A continuation of events surrounding the drug war and related social issues of Baja California and Mexico. Keeping an eye on Seig Heil Trump. We are still trying to restore all blogs from 2006 which were hacked by Linton Robinson and his team, famous for supporting the Baja Trump Towers on one of his real estate sites. Highlights of Paris-Simone's favorite music !!
Courtesy Business Insider: Mariupol about a week ago
I'm not really avoiding Mexico, well c'mon maybe a little due to AMLO's "neutral" stance on Putin-Russia and locally their absolute non coverage of Putin the War Criminal Maniac Prick; and since we are coming up towards the end of April I will be back with the execution stats for our region.. In a few days.
Meanwhile, sign up for their instant email alerts on reports so you can stay in the loop:
"Lviv, Ukraine — Few beyond the metals
industry had heard of Mariupol’s Azovstal Steel and Iron Works before it
became the scene of a desperate last stand against Russia’s invading
forces.
Until recently Azovstal
was a major player on the global stage, producing 4 million tons of
steel annually and exporting the majority across the globe, according to
its owner Metinvest Holding, Ukraine’s biggest steelmaker.
From London’s Shard skyscraper to Hudson Yards in Manhattan to Genoa’s San Giorgio Bridge
(which replaced the collapsed Morandi Bridge), steel produced at
Azovstal is used in some of the world’s most recognizable landmarks.
But for weeks now, the world has been gripped by the battle raging over the steelworks on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
The pocket of Ukrainian fighters entrenched at the plant has
become a symbol of the country’s unwavering resistance in the face of an
enemy that far outnumbers them.
Yuriy Ryzhenkov, CEO of Metinvest Holding which owns the plant, is
devastated by what he sees happening to the plant and to Mariupol.
“The city’s literally under siege for almost two months now. And
the Russians, they don’t allow us to bring food into the city or water
into the city,” Ryzhenkov says.
“They’re not allowing us to take the civilians out of the city in a
centralized manner. They make the people either move out in their own
automobiles or even walk by foot through the minefields. It’s a
humanitarian disaster there.”
Asked why Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to take Azovstal
so badly, Ryzhenkov tells CNN, “I don’t think it’s the plant that he
wants.”
“I think it’s about the symbolism that they wanted to conquer Mariupol. They never expected Mariupol to resist.”
At least 150 employees have been killed and thousands remain unaccounted for, he says.
“What we know is that out of the 11,000 employees at Azovstal,”
says Ryzhenkov, “only about 4,500 people got out of Mariupol and got in
contact with us so we know their whereabouts.”
He seems haunted by the fate of Azovstal’s workforce.
“For the last two months, the whole company tried to do anything
possible to get the people to the safety. Unfortunately, at the moment,
we’re still not even half-way there.”
The company’s staff includes family dynasties who have made steel for as long as they can remember.
Ivan Goltvenko, a 38-year-old human resources director at the
plant, is the third generation of his family to work at Azovstal.
“I hoped I would work for Azovstal all my life and will contribute a lot to the fabric and to my city,” he says sadly.
“Seeing your city being destroyed is horrible, You could compare
it to a relative dying in your arms … And seeing him or her dying
gradually, organ after organ failing, and you can do nothing.”
From the city of Zaphorizhzhia, he finds it hard to watch the
scale of the devastation wrought by Russian airstrikes “because you want
your city to remain the same as it was in your memory.”
News of what’s happening back home is filtering through from friends and colleagues who are still trapped in Mariupol.
“Today, for example, I was shown a video of my apartment. Despite
the fact that the house survived, my flat is completely looted by
Russian soldiers. Nothing valuable was left – they even rummaged among
the children’s toys, and many of them were stolen.”
He says he spoke to one colleague on April 24 who revealed some of the horrors with which residents are being confronted.
“From one of the employees, who has a connection, we know that he
is in the city, he didn’t manage to leave, and he has been involved in
debris removal and transporting the bodies of dead citizens,” Goltvenko
says.
“And yesterday he told me that for one day from only one district
of the city, I would even say ‘from only one street’ he loaded four
trucks of bodies.
“He said: ‘I was drawn to volunteering at the morgue to collect bodies in the city and take them away.’”
“For that,” says Goltvenko, “he receives a dry ration.”
His colleague, 49-year-old Oleksiy Ehorov, Deputy Head for Repairs, has lived in Mariupol since he was a child.
“I studied there, I started working there, there I’ve become the
person who I am now. And seeing how it has been destroyed … You can’t
tell it without tears, without a lump in the throat,” he says.
The agony is not over. Russian jets and missiles continue to
pummel the site despite Putin saying last week there was no need to
storm the industrial area around the plant.
The defenders of Azovstal have repeatedly refused to give up their
weapons. There are thought to be hundreds of soldiers and civilians
still in the plant.
Before the war
What has happened at Azovstal is a mirror image of what’s happened
to a city proud of its history and industrial heritage.
The industrial port city was perhaps never conventionally
beautiful, with chimney stacks emitting smoke and steam into the sky
over the plant. At the port, blue and yellow cranes moved heavy items
around the bustling shipyard. But Mariupol had its charm and was beloved
by its residents.
In recent years, major improvements had been made, green spaces
were developed and quality of life for the working-class communities was
at last improving.
“The last eight years we’ve spent on building a modern and
comfortable city there … a good city to live in,” Ryzhenkov says.
“We’ve completed some major environmental projects, and there were
still plans to make sure that we have clean air, that we have clean
water and so on and so forth. And now we’re seeing all that is being
destroyed in less than two months.”
Maryna Holovnova, 28, says “it was like a living dream” because
“we had worked towards turning the city from just industrial small town
to a cultural capital.”
The Mariupol native, returned in 2020 after a 10-year absence to
find a burgeoning social scene. “It was completely different,” she tells
CNN, proudly adding it had even been designated Ukraine’s Cultural
Capital last year by the Ministry of Culture.
“We had so many festivals and we had so many people coming from
other cities and from other countries as well,” she continues. “We got a
chance to tell the people about the city not only from the perspective
of industrial development, but also from a cultural point of view [and]
from the historical point of view – because Mariupol has an amazing
history.”
A beaming smile spreads across her face as the former city guide
remembers the route she’d take visitors on. It would start at Mariupol’s
century-old Old Water Tower, she says, before winding around the city
center, taking in its many historic buildings and locations tied to
home-grown personalities.
Holovnova says with the waterfront metropolis continuing to
thrive, a sailing tour was introduced last year, and plans were underway
to launch an industrial-themed excursion complete with a factory tour
showcasing the process of steel production.
“One of my favorite places, which was weird as locals wouldn’t
understand me … was an observation point from where you could see the
whole Azovstal factory and you could see how big it was, how huge it
was, how great it was,” she says. “For locals it was nothing special
because we get used to it but all the foreigners, people from other
cities, they were amazed by the view.”
City under siege
The blossoming of Mariupol was an unlikely story, because it was
swallowed by the violence of the 20th century. It was the scene of
bitter fighting in World War II.
This time, the devastation is even greater. Ukrainian officials
say less than 20% of the city’s buildings are unscathed. Russia’s
merciless bombing campaign has left rubble where landmarks like the
Drama Theater once stood. Ukrainian officials say about 300 of the
estimated 1,300 civilians who had sought sanctuary in the cultural
institution are believed to have died when it was bombed in a brazen
attack by Russia on March 16.
The same applies to Azovstal. Built in 1933 under Soviet rule, it
was partially demolished during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s before
being rebuilt.
Now it is gone again – its carcass sheltering Ukrainian soldiers
and around 1,000 civilians in a maze of underground chambers, according
to Ukrainian officials.
An estimated 100,000 people remain in the city. On Thursday, local
authorities warned Mariupol was vulnerable to epidemics given the
appalling sanitary conditions in much of the city and the fact that
maybe thousands of bodies remain uncollected.
Oleksiy Ehorov can’t bear to think of what has happened to his
city – and his family. His mother-in-law died from injuries sustained
from shelling during their first attempt to flee to Zaporizhzhia.
“My emotions disappeared already there in Mariupol. That’s why there’s nothing but hate,” he tells CNN.
Ehorov says he loved living by the sea and had hoped to stay at the steelworks until he retired.
Now all he can do is watch as Russia continues to blockade the city and his former workplace.
When asked if he’d work under the Russians if they take the
factory, he echoes Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man and the main
shareholder of the group behind Azovstal steel.
“No. I’m not going to. After what they did … never.”
__________
CNN’s Tim Lister contributed to this report from Lviv, Ukraine and Kostan Nechyporenko contributed from Kyiv.
~~~~~
The "Ukrainian Headquarters of Baja California"....
Holy Crap ! Oh wow, how radical 🙄 ! Yes, we are in enemy territory ! Escuchen - Los Juventudes de Morena, sounds like another Norteno Music Group ! And when they hear "Jefe de Jefes" by Los Tigres, to them, it symbolizes Putin the Maniac. Good Lord. Strange indeed.
We were laughing - and probably should not have been under the circumstances, but Mike commented that our house looks like the Ukrainian Headquarters of Baja California. There are two Ukrainian flags, Ukrainian stickers on the windows, Ukrainian stickers on my 1990 Volvo, and two really neat yellow and blue hanging wind socks, plus chimes. I haven't put up the sunflower flags yet.
Although Mike does not know these people( and there are a lot of them), he is related to both the Frentzko's (Mom's side which was entirely Ukrainian ) and the Grisaks (Dad's side) of Slovinky. His Dad wrote the book on the family lineage; the Grisak's were ethnic Russians who migrated to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They considered themselves to be Russian, but held no allegiance to the Motherland.
"Two extensive accounts were published separately but authored by related
members of the Grisak/Gresock family who came from Slovinky, Spiš
County, to Jefferson and Indiana Counties. The Grisak Family (1978), by Michael J. Grisak, based on the manuscript of his father, Joseph Grisak
(1873-1950), is substantially about the family’s lineage and life in
Europe, but also with valuable accounts of his life in the U.S., around
Punxsutawney, Vintondale, and Dunlo (the latter two in Cambria County). The Gresocks of Chambersville, by Dennis J. Baca
(1994, rev. ed. 2011) followed the life of another branch of the same
family who settled in Indiana County. The amount of detail in The Grisak Family especially is quite remarkable, so I will have to be very selective in what excerpts I may have room to provide."
Additionally, during the 1950's, a Soviet Delegation came to Gary ,Indiana to study the US Steel Mills where Dad worked. They needed a Russian speaking interpreter, and chose Dad . The FBI came to the Grisak house several times when Mike was a kid and checked out Dad real good and gave him a good to go pass. Speaking of languages, because of all the migration mix in this part of the old world, Mike's Grandfather was fluent in Russian, German, Slovak and Hungarian.
Melanie still has it.....
I bring this up because - well, do any of you remember "Melanie" from the 1960's ? Pretty sure she made appearances on the Smothers Brothers. Anyway, Melanie's last name is "Safka" - her father is Ukrainian.
We could re-title the song to' Look What They've Done To My Mariupol', Ma !' But in truth it's not just Mariupol, it is all of Ukraine. Bastards.
Of course, nothing is said about this down here, at all. It's beyond creepy.
~~~~~
Brilliant, as usual. Were or are any of you Iggy Pop fans? At that time - around the release of "Raw Power", although anti-social, we were more just mellow surfers rather than punk rockers watching aghast as the Yuppies seemed to take over, the marches against the Vietnam War were fewer if not entirely over with, San Diego had finally given Angela Davis the boot and they were rejoicing and uncorking champagne at City Hall over her departure, boards were getting shorter, JFK, Bobby & MLK were all gone and everything seemed lost. And we were radical surfers...at least we believed Tom Wolfe was a dork.
I found a few interesting clips you might be interested in taking us from the inception and influences of "Raw Power" to present date anti-Ukraine War rock 'n roll - punk, hailing from Coachella 2022.
In one interview, the Stooges guitarist explained how he was attempting to replicate the sounds of battlefield machine gun fire and chaos. Someone more very recently took that to heart, and switched out the Ride of the Valkyries in the film Apocalypse Now, substituting Search & Destroy in its place. And, it works.
~~~~~
Maneskin: Well, I hope he doesn't catch a cold...just kidding but I do worry about Iggy too losing his trousers....
More Maneskin at Coachella are there hot springs there ? Nah.
Meanwhile little by little, more European and American music artists are coming forward with anti-Russian War in the Ukraine songs and sentiments. (well not down here doh ) One group, Maneskin from Italy performed channeling Iggy (their mentor)on the last set at Coachella:
"The Italian band MÃ¥neskin made its name in the U.S. with a crafty
cover, of the Four Seasons’ “Beggin,'” and there were more where that
came from during the band’s set Sunday night at Coachella: The group went to both ends of the pop/punk scale and memorably covered Britney Spears’ “Womanizer,” followed by Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
Although it may not exactly count as a cover, singer Damiano David
also offered a partial recitation of one of the greatest movie speeches
of all time — the climactic monologue from Charlie Chaplin’s classic anti-fascist film “The Great Dictator” — as the introduction to a new, original song that was dedicated to Ukraine.
Probably not much of the young crowd immediately recognized the 1940
Chaplin speech, which was shortly followed by David yelling “Fuck
Putin!” in the middle of the new song, “We’re Gonna Dance on Gasoline,”
their last number of the night on the Mojave stage.
But there was mass recognition, and an outbreak of joy, as the
“Eurovision” winners tore into Spears’ modern pop classic in a fercious
fashion befitting the rest of their hard-rocking set. As with another
already iconic cover from earlier in the weekend — Harry Styles doing
“Man! I Feel Like a Woman” with an assist from its originator, Shania
Twain — David took a song with a strong female point of view and did not
bother doing any gender-switching in the lyrics.
“As you know, we really like doing covers,” the singer told the
crowd. “More than how much we love doing covers, we love Britney
Spears,” he added.
Earlier in the set, David had made the closest thing to a costume
change by doffing a sheer nightgown he was wearing to reveal a skimpy
outfit that resembled bondage gear — saying that this stripping down was
supposed to happen later in the set, but the lack of promised cool
temperatures on stage made him get to it sooner. When the Spears song
soon came up in the setlist, he said, “Britney Spears makes us hot.”
The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was dedicated to that band’s
singer, Iggy Pop, who was a featured guest recently on an original
MÃ¥neskin recording, the similarly titled “I Wanna Be Your Slave.” That
song naturally preceded the Stooges’ song in the set.
As saucy as much of the rest of the 10-song set was, from “ZItti E
Buoni” forward, the finale took on a more serious, if hardly less
rocking, tone, after David put his outer layer back on. The new
“Gasoline” song was preceded by a sober reflection on the war in Ukraine
— David’s own words mixed with Chaplin’s.
“Are you having fun?” the singer asked. “I’m happy to hear it. But
sometimes we’ve gotta understand how big our privilege is, to have the
chance to just attend a gig and have fun and be careless and have
nothing to think about. And none of us have to think of, (when) you wake
up, how many bombs have been launched on the city. So before we start
playing our last song, I just want to give you a pitch that Charlie
Chaplin gave.”
David then recited an excerpted and condensed version of the
climactic speech that the great movie actor gave in character at the
close of the satirical “The Great Dictator,” released in the early part
of World War II. The part of the famous recitation revived by David
reads in part: “Do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but
the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human
progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power
they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men
die, liberty will never perish… Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who
despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do,
what to think and what to feel! Who … treat you like cattle, use you as
cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine
men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are
not cattle! You are men!”
~~~~~
(***Is any of this making you feel...a little bit old ? That's okay, I just hope these kids get around to watching Charlie Chaplin. And like it or not, these are the new poets, the new voices in our time. Anyone who is missing any of this has really missed the boat.
.....)
..........
" How are you sleeping at night?
How do you close both your eyes,
Living with all of those lives
On your hands?
Standing alone on that hill,
Using your fuel to kill.
We won’t take it standing still,
Watch us dancе.
How are you sleeping at night?
How do you close both your eyes,
Living with all of those lives
On your hands?
Standing alone on that hill,
Using your fuel to kill.
We won’t take it standing still,
Watch us dancе.
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!"
Keep it up kids.
~~~~~
Finally.....something sad but more soothing:
"Transcribed with the permission of Bob Hecht, from his Podcast:
During World War II there were a number of songs that
seemed to capture the ethos of the time. One of the most significant and
popular was “I’ll Be Seeing You,” famously recorded by Bing Crosby,
Billie Holiday, Jo Stafford and many others. The song became a virtual
anthem of the war, embodying as it did, the reality of wartime
separations and loss.
This is the story of a song that
began its life as just another poignant ballad of love and loss was
largely forgotten, and then came roaring back to life.
And the guy
who wrote the words to that song would never know that it not only
became a huge hit, but the virtual anthem of a wartime generation.
Partings were a fact of wartime life. Many of those partings were for
years, though many were forever, with nearly a million American and
British lives lost.
It’s hard to imagine a song more perfect for the time, even
though it wasn’t written with a war in mind, at all. For during WWII
there was a lot of saying goodbye. After all, between the Allied forces
of America and Britain alone, there were some 20 million people who
served in the war. Soldiers and civilians alike, became accustomed to
goodbyes. Partings were a fact of wartime life. Many of those partings
were for years, though many were forever, with nearly a million American
and British lives lost.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” became emblematic of
such separations. This sentimental ballad with its appealing and
sing-able melody, and its straight-forward relatable lyrics, resonated
with anyone who had either lost someone, or who was waiting and hoping
to see them again.
So how did the song happen? Well it came from the songwriting
team of Sammy Fain, who wrote the music and Irving Kahle, who wrote the
words.
Fain and Kayle had many hits together during their 17 year
collaboration, dating back to 1925; including “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”
and “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella.”
They wrote “I’ll Be Seeing
You” in 1938 for a Broadway musical comedy called “Right This Way.” But
the show was a flop, lasting for only 15 performances. Sammy Fain once
joked that a lot of theater-goers at those 15 shows, never even stuck
around for the whole show. “Where’s the exit?”, Fain asked
sarcastically. Well, Right This Way.
Then in 1943, the
forgotten song was unexpectedly rescued from obscurity when someone must
have realized the timeliness of its sentiment for the universal plight
of wartime separations. Everyone big recorded it. Bing Crosby had one of
the biggest hits with the song, as did Jo Stafford, Billie Holiday and
Frank Sinatra.
But lyricist Kahle never knew of the song’s
surprising late success. He had died the year before its resuscitation,
at only 38, of a heart attack.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” differed from
earlier Tin Pan Alley songs about loss and separation. It wasn’t about
rejection by one’s beloved, about being dumped. It was a universal song
about the power of love transcending time and distance.
And it
wasn’t only lovers who related to the song. It was also meaningful to
mothers separated from their sons and daughters; and to children
separated from their parents.
In a World War II memoir, there’s
the story of a young girl desperately missing her father. She writes,
“the line ‘I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you,’ had a
profound effect on me. It was amazing to be able to look at the moon,
and realize that all those miles away, he was able to look at the same
moon.”
The song didn’t have that same salutary effect on everyone,
however. Jazz critic Francis Davis spoke about that in an interview. “I
grew up in a home where my mother had lost her brother in World War
II,” Davis said. “We had my grandmother in the house as well. There were
certain songs that we had to turn off when they came on the radio,
because they just reminded my grandmother in particular, too much of her
son. One of them was ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
For soldiers during
the war, the song was virtually ever present. One soldier recalls
overhearing his buddy on the phone to his girlfriend. He was singing to
her “I’ll Be Seeing You,” but he changed the words to “I’ll be squeezing
you in all the old familiar places.”
But another soldier recalls
hearing the song in the midst of the allied invasion of Sicily. “When we
hit the beach,” he remembered, “we were all hit, the medics couldn’t
get to us. I could hear a wounded soldier nearby singing ‘I’ll be seeing
you.’ And then he stopped. I had listened to him die.”
Lyricist
Irving Kahle had considered “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the greatest song he
had ever written. And he’d often expressed his disappointment that it
hadn’t become a hit – at least not during his lifetime. He would surely
have appreciated knowing what his words came to represent, and what the
song meant to so many millions of people, during very difficult times.
And
all it took for the song to catch on was the complete catastrophic
upending of the world order, in which parting became a normal fact of
life for so many; and for which there just happened to be a song already
made; a song that managed to distill the mood of an entire era.
At
Kahle’s funeral, his longtime songwriting partner, Sammy Fain, arranged
to have a special piece of music played during the service. Of course,
that was “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
But our last words go to songwriter
Sammy Kahn, who once said, “You know, old songwriters never really die,
because their songs keep them alive, forever."
~~~~~
And guess who is singing? Our own, Iggy Pop. Ahhh, sweet !
............
I know, I was too old to be into the punk scene. But as far as that other - like they say, it's only rock 'n roll but I like it like it yes I do. Apparently if you want to see Iggy, you'll have to go to France. I'd go, if he actually sang "I'll be seeing you". But with a shirt on.
It's been difficult for me to watch and read about the Battle of Donbas(s) and the fate of the survivors of Mariupol unfold. I am hoping that our Government and our Military have on purpose downplayed information on Ukraine's capabilities of dealing with this siege.
But, when I was watching the hundreds of Soviet tanks zooming and roaring unabated down the roads and read of the thousands of Syrian ground troops plus looked at the Soviet's strategy to encircle the Ukrainians from the north,east and south I shuddered. Are y'all worried about this or is it just me?
Here is another look at the Russian strategy in the Donbas(s) Region:
"( RFE/RL )
– Vladimir Putin “has driven Russia into a trap” by invading Ukraine,
the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik has said, predicting ultimate
defeat for the Russian leader and a chance for much-needed liberal
reforms afterward.
“In Russia, changes took place after wars were lost — after the
Finnish war, the Japanese war, the Afghan war, and now Ukraine,” Michnik
recently told RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus in an interview.
Michnik, a leading intellectual of the Cold War era and longtime
critic of Russian domination of Eastern Europe, is now, at age 75, the
editor in chief of the liberal Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
In a column for the paper, Michnik placed the struggle of Ukrainians
as just the latest chapter in the historical repression by the Soviet
Union and Russia. “We must say it loud and clear,” he wrote. “We are all Ukrainians now.”
In his interview with RFE/RL, Michnik said Putin was likely deluded
into thinking events during his latest invasion of Ukraine would largely
mirror those in Crimea in February 2014, when Russian soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms seized control of Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula.
[Putin] did not think that there would be such a heroic
response from the Ukrainian Army and Ukrainian society. It’s
fantastic.”
“His hope that there would be a repeat of what happened in Crimea.
The enthusiasm, as there was during Crimea, did not occur,” Michnik
explained.
A month after illegally annexing Crimea in March 2014, Putin sent
arms, funds, and other aid to separatists in southeastern Ukraine,
sparking a conflict that has left at least 13,200 dead.
In his calculus to go to war, Putin was driven by a belief — held by
many Russians — that Ukrainians aren’t a separate people, said Michnik.
“He thinks, as probably some of our common Russian friends do, that
Ukraine is not Ukrainians, they are little Russians, one nation. This is
a big mistake, not only for Putin but also for many absolutely honest
and intelligent people in Russia,” he said.
A Russian flag flies next to buildings destroyed by Russian shelling in Mariupol on April 12.
Exiled Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky recently told CNN that Putin became “literally insane” when his invasion of Ukraine wasn’t met with a friendly reception from its citizens.
Putin also got the West’s response wrong, Michnik said, hoping what
many have criticized as the hasty retreat from Afghanistan by the United
States and its NATO allies was a sign of cracks among the allies.
“[Putin] thought the United States was dead after Kabul, that [Joe]
Biden didn’t have a [Donald] Trump illusion, that Biden didn’t think
like Trump did, that Putin was a benevolent genius. Biden is a calm,
normal person who knows that [Putin] is a bandit, how to behave with a
bandit,” said Michnik.
Putin also likely brushed off the capabilities of the Ukrainians,
Michnik said, admitting he was himself among the initial skeptics.
“[Putin] did not think that there would be such a heroic response
from the Ukrainian Army and Ukrainian society,” he said. “It’s
fantastic. No one thought it would happen, and I didn’t think it would
either. The Ukrainians told me that this would happen, but I did not
believe them.”
An aerial view of destroyed Russian armor on the outskirts of Kyiv on March 31.
Ukraine has estimated as of April 13 that 19,800 Russian soldiers
have died since the beginning of the war, citing its own recovery of
bodies and intercepted Russian communications. Russia has called the
Ukrainian numbers inflated and only twice announced its own figures, a
fraction of those tabulated by Kyiv.
The war with the Poles was not a war with the Poles —
no, they were the white Poles…. When there was a winter war with
Finland, they were white Finns. Now, not Ukrainians, but fascists,
Nazis….”
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said on April 7 that the
country had “significant losses of troops and it’s a huge tragedy for
us” during an interview on Sky News, a rare official admission of the
scale of the Russian losses.
What support Putin has among average Russians is difficult to gauge,
said Michnik, amid worsening repression and the muzzling of any
opposition media.
Ordinary Russians can face up to 15 years in prison for questioning
or contradicting the Kremlin’s war narrative, with thousands detained so
far by police nationwide for speaking out.
“I don’t believe Russians are 100 percent supportive of Putin;
200,000 Russians have gone abroad. In 1968, during the intervention in
Czechoslovakia, seven people took to Red Square in Moscow. Today, 8,000
have already been arrested for taking to the streets with the slogan,
‘No To War,'” said Michnik, referring to estimates of how many Russians
have left the country since the Russian invasion started on February 24.
Russia has adopted many Soviet tactics in defining those opposed to
them, Michnik explained, with Ukrainians dehumanized as “just Nazis,
fascists,” in a never-ending barrage on state-run media.
“Even during the time of the Bolsheviks, the war with the Poles was
not a war with the Poles — no, they were the white Poles,” Michnik said,
noting the term used by the Bolsheviks and later the Soviet authorities
to designate “enemies” of its communist rule.
“When there was a winter war with Finland, they were white Finns.
Now, not Ukrainians, but fascists, Nazis…. But if they tell you so in
the morning, after dinner, in the evening, one day, another day, a third
day, after all, you think there is something to it,” Michnik said.
“I remember it well, how in Poland in Soviet times there was
anti-German propaganda that all Germans were Nazis. But not these
Germans, not ours from East Germany — they were good Germans. Ukrainians
from Luhansk and Donetsk who support the Kremlin’s policy are good, but
they are not Ukrainians either. They are little Russians.”
Ultimately Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will end with defeat for
Putin, Michnik said, and judging by previous Russian military defeats in
the past, an opportunity for change may emerge.
“I am sure that Ukraine will become for Putin what Afghanistan became
for [Leonid] Brezhnev,” Michnik said, referring to the former Soviet
leader who ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Now, Michnik holds out hope that a Russian defeat in Ukraine could be the spark to ignite democratic change in Russia.
“Russia made a bad choice. But we still have hope that it is still
possible. I will not live to see it, but my son will live, [and] a new
wave will come…”
With additional reporting by Tony Wesolowsky
Vadim Dubnov is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus, which broadcasts in Russian to Georgia.
"As the war in Ukraine heads for its third month amid a rising toll of
death and destruction, Washington and its European allies are
scrambling, so far unsuccessfully, to end that devastating, globally
disruptive conflict. Spurred by troubling images of executed Ukrainian
civilians scattered
in the streets of Bucha and ruined cities like Mariupol, they are
already trying to use many tools in their diplomatic pouches to pressure
Russian President Vladimir Putin to desist. These range from economic sanctions and trade embargoes to the confiscation of the assets of some of his oligarch cronies and the increasingly massive shipment of arms to Ukraine. Yet none of it seems to be working.
Even after Ukraine’s surprisingly strong defense forced a Russian
retreat from the northern suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, Putin only
appears to be doubling down with plans for new offensives in Ukraine’s
south and east. Instead of engaging in serious negotiations, he’s been
redeploying his battered troops for a second round of massive attacks led by General Alexander Dvonikov, “the butcher of Syria,” whose merciless air campaigns in that country flattened cities like Aleppo and Homs.
So while the world waits for the other combat boot to drop
hard, it’s already worth considering where the West went wrong in its
efforts to end this war, while exploring whether anything potentially
effective is still available to slow the carnage.
Playing the China Card
In January 2021, only weeks after President Joe Biden’s inauguration,
Moscow began threatening to attack Ukraine unless Washington and its
European allies agreed that Kyiv could never join NATO. That April,
Putin only added force to his demand by dispatching 120,000 troops to
Ukraine’s border to stage military maneuvers
that Washington even then branded a “war threat.” In response, taking a
leaf from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s tattered Cold War
playbook, the Biden administration initially tried to play Beijing off
against Moscow.
After a face-to-face summit with Putin in Geneva that June, President Biden affirmed
Washington’s “unwavering commitment to the sovereignty and territorial
integrity of Ukraine.” In a pointed warning to the Russian president, he
said,
“You got a multi-thousand-mile
border with China… China is… seeking to be the most powerful economy in
the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.
You’re in a situation where your economy is struggling… I don’t think
[you should be] looking for a Cold War with the United States.”
As Russian armored units began massing for war near the Ukrainian
border that November, U.S. intelligence officials all-too-accurately leaked
warnings that “the Kremlin is planning a multi-front offensive…
involving up to 175,000 troops.” In response, over the next three
months, administration officials scrambled to avert war by meeting a
half-dozen times with Beijing’s top diplomats and beseeching “the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade.”
In a video conference on December 7th, Biden told
Putin of his “deep concerns… about Russia’s escalation of forces
surrounding Ukraine,” warning that “the U.S. and our Allies would
respond with strong economic and other measures in the event of military
escalation.”
In a more amicable video conference just a week later, however, Putin assured
China’s President Xi Jinping that he would defy any human-rights
boycott by Western leaders and come to Beijing for the Winter Olympics.
Calling him his “old friend,” Xi replied that he appreciated this
unwavering support and “firmly opposed attempts to drive a wedge into
our two countries.” Indeed, during the February Olympics opening
ceremony, the two of them publicly proclaimed a de facto alliance that had “no limits,” even as Beijing evidently made it clear that Russia should not spoil China’s glittering Olympic moment on the international stage with an invasion right then.
In retrospect, it’s hard to overstate the price Putin paid for
China’s backing. So desperate was he to preserve their new alliance that
he sacrificed his only chance for a quick victory over Ukraine. By the
time Putin landed in Beijing on February 4th, 130,000 Russian troops
had already massed on the Ukrainian border. Delaying an invasion until
the Olympics ended left most of them huddled in unheated canvas tents
for three more weeks. When the invasion finally began, idling vehicles
had burned through much of their fuel, truck tires sitting without rotation were primed for blow-outs, and the rations and morale of many of those soldiers were exhausted.
In early February, the ground in Ukraine was still frozen, making it
possible for Russia’s tanks to swarm overland, potentially encircling
the capital, Kyiv, for a quick victory. Because the Olympics didn’t end
until February 20th, Russia’s invasion, which began four days later, was
ever closer to March, Ukraine’s mud month when average temperatures
around Kyiv rise rapidly. Adding to Moscow’s difficulties, at 51 tons,
its T-90 tanks were almost twice as heavy as the classic go-anywhere
Soviet T-34s which won World War II. When those modern steel-clad
behemoths did try to leave the roads near Kyiv, they often sank deep and fast in the mud, becoming sitting ducks for Ukrainian missiles.
Instead of surging across the countryside to envelop Kyiv, Russia’s tanks found themselves stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam
on a paved highway where Ukrainian defenders armed with shoulder-fired
missiles could destroy them with relative ease. Being enveloped by the
enemy instead of enveloping them cost the Russian army most of its
losses to date — estimated recently at 40,000 troops killed, wounded, or captured, along with 2,540 armored vehicles
and 440 rocket and artillery systems destroyed. As those crippling
losses mounted, Russia’s army was forced to abandon its five-week
campaign to capture the capital. On April 2nd, the retreat began, leaving behind a dismal trail of burned vehicles, dead soldiers, and slaughtered civilians.
In the end, Vladimir Putin paid a high price indeed for China’s support.
President Xi’s foreknowledge
of the plans to invade Ukraine and his seemingly steadfast support even
after so many weeks of lackluster military performance raise some
revealing parallels with the alliance between Joseph Stalin, the leader
of the Soviet Union, and China’s Mao Zedong in the early days of the
Cold War. After Stalin’s pressure on Western Europe was blocked by the
Berlin airlift of 1948-1949 and the formation of NATO in April 1950, the
Soviet boss made a deft geopolitical pivot to Asia. He played upon his
brand-new alliance with a headstrong Mao by getting him to send Chinese
troops into the maelstrom of the Korean War. For three years, until his
death in 1953 allowed an armistice to be reached, Stalin kept the U.S.
military bogged down and bloodied in Korea, freeing him to consolidate
his control over Eastern Europe.
Following this same geopolitical strategy, President Xi has much to
gain from Putin’s headstrong plunge into Ukraine. In the short term,
Washington’s focus on Europe postpones a promised (and long-delayed)
U.S. “pivot” to the Pacific, allowing Beijing to further consolidate its
position in Asia. Meanwhile, as Putin’s military flattens cities like
Kharkiv and Mariupol, making Russia an outlaw state, a mendicant Moscow
is likely to become a cut-rate source of much-needed Chinese fuel and food
imports. Not only does Beijing need Russia’s gas to wean its economy
from coal but, as the world’s largest consumer of wheat, it could
achieve food security with a lock on Russia’s massive grain exports.
Just as Stalin capitalized on Mao’s stalemate in Korea, so the elusive
dynamics of Eurasian geopolitics could well transform Putin’s losses
into Xi’s gains.
For all these reasons, Washington’s initial strategy had little
chance of restraining Russia’s invasion. As retired CIA analyst Raymond
McGovern argued,
drawing on his 27 years studying the Soviet Union for the agency,
“Rapprochement between Russia and China has grown to entente.” In his
view, the sooner Biden’s foreign-policy team “get it through their
ivy-mantled brains that driving a wedge between Russia and China is not
going to happen, the better the chances the world can survive the
fallout (figurative and literal) from the war in Ukraine.”
Sanctions
Since the Russian invasion began, the Western alliance has been
ramping up an array of sanctions to punish Putin’s cronies and cripple
Russia’s economic capacity to continue the war. In addition, Washington
has already committed $2.4 billion for arms shipments to Ukraine, including lethal antitank weapons like the shoulder-fired Javelin missile.
On April 6th, the White House announced
that the U.S. and its allies had imposed “the most impactful,
coordinated, and wide-ranging economic restrictions in history,” banning
new investments in Russia and hampering the operations of its major
banks and state enterprises. The Biden administration expects the
sanctions to shrink Russia’s gross domestic product by 15% as inflation
surges, supply chains collapse, and 600 foreign companies exit the
country, leaving it in “economic, financial, and technological
isolation.” With near unanimous bipartisan support, Congress has also voted to void U.S. trade relations with Moscow and ban its oil imports (measures with minimal impact since Russia only supplies 2% of American petroleum use).
Although the Kremlin’s invasion threatened European security, Brussels moved far more cautiously, since Russia supplies
40% of the European Union’s gas and 25% of its oil — worth $108 billion
in payments to Moscow in 2021. For decades, Germany has built massive
pipelines to handle Russia’s gas exports, culminating in the 2011
opening of Nordstream I, the world’s longest undersea pipeline, which Chancellor Angela Merkel then hailed as a “milestone in energy cooperation” and the “basis of a reliable partnership” between Europe and Russia.
With its critical energy infrastructure bound to Russia by pipe, rail, and ship, Germany, the continent’s economic giant, is dependent
on Moscow for 32% of its natural gas, 34% of its oil, and 53% of its
hard coal. After a month of foot-dragging, it did go along with the European decision
to punish Putin by cutting off Russian coal shipments, but drew the
line at tampering with its gas imports, which heat half its homes and
power much of its industry.
To reduce its dependence on Russian gas, Berlin has launched multiple long-term projects to diversify its energy sources, while cancelling the opening of the new $11 billion Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia. It has also asserted control
over its own energy reserves, held inside massive underground caverns,
suspending their management by the Russian state firm Gazprom. (As
Berlin’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck put it, “We won’t leave energy infrastructure subject to arbitrary decisions by the Kremlin.”)
Right after the Ukraine invasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced
a crash program to construct the country’s first Liquified Natural Gas
(LNG) terminals on its north coast to unload supplies from American
ships and those of various Middle Eastern countries. Simultaneously,
German officials flew off to the Persian Gulf to negotiate more long-term deliveries of LNG. Still, the construction of such a multibillion-dollar terminal typically takes about four years, and Germany’s vice-chancellor has made it clear that, until then, massive imports of Russian gas will continue in order to preserve the country’s “social peace.” The European Union is considering plans to cut off Russian oil imports completely, but its proposal to slash Russian natural-gas imports by two-thirds by year’s end has already met stiff opposition from Germany’s finance ministry and its influential labor unions, worried about losses of “hundreds of thousands” of jobs.
Given all the exemptions, sanctions have so far failed to fatally
cripple Russia’s economy or curtail its invasion of Ukraine. At first,
the U.S. and EU restrictions did spark
a crash in Russia’s currency, the ruble, which President Biden
mockingly called “the rubble,” but its value has since bounced back to
pre-invasion levels, while broader economic damage has, so far, proved
limited. “As long as Russia can continue to sell oil and gas,” observed Jacob
Funk Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson International Economics
Institute, “the Russian government’s financial situation is actually
pretty strong.” And he concluded, “This is the big escape clause of the
sanctions.”
In short, the West has seized a few yachts from Putin’s cronies, stopped serving
Big Macs in Red Square, and slapped sanctions on everything except the
one thing that really matters. With Russia supplying 40% of its gas and collecting an estimated $850 million daily, Europe is, in effect, funding its own invasion.
Reparations
Following the failure of both Washington’s pressure on China and
Western sanctions against Russia to stop the war, the international
courts have become the sole peaceful means left to still the conflict.
While the law often remains an effective means to mediate conflict
domestically, the critical question of enforcing judgements has long
robbed the international courts of their promise for promoting peace — a
problem painfully evident in Ukraine today.
Even as the fighting rages, two major international courts have
already ruled against Russia’s invasion, issuing orders for Moscow to
cease and desist its military operations. On March 16th, the U.N.’s
highest tribunal, the International Court of Justice, ordered Russia to
immediately suspend
all military operations in Ukraine, a judgment Putin has simply
ignored. Theoretically, that high court could now require Moscow to pay
reparations, but Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council,
could simply veto that decision.
With surprising speed, on day five of the invasion, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) at Strasbourg ruled in the case of Ukraine v. Russia (X),
ordering the Kremlin “to refrain from military attacks against
civilians and civilian objects, including residential premises,
emergency vehicles and… schools and hospitals” — a clear directive that
Moscow’s military continues to defy with its devastating rocket and
artillery strikes. To enforce the decision, the court notified the
Council of Europe, which, two weeks later, took the most extreme step
its statutes allow, expelling
Russia after 26 years of membership. With that not-terribly-painful
step, the European Court seems to have exhausted its powers of
enforcement.
But matters need not end there. The Court is also responsible for enforcing the European Convention on Human Rights, which reads
in part: “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful
enjoyment of his possessions.” Under that provision, the ECHR could
order Russia to pay Ukraine compensation
for the war damage it’s causing. Unfortunately, as Ivan Lishchyna, an
adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, points out: “There is no
international police or international military force that can support
any international court judgment.”
As it happens, though, there is a blindingly obvious path to payment.
Just as a U.S. municipal court can garnish the wages of a deadbeat dad
who won’t pay child support, so the European Court of Human Rights could
garnish the gas income of the world’s ultimate deadbeat dad, Vladimir
Putin. In its first five weeks, Putin’s war of choice inflicted an
estimated $68 billion dollars of damage
on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure (its homes, airports, hospitals,
and schools), along with other losses worth about $600 billion or three
times that country’s total gross domestic product.
But how would Ukraine collect such a sum from Russia? Any Ukrainian
party that has suffered damage — whether individuals, cities, or the
entire nation — could petition the European Court of Human Rights to
enforce its judgement in Ukraine v. Russia (X) by awarding
damages. The Court could then instruct the Council of Europe to direct
all European corporations buying gas from Gazprom, the Russian state
monopoly, to deduct, say, 20% from their regular payments for a Ukraine
compensation fund. Since Europe is now paying
Gazprom about $850 million daily, such a court-ordered deduction, would
allow Putin to pay off his initial $600 billion war-damage debt over
the next eight years. As long as his invasion continued, however, those
sums would only increase in a potentially crippling fashion.
Though Putin would undoubtedly froth and fulminate, in the end, he
would have little choice but to accept such deductions or watch the
Russian economy collapse from the lack of gas, oil, or coal revenues.
Last month, when he rammed legislation through his parliament requiring
Europe’s gas payments in rubles, not euros, Germany refused, despite the
threat of a gas embargo. Faced with the loss of such critical revenues
sustaining his economy, a chastened Putin called Chancellor Scholz to capitulate.
With billions invested in pipelines leading one-way to Europe,
Russia’s petro-dependent economy would have to absorb that war-damage
deduction of 20% — possibly more, if the devastation worsened — or face
certain economic collapse from the complete loss of those critical
energy exports. That might, sooner or later, force the Russian president
to end his war in Ukraine. From a pragmatic perspective, that 20%
deduction would be a four-way win. It would punish Putin, rebuild
Ukraine, avoid a European recession caused by banning Russian gas, and
prevent environmental damage from firing up Germany’s coal-fueled power
plants.
Paying for Peace
Back in the day of anti-Vietnam War rallies in the United States and
nuclear-freeze marches in Europe, crowds of young protesters would sing
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s hope-filled refrain, even though they were
aware of just how hopeless it was even as the words left their lips:
“All we are saying is give peace a chance.” But now, after weeks of
trial and error over Ukraine, the world just might have a chance to make
the aggressor in a terrible war at least begin to pay a price for
bringing such devastating conflict back to Europe.
Perhaps it’s time to finally deliver a bill to Vladimir Putin for a
foreign policy that has involved little more than flattening one hapless
city after another — from Aleppo and Homs in Syria to Chernihiv,
Karkhiv, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Mykolaiv, and undoubtedly more
to come in Ukraine. Once the world’s courts establish such a precedent
in Ukraine v. Russia (X), would-be strongmen might have to
think twice before invading another country, knowing that wars of choice
now come with a prohibitive price tag."
~~~~~
Noted from Informed Comment: Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in
Southeast Asia. He has written about, and testified before Congress on,
Philippine political history, opium trafficking in the Golden Triangle,
underworld crime syndicates, and international political surveillance.
He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century (Dispatch Books) and A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books).
~~~~~
Back later with a bit more on Mexico...meanwhile Pulse has the pulse. We're getting the final boosters at the end of the week, Doc put me on a stronger pain med for knee, so I'm loopy, but no pain. Operation sometime in July wish it would just hurry up. Paris says woofers !
