Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged the US-led NATO bloc to ramp up support of his country amid the ongoing conflict with Russia, claiming that Kiev’s defeat would result in a “delayed” war between Moscow and the whole West. Zelensky made the remarks as he addressed the NATO summit in Madrid via a video link on Wednesday.
“It’s either urgent aid to Ukraine sufficient for victory, or a delayed war between Russia and you,” Zelensky told NATO leaders.
The country needs both direct military and financial aid, Zelensky stated, adding that some $5 billion a month was needed to cover its budget deficit. Top Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called upon the West to provide financial support.
“Financial aid for Ukraine has no less significance than arms deliveries,” Zelensky said. “We need some $5 billon every month, you know that. And this is a fundamental thing, needed for defense and protection.”
To help Ukraine now end this war with a victory on the battlefield, that is, to give a really strong response to Russia’s actions – this is what we, and the entire alliance, the whole Euro-Atlantic community need.
Once the conflict is over, Ukraine must be provided with a decent place in the Western security architecture, Zelensky insisted, rejecting the prospect of Ukraine remaining in a “gray zone” between Russia and the NATO bloc. “We need security guarantees, and you must find a place for Ukraine in the common security space,” he stressed.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
Economists on both sides of the Atlantic have recently urged their respective publics to prepare for a recession, and possibly a stagflationary crisis, amid surging inflation and soaring energy costs exacerbated by Washington and Brussels’ moves aimed at dramatically reducing dependence on Russian oil and gas.
The European Union’s plan to replace Russian gas before the end of the current year isn’t only “wildly optimistic,” but will add to the economic woes the bloc is already facing, London-headquartered macroeconomic forecasting consultancy TS Lombard has predicted.
In a recent report, TS Lombard researcher Christopher Granville calculated that the EU imported roughly 155 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas from Russia in 2021, with all of Brussels’ proposed measures to replace it – including diversification of gas sources, heating efficiency measures, solar rooftops, biomethane, etc. account for the equivalent of about 102 bcm of gas, leaving about a third of supplies unaccounted for.
“Apart from implementation timings of commissioning German LNG-receiving terminals, Russia is also an important supplier of LNG, underlining the challenge for Europe of sourcing adequate LNG supplies,” Granville wrote.
Amid EU efforts to source gas from alternative suppliers, including the US, Qatar and Azerbaijan, Granville’s report warned that the EU will be made to “pay more on average for its [non-Russian] oil and gas than its peers. Asian countries will buy more Russian oil at discounted prices… LNG imported by Europe from the US will cost [much] more than the price paid by US consumers owing to transit and liquefication/re-gasification costs.”
Russian officials and European energy company officials have estimated that Russian pipeline gas flowing to Europe has been 40 and 50 percent cheaper than American LNG, and less expensive than all other alternatives, owing to the shorter transit distances, larger volumes, and competitive pricing.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Moscow’s “Western colleagues” had “forgotten” the elementary laws of economics by trying to cut themselves off from Russian energy, predicting that the decision would turn Europe into the region with the highest energy costs in the world. This would undermine the EU’s competitiveness vis-à-vis other agglomerations, he said.
“Obviously, together with Russian energy resources, economic activity will also be leaving Europe for other regions of the world. Such an economic suicide is of course the internal affair of European countries. We must proceed pragmatically and primarily from our own economic interests,” Putin said.
Russian natural gas exports to Europe have declined precipitously in recent months as EU bloc countries search for alternatives. The drop accelerated earlier this month after Russian gas giant Gazprom indicated that it would be forced to reduce flows to Europe by up to 60 percent due to problems with the repair and maintenance of German-sourced turbines pumping gas through the Nord Stream 1 network. Germany and Denmark activated emergency measures as supplies dropped. Brussels accused Moscow of artificially throttling exports, with the European commission calling the emergency measures “blackmail.”
Takahide Kiuchi, an economist at the Tokyo-based Nomura Research Institute economic consultancy, warned in a research note Tuesday that if the crisis surrounding the Nord Stream 1 shortfall escalates, Brussels could add gas to the list of other Russian energy supplies that have been banned or semi-banned. This, he predicted, would push the Eurozone into a “sharp slowdown,” and plunge Germany into a recession.
The Kremlin says Russia will halt its months-long military offensive in neighboring Ukraine as soon as Ukrainian forces surrender.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday that hostilities in Ukraine could end “before the end of today” if Kiev orders the nationalists to lay down their weapons and Moscow’s demands are met.
“The Ukrainian side can end all this before the end of today; an order is necessary for the nationalist units to lay down their weapons, an order is necessary for the Ukrainian military to lay down their weapons; and they must fulfill all Russia’s demands. Then everything will be over before the day ends,” Peskov said.
“Everything else are just speculations of the Ukrainian head of state,” he added. “We are guided by the statements of our President Vladimir Putin that the special military operation is going according to plan and achieving its goals.”
Asked whether the Russian side had any approximate timeframe for the end of the offensive in Ukraine, the Kremlin spokesman responded in the negative.
Peskov made the comment while reacting to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s remark that he would like to end the hostilities before the end of the year.
Zelensky urged world powers on Monday to do their utmost to help end Russia’s offensive before the cold season, also saying that the time was not ripe for holding talks with Russia as Kiev was seeking to consolidate its positions.
In a statement on Monday, the Group of Seven (G7) countries expressed full support for Ukraine in the conflict with Russia, pledging to further tighten sanctions on Moscow.
Addressing G7 leaders at their summit in the Bavarian Alps via video link, the Ukrainian president called for arms supplies and air defenses to gain the upper hand in the conflict.
Since the start of Russia’s military strikes on February 24, the US and its Western allies have been imposing sanctions against Moscow. More than four months after the Kremlin launched its offensive against Ukraine, Russian troops have taken control of nearly the entire Donbass region, focusing their military attention on northeastern Ukraine.
In a separate development on Tuesday, G7 leaders in a statement denounced Russia’s offensive as “illegal and unjustifiable.”
“We, the leaders of the Group of Seven … were joined by the leaders of Argentina, India, Indonesia, Senegal and South Africa, as well as Ukraine,” they said in their draft final statement. “We re-emphasize our condemnation of Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war of aggression against Ukraine.”
The G7 leaders also agreed to explore imposing a ban on transporting Russian oil that had been sold above a certain price, ramping up pressure on Moscow over the soaring global inflation and energy shortages fueled by the country’s offensive in Ukraine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said an oil price cap would ratchet up the existing Western pressure on Russia, stressing that the sanctions would stay until Moscow accepted failure in Ukraine.
“There is only one way out: for Putin to accept that his plans in Ukraine will not succeed,” Scholz told a closing news conference at the three-day G7 summit, adding that the aim of the ban was to tie financial services, insurance, and the shipping of oil cargoes to a price ceiling. “We invite all like-minded countries to consider joining us in our actions.”
The International Energy Agency announced in its June monthly report that the revenues from Russian oil export had soared in May even as volumes had fallen.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Russian gas giant Gazprom could seek to change the terms of its delivery contracts if Western governments implemented a price cap on Russian gas.
The G7 on 26 June re-launched its previous Build Back Better World program to provide infrastructure funds to poor and developing nations under a new name, the Global Investment and Infrastructure Partnership. The project aims to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative kicked off by Beijing in 2013.
The Build Back Better World (B3W) program was pompously announced by the club of seven developed nations to counter China’s Belt and Road at the G7 Summit in Cornwall in July 2021. However, little had been heard of the G7’s endeavor since then. In June 2022, the Group of Seven decided to breathe new life into the project.
“So far, America has failed to build momentum on its plan to Build Back a Better World,” says Francesco Sisci, a Beijing-based China expert, author, and columnist. “However, with this new G7 plan, which includes other countries, this momentum could start to be built. It is a question mark. Nobody is sure until things are realized. But you cannot just underestimate and dismiss this plan, because there is a large commitment of many countries with a large economy and this plan could make big sense.”
The G7’s grand design envisages laying a secure sub-sea telecommunications cable that will connect Singapore to France through Egypt and the Horn of Africa; creating a COVID-19 vaccine plant in Senegal; expanding solar projects in Angola, including solar mini-grids and home power grids; and establishing an innovative modular nuclear reactor plant in Romania, among other issues.
The US president pledged to mobilize $200 billion in investments in global infrastructure projects over the next five years. The overall investment, including G7 member states and private capital, is expected to reach $600 billion.
“With two competing plans – size matters, at the end of the day,” says Sisci. “That is, China may be able to immediately finalize a lot of money in a short time in a number of projects. The G7 countries could be slower, but eventually they could build up momentum and they could channel much more money much more effectively, perhaps, in a much larger number of projects which could stifle Chinese projects.”
Sisci suggests that the club of developed capitalist countries “may end up being more effective in many ways [than China], a smaller non-capitalist country.”
“China, but also Russia, by far, don’t have the size, the gravitas to oppose even a divided G7, which is coming together because of this opposition to China or Russia-driven projects,” he notes.
G7 Economic & Geopolitical Hurdles
However, some other observers express skepticism over the ability of the US and G7 to implement the project given record-high inflation and cost of living crisis currently engulfing the states. The US, British and European central banks are struggling to tame skyrocketing inflation by raising interest rates to reduce demand, which is prompting recession fears.
“Washington claims they are going to be sending over $200 billion. But where’s the money coming from and how is it going to be really used?” asks Thomas W. Pauken II, the author of “US vs China: From Trade War to Reciprocal Deal,” a consultant on Asia-Pacific affairs and a geopolitical commentator.
He notes that previously the US Senate voted Biden’s landmark Build Back Better initiative down, and for good reason, as Republican congressmen feared that the Democratic administration’s spending spree would fan inflation and increase an already bloated national debt.
Pauken also expresses bewilderment over the G7’s apparent readiness to embark on the bold international project at a time when the group is involved in the Ukraine crisis with the UK trying to keep the military conflict dragging on. “I mean, it’s laughable that they have to think about [competing with] China at this time when they’re on the brink of a major war in Europe,” the commentator remarks.
Meanwhile, the G7’s Global Investment and Infrastructure Partnership cannot be regarded so far as a viable alternative to the Beijing-led Belt and Road Initiative that has been implemented for slightly less than a decade, according to Pauken.
“First of all, [the G7] actually need[s] to make these projects work,” says the geopolitical commentator. “Other than that solar plant in Angola, I don’t see any of these initiatives really working.”
In particular, China invested almost $59.5 billion in its comprehensive infrastructure project in 2021 alone. When it comes to crucial elements of the project, the West appears to be lagging behind. While the G7 is still considering building a subsea cable linking Europe and Southeast Asia, China kicked off its Digital Silk Road (DSR) almost seven years ago. The DSR’s backbone is the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE), a 9,300 mile long subsea cable network meant to tie Asia, Africa, and Europe together. The network is designed to transmit over 16Tbps per fibre pair with its Mediterranean section going from Egypt to France having already been laid.
Are Emerging Economies Interested in the G7 Agenda?
There is yet another problem as to how to make these Western projects attractive for Global South nations, the Asia Pacific expert continues. In particular, the G7 has been pushing ahead with a climate change agenda and the plan to cut carbon emissions, which is not relevant for the majority of third-world states which are still reliant on cheaper and more reliable fossil fuels and coal plants, he notes.
“You also have to deal with auditing issues as well as the so-called climate change consultants who go on the ground and on site,” he says. “You have to prove that those infrastructure projects are not causing much of a carbon footprint. But most of the major infrastructure does require a big carbon footprint, especially in the emerging markets, because they don’t have the same equipment or they don’t have the same standards or labor laws as they would have in Western Europe or the US.”
Many emerging economies, including African countries, are beginning to have a growing frustration with the US and Europe, according to Pauken. The reality is that Africans and many of the emerging markets want to focus on economic stuff, he notes. However, when the US officials come in, they’re talking about climate change or gender equity, and this is not as interesting to developing nations, the commentator emphasizes.
“[Developing nations] want help on improving their agricultural production levels and boosting their energy capacity, which the Russians and the Chinese have been doing,” Pauken notes.
Given all of the above, it is unlikely that the G7’s Global Investment and Infrastructure Partnership initiative is going to actually happen, argues the geopolitical commentator.
“They’re rebranding a failed policy, thinking it might work by using new names and new mergers. Last time it was separate between the EU and separate between the US and they somehow think that if you combine the two failed projects into one, that this will somehow succeed. That’s not going to work in the real world,” Pauken concludes.
Interruptions in Russian gas supplies and mass switching to electricity will lead to “a general energy collapse” in Europe, Prime Minister of Montenegro Dritan Abazović claimed on Monday.
Speaking to parliament, Abrazovic recalled the recent remarks by the German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck who, amid looming energy difficulties over the winter period, advised his compatriots to spend less time in shower and to prepare warm clothes.
In Abrazovic’s opinion, if someone from his government came up with such advice, he would be ridiculed. Montenegrin ministers are now focused on preventing a crisis like this, he said, but everything does not depend on them.
“If it comes true that in the fall, or with the onset of cold days, gas is not delivered from Russia to Western Europe at a level that satisfies its economy, and if it switches to electricity, there will be a general energy collapse,” he warned.
He explained that there was an even greater danger than increasing energy prices: In his opinion, there might be a situation in which “even with money, you will not be able to get electricity.”
The ministers, Abrazovic warned, are focused now on preventing the worst scenarios but also on preparing for them. He said that one of the ways to do it was rebalancing the budget. The prime minister also stressed that while Montenegro, unlike some other European countries, was not dependent on natural gas, it must still be prepared and should “look at how to get the most out of the tourism industry.”
“However, both Covid and the crisis caused by the war in Ukraine should teach us the following: We have to increase food production and to become a country that is not energy dependent,” he said.
In order to become more independent, the focus should also be on building new energy facilities, according to Abrazovic.
The prime minister expressed certainty that his government was addressing the issues correctly and that there was no reason to panic.
Earlier this month, International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol warned the EU to be prepared for the possibility of a complete shutdown of Russian gas exports this winter, calling on the bloc’s members to widen the span of measures aimed at preparing for this scenario, according to Financial Times.
Germany, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands announced their plans to step up the use of coal for power generation, while Sweden and Denmark said they would also launch emergency measures to curb the use of natural gas.
The European gas market is already experiencing a severe shortage of imported energy supplies. Shipments by Russia’s Gazprom through the Nord Stream pipeline have fallen significantly this month because of parts shortages due to sanctions.
The reduced deliveries come at a time when Europe is racing to stock up for winter, with gas storages on the continent currently standing at 55%, according to recent data.
The EU plans to phase out Russian gas by 2030 as part of its response to Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine, which was launched in late February. However, several countries, including Germany, have repeatedly warned their economies would suffer if the flow were to stop immediately.
ACCORDING TO the Cambridge Dictionary, a sanction is ‘a strong action taken in order to make people obey a law or rule, or a punishment given when they do not obey’. The purpose is pretty obvious, to try to deter an action that is not deemed by the sanctioner as acceptable.
A child thus may be sanctioned for poor behaviour with no sweets for a week. A country is equally sanctioned in some way deemed to harm the errant country and not those giving the sanction. Russia has been sanctioned by primarily the US, UK and EU in an unprecedented fashion due to the war in Ukraine. But who is it hurting?
This article is not about the morality of the situation in Ukraine. It is simply about whether the sanctions have been effective, or have they actually been counter-productive? At the most basic level, has applying sanctions made it more, or less likely, that UK policy goals will be achieved?
A third of a year into war, the only conclusion one can sanely draw so far is that the West’s sanctions have been an unmitigated disaster in self-harm undermining domestic prosperity while causing serious inflationary and monetary dislocation.
There is very little evidence that Western sanctions have materially harmed Russia’s ability to prosecute war or (as much as we can judge) diminish Russian domestic support for it. Far from Government’s expectations that it would cripple the Russian economy and perhaps lead to regime change, if anything it is Western economies that are in desperate trouble. It seems that US, UK and EU sanctions are proving to be a lose-lose trade.
A simple test – what currency traders would say
We were told sanctions were going to cripple the Russian economy and stop its war machine. For around two weeks, judging by the currency market’s reaction to a then collapsing rouble, that superficially seemed right.
Initially the rouble halved from a pre-war 75 to the USD to a low of 140 as the West confiscated over $300billion of Russia’s sovereign assets held in the West. This, coupled with a wholesale withdrawal of Western companies, from BP to McDonald’s, and a tightening of oil and gas sanctions, resulted in currency collapse.
Such a collapse, if prolonged, would have been very dangerous for Russia’s stability as it simply destroys its terms of trade, potentially resulting in material inflation as the cost of importing goods rises significantly.
But Western policy makers did not think through the second derivative which is coming back to bite. Economically Russia to an extent is the polar opposite of the West.
The West undoubtedly has significant technological and soft power advantage over Russia. However, most Western economies have growing and inefficient public sectors and weak central banking systems impeded by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and particularly lockdowns, with substantial growing public debt and debased monetary systems through a new-found belief in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – accompanied by all the associated Quantitative Easing over the last decade. Britain and the US also run substantial trade deficits.
Russia, on the other hand, is a commodity- and primary products-led export economy running a substantial trade surplus, with weak technology and service sector exports and soft power. Its public finances are very strong with low public debt, low taxes (14 per cent flat rate income tax) and substantial cash reserves even after half were sanctioned.
This asymmetry of strategic advantage between Russia and the West has profound implications if sanctions are applied. Thus quite quickly currency traders realised what extraordinarily almost none of our current crop of virtue signalling politicians dare to say – that the sanctions were potentially more of a threat to the West (UK and EU in particular) as the impact of ‘cancelling’ Russian carbon was highly inflationary.
There are no cheap short or medium term substitutes. Much of the West is dependent on Russian primary products, while only some Russians might be upset the Prada store in Moscow had closed (but the back door from China remained wide open). An inconvenience, sure; a game changer, probably not.
Thus the rouble strengthened materially and at the time of writing is 55 to the USD, almost 30 per cent stronger than before the conflict in Ukraine. If one compares the sterling- rouble exchange rate, sterling’s underperformance is even starker.
It is quite simple. Cancel Russian oil (13 per cent global production) and India joyfully buys the discarded stock at a discount while the global price goes up as the West scrambles to find new supply. Worse, cancel Russian gas and the EU has a major crisis, as does the UK given the UK’s foolish decade-plus de-emphasising of carbon, including the closure of strategic gas storage facilities. The list goes on well beyond carbon – from titanium to fertiliser, from wheat to cod.
But it is oil and gas that are so critical as power is essential to the manufacture, to a greater or lesser extent, of most things. The irony is that as well as Saudi, Iran and Venezuela, the greatest beneficiary of soaring hydrocarbon prices is Russia. Putin’s Russia has run consistent trade surpluses but the current surplus is a record, as a direct result of sanctions, taking the spot price of oil from a pre-war $80 a barrel to $120 today.
While the rouble strengthens and the Russian trade surplus expands, the effect on Western economies has been devastating. In fairness the West had been severely undermining its own advantage for many years prior to the invasion of Ukraine, fuelled by Governmental policies based on a double fallacy: that monetary policy could solve all ills, and that centralised decision-making and excessive public spending could solve all ills.
Both fallacies are now coming with a substantial price, but to multiply that with an ill-thought-out sanctions regime that is achieving none of its underlying goals and is harming Western economies is frankly hard to fathom.
The West, particularly the EU and UK, is now in a pickle. This pickle has the potential to be calamitous as Governments remain in denial at the scale of the challenge they are facing.
We are in a situation where the inflationary surge, given supply chains, is in its embryo stage, not close to its conclusion. Sure, the price rise at the pumps is immediate, but domestic energy prices are set to increase by a further 40 per cent in September when the price cap comes off. As a warning, German producer price inflation (see chart below) is over 30 per cent, a rate not seen since post-war ruination in 1946.
I sincerely hope I am wrong but this has the potential to get very nasty. Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday: ‘We are using all the tools at our disposal to bring inflation down and combat rising prices. We can build a stronger economy through independent monetary policy, responsible fiscal policy which doesn’t add to inflationary pressures, and by boosting our long-term productivity and growth.’ That says to me he hasn’t a clue about the scale of the challenge or indeed the underlying causes.
The reality is unfortunately that both the Bank of England and the ECB are so far behind the curve as to make you weep. Interest rates of 1.25 per cent when RPI is 11 per cent are so far off-kilter while the ECB, with arguably an even greater inflation headache given German industrial reliance on Russian gas, is only now coming off negative rates.
Moreover, expanding a wantonly inefficient public sector to around half the entire economy coupled with an unprecedented regulatory stranglehold can only spell a productivity disaster. It is throwing money at the bad, paid for by the good.
Where this will end remains uncertain, so many unknowns are there. What we can predict is that this is the beginning not the end of the maelstrom. Governments do not like short-term pain as elections approach and we risk yet another debt-funded stimulus papering over the ever-wider cracks. How credible would that really be when inflation is 11 per cent? Would they dare print money again in such circumstance? I fear they would.
This country and indeed Europe generally is enduring enormous self-harm. Sanctions have backfired but the cocktail of sanctions, massive public sector expansion, delusional monetary policy and delusional energy policy risk an economic disaster of immense proportion.
There is no easy fix but unless we wish to become a northern version of Argentina, with a debased currency, constant crisis and missed opportunity, we need to understand the scale and multiple layers of our challenge.
It’s too late to avoid prolonged and meaningful inflation, and in time recession, but it’s not too late to start to rectify policy error. I can’t see the current crop of politicians analysing forensically the impact of sanctions but a great start would be to toss away the gateway drug to our delusions, the strange idea that Modern Monetary Theory works and governments can print and spend their way out of a crisis. Frankly they can’t and with that acceptance perhaps we can start the process of an appropriately balanced economy focused on private activity, not state direction. Government got us in this mess, only the people can free us from it.
In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively. Some have gone on to say that they have profited from my reporting on the content and changing views aired on Russian political talk shows these past few months, all of which is rarely featured in mainstream Western news and analysis. My intent in such reporting was to ensure that at least some people here understand what Ukraine and its Western backers are up against, so as to better understand the course of the fighting on the ground and who may be winning.
In this context, I announce with sadness that the job of even-handed reporting has just become much more difficult as a result of Eutelsat’s implementation yesterday of a policy decision announced just over a month ago, but which went unnoticed by most everyone, myself included.
I quote from Google Search:
“Eutelsat to remove banned Russian channels. Eutelsat ready to immediately stop the rebroadcasting of the Russian channels RTR Planeta and Rossiya 24 on its satellites on June 25. 13 May 2022”
Indeed, the main state news channels of the Russian Federation can now no longer be received via satellite antennas here in Belgium or elsewhere on the Continent. They are partially and sporadically accessible on the internet via www.smotrim.ru but the level of interference from Western censors makes such viewing a dismal exercise. “Freezing” of frames seems to be most common with respect to the talk shows “Sixty Minutes” and “Evening with Solovyov,” two programs which I had been following and reporting on most regularly. However, it also is applied against Russian shows which might be characterized as being simply entertainment, such as the currently running historical serial about the life and times of the 18th century tsarina Elizabeth. I dare anyone to get more than a minute or two into the broadcast before the curtain comes down, so to speak.
The curtain in question is an updated Iron Curtain, which this time has been dropped on our heads by the powers that be in Washington. After all, it is Washington that pressured the French controlled Eutelsat rebroadcaster of television channels that dominates the European and other global markets to throw out the Russians.
The argument behind that demand was to exclude “Russian propaganda” from the airwaves.
In the spirit of fairmindedness with which I opened this essay, I agree that Russian state television is practicing propagandistic methods insofar as it withholds certain information from viewers while promoting other information favorable to its paymasters. For example, on Russian state television news you will not find a word about the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings of Russian artillery and rocket attacks on Kharkov. You are shown only the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings in Donetsk and towns of the Donbas caused by Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes.
On the other hand, however, European and U.S. newscasts feature the damage caused by Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns while saying not a word about the sufferings of the Donbas population from military assaults by Ukrainian forces. Just as they have been entirely silent about such suffering and death among the Donbas population that Kiev has inflicted on them for the past eight years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2014.
Each side in the Ukrainian conflict accuses the other side of using cluster bombs and other internationally prohibited weapons against civilian populations. These accusations are put on air by Russian and Western news programs only as they are set out by their favored respective side.
My point is very simple: by silencing the so-called Russian propagandists, Western propagandists have the field to themselves here in Belgium, in the broader European Union and in North America. The possibilities for the public to form an independent view of what is going on are choked off, and with that there is no basis for informed policy discussion in the expert community. As The Washington Post so nicely puts it: democracy dies in darkness.
And what about the Russian side? Are they also cut off and ignorant as my remarks on coverage of casualties above might suggest? I commented on this question in my travel report on my six week stay in Petersburg that began in May: Western news channels have been removed from the cable television distributors in the city. For this I blame not Russian government prohibitions but the commercial decisions of Western content providers who terminated their contracts with Russian distributors just as did the Hollywood studios. Meanwhile, Western stations remain accessible on the internet without interference and they remain accessible on satellite television.
At my dacha, I had no difficulty receiving the BBC and Bloomberg for free courtesy of my parabolic antenna. How long this will be the case given the tit-for-tat nature of the relationship between the West and Russia generally I cannot say. But if someone does pull the plug on Western ‘propaganda’ in Russia, it will be in response to the West’s dropping the Iron Curtain on Russia, not the other way around.
It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship. The only likely result will be total shock and surprise throughout the Western world when the Russians complete their liberation of Donbas, take the Ukrainian Black Sea coast including Odessa and declare victory over what will by then be an utterly destroyed Ukrainian army.
In the meantime, under greatly constrained conditions, I will try my best to follow the Russian side of the story on talk shows, on news reports of Russian war correspondents embedded with their forces on the front lines, and to share with readers what appears to be afoot on the other side of the barricades.
Lithuania will maintain the ban on the transit of sanctioned goods between Kaliningrad Region and mainland Russia, President Gitanas Nauseda has said.
“It is absolutely clear that Lithuania must and will implement EU sanctions,” Nauseda wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
“Lithuania must and will maintain control over the goods passing through its territory, and there cannot be any ‘corridors’, nor can there be any appeasement of Russia in response to the Kremlin’s threats. I have made clear to the president of the European Commission how Lithuania sees the situation.”
Kaliningrad Region is a small Russian exclave nestled between Lithuania and Poland. A week ago, Lithuania’s national rail operator suspended the transit of sanctions goods between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia, citing instructions from Brussels.
Since the EU closed its airspace to Russian planes in February, the only option for the authorities in Kaliningrad now is to ferry goods to and from mainland Russia via the Baltic Sea.
The EU imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow in response to the military campaign in Ukraine launched in late February.
Nauseda reiterated on Saturday that Vilnius was acting in accordance with the EU’s fourth package of restrictions, which was adopted “with Lithuania’s active participation.”
The EU earlier backed Lithuania in its move to partially ban the transit of Russian goods.
Russia has argued that the disruption of transit is illegal under international law and threatened to retaliate.
The Times reported on Thursday that Italy and several other European governments asked the European Commission to defuse the crisis.
Petras Austrevicius, a European Parliament member from Lithuania, said on Friday that an unnamed EU member state proposed that the Commission allow Russia-to-Russia transit of sanctioned goods. Austrevicius urged Brussels not to “succumb to pressure from the aggressor and create extraterritorial exemptions and concessions.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed hope that the decision to partially ban the transit could be reversed. “Let’s hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Which is what we do all the time,” he told reporters on Friday.
On Tuesday, a senior EU official shocked observers when she asserted that the bloc had never required its citizens to receive a COVID-19 vaccination in order for them to have access to public services and that claims to the contrary had primarily been made by what she called “anti-vaccine activists.”
It happens as the EU gets ready to update its transnational COVID-19 passport system – a tool that allows EU member states to lock down their own people and shows whether or not a bearer is vaccinated and/or boostered against the disease.
Vra Jourová, the EU’s commissioner for “Values and Transparency,” asserted during a meeting of the bloc’s Special Committee on COVID-19 Pandemic that the organisation had never even considered pressuring people to get vaccines, despite the planned renewal of the EU’s COVID passes and the bloc’s prior public interest in implementing a union-wide regime of mandatory vaccination.
The commissioner told the committee that the EU has never even “considered or even set in stone in any regulation or… requirement to get vaccined,” adding that “We were never pressuring the population to acquire the vaccinated as a condition for access to public services or health services.”
Jourová, on the other hand, claimed that those who made the contrary assertion that “if you are not vaccinated you will not get… to the public areas or [get] access to the services (sic)” were primarily “anti-vaccine activists.”
While Jourová seemed rather certain of her assertion, others did not share her confidence. In particular, elected representative Cristian Terhes MEP questioned whether the commissioner was genuinely being “serious” when she made her claim.
“Madame Commissioner I have to tell you — and please look at me — Madame Commissioner, are you serious with what you just said right now?”, posed the politician from Romania.
“… we are talking about the fundamental rights of every EU citizen, and we just heard right now that through this green certificate people were not forced to be vaccinated,” he continued. “Are we serious? Can we look people in the eyes, citizens of the European Union telling them that?”
Terhes went on to say that, during periods of lockdown, he had to regularly “fight” with EU security to even get access to the European parliament without a COVID pass, a claim that appears to directly contradict the spirit of the commissioner’s statements.
Acting on a proposal of the European Commission, the European Parliament, as expected, voted yesterday to renew the EU Digital Covid Certificate for another year. The vote was 453 for, 119 against and 19 abstentions.
The certificate regulation had been scheduled to expire on June 30. Earlier this month, a delegation from the parliament had already reached a “political agreement” with the Commission on renewing the certificate, thus making yesterday’s vote virtually a foregone conclusion.
The certificate regulation was originally adopted in June of last year, ostensibly to facilitate “safe travel” between EU member states. But the EU digital certificate quickly evolved into the model and sometimes infrastructure for the domestic “health” or Covid passes that would serve to restrict access to many other areas of social life over the following year.
The EU has opted to extend the covid certificate despite the overwhelmingly negative results of a public consultation on the subject that was launched by the European Commission under the heading of “Have Your Say” and that was open to the public from February 3 to April 8. The consultation elicited over 385,000 responses – almost all of which appear to be opposed to renewal!
In a letter to the European Ombudsman that the French member of the parliament Virginie Joron posted on her Twitter feed, Joron writes:
I read hundreds of responses at random with my team. I did not find any in favor of extending the QR code [i.e. the digital certificate]. Based on this large survey, it seems obvious that virtually all the responses were negative.
The overwhelmingly negative tendency of the responses was indeed evident from the outset. The first full page of responses, all of them dating from February 4, is available here. They are, of course, in a variety of European Union languages: French, German, Italian, and also one in English.
To provide readers an idea of the tenor, here is a translation of just the first line or two of the first several responses (starting from the bottom of the page):
I am completely opposed to the establishment of this certificate given what is currently happening with the EU’s disastrous handling of Covid…
I want this cst [probably a reference to Belgium’s “Covid Safe Ticket”] or vaccine passport simply to be eliminated…
There are claims made in the draft document that are not scientifically supported. For example, it is claimed that the Covid certificate represents effective protection against the spread of the virus – what data can support this claim?…
Hello, I am shocked and disgusted by the freedom-killing decisions taken in the EU … as regards this “European certificate” …
The covid certificate or green pass SHOULD BE ABOLISHED immediately as discriminatory and unconstitutional and not supported by any scientific data, because it is exclusively based on PUNITIVE measures for citizens…
I am opposed to the extension of the green pass, which serves no purpose other than creating discrimination…
I never want to be subjected to a discriminatory certificate again…
And, finally, the English-language entry:
The digital Covid certificate should end immediately. There is so much data that supports the fact that digital passports have zero positive impact on transmission rates and in fact in the most vaccinated and highly regulated countries, there [sic.] covid rates are insane…
And so on and so forth through 385,191 responses.
The renewal of the Digital Covid Certificate does not mean that it will be immediately applied, but that the infrastructure will remain in place and that it can be applied if and when member states see fit to do so.
The current rules for holding a valid EU Digital Covid Certificate do not only, needless to say, discriminate against the unvaccinated, but also against natural immunity, which is treated as more ephemeral than vaccine-induced immunity.
Proof of completed primary vaccination makes a certificate valid for 270 days; proof of having received a booster dose confers unlimited validity for the moment. On the other hand, proof of “recovery” – with a positive PCR test being the only accepted proof – only confers 180 days of validity.
The Western propaganda narrative on the conflict in Ukraine is in big trouble. Months of lying by governments and dutiful news media are falling apart as Russia makes major advances to safeguard the Russian-speaking populations in Crimea and Donbass, the formerly eastern Ukrainian region, and to neutralize Nazi military forces under the control of the Kiev regime and backed to the hilt by NATO.
Recall how only a few weeks ago Russia was being pilloried in Western media for making a “strategic blunder” from its military intervention in Ukraine that began on February 24. Western leaders were gung-ho in predicting military defeat for Moscow. After four months of conflict not only are Russian forces decimating NATO-backed Ukrainian flanks, the wider repercussions that the Western powers could have avoided if they had engaged diplomatically with Russia to resolve long-held security concerns are rebounding with devastating economic impact. The U.S.-led NATO and European Union axis is digging a giant hole for itself. If not a grave.
To divert from the NATO-fuelled disaster, the U.S.-led military alliance is recklessly provoking Russia with a blockade on the Russian exclave territory of Kaliningrad. The Russian territory is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This week Lithuania moved to block rail and road transport to Kaliningrad. It is clear that the Baltic state is not acting alone. It is enforcing a policy ordained by the NATO and EU leadership. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the absurd excuse that Lithuania was merely applying sanctions against Russian goods. He denied the blatant reality that the move was a hostile economic blockade on sovereign Russian territory and its internal affairs. Laughably, Borrell has the brass neck to accuse Russia of blockading Ukrainian ports.
Moscow has warned that if the blockade of its territory is not lifted it would be seen as aggression to which it will respond. In other words, the NATO and EU axis has decided to gratuitously escalate tensions with Russia to the point of provoking acts of war which a blockade certainly deems.
The insane move by the Western powers has to be seen as nothing other than desperate diversionary tactics to distract from their fiasco of failing propaganda lies over Ukraine. Rather than admitting (even tacitly) that its policies have created a monumental mess in Europe and indeed the wider world, the Western powers are digging an even deeper hole by ratcheting up even more tensions with Russia.
This would also explain the farcical move this week by the European Council to grant official candidate status to Ukraine for joining the 27-member bloc. In practice, it may take decades for Ukraine to gain membership. Turkey has had the same status for 22 years without moving into the European fold. Serbia and other Balkan states have been waiting up to 10 years as candidates for joining the EU club. So, the fanfare of the EU leadership granting Ukraine application is largely empty theater. All the declarations about “solidarity” with Ukraine are typical Brussels bombast.
No wonder other candidate states are exasperated by what they rightly see as the EU playing politics without an iota of principle. The Kiev regime is hailed as “sharing European values” as it bans opposition political parties and outlaws the Russian language, literature, and music. The European Union is impaling itself with its own unscrupulous contradictions by granting candidate status to Ukraine.
But in the futile short term, what it is designed to do is, again, distract from the public embarrassment of the EU and NATO overseeing a total debacle in Ukraine. Billions of dollars and euros bilked from European and American citizens to fuel a Nazi regime have achieved nothing militarily except to prolong the war in Ukraine and escalate the danger of an all-out confrontation with Russia. A war that would in all likelihood lead to a nuclear catastrophe for the planet.
The U.S. and European political establishments have lost all moral authority to govern. At a time of historic collapse in Western capitalist economies, they have decided to make hardship and misery all the more acute for their societies by provoking global energy and inflation crises. Their insane irresponsibility is driven by Western ideological interests, kowtowing to the transatlantic elite and the military-industrial complex as well as by an inveterate mentality of Russophobia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out this week that the current climate and dynamics of the EU and NATO are forming a war bloc against Russia, one that has a vile echo of how Nazi Germany and European fascists armed up against the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
The morally bankrupt Western ruling class has always found war to be an expedient escape route from internal calamity. Their lies and misrule can be covered up with the blood of millions, so it is heinously calculated. They did this in the First and Second World Wars. They are willing to do it again with a Third World War.
It is truly shocking that the NATO and EU axis is moving week-by-week towards open war against Russia. The scenario has already moved from a proxy war to a direct one.
The provocation of blockading Kaliningrad is a direct assault on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Likewise, the scandalous flirting with Ukraine over EU membership as well as the delivery of missile systems to the Kiev regime by the United States, Germany, Britain, and others, are all madcap maneuvers to evade accountability and condemnation for their own inherent failure.
It is highly notable that this week saw massive protests on the streets of Brussels in which public anger was explicitly directed at deteriorating economic conditions for citizens in concert with denunciations of NATO warmongering in Ukraine against Russia.
The cat is out of the bag. The warmongering policies of Western misrulers are being connected and comprehended by the general populace. The effete elites know they are being exposed. The emperor has no clothes. And the Western public is getting angrier with millions of workers going on strike and demanding their rights from a callous establishment.
In a wide-ranging speech last week to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Western misrulers are facing increasing populist revolt and eventual downfall from their own egregious incompetence and mismanagement.
Such democratic uprisings in the West can’t come soon enough because the grave danger is that its corrupt elite is rushing to provoke war as a diversion. Again.
As has been reported abundantly by the French and international media, Sunday’s results — with Macron’s party and coalition losing its absolute majority — were indeed momentous and have the potential to restore a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government. (The French courts, as I’ve mentioned before, are almost a lost cause when it comes to performing the duties of judicial review, and in my view there is no point in including the judiciary in the French checks and balances model anymore).
But I think caution is still called for too. There is no reason to assume that immediate reversals or changes to the worst laws of the recent past will be forthcoming or are guaranteed at any point. Just as we have seen in the US in recent congressional votes of generational-defining importance, ideological or partisan differences don’t usually make much, if any, difference when the result is ordained in advance by the executive and consent is manufactured dutifully by the media.
I think it’s also important to recall that while it is true that it has the last word in the lawmaking process, the lower house in France, L’Assemblée Nationale, needs only a relative majority for a bill to become law. Except for amendments to the constitution, where an absolute majority of members is required to be present, there is no minimum number of deputés that have to be in attendance for a bill to be voted on. If only 5 members happen to be in the lower chamber when a vote is held and 3 vote in favor, the proposed legislation passes.
I mention these facts not to be a killjoy but rather to draw attention to the fact that throughout the coronavirus delirium (which continues, albeit in muted fashion, in France), the French Parliament first voted, in early 2020, with an overwhelming majority and across partisan lines, to declare a state of emergency and confer dictatorial powers to the president. For the following two years, every time the parliament had an opportunity to revoke or limit those powers by, for instance, ending the state of emergency, it not only didn’t do so, but actually went on to codify the worst of the totalitarian covid restrictions, for example, ushering in legalized discrimination with health passes and later, vax passes.
And while it is true that the entirety of the far-left and far-right minorities in the lower house proclaimed themselves opposed to the post-lockdown measures such as health and vax passes, when it was time to put their money where their mouths were, most did not even bother to show up to vote. On two of the most important votes held over the last year, concerning a law that would require the use of health and vax passes for access to transport and places of leisure and culture, as well as to hospitals and retirement homes, Macron’s ruling party’s presence was so weak in the lower house that had every member of the far-left and right oppositions actually made the trip to vote (or voted by proxy), the bills would not have passed. One wonders if the exemptions they enjoyed, as members of Parliament, from the coercive, live-ruining measures that are health and vax passes had anything to do with their being largely absent from the votes.
Either way, the fact that these totalitarian policies didn’t have to become law, that they could have been torpedoed last year, even while the president’s party held an absolute majority in the lower house, doesn’t inspire confidence that they will be done away with now that the balance of power has shifted.
That said, the composition of the recently elected lower house will create many opportunities for the now much larger opposition parties to stop Macron in his tracks. I won’t get into the numbers too much except to say that Macron’s coalition party (which is made up of four centrist parties) is 44 seats shy of the absolute majority necessary to govern unfettered and, having only a relative minority, will need to wheel and deal and seriously compromise in order to get anything it puts foward passed.
At the same time, both Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) won enough seats to significantly expand their power and influence. However, of the two, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally emerged as the clear winner and most powerful single party opposition group. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed chose to form a coalition with three other left-leaning parties in the hopes of acquiring an absolute or relative majority, and while their Nupes coalition won the most seats after the president’s own coalition, it was not enough to secure any majority positions or allow Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party to surpass Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in seats.
On the upside, both far right and far left, having surged in numbers, are now able to call for a motion of censure of Macron’s government, which can lead to a no-confidence vote — a measure Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed promptly resorted to yesterday.
In the case of Marine Le Pen’s far right Rassemblement National, however, having surpassed the critical threshold of 80 seats, her group can now request positions on various important committees, as well as have bills sent to the constitutional court for judicial review. This is a milestone and historic achievement for her much maligned party.
In the case of Mélenchon, as mentioned above, his France Unbowed successfully formed an all-left and left-leaning coalition, which includes the socialist, environmentalist and communist parties. While this coalition won the most seats after Macron’s own coalition, it is believed to be a tenuous alliance in which the individual groups will not see eye to eye on a range of issues. The hope is, however, they will remain united on the most important ones.
The funny thing in all this is that Mélenchon, elected to the lower house in 2017, did not stand for re-election this year in his Marseille district, a seat he would have won handily. It seemed that he bet the house on his coalition pulling off a landslide victory, in which case their numerical superiority in the lower house would force the president to appoint him as Prime Minister. Sadly for Mélenchon (and us), he lost his wager and will now have to direct the operations of his party and coalition from outside the halls of the Assemblé Nationale.
The upshot of all this is that Macron is looking at a Parliament that may not pass any of his upcoming reforms into laws — and he has a pack of the vile things he’d like to ram through. In the short term, the future will not be easy for the impatient monarch. His government is already facing a motion of censure on the 5th of July (introduced Monday by Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed party), and three of his cabinet ministers who were in the running for parliamentary seats lost their bids. According to convention, their unsuccessful attempt to get elected to the lower house while working in the president’s cabinet as ministers will require them to resign from their positions, leaving Macron scrambling to appoint replacements. He will have to do this while also meeting with the leaders of the opposition parties, whom he hopes to begin negotiating with, ahead of the upcoming parliamentary session.
Macron is also under great pressure from the EU in Brussels to continue the EU-wide project of neoliberal reforms. Until now, the French president has had a free hand in pushing through some of the most politically, socially and economically destructive and divisive policies ever seen in modern France, the last two years of totalitarian public health policies and the continued dismantling of France’s public health service being the prime examples. Will he be able to continue? It seems the answer is: yes, but perhaps not so easily.
Macron does have one card left he can play, however; though it’s a risky one: he can dissolve the Assemblée Nationale. Yes, you read that correctly. The constitution of the 5th Republic gives the French president the power to dissolve the lower house and call new elections (which have to be organized within 60 days) if he deems the parliamentary configuration to be an impediment to effective lawmaking. (Can you imagine Biden — or better, Trump — announcing to the house of representatives, after one-too-many government shutdowns, “That’s it — You’re all fired. Everyone out of the capital! We’re gonna have new elections, and we’re gonna get it right this time!”)
Not surprisingly, though, such an un-democratic move is not popular and the last time it was used, by Jacques Chirac in 1997, it blew up in the president’s face when the new vote results were worse than the first time around and forced him to appoint a socialist (and formidable political rival) as Prime Minister. That said, the chattering classes are predicting Macron will indeed resort to this measure at some point in the future. But when?
For us, the main concern remains that of the state of emergency (under which we have been living for two and a half years), which allows Macron to act like a dictator and close businesses, confine people to their homes, impose curfews, force the population to wear facemasks, and make the restitution of these once unconditional rights (to work, to assemble, move and breath freely, etc.) contingent on the injection of experimental drugs that no one needs and only a fraction of the population actually wants.
Though many of its most oppressive measures have been (temporarily) lifted, the state of emergency is still in effect and will remain in effect until July 31 of this year. One of the biggest casualties of the president’s irrational, totalitarian covid policies has been the healthcare workers, 15 thousand of whom (doctors, nurses, orderlies) as well as hundreds of gendarmes, remain suspended from their jobs, without pay, having been deprived of their right to work last September 15th because they refused to take an experimental medicine that, by the government’s own admission, does not prevent transmission of a disease deemed to be a major threat to public health.
Despite the bleak situation, there may be cause for some hope. As mentioned earlier, Macron’s ability to govern by decree is set to end at the end of next month, with the lapsing of the state of emergency. In order to extend it and make possible the return in the fall of vax passes, lockdowns, curfews, travel restrictions, business closures, mask mandates and all the other totalitarian horrors that serve no public health benefit in relation to upper respiratory viruses that spread like the common cold (and therefore can’t be stopped from spreading), but which the leaders of Europe desperately want to retain and make permanent, Macron will need to get a new covid law passed by the parliament before the end of July.
The French president was in fact supposed to present said covid bill at a ministerial meeting today (the first step in the legislative process before the bill reaches parliamentary committees and debates), but had to cancel the meeting because of the aforementioned resignations of three of his ministers. This delay will presumably push the start of the legislative process for this bill back another week. But next week Macron will be out of France on a NATO-related trip, so perhaps it will get pushed back an additional week. When it is eventually presented to the parliament, the bill will need to be debated and put to a vote by the newly elected lower house — and that’s where the rubber should meet the road.
It will indeed be the first and most important test of the new assembly, and one which will no doubt come with an unprecedented amount of pressure and propaganda from Macron and the media. Will the opposition parties finally say no to the president dictator and all his lies and send this disgraceful piece of legislation into the garbage where it belongs? Or will the new Assemblée play ball as the last useless lot did? L’espoir fait vivre, as they say over here.
Postscript:
Europe is slowly transitioning into a bio-security and surveillance state. Tomorrow, the EU parliament is expected to rubber stamp the EU commission’s decision to extend the use of the EU Digital Covid Pass for another year for all travel to and within Europe.
This will mean that, until the end of June 2023, in order to board a plane, train or boat into or within Europe, you will need to show either a negative PCR or antigen tests 24 hours before traveling, a certificate of proof of recovery from covid (which may be valid for 3 months), or proof of experimental injection.
The law reads like a Pfizer press release, and is just as fraudulent and circular in its reasoning. This digital covid certificate measure, we are told, is necessary to ensure the free and safe movement of Europeans within Europe, a right that is guaranteed by the European Union’s various treaties and conventions…but which was illegally taken away two years ago by the European Union.
There are protection rackets that are more sophisticated than this…I don’t understand how Europeans will submit to this for another year. It’s an ominous sign.
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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