Eurasia note #64 - From Coup To War, Ukraine's Historical Parallel

Past interventions have some ominous implications as to the intent of 'the players.'

Ukraine is manipulated into classic coup fodder — rich resources, poor people.
History of coups and wars are always about grabbing resources, getting rid of folk.
This war maximizes regional impact, upends alliances: a geopolitical gamble.

Ukraine suffers drone strikes on the night of Oct 31, hitting Poltava region.
Morning saw a wave of attacks on Ukraine’s electricity and water utilities.
In some cities, including the capital Kyiv, 80 per cent are still without water.

Moscow said attacks are revenge for attacks on navy vessels in Sevastopol.
Russia suspends grain exports after Ukraine attacked ships with drones.
Accuses Britain of complicity in naval attacks and even the Nord Stream bombing.

(Just under 2,500 words or 12 minutes of your time.) (Re-edited Nov 2.)

Surface torpedo or guided drone: new tools, old games

Tbilisi, Nov 1, 2022

Sporadic drone attacks continued into the evening of Oct 31, but nothing on the scale of Monday morning’s demolition of electricity and water infrastructure.

Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s power grid — some estimates say 40 facilities were hit, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal confirmed direct hits on 18 sites.

Autumn is in full swing with temperatures here of 5C at night, so people will be feeling it 500 miles to the north.

Russia fired dozens of missiles at Ukrainian energy facilities including hydroelectric power stations on Monday, causing widespread blackouts, mobile phone outages and reductions in water supplies.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said 80 per cent of residents were left without water and many also lost electricity. An attack on Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv knocked out power and the metro, or underground railway.

Other targets included Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, the Kyiv region, the southern regions of Odesa and Zaporizhzhia, and the central Cherkasy region.

Ukraine said air defences neutralized 44 of the more than 50 missiles that were fired on Monday morning. They have the skills to restore the damage but it’s not clear they have the equipment or the opportunity. An attack on Oct 10 took out 15 per cent of capacity and a rough estimate says they lost the same on Monday. While nuclear plants are still operating, Moscow has targeted regional electricity distribution centres where transformers step down the voltage for domestic use.

Russian ground offences continue in Donetsk oblast towards Avdiivka and Bakhmut, and in Lugansk oblast from Kreminna and Svatove.

Part of the Ukraine counter offensive has been to attack Russian shipping. Thus the missile strikes were said to be revenge for Ukraine’s drone attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol on Oct 29 which also disrupted grain exports, prompting Russia to quit a UN-brokered export deal.

Russia claimed British specialists had coordinated the attack from a naval centre in Ochakov, on the Black Sea coast between Odesa and Kherson, launching British-made unmanned surface drones.

The latest allegation is that it was Britain that bombed the Nord Stream gas pipelines leaving Germany drastically short of gas. Many commentators, including here at Moneycircus, had surmised the U.S. was responsible. Monkey Werx which tracks aircraft movements had spotted U.S. surveillance aircraft in the area. U.S. development of underwater explosive drones pointed the same way. The waters in which the attack occurred were under NATO-U.S. protection.

With hindsight, of course the above may have been assistance to the British. Phone calls are cited as evidence (sourced by Kim Dotcom). The outcome is moot: neither Russia nor Germany had any thing to gain so the culprit was the Anglosphere. [1]

On the other hand the Mediterranean or Levantine gas fields, combined with the Three Seas Initiative represent plenty of incentive for U.S., British, Israeli and other interests to will the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.

See Moneycircus: Sep 30, 2022, Europe, Gas And The Endgame

One side effect is that a United Nations-brokered plan to export Ukraine’s grain harvest has been disrupted. At the weekend Moscow said it would suspend grain cargoes because of attacks by Ukrainian drones. The drones in question appear to be surface directed torpedoes fitted with cameras and remote guidance systems.

Food scarcity

The UN led the negotiations purportedly to secure food for African and other nations in regions that rely heavily on Russia and Ukraine for wheat.

In September, however, president Vladimir Putin said almost all Ukrainian grain shipped under the deal was redirected to Europe, something Ukraine denied.

The West has put almost every foot wrong where it comes to looking after its own population by failing to secure food and energy — it seems almost on purpose. Europe is facing a gluten-free diet while children are offered trial packets of crisps (chips) made from locusts, which is the loudly-promoted by the World Economic Forum.

Ukraine is a big exporter of wheat, corn and sunflower oil but it’s Russian food we need: it is by far the bigger producer. The EU sanctions explicitly exclude food supplies and fertilisers but there is little apparent effort to access that. (Correction: original text implied it was subject to sanction.)

The U.S. is playing down Russia’s harvest for reasons we can only surmise. The USDA refuses to change its forecast of 91 million tonnes of wheat while the Russian agriculture ministry is reporting almost 102. This matters because it keeps wheat prices higher than they would be otherwise, at a cost to U.S. consumers in particular, and a profit to suppliers. [2]

As for energy, European leaders have filled their gas reservoirs by 75-90 per cent but they say nothing about when they'll need to use that and what will happen when they try to refill.

Strategic games

The cynical manipulation of Ukraine by British and U.S. advisers like they'll turn Ukraine into something Bolivia or Chile, rich in resources of which the people never see the benefit, a high-tech Haiti.

Yet the game here is more complex; we can glimpse it only in parts. First of all, this is a proxy war, in which the soldiers and civilians of Ukraine are treated as expendable. Secondly, the conflict is being fueled in order to maximize regional impact — impoverishing the populations of NATO countries, too — with the third objective of driving wedges between certain countries and upending alliances. The fourth aim is, as always in war, to remove obstacles, clear land of population, eliminate popular demands, slough off burdens and secure control of resources.

We shall come to some examples of history whose geography and political context are obviously different, yet which offer parallels and guidance.

The desire to seek comparison is not so crazy. The U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments on at least 72 occasions during the Cold War alone. [3]

Sometimes the business motive is clear: interventions like Guatemala in 1954 were prompted by the interests of the Boston United Fruit Company in which the Dulles brothers (see below) were invested. Frequently the objective is to forestall economic reforms like land redistribution, and protect the interests of powerful families (Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1979) or in more recent times to take control of public utilities and privatize assets (Bolivia, 2019).

Sometimes the precise motive behind a coup is obscured yet the history of a country’s destablization by outside forces leaves little doubt as to their origin. This year U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said of Haiti, “a new elected president should succeed President Moïse when his term ends on February 7, 2022.” Moïse disputed this, saying that as he had not taken office until 2017 he had another year, which the Organization of American States supported. He claimed to have obstructed a coup in February. Then, in July 2022, he was assassinated.

Sometimes those ousted are popular. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was Haiti's first democratically elected president. He was overthrown in 2004. Victor Yanukovych, though not particularly popular, was fairly elected in 2010 and overthrown in 2014.

His replacement by figures from the Svoboda party, backed by the paramilitaries of Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, and military figures trained in the U.S., turns the clock back to earlier U.S. adventures.

Usually coups are accompanied by Wilsonian appeals to making the world safe for democracy. One must jettison political language and slogans, for these hide as much as they reveal. Most wars or coups are, at root, motivated by control of resources. Outsiders exploit the local political characters for they must work with what they find.

This is where the corporate media deceives us. History and heritage determine politics: the world is not a liberal, globalist candy store. People are shaped by their environment in many different ways: mountain folk tend to be wary and defensive; generations raised beside land borders have a different outlook to islanders; religion plays its role.

Globalists seek to deny this, or to manipulate it to their advantage, yet they keep what is useful and eliminate what’s obstructive to their purpose.

In Ukraine Svoboda controlled the prime minister, and the top positions in defence, environment, education and agriculture, along with the chief prosecutor.

The incoming government was hyper-conservative, or “business friendly,” in keeping with U.S. regime change, from the Bolivian and Brazilian coups of the 1960s, through Pinochet, to Bolivia, again, in 2019.

They froze wages and increased prices, while cutting gas subsidies — Ukrainians were offered a domestic policy of austerity and a foreign policy of confrontation with Russia. Like other objects of intervention, Ukraine would face economic repression at home while serving as a lever to reshape geopolitics. The people were expendable.

Parallel lines

It is rare for coups to lead to war. Indeed, one of the few things one can say in favour of coups — whether the military seizes control or society is placed under the thumb of an elite — is it restores continutity or stablity, however repressive. There are some exceptions.

A loose parallel with current events is the manipulation of politicians and local population in Vietnam, which Graham Greene described in The Quiet American. This was a region — Vietnam and Laos — that the Western and European nations had primed for war.

France was the colonial power, seeking to keep a lock on resources. Britain continued to wield influence where it could — in Burma, for example — though it gradually deferred to the U.S, losing any influence on strategy.

Meanwhile the U.S. waded into war, claiming to be motivated by the Domino Theory which was nothing more than a slick marketing concept to be used as a pretext in the press.

The first French mineral mining company in Vietnam dated from the 1880s but the U.S. Geological Survey and private scouts for families like the Rockefellers arrived to map the region prior to WW2.

A stronger, though more complex parallel is Indonesia, where the Rockefellers had found gold and ample deposits of sweet crude (oil low in sulphur and thus cheaper to refine). However to get their hands on it the colonial rulers had to go — the Dutch in Indonesia as the French in Vietnam.

As for the local people, they were to be used as a pretext, at best collateral damage, at worst fodder for mutual extermination.