Eurasia note #50 - War With Russia Would Make Slaves Of Us All

Pretext to reset banks, welfare and pension funds, and a 2-tier European Union

Ukraine halts one third of Russian gas in transit to Europe.
U.S. House of Representatives approves $40 bn aid to Ukraine.
Finland, Sweden pitch for NATO membership; get a warm U.S. welcome.
Polish president makes cryptic comment of “no border between Poland and Ukraine.”

War with Russia would be 2-pronged strategy to neuter a rival and the people at home.
It is a pretext to solve crises, from welfare and pension systems, to bankrupt banks.
Politicians may use chaos to force solutions the people would not otherwise accept.
Alternative explanation: it’s all just incompetence.
Day 79 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (3,200 words or 15 minutes’ read.)

Finnish soldier with a reindeer in Lapland during the Continuation War, 1944

Tbilisi, May 13, 2022

Politicians continue to reshape the map of Europe in service of military or financial interests, while ignoring the hardship confronting their own populations.

To the north of Europe, Sweden and Finland may be about to tear up their historic neutrality without consulting the public. Only in southern Europe does there seem to be resistance to the raison d'être of NATO’s self-propelled howitzer.

Whether this reflects the neo-imperial aspirations of Europe’s former aristocratic and financial elite, or the military industrial machine, there are clear and separate agendas served by war — that have nothing to do with Ukraine’s integrity.

Sanctions have worsened food and fuel shortages, wreaking havoc on their own populations. In this inversion, land, resources and people serve military and geopolitical interests, not the other way around.

Finland’s president and prime minister made a pitch to join NATO as soon as possible, and the U.S. said it would agree if they were to apply. A little over eighty miles (130 km) from Russia’s second capital, St Petersburg, it has been neutral since the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948.

Russia questioned why the historically neutral country should become “a frontier of military confrontation with the Russian Federation, while losing independence in making its own decisions? History will be the judge.” The Russian foreign ministry said it would respond with “military-technical steps.”

Since Switzerland has effectively cancelled its neutrality it seems that buffer zones and neutral states are out of fashion. The only option is to sign up for one of the teams. That did not work out well in the 20th century.

Speaking on May 3, Poland’s Constitution Day, president Andrzej Duda declared there would be “no border between Poland and Ukraine,” and talked of a common force to repel threats. He dressed it in the clothes of “rebuilding their common happiness together” — which may be New Age globalism or a pitch to regain lands that were historically Polish. [1]

Polish media has previously discussed a peacekeeping role that could lead to a more or less permanent presence in western Ukraine and Lviv/Lvov.

Inflaming the war of words, Lithuania's parliament on Tuesday designated Russia as a terrorist country and called its actions in Ukraine a genocide.

Sanctions latest

Hidden hands are manipulating the shape of the economic and military war. While Russia is succeeding in its demand to be paid for gas in roubles, Ukraine closed a pipeline that accounts for a third of transit of Russian gas onward to Europe.

The motive is unclear but you can be sure that whoever is behind it is not losing money. Whether they are taking a cut of the gas or weaponry revenues or U.S. aid, the big investors are moving into physical assets and are positioned to make a killing once the populations of these continents are impoverished. [2]

Twenty European companies have now opened accounts with Gazprombank in order to buy gas in roubles, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The EU softened its sanctions, dropping plans to ban European shippers from transporting Russian oil, after protests from Greece. [3]

Ukraine’s pipeline operator GTSOU on May 11 closed part of the Soyuz pipeline, which flows from Russia across Lugansk oblast on its way to Europe. Ukraine cited “force majeure” and said it could not run the Novopskov station near the Russian border.

Northern elite

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — unknown.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action” — Ian Fleming, Goldfinger.

It seems reckless to risk war with Russia over its demand for Ukraine to stay neutral, and for the West to keep its word about expanding NATO eastward. Whoever is behind the ranks of politicians, socially-distanced and smiling, they undoubtedly have other goals.

It may be a two-pronged strategy by Europe’s wealthy northern countries to provoke Russia, which even if they fail to humble the bear, will leave them with supremacy over a starving and poor southern Europe.

Russia remains the lodestone for the City of London and Western oil moguls, as it has been since bankers financed the Bolshevik putsch in 1917. [4]

Even if they cannot gain control — which they tried again in the 1990s with the Harvard advisors to president Boris Yeltsin — it serves the age old purpose of provoking the Russian bear as bogeyman. [5]

There is more than one goal served by placing the Western populations on a war footing, increasing digitization, surveillance, medical tyranny and political control. This is not speculation — this agenda has been brazenly obvious under cover of Covid.

There are crises to solve, such as the insolvency of banks and pension funds, and promises to wriggle out of, like welfare and benefits. [6]

Crisis, whether from food or mineral shortages, may produce the external excuse to reshape the European Union, forcing it to confront an internal crisis that the Brussels technocrats rarely acknowledge — though Belgium’s former finance minister Johan Van Overtvelt once quipped, “when the entire euro economy is on the balance sheet of the ECB, then the asset-purchase program will have hit its limits.” [7]

Italian independence

The Atlantic bloc is struggling to keep Italy on board with sanctions. Prime minister Mario Draghi travelled to Washington on Tuesday to assure president Joe Biden of united front against Russia. [8]

A former central banker who was installed by the Brussels and Davos technocrats, Draghi talks their language but is walking a fine line. He has backed sending heavy weaponry to Ukraine even though many in his governing coalition object.

Draghi conceded that European companies would be able to pay for gas in rubles without breaching sanctions, contrary to the European Union position. More than 40 per cent of Italy’s gas comes from Russia, and he has sent the country’s “ecological transition minister” Roberto Cingolan to Angola, Congo, Algeria and Egypt to try to diversify supply.

Italy has always had a strong cultural influence on Russia. Italian architects designed St Petersburg in the 18th century and today Russia’s wealthy are big spenders on second homes in Italy. Italian communists played a role in the young Soviet Union — evidenced by the names on the gravestones in Moscow’s Novodeviche Cemetery and the car-making city of Togliatti, situated on the Volga in Samara, named after the Italian politician Palmiro Togliatti. [9]

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League party has drawn a distinction between sanctions on those who started the war and ordinary Russian people — rejecting today’s ugly Russophobia. Giuseppe Conte, whose Movimento 5 Stelle is the largest in Italy’s parliment, has criticized Europe’s rush to rearm.

The most outspoken is 5 Star’s foreign policy spokesman Manlio Di Stefano who in 2015 said the United States, NATO and the agricultural giant Monsanto had conspired to stir conflict in Ukraine, to genetically modify Europe’s bread basket and transform it “into a NATO base to launch the final attack on Russia.”

There is a propaganda drive to keep Italy onside. U.S. and NATO-aligned politicians and media claim that television commentators are in the pay of the Kremlin, and have launched an inquiry by Copasir, a parliamentary committee for the security of Italy. [10]

Politico, a journal with a Brussels perspective, also put its spin on why Italians are failing to march in lockstep with the NATO boot. Since those taking an independent line on Russia-Ukraine come from across the political spectrum, they can’t be branded far-right. So the journal linked anti-vaccine sentiment with what the local press has termed Italy’s “partito russo.” [11]

Much of continental Europe has a longstanding anti-NATO strand. To quote the article:

“Nicola Fratoianni, leader of the far-left Sinistra Italiana which condemned the invasion but voted against sending arms to Ukraine and against increasing defense spending, said: “We view NATO … unfavorably. It was created in a different historical time when the world was divided. That world doesn’t exist anymore, so perhaps we need to rethink.” 

Focusing on a single country, one can see a historical and economic reasons why Italy, or India for that matter, might reject the Washington-Brussels axis.

The bigger picture is whether that axis and its dogged pursuit of sanctions — however damaging to all sides — will lead to a new economic iron curtain or a fresh carving up of trading zones.