Eurasia note #42 - Signs Of Escalation In Ukraine, Pacific

Reading between the lines gives worrying clues to what's next

NATO & EU suggest they'll go “all the way” with Ukraine; send offensive weapons.
EU mulls embargo on Russian oil and gas; German industry warns of collapse.
China and India buy more Kremlin Crude; UN vote underlines multipolar shift.
Pakistan PM Imran Khan ousted; accuses U.S. of colluding with opposition.
Russian finance minister calls for emerging markets to form own financial system.

Russian forces mass around Kharkiv; Ukraine forces on defensive in Mariupol centre
— according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Internally displaced persons rises to 7.1 million, says United Nations.

South Pacific Solomon Islands sign security pact with China, driving AUKUS raucous.
Lying between Australia and Guam; potentially a proxy in other people’s disputes.
NATO to engage politically and practically in Asia-Pacific for the first time.
Australia to study information warfare at NATO’s school of propaganda excellence.
(2,100 words or 10 minutes’ read)

The German tour ship MS World Discoverer lies abandoned in the Solomon Islands, a symbol of unequal power relations. Source: Reddit

Tbilisi, Apr 10, 2022 (1100 GMT)

In 2000 a German cruise ship struck a rock and began to list. After passengers were rescued the captain grounded the vessel on the Nggela islands in the central province of the Solomon Islands.

And there it lies on their beautiful coast: the MS World Discoverer, abandoned as a symbol of unequal power relations and the imperial attitude of the world as dumpster.

The Solomon Islanders must hope they don’t see the same fate as Ukraine — yet another surrogate in a struggle between the dominant powers.

Between the lines

Interstitial is the new word in town. It reflects the gulf between the war as presented in the media, and waged on the ground. The online war reeks of desperation — and the growing risk that governments will believe, and act upon, their own headlines.

You may lack time to scroll through different sources but parsing is still possible. One clue is when the media narrative is inconsistent by its own terms.

When media compete for the most gruesome headline, the purported abomination had better be backed up by evidence, photographic or otherwise: big claims require big evidence.

As for Kramatorsk and Bucha, we may never know “who did it” — in wartime there is unlikely to be an investigation, far less an impartial one (See Douma).

Another way to read between the lines is to observe how long a story stays in the headline; if the visual evidence appears immediately (as in Bucha), if it is limited to one or two images or individuals (Mariupol maternity hospital) or if evidence of victims never appears at all (Mariupol theatre).

For example, the time between Russian forces leaving Bucha and the release of images of bodies several days later raised serious doubts. This “gotcha” narrative had too many holes and the media quickly moved on, actually saying in The Guardian, “there are other atrocities elsewhere.”

We can conclude, first, that we are possibly being misled as to the perpetrators, second, that both sides are likely to share responsibility, and thirdly that someone desperately needs atrocities to justify whatever they are planning.

For more on Kramatorsk and Bucha, see Moneycircus Apr 8, 2022 — Eurasia note #41 - Ukraine's Battle for Kramatorsk Looms

This week NBC News admitted it basically makes stuff up. That information it reports doesn’t have to be true so long as it disrupts the Kremlin’s tactics and “prevents Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,” a Western government official told NBC. [1]

“Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect.”

Your perceptions are being manipulated. One moment we are told Kyiv is carnage. The next, British prime minister Boris Johnson is strolling in the streets with Zelenskiy, European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is in Bucha. This is pure behavioural psychology: Russia is there and not there; it is slaughtering the people but Ukraine is winning.

This is the Strategy of Tension that NATO and the CIA perfected during Operation Gladio and later during the War on Terror: the enemy is everywhere and nowhere; be fearful, trust government.

Western populations are being prepared for the escalation of war when Ukraine loses, if it has not already, keeping the war to distract from the economic crunch at home.

Another example: you are told that rising prices and shortages of food and fuel are caused by the war; so wouldn’t that be a good reason to end it sooner? For the past year the energy crisis was blamed squarely on the rush for Green energy (or subsidies).

This leads to another between-the-lines observation. The party in Germany that is pushing most strongly for a harder line on Ukraine is the Greens, which has good reason to want to blame the results of its energy policy on Russia. [2]

They will have noticed the polling in France’s presidential election taking place on Apr 10 — where support for the Green party was trailing, despite voters’ concern about climate change.

Sanctions vortex

The whirlpool of sanctions is plain to all. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy repeated his call for an embargo on purchases of Russian oil and gas. Some German ministers argue an embargo would force Russia to halt the war.

Analyst Mikhail Krutikhin of consultants RusEnergy told Euronews such a move would cost the Russian federal government 27 per cent of its income directly, rising to 60 per cent once tax revenues are included.