats and fertilizer, and pharmaceuticals are no longer sanctioned. Anyone can buy these from Russia and anyone can transport these. It will be fairly straightforward for Russia to increase these supplies in general and to Belarus more specifically.

But notice the EU has also extended exemptions to the transport of oil, including to such countries as India, China and Saudi Arabia. This trade is now specifically allowed.

What does all this mean? It draws attention to the much greater importance of Russia as a global provider of food and fertilizer than Ukraine. A major problem: several of the clauses are being kept secret, so there is no complete text. But we have clues: Russia confirms Ukraine is free to move food, and Russia will not launch attacks on ports facilities. Missile strikes on Odessa can and are continuing. But Russia will not attack port facilities or de-mining of ports for a period of three months, enough time to clear the existing Ukrainian backlog. We can expect that following this period, Russia may move on towards Odessa early in 2023. Russia is already forming the Odessa Brigade of anti-Ukrainian Ukrainians whose purpose may be an attack on Odessa and thus to capture the whole of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast.

So the agreement is time-limited. On the issue of mines, Russia has consistently argued that the mines were planted by Ukraine and that one of the problems in getting ships out of Ukrainian ports is the existence of minefields that Ukraine has refused to de-mine because of fear of Russian attacks on ships that pass through the fields. Do we know whether these ports will be de-mined? This may be the topic in the secret clauses. The mine fields will likely be de-mined and de-mined by Turkey, in collaboration with some non-NATO country. Turkey will inspect ships from Ukraine ports on their way to their destinations to make sure that the ships contain only food and the ships will also be inspected, with some Russian overwatch role, to make sure that they do not contain arms when they return. Since Ukraine has had no problem in getting arms in other ways, this agreement regarding arms may not have that much significance.

Putin has got everything he wanted from the agreement. Mercouris defines it as a retreat by Ukraine and the West in Putin’s favor. Why has this happened?

Read full article here.

By Irina Chevtayeva, Deutsche Welle, 7/19/21

Anton (name has been changed) was a businessman in Ukraine. On February 24, he drove to the border with his wife and their two children to escape the Russian invasion. The trip, which usually takes only a few hours, took them almost the entire day.

But while they were still en route, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy banned men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

That meant Anton’s wife and children were allowed to leave for the EU, while he stayed behind — and immediately began to look for ways to reunite with them. “Duty to the family had priority,” Anton said. He drove to a village on the border with Romania, aiming to cross the Tisza River. “We were several men. But locals betrayed us and we were caught. We didn’t even make it to the river,” Anton told DW, adding that he later heard that smugglers usually take four people to the river for $5,000 (€4,930) each and show them where to cross. Anton was drafted into the army on the spot, but there was no suitable assignment for him so he returned home and made new plans to leave.

Tips found on social networks

The ban on leaving the country does not apply to single fathers, men who have three or more children, and people with disabilities. Students of foreign universities, drivers of humanitarian aid transports, as well as persons with permanent residence abroad are also exempt from the ban.

Some men who fall into neither of those categories but want to leave Ukraine choose the route via Crimea, which was annexed by Russia. Others enroll in a foreign university, find a job as a volunteer emergency aid driver or try to cross the so-called green border on foot.

Social networks offer various tips. The Instagram account “Departure for Everyone” has more than 14,000 followers. Private chats share information on how to retroactively enroll in a Polish or other European university — showing a date before the start of the war — within ten days for €980.

‘Men like me are called traitors’

Anton managed to leave Ukraine with the help of a charity foundation run by friends. “The foundation applied for an exit permit. We all drove, and the cars returned to Ukraine with humanitarian aid, but I stayed in the EU. Men like me are called traitors,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the front, and if I didn’t have children I would have been there long ago. But we didn’t have children so that my wife would have to survive somehow alone with them,” he added.

There seems to be quite some interest in leaving the country. “Legal Move Abroad,” a Telegram channel, has more than 53,000 followers and its backup channel, “Help at the Border,” has more than 28,000. For $1,500, the latter offers a certificate exempting a person from military service for health reasons. Another offer involves leaving the country ostensibly as the driver of a humanitarian aid truck. Allegedly, this allows ten men a day to get out of the country, at a price of $2,000.

Telegram also posts reviews by people who allegedly used those services: “I went as a helper, everything went faster and easier than I thought”; “Thank you for helping my son, he is now in Italy”; “I have arrived in Bulgaria, I am grateful.” DW wrote to several of these users, but only one responded, saying he did not want to “risk anything or tell anything.”

Most Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Germany

More than nine million Ukrainians have fled abroad since February 24, according to the UN. DW asked Ukraine’s border control service how many men are included in that figure but has not yet received an answer. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry reported on March 1, that some 80,000 military age males had returned to the country, most of them after February 24, “to defend sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Poland and Germany have taken in the most refugees. Poland counted 3.6 million, including 432,000 men aged 18 to 60, between February 24 and June 7. In Germany, 867,214 refugees were registered from the end of February to June 19. According to a March survey commissioned by the Federal Interior Ministry, 48% of the arrivals were women with children, 14% were single women, 7% were men with children and 3% were men who arrived alone.

A petition and many bribes

In May, Odesa lawyer Alexander Gumirov launched a petition demanding Kyiv lift the ban on men traveling abroad, and calling instead for the recruitment of volunteers. In just a few days, the petition gathered 25,000 signatures, which meant the president had to review it. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s response: the petition should be addressed to the parents of soldiers who died defending Ukraine.

Gumirow still considers the ban pointless. “If a person wants to defend his free, beloved native country, his home and his family, there is no need for a ban on leaving,” he said, adding that a ban is unnecessary, too, if people don’t want to defend their home.

Many men in Ukraine currently cannot find work, cannot feed their families nor do they pay taxes, according to Gumirov. In addition, he says, the ban leads to corruption. He says he receives daily inquiries about possible loopholes to get around the ban, adding that every one comes accompanied by a bribe offer.

Dmytro Busanov, a lawyer from Kyiv, said that according to the constitution, restricting the right to leave Ukraine can only be regulated by law, which has not been done so far. He considers the current ban illegal. “I get a lot of complaints, but people don’t want to sue in court,” Busanov said. He said he believes it would be possible to take the issue to the European Court of Human Rights.

Too few volunteers

Ukrainian men who travel abroad are often condemned by the wives of men who are fighting, said a Ukrainian lawyer who wishes to remain anonymous. Her husband volunteered to be on the front lines. She said she supports Gumirov’s petition in principle but that it was worded incorrectly — it implies people can all just leave and “let volunteers fight. That is unfair.” There are too few volunteers, said the lawyer, who is currently in the EU with her children. Her husband wanted to take up the fight, but he also wants to see his children, she said. She suggests granting soldiers short leaves and allowing them to travel abroad.

Anton, has since settled in an EU country with his wife and children. He is learning the language and looking for a job. He does not rule out returning home should Ukraine win the war. “In peacetime, I’ve always said that Ukraine is one of the best places to be.” He is a patriot, he says, adding he wants the war to end as soon as possible. “I send money to the army,” Anton says. “We are far away, but that doesn’t mean I’m a traitor.”