Eurasia note #22 - Ukraine Is About More Than War

Donetsk, Lugansk recognition pits ethnicity and 'nation' against globalist dream

Independence of Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics clarified.
Russia says recognition applies to areas currently under control.
U.S. imposes sanctions on banks, cargo ships and a soccer club.
Conflict risk depends on Ukraine forces in other half of the two oblasts.
Putin inverts globalist attack on the nation state.
(2,500 words or seven-minutes’ read — news, followed by analysis.)

Donetsk citizens celebrate recognition by Russia

Tbilisi, Feb 23, 2022

Russia has clarified that its recognition of independent statehood applies to areas under the control of Donetsk and Lugansk authorities.

The attempt to solve the dispute over Donbas, between Ukraine and Russia, has implications far beyond the two countries.

The fallout will be felt in Western countries as president Vladimir Putin laid down a challenge to the protection of ethnicity and culture, at a time when the Western nation states are under attack by globalist forces.

Flashpoints are evident on the Ukrainian side of the border, where president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he would be conscripting reservists. Mortars are reported to have landed on both sides of the front line.

Germany’s decision to put certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline on hold, may sound the death knell for the project, implying a rough road ahead for western European economies.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko clarified on Tuesday, the part of Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics that has been recognized is the area “within the borders where their authorities operate and have jurisdiction.”

This suggests that it is not the whole oblast, half of which is controlled by Ukrainian forces — and that unless Ukraine forces attack, Russia would not push them out.

This still goes beyond the terms of the Minsk agreement which provided for granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. As independent states, that border would no longer be Ukraine’s.

On Tuesday the Russian State Duma authorized the use of force abroad. The ethnic-Russian regions face 150,000 Ukrainian conscripts, reinforced by privately-financed militias and foreign fighters. Donetsk has about 30,000 poorly armed defenders. Russian army units arrived.

Hopes that a decisive move by Russia would halt conflict were soon disappointed. Ukraine motorized BM-21 Grad rocket launchers were reported by spotters of the Donetsk People’s Republic moving to Mariupol. Projectiles were fired from Ukraine onto the Donetsk-Gorlovka highway, killing several car passengers.

Tens of thousands of people have been moved from Donetsk to the Rostov region, mostly women and children. Men under the age of 55 are expected to fight if necessary.

Euromaidan Press reported 86 attacks by “Russian proxies” on Ukrainian positions in Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, though the time period was unclear.

The U.S. Treasury announced sanctions on Tuesday against Promsvyazbank, Russia’s 10th largest and closely connected to the defence sector. It has interests in cargo shipping, finance, technology and real estate. It also sanctioned Russia’s development institution VEB and 25 its subsidiaries in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, which include CSKA soccer club.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov scheduled for today.

De-communization comments

A crucial part of Putin’s Monday night television address was a broad exposition on Ukraine and its history. [1]

Western academics, press and politicians were mezmerized by his use of the phrase de-communization — to the confusion of the newly-collectivist Western elite.

The most telling quote was when he called eastern Ukraine, ancient Russian land, with the right to use the language, worship at the Russian orthodox church.

The Washington Post confected a fear-mongering vista of Putin, eager to tear down the borders of post-Communist eastern Europe. What he actually did was to point out that Ukraine is a product of Josef Stalin’s Decree on Nationality, or the communist view of sovereignty as flexible. [2]

Stalin depopulated large areas of the region, transporting its Cossack population to Siberia. He created a Jewish autonomous region in the far east. He obliterated the history of Khazaria by flooding archaeological sites.

The Bolsheviks created Ukraine. After WW2, Stalin took parts of Poland, Romania and Hungary, and bolted them on. Nikita Khruschev took Crimea away from Russia in 1954 and added it to Ukraine. According to Putin, “nobody asked millions of people about anything.”

“The Soviet Ukraine emerged as a result of the Bolshevik policy, and even nowadays it can with good reason be called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Ukraine. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by the archive documents, including Lenin’s directives regarding Donbas which was literally squeezed into Ukraine,” Putin said

Putin blamed strategic decisions in Soviet times and during its dissolution for creating today’s divisions.

Ukrainians voted for independence in a 1991 referendum, about 85 per cent of eligible voters deciding by more than 90 per cent to split from the Soviet Union.

Analysis

There is a strange asymmetry to Putin’s statements and those of the globalists. He is challenging Ukraine’s borders in the name of the Narod, the people. The globalists challenge the existence of nation states in the name of global governance. I return to this issue below.

Ukraine is increasingly a failed state, without a strong internal leader. Power resides in the oligarchic elite who control its resources and finance private armies. Ukraine does not have Western backing so much as meddling. Private foundations like those of George Soros promote corruption in the name of fighting it. Western agencies launder money through the country in the name of health projects such as AIDS.

See Moneycircus, Jan 27, 2022 — Eurasia Note #19 - Ukraine: Just Bizniz for Some: Claiming to defend a country, while looting it, has a touch of depravity

Western pressure on Ukraine, from NATO, neocons, free-wheeling finance capital and local oligarchs are manipulating a weak government towards open war. It is hard to see how Ukraine can withstand this pressure.

There are parallels with how the republic of Georgia was manipulated into the South Ossetia conflict in 2008, which prompted a Russian counter-invasion, to Georgia’s cost. When the small Caucasus country faced its giant neighbour to the north, Western allies were nowhere to be found.

Russia’s move may not be welcome but it is not impulsive, whatever the Western media will tell you. The Russian diplomatic machinery works in a measured fashion.

They seem to have decided that Ukraine's government cannot bring itself to commit to the Minsk agreement on autonomy. To abandon the ethnic Russian minority to the Ukrainian militias would result in ethnic cleansing, which it could not stand by and watch — the only alternative being statehood.

Rationing looms

The rules-based international order has come back to bite the European Union countries. They decided that long-term gas contracts signed with Russia in the early 2000s were not good enough - at $250 per thousand cubic meters. When they saw the spot price of gas fall, they got the courts to tear up the contracts. At the peak of the current energy crisis in Dec 2021 the spot price spiked as high as $2,100. Now the EU nations are hung by their own petard.

Germany’s decision not to certify Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline will do more harm to its own people than to Russians. It could lead to energy rationing in Germany itself, while fertilizer shortages bode ill for this year’s harvest in Europe.

Energy companies, including those of Russia, made huge profits. In the third quarter of 2021 Gazprom made a profit of $7.8 billion, more than double the same period in 2019. Russia’s other gas exporters, Novatek and Rosneft, made $6.3 billion combined. The cost of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is estimated at $9 billion, for comparison.

Gas is not the only issue. A shortage of nitrogen fertilizer means the European fields are not being fed this winter. That will lead to a smaller harvest this autumn.

A cynic would say this suits The Great Reset with its plan to Build Back Better for a Green New Deal. The stated objective of former governor of the banks of England and Canada, Mark Carney, is to force companies that are not “sustainable” to go bankrupt. This inevitably means much of the small business sector that cannot affored the costs of carbon taxes and complying with regulations.

The oligarchs’ militia

The Ukrainian showdown fits like a glove into the globalist attack on Western populations. The arming of private militias, including Azov battalion, and the presence of foreign mercenaries from Syria and Chechnya, strikes a parallel with reports of foreign military posing as police on the streets of Ottawa.