Traffic on the highway is visible near the Crocus City Hall with a warning message on a billboard that reads “We mourn 03.22.2024” on the Western edge of Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 22, 2024. (AP)
Larry Johnson, former CIA and US State Department analyst, says the US was quick to acquit Ukraine of any ties to the terrorist attack in Russia’s capital.
“We still don’t know how many shooters there were. We don’t know what the weapons were. We don’t know what the firearms were. We don’t know what the explosives were. We don’t know how many were actually killed, how many wounded, but yet the US State Department knows that it was not Ukraine,” stated former CIA and State Department analyst Larry Johnson, according to Sputnik.
This indicates that the US government has no grounds to declare that there is no Ukrainian connection to the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of innocent Russians in Moscow.
The former analyst then highlighted another significant point stating that the statement “comes on a day that one of the CIA propaganda outlets came out and said that the Biden administration and the intelligence community were very concerned about what they call ‘brazen’, unwarranted attacks by Ukraine.”
Based on these premises, the former CIA and US State Department analyst announced that he suspected that Washington had information regarding the attack, yet withheld this information from Moscow.
In turn, the Russian Foreign Minister Maria Zakharova, on her Telegram channel, questioned the US statement saying “On what basis do officials in Washington draw any conclusions in the midst of the tragedy about anyone’s innocence? If the United States has or had reliable information in this regard, then it must be immediately transferred to the Russian side.”
Zakharova then stressed that “if there is no such data, then the White House has no right to issue indulgences to anyone,” adding “All those involved, as stated by the Russian leadership, will be identified by the competent authorities.”
As for the Deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, he underscored that “Terrorists understand only retaliatory terror.”
Medvedev further emphasized that “If it is established that these are terrorists of the Kiev regime, it is impossible to do otherwise with them and their ideological inspirers. All of them must be found and ruthlessly destroyed as terrorists. Including officials of the state that committed such an atrocity.”
As the Draconian Western-led sanctions on Russia exacerbate the economic crisis worldwide, and as Russian troops gain more ground despite the influx of military aid into Ukraine, exposing US direct involvement in bio-labs spread across Eastern Europe and the insurgence of neo-Nazi groups… How will things unfold?
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In his famous anti-Vietnam War speech, the late senator from South Dakota George McGovern told fellow Congressional leaders, “This chamber reeks of blood.”
On Saturday, journalist Max Blumenthal opened a hard-hitting talk at the Ron Paul Institute’s “Which Way America…?” conference in D.C.by quoting those words, but applied them to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Blumenthal said that in Ukraine, Washington continues “wasting the lives and bodies of over 150,000 men, and that’s according to the Pentagon.” Citing recent studies on the immense numbers of Ukrainians who have lost limbs after a year-and-a-half of fighting (which could be surpassing WWI rates), he said the true Ukraine casualty count could be closer to 500,000 – which marks a monumental tragedy and disaster.
The GrayZone journalist then said of today’s Congress that “this chamber” not only “reeks of blood” but.. “they have wasted Ukrainian society on the mantle of anti-Russia hysteria” – as lawmakers in lockstep with the Biden administration continue to sink billions into Kiev.
Beltway liberal elites, Blumenthal asserted, still think Russia must be punished given they see Moscow as having brought the “bad orange man” to power in 2016. This is a big ideological aspect to what motivates the hawks, he said.
Further, Blumenthal explained that what’s happening here is that the US ruling class has “militarized the culture wars while depicting Ukraine as the ‘woke side’ vs. Russia as backwards and oppressive.”
But more importantly, the real “victors” are the major US defense contractors and their appendages like the K street neocon lobbying firms. Blumenthal highlighted that these, and the Biden administration, are operating with the bigger vision in mind of turning Ukraine into Europe’s “big Israel”.
By this is meant a permanently militarized ‘Spartan’ wartime state, which is funded and weaponized by Washington in perpetuity, and possesses all the latest cutting edge Western defense tech. But like with the state of things long evident inside Israel (in particular oppression of both Palestinians and Israeli political dissenters), democracy must be eroded at home for this to happen. Still, the defense tech peddlers in the military-industrial complex will ‘win’ no matter how much Ukrainian society and its people are sacrificed.
“In order to defend democracy in Ukraine, democracy must be curtailed at home,” Blumenthal emphasized, drawing lessons from current examples of oppression of free speech in the West, particularly related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He noted here that his own investigative media outlet, The GrayZone, has had the bulk of its funding frozen by the popular platform GoFundMe. The outlet explained days ago [emphasis ZH]:
By this point, we had raised over $90,000 from over 1100 contributors. The generous contributions from our audience were accompanied by hundreds of messages of effusive support for our factual journalism holding imperial power to account.
And now, Gofundme is holding the donations hostage, refusing to transfer them to us, while failing to inform donors that it has effectively seized their money. The for-profit site has similarly refused to explain its freezing of their donations, issuing nothing more than a vague allusion – “some external concerns” – to pressure from powerful outside forces.
Gofundme’s financial sabotage follows the de facto sanctions imposed by Venmo and Paypal on our managing editor, Wyatt Reed, after he reported on the Ukrainian military’s targeting of civilians from the separatist side of the Donbas region.
Again, this is why Blumenthal could draw on recent personal experience in telling the Ron Paul conference audience that “democracy must be curtailed” in America in order to keep unlimited taxpayer dollars flowing into the Zelensky government’s coffers.
Blumenthal continued… but “now Russia has no incentive to negotiate” given they have the clear military momentum amid a failing Ukraine counteroffensive. The US and UK likely had a window of opportunity in the initial months of the war to more easily open up serious diplomatic peace negotiations, but this was actively thwarted.
“We cannot have peace negotiations while war is being incentivized [by Washington interests] to this point,” he continued while also referencing neocons like Bill Kristol, who has been leading a charge to silence any dissenting views from among Republican nominees and politicians on Ukraine.
“These operatives need constant opportunities” which a permanent proxy war in Europe enables, Blumenthal continued – just like with the constant and historic billions in aid flowing to Israel, which serves to cyclically fuel the accompanying global reach and outsized influence of the Israel lobby.
On this question of whether negotiations are possible even from Kiev’s perspective, Zero Hedge asked Blumenthal what he thinks would happen in the unlikely scenario that Zelensky himself suddenly pursued peace talks with the Russians. Blumenthal responded as follows:
“If Zelensky were to pursue peace talks now before he’s re-elected… due to the kind of social forces that have been unleashed by Maidan, he will face a far-right Nazi insurgency in his own country, and he will become public enemy number one among some of the most violent and militarized forces.
…Which is why he went and met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of Azov. Zelensky was elected on a platform of peace by 73% of the population because you still had the ethnic Russian population participating in Ukrainian society. They have been completely driven out and the constituency he’s working with is completely different now.”
Below: Last month, Ukrainian President Zelensky held court with one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in modern Ukrainian history, Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky.
Turning Ukraine into “a big Israel” will involve long-term funding to shape and place “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier not in the Middle East but in Europe,” Blumenthal said.
But as Ukrainians continue to be slaughtered, it won’t be a happy situation for a country to become a “big Israel”, Blumenthal concluded.
Former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro (from 2011 to 2017) is helping to push this Ukraine as “big Israel” concept forward, Blumenthal pointed out.
A partial list of key elements of Shapiro’s road map for Ukraine was previously published by The Atlantic Council as follows:
Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.
The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrifice. Civilians recognize their responsibility to follow security protocols and contribute to the cause. Some even arm themselves (though under strict supervision) to do so. The widespread mobilization of Ukrainian society in collective defense suggests that the country has this potential. In his comments, Zelenskyy reflected this reality when he said security would “come from the strength of every house, every building, every person.”
Self-defense is the only way: If there’s any single principle that animates Israel’s security doctrine, it’s that Israel will defend itself, by itself—and rely on no other country to fight its battles. The tragedies of Jewish history have embedded that lesson deep in the nation’s soul. Ukraine’s own trauma, forced to fight alone against a larger aggressor, reinforces a similar conclusion: Don’t depend on the guarantees of others.
But maintain active defense partnerships: Self-defense doesn’t mean total isolation. Israel maintains active defense partnerships, chiefly with the United States, which provides generous military assistance, but also with other nations with whom it shares intelligence, technology, and training. While Ukraine will probably not join NATO any time soon, it can deepen security partnerships with Alliance members and receive aid, weaponry, intelligence, and training to bolster its self-defense.
Intelligence dominance: From its earliest days, Israel has invested deeply in its intelligence capabilities to ensure that it has the means to detect and deter its enemies—and, when needed, act proactively to strike them. Ukraine will need to upgrade its intelligence services to compete against Russian capabilities and ensure that it’s prepared to prevent and repulse Russian attacks.
Technology is key: Although it relies on US assistance, Israel also chooses homegrown technology solutions for many of its greatest challenges. Multi-layer rocket and missile defenses, counter-drone systems, and tunnel detection technology are just recent examples. Ukraine—already home to bright technological minds—will know what threats it faces more than any partner; investing in its own solutions will allow it to be most responsive and adapt to new threats.
The west is nostalgically caught up with outdated ‘containment’ policies, this time against Global South integration. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world is moving on, together.
Once upon a time, there existed an Iron Curtain which divided the continent of Europe. Coined by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the term was in reference to the then-Soviet Union’s efforts to create a physical and ideological boundary with the west. The latter, for its part, pursued a policy of containment against the spread and influence of communism.
Fast forward to the contemporary era of techno-feudalism, and there now exists what should be called a Tin Curtain, fabricated by the fearful, clueless, collective west, via G7 and NATO: this time, to essentially contain the integration of the Global South.
BRICS against G7
The most recent and significant example of this integration has been the coming out of BRICS+ at last week’s online summit hosted by Beijing. This went far beyond establishing the lineaments of a ‘new G8,’ let alone an alternative to the G7.
Just look at the interlocutors of the five historical BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa): we find a microcosm of the Global South, encompassing Southeast Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Africa and South America – truly putting the “Global” in the Global South.
Revealingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s clear messages during the Beijing summit, in sharp contrast to G7 propaganda, were actually addressed to the whole Global South:
– Russia will fulfill its obligations to supply energy and fertilizers.
– Russia expects a good grain harvest – and to supply up to 50 million tons to world markets.
– Russia will ensure passage of grain ships into international waters even as Kiev mined Ukrainian ports.
– The negative situation on Ukrainian grain is artificially inflated.
– The sharp increase in inflation around the world is the result of the irresponsibility of G7 countries, not Operation Z in Ukraine.
– The imbalance of world relations has been brewing for a long time and has become an inevitable result of the erosion of international law.
An alternative system
Putin also directly addressed one of the key themes that the BRICS have been discussing in depth since the 2000s — the design and implementation of an international reserve currency.
“The Russian Financial Messaging System is open for connection with banks of the BRICS countries.”
“The Russian MIR payment system is expanding its presence. We are exploring the possibility of creating an international reserve currency based on the basket of BRICS currencies,” the Russian leader said.
This is inevitable after the hysterical western sanctions post-Operation Z; the total de-dollarization imposed upon Moscow; and increasing trade between BRICS nations. For instance, by 2030, a quarter of the planet’s oil demand will come from China and India, with Russia as the major supplier.
The “RIC” in BRICS simply cannot risk being locked out of a G7-dominated financial system. Even tightrope-walking India is starting to catch the drift.
Who speaks for the ‘international community?’
At its current stage, BRICS represent 40 percent of world population, 25 percent of the global economy, 18 percent of world trade, and contribute over 50 percent for world economic growth. All indicators are on the way up.
Sergey Storchak, CEO of Russian bank VEG, framed it quite diplomatically: “If the voices of emerging markets are not being heard in the coming years, we need to think very seriously about setting up a parallel regional system, or maybe a global system.”
A “parallel regional system” is already being actively discussed between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China, coordinated by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev, who has recently authored a stunning manifesto amplifying his ideas about world economic sovereignty.
Developing the ‘developing world’
What happens in the trans-Eurasian financial front will proceed in parallel with a so far little known Chinese development strategy: the Global Development Initiative (GDI), announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly last year.
GDI can be seen as a support mechanism of the overarching strategy – which remains the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), consisting of economic corridors interlinking Eurasia all the way to its western peninsula, Europe.
In a nutshell, the GDI aims to turbo-charge international development cooperation by supplementing financing to a plethora of bodies, for instance the South-South Cooperation Fund, the International Development Association (IDA), the Asian Development Fund (ADF), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Priorities include “poverty reduction, food security, COVID-19 response and vaccines,” industrialization, and digital infrastructure. Subsequently, a Friends of the GDI group was established in early 2022 and has already attracted over 50 nations.
BRI and GDI should be advancing in tandem, even as Xi himself made it clear during the BRICS summit that “some countries are politicizing and marginalizing the developmental agenda by building up walls and slapping crippling sanctions on others.”
Then again, sustainable development is not exactly the G7’s cup of tea, much less NATO’s.
Seven against the world
The avowed top aim of the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau at the Bavarian Alps is to “project unity” – as in the stalwarts of the collective west (Japan included) united in sustainable and indefinite “support” for the irretrievably failed Ukrainian state.
That’s part of the “struggle against Putin’s imperialism,” but then there’s also “the fight against hunger and poverty, health crisis and climate change,” as German chancellor Scholz told the Bundestag.
In Bavaria, Scholz pushed for a Marshall Plan for Ukraine – a ludicrous concept considering Kiev and its environs might as well be reduced to a puny rump state by the end of 2022. The notion that the G7 may work to “prevent a catastrophic famine,” according to Scholz, reaches a paroxysm of ludicrousness, as the looming famine is a direct consequence of the G7-imposed sanctions hysteria.
The fact that Berlin invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal as add-ons to the G7, served as additional comic relief.
The Tin Curtain is up
It would be futile to expect from the astonishing collection of mediocrities “united” in Bavaria, under de facto leader of the European Commission (EC), Fuehrer Ursula von der Leyen, any substantial analysis about the breakdown of global supply chains and the reasons that forced Moscow to reduce gas flows to Europe. Instead, they blamed Putin and Xi.
Welcome to the Tin Curtain – a 21st century reinvention of the Intermarium from the Baltic to the Black Sea, masterminded by the Empire of Lies, complete with western Ukraine absorbed by Poland, the Three Baltic Midgets: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Czechia and even NATO-aspiring Sweden and Finland, all of whom will be protected from “the Russian threat.”
An EU out of control
The role of the EU, lording over Germany, France and Italy inside the G7 is particularly instructive, especially now that Britain is back to the status of an inconsequential island-state.
As many as 60 European ‘directives’ are issued every year. They must be imperatively transposed into internal law of each EU member-state. In most cases, there’s no debate whatsoever.
Then there are more than 10,000 European ‘rulings,’ where ‘experts’ at the European Commission (EC) in Brussels issue ‘recommendations’ to every government, straight out of the neoliberal canon, regarding their expenses, their income and ‘reforms’ (on health care, education, pensions) that must be obeyed.
Thus elections in every single EU member-nation are absolutely meaningless. Heads of national governments – Macron, Scholz, Draghi – are mere executants. No democratic debate is allowed: ‘democracy,’ as with ‘EU values,’ are nothing than smokescreens.
The real government is exercised by a bunch of apparatchiks chosen by compromise between executive powers, acting in a supremely opaque manner.
The EC is totally outside of any sort of control. That’s how a stunning mediocrity like Ursula von der Leyen – previously the worst Minister of Defense of modern Germany – was catapulted upwards to become the current EC Fuhrer, dictating their foreign, energy and even economic policy.
What do they stand for?
From the perspective of the west, the Tin Curtain, for all its ominous Cold War 2.0 overtones, is merely a starter before the main course: hardcore confrontation across Asia-Pacific – renamed “Indo-Pacific” – a carbon copy of the Ukraine racket designed to contain China’s BRI and GDI.
As a countercoup, it’s enlightening to observe how the Chinese foreign ministry now highlights in detail the contrast between BRICS – and BRICS+ – and the imperial AUKUS/Quad/IPEF combo.
BRICS stand for de facto multilateralism; focus on global development; cooperation for economic recovery; and improving global governance.
The US-concocted racket on the other hand, stands for Cold War mentality; exploiting developing countries; ganging up to contain China; and an America-first policy that enshrines the monopolistic “rules-based international order.”
It would be misguided to expect those G7 luminaries gathered in Bavaria to understand the absurdity of imposing a price cap on Russian oil and gas exports, for instance. Were that to really happen, Moscow will have no problems fully cutting energy supply to the G7. And if other nations are excluded, the price of the oil and gas they import would drastically increase.
BRICS paving the way forward
So no wonder the future is ominous. In a stunning interview to Belarus state TV, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov summarized how “the west fears honest competition.”
Hence, the apex of cancel culture, and “suppression of everything that contradicts in some way the neoliberal vision and arrangement of the world.” Lavrov also summarized the roadmap ahead, for the benefit of the whole Global South:
“We don’t need a new G8. We already have structures…primarily in Eurasia. The EAEU is actively promoting integration processes with the PRC, aligning China’s Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian integration plans. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are taking a close look at these plans. A number of them are signing free trade zone agreements with the EAEU. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is also part of these processes… There is one more structure beyond the geographic borders of Eurasia.”
“It is BRICS. This association is relying less and less on the Western style of doing business, and on Western rules for international currency, financial and trade institutions. They prefer more equitable methods that do not make any processes depend on the dominant role of the dollar or some other currency. The G20 fully represents BRICS and five more countries that share the positions of BRICS, while the G7 and its supporters are on the other side of the barricades.”
“This is a serious balance. The G20 may deteriorate if the West uses it for fanning up confrontation. The structures I mentioned (SCO, BRICS, ASEAN, EAEU and CIS) rely on consensus, mutual respect and a balance of interests, rather than a demand to accept unipolar world realities.”
The ironclad fictional “narrative” imposed all across NATOstan is that Ukraine is “winning”.
So why would weapons peddler retrofitted as Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin literally beg since late February to have his phone calls answered by Russian Defense Minister Shoigu, only to have his wish finally granted?
It’s now confirmed by one of my top intel sources. The call was a direct consequence of panic. The United States Government (USG) by all means wants to scotch the detailed Russian investigation – and accumulation of evidence – on the US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, as I outlined in a previous column.
This phone call happened exactly after an official Russian statement to the UN Security Council on May 13: we will use articles 5 and 6 of the Convention on the Prohibition of Bioweapons to investigate the Pentagon’s biological “experiments” in Ukraine.
That was reiterated by Under Secretary-General of the UN in charge of disarmament, Thomas Markram, even as all ambassadors of NATO member countries predictably denied the collected evidence as “Russian disinformation”.
Shoigu cold see the call coming eons away. Reuters, merely quoting the proverbial “Pentagon official”, spun that the allegedly one-hour-long call led to nothing. Nonsense. Austin, according to the Americans, demanded a “ceasefire” – which must have originated a Siberian cat smirk on Shoigu’s face.
Shoigu knows exactly which way the wind is blowing on the ground – for Ukrainian Armed Forces and UkroNazis alike. It’s not only the Azovstal debacle – and Kiev’s all-around army breakdown.
After the fall of Popasnaya – the crucial, most fortified Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass – the Russians and Donetsk/Luhansk forces have breached defenses along four different vectors to north, northwest, west and south. What’s left of the Ukrainian front is crumbling – fast, with a massive cauldron subdivided in a maze of mini-cauldrons: a military disaster the USG cannot possibly spin.
Now, in parallel, we can also expect full exposure – on overdrive – of the Pentagon bioweapons racket. The only “offer you can’t refuse” left to the USG would be to present something tangible to the Russians to avoid a full investigation.
That’s not gonna happen. Moscow is fully aware that going public with illegal work on banned biological weapons is an existential threat to the US Deep State. Especially when documents seized by the Russians show that Big Pharma – via Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and Gilead – was involved in several “experiments”. Fully exposing the whole maze, from the start, was one of Putin’s stated objectives.
More “military-technical measures”?
Three days after the UN presentation, the board of the Russian Foreign Ministry held a special session to discuss “the radically changed geopolitical realities that have developed as a result of the hybrid war against our country unleashed by the West – under the pretext of the situation in Ukraine – unprecedented in scale and ferocity, including the revival in Europe of a racist worldview in the form of cave Russophobia, an open course for the ‘abolition’ of Russia and everything Russian.”
So it’s no wonder “the aggressive revisionist course of the West requires a radical revision of Russia’s relations with unfriendly states.”
We should expect “a new edition of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation” coming out soon.
This new Foreign Policy Concept will elaborate on what Foreign Minister Lavrov once again stressed at a meeting honoring the 30th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy: the US has declared an all-round Hybrid War on Russia. The only thing lacking, as it stands, is a formal declaration of war.
Beyond the disinformation fog veiling the application of Finland and Sweden – call them the Dumb and Dumber Nordics – to join NATO, what really matters is another instance of declaration of war: the prospect of missiles with nuclear warheads stationed really close to Russian borders. Moscow already warned the Finns and Swedes, politely, that this would be dealt with it via “military-technical measures”. That’s exactly what Washington – and NATO minions – were told would happen before the start of Operation Z.
And of course this goes much deeper, involving Romania and Poland as well. Bucharest already has Aegis Ashore missile launchers capable of sending Tomahawks with nuclear warheads at Russia, while Warsaw is receiving the same systems. To cut to the chase, if there’s no de-escalation, they will all eventually end up receiving Mr. Khinzal’s hypersonic business card.
NATO member Turkey, meanwhile, plays a deft game, issuing its own list of demands before even considering the Nordics’ gamble. Ankara wants no more sanctions on its purchase of S-400s and on top if be re-included in the F-35 program. It will be fascinating to watch what His Master’s Voice will come up with to seduce the Sultan. The Nordics engaged in a self-correcting “clear unequivocal stance” against the PKK and the PYD is clearly not enough for the Sultan, who relished muddying the waters even more as he stressed that buying Russian energy is a “strategic” issue for Turkey.
Counteracting financial Shock’n Awe
By now it’s evidently clear that open-ended Operation Z targets unipolar Hegemon power, the infinite expansion of vassalized NATO, and the world’s financial architecture – an intertwined combo that largely transcends the Ukraine battleground.
Serial Western sanctions package hysteria ended up triggering Russia’s so far quite successful counter-financial moves. Hybrid War is being fought predominantly in the economic/financial battleground – and the pain dial for the collective West will only go up: inflation, higher commodity prices, breakdown of supply chains, exploding cost of living, impoverishment of the middle classes, and unfortunately for great swathes of the Global South, outright poverty and starvation.
In the near future, as insider evidence surfaces, a convincing case will be made that the Russian leadership even gamed the Western financial gamble/ blatant robbery of over $300 billion in Russian reserves.
This implies that already years ago – let’s say, at least from 2016, based on analyses by Sergey Glazyev – the Kremlin knew this would inevitably happen. As trust remains a rigid foundation of a monetary system, the Russian leadership may have calculated that the Americans and their vassals, driven by blind Russophobia, would play all their cards at once when push came to shove – utterly demolishing global trust on “their” system.
Because of Russia’s infinite natural resources, the Kremlin may have factored that the nation would eventually survive the financial Shock’n Awe – and even profit from it (ruble appreciation included). The reward is just too sweet: opening the way to The Doomed Dollar – without having to ask Mr. Sarmat to present his nuclear business card.
Russia could even entertain the hypothesis of getting a mighty return on those stolen funds. A great deal of Western assets – totaling as much as $500 billion – may be nationalized if the Kremlin so chooses.
So Russia is winning not only militarily but also to a large extent geopolitically – 88% of the planet does not align with NATOstan hysteria – and of course in the economic/financial sphere.
This in fact is the key Hybrid War battleground where the collective West is being checkmated. One of the next key steps will be an expanded BRICS coordinating their dollar-bypassing strategy.
None of the above should overshadow the still to be measured interconnected repercussions of the mass surrender of Azov neo-Nazis at UkroNazistan Central in Azovstal.
The mythical Western “narrative” about freedom-fighting heroes imposed since February by NATOstan media collapsed with a single blow. Cue to the thunderous silence all over the Western infowar front, where no mutts even attempted to sing that crappy, “winning” Eurovision song.
What happened, in essence, is that the creme de la creme of NATO-trained neo-Nazis, “advised” by top Western experts, weaponized to death, entrenched in deep concrete anti-nuclear bunkers in the bowels of Azovstal, was either pulverized or forced to surrender like cornered rats.
Novorossiya as a game-changer
The Russian General Staff will be adjusting their tactics for the major follow-up in Donbass – as the best Russian analysts and war correspondents incessantly debate. They will have to face an inescapable problem: as much as the Russian methodically grind down the – disaggregated – Ukrainian Army in Donbass, a new NATO army is being trained and weaponized in western Ukraine.
So there is a real danger that depending on the ultimate long-term aims of Operation Z – which are only shared by the Russian military leadership – Moscow runs the risk of encountering, in a few months, a mobile and better weaponized incarnation of the demoralized army it is now destroying. And this is exactly what the Americans mean by “weakening” Russia.
As it stands, there are several reasons why a new Novorossiya reality may turn out to be a positive game-changer for Russia. Among them:
The economic/logistics complex from Kharkov to Odessa – along Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Nikolaev – is intimately linked with Russian industry.
By controlling the Sea of Azov – already a de facto “Russian lake” – and subsequently the Black Sea, Russia will have total control of export routes for the region’s world-class grain production. Extra bonus: total exclusion of NATO.
All of the above suggests a concerted drive for the development of an integrated agro-heavy industry complex – with the extra bonus of serious tourism potential.
Under this scenario, a remaining Kiev-Lviv rump Ukraine, not incorporated to Russia, and of course not rebuilt, would be at best subjected to a no-fly zone plus selected artillery/missile/drone strikes in case NATO continues to entertain funny ideas.
This would be a logical conclusion for a Special Military Operation focused on precision strikes and a deliberate emphasis on sparing civilian lives and infrastructure while methodically disabling the Ukrainian military/logistics spectrum. All of that takes time. Yet Russia may have all the time in the world, as we all keep listening to the sound of the collective West spiraling down.
While there are not official confirmations (that I know of) from the Russian military, it appears that Lavrov is the first, and so far only, Russian official who declared that the 2nd phase of the operation has begun. Truth be told, pretty much everybody else thinks likewise. Considering the intensity of Russian bombings and artillery strikes overnight, which were reported by numerous sources, it certainly appears reasonable to me to conclude that this 2nd phase has indeeed begun. For example, the Russian defense ministry reported on Tuesday morning that its troops had delivered artillery strikes at 1,260 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including 1,214 locations where Ukrainian troops amassed their forces.
How long this phase of the war will last is anybody’s guess. Optimists think a week, pessimists a month, but in reality nobody really knows because the outcome will be determined not by maneuver like during the first phase, but by logistics, specifically fuel and ammunition, in other words by mobility and firepower.
I remind you that the Ukronazi forces in the eastern Ukraine have been in a de facto “cauldron” (as I explained, you can be physically surrounded or you can be “blocked by fire”) since over one month, and that the Ukrainians were not able to meaningfully resupply them while the Russian side has quasi limitless fuel and ammo (in spite of the Pentagon’s hallucinations). Russia also has air supremacy and very heavy weapons, neither of which the Ukrainians have.
In other words, while the Nazi forces in the eastern Ukraine get slaughtered, the US administration in Kiev will have to change the narrative about “the glorious Ukrainian military is winning” to “Russians are killing babies” (without ever wondering WHY and HOW civilians and even kids ended up inside the Avtostal complex, assuming the recent photos of kids hiding there are real and not made in Kiev).
Nobody really knows how many Ukrainians are still in the Donbass cauldron, and neither do we know how their morale and determination to stand and fight to the end is. For all these reasons giving even an approximate timeframe for this battle is impossible, at least for me.
This week is Passion Week for Orthodox Christians and I will be leaving tomorrow to attend the church services in our parish, about a 4 hour drive one way, so I will stay there until very late Sunday evening. In other words, my presence at the blog for the next 6 days will be minimal, I will travel with a laptop, but I will mostly be busy with the preparations for, and the celebration of, Holy Paskha.
So I leave you in the tender care of my colleagues Amarynth and Herb who will continue to post guest posts and keep you informed.
For daily reports, I suggest you follow the (excellent) situation reports written by Nightvision. Just please keep in mind that due to the nature of this second phase, there will be less maps of troop movements and that moving one or two kilometers against the very heavily and deep defenses of the Ukrainians might mean much more than moving 10 or 20 kilometers on open terrain.
By the way, the Empire of Hate and Lies knows the true score, and they are massively freaking out.
I doubt it, if anything, their antics “by infantiles – for infantiles” combined with the most massive exercise in world history to “cancel” any “wrong” information, show both how desperate and helpless these folks are.
As for the Nazis occupiers, they just passed a law allowing foreigners to work for the Ukrainian “intelligence” services. What a surprise, at least for those who had not realized that the USA has been running the SBU, and everything else, in Nazi occupied Ukraine since the Euromaidan (and even before).
In conclusion, I just want to end with a reminder. This is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. This is a war between Russia and the united West, the latest one is a series going back at least a thousand years. Russia has been singled out for “cancellation” and we don’t want to be canceled.
While for eight years Russia did all she could NOT to get involved, the Empire of Hate and Lies did successfully force her into an open military intervention in the Ukraine, and now that Empire will do all it can to prolong that war and have it result in the maximal loss of human life and the total destruction of the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, exactly the OPPOSITE of what the Kremlin wants: to disarm and denazify the Ukraine with the minimum of human loss of life and with as much of the civilian infrastructure preserved as possible. These goals are as asymmetrical as can be, and it is much MUCH easier to destroy than to preserve. Please keep that in mind when the next propaganda Tsunami hits.
One last request: unless this is both urgent and important, please do not email me between today and next Monday. I will have very little time to reply, and I rather stay focused on the spiritual matter during these sacred days.
The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.
Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
Leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev says a complete overhaul of the western-dominated global monetary and financial system is under works. And the world’s rising powers are buying into it. Photo Credit: The Cradle
In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”
Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.
The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?
Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.
Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.
At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.
Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail. The British colonial economic system based on slave labor was overtaken by structurally more efficient economic systems of the US and the USSR. Both the US and the USSR were more efficient at managing human capital in vertically integrated systems, which split the world into their zones of influence. A transition to a new world economic order started after the disintegration of the USSR. This transition is now reaching its conclusion with the imminent disintegration of the dollar-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the United States global dominance.
The new convergent economic system that emerged in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and India is the next inevitable stage of development, combining the benefits of both centralized strategic planning and market economy, and of both state control of the monetary and physical infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The new economic system united various strata of their societies around the goal of increasing common wellbeing in a way that is substantially stronger than the Anglo-Saxon and European alternatives. This is the main reason why Washington will not be able to win the global hybrid war that it started. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric global financial system will be superseded by a new one, based on a consensus of the countries who join the new world economic order.
In the first phase of the transition, these countries fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by prices at various exchanges, denominated in dollars. This phase is almost over: after Russia’s reserves in dollars, euro, pound, and yen were “frozen,” it is unlikely that any sovereign country will continue accumulating reserves in these currencies. Their immediate replacement is national currencies and gold.
The second stage of the transition will involve new pricing mechanisms that do not reference the dollar. Price formation in national currencies involves substantial overheads, however, it will still be more attractive than pricing in ‘un-anchored’ and treacherous currencies like dollars, pounds, euro, and yen. The only remaining global currency candidate – the yuan – won’t be taking their place due to its inconvertibility and the restricted external access to the Chinese capital markets. The use of gold as the price reference is constrained by the inconvenience of its use for payments.
The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency. I expect that the model of such a monetary unit that we developed will play its role at this stage. A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS countries, which all interested countries will be able to join. The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the GDP of each country (based on purchasing power parity, for example), its share in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries.
In addition, the basket could contain an index of prices of main exchange-traded commodities: gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar, as well as water and other natural resources. To provide backing and to make the currency more resilient, relevant international resource reserves can be created in due course. This new currency would be used exclusively for cross-border payments and issued to the participating countries based on a pre-defined formula. Participating countries would instead use their national currencies for credit creation, in order to finance national investments and industry, as well as for sovereign wealth reserves. Capital account cross-border flows would remain governed by national currency regulations.
The Cradle:Michael Hudson specifically asks that if this new system enables nations in the Global South to suspend dollarized debt and is based on the ability to pay (in foreign exchange), can these loans be tied to either raw materials or, for China, tangible equity ownership in the capital infrastructure financed by foreign non-dollar credit?
Glazyev: Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated the wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?
In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.
The Cradle:In one of your latest essays, The Economics of the Russian Victory, you call for “an accelerated formation of a new technological paradigm and the formation of institutions of a new world economic order.” Among the recommendations, you specifically propose the creation of “a payment and settlement system in the national currencies of the EAEU member states” and the development and implementation of “an independent system of international settlements in the EAEU, SCO and BRICS, which could eliminate critical dependence of the US-controlled SWIFT system.” Is it possible to foresee a concerted joint drive by the EAEU and China to “sell” the new system to SCO members, other BRICS members, ASEAN members and nations in West Asia, Africa and Latin America? And will that result in a bipolar geo-economy – the West versus The Rest?
Glazyev: Indeed, this is the direction where we are headed. Disappointingly, monetary authorities of Russia are still a part of the Washington paradigm and play by the rules of the dollar-based system, even after Russian foreign exchange reserves were captured by the west. On the other hand, the recent sanctions prompted extensive soul searching among the rest of the non-dollar-block countries. western ‘agents of influence’ still control central banks of most countries, forcing them to apply suicidal policies prescribed by the IMF. However, such policies at this point are so obviously contrary to the national interests of these non-western countries that their authorities are growing justifiably concerned about financial security.
You correctly highlight potentially central roles of China and Russia in the genesis of the new world economic order. Unfortunately, current leadership of the CBR (Central Bank of Russia) remains trapped inside the intellectual cul-de-sac of the Washington paradigm and is unable to become a founding partner in the creation of a new global economic and financial framework. At the same time, the CBR already had to face the reality and create a national system for interbank messaging which is not dependent on SWIFT, and opened it up for foreign banks as well. Cross-currency swap lines have been already set up with key participating nations. Most transactions between member states of the EAEU are already denominated in national currencies and the share of their currencies in internal trade is growing at a rapid pace.
A similar transition is taking place in trade with China, Iran, and Turkey. India indicated that it is ready to switch to payments in national currencies as well. A lot of effort is put in developing clearing mechanisms for national currency payments. In parallel, there is an ongoing effort to develop a digital non-banking payment system, which would be linked to gold and other exchange-traded commodities – the ‘stablecoins.’
Recent US and European sanctions imposed on the banking channels have caused a rapid increase in these efforts. The group of countries working on the new financial system only needs to announce the completion of the framework and readiness of the new trade currency and the process of formation of the new world financial order will accelerate further from there. The best way to bring it about would be to announce it at the SCO or BRICS regular meetings. We are working on that.
The Cradle: This has been an absolutely key issue in discussions by independent analysts across the west. Was the Russian Central Bank advising Russian gold producers to sell their gold in the London market to get a higher price than the Russian government or Central Bank would pay? Was there no anticipation whatsoever that the coming alternative to the US dollar will have to be based largely on gold? How would you characterize what happened? How much practical damage has this inflicted on the Russian economy short-term and mid-term?
Glazyev: The monetary policy of the CBR, implemented in line with the IMF recommendations, has been devastating for the Russian economy. Combined disasters of the “freezing” of circa $400 billion of foreign exchange reserves and over a trillion dollars siphoned from the economy by oligarchs into western offshore destinations, came with the backdrop of equally disastrous policies of the CBR, which included excessively high real rates combined with a managed float of the exchange rate. We estimate this caused under-investment of circa 20 trillion rubles and under-production of circa 50 trillion rubles in goods.
Following Washington’s recommendations, the CBR stopped buying gold over the last two years, effectively forcing domestic gold miners to export full volumes of production, which added up to 500 tons of gold. These days the mistake and the harm it caused are very much obvious. Presently, the CBR resumed gold purchases, and, hopefully, will continue with sound policies in the interest of the national economy instead of ‘targeting inflation’ for the benefit of international speculators, as had been the case during the last decade.
The Cradle: The Fed as well as the ECB were not consulted on the freeze of Russian foreign reserves. Word in New York and Frankfurt is that they would have opposed it were they to have been asked. Did you personally expect the freeze? And did the Russian leadership expect it?
Glazyev: My book, The Last World War, that I already mentioned, which was published as far back as 2015, argued that the likelihood of this happening eventually is very high. In this hybrid war, economic warfare and informational/cognitive warfare are key theaters of conflict. On both of these fronts, the US and NATO countries have overwhelming superiority and I did not have any doubt that they would take full advantage of this in due course.
I have been arguing for a long time for the replacement of dollars, euro, pounds, and yen in our foreign exchange reserves with gold, which is produced in abundance in Russia. Unfortunately, western agents of influence which occupy key roles at central banks of most countries, as well as rating agencies and key publications, were successful in silencing my ideas. To give you an example, I have no doubt that high-ranking officials at the Fed and the ECB were involved in developing anti-Russian financial sanctions. These sanctions have been consistently escalating and are being implemented almost instantly, despite the well-known difficulties with bureaucratic decision making in the EU.
The Cradle: Elvira Nabiullina has been reconfirmed as the head of the Russian Central Bank. What would you do differently, compared to her previous actions? What is the main guiding principle involved in your different approaches?
Glazyev: The difference between our approaches is very simple. Her policies are an orthodox implementation of IMF recommendations and dogmas of the Washington paradigm, while my recommendations are based on the scientific method and empirical evidence accumulated over the last hundred years in leading countries.
The Cradle: The Russia-China strategic partnership seems to be increasingly ironclad – as Presidents Putin and Xi themselves constantly reaffirm. But there are rumbles against it not only in the west but also in some Russian policy circles. In this extremely delicate historical juncture, how reliable is China as an all-season ally to Russia?
Glazyev: The foundation of Russian-Chinese strategic partnership is common sense, common interests, and the experience of cooperation over hundreds of years. The US ruling elite started a global hybrid war aimed at defending its hegemonic position in the world, targeting China as the key economic competitor and Russia as the key counter-balancing force. Initially, the US geopolitical efforts were aiming to create a conflict between Russia and China. Agents of western influence were amplifying xenophobic ideas in our media and blocking any attempts to transition to payments in national currencies. On the Chinese side, agents of western influence were pushing the government to fall in line with the demands of the US interests.
However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. Common interests of survival and resistance are uniting China and Russia, and our two countries are largely symbiotic economically. They complement and increase competitive advantages of each other. These common interests will persist over the long run.
The Chinese government and the Chinese people remember very well the role of the Soviet Union in the liberation of their country from the Japanese occupation and in the post-war industrialization of China. Our two countries have a strong historical foundation for strategic partnership and we are destined to cooperate closely in our common interests. I hope that the strategic partnership of Russia and the PRC, which is enhanced by the coupling of the One Belt One Road with the Eurasian Economic Union, will become the foundation of President Vladimir Putin’s project of the Greater Eurasian Partnership and the nucleus of the new world economic order.
April 15, 2022
The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and cross-posted at The Cradle.
Leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev says a complete overhaul of the western-dominated global monetary and financial system is under works. And the world’s rising powers are buying into it. Photo Credit: The Cradle
Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”
Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.
The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?
Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.
Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.
At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.
Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail. The British colonial economic system based on slave labor was overtaken by structurally more efficient economic systems of the US and the USSR. Both the US and the USSR were more efficient at managing human capital in vertically integrated systems, which split the world into their zones of influence. A transition to a new world economic order started after the disintegration of the USSR. This transition is now reaching its conclusion with the imminent disintegration of the dollar-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the United States global dominance.
The new convergent economic system that emerged in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and India is the next inevitable stage of development, combining the benefits of both centralized strategic planning and market economy, and of both state control of the monetary and physical infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The new economic system united various strata of their societies around the goal of increasing common wellbeing in a way that is substantially stronger than the Anglo-Saxon and European alternatives. This is the main reason why Washington will not be able to win the global hybrid war that it started. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric global financial system will be superseded by a new one, based on a consensus of the countries who join the new world economic order.
In the first phase of the transition, these countries fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by prices at various exchanges, denominated in dollars. This phase is almost over: after Russia’s reserves in dollars, euro, pound, and yen were “frozen,” it is unlikely that any sovereign country will continue accumulating reserves in these currencies. Their immediate replacement is national currencies and gold.
The second stage of the transition will involve new pricing mechanisms that do not reference the dollar. Price formation in national currencies involves substantial overheads, however, it will still be more attractive than pricing in ‘un-anchored’ and treacherous currencies like dollars, pounds, euro, and yen. The only remaining global currency candidate – the yuan – won’t be taking their place due to its inconvertibility and the restricted external access to the Chinese capital markets. The use of gold as the price reference is constrained by the inconvenience of its use for payments.
The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency. I expect that the model of such a monetary unit that we developed will play its role at this stage. A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS countries, which all interested countries will be able to join. The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the GDP of each country (based on purchasing power parity, for example), its share in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries.
In addition, the basket could contain an index of prices of main exchange-traded commodities: gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar, as well as water and other natural resources. To provide backing and to make the currency more resilient, relevant international resource reserves can be created in due course. This new currency would be used exclusively for cross-border payments and issued to the participating countries based on a pre-defined formula. Participating countries would instead use their national currencies for credit creation, in order to finance national investments and industry, as well as for sovereign wealth reserves. Capital account cross-border flows would remain governed by national currency regulations.
The Cradle:Michael Hudson specifically asks that if this new system enables nations in the Global South to suspend dollarized debt and is based on the ability to pay (in foreign exchange), can these loans be tied to either raw materials or, for China, tangible equity ownership in the capital infrastructure financed by foreign non-dollar credit?
Glazyev: Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated the wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?
In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.
The Cradle:In one of your latest essays, The Economics of the Russian Victory, you call for “an accelerated formation of a new technological paradigm and the formation of institutions of a new world economic order.” Among the recommendations, you specifically propose the creation of “a payment and settlement system in the national currencies of the EAEU member states” and the development and implementation of “an independent system of international settlements in the EAEU, SCO and BRICS, which could eliminate critical dependence of the US-controlled SWIFT system.” Is it possible to foresee a concerted joint drive by the EAEU and China to “sell” the new system to SCO members, other BRICS members, ASEAN members and nations in West Asia, Africa and Latin America? And will that result in a bipolar geo-economy – the West versus The Rest?
Glazyev: Indeed, this is the direction where we are headed. Disappointingly, monetary authorities of Russia are still a part of the Washington paradigm and play by the rules of the dollar-based system, even after Russian foreign exchange reserves were captured by the west. On the other hand, the recent sanctions prompted extensive soul searching among the rest of the non-dollar-block countries. western ‘agents of influence’ still control central banks of most countries, forcing them to apply suicidal policies prescribed by the IMF. However, such policies at this point are so obviously contrary to the national interests of these non-western countries that their authorities are growing justifiably concerned about financial security.
You correctly highlight potentially central roles of China and Russia in the genesis of the new world economic order. Unfortunately, current leadership of the CBR (Central Bank of Russia) remains trapped inside the intellectual cul-de-sac of the Washington paradigm and is unable to become a founding partner in the creation of a new global economic and financial framework. At the same time, the CBR already had to face the reality and create a national system for interbank messaging which is not dependent on SWIFT, and opened it up for foreign banks as well. Cross-currency swap lines have been already set up with key participating nations. Most transactions between member states of the EAEU are already denominated in national currencies and the share of their currencies in internal trade is growing at a rapid pace.
A similar transition is taking place in trade with China, Iran, and Turkey. India indicated that it is ready to switch to payments in national currencies as well. A lot of effort is put in developing clearing mechanisms for national currency payments. In parallel, there is an ongoing effort to develop a digital non-banking payment system, which would be linked to gold and other exchange-traded commodities – the ‘stablecoins.’
Recent US and European sanctions imposed on the banking channels have caused a rapid increase in these efforts. The group of countries working on the new financial system only needs to announce the completion of the framework and readiness of the new trade currency and the process of formation of the new world financial order will accelerate further from there. The best way to bring it about would be to announce it at the SCO or BRICS regular meetings. We are working on that.
The Cradle: This has been an absolutely key issue in discussions by independent analysts across the west. Was the Russian Central Bank advising Russian gold producers to sell their gold in the London market to get a higher price than the Russian government or Central Bank would pay? Was there no anticipation whatsoever that the coming alternative to the US dollar will have to be based largely on gold? How would you characterize what happened? How much practical damage has this inflicted on the Russian economy short-term and mid-term?
Glazyev: The monetary policy of the CBR, implemented in line with the IMF recommendations, has been devastating for the Russian economy. Combined disasters of the “freezing” of circa $400 billion of foreign exchange reserves and over a trillion dollars siphoned from the economy by oligarchs into western offshore destinations, came with the backdrop of equally disastrous policies of the CBR, which included excessively high real rates combined with a managed float of the exchange rate. We estimate this caused under-investment of circa 20 trillion rubles and under-production of circa 50 trillion rubles in goods.
Following Washington’s recommendations, the CBR stopped buying gold over the last two years, effectively forcing domestic gold miners to export full volumes of production, which added up to 500 tons of gold. These days the mistake and the harm it caused are very much obvious. Presently, the CBR resumed gold purchases, and, hopefully, will continue with sound policies in the interest of the national economy instead of ‘targeting inflation’ for the benefit of international speculators, as had been the case during the last decade.
The Cradle: The Fed as well as the ECB were not consulted on the freeze of Russian foreign reserves. Word in New York and Frankfurt is that they would have opposed it were they to have been asked. Did you personally expect the freeze? And did the Russian leadership expect it?
Glazyev: My book, The Last World War, that I already mentioned, which was published as far back as 2015, argued that the likelihood of this happening eventually is very high. In this hybrid war, economic warfare and informational/cognitive warfare are key theaters of conflict. On both of these fronts, the US and NATO countries have overwhelming superiority and I did not have any doubt that they would take full advantage of this in due course.
I have been arguing for a long time for the replacement of dollars, euro, pounds, and yen in our foreign exchange reserves with gold, which is produced in abundance in Russia. Unfortunately, western agents of influence which occupy key roles at central banks of most countries, as well as rating agencies and key publications, were successful in silencing my ideas. To give you an example, I have no doubt that high-ranking officials at the Fed and the ECB were involved in developing anti-Russian financial sanctions. These sanctions have been consistently escalating and are being implemented almost instantly, despite the well-known difficulties with bureaucratic decision making in the EU.
The Cradle: Elvira Nabiullina has been reconfirmed as the head of the Russian Central Bank. What would you do differently, compared to her previous actions? What is the main guiding principle involved in your different approaches?
Glazyev: The difference between our approaches is very simple. Her policies are an orthodox implementation of IMF recommendations and dogmas of the Washington paradigm, while my recommendations are based on the scientific method and empirical evidence accumulated over the last hundred years in leading countries.
The Cradle: The Russia-China strategic partnership seems to be increasingly ironclad – as Presidents Putin and Xi themselves constantly reaffirm. But there are rumbles against it not only in the west but also in some Russian policy circles. In this extremely delicate historical juncture, how reliable is China as an all-season ally to Russia?
Glazyev: The foundation of Russian-Chinese strategic partnership is common sense, common interests, and the experience of cooperation over hundreds of years. The US ruling elite started a global hybrid war aimed at defending its hegemonic position in the world, targeting China as the key economic competitor and Russia as the key counter-balancing force. Initially, the US geopolitical efforts were aiming to create a conflict between Russia and China. Agents of western influence were amplifying xenophobic ideas in our media and blocking any attempts to transition to payments in national currencies. On the Chinese side, agents of western influence were pushing the government to fall in line with the demands of the US interests.
However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. Common interests of survival and resistance are uniting China and Russia, and our two countries are largely symbiotic economically. They complement and increase competitive advantages of each other. These common interests will persist over the long run.
The Chinese government and the Chinese people remember very well the role of the Soviet Union in the liberation of their country from the Japanese occupation and in the post-war industrialization of China. Our two countries have a strong historical foundation for strategic partnership and we are destined to cooperate closely in our common interests. I hope that the strategic partnership of Russia and the PRC, which is enhanced by the coupling of the One Belt One Road with the Eurasian Economic Union, will become the foundation of President Vladimir Putin’s project of the Greater Eurasian Partnership and the nucleus of the new world economic order.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Russia has condemned the United States’ fresh sanctions on two of its largest banks, saying they are a direct blow to the Russian population and ordinary citizens.
Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov made the remarks on Wednesday, after Washington announced a new round of sanctions against Sberbank and Alfa-Bank over Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.
“The administration’s non-stop sanctions attacks show true aspirations of the United States. An example is the restrictions against Sberbank and Alfa-Bank, where most Russians keep their savings. This is a direct attack on the Russian population, ordinary citizens,” Tass news agency quoted him as saying.
“By imposing new sanctions, Washington continues to damage the global economy. It undermines the possibilities of foreign partners for mutually beneficial cooperation with us. It leaves foreign business without the income necessary in the current period of economic turbulence,” the ambassador added.
Antonov said the US’s attempts to make it difficult for Russia to service its public debt were “puzzling,” adding that Moscow saw in these efforts “a desire to tarnish the reputation of Russia, which, despite the economic barriers built by Washington, continues to fulfill its debt obligations in good faith and on time.”
The US announced the new round of sanctions targeting Russian state-owned financial institutions and other enterprises on Wednesday. Restrictions also targeted Kremlin officials and their family members.
The move came after Ukraine and its Western allies, including the US, accused Moscow of committing war crimes in Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital.
In a video message on Saturday, the mayor of Bucha, Anatoliy Fedoruk, claimed that 300 people had been killed by the Russian army, with some appearing to have been executed summarily. He displayed videos and photographs, claiming that 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves while nearly 10 others had been either not buried or only partially covered by earth.
Kiev has urged major Western powers, including the United States, to impose new crippling sanctions on Moscow over the “massacre” in Bucha.
Russia has denied the allegations, terming it a “monstrous forgery” staged by the West to discredit it.
Moscow has twice requested an urgent session of the United Nations Security Council over the Bucha situation, but the United Kingdom has refused to hold the meeting both times.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military offensive against Ukraine on February 24. The conflict has provoked a unanimous response from Western countries, which have imposed a long list of sanctions on Moscow. Russia says it will halt the operation instantly if Kiev meets Moscow’s list of demands, including never applying to join NATO.
Delegations from Kiev and Moscow have been negotiating for peace and a ceasefire in recent weeks, but a breakthrough has been elusive.
Question: Initially, the in-person talks were held in Belarus followed by online talks. You met with Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba in Antalya, Turkey, on March 10. What’s your take on the negotiating process?
Sergey Lavrov: I did not fly to Turkey in order to forestall the Belarusian negotiating track agreed upon by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky which is now being implemented via video conference. President Zelensky asked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to speak with President Putin in order to set up a meeting between Dmitry Kuleba and me in Antalya, since we both planned to take part in the Antalya Diplomacy Forum.
Based on this request, President Vladimir Putin instructed me to hold a meeting and find out what Dmitry Kuleba has to offer (which is what I asked him to do). He stated that he did not arrive there to reiterate public statements. This statement got my attention. Dmitry Kuleba failed to vocalise any new ideas during the 90-minute conversation in the presence of Foreign Minister of Turkey Mevlut Cavusoglu, despite multiple reminders to the effect that I wanted to hear things that had not been said publicly. I did my part and made myself available to listen to what he had to say. Anyway, we had a conversation, which is not a bad thing. We are ready for such contacts going forward. It would be good to know the added value derived from such contacts and how the proposals to create new channels of interaction correlate with the functioning of an existing and steady negotiating process (the Belarusian channel).
I’m not going to comment on the details, which are a delicate matter. According to head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky, the talks focus on humanitarian issues, the situation on the ground in terms of hostilities, and on matters of political settlement. Overall, the agenda is known (it was repeatedly and publicly announced by President Vladimir Putin in his elaborate remarks) and includes matters of security and saving lives of the people in Donbass; preventing Ukraine from becoming a permanent threat to the security of the Russian Federation; and preventing the revival in Ukraine of neo-Nazi ideology, which is illegal around the world, including civilised Europe.
I base my opinion on the assessments provided by our negotiators. They state that the talks are not going smoothly (for obvious reasons). However, there is hope for a compromise. The same assessment is given by a number of Ukrainian officials, including members of President Zelensky’s staff and President Zelensky himself.
Question: President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky said that the positions of Russia and Ukraine during the talks have become more “realistic.”
Sergey Lavrov: This is about a more realistic assessment of the ongoing events coming from Vladimir Zelensky. His previous statements were confrontational. We can see that this role and function has been reassigned to Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, who started saying that Russia’s demands are “unacceptable.” If they wish to create additional tension (as if the current tension were not enough) in the media space, what can we do?
We saw a similar tendency with respect to the Minsk agreements. Dmitry Kuleba was riding ahead on a dashing horse, along with those who were hacking the Minsk agreements into pieces. He publicly stated that the agreements would not be fulfilled. I would give negotiators an opportunity to work in a calmer environment, without stirring up more hysteria.
Question: President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky said that they are “reasonable people” and they realise that they are no longer welcome in NATO. What made him change his rhetoric? NATO aspirations are stated in one of the articles of the Ukrainian Constitution. They have been saying it all along that Kiev actually wants to be part of the alliance.
Sergey Lavrov: The rhetoric has changed because more reasonable thinking is paving its way to the minds of the Ukrainian leaders. The issue of dissolving the Soviet Union was resolved in a very odd manner: very few parties were asked; the decision was split “between three,” so to speak, and it was done. Later, certain common ground was achieved in the form of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It is good that the other former Soviet republics were shown some respect, at least post factum.
In the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, adopted before the Belovezh Accords, it was stated in black and white that Ukraine would be a non-aligned and militarily neutral state. In all the subsequent documents characterising the formation of Ukrainian statehood, the declaration was always listed among fundamental documents. After the anti-constitutional coup in February 2014, the Ukrainian Constitution was amended to include statements on continuous movement towards NATO (in addition to the European Union). That undermined the integrity of the previous process and the fundamental documents that the Ukrainian state is based on – because the Declaration of Sovereignty and the Act of Ukraine’s Independence are still listed among the founding documents of the Ukrainian state.
This is not the only inconsistency. The provision of the Ukrainian Constitution on ensuring the rights of the Russian and other ethnic minorities remains intact. However, a huge number of laws have been adopted that run counter to this constitutional provision and flagrantly discriminate against the Russian language, in particular, against all European norms.
We remember that President Zelensky recently said that NATO must close the sky over Ukraine and start fighting for Ukraine, recruiting mercenaries and sending them to the frontline. That statement was made very aggressively. The reaction of the North Atlantic Alliance, where some clear-headed people still remain, had a cooling effect. This reasonable approach in the current situation deserves to be welcomed.
Before the final decision was made to begin the special military operation, President Vladimir Putin spoke about our initiatives concerning the security guarantees in Europe at a news conference in the Kremlin, explaining that it is unacceptable that Ukraine’s security be ensured through its NATO membership. He clearly said that we are ready to look for any ways to ensure the security of Ukraine, the European countries and Russia except for NATO’s expansion to the east. The alliance has been assuring us that we should not be worried as it serves a defensive purpose and nothing threatens us and our security. The alliance was declared as defensive in its early days. During the Cold War, it was clear who was defending whom, where and against which party. There was the Berlin Wall, both concrete and geopolitical. Everybody accepted that contact line under the Warsaw Pact and NATO. It was clear which line NATO would protect.
When the Warsaw Pact and later the Soviet Union were dissolved, NATO started, at its own discretion and without any consultations with those who used to be part of the balance of power on the European continent, working its way to the east, moving the contact line further to the right each time. When the contact line came too close to us (and nobody took our reasoning seriously in the past 20 years), we proposed the European security initiatives which, to my great regret, were also ignored by our arrogant partners.
Question: Many people in Russia and Ukraine are asking themselves whether the situation could not have been resolved peacefully. Why didn’t this work out? Why did it become necessary to conduct a special operation?
Sergey Lavrov: Because the West did not want to resolve this situation peacefully. Although I have already discussed this aspect, I would like to highlight it once again. This has absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine. This concerns the international order, rather than Ukraine alone.
The United States has pinned down the whole of Europe. Today, some Europeans are telling us that Russia started behaving differently, that Europe had its own special interests differing from those of the United States, and that we have compelled Europe to share the United States’ fervour for the cause. I believe that what has happened is entirely different. Under President Joe Biden, the United States set the goal of subordinating Europe, and it has succeeded in forcing Europe to implicitly follow US policies. This is a crucial moment, a landmark in contemporary history because, in the broad sense of the word, it reflects the battle for a future international order.
The West stopped using the term “international law,” embodied in the UN Charter, many years ago, and it invented the term “rules-based order.” These rules were written by members of an inner circle. The West incentivised those who accepted these rules. At the same time, narrow non-universal organisations dealing with the same matters as the universal organisations were established. Apart from UNESCO, there is a certain international partnership in support of information and democracy. We have international humanitarian law and the UN Refugee Agency dealing with related issues. The European Union is setting up a special partnership for dealing with the same matter. However, decisions will be based on EU interests, and they will disregard universal processes.
France and Germany are establishing an alliance for multilateralism. When asked about the reason for setting it up at a time when the UN – the most legitimate and universal organisation – embodies multilateralism, they gave an interesting reply that the UN employed many retrogrades, and that the new alliance prioritised avantgardism. They also stated their intention to promote multilateralism in such a way that no one would hamper their efforts. When asked what the ideals of this multilateralism were, they said that they were EU values. This arrogance and misinterpreted feeling of one’s own superiority also rule supreme in a situation that we are now reviewing, namely, the creation of a world where the West would a priori manage everything with impunity. Many people now claim that Russia has come under attack because it remains virtually the only obstacle that needs to be removed before the West can start dealing with China. This straightforward statement is quite truthful.
You asked why it was impossible to peacefully resolve the situation. For many years, we suggested resolving the matter peacefully. Many reasonable politicians from the US and Europe responded in earnest to Vladimir Putin’s proposal at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. Unfortunately, decision-makers in Western countries ignored it. Numerous assessments by world-famous political analysts, published in many leading US magazines, such as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and European magazines, were also ignored. A coup took place in 2014. The West unconditionally backed Ukraine and the coup’s perpetrators who had gained power in Kiev. The West emphatically refuses to set any framework in relations between NATO and the territory of Russian interests. These warnings were also voiced but were disregarded, to put it mildly.
You should read the works of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who said back in the 1990s that Ukraine would become a key issue. He said openly that a friendly Ukraine would make Russia a great power, and that a hostile Ukraine would turn it into a regional player. These statements concealed geopolitical implications. Ukraine merely acted as a tool for preventing Russia from upholding its legitimate and equal rights on the international scene.
Question: Not long ago, I heard the current adviser to the President of Ukraine, Alexey Arestovich, speak. A couple of years ago, he said that neutral status was too expensive for Ukraine. “We can’t afford it,” he said. What do you think about this statement? Is that true? Following up on what worries ordinary Ukrainians – security guarantees – what is Russia ready to do? What kind of guarantees can it provide?
Sergey Lavrov: Neutral status is being seriously discussed in a package with security guarantees. This is exactly what President Vladimir Putin said at one of his news conferences: there are multiple options out there, including any generally acceptable security guarantees for Ukraine and all other countries, including Russia, with the exception of NATO expansion. This is what is being discussed at the talks. There is specific language which is, I believe, close to being agreed upon.
Question: Can you share it with us yet or not?
Sergey Lavrov: I’d rather not, because it is a negotiating process. Unlike some of our partners, we try to adhere to the culture of diplomatic negotiations, even though we were forced to make documents public that are normally off-limits. We did so in the situations where our communication with the German and French participants of the Normandy format was misrepresented to the point where it was the opposite of what really happened. Then, in order to expose the culprits before the international community, we were forced to make things public. No attempts at provocation are being made now as we discuss the guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality. Hopefully, the first attempts at a businesslike approach that we are seeing now will prevail and we will be able to reach specific agreements on this matter even though simply declaring neutrality and announcing guarantees will be a significant step forward. The problem is much broader. We talked about it, including from the point of view of values such as the Russian language, culture and freedom of speech, since Russian media are outright banned, and the ones that broadcast in Ukraine in Russian were shut down.
Question: But they can always tell us that they are an independent country and it’s up to them to decide which language to speak. Why are you – Russia and Moscow – forcing us to speak Russian?
Sergey Lavrov: Because Ukraine has European obligations. There is the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. There are multiple other commitments, including in the Council of Europe, which we are leaving (this has been announced officially). However, we will never renounce our obligations regarding the rights of ethnic minorities, be they linguistic, cultural, or any other. We will never “withdraw from the documents” that guarantee freedom of access to information.
In the 1990s, everyone was rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the Soviet Union becoming an absolutely obedient and obsequious partner of the West. Back then, we did our best to show that perestroika and new thinking were opening up a groundbreaking chapter in the history of our state. We signed everything that the West wanted us to sign at the OSCE, including the declaration proposed by the West and supported by us which contained obligations to ensure freedom of access to information in each country and to transboundary information sources. Now, we are unable to get through to the West so that it itself starts fulfilling this obligation, which they themselves initiated.
This Russian language-related requirement is enshrined in the obligations. Ukraine did not turn them down. Can you imagine the consequences of Finland banning the Swedish language? There are 6 percent of Swedes in Finland, and Swedish is the second official language. Or, Ireland banning English, or Belgium banning French? The list goes on and on. All these minority languages are respected, regardless of the fact that they have a parent state, whereas our case represents an exception. This is a case of outright discrimination, and what is known as enlightened Europe is just keeping quiet about it.
Question: We have decided to withdraw from the Council of Europe before being expelled. Why?
Sergey Lavrov: By and large, this decision was formulated long ago. Not because of a series of suspension and reinstatement of our rights, but because that organisation has fully degenerated. It was established as a pan-European organisation of all countries, with the exception of Belarus which was given observer status. We did our best to help Belarus participate in several conventions, which is possible in the Council of Europe. In general, Belarus was considering the possibility of joining it.
However, over the years the Council of Europe has turned into a kind of OSCE, (excuse my language), where the initial idea of interaction and consensus as the main instruments of attaining the goal of common European cooperation and security was superceded by polemics and rhetoric, which was becoming increasingly Russophobic and was determined by the unilateral interests of the West, in particular, NATO countries and the EU. They used their technical majority in the OSCE and the Council of Europe to undermine the culture of consensus and compromise and to force their views on everyone, showing that they have no regard whatsoever, do not care one iota for our interests and only want to lecture and moralise, which is what they have actually been doing.
Our intention to withdraw matured long ago, but our decision to withdraw has been accelerated by the recent events and the decision enforced through voting. The Parliamentary Assembly issued recommendations for the Committee of Ministers, which has voted to suspend our rights. They told us not to worry, that we would only be unable to attend the sessions but can still make our payments to the budget. This is what they have openly said.
The Foreign Ministry pointed out in a statement that our withdrawal from this organisation will not affect the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens under the European Convention on Human Rights, from which we are withdrawing as part of our withdrawal from the Council of Europe. First of all, there are constitutional guarantees and guarantees under the international conventions to which Russia is a party. These universal conventions are the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which the United States has not signed); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the US is not among its signatories) and many other conventions and covenants most of which have been incorporated into the national legislation. Our lawyers are working with the Constitutional Court and the Justice Ministry on additional amendments to Russian laws to prevent any infringement on the rights of our citizens as the result of our withdrawal from the Council of Europe.
Question: Several counties have been trying to develop dialogue between Moscow and Kiev. France was the first to do this, followed by Israel, and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will come to Moscow today. Turkey has stepped up its activity. Why are these three countries so active on this issue?
Sergey Lavrov: They are not the only ones to offer their services. The President of Russia had a telephone conversation with President of the European Council Charles Michel yesterday. He has had contacts with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, President of France Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett. My foreign colleagues have contacted me as well. For example, Switzerland, which has traditionally posed as a country where compromises are reached, is ready to mediate.
In this context, it is strange that mediation services are being offered by the countries which have joined the unprecedented sanctions against Russia and have proclaimed the goal (they make no bones about stating this openly) of setting the Russian people against the Russian authorities. We take a positive view on the mediation offers coming from the countries which have refused to play this Russophobic game, which are aware of the root causes of the current crisis, that is, the fundamental and legitimate national interests of Russia, and which have not joined this war of sanctions. We are ready to analyse their proposals. Israel and Turkey are among these states.
Question: Do they come with proposals, asking if they could help establish dialogue? Or how is this taking place in reality?
Sergey Lavrov: This happens in different ways. Right now, I cannot go into detail, but both want to help achieve accord at the talks conducted via the “Belarusian channel.” They know the state of the talks, what proposals are on the table, and where there is a bilateral rapprochement. They are sincerely trying to speed up the rapprochement. We welcome this, but I would like to stress once again that the matter of key importance is having a direct dialogue between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations and solving what we consider fundamental issues related to the effort not only to ensure the physical security of people in eastern Ukraine and for that matter in other parts of Ukraine, but also to enable them to live normal, civilised lives in the country that has a duty to ensure the rights of those who are known as ethnic minorities, rights that have been trampled underfoot in every sense.
Let us not forget about the tasks of demilitarisation. Ukraine cannot have weapons that create a threat to the Russian Federation. We are ready to negotiate on the types of armaments that do not present a threat to us. This problem will have to be solved even regardless of the situation’s NATO aspect. Even without NATO membership, the United States or anyone else can supply offensive weapons to Ukraine on a bilateral basis, just as they did with the anti-missile bases in Poland and Romania. No one asked NATO. Let us not forget that [Ukraine] is perhaps the only OSCE and European country that has legislatively legalised the neo-Nazis’ right to promote their views and practices.
These are matters of principle. I hope that the realisation of their legitimacy, justifiability and key importance for our interests and therefore the interests of European security will enable those, who are graciously offering their good offices, to promote relevant compromises in contacts with Ukraine, among others.
Question: We have named certain countries that are helping to settle this crisis. Has the United States offered any services in this connection, like “let us help to establish contacts?” After all, it is no secret to anyone that Russia-US relations were at a very low level. Now they have hit rock bottom, haven’t they?
Sergey Lavrov: Yes, there is such a figurative expression. Of course, the situation is unprecedented. I can’t recall anything like the frenzied policy that Washington is conducting right now. To a considerable extent, this policy is generated by Congress whose members have lost all sense of reality and are throwing all conventions to the winds. I am not even mentioning the diplomatic proprieties that have long since been abandoned.
The United States certainly has played the decisive role in shaping the position of the Kiev authorities. The Americans have maintained a huge “presence” in Kiev’s “corridors of power” for many years, including the uniformed agencies, the security service, and the top brass. Everyone knows this. The CIA and other US secret services have their missions there.
Like other NATO members (the Canadians, the British), they have sent hundreds of their instructors to train combat units not only within the Armed Forces of Ukraine but also in the so-called volunteer battalions, including Azov and Aydar. However, some seven or eight years ago, in 2014, immediately after the coup d’etat, the Azov battalion was officially struck off the list of recipients of US aid. This was done precisely because it was regarded as an extremist, if not terrorist, organisation. Today, all pretences have been removed.
Now any person or group in Ukraine that declares Russia its enemy is immediately taken under the wing of overseas and Western patrons.
They are talking about the supremacy of law and about democracy. What supremacy of law, if the EU, in violation of its own law on the inadmissibility of arms supplies to conflict zones, takes the decision to do the opposite and send offensive arms to Ukraine?
We do not see any sign that the United States is interested in settling the conflict as soon as possible. If they were interested, they would have every opportunity, first, to explain to the Ukrainian negotiators and President Zelensky that they should seek compromises. Second, they need to make it clear that they are aware of the legitimacy of our demands and positions, but do not want to accept them, not because they are illegitimate but because they would like to dominate the world and are unwilling to restrain themselves with any commitments to take into consideration the interests of others. They have already brought Europe to heel, as I have said.
The US has been telling Europe for years that Nord Stream 2 could undermine their energy security. Europe responded that they should find out that on their own. They took the decision and their companies invested billions of euros. The Americans were claiming that this was contrary to the EU’s interests. They offered to sell them their liquefied gas. If there are no gas terminals, they should be built. The Germans told me this a few years ago. It was during President Trump’s administration. Europe was complaining that this would considerably increase gas prices for their consumers. Donald Trump replied that they were rich guys and will compensate the difference from the German budget. That’s their approach.
Today, Europe was shown its place. Germany eventually said that its regulator was taking a break, and this precisely defines the FRG’s place in the arrangements that the Americans are making on the world scene.
Question: Has Germany become a less independent state under the new chancellor? Would it have acted the same under Angela Merkel?
Sergey Lavrov: The Nord Stream 2 was commissioned, albeit temporarily suspended afterwards, under the new chancellor. I hope that experience will bring an understanding of the need to uphold national interests, rather than to fully rely on the overseas partner who will make all the decisions for you and then do everything for you as well. Clearly, the enormous number of US troops on German soil is also a factor that interferes with independent decision-making.
Articles are being published to the effect that the “politics of memory” is vanishing. It has always been considered a sacred thing in Germany and meant that the German people would never forget the suffering they brought during World War II, primarily to the peoples of the Soviet Union. After I read this, I realised that many people are aware of it. These are open publications. German political scientists are talking about this and, of course, ours do so as well. Several years ago, I spotted something that was probably the early phase of this emerging trend. We were holding ministerial and other consultations with the Germans (I’m talking about foreign policy talks) at the level of department directors and deputy ministers. I never saw this at the ministerial level. The thought that was conveyed to us during the talks was that “we, the Germans, have paid our dues to everyone and owe nothing to anyone, so stop bringing this up.”
Speaking of the Germans, there is a thing that is worth mentioning. We are now talking a lot about attributes of genocide or racial discrimination. Take, for instance, the siege of Leningrad. For many years and with all my colleagues, starting with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Guido Westerwelle, Heiko Maas, and most recently Annalena Baerbock, I very persistently, with each of them, raised the topic of paying compensations to the Leningrad siege survivors. The German government has made two one-time payments but only to Jewish survivors. We asked why only Jews, because many ethnic groups, including Russians and Tatars, lived in Leningrad and continue to live there. Many of them are still alive. How are they supposed to understand the fact that only the Jews have received some kind of help from the German government when at the time they were boiling shoes, burying children and transporting corpses on sleds together? The payments in question are not big. But, first, for many of them they matter, and second, they serve as the recognition of the fact that everyone has been impacted by the siege. Their answer was interesting. The Jews, they said, are victims of the Holocaust. These payments cannot be made to other survivors, because they are not Holocaust victims. Our attempts to reach out to the German legislators and politicians and tell them that the siege of Leningrad was an unparalleled event in the history of WWII, where there was no distinction between Jews, Russians or other ethnic groups, failed. We reached out to Jewish organisations. It is a matter of honour for them as well. We will continue this work going forward. January marked yet another anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad. The President of Russia signed an executive order on one-time payments to all siege survivors, including the Jews. We have not seen any sign of conscience awakening in Germany so far.
First, as the entire western press is clamoring in impotent range, Russia has fire 8 Kalibr missiles at a major NATO base in western Ukraine. The base is utterly destroyed and there are many (well over 180+) dead mercenaries and even more wounded ones. The base was near the Polish border which, of course, triggered even more hysterics.
What is important about this strike is this: Russia has just proven to the world that she can “reach” as far as she wants and that her conventional strikes can be truly crippling. That, of course, also means that as soon as any western mercenary crosses the Ukrainian border he will have a crosshairs painted on him.
Ever since the first Ukie civil war, the Nazis have been organizing what they called “safaris” where wealthy western Nazis could pay a lump sum to then travel to the Donbass and shoot some Snow Niggers. Of course, the problem with this concept that sometimes you could mistakenly hit a soldier rather than a civilian and that this Snow Nigger would shoot back.
So now, instead of asking Nazis to pay to kill Snow Niggers, now the Ukies (and their US masters, of course) are willing to pay Nazis to come a fight the Snow Niggers. And Iavorov in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the LOC must have felt extremely safe and cozy. This is now this facility is described in an interview of the Mayor of Lvov by the Israeli website Ynet:
Those who were there a week ago said that some 100,000 men, some of them are new recruits, were at the base, undergoing a fast-track army training before going into battle. It appears the Russian intelligence received a tip on the actions in the base, before deciding to bomb it.
True, in the same interview, the said mayor claimed “at least 35”!
This is what this major NATO facility looks like today, judge for yourself:
It should be noted that this base was also a huge weapons depot for weapons brought in by land, from Poland, and that all this western kit is now reduced to a gigantic Lego pieces dump.
By the way, there are many more such facilities in the Ukraine!
The base on the far left indicated as “International Center for Peacekeeping and Security”,Iaworow, Lvov oblast” (международный центр миротворчества и безопасности, Яворов, Львовская обл.) is the one the Russian destroyed! yes, it was labeled “Peacekeeping and Security”, I kid you not!
I don’t know who taught whom to lie like that – NATO and Nazis are both specialists in that field, really – but to call a military base which was supposed to bring a full brigade (several thousand!!) of Nazi volunteers a “peacekeeping security center” is truly precious, even by the rather lax standards of the Empire of Lies.
Then there was this strike, also in the Ukraine:
What you see here is the result of a Ukie strike on the Donetsk city center today.
The Ukies fired a Tochka-U missile precisely at downtown Donetsk.
Military value from this strike? Zero.
Feelgood value from this strike? Immense!
And no, this is NOT a war crime! This is how the glorious glorious armed forces of the Nazi Ukraine take just revenge against Russia and the “separs” who dare to support her.
Russia exposed to the world’s contempt
You cannot compare the innocent mercenaries to those criminal civilians, because the former act in the name of humanity civilization and progress whereas the latter are russki brutes, Mongols really, who represent a threat for the wonderful White and Christian European civilization.
In fact, when the western doubleplusgoodthinkers proclaim with indignation that the Ukrainian civil war (well, the two Ukie civil wars really) killed 14’000 people, they “forget” to mention that the vast majority of those killed where civilians from the LDNR and that for YEARS the LDNR forces did not reply to Ukie attacks, not just sniper or mortar fire, but also heavy artillery strikes and major terrorist attacks, including the President of the DNR.
But that matters nothing to the Empire of Lies.
But now that a sad and ugly group of bona fide Nazi volunteers got hit on a military base (a legitimate target under international law and the laws of war specifically!) we hear a massive “oy veh!!!” rising to the heavens and demanding that Russia be severely punished for daring to shoot at those wannabe Kulturträgers!
I think that it would be fair to summarize The Rule as follows: we get to kill as many Snow Niggers as we want, but Snow Niggers dare not kill any of our White and Christian Kulturträgers.
Speaking of niggers, here is another important missile strike.
The Iranian Sand Niggers used their (very accurate) missiles to obliterate a Mossad base in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now that, what shall we call it? maybe a “Jewish Cultural Center” or maybe a “Iraqi Law Center against Antisemitism” has been turned into this:
Interestingly, the IRGC indicated that the operation was in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capital of Damascus last Monday, in which two IRGC officers were killed. Apparently, the Iranian Snow Niggers do not believe that the Jewish Kulturträgers get to kill them without retaliation.
Most interestingly, following this strike the Israelis have copied the US “counter-attack philosophy” and… …done exactly nothing about this! The story is mostly buried deep in the Israeli media, which doesn’t deny or cover it up, it just mentions them en passant and then goes on to other topics (including lots of anti-Russian pro-Ukie coverage of the Russian’s special operation in the Ukraine).
Here is the simple truth: the Empire of Lies cannot afford a full-scale with against Russia and China: that we already knew, but it can’t even take on Iran, in spite of that country being much smaller and comparatively weaker. But what the Iranians do have truly formidable weapons, and I am not referring to their (actually quite formidable) missiles, but by their political will and courage to use their missiles against *any* enemy.
An often-repeated story is that the Iranian hero and martyr General Soleimani personally visited Moscow and convinced the Russians to launch their military intervention in Syria. This inspires two hopes in me:
I hope to see Moscow at least once more before my time down here is up and that day I hope to be able to bring flowers to a large statue of General Soleimani somewhere in Moscow, maybe in the place were the Pushkin Square McDonalds (due to close today, not a day too soon, thank you sanctions!!!) stood all these years? Or maybe right in front of the US Embassy in Moscow which, by then, I hope to see vacated by the servants of the Empire of Lies and, maybe, replaced by a US Music Center (Jazz, Blues, Country, Gospel, Appalachian and many other kinds of beautiful US music.) or, maybe, an exhibit like the one the Iranians did with the CIA station in Tehran? Something beautiful and inspiring for sure.
By the time I see Russia, maybe for a last time, I hope that the spirit and ethos of General Soleimani will “infect” all the Russian ruling elites and give them the morality and courage they currently so clearly lack.
God willing, God willing!
It is too early for any maps right now (dragon-first-1 was told by persons in high positions to stop making and posting his while Radovka is slow), but if I see something interesting, I will post it here.
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There are very few things in this world that can leave me almost speechless. This is one of them.
Dropping all pretense of their hidden ideology, Reuters is reporting exclusively that Facebook and Instagram have modified their terms and conditions to permit advocacy and support for the Nazi party in Ukraine (Azov Regiment), and they have modified their violence terms to allow platform users to advocate for death to Russians.
It would be odd if Big Tech were generically against all Nazi’s, while U.S. military advisors are in Ukraine training specific Azov Regiment Nazi’s to fight Russians. The Javelin missile system, pictured above, is what Ukraine is using to defeat Russian tanks and armored vehicles. The U.S. is sending the Ukraine military thousands of them. Apparently arming and training Nazis is okay right now.
“Emails also showed that Meta would allow praise of the right-wing Azov battalion, which is normally prohibited, in a change first reported by The Intercept. Meta spokesman Joe Osborne previously said the company was “for the time being, making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov Regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.” (link)
Meta Platforms (FB.O) will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, according to internal emails to its content moderators.
“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
The calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method, one email said, in a recent change to the company’s rules on violence and incitement.
The temporary policy changes on calls for violence to Russian soldiers apply to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, according to one email.
[…] “We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.),” it said in the email. (read more)
For almost fifteen years we have been outlining the connection of the Obama and EU ideologues to Nazism. This is something that everyone associated with the Democrat Party have denied repeatedly. Now, all of a sudden, Facebook and Instagram, the support system in Big Tech for the ideology of Democrats, is openly admitting a change in position allowing public support for Nazism on their platforms.
This is a remarkable moment.
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By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.
Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research facilities”. ”
An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).
So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your biological material.”
The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.
Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus, among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.
The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”
In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.
The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this propaganda”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective: “The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”
Down on the ground
Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.
Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters.
They will be bolstered by a fresh contingent of 450 fighters just arrived from – where else – Idlib, including lots of non-Syrians from Europe and the Maghreb. Most though are al-Qaedites and members of the Syrian branch of the Turkestan Islamic Party. Their transit point: the Syria-Turkish border, a smuggling free-for-all.
As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here. The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).
For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man
Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”
Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev.
Lavrov at least was quite explicit on some key issues. Russia does not want war; never used oil and gas as a weapon; and wants Ukraine to be neutral.
The West, Lavrov added, refuses to understand the concept of “indivisibility of security”; those who supply Ukraine with weapons and send mercenaries should understand “they’re responsible for their actions”; and referring to the hysterical sanctions swamp, he stressed, “we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life.”
It’s quite enlightening to juxtapose Lavrov with clueless NATOstan “analysts”, totally ignorant of Eurasia and pontificating about “a new ideological conflict between irredentist tyrannies and liberal democracies”. It’s about sovereignty, stupid – not ideology.
NATOstan of course is incapable of understanding the process of Nazification of Ukraine – the key theme of any serious political/cultural/sociological analysis. It’s not an accident that the list of nations supporting the neoNazi-infested collapsed government in Kiev happens to largely coincide with the list of nations that refused to vote in favor of the UN resolution condemning the rehabilitation of Nazism.
In historical terms, these “analysts” might learn something by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov considered Ukraine as an avowedly reductionist version of “the steppe”: culturally barren, not capable of creating anything, destined to barbaric destruction. It’s important to remember that when Ukraine attempted to constitute itself as a state in 1918-1920, cultural and industrial centers such as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Luhansk had never been Ukrainian. And western Ukraine for a long while was part of Poland.
All aboard the Eurasian train
On the economic front, the dogs of hybrid war bark while the Eurasia integration caravan marches on – with the Empire irretrievably being pushed outside of the Eurasian landmass.
In a phone call prior to the Lavrov-Kuleba meeting in Antalya, President Erdogan suggested to Putin setting up a trading mechanism in gold and also rubles, yuan and Turkish lira to beat the Western sanction hysteria. The source is Abdulkadir Selvi, very close to Erdogan. No Russia-China official comment yet.
The key fact is that Russia, China, and for that matter the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – responsible for at least 30% of global GDP and the bulk of the Eurasian market – don’t need the West at all.
As Peter Koenig, a former senior economist at the World Bank points out, “Western GDP has a different basis, with blown out of proportion services, whereas the GDP of the SCO and the Global South is production-based. A huge difference when one looks at the backing of currencies: in the West there is literally none. Eastern currencies are mostly backed by national economies, especially in China and soon in Russia too. That leads to self-sufficiency, and no longer reliance on the West.”
In the larger geopolitical spectrum, the non-stop war of attrition by the Empire against Russia with Ukraine as a pawn is a war against the New Silk Roads; Maidan in 2014 took place only a few months after the launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), then OBOR (One Belt, One Road) in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. It’s also a war on the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership. In sum: it’s an all-out war on Eurasia integration.
And that bring us to the key aspect of BRI: Eurasia rail/road connectivity – between China and the EU and with one corridor traversing Russia. The coordinated NATOstan sanction hysteria is not only against Russia, but also against China.
For the Beltway, BRI is beyond anathema: it’s almost like the Beast of the Apocalypse. As a response, the West even has concocted puny schemes such as the American B3W (“Build Back Better World) and the EU’s Global Gateway. Their impact, so far, does not even qualify as negligible.
Ukraine in itself is not a problem for BRI; traffic is only 2% of eastbound China-Europe freight trains. But Russia is another story.
According to Feng Xubin, Vice Chairman of the China-Europe Railway Express Transportation Coordination Committee, the freight settlement system between China and Russia may be in trouble: “At present, freight is denominated in dollars […] If the West cuts off Russia’s intermediate settlement channel in the international financial system, it means that the settlement system for freight charges between China and Russia will not be able to proceed normally.”
From the EU’s point of view, trade interruptions are not exactly a good deal. China-EU freight traffic increased over 100% last year.
For instance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are co-financing a 67 km high-speed rail stretch from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border.
Sanctions on Russia will definitely affect the trans-Eurasia supply chain – on transportation, ports, insurance, communications. Yet quite a few sanctions may be revised later on, as the EU itself starts to feel the pain.
China will have an abundance of Plan Bs. The key northern BRI corridor remains China-Kazakhstan-Russia-Belarus-EU, but there is a possible detour via the Caspian, in Aktau in Kazakhstan. There will be extra incentive to fully link the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway with the Turkish grid. And there will be extra movement in the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), with Baku connecting to the Iranian Caspian Sea coast and by rail to ultra-strategic Chabahar port.
So we may be heading towards extra impetus for BRI’s multimodal southern corridor – bypassing Russia: that means a boost for Turkey, the Caucasus and the Caspian. And no losses for China. As for Russia, even if this re-routing may last for a while, it’s not such a big deal. After all from now on Russia will be developing intensive trade towards the east and south of Eurasia, and not towards the sanctioning West.
نقل عن الرئيس الروسي فلاديمير بوتين قوله تعليقاً على مسار الحرب في أوكرانيا أن «الأميركيين رأوا مصادر قوتنا في سورية وحاولوا تقليدها لخوض حرب رابحة، ونحن رأينا نقاط ضعفهم ووضعنا ما يلزم من خطط لجعل حربهم خاسرة». ويشرح أحد الخبراء الذين يتابعون الحرب الدائرة في أوكرانيا عن كثب بصفتها حرباً أميركية روسية، معنى كلام الرئيس بوتين، فيقول أن الحرب تبدو أقرب لنسخة منقحة من الحرب السوريّة، يختبر فيها الطرفان في أخطر ساحة مواجهة، وربما آخر ساحة مواجهة قبل ترسيم التوازنات الدولية الجديدة والخرائط الدولية الجديدة، كل ما أدخلاه من تعديلات على خطط الحرب من خلال خبرة كل منهما المستقاة من دوره المحوريّ في الحرب السورية، التي أتاحت لكل من الدولتين العظميين فرصة التعرف عن قرب على خطط حرب الخصم، لمدة طويلة أتيح لكل منهما خلالها الزجّ بقوى جديدة وإجراءات جديدة، وتعديل وتنقيح الخطط، حتى استنفدت سورية ما توافر فيها بصفتها ساحة المواجهة الحاسمة الأولى بعد نهاية الحرب الباردة وتفكك الاتحاد السوفياتي، وسيادة القطب الأميركي الواحد وبدء مسار الصعود الروسي.
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بالمقارنة مع الحرب السورية يبدو الأميركيون قد اختاروا للحرب البلد الذي يجعل الحرب روسية أوروبية، فأوكرانيا وحدها تملك هذه الحساسية الخاصة بالنسبة لكل من روسيا والدول الأوروبية، ويمكن لها تفجير كل ما تم بناؤه بين الطرفين من خطوات متقدّمة بلغت اقتصادياً وسياسياً مرحلة الإيحاء بأن أوروبا تحولت او تكاد الى حليف أقرب لموسكو من واشنطن، ولذلك فقد منحوا هذه الحرب كل ما يعتقدونه فرصاً للفوز من وحي ما اكتسبوه من خبرة خسارتهم للحرب في سورية، فجعلوا الرئيس الأوكراني رمزاً للعداء لموسكو أملاً باستدراجها لجعل هدف إطاحته عنواناً للحملة الروسية، والوقوع في ما وقع فيه الأميركيون لجهة جعل إسقاط الرئيس السوري هدفاً لحربهم، وقد تورط رؤساء أميركا تباعاً، باراك أوباما ودونالد ترامب، بتحديد مواعيد لرحيل الرئيس بشار الأسد فإذا بهم يرحلون ويبقى، بينما تمترس الأميركيون وراء الشرعيّة الدستوريّة للرئيس أسوة بما اعتبروه أهم مصادر القوة التي توفرت لروسيا في سورية، وعملوا لمنح الرئيس الأوكراني كل الأسباب التي تجعله مصدر إلهام لنشوء “مقاومة وطنية أوكرانية” ضد “غزو أجنبي”.
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أضاف الأميركيون لهذه الخبرة مصدرين إضافيين، الأول سحب ورقة الشرعية القانونية دولياً من يد روسيا بإجبارها على إدخال جيشها بصورة “غير شرعية” الى أراضي بلد آخر، والثاني بناء قوة شعبية وعسكرية ملتحمة في القتال وراء الرئيس الأوكراني ضد روسيا، بمثل ما بدت في سورية القوة الشعبية والعسكرية المتماسكة وراء الرئيس الأسد في مواجهة الحرب الأميركية. وهكذا حلت القومية البيضاء المتطرفة التي ترفع شعار النازية الجديدة، إلى نواة صلبة لألوية الجيش المقاتلة، ومحوراً لبناء ميليشيات متعاطفة، ونقطة انطلاق لاستقدام متطوعين متعاطفين، في محاولة لتقليد الدور الذي لعبه حزب الله ومعه قوى المقاومة في سورية.
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على الضفة الروسية كان أبرز عناصر الخبرة المكتسبة حول الخصم الأميركي، الانتباه الى خشيته المرضية من أية خطوة قد تؤدي إلى تصادم مباشر روسي أميركي، والبناء على هذا العامل الهام خطة حرب بطيئة لا مبرر للسرعة في خوضها. فالحرب البطيئة تتيح تخفيض الأضرار على المدنيين، كما تتيح ترك تداعيات وتفاعلات الحرب التي تريد لها موسكو أن تتجذّر وتنمو، أن تنال الوقت اللازم لذلك. والخبرة الثانية التي انتبهت لها موسكو كانت إدراك أن العقوبات هي السلاح المحوري بيد واشنطن، وأن تفكيك هذه العقوبات وتحويلها الى سلاح معاكس يدمر الاقتصاد الغربي كلما تم المضي باستخدامه وتصعيده، يحتاج إلى برود روسي في التعامل مع يوميات الحرب من جهة، والى مخزون احتياطي قابل للتصرف يسبق بدء الحرب، وهكذا بدأت موسكو تراكم مخزوناً من العملات والذهب خارج السيطرة الغربية، بلغ حاجتها للإنفاق لعامين، أي 350 مليار دولار، وتحت وطأة يوميات الحرب بدأت تداعيات العقوبات التي وجد الغرب نفسه منساقاً نحوها في سوق الطاقة، مصدر زيادة للعائدات الروسية مع زيادة الطلب والأسعار معاً، وسبباً لتنازلات مفرطة يقدمها الغرب لخصومه وحلفاء روسيا القادرين على سد فجوات السوق، كحال إيران وفنزويلا،، بما جعل ما بناه الأميركيون خلال ثلاثين عاما عرضة للتدمير دفعة واحدة.
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انتبه الروس لأهمية تحضير عناوين معركتهم لمنع الأميركيين من الإفادة من مصادر قوة روسيا في سورية، فوضعوا هدفاً يرتبط بالأمن الدولي وعنوانه حياد أوكرانيا، وهدفاً داخلياً يرتبط باجتثاث النازية وحق تقرير المصير للأقليات القومية، لكنهم تنبهوا أكثر لما بمكن أن يشكل العدة السريّة للأميركيين، في مجال الأسلحة الكيميائية، فبادروا مبكراً للتفتيش عن كل ما يتصل بالمختبرات والوثائق والمخزون الكيمائي والبيولوجي، وحققوا انتصارا معنوياً كبيراً بوضع اليد على كنز استخباريّ على هذا الصعيد.
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المعادلة الواقعية تقول إن ما بدا خبرة أميركية من الحرب السورية بقي تكتيكياً يزول مفعوله مع الوقت، وما يبدو خبرة روسية صار استراتيجياً تكبر مفاعيله مع الوقت.
Note by the Saker: one of our readers today sent me a very interesting document in Russian. First, I thought “more of the same” (5th columnist stuff) but then I started reading it and I changed my mind. This was clearly written by a military professional, his name is Alexander Dubrovsky. It was posted here and here. So I literally *begged* our new Russian translators to make even a “quick and dirty translation” because I wanted to get the info to you as fast as possible (in the meantime, I was writing this). And one of them did! (Thank you N.!!!).
While Dubrovsky’s views are not “Holy Writ” his testimony and analysis is, I think, priceless, especially for those who live in Zone A. We don’t have to agree with every letter, but I urge you to read it very carefully and in full. I consider this text so important that I will post it under “guest analyses” and not “Saker Community translations” because I want to give it max visibility. All our articles under “guest analyses” are written for the Saker blog or by permission, never taken off the Internet without the author’s permission. But, as the ancient Russian saying goes, “rules are for the cause and not the cause for the rules” 🙂
As promised, I am not inventing anything more about the special operation in Ukraine, giving the floor to professionals.
The source is unknown to me; it came via WhatsApp. It is published without notes and without editing, only some places highlighted by me.
Subjective opinion.
(Let’s try to make sense of the situation without hysteria and insults.)
It’s hard for everyone. Our guys are dying. Citizens of Ukraine are dying. But the hardest part is for the military, acting both in reserve, both Russian and Ukrainian, who have gone through “hot” conflicts. I’m grinding my teeth from impotence, I’m not personally sure — could I have carried out the Commander-in-Chief’s order had I been in the ranks today. To minimize civilian casualties is understandable, we are one people. And how to try not to cause critical damage to the APU — I have little idea within the tactics of my own unit.
I categorically object to the publication of the number of combat losses until the operation has entered its final phase. This is a gift for someone else’s information war, a trump card in the hands of the enemy, the dispersal of false information among outright alarmists inside the country: “they all lie, hide, underestimate”, “no war”, “mothers, don’t let your sons”, “how I want peace”, “how much more blood can be shed”…
You can and should. Soldiers and heroes are dying. Who came to the army not to polish paving stones with their shoe soles, but to defend the Motherland. Even at the cost of his own life. This was a mistake of the General Staff, the people should clearly understand the objectives of the operation, its necessity, the inevitability of victims. Not the current price.
It sounds cruel, but such is the harsh military reality. We will wipe our own and women’s tears after the Victory, we will bow to every widow, mother, bride, sister for the feat of their men.
The first stage of the operation…
We underestimated the enemy’s power of informational, ideological, psychological resistance, they were waiting for us. Literally on the very first day, with one click of American bloody fingers, they deprived us of the support of the civilian population and those AFU units ready to become neutral. Millions of dollars, thousands of IT guys, global media corporations cut Ukraine off from any objective information, it stank in our country.
And our main losses were in the first three days. Now they will be rapidly reduced. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, like the Crimean one— are no longer carried out by the Russian army. The fighters received other orders, got involved, got angry, regrouped, any hopes for active support from the civilian population and those parts of the AFU who had changed their mind were dispelled.
There were few flowers and bread loaves to be seen, the people have been crushed by propaganda and lies, intimidated into insanity by the Nazis. Another important point was missed in the calculations — almost 600 thousand Ukrainians have passed through the ATO zone in the Donbas since 2014, today they have replenished the territorial defense everywhere, many have something to fear. Especially in the wake of fakes about executions without trial by the ATO.
Can you imagine what, during a year of service there, the Nazis stuffed into their heads – gave them the opportunity to shoot at the settlements of “quilted jackets and colorados” with impunity, to mock the civilian population there. So, the calculation for the help of locals and APU was inaccurate, the cancer in Ukrainian society is simply monstrous. But… we will cure it.
If we explain our tactics of the first days… this is a creatively reworked “reconnaissance by combat” of the Great Patriotic War. Only with a deep and rapid penetration into the Nazi-occupied territory. We provoked the activity of the enemy with tactical groups, deliberately drawing out parts of the APU and the National Guard from their locations. With a small number withstanding the terrible counterattacks of tanks and armored vehicles, of a superior in number motorized infantry.
Sometimes it was impossible to suppress the “Grads”, artillery and mortars hidden in residential neighborhoods that were nailing you. Urban areas could not be cleaned methodically in combat formations, causing supporting fire, attack helicopters, sappers, flamethrowers, tanks to carry machine-gun emplacements in houses and social infrastructure facilities.
This is a war unfamiliar to us veterans. Especially when the sky is under your full control, airfields are packed with attack aircraft and bombers, operational and tactical missile systems are in service, there is a lot of heavy artillery. Now it has become clear even to civilians: the correct name for what is happening truly is “a special military operation for denazification.” And the demilitarization of Nezalezhnaya was completed by the end of the third day.
The APU, as a single, manageable and effective structure, has ceased to exist. Today, there are dozens of groups of different numbers isolated from each other, hiding in cities and towns. No centralized supply, no air support, no approach of reinforcements. They are not able to act within the framework of any plans of the Ukrainian General Staff. Just crowds of armed men with orders to stand to the death.
The main groups “North” and “East” were beheaded and deprived of command — these are 22 brigades, which had been entrusted with the honorable duty to drown Donbass in blood at the beginning of March. We beat them to it by a week or two, starting our own special operation. Now 150 thousand people (together with national soldiers) are marinated in “cauldrons”, cut off from each other. For a second — this was done by smaller Russian forces… and in five days.
There is no organized resistance in other operational areas. Separate parts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), national battalions, sabotage groups. Everyone acts at their discretion, with varying degrees of activity. There is no way to move in columns, regroup, replenish ammunition, fuel, equipment even in local warehouses, everything is systematically destroyed by high-precision weapons and aircraft.
In a week or two, 80% of the AFU will turn into detachments completely devoid of ammunition, fuel, medicines, and food. Mentally and physically exhausted, without a unified command, goals and objectives. For the army, this is a terrible thing – despondency and decay. Especially for the Ukrainian, which is held by fear, propped up by Bandera detachments. Servicemen fear for the fate of their families in the rear.
The second stage of the operation…
Recognizably, the Syrian scenario. A neutral or terrorist-fearing population, among which it is almost impossible to identify militants. The Russian Army does not take such settlements – it surrounds cities with Bandera national battalions. Soon we will observe buses and “export tours” in the direction of the Western region. As soon as they are “ripe” without any support and help from outside.
In other places, cities are taken into semi-encirclement, thereby inviting the defenders to leave the territory on their own. No organized military columns, heavy equipment – all these goods are being destroyed. Individually, expensive. Yes, there is a danger of the appearance of a large number of sabotage groups, however, strategically three main tasks of the special operation are being solved: minimizing losses among the civilian population and infrastructure, our units and the army of Ukraine.
For the Russian and Ukrainian military to be cutting each other up with rapture is much too a luxurious gift for Washington and the Euro-Reich. The Bandera’s “partisan detachments” will get on your nerves, but the idea of the command is not bad. They will become legitimate prey for counter-terror detachments, military police and Ramzan Kadyrov’s men from the National Guard. Who do not take terrorist prisoners, they wipe them out… wherever they may find them. Denazification in the literal sense of the word.
An even sadder fate awaits the numerous mercenaries of the EuroReich, from which they form not military units (no time), but sabotage and tactical groups. Our General Staff has already stated that it does not consider them combatants with all the ensuing consequences, no conventions on prisoners of war apply here. I am sure that a special, cruel and purposeful hunt will be conducted for these “soldiers of fortune”. Poor devils…
The third stage of the operation.
I will not tell you in detail how and where the fighting unfolds, there is enough information from professional experts in the public domain. But everything is happening strictly according to plans, we have not even started transferring reserves, and they are standing in columns in the border areas. Losses are not just tolerable (from a military statistical point of view) — insignificant. Not a single unit has been allocated for re-formation or rest, which means it is fully combat-ready.
Look at the map, estimate the distances, marches, constant clashes, regrouping, maneuvering for tens of kilometers, and remember – our guys are opposed by the third largest army in Europe and extremely motivated Nazi formations. We need to tighten up the rear, rest elementary, maintain equipment, perform a bunch of previously unforeseen actions.
There is no need to pressure anyone, to demand more decisive actions – Flags of Victory over Mariupol, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kharkov, Odessa, and even more so, useless Kiev with its three million panicked, propaganda-pumped citizens. The objectives of the operation are strategy and tactics – in this completely new page in the art of war, haste is unacceptable.
My classmate at the Academy asked yesterday in a personal post:
Why is military aid to Ukraine not destroyed right at the arrival airport?
Why is it even possible for NATO transporters to visit the airspace of Ukraine?
Do you have a feeling that our diplomats are beginning to drain the efforts of the army? … All sorts of bad thoughts are wandering around in my head.
According to point number three. There will be no drain, all the goals of the special operation will be fulfilled. This is categorically repeated every day by the hardened Lavrov, and Putin announced yesterday. The French “peacemaker” Macron is all washed up with his mediation. And Medinsky in Belovezhskaya Pushcha is subtly mocking the metrosexuals from the Ukrainian delegation. There’s no one there to talk to.
Look at the brave Commander-in-Chief Ze, how he looks. Complete disintegration of the personality under the influence of drugs. The Americans will not allow him to negotiate and his own Nazis will kill him. The task is different – to completely destroy the country, drown it in chaos, so there will be nothing left over for anyone.
The special operation does not stop, there will be no more delays. Every day of delay categorically harms us, unplanned diplomatic, political, economic and military problems appear. Only speed and onslaught, until in the West they begin to assess the situation with a cool head.
About flying transporters with NATO symbols delivering weapons. This is impossible, the sky over the Nezalezhnaya and the south of Russia is closed for flights. They will make ground deliveries from Poland. And we will not destroy such convoys with “humanitarian aid”. Why, you ask? Better ask another question — who exactly is in power in Ukraine?
Outright Nazis. They took millions of civilians hostage in cities without humanitarian corridors, drove terrified people into basements and subway stations. Poisoning people with lies about “Russian atrocities”, mass shootings, executions, violence, carpet bombing. They place civilians with machine guns near strategic command and control facilities. As in Kiev at the SBU building, closely adjacent to the St Sofia Cathedral.
Zelensky’s curators and Bandera battalions are staging a humanitarian catastrophe, leaving the towns and villages of Donbass and blowing up everything: bridges, substations, pumping stations. Remember the liberation of Ukraine and 1945, the agony of the Third Reich. The quote of the demoniac, issued in the orders on the destruction of the entire infrastructure of Germany: “if the war is lost, it absolutely does not matter that the people will die.”
It is useful to know history in order to predict the behavior of the Nazis. Such is the ideology, social norms of life, worldview.
So, military columns will not be destroyed for three reasons. Firstly, these are trophies. Secondly, weapons will not get to the combat-ready units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the national battalions of the South-East — the addressees are sitting in “cauldrons”. Thirdly, everything will be transported by ordinary civilian trucks, the rear transport of the AFU units is together with its parts, or destroyed in fleets.
Calculate and hit container trucks? Yes, you can. Just keep in mind — all the roads to the border checkpoints with “kind-hearted Europe” are clogged with columns of cars of fleeing Ukrainians for hundreds of kilometers. The traffic there is terrible. There are women and children in the cars. And Poland and Hungary did not move the inspection points into the depths of their territories, did not increase the checkpoint capacity with additional personnel.
That is, Ukrainian border guards with their “colleagues” keep people waiting for days to cross the border. Continue to describe the scenario that Kiev and Washington are counting on? Or can you figure out for yourself what kind of TV picture the whole “civilized world” expects? They dream that bloodthirsty Russians will start bombing civilian cars… or the railway.
But it is hard to believe in such scenarios, it is clear to everyone – Ukraine is completely lost, no amount of weapons will help it anymore. But some parts will definitely be delivered to Lvov, mercenaries and ideological Banderites will receive them. And then in groups proceed to commit sabotage, intimidate local administrations across the country, try to disrupt our communications and supply lines.
But this is another special operation, a police one. One that Ukrainians themselves are able to carry out with minimal Russian help, as they get over their shock. This is their land, they live here. Announce a reward of five thousand dollars for an anonymous denunciation — in a day all saboteurs and partisans will end. This is the kind of country it is.
But we’ll make it sooner…
I want to reassure you, for the twelfth day our guys are operating in a different operational and tactical reality, losses will rapidly decrease. If earlier there was a strict order not to cause even hypothetical harm to civilians, civilian objects… today it has been modified. In one sentence: “not to the detriment of the personnel of the units.” As a military man, I am completely satisfied: now the humanitarian sensitivities are over – real work will go on.
Fired at a column – in response will follow the entire military-technical menu. Such orders only work that way. Will the civilian population suffer? Yes, some losses are inevitable, but not through our fault. We do not storm cities according to Regulations, but bypass or surgically act with special forces, as in Kharkov. With the use of previously completely unknown tactics of urban combat by night maneuver groups. Let’s talk about this separately.
Let the Ukrainians pickle themselves in the cities, digesting the Banderites who have settled in and the “territorial battalions” fooled by Nazi propaganda. Who can no longer cope with looters there, never mind the “reflection of aggression”. This is not our problem now, no matter how cruel the words may sound.
The final turning point will come after the cleansing of Kharkov, blocking or taking Odessa. All the heroic self-defense forces of other settlements will dissolve by themselves, obvious signs of a humanitarian catastrophe are already visible in the surrounded cities. The fog, when it is completely fake, subsides most quickly in the dark, invigorating coolness and on an empty stomach.
The population is not morally ready to stand to the last. Ukrainian social networks are already full of messages from places where local administrations remained after the arrival of the Russian Army, food is being delivered smoothly, street lighting is on, local police control the streets. With each new day, the fake hysteria will subside, the thought will come to the drugged heads: what next?
Will the encircled Banderites begin to commit atrocities in their impotent anger? Well, Ukrainians should also carry this cross on their own. Of course, we will try to do everything to rescue children and the elderly. But Putin will not allow to bear sensitive losses, this is not that war.
It was not us who raised the fiend of hell, nurtured it, allowed it to seize power and hostages in the person of an entire nation. It was not us, who armed them and sent them to kill Donbass, taught them to hate Russians. Criminal indifference and complicity is also a punishable act. Not by us, by life itself.”
I agree that in some places it is very cynical, but this is only from the point of view of a civilian. Any military action –that is a different reality…
US President Joe Biden has announced a total ban on Russian energy imports, including oil and gas.
“Today I’m announcing the United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy. We’re banning all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy. That means Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at US ports and the American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine,” Biden said in a televised address Tuesday morning.
“This is a move that has strong bipartisan support in Congress and I believe in the country. Americans have rallied to support the Ukrainian people and made it clear we will not be part of subsidizing Putin’s war,” Biden added.
Biden said he had consulted allies around the world before making the decision, particularly in Europe. “We’re moving forward with this ban understanding that many of our European partners and allies may not be in a position to join us,” he said, pointing to America’s domestic oil production capabilities compared to those of its NATO allies.
“But we’re working closely with Europe and our partners to develop a long-term strategy to reduce their dependance on Russian energy as well,” Biden said.
“This is a step that we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin, but there will be costs as well here in the United States,” Biden said, adding that “defending freedom has a cost.”
Biden blamed Putin for the rising gas prices Americans have already had to pay. “Since Putin began his military buildup on Ukrainian borders, just since then, the price of the gas at the pump in America went up 75 cents. And with this action it’s gonna go up further,” he said. The president also asked America’s oil producers to refrain from “profiteering or price gouging” at this time.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commended Biden’s decision and promised to pass strong legislation on the matter later in the day.
The US Department of Energy increased its prognosis for oil production in 2023 by 390,000 barrels per day, for a total of 12.99 million barrels per day (bpd). Production is expected to increase by 60,000 barrels per day in 2022 to 12.03 million bpd.
US imports of Russian oil nearly tripled in 2021 compared to 2020, averaging roughly 209,000 bpd, according to Energy Information Administration figures.
Biden also commented on the sanctions slapped on Moscow by the US and its allies, saying they’ve already inflicted “significant damage” to the Russian economy.
“[Sanctions have] caused the Russian economy to quite frankly crater. The Russian ruble is now down by 50%…One ruble is now worth less than one American penny. And preventing Russia’s central bank from propping up the ruble, and to keep its value up, they’re not going to be able to do that now. We cut Russia’s largest banks from the international financial system and it’s crippled their ability to do business with the rest of the world. In addition, we’re choking off Russia’s access to technology, like semiconductors, that [will] sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come,” Biden said.
The president pointed to the voluntary pullout of US and foreign companies from Russia, and the halt in the trade of “many Russian securities” on the US stock exchange. He also pointed to the formation of a Department of Justice task force to “go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs…to make sure that they share in the pain.”
Russia began a military operation to demilitarize Ukraine on 24 February after weeks of escalating shelling, sabotage and sniper attacks by Ukrainian forces against the Donbass republics.
Question: Unprecedented sanctions pressure is being exerted on the Russian Federation due to the recent events, primarily “on the ground.” Has Russia changed its position? Does the world hear what Russia is saying? What do you think about the ongoing talks in Belarus? What should we expect from the next round?
Sergey Lavrov: This is a comprehensive question. You have touched on many issues. I am sure the world is listening to Russia, but it is difficult to say at this point the extent to which it hears us. The majority may understand what this is about, but they have to obey the toughest dictate.
Speaking frankly, it is of course bad when people die: military servicemen and civilians (women and children). This has been happening in Donbass for eight years and is now happening during Russia’s special military operation. The goal of this operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukrainian territory or that could start from there.
I have no doubt that a solution will be found. Our minimum terms are well known. They are being discussed, in part, at the talks with Ukrainian representatives. Talks were held in Gomel and new talks were supposed to take place today. However, the Kiev team has again found some reason to postpone the talks. There is no doubt whatsoever that Ukraine receives instructions from Washington; they are not independent at all. Nevertheless, talks must take place. I will not go into the details of the agenda; they are well known. We can no longer tolerate the threat of direct attack on the Russian Federation from the territory of Ukraine. Such threats are fixed in the current doctrinal documents of the Kiev regime. One of the main reasons is Ukraine’s unrelenting desire to join NATO and the reluctance of the Alliance’s members to fulfil their commitments that they do not take any measures that would enhance their security at the expense of the security of others.
In the final analysis, this is not just the situation in Ukraine, the efforts to demilitarise and de-Nazify it, to prevent the continuing manifestations of genocide on its territory, putting a stop to any violence and ensuring for the Ukrainians an opportunity to decide their destiny themselves; no, it is the world order that is at stake. This is for a reason that the West is avoiding, in any way it can, giving a response to our implicit, clear-cut proposals on the security system in Europe that rely on existing agreements.
I mentioned the core principle endorsed at the top level by the OSCE which underlies Russia-NATO relations. Each country has the right to choose alliances. However, no country can strengthen its security at the expense of the security of any other country. No organisation can claim dominance in the Euro-Atlantic space, which is exactly what NATO is doing now. The West strengthening its security at the expense of Russia’s security has become proverbial. We are being told “not to worry because Ukraine or any other country joining NATO will not pose a threat to Russia’s security.” Why should the West tell us what our security needs are? Just like the Americans decided for Germany and Europe what was needed for European energy security. They decided that Nord Stream 2 was something that the EU did not need for its energy security, which would be ensured instead by supplies of liquefied natural gas from the United States at multiple times the cost.
The fact is that we are being listened to, but not heard. They are trying in every possible way to impose on us their idea of how to continue living in Europe.
The comparison suggests itself. In their time, Napoleon and Hitler set out to subjugate Europe. Now, the United States has taken it over. There was no question about NATO, and the European Union was shown its place. The story of Nord Stream 2 vividly illustrated the EU’s actual place in the international arena. It was coerced into doing what it is now doing, end of story. Now, they have started talking and Western capitals are issuing demands. The picture being created on the world stage is like something out of Hollywood, showing absolute evil and absolute good represented by the main character, who also happened to script this “action movie.” It’s sad.
I’m sure the hysteria will pass. Our Western partners will, for lack of a better word, get over it eventually. We remain ready for dialogue, but on one indispensable condition which is this dialogue must be based on equality, respect and consideration for each other’s interests.
Question (retranslated): President of Russia Vladimir Putin is described in the West as an isolated man who is reacting emotionally. When did you speak with him last? Is he taking advice?
Sergey Lavrov: You are choosing to characterise what the President of Russia is doing and how based on Western propaganda.
In the past few weeks, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly explained in detail our view. It reflects the position of the Russian leadership, arrived at in full conformity with the constitutional powers of the President of the Russian Federation and such structures as the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, special services and the Security Council of Russia. This work is being carried out on a daily basis. Permanent Security Council members meet at least once a week. This is the decision-making mechanism.
Question (retranslated): Despite all the nuclear fears, Russia and the United States have managed to maintain stability for decades. Can you reassure the world by saying that Russia will not lose its head and be the first to use nuclear weapons?
Sergey Lavrov: We have a military doctrine that describes the parameters and conditions for using nuclear weapons. There is no “escalation for the sake of de-escalation” there, though Western analysts claim otherwise.
Talk of nuclear war has already begun. Look carefully at these statements and the characters who made them. First, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a propaganda frenzy, trying to curry favour with the most radical forces in the West, that nobody would ban the North Atlantic Alliance from doing whatever it wants, even if it suddenly decides to deploy nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. To begin with, NATO cannot decide where to deploy nuclear weapons. It does not have them. The Americans do. Stoltenberg’s comment was very revealing.
Next, Vladimir Zelensky started saying that they would renege on their obligations as a non-nuclear state and acquire nuclear weapons. Remember this as well. Do not forget to look at what was said by my colleague, Foreign Minister of France Jean-Yves le Drian. He loves to show off, you know. The rooster is a national symbol of France. They often get cocky. During one of his chats with the world, he said Vladimir Putin must remember that France also has nuclear weapons. Neither President Putin nor I are saying this. Other people started this talk. The recently appointed UK Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss said she was prepared for conflict between NATO and Russia. Please note what US President Joseph Biden has said. When asked whether there was any alternative to the current “sanctions from hell” he said World War 3 was the only alternative to these sanctions. It is commonly understood that World War 3 means nuclear war. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the thought of nuclear war is constantly running through the minds of Western politicians but not the minds of Russians. I assure you that we will not let any provocations cause us to lose our balance. But if a real war is unleashed against us, this must be a concern for those who are hatching such plans. And I believe these plans are being hatched.
Question (retranslated): The world is witnessing Russian bombs killing people in Ukraine and we keep hearing the lies that the Russians are telling about these attacks. The world has come together to condemn them. How can you defend this position?
Sergey Lavrov: You read your question from a piece of paper. The question is short, but still you chose to read it off the piece of paper. I cannot comment on the fakes which abound. It may have come to your attention that primarily Europe and the United States are trying to shut down Russian media and sources of information about the developments in Ukraine, the ongoing special military operation and the way the Ukrainian army, the Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions are treating civilians. When they retreat, they plunder the areas on their way out. In Donbass, the self-defence units of Donetsk and Lugansk began to drive them out. They take people’s vehicles and equipment, and behave like looters and thieves. There is a lot of information about provocations being prepared, including in Mariupol and other places, where the Ukrainians are trying to use civilians as human shields. Ask the Indian, Arab, or African students who are trying to leave Ukraine, but they won’t let them go. Just yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with President Vladimir Putin. He is concerned that an Indian student died in Kharkov, Ukraine. There are no Russian troops in Kharkov. But we see foreigners who want to depart, including across Russian territory, being prevented from leaving at the Kharkov railway station. We are ready to accommodate these students. I don’t have enough time to list all the instances. I encourage you to visit our Ministry’s website, which provides a detailed description of what the Kiev neo-Nazi regime is doing. I know you are fond of the word “kill.” The real killers are fighting on the side of the Kiev regime.
Question (retranslated): Do you believe that President Vladimir Zelensky, the first Jewish president of Ukraine, whose family died during the Holocaust, is a Nazi?
Sergey Lavrov: I believe he is being manipulated by nationalists and neo-Nazis. Otherwise, I find it difficult to explain how President Zelensky can “preside” over a society where neo-Nazis and neo-Nazism are flourishing. They openly hold marches and torchlight processions, and he has his guard of honour stand guard as they do so. They conduct exercises, learn methods of urban warfare, sabotage, and provocation. All of that is happening under President Vladimir Zelensky. He claims that his grandfather fought on the fronts of WWII. Look at the laws he signs. How can a president, who is a “citizen of the world” (as every Jewish person is supposed to be), sign a law on indigenous peoples of Ukraine? Russians are not listed among the indigenous peoples. How can a president who is not a racist sign and support laws that ban the Russian language not only in schools (which is ugly in and of itself), not only in education, but in everyday life as well? You cannot ask a pharmacist for medications in Russian. By the way, Crimea (which some people in the West worry so much about) has three state languages – Russian, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian – which was never the case under Ukrainian rule. Any Russian citizen living in Crimea can come to any federal or local office and speak his or her native language, and they must answer them in the same language. The list goes on and on. I know that you go for catchy images and so you don’t have time to deal with the facts and really understand them. For once, spend at least 30 minutes to read what’s posted on the website of our Ministry, or on the website of the Russian Defence Ministry. I know that you will not be allowed to raise your voice. Yesterday, President of France Emmanuel Macron said that it was a lie to accuse Vladimir Zelensky and Ukraine of allowing Nazism to flourish. He got his answer already. However, the best answer came from his fellow citizen, a French journalist who visited Donbass and described the shelling of a school, the death of two women, two teachers who worked at that school, and she shamed the Western leaders who refuse to see it. Of course, she was not allowed to publish this, but her comment is still available on social media. I encourage you to learn about the facts rather than try to pretend that the same Hollywood “action movie” is unfolding according to the script about absolute evil and absolute good which was written by your colleagues.
Question (retranslated): Not so long ago we interviewed some European officials. They said NATO really did not want to expand eastward. Russia was not supposed to have any problems with this. Now such statements are no longer made. Why have these changes appeared and why were such Russian media as Sputnik and RT blocked in the EU? We are seeing disinformation from social and traditional media. What is your response to all this?
Sergey Lavrov: What is my response to all this? This fact is well known and cannot be concealed. The Soviet leadership and then the Russian leadership was reassured that NATO would not move to the east, that not a single piece of NATO’s military infrastructure would appear to the east of the Oder River. You know what happened afterwards. President Vladimir Putin has spoken about this many times. There were five consecutive waves of NATO expansion. Moreover, each time the rhetoric, military planning and exercises of this alliance became increasingly directed against the Russian Federation.
We have talked about this and explained it many times. But we did not see a response that would indicate NATO’s readiness to speak on equal grounds, based on respect for each other’s interests and concerns. I deliberately cited statements that were made at the highest level in the OSCE in Istanbul in 1999, in Astana in 2010 and the statements of the Russian and NATO leaders at the summit in Pratica di Mare in 2002. It was clearly said that nobody would enhance their security at the expense of the security of others and that not a single organisation in the Euro-Atlantic region had the right to claim domination in the OSCE space. NATO members are categorically refusing to honour both.
You have asked me a very good question: Why is this happening and why do they need to maintain this position? I see no other explanation but the stubborn, relentless desire to maintain their superiority in all areas and show everyone that it is NATO that is dictating orders in Europe. Now Yens Stoltenberg has said that NATO bears global responsibility for global security. So, all this talk about the defensive character of the Alliance is cheap talk, “in favour of the poor” as we say here. If the Alliance was defensive it would have had to defend itself by now. But nobody has ever attacked it. And yet the Alliance decided itself: Now we are defending ourselves along the conventional Berlin Wall. Then the Berlin Wall was gone – why don’t we defend ourselves somewhere else? Then they started moving eastward. Each time, they drew a defensive line independently and unilaterally. It has already approached the Russian Federation. This was explained many times. President Vladimir Putin explained this explicitly in his public statements and long conversations with Western leaders. When they speak with us at the bilateral level, they seem to show understanding, but something happens with them as soon as they get together. Apparently, what happens is that they are already ruled by the United States that is issuing orders and instructions to them. It’s sad. We remain open to a conversation. It is bound to start eventually anyway.
Everyone knows that a coup d’etat took place in Ukraine. It was not provoked by anything. It took place a day after the President and the opposition signed an agreement on early elections which the opposition was bound to win.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin asks his colleagues: Why did they stage this coup? If there had been no coup the afore-mentioned agreement would have been fulfilled. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to start an uprising in Crimea against the putschists. Crimea would have remained Ukrainian. We have said and explained all this.
But in the current situation we cannot tolerate this threat because Ukraine has been turned into “anti-Russia”, into a bridgehead for undermining everything Russian. This continued for a long time. This was part of a big geopolitical game. Do your remember Zbigniew Brzezinski said that Russia and Ukraine together were a superpower? I believe he also said that it necessary to make every use of Ukraine to undermine Russia’s interests, influence and culture. I’d like to emphasise that he urged his colleagues to use Ukraine to cause the collapse of the Russian Orthodox faith, which is now being actively done. President Petr Poroshenko started this line and President Vladimir Zelensky is doing much to support it. So, there is no lack of goodwill on our part but we cannot allow and will not tolerate continuous crude encroachments on our interests that create a physical threat to Russia’s security.
Question (retranslated from English): What is your assessment of the current situation after the talks with Ukraine?
Sergey Lavrov: I cannot say now what the situation will be like after the talks. The talks have not started yet. I believe the head of the delegation, who is holding talks with Ukraine, will make a statement as soon as they are completed. Then we will learn all about it.
Question (retranslated from English): Russia is isolated in the diplomatic arena, with only four countries having voted against the resolution calling on Russia to stop its military operation immediately. For perhaps the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO is united as never before. In diplomatic terms, it has been a fiasco, or a defeat for Russia, has it not?
Sergey Lavrov: That is for you to judge. I cannot judge my actions or my country’s actions. We are confident that we are doing the right thing.
I want to say again that it is bad, very bad that people are dying.
I am not thinking of a diplomatic fiasco but rather of the West’s “talent” for diplomacy. Thousands of people died – about 14,000 people died over the eight years of war in Donbass. Not a single person from your channel or any other media outlet in the West has ever thought of travelling to Donbass to see how people whom the Ukrainian regime declared terrorists, although they had never attacked anyone, live there. They were attacked and called terrorists. These people come under fire every day, civilians are killed there, schools and kindergartens are destroyed and acts of terrorism are committed.
If you choose what the West says as the criterion for your professional actions, then so be it. If you call those eight years of silence on the part of Western media and Western politicians and eight years of torpedoing the Minsk agreements, with the Ukrainian regime not only failing to implement the agreements but continuing to use force against civilians – if you call those eight years of choosing to ignore and remain silent a diplomatic triumph, that is your right. You represent an independent media outlet, as I understand. Russia has stood up for its interests and NATO, as you said, is finally united as never before. Has NATO sought to bring back the reason for justifying its existence? The reason vanished following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation. Later, it was Afghanistan. Recently, NATO has triumphantly pulled out of Afghanistan. However, this event failed yet again to provide motivation for uniting and keeping a tight rein on all allies. What strategic autonomy is President of France Emmanuel Macron talking about? Nobody will ever allow anyone to have strategic autonomy. The United States has already shown it clearly. This is, perhaps, the diplomatic triumph of the United States. But then I will not say who in Europe is suffering a diplomatic fiasco.
As for the arithmetic you mentioned, we know well what methods our Western colleagues use to achieve results like these: pure blackmail and arm-twisting. They tell all counties without exception and without mincing words: there will be voting and you must vote the way we tell you. They say this to officials in foreign countries who have accounts in the West and whose children study in universities in Western countries. Exactly like this, without ceremony. I know this because many of my friends tell me that such pressure is being put on them: “I’m sorry, we can’t vote differently, it is my life, and the life and well-being of my family.” Yes, these methods are used to achieve a diplomatic triumph. My congratulations to you. However, the truth will out ultimately.
Again, I want to invite you to visit the Foreign Ministry website for irrefutable documentary evidence of what Ukrainian military and neo-Nazis were doing in Donbass and other parts of Ukraine. That is why we are not feeling political loneliness.
Question: Is the plan to bring back Viktor Yanukovych to power in Kiev? Is this the endgame for Russia?
Sergey Lavrov: Again, your question shows that you came to this interview without even reading through what President Vladimir Putin and I have said on multiple occasions. It is up to the Ukrainian people, or rather all the peoples living in multi-ethnic Ukraine, to decide on the future of Ukraine and on who should be their leader.
Question: I have a question about Polina Zakhodinskaya. She was in her final year of primary school. She was shot dead by the Russians as she was in her family car in Kiev on Saturday. Mr Lavrov, I know you have a daughter yourself. I want you to look me in the eye and just tell me how do you sleep at night knowing that Russian bombs and bullets are killing children?
Sergey Lavrov: I can’t add anything to what I have already said. Every human life is precious. Unfortunately, hostilities involve casualties, not only among the military, but also the civilians. Our servicemen participating in the special operation have a strict order to use only high-precision weapons to suppress the military infrastructure. Even the barracks with the Ukrainian military are not targeted.
I can only convey my condolences to the bereaved families.
Question: You say high precision is used, but hundreds of civilians have reportedly already died. This is now being investigated by the International Criminal Court. I wonder if you personally are preparing your defence in a war crimes tribunal?
Sergey Lavrov: You are keen on asking pointed questions, I’m sure you’ll have a big audience. You will charge this audience emotionally. As I understand, this is your job. This is not so much a media outlet as a tool for inculcating what Western leaders need into the people’s heads. I’m here to say it again: I do not justify any actions that result in civilian deaths.
We did not come up with the term “collateral damage.” Our Western colleagues came up with it during their reckless undertakings in Iraq, and before that in other countries such as Libya, and Latin America. Have you ever covered the developments in Iraq or Libya with the same emotional zeal? With hundreds of thousands of dead civilians? I can’t remember that. So, I regard your question as rhetorical.
Question: Yes, of course, this is my job, but you started this war, and Polina’s blood is on your hands, isn’t it, Mr Lavrov?
Sergey Lavrov: I prefer not to play these games. You’re acting as if it’s some kind of a talk show. If you want to know my position, I have outlined it in the most detailed way, including the humanitarian aspects of the ongoing operation.
I understand that you will cover all this the way you need to, but I want you to remember (probably, any journalist on a put-up mission still has a conscience), what you did during these eight years, when little girls, women, and older people were killed by the thousands in Donbass. The Ukrainian regime killed them. Go ahead and visit our Ministry website. I’d rather not take up your time with long stories. And if you are so worried (and rightly so) about the humanitarian consequences of any hostilities, it would be only fair if you looked at the chapters that you have so far preferred not to touch upon in your work.
Question: Russia has officially lost 500 soldiers in just one week of fighting, and other estimates are much, much higher. At this rate, we’re looking at one of the most costly campaigns in recent Russian history, far deadlier that Afghanistan or Chechnya, for example. The official message was that Russians would be welcomed with open arms, and that the Ukrainian army would lay down its weapons. What has gone wrong?
Sergey Lavrov: This is a subjective view. Yes, there are losses. There are always losses in such situations. But I have already spoken about this.
As for what has gone wrong, I don’t think you’re familiar with our plans, which are kept secret. They underlie the operations of our group which is implementing the special military operation on orders from President Putin. Yours is an abstract question.
I would like to point out that this situation cannot be considered separately from all the other developments, from the past 30 years that were full of various events in relations between Russia and the West, and between the West and the rest of the world, in particular the United States.
President Putin has said on numerous occasions that the threat has come right to our border. I don’t think it is a big secret that the Pentagon is seriously concerned about the chemical and biological facilities in Ukraine, where it has built two military biological laboratories that were creating pathogens, in Kiev and Odessa. They are worried now that they will lose control of these laboratories. At the same time, the Americans categorically refuse to establish a verification mechanism in keeping with the Biological Weapons Convention and continue to build its military biological facilities along the perimeter of the Russian Federation. Miliary bases were being built in Ukraine, including by the British, and many other things were taking place there. The CIA had an extensive presence there at all times.
The Ukrainian army was clearly not trained to fight against Poland. When similar events took place in Iraq, the United States announced that they were a threat to the US national security. Has anyone wondered why the US decided to restore order in a country 10,000 kilometres away? Nobody did, because this is arrogant great-power behaviour. When Russia pointed to the threat it was facing, we were told that there was no threat at all, and that we were safe. They think that they can determine the conditions of our security when the threat is right on our border. We don’t interfere in situations 10,000 km from our borders to set things right according to “our rules.” What we are doing now is a forced decision, because they refused to listen to us and instead kept lying to us for the past 30 years.
There will probably come a time when we will need to come to an agreement, but we will only do this on the basis of the principle all sides have adopted: not to strengthen one’s security at the expense of others’ security and not to claim dominance. Only an equitable dialogue. But our Western colleagues are not ready for this; they are playing at absolute good by grossly abusing diplomatic methods and by forcing small and medium-sized countries to carry out their orders. This happened in global history many times before. So, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.
The operation is ongoing, and its goals have been stated clearly: the demilitarisation of Ukraine, which means that no weapons that can pose a threat to Russia must be deployed there at any time; the denazification of Ukraine, because the Nuremberg Trials’ verdict has not been reversed; and, of course, guarantees for Ukraine without its admission to NATO. President Putin has pointed out that NATO’s expansion is unacceptable to us, but we are ready to openly discuss security guarantees for Ukraine, for Europe and for the Russian Federation.
Question: Just to follow up on what you said on Russia’s demands. You said yesterday that Russia isn’t looking for Ukrainian capitulation. Are you now prepared to deal with Ukrainian President Zelensky? What exactly does he need to agree to to stop the fighting? Are you looking to take control of the whole of Ukraine before talks make any kind of progress? Does that mean the full destruction of the Ukrainian army?
Sergey Lavrov: No, that does not mean what you have referred to in such an emotional manner. Let me spell this out one more time for you. Despite all my efforts to explain this, I keep getting questions as if no one hears my answers. We are ready for talks. When President Vladimir Zelensky asked to hold talks, President Vladimir Putin immediately agreed and sent a delegation. After that Vladimir Zelensky changed his mind. Probably the Americans told him to slow down. Later they said that they were going to come. They were not there on the agreed day, however, and arrived only 24 hours later. We waited for them there. The talks took place. We communicated our negotiating position to our Ukrainian colleagues. They promised to come to this round of talks with their negotiating position. We are ready to talk, while continuing our operation, because we cannot allow Ukraine to retain infrastructure which poses a threat to the security of the Russian Federation.
We will see to it that the demilitarisation is carried out all the way through, meaning the destruction of infrastructure and weapons posing a threat to us. Even if a peace deal is signed, it will definitely include a provision to this effect.
Question: President of France Emmanuel Macron and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin are frequently in touch. Do you think President Macron and France have a special role to play for achieving a diplomatic solution?
Sergey Lavrov: France has quite a long-standing tradition of acting as a mediator in various conflicts. We remember President of France Nicolas Sarkozy, who helped settle the situation which started with Mikheil Saakashvili’s criminal order to bomb peacekeepers and South Ossetia. We know that President of France Emmanuel Macron and his predecessor contributed proactively to creating the Normandy format. In fact, it is within its framework that the Minsk agreements were signed. These agreements were an important step in these efforts, but the story did not end there. With the Minsk agreements signed and approved by the UN Security Council, neither France nor Germany did anything to force Ukraine to fulfil them. On the contrary, they started saying that Ukraine does not have to carry them out and that it is up to the Russian Federation to do its part. They said that there must not be any direct dialogue between Kiev and Donetsk or between Kiev and Lugansk because this is all just for show, while the real “culprit” is the Russian Federation. We tried to bring our French and German partners to their senses and showed them the Minsk agreements and the UN Security Council resolutions saying that all key matters must be settled with Donetsk and Lugansk. This did not help.
I have already mentioned that President of France Emmanuel Macron has been quite proactive in his efforts. He has talked with President of Russia Vladimir Putin on the phone quite a few times and visited Russia just recently. Another telephone conversation between them is underway at this very moment. If France succeeds in bringing about an agreement this time, this will only make us happy, as long as the agreement is based on principles approved by the OSCE and enshrined in international relations. However, yesterday President of France Emmanuel Macron said that statements on the spread of neo-Nazism in Ukraine are lies, as I have already mentioned. Hearing this from an ally… Don’t they see any parallels with what is happening in Ukraine regarding Jews and Russians: aggressive statements, torch processions and lots of violent crimes, including in Donbass. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is France’s partner within the Normandy format (which no longer exists, as far as I can see) said that it was ridiculous to describe what is happening in Ukraine as genocide. Hearing this from a German representative is not a very pleasant experience. If our German colleagues are unable to recognise these cues… Olaf Scholz has recently talked about the seriousness of the situation in Europe by claiming that they have not seen anything of this kind for 75 years. Does this mean that our German colleagues forgot or failed to notice how Yugoslavia was bombed, or maybe they just missed the whole thing?
You see, no matter where our discussion takes us, we always come across double standards. This absolute good our American colleagues are now trying to create with your assistance implies that you can do as you please: hand out guilty verdicts whenever you deem necessary and sweep under the carpet things you find inconvenient because of the direct involvement of the West, primarily the United States. I do understand that solidarity and allied relations are important for you, but this does not benefit the world or international relations in any way. What you are now trying to establish in the Russian Federation is a dictatorship without democracy, brotherhood, or equality of any kind.
Once again, we welcome the mediating efforts of President of France Emmanuel Macron. President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has explained on multiple occasions our vision of settling the current situation.
Question: The European Union gives weapons to Ukraine. Do you consider this an act of war? Do you think there is a risk of sliding into a nuclear war?
Sergey Lavrov: It is not us who started the talk about a nuclear war. Conversations to this effect were started by your Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who urged President of Russia Vladimir Putin to keep in mind that France also had nuclear weapons, and by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who said that, if necessary, they would deploy nuclear weapons even closer to the Russian Federation. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss went on record as saying that she was ready for a war between NATO and Russia. This is the talk you are trying to use in a bid to accuse us of all this. I reiterate: it is not us who bring up the subject of nuclear war, of a Third World War, in these discussions. It is probably needed to keep the public in the West on tenterhooks, to continue fanning Russophobia until any Russian becomes a target for aggression. Students are expelled, performers are not allowed to perform, and athletes see their wings cut… Among other things, this is a case of dishonest, dirty rivalry to make things easier in sports, arts, and other areas of human activity. This is obscene. My great hope, therefore, is that our main partners will get past this madness. We will be ready to hold talks, but, as I said, solely in a business-like, pragmatic, and equitable manner. If they hope that the world will be different after what is going on now and that Russia will keep its head down and obey the diktat, they are up for a great disappointment. They should remember Russian history.
Question: One of my colleagues mentioned the results of voting on the General Assembly’s resolution. You are certainly familiar with these results. You must also be familiar with how the Security Council voted. Given this attitude towards Russia’s current approach, do you think Russia’s foreign policy priorities, its development vectors might change in any way, maybe switch gears? So far, no security guarantees have been provided by the West. We have heard from you many times how important this is. Do you think the campaign Moscow has launched in Ukraine will result in some kind of security guarantees provided to Russia by the West?
Sergey Lavrov: All conflicts end in agreements, so this isn’t up to us. Our approach is well known. No one has listened to us for 30 years. The West is perfectly aware of our concerns. Endlessly ignoring them with such arrogance has not worked and will not work. Only naive people could have thought otherwise.
As to switching gears – we are ready to work in all areas where there is mutual readiness to do business based on a balance of interests. I can assure you that those countries that have banned their companies from operating in the Russian Federation did so under enormous pressure. They are saying now they are prepared to suffer, as soon as this can “teach Russia a lesson.” Even the Deputy Director of the US National Economic Council said the United States would like to avoid a sharp rise in oil prices because it would benefit Russia. Do you understand? Not because fuel prices at gas stations would rise, American voters would not be happy about the inconvenience and would be dissatisfied with their government – but because it would benefit Russia. Their minds only work one way – how to punish Russia as much as possible. Indeed, this affects both the economy and the social sphere. I assure you that we will deal with whatever problems the West creates for us out of its determination (I emphasise once again – not to ensure their own security, this isn’t about the security of the West at all) to use Ukraine as a tool and a pretext to prevent Russia from pursuing an independent policy. There are few countries left on Earth that can afford such a luxury. Sanctions are a tax on independence, if you like.
Returning to your second question about security guarantees, I have quite enjoyed rereading an article that John Mearsheimer, a professor at University of Chicago, wrote in September 2014 after the events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He said the West was steering Ukraine along the path of false expectations towards an imminent crash. “The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernise Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer” and boost its economy. Ukraine doesn’t have to be caught in the middle, between Russia and NATO. That would be the best option for Ukrainians. But instead, we are inciting Ukraine to gang up on the Russians. We are enticing Ukraine with the idea that one day, the country will become part of the West, and we will defeat Putin. And things will be just as we want them. And time is on our side. Well, Ukrainians are happy to play this game of course. And they no longer want to compromise with the Russians. On the contrary, they want to take a tough stance. Well, if they do, it won’t end well for them. What we are doing now is provoking just such an outcome. I believe it would make much more sense to create a neutral Ukraine. It is in the US interests to end this crisis as quickly as possible. It is in Russia’s best interests as well. And most of all, it is in Ukraine’s best interests.
He wrote this seven and a half years ago and published it in Foreign Affairs. A very authoritative and respected publication the White House and the Department of State listen to. Yet, apparently, this time it was not heard. I am sure that the White House and the American leadership are aware of this opinion. But alternatives are simply ignored because the real aim is different. Their aim is not to protect Ukraine’s security while relying on a balance of interests of Ukraine, the United States and Russia. It is to demonise and finish off the Russian Federation. This was the original goal. Now, unfortunately, there are no doubts left.
Thank you all, colleagues. I understand your emotions, but journalism involves juxtaposing facts. I invite you again to visit the Foreign Ministry website.
لا يمكننا فهم الأحداث الدموية في أوكرانيا إنْ لم نتوقف عند أسبابها وبطبيعة الحال عند تداعياتها. وهذا هو ما سنحاول مقاربته في عرضنا لأنّ نتائج ما حصل لن يكون منحصراً بالأطراف المتصارعة ولكن سيؤثّر بشكل واضح على موازين القوّة في العالم، وعلى ملامح النظام العالمي الجديد الذي سيلد من رحم المعارك القائمة على أرض أوكرانيا (وهي بالمناسبة استكمال للمعارك التي بدأت في المشرق العربي وشمال أفريقيا والجزيرة العربية). كما أنها ستؤثّر على مسار الحرب الكونية على سورية والصراع مع الكيان الصهيوني وبطبيعة الحال على الأوضاع في لبنان ومستقبله.
إنّ ما يجري في أوكرانيا ليست حرباً بالمعنى المألوف وإن كان طابعها عسكري. فهي أقرب لعملية عسكرية واسعة لتحقيق أهداف محدّدة وليس لتغيير معالم جغرافية ولا لتغيير نظام حكم، وإنْ كانت نتيجتها ستؤدّي إلى ذلك، ولا لسحق أو تدمير بنى تحتية وجيوش ومجتمع كما يفعل الكيان الصهيوني مع فلسطين وسورية ولبنان. ولفهم ما يجري يجب أن نقارب ولو بشكل سريع أسباب العملية العسكرية الواسعة.
منطلق المقاربة هو أن العملية العسكرية التي تقوم بها روسيا هي خطوة دفاعية وليست هجومية رغم الظاهرة لاحتلال بلد مجاور. والخطوة العسكرية أتت في سياق طويل بدأ بعد انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي وتولي الحلف الأطلسي خلال التسعينات من القرن الماضي التوسّع شرقاً رغم الوعود «الشفهية» ولكن الموثّقة وفقاً لشهود أعيان من ان الأطلسي لن يتقدّم «اينشا» أي 2،54 سنتيمتر تجاه الشرق. فوجود قواعد عسكرية ومنصّات صاروخية في دول كانت ضمن حلف وارسو أصبح أمراً يهدّد مباشرة الأمن القومي الروسي. حذّر الرئيس الروسي تكراراً ومراراً منذ 2007 في خطاب شهير له في مؤتمر الأمن الذي عُقد في مدينة ميونيخ بأنّ القطبية الواحدة ليست مقبولة وأن الأمن في أوروبا أمن مشترك لا يمكن تجزئته. تجاهل الأطلسي، أيّ الولايات المتحدة، ذلك التحذير فقام بالثورات الملوّنة التي أطاحت بحكومات قريبة من موسكو. وفي مؤتمر بوخارست في 2008 كان القرار لدول الأطلسي بفتح باب انتساب جورجيا وأوكرانيا للحلف. ففي ذلك القرار تمّ زرع جذور الأزمة الحالية. كما حاولت جورجيا في نفس السنة والتي حصلت فيها «ثورة» ملوّنة اجتياح إقليم اوسييتيا فكان الردّ الروسي صاعقاً ومفاجئاً علماً أنه قبل ذلك كان قد قضى على تمرّد الشيشان.
ردّ روسي غير متوقّع
لم يتوقع الأطلسي قوّة الرد الروسي وفعّاليته ولم يكترث لذلك واعتبره انتكاسة يمكن التعويض عنها عبر الانقلاب الذي دفعت به في أوكرانيا 2014 والاتيان بحكومة شديدة العداء لروسيا تسيطر عليها اقلّية نيو نازية. ثم حاول الأطلسي في أواخر 2021 تغيير النظام في بلاروسيا وفي 2022 تكرار السيناريو في كازاخستان لاستكمال محاصرة روسيا فنجحت الأخيرة بوأد التمرّد والقضاء عليه في البلدين بسرعة فائقة أذهلت العالم. لكن الردّ الأميركي/ الأطلسي على مطلب روسيا بتحييد أوكرانيا وعدم ضمّها للحلف الأطلسي كان التجاهل المطلق وعدم الاكتراث. ثم جاء تصريح الرئيس الأوكراني بضرورة تزويد أوكرانيا بسلاح نووي. فكانت بمثابة الشعرة التي كسرت ظهر البعير. لذلك كان الهجوم «الدفاعي» الذي بدأ في 25 شباط/ فبراير 2022 وما زال قائماً عند إعداد هذه المقاربة.
لم تضع العملية العسكرية الروسية الواسعة في أوكرانيا أوزارها لكن يمكننا أن نستخلص بعض العبر التي ستكون أساسية لفهم المستقبل العالمي. فأولى هذه العبر هي أنّ الولايات المتحدة والحلف الأطلسي والاتحاد الأوروبي نجحا في جرّ روسيا إلى مواجهة عسكرية في أوكرانيا مع القوّات المسلّحة الأوكرانية والكتائب النيونازية التي تسيطر على مقدّرات البلاد. وهذا النجاح التكتيكي الطابع سيكون له تداعيات استراتيجية سلبية كما سنشرحها لاحقاً.
ثاني النجاحات هي ضرب التقارب الأوروبي الروسي بشكل عام ومنع التقارب الروسي الألماني عبر تجميد تشغيل خط سيل الغاز الشمالي الثاني (نورستريم 2). والمعلوم أنّ روسيا تزوّد ألمانيا وأوروبا بحوالي من 40 بالمائة من احتياجاتها في الغاز لكن مع تعثّر خط الغاز الذي يمرّ بأوكرانيا أصبحت ألمانيا وأوروبا مكشوفة بشكل كبير تجاه الغاز. ونذكّر هنا أن خطا نورستريم 2 تمّ بناؤه بناء على طلب ألمانيا بعد الانقلاب الذي حصل في أوكرانيا سنة 2014. لذلك يصبح إقفال ذلك الخط نجاحاً تكتيكياً آخر لكن مردوده الاستراتيجي سيكون كارثياً على المانيا وأوروبا التابعة للولايات المتحدة.
ثالث النجاحات هو فرض إجراءات تحاصر روسيا مالياً واقتصادياً لعزلها عن العالم ولإخضاعها بغية قلب النظام القائم واستيلاد حكومة تابعة للغرب تمهيداً لاستيلاب الثروات الاقتصادية الضخمة الموجودة في روسيا. لكن هذا النجاح التكتيكي في الحصار سيكون كارثياً على الولايات المتحدة حيث ينذر بتسريع نهاية هيمنة الدولار في التداول العالمي.
رابع النجاحات هو السيطرة على السردية الإعلامية بشكل مطلق في الدول الغربية. لكن بالمقابل كرّس سقوط الاعلام المهيمن الذي لم ينقل وقائع العملية العسكرية بشكل صحيح بل اكتفى بسرد الأكاذيب والتضليل والتلفيق ما أنهى مصداقيته في الولايات المتحدة حيث الاعلام الموازي اكتسب شرعية متنامية في معركة «المصداقية».
نكتفي بهذه «النجاحات» التي تستدعي تدقيقاً لمعرفة يقينها واستخلاص العبر.
هذه المقاربة السريعة لخلفية وسياق العملية العسكرية في أوكرانيا كانت ضرورية لفهم الموقف الروسي الدفاعي. فتجاهل المطلب الروسي من قبل الأطلسي وخاصة من الولايات المتحدة سواء كان متعمّداً لأسباب عقائدية أو نتيجة عنجهية وغرور هو سبب العملية. هناك من يعتبر أنّ التجاهل كان متعمّداً لجرّ روسيا إلى «المستنقع» الأوكراني واستنزافها عسكرياً وفرض إجراءات اقتصادية قاسية هدفها عزل روسيا وإحداث اضطرابات في روسيا تتوّج بانقلاب على الرئيس بوتين والإطاحة به وتغيير النظام والإتيان بنظام شبيه بالنظام الذي كان قائماً في ولاية بوريس يلتسين الذي سيسهّل الاستيلاء على الثروات الروسية وتفكيك روسيا. ففي عقيدة المحافظين الجدد والمتدخلين الليبراليين المهيمنين على القرار السياسي الخارجي الأميركي الهدف هو إنهاء روسيا كمنافس محتمل للهيمنة الأميركية في العالم.
أهداف غربية عديدة لكن بلا نتيجة!
لكن ما هي النتيجة حالياً ومستقبلياً للموقف الغربي (الأطلسي والأميركي) من جرّاء الإجراءات التي اتخذها تجاه روسيا؟
من الواضح انّ الولايات المتحدة وسائر دول الحلف الأطلسي لن يتدخلوا عسكرياً بشكل مباشر بل سيكتفون بالحصار الإعلامي أولاً والدبلوماسي ثانياً، والاقتصادي والمالي ثالثاً، إضافة إلى تمويل عمليات التخريب في أوكرانيا وربما في روسيا عبر شبكات من العملاء. وهذا دليل على الضعف العسكري وفقدان القدرة على تحمّل ضريبة الدم فلذلك يلجأ الغرب إلى هدر دم الآخر بما فيه الدم الأوكراني كما فعل في سورية.
فعلى الصعيد الإعلامي استطاعت الولايات المتحدة وحلفاؤها السيطرة الكاملة على السردية التي يفرضونها على الجمهور الغربي عبر منع المنصات والمنابر لمن يخالف السردية. كما انّ السردية مبنية على الأكاذيب التي يُمنع تفنيدها تساهم في تعميق سوء التفاهم بين الشعوب بل في تعميق الكراهية بين الشرق والغرب. ونعتقد انّ الرقابة المفروضة من قبل المراجع الغربية ومنع المنصات الناقدة هي ظاهرة ضعف وليست ظاهرة قوة كما أنها ظاهرة تؤكّد فقدان الحجة والبرهان. فمن تابع روايات المراسلين الأجانب في أوكرانيا لصالح وسائل الإعلام الغربية يجد أنّ مضمون الرواية مخالف للحقيقة. فسردية «النجاحات» العسكرية الأوكرانية ضدّ الجيش الروسي لا تترجم بدلائل مادية. كما أنّ تلك الوسائل وبشكل جماعي لم تبرز أيّ خارطة للواقع الميداني. فأين توجد القوّات المتصارعة غير معروف في وسائل الإعلام الغربية بينما في وسائل الإعلام الموازي وغير المهيمن نرى خرائط عن التحرّك والتقدّم.
لكن في آخر المطاف الجمهور العام الذي لا يستثمر وقته في البحث عن الحقيقة لا يعرف فعلياً أين أصبحت الأمور. والفطرة الموجودة عند الجمهور الغربي وخاصة في الولايات المتحدة جعلته يشكّك في ما يبثّه الاعلام المهيمن. لذلك لا نجد حتى الساعة موجات من الاحتجاجات ضدّ «الاحتلال» الروسي لأوكرانيا دون أن يعني ذلك التأييد لروسيا وعمليتها العسكرية. وهذه نقطة مهمة يجب التوقف عندها لأنّ في المستقبل القريب ستجد الحكومات الغربية صعوبة كبيرة في تسويق سياسات غير مقبولة لدى الجمهور العام سواء على صعيد الصراع في أوكرانيا وغير أوكرانيا وعلى صعيد مختلف السياسات الداخلية عندما تنكشف حقيقة الوقائع الميدانية والسياسية. فذاكرة الكذب حول سلاح الدمار الشامل في العراق واحتلال العراق وما نتج من مآسٍ ما زال في ذاكرة الجمهور العام.
هذه السيطرة على السردية الإعلامية لم تستطع أن تخفي العنصرية الغربية تجاه الشعوب السمراء والصفراء والسوداء. فـ «زلّات اللسان» للمراسلين الأجانب حول «بيضوية البشرة وزرقاوية العيون» للاجئين الأوكرانيين الفارين من ساحات الاشتباكات والتركيز على «مسيحيّتهم» و»تمدّنهم النسبي» كشف العنصرية الغربية تجاه الشرق. هذا في وسائل الإعلام المهيمن فما بالك في ما ينشر على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي؟! لم يكن ذلك في الحسبان ومن الصعب تصوّر ما يمكن أن يفعله ذلك الإعلام لتصحيح الصورة عنه. المشكلة أو حتى المصيبة التي تعصف بالنخب الحاكمة في الغرب وخاصة في الولايات المتحدة والمملكة المتحدة أنها أصبحت منقطعة عن الواقع. فهي أصبحت تصدّق الأكاذيب التي أطلقتها وتبني سياساتها ومواقفها من منطلقات عقائدية ورغبوية منقطعة عن التطوّرات الميدانية.
الخطورة في الموقف الغربي هو التحوّل السريع من مواجهة سياسية مع خصم أيّ روسيا إلى محاولة ألغاء مجتمع وثقافة برمّتها. فطبيعة الإجراءات التي اتخذها الغرب ليست لمواجهة الرئيس الروسي وسياساته بل لإلغاء روسيا. فهذا هو الدافع العقائدي الذي يحكم النخب الحاكمة في الغرب وبالتالي تحويل الصراع السياسي على النفوذ إلى صراع وجودي يحمل في طيّاته كافة الاحتمالات النافية للوجود كالحرب النووية. فعندما سئل وزير الخارجية لافروف عن احتمال قيام حرب عالمية ثالثة نووية أجاب «اسألوا بايدن»! لكن موازين القوّة الفعلية على الأرض مختلفة كلّياً عن التقديرات الرغبوية في المحافل الدولية وبالتالي سنشهد في الأسابيع المقبلة وقائع على الأرض لم تكن في الحسبان الغربي.
المناعة الاقتصادية الروسية كبيرة جداً
أما الإجراءات الاقتصادية والمالية فهي سلاح ذو حدّين. الرهان الغربي هو تردّي الأوضاع الاقتصادية في روسيا لخلق بيئة مضطربة تزيد من النقمة على الحكم وتؤدّي إلى ثورات للإطاحة بالنظام والرئيس. ما يغيب عن بال المخطّطين أن القيادة الروسية كانت منذ 2008 تخطّط للحظة المواجهة. لسنا هنا في إطار سرد الخطوات التي أقدمت عليها طيلة السنوات الماضية بل نكتفي بالقول إنّ المناعة الروسية في القطاعات الاقتصادية والمالية الاستراتيجية كبيرة جداً بسبب البدائل التي أقامتها لمواجهة الحصار الاقتصادي والمالي. بل كلاعب الجودو استطاعت القيادة الروسية استعمال قوة الخصم ضده. فالإجراءات المالية والاقتصادية التي اتخذها الغرب تجاه روسيا تظهر مدى انكشاف تلك الاقتصادات تجاه روسيا بما فيها الولايات المتحدة وإنْ كانت بدرجات متفاوتة من الانكشاف.
قراءتنا للعقوبات المفروضة من قبل الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها هي أنها موجّهة فعلياً ضدّ أوروبا الغربية التي كانت تظهر ملامح التململ من الإملاءات الأميركية. فهذه العقوبات فرضت وحدة موقف أوروبية قصرية قد تطيح بأيّ تطلّع استقلالي على المدى القصير. لكن معظم الحكومات الأوروبية التي رضخت للولايات المتحدة تواجه استحقاقات انتخابية في وضع اقتصادي متردّ أصلاً ويزداد تردّياً بسبب العقوبات. فعلى سبيل المثال، العقوبات على روسيا كتوقيف العمل بالسيل الغاز الشمالي الثاني (نور ستريم 2) سيؤدّي إلى أزمة طاقة تضرب البنية الاقتصادية الصناعية الألمانية وتزيد من كلفة التدفئة أضعافاً مما كانت عليها. وهذه قضايا تشكل محور الصراع السياسي الداخلي. فأزمة الطاقة التي بدأت تجتاح أوروبا وارتفاع كلفتها ترافقها أزمة ارتفاع المواد الغذائية. والانكماش الاقتصادي الذي دخلت فيه قد يتحوّل إلى كساد كبير. فالكساد في اقتصاد منتج هو انخفاض مستوى الإنفاق الاستهلاكي الذي يخفّض الطلب الفعلي ويؤدّي إلى تفاقم البطالة فإلى تراجع في الدخل فإلى المزيد من تراجع في الإنفاق الاستهلاكي ليصل بفعل المكرّر الاقتصادي (economic multiplier) إلى حالة جمود فركود لها ارتدادات سياسية واجتماعية قد تقلب الطاولة على رؤوس النخب الحاكمة.
أما في الدول الريعية التي تستورد معظم حاجياتها فارتفاع الأسعار يؤدّي إلى نقمة اجتماعية. وما يزيد الطين بلّة بالنسبة لدول مثل المانيا وفرنسا وإيطاليا التي ما زالت تحافظ على قاعدة إنتاجية صناعية هو فقدان قدراتها التنافسية بسبب ارتفاع كلفة الإنتاج ما سيجعّلها تتخلّى عن القاعدة الصناعية لتدخل في مرحلة ما بعد الصناعة فإلى المزيد من الانكشاف تجاه الدول المصنّعة الصاعدة كالصين والهند ودول أميركا اللاتينية. فإذا كان هدف الغرب بقيادة الولايات المتحدة محاصرة الصين فإنّ الإجراءات التي اعتمدها تجاه روسيا وبشكل غير مباشر تجاه أوروبا ستكون لمصلحة الصين! هذا ما نقصده بالربح التكتيكي القصير المدى الذي يصبح خسارة استراتيجية طويلة المدى!
ضرب ديمومة النظام المالي
من جهة أخرى، فإنّ قرار إخراج روسيا من منظومة «سويفت» ومعاقبة عدد من المصارف الروسية وأهم من كل ذلك تجميد أصول وأموال المصرف المركزي الروسي فإنّ ذلك يضرب في الصميم ديمومة النظام المالي الذي بحاجة إلى استقلال واستقرار بعيداً عن التقلّبات السياسية. كما أنّ مصداقية التعامل مع المراكز المالية الغربية وخاصة الأميركية انتهت إلى غير رجعة. فمن هي الدولة التي ستبقى مطمئنة على أصولها وموجوداتها المالية تحت السيطرة الأميركية والغربية؟ هذا سيؤدّي حتماً إلى التسريع في نظام مدفوعات مالي دولي بديل وخارج عن سيطرة الولايات المتحدة ومنظومتها المالية. توجد الان منظومات موازية ل «سويفت» تعود للصين كنظام «سي أي بي أس (CIPS)، ولروسيا في نظام اس أف بي أس (SFPS)، وللهند في نظام أس أف أم أس (SFMS). الخطر المباشر هو تنامي المنظومة الصينية كما أشار عدد من الخبراء كدافيد برانكاسيو وجنيفر باك وهما خبراء ماليين دوليين. ونضيف ماذا إذا أقدمت كل من الصين والهند وروسيا على تشبيك أنظمتها؟ فلا يجب أن ننسى أن الكتلة البشرية والجغرافية التي تمثّلها هذه الدول الثلاث لها وزنها الاقتصادي في العالم يصعب تجاهله في الحد الأدنى بل هو مؤثر بشكل كبير على مصالح اقتصادات العالم الغربي. ما لفت نظرنا أن قرار إخراج روسيا من منظومة «سويفت» حذّرت منه المؤسسات المالية الأميركية كالاحتياط الاتحادي والمؤسسات الكبرى كغولدمان ساكس وبلومبرغ لأنّ ذلك سيسرّع في تنامي الأنظمة المنافسة بما فيه الشبكات العنكبوتية المالي. والمعلومات الأولية تفيد أنها بدأت فعليا. لكن السياسة أقوى من الاعتبارات الاقتصادية والمالية ما يؤكّد مقولتنا أن السياسة هي المحرّك الأساسي وأنّ الاقتصاد ليس إلاّ وجها للسياسة ولكن بلغة الأرقام.
من تداعيات الإجراءات العقابية على روسيا هو تسريع التخلّي عن الدولار في الدول المنافسة الرئيسية كالصين وروسيا وستلحقها الهند. كما سيتنامى تخفيض الاحتياطات النقدية بالدولار بعدما أقدمت الولايات المتحدة على تجميد أو السطو على الأصول المالية للمصارف المركزية. لا ننسى كيف تمّ الاستيلاء على أموال إيران بعد الثورة الإسلامية ولا على أموال ليبيا ومؤخرا على أموال أفغانستان. فانخفاض الطلب على الدولار عالمياً سيفقد الولايات المتحدة سلاحاً أساسياً استخدمته في تمويل حروبها على شعوب ودول العالم.
في الخلاصة، نستطيع أن نقول إنّ النجاحات التي حققتها الولايات المتحدة على صعيد مواجهة روسيا سترتدّ على حلفائها في الدرجة الأولى كما سيصيبها ارتدادات ذلك. لكن سنفصّل كلّ ذلك في مقاربة منفصلة لاحقة لضيق المساحة المتاحة الآن.
*باحث وكاتب اقتصادي سياسي والأمين العام السابق للمؤتمر القومي العربي وعضو الهيئة التأسيسية للمنتدى الاقتصادي والاجتماعي
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 