EU, US, UK to Putin: We see you. We raise you.
It's been 16 years coming. We've finally reached the "tipping point" we've been warned about. Time's up for oligarchs, kleptocrats and their friends in high places in London, Rome, Ottawa. . .
“Events, dear boy, events.” This is said to have been what the British prime minister Harold MacMillan answered when asked about what was most likely to cause governments to suddenly shift or reverse their intended direction. The events of the past week have produced the most dramatic shifts in the democratic world order, and one or two utterly tectonic reversals.
The whole idea of this newsletter was to provide subscribers with some otherwise hard-to-find backstory to precisely the sort of events that have been unfolding in Europe these past few days. These are events of the kind I’ve been tracking for quite a few years now, from Syria to Hong Kong and from New York to Geneva, so the trajectory of these things is something I’m supposed to know something about.
But holy cow. Talk about events.
In this newsletter tomorrow I’ll have some background (for paying subscribers) on the reach and influence of the global oligarchy (Russian and otherwise) in countries like Canada, and why it’s so difficult to talk about these things out loud, and just how awkward the latest sanctions regime is going to (or should) make the lives of certain people. I’ll also have a handy guide to help paying subscribers wade through the narrative-mongering and the dezinformatsiya that’s been making the rounds, with a brief compendium of who you can trust to help you figure out what’s happening in Ukraine, and who you really shouldn’t give the time of day. So if you haven’t already, take out a paid sub. It’s only $5/month.
Back to the latest events. The European Union (calling Putin’s nuclear bluff) has announced that it intends to purchase and deliver up to €450 million in weaponry to Ukraine. The EU has never done anything like this before. Until now, only the Baltic states, the Czechs and Poland were willing to send arms to Ukraine, but the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters the “taboo” has been broken. “Because the war is back in our borders. That is why it is a defining moment for European history, a page of history has been turned.”
All the fussing and whinging about whether Ukraine should be admitted to NATO (of course it should be) has been rendered moot. NATO’s European leaders have decided to conduct themselves as though Ukraine has been among NATO’s ranks all along.
Even Germany, Russia’s primary interlocutor (and appeaser) in Western Europe, has wholly reversed its decades-long neo-pacifist standpoint and has agreed to send the Ukranians 500 Stinger missiles and 1,000 anti-tank weapons. Only a few days ago Germany was chafing against any EU arms shipments to Ukraine, by anyone.
Chronically “neutral” Sweden, not even a NATO member, is sending 5,000 anti-tank weapons along with assorted military kit and $50 million directly to the Ukrainian military. The Belgians are sending 200 grenade launchers and a few thousand machine guns. Even Hungary, ordinarily content to sidle up to Russia and China to Europe’s disadvantage, is sending Ukraine shipments of food and fuel.
Along with its historic arms announcement, the EU has put in place a range of heavier sanctions, including the financial “nuclear option’’ of SWIFT-system evictions handed to several Russia banks, also extending the sanctions to cover Russia’s satrapy in Belarus, and is closing European skies to Russian aircraft. Canada has joined Europe in the targeted SWIFT evictions, the move against the regime of the Kremlin’s Belarusian marionette Alexander Lukashenko, and closing Canada’s skies to Russian airplanes (at the time I was writing this American skies were still open, which is weird).
Certainty: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is now the leader of the free world. He has put a spring in the step of the persecuted peoples of Venezuela, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, Iran, Pakistan’s occupied Balochistan, and Russia itself. His bravery has captured the imagination of tens of thousands of people turning out for solidarity demonstrations from Haifa to London and from Toronto to Paris.
Uncertainty: lots of it, including the height of the corpse heaps that have piled up since Putin launched his insane war of conquest just a few days ago. Russian casualties: The Ukrainian military on Sunday counted 4,300 soldiers the Russians have lost, but it’s unclear whether that was meant to include all killed, wounded and captured. Yesterday, the Ukranian military was widely reported to have said the number of dead Russian soldiers is roughly 3,500. If that was true, that’s about 1,000 more dead soldiers than the number of America killed during the entire 20-year American engagement in Afghanistan.
Do please read my weekend Macleans magazine piece for what I hope is a comprehensible account of where we’re at and how we got here. It’s not just about Russia, and it’s not just about Ukraine. It’s about a 16-year advance of the police-state bloc and the global retreat of the liberal democracies. Here’s Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz: “Authoritarians are becoming bolder, while democracies are back on their heels. Democratic governments must rally to counter authoritarian abuses and support the brave human rights defenders fighting for freedom around the world.”
Those human rights struggles around the world have been my “beat” for quite a while, and those freedom fighters are now facing Russian tanks in the streets in a people’s war in Ukraine, and much of the democratic world is rallying to counter Vladimir Putin’s barbarism.
It remains an open question whether the resistance will be more effective in bringing Putin to heel than the impressively accelerated sanctions his regime now faces. There’s also rising discontent among the Russian people about what the hell Putin has gotten them into. Protests have been reported across dozens of cities in Russia, but it’s hard to pin much down.
It would be wrong to imagine that just because things have not gone his way at all so far that Putin can’t or won’t turn things around. Remember Aleppo, where Russian bombers eviscerated civilian areas in 2016. Remember Russia’s campaign of deliberately targeting Syrian hospitals outside regime-held areas. Remember Grozny. Remember that Putin will not scruple about mass murder.
Regime change in Moscow is the only sensible way out now. Don’t take that as some sort of quixotic call for a return to Shock and Awe in a US-led invasion and overthrow of Putin’s gangland oligarchy. It’s just a recognition of an uncomfortable fact. If Putin is allowed to simply withdraw his troops from Ukraine in exchange for sanctions relief or whatever concessions he may make to Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the coming days, he’ll just live to fight another day. The lesson to dictators everywhere would be that you can commit these unpardonable acts and get away with it. Putin will simply live to fight another day.
We might start with first principles, then: A recgnition that the ancient and inalienable right of tyrannicide is vested in the Russian people, and in the peoples of unfree, undemocratic countries the world round.
A brief aside, which is kind of upbeat. Yesterday the punk-era fascist-botherer, undead Hot Nasties bandmember, former Liberal war room nuisance-maker and current hot-ticket Toronto Sun columnist Warren Kinsella, who is also a gifted painter, offered one of his landscapes in an auction to raise funds for the Ukraine relief efforts I pointed to in this newsletter, published yesterday. Last I saw the bids were up to $3000.
So that’s nice. Anyway, crazy week, but I’ll be back at this tomorrow. Never intended for this newsletter to be daily, and it won’t be except during such times when “a page of history” is turning, as the EU’s Josep Borrell puts it, and it was just my ill luck that history’s page turned this past week.
I launched this thing seven days ago. Do us a favour and subscribe, and remember, the deep background stuff is for paying customers.
The new weaponry includes elaborate cyber-espionage, high-tech subversion, “elite capture” influence operations across the board in capitalist democracies, electoral interference, digital disinformation campaigns, and Novichok, the nerve-agent poison that targeted Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last year, and Sergei and Yulia Skripal, in Britain, four years ago.
It’s not just about brute military force and the threat of it. There’s also the forced and often eager submission of multinational corporations lured by promises of access to Chinese markets, and the ease with which Russian and Chinese oligarchs and their Ferrari-driving children rely on the real estate markets of London, Vancouver, New York and Paris as boltholes for the wealth they’ve stolen from their people.
Putin has to be taken down and it must come from within which I do think will happen sooner than later I hope .
Look forward to tomorrows article.