Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine
Two of my favorite New York Times words are “shadowy” and “murky.” They are brilliantly suited to the Manichean version of our world the Times inflicts daily upon its unsuspecting readers. When The Times terms someone or some society or some chain of events shadowy or murky it scarcely has to do any reporting. Two words more or less without meaning point readers’ minds in precisely the desired direction.
I do not mean to single out The Times in this, except that I do. None of the other major dailies and none of the network broadcasters comes close to the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record in the matter of shadows and murk. This is especially so of the foreign desk, and a murkier corner of American journalism I cannot think of.
There are lots of shadowy people in Russia, The Times will have us know, or think we know. Lots of murky things happen there. Donald Trump’s dealings with the Kremlin were very shadowy, and never mind it turned out there was nothing in them to cast any shadows. Shadows linger long after the lights go on, another of their useful features.
It follows that there are never any shadows and nothing is ever murky among those people or nations the government-supervised Times counts among the “good guys” as opposed to the “bad guys,” and the most powerful paper in America does indulge in such language, if you have not noticed.
We come now to Ukraine. The shadows may be many and the murk very thick, but you will never read of either in The Times. The corruption scandal now erupting in Kyiv and across the country seems to me confirmation that Ukraine has made itself in the post–Soviet era less a nation than a criminal enterprise. This often happens in failed states, where no one believes in anything anymore for the simple reason there is nothing left to believe in. It is then the shadows descend and all grows murky.
This is my read of Kyiv’s latest—of countless—purported efforts to cleanse the pool of corruption in which many of its top officials, most it sometimes seems, have long swum their laps. The Zelensky regime’s announcements of various firings, dismissals, and resignations, late last week and early this, are the merest swab on a gangrene-like disease that has all but consumed what there was of a Ukrainian polity. But worry not. There are no shadows or murk in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, Washington’s puppet, is the very goodest of the good guys and will get this done.
By the best count I’ve read, in Le Monde and France24, more than a dozen top officials have so far been relieved of duty one way or another. There are a lot of deputies on this list—the level of administrator typically charged with seeing that things get done. The first of these to get the sack was a deputy infrastructure minister named Vasyl Lozynsky, who was arrested Sunday. On Tuesday came the apparently forced resignation of Kirill Tymoshenko, Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff. This brings things quite high in the hierarchy.
And then the long list: a deputy defense minister, a deputy prosecutor, and two other deputies in charge of Kyiv’s provincial development programs. Along with these, the governors of five administrative regions—Kyiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—were also fired outright or forced to resign. As France24 points out, the latter three of these regions are active battlefields; Kyiv and Sumy were on the front lines earlier on in the conflict.
Let us gather what facts we have and see what we can make of them.
Vasyl Lozynsky, the infrastructure man, was responsible for restoring the hardware of water, electricity and heating supplies in those areas of Ukraine where either Russian or Ukrainian artillery and rockets had damaged or destroyed them. Plenty of room for patriotic service there, you have to say. Lozynsky is charged with embezzling roughly $400,000 of official funds on behalf of a crime syndicate of which he was a member. Some of these funds were supplied by foreign donors as part of the West’s war effort.
There is the case of Kirill Tymoshenko. A top aide to Zelensky, he has been by the president’s side since he was elected to office four years ago. Close, then. The Times’s explanation for his resignation borders on the cute. Tymoshenko’s transgression was to live a life of conspicuous consumption and “zip around Kyiv,” as The Times put it, in a flash SUV General Motors donated for use in humanitarian projects. This does not sound to me like the nadir of Ukrainian corruption.
Le Monde’s piece featured a photograph of Tymoshenko with an unmistakable smirk and holding up a resignation letter signed with a heart, exclamation marks, and other less-than-serious scribble. I would not call him a worried man—or a serious man.
The deputy defense minister, Vyacheslav Shapovalov, resigned after a Kyiv weekly, Zerkalo Nedeli, published an investigative piece revealing a kickback scheme wherein Shapovalov’s ministry paid extravagantly over the odds for food intended to supply Ukrainian troops. The fraud—I am reading Le Monde’s account of the Zerkalo Nedeli account—was in the amount of $330 million.
Not much has come out about the others in Kyiv or the provincial governors, but the running theme is impossible to miss. A lot of these people had wartime functions giving them access to funds that were supposed to finance various dimensions of the war effort. Foreign funds would have to be prominent among these, given Kyiv is dead broke. This is in keeping with what we’ve read for many months: The Ukrainian political, security and military cliques are massively ripping off the U.S.
Never mind that. The Times asserted high in its coverage—two stories to date—that all these officials casting no shadows scrupulously avoided stealing any of the billions of dollars the U.S. and the rest of the West are pouring into Ukraine. “There was no sign that the Ukrainian army’s food procurement scandal involved the misappropriation of Western military assistance,” Michael Schwirtz and Maria Varenikova wrote in Wednesday’s editions.
And further on: “The Biden administration is ‘not aware that any U.S. assistance was involved’ in the corruption allegations, the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, told reporters on Tuesday. ‘We take extraordinarily seriously our responsibility to ensure appropriate oversight of all forms of U.S. assistance that we’re delivering to Ukraine,’ he added.”
“No sign,” “not aware”: Know what you are reading, readers. These are elisions. They are not denials. Are we supposed to think Ned Price is going to risk the acquiescence of most Americans if, in the land of no shadows and no murk, the Ukrainians have been misappropriating U.S. taxpayers’ dough? As to the oversight assertion, it is patently false, as that explosive CBS exposé aired last year made perfectly clear. In it we learned that up to 70 percent of the matériel the West ships in via Poland is siphoned into Ukraine’s immense black market in arms.
It is perfectly plain what is going on here by way of the timing. The U.S. has gone from “no lethal arms,” in the years after it sponsored the 2014 to promising, as of this week, main battle tanks. Here is Yuriy Sak, who advises Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, talking to Reuters Thursday:
They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS [advanced rocket] systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.
As Sak made clear, the Kyiv regime is about to start pestering the U.S. for F–16 fighter jets. “Not just F–16s,” Sak added with breathtaking impudence. “Fourth-generation aircraft, this is what we want.”
These kinds of statements from officials of Sak’s rank make it bitterly clear that Kyiv is confident the conflict with Russia has landed it with a cash cow that will keep on giving far into the future. Unfortunately, this is an accurate read of the Biden administration’s obsession with destroying the Russian Federation and, in the service of this project, keeping the war going indefinitely.
Think about the Tymoshenko resignation in this context. Here is a man who probably saw Zelensky on a daily basis and enjoyed his boss’s confidence. The expropriated SUV and the expensive living had to be obvious in the presidential circle. Nothing was said for as many as four years. Suddenly, Tymoshenko’s vulgar displays, penny ante as they may be, are just as damaging as the big-time theft at this moment.
I see only one conclusion: We witness a faux purge fashioned to look ruthless when it is nothing more than cosmetic. I do not think Zelensky, to put this point another way, is at all interested in rooting out Ukraine’s structural corruption. There are signs aplenty in his past that he does not stand so supremely far above it.
Zelensky is more a creature of the Biden administration than he is of Washington per se, it seems more accurate to say at this point. The distinction is important. It is very likely the Biden White House—and who knows who runs it these days?—has ordered its puppet to clean up the act, even if it is an act and nothing more.
Victoria “Cookies” Nuland, among the architects of the 2014 coup and an infinitely tolerant patron of the Kyiv regime ever since, made this clear Thursday. “We have been very clear that we need to see, as they prosecute this war, the anti-corruption steps, including good corporate governance and judicial measures, move forward,” she said in Senate testimony. It’s boilerplate, said many times over the years, but it is telling that Nuland is called upon to say it again and now.
Let us not forget: Now that Republicans are a majority in the House, they could any day begin demanding strict accountability for the profligate amounts of weaponry and money the Biden administration is pumping into Ukraine. Kyiv will look shadowy and murky indeed if the newly seated House gets going on this project. This leaves Biden just as vulnerable as Zelensky appears to be.
To turn this dimension of things another way, there are reports here and there that the Biden administration is growing fed up with Zelensky and the mess of corruption, in combination with severe anti-democratic repression, he oversees. I cannot verify these reports and I don’t think anyone can at this moment. But as the war outlook dims, Zelensky’s political fortunes may well dim with them.
There is a deeper, profoundly saddening point to consider as this newest corruption scandal unfolds, and all indications are that it will continue to do so. What kind of people are these? What kind of polity is this? What kind of country is Ukraine?
Kirill Tymoshenko’s nonsense is not altogether nonsense: It is worthy of a few moments’ thought. What kind of man is he to behave as he has in this passage of the Ukrainian story? As to the others, same questions: What kind of man would steal funds meant to keep his own people warm? What kind of man would embezzle the money meant to feed troops defending their country, setting aside on behalf of what?
I have called Ukraine a failed state. I do not think there is any question of this. I have been on the way for some time to concluding Ukrainians are a failed people, too. By this I mean a broken people. The tragic suffering they endured during the Soviet era left deep scars, a kind of national pathology. Did this leave them incapable of making a nation of themselves in the post–Soviet years? I can only pose the question.
It is prompted by what I see now, a failed state wherein many people are left with nothing in which they can believe, where there is nothing to which they can belong. At the top, a sordid greedfest. Everywhere else it is sheer survival in a state of constant anxiety. It is a terrible thing to recognize how utterly inadequate the people running the criminal state of Ukraine are to respond to this moving tragedy.
Amid all the revelations of corruption and the firings and dismissals, Zelensky gave a much-noted speech last weekend to commemorate Ukraine’s Unity Day. “We are all together, no matter where we were born and where we grew up,” he said. “Say today: I will defend my Ukraine. My unity.” The conceit is too thin to hold up at this point and the irony of the moment too great to miss. There is little unity to find among Ukrainians, it seems to me. The nationalism professed by the ruling cliques shapes up as a veil covering up the rampant thievery. The virulent nationalism evident among the far-right political factions and militias, a topic I will take up in future commentaries, seems now to reflect a desperate need to belong in a nation offering nothing in which to belong, to find meaning where there is no meaning.
Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine - scheerpost.com
https://i0.wp.com/scheerpost.com/wp-...ng?w=780&ssl=1Patrick LawrencePatrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored without explanation.
Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/...4000x5673.jpeg
Chris Hedges
Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.
U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery: Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package. These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.
The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance. It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries. It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.
I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance. As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.
NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.
The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal. The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six to eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.
So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.
Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition. Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts. Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance. Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.5 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zero temperatures, the Ukrainian president says. According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war as of last November.
“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Senator Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”
Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.
The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.
In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.
As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.
Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”
Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.
America’s two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide.
“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”
Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its one military man army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state.
Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state. In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder. The British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/u...hat-went-wrong
