Russian Tensions
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From BBC website “A senior Chinese diplomat has dismissed the notion that his country is working around sanctions on Russia, a day after EU leaders warned China against doing so. Wang Lutong, from China’s foreign ministry, said Beijing was helping the global economy through continued trade with Russia. But Western nations have expressed concerns about Beijing’s reluctance to condemn Russia’s invasion – and have fears Beijing could offer support to Russia to lessen the impact of the sanctions. On Friday, European Commission chief Ursual von der Leyen warned the business sector in Europe was watching China’s actions closely.”
This is not the first occasion that China has been accused of circumventing the sanctions and warned off.
Is a two-front war really unimaginable? A proxy war against Russia and a trade war against China?
Is it too suicidal to contemplate?
Nothing now can surprise me as reason seems to have been jettisoned from diplomacy.
Couple of articles: Russian treatment of evacuated Ukrainians
An interesting first hand account of a Mariupol resident: filtered and questioned (which is standard urban warfare/counter insurgency practice) and then she managed to reach family in Russia: “When we were on the Rostov-to-Moscow train, it was such a strange feeling to hear everyone discussing Mariupol. People on the train were claiming that, in Mariupol, biological weapons were being developed [by the West] to destroy the reproductive systems of Russian women. It felt like a kind of collective dream. Before the war, I really had believed that Russians were not the same as Putin. I was sure that no one wanted war with Ukraine. Now I think that even sensible people in Russian society are a part of this and are also responsible for it.”
And then this from Paul Rogers:”The appalling Russian bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities is broadcast to Western audiences thanks to near-24/7 coverage in the Western media. What is not realised by many of these audiences, is that this kind of coverage was also available, around the clock, during the Iraq War. Channels such as Al-Jazeera gave full accounts, including graphic images, of the injuries and deaths caused by Western forces, much of which was withheld on Western channels.
In short, there is rightly much anger across the West at what Putin’s forces have been doing and will continue to do in Ukraine. Many people living outside Western states are also appalled but, for them, what Russia is doing is not desperately different from what has been done by US-led coalitions in wars in South Asia, North Africa and especially the Middle East. If people are at a loss to understand why much of the world is not more forthright in its condemnation of Russia, that is where to look.”
Some interesting background info on why the Russian military campaign seems to be stalling
The Ukrainian regime is not completely naive. They know what NATO hawks like Borys have in mind — Afghanisation – and are not too enthusiastic about it. Can’t say I blame them. Here is what one of them has said;
“Our partners must finally understand that the ‘Afghanization’ they want and the long-lasting exhausting conflict for Russia will not happen,” Podolyak said. “Russia will leave all Ukrainian territories except the south and east. And will try to dig in there, put in air defense and sharply reduce the loss of its equipment and personnel.”
“‘Afghanization’ is when there is a strong guerrilla resistance across the country that inflicts heavy losses on the aggressor for many months or even years and thus significantly weakens the power of the occupier’s army,” he said. “Such actions took place during the Soviet Union’s attempt to control Afghanistan: Afghan guerrillas destroyed and weakened the Soviet occupiers for years. As a result, weakened Russia as a whole.”Anyone who wants to inflict that on the population of some country just to weaken a rival state must rate as criminal by any standards.
<ahref=”https://www.rt.com/business/553099-gold-backed-ruble-gamechanger-west/”> Russia pegging the Ruble to gold
So, this is the economic front of the war:”By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5,000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar.”
“The fixed peg between the ruble and gold puts a floor on the RUB/USD rate but also a quasi-floor on the US dollar gold price. But beyond this, the linking of gold to energy payments is the main event. While increased demand for rubles should continue to strengthen the RUB/USD rate and show up as a higher gold price, due to the fixed ruble – gold linkage, if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price. ”
We know Russia has been stockpiling gold for such a situation, so this move makes sense: of course, Russia will have to watch its balance of gold net transactions, but as an exporter country, that shouldn’t be a problem short term. Of course, also, appreciating gold values would mean domestic inflation.
As the Russians retreat or re-deploy (choose whichever narrative you wish) stories are emerging of numerous dead civilians.
Time should clarify whether they were collateral damage, deliberately targeted or executed.
My first thought, however, was how many were those civilians urged to make petrol bombs and to throw them at the Russians?
Here’s Peter Hitchens’ take on the war. I am drawing attention to it since, as we don’t read the Daily Mail here we might miss it, even though it appeared in the Mail on Sunday which frequently takes a different even opposite position to the Daily Wail itself.
Anyway, here it is:
The well-known Ukrainian Trotskyy would have approved, writing in 1934:
“the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes.”
https://www.leftvoice.org/leon-trotsky-if-america-should-go-communist/
For the moment, the Bank of Russia is buying gold at the fixed price only from Russian banks, maybe as a first step towards what the RT interview suggests of eventually linking the value of the ruble directly to gold.
More here:
The fact that the “West” is prepared not only to risk a global economic downturn but also disruption to the international payments system shows how determined they seem to be to do down Russia. In any event, they don’t seem to be likely to achieve their original stated aim of incorporating Ukraine into NATO.
But at what point will Western oligarchs react against this and bring pressure to bear to stop this danger to their commercial interests?
United States, Russia, European Union, Ukraine, all states are responsible of the war
Why is that these days the liberal centre, who are supposed to be “the lesser evil”, are the warmongers and the authoritarian right is less bellicose? Hungary is an example where Orban has just been re-elected against the opposition which wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine:
“Their candidate Peter Marki-Zay argued that Hungary should join Poland, the UK and others in supplying arms to Ukraine. And if called upon, and only within a Nato framework, should even consider sending troops.”
I don’t know if this was a big issue in this election but it seems a majority there have not been carried away by Ukrainomania.
It’s the same in Serbia where the outgoing president was re-elected too, but that’s more easily understandable as 23 years ago Serbia was the victim of a NATO bombing campaign.
Both have been bellicose and warmonger, the actual situation is that right-wingers are playing the card of the nice guy to obtain the votes of the workers, they are warmongers in disguise. An article published by the Socialist Party, clearly indicates that the right-wingers, nationalists and populists are winning the votes of the workers due to the failures of the social democrats, liberals and leftwingers
In the light of the Bucha atrocities the claim is arising that Russia has openly genocidal aims (note, Russia has been claiming a potential genocide against Russian Ukrainians, it seems to be a standard claim these days in which all actions are justified against the supreme crime.)
People are pointing to an op-ed in a Russian state backed paper:
Translation here : of course, in war, a jingo can always be found, and this could just be sabre rattling by the regime, depending on whether more sensible heads might prevail (certainly, I don’t think the programme presented is remotely realistic, it’s a recipe for perpetual guerrilla war – then again, I didn’t think invasion was realistic, so what do I know).“The duration of denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which must be born, grow up and reach maturity under the conditions of denazification. The nazification of Ukraine continued for more than 30 years, beginning at least in 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism received legal and legitimate forms of political expression and led the movement for “independence” towards Nazism.”
“The name “Ukraine” apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity in a territory liberated from the Nazi regime. The people’s republics newly created in the space free from Nazism should and will grow on the basis of economic self-government and social security, restoration and modernization of the life support systems of the population.”
“— lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);
— adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of primary normative acts of denazification “from below”, a ban on all types and forms of the revival of Nazi ideology;
— Establishment of memorials, commemorative signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
— the inclusion of a complex of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people’s republics;
— creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.”I don’t think that the Russian state really wants to exterminate Ukrainians by “denazifying” them. That seems to have been written by some extremist.
But the old Soviet Union had a chance to try this in Western Ukraine after WW2. This part of what is now Ukraine, with Lvov as the main city, had never been part of the Russian Empire. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to WW1 and then of Poland up to 1939.
After WW2 the Russian state had trouble digesting it. The attempt to do so it did lead to six years of guerrilla warfare and, you are right, would again. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA):
“After the end of World War II, the Polish communist army—the People’s Army of Poland—fought extensively against the UPA. The UPA remained active and fought against the People’s Republic of Poland until 1947, and against the Soviet Union until 1949. It was particularly strong in the Carpathian Mountains, the entirety of Galicia and in Volhynia—in modern Western Ukraine. By the late 1940s, the mortality rate for Soviet troops fighting Ukrainian insurgents in Western Ukraine was higher than the mortality rate for Soviet troops during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army)
When the USSR collapsed in 1991 these nationalists came out into the open again and could even be said to be at the origin of present-day anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism.
The irony is that this would not have been a problem for the Russian state (in its various forms) had it not seized the parts of previously non-Russian Ukrainian area and incorporated into its province of Ukraine.
But I can’t imagine that those in charge of the Russian state want to repeat the exercise with the whole of the Ukraine. Their aim now appears to be to move their frontier westwards, leaving the rest of Ukraine as an independent neutral state (as the USSR did with Finland after WW2).
The pictures from Bucha are horrific enough. The trouble is the Ukrainian propaganda machine doesn’t know when to stop:
“Mylovanov said early eyewitness accounts and anecdotal evidence suggest children may have been burned alive, young women raped en-masse and then executed afterwards, and people forced to eat their pets after being deliberately starved by Russian troops.”
All those atrocities committed by the Russian troops ( or the mercenaries ) are going to increase the hate against the Russians and many nationalists movements and extremists guerrillas are going to emerge,
NATO and the USA are going to continue spreading more propaganda, and Russia is going to continue denying the atrocities
Neo Nazis groups have always existed in Eastern Europe and some parts of that region viewed the German Nazis as their liberators.
It is ironic that in most of those countries that were part of the Soviet Union most workers are anti-communists
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