Eurasia note #23 - Russia Intervenes in Ukraine

The first war of The Great Reset dovetails with globalist objectives

Putin says military operation has objective of “demilitarization and denazification.”
Follows request for assistance from Donetsk and Lugansk republics.
Oil and gas prices jump, currencies of Russian and Ukraine plunge.
Risk that investors will panic and send funds abroad — just like Canada.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin critic, say intervention is for political gain.
Georgian president condemns invasion, stands with Ukrainian people.
Erie parallel with globalist agenda that challenges the accidental borders of history.
(3,200 words, 10 minutes’ read — outcomes behind paywall for paying subscribers.)

Ukrainian armed forces plane crashed in Donetsk today

Tbilisi, Feb 24, 2022

Let's get a few things things straight. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Ukraine has a Nazi problem. Russia has invaded the country, on the pretext of removing that problem. [1]
Western intelligence was right, though probably by accident. The West bears responsibility for sponsoring Nazi elements within the country.

Welcome to the first war of The Great Reset. The broader context is that by accident or design it fits the agenda. We already know that the world is being restructured. The war is part of that. Discontent with the vaccine policy means Russia and the West benefit from distraction.

Borders that were formed to suit the economic and corporatist interests of a century ago are once again in play, at the hands of globalists, through The Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030.

There are unmistakeble signs that the leading powers of the West are being undermined from within. Canada’s self-harm, unleashing emergency powers, then freezing accounts — before reversing when the banks screamed “capital flight!”— is just the latest example. The choreographed chaos of Covid policy, shifting back-and-forth, is another.

The inevitable bloodshed in Ukraine is on another level. No, it is not arranged to distract from the Covid chaos but it comes out of the same policy that is undermining nation states. It addresses similar questions of how much the people matter — relative to the interests of finance capital.

Ukraine is one of a growing list of failed states where the countries’ rich resources are controlled by a small number of oligarchs while the people go hungry — Ukraine ranks among the very poorest of European countries.

In such states, that include Iraq and Libya, the politicians are weak and international corporations extract raw materials on their own terms, often under the protection of private armies, while the banks are little more than laundries for cash.

Set against this is the ideal that people matter: that the nation is not a mere patch of land bristling with missile silos protecting the oligarch’s minerals and mines. Sometimes it seems that is how NATO and its business end, the Atlantic Council (which represents those very corporations) view the bloodlands.

If “war is the health of the state,” or not, it certainly validates the state at a time when globalists are trying to dissolve it. This defines the action in Ukraine, whatever motives you ascribe to president Vladimir Putin.

In the past two years we have been accustomed to dysfunction. Perhaps that’s all it is. Sometimes you make chaos just to watch things fly. Volatility is when you grab assets, make money, and do the laundry while the wind is brisk. The U.S. has just done so in Afghanistan when it ran way with the gold.

The important question is what remains afterwards: yet another failed state, or one that is fit for people to live in: a nation?

Legal niceties

Once the loss of human life becomes actual, talk of moral right must take second place to law.

Ukraine complained of a gross violation of the UN Charter and fundamental norms and principles of international law. The Charter says countries should “refrain… from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

In practice the Charter is rarely used since military deterrence is considered a diplomatic tool.

Western states also broke the Charter, it can be argued, as delivering weapons to Ukraine also violates the ban on the threat of military force, says Anne Peters of Max Planck Law. [2]

However now that conflict has begun, Ukraine is of course entitled to defend itself and can request assistance from other states regardless of its not being a member of NATO. Western states may also be entitled under the Charter to act collectively.

Laws on the legality of the resort to armed force only apply prior to a conflict and this one has been underway for eight years. The U.S. and NATO cannot logically argue that Russia has just invaded Ukraine when they say it did so in 2014 when Crimea seceded. [3]

In a way this also represents Russia’s position, since it claims an ongoing threat to the lives and safety of residents of Donetsk and Lugansk resulting from the failure of the Ukraine government to enforce the autonomy provisions of the Minsk agreement.

The UN Charter is unenforceable — pressure for a settlement can be brought to bear only through sanctions or negotiations. In “hot” war international humanitarian law (IHL) applies, which is where we are now.

Moral force

Law and morality are two different things. Russia can point out with justice that Ukraine has for decades stolen Russian gas, broken an agreement to return Soviet assets in return for Russia paying off all Soviet debt, and displayed a “parasitic” attitude despite receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies.

The heart of president Vladimir Putin’s argument is the people: that Ukraine has failed its own population, economically and morally, whipping up a Nazi form of nationalism to pit them against those who are, historically, their own family.

To Western technocrats this will sound like populist rhetoric. Is there a role for “the Narod” in this argument? It is the explicit policy of the European Union and the United Nations to dilute culture and individual identity, which they see as a threat to communitarianism. [4]

In Monday’s televised address he said “Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” On Thursday he said the “special military operation” would protect “people who have for eight years been exposed to humiliation and genocide by the regime.” [5]

Controversial businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said the intervention harmed Russian interests and was only started to keep Putin's clan in power.

In Ukraine’s near neighbour to the south, Georgia, president Salome Zurabishvili called for a halt to “this blatant violation of international order” by all possible measures.

Neocons’ last hurrah

Superficially, the neoconservatives have won: the crowd around Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland got their war in the Donbas — John McCain will have a Martini in his grave. The nationalist and Nazi militia that McCain and Lindsey Graham cultivated as heroes against Russia are the same archetype that the DHS regards as white supremacists within the U.S.. [6]

The Mujahedeen that the U.S. armed as the resistance to Russia are the same people portrayed by the FBI as terrorists back home. [7]

Modern day neocons are far from the Trotskyite roots of their fathers but remember who financed those revolutionaries as they sat in London, New York, Zurich and Baku. Today’s neocons are still aligned with finance capital, just under a different political cloak. But that is another ball of geopolitical yarn. [8]

If this is the neocons' last hurrah, and Russia comes away stronger, they will have shot their bolt. 

In his speech Putin hinted at unfinished business in Ukraine. Russia lost 20 million souls fighting fascism.

You can see why this infuriates the neos, -con and -liberal. Putin is defending nationalism while fighting the very fascists that the liberals champion in Ukraine. He exposes their duplicity, even if the public doesn't notice.

Corporations rampant

This is a time of rivalry between great powers and finance capital. Corporations want to roam the globe without the state cramping their style: to let them deploy innovations in real time, regulate themselves — to gain critical mass and greater profits, to fund more research and exponentially-rising control.

This is J.D. Rockefeller’s view of competition as sin. Dispense with rivalry, agree prices within your cartel, form a syndicate and fire the trust-busters and regulators who would obstruct monopoly. This is the privately-owned, high-tech, Silicon Valley version of Marx’s commanding heights of the economy: oligarchical collectivism.

This is the lodestone where the 1,000 corporations of Davos meet the Russian, German and Chinese technocrats and the U.S. patent lawyers working arm-in-arm with the CIA to maintain the advantage of American corporations — all of them using the nation state as leverage while those same corportions gnaw at its Westphalian marrow.

Part Two: how Russia is part of the globalist effort, but with a nuance — a nationalist twist that could reinvigorate the nation state. Like Canada’s Emergency Act blunder, Russias action on Ukraine may have unintended side effects.