Category: European Union

Is Europe Losing Patience with Zelenskyy?

Wednesday 24 August 2022

Over the past six months Socialists in every part of the EU have united with anti-war groups, dissenters, and the growing number of ordinary people who are becoming increasingly alarmed by the effects this war and the sanctions against Russia are having on their lives. The limitation of oil and gas in the global economy has driven costs up, accelerating an already developing cost of living crisis; threatening less-well-off people with a bitter winter in which they will be unable to afford the basics of food, heating, and rent. … More Is Europe Losing Patience with Zelenskyy?

Impending Nuclear Disaster at the Zaporozhye NPP

Monday 22 August 2022

It is an undeniable fact that Ukrainian forces are responsible for the artillery bombardment of the Zaporozhye NPP, and there are two reasons for this; one ideological and the other practical. The prevailing ideology of the Ukrainian forces on the southern front is, as has been well-documented even in the western media, National Socialist — or Nazi — in nature; a profoundly nihilistic and apocalyptic brand of palingenetic ultranationalism. … More Impending Nuclear Disaster at the Zaporozhye NPP

Žižek on the War in Ukraine

Monday 27 June 2022

Žižek’s recent comments on Ukraine have quite understandably bewildered and divided socialists around the world. Ukraine, he says, ‘risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger Nato.’ But wait! Supporting Ukraine is to support a Nazi-captured state, post-Maidan, and to seek a stronger NATO is to desire a reinforced US unipolarity and the furtherance of American liberal and capitalist hegemony. To the socialist (qua a leftist who reads) this is simply anathema. … More Žižek on the War in Ukraine

Chekhov’s Nuclear War

Wednesday 4 May 2022

NATO and the western media have made a great fuss about Russia’s revision of its nuclear strategy; suggesting that, by incorporating a particular nuclear option into its conventional military response, the Putin administration has adopted a fundamentally more aggressive and bullying strategy — and has leapt on this to accelerate the expansion of the anti-Russian nuclear alliance and the buildup of ‘defensive’ forces on the Russian border. Little if anything, however, has been said about why Russia made these revisions in the first place. … More Chekhov’s Nuclear War

The Future of Ukraine

Monday 14 March 2022

There can be no question that this new configuration will establish the territorial boundaries of the new Cold War. And nothing of this should come as much of a surprise to anyone in Washington or Brussels. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger warned that NATO expansion into eastern Europe would provoke a conflict with Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin each expressed their concerns over the extension of US hegemony in the region, and in 2015 Noam Chomsky reminded the West what the end of Ukrainian neutrality would trigger. … More The Future of Ukraine

Europe’s Acceptable Refugees

Wednesday 9 March 2022

The villagers of Beregsurány, like everyone over Europe welcoming Ukrainian refugees, are to be applauded. Even celebrated. People fleeing Ukraine — human beings — men, women, and children, young and old, able and disabled, are in a desperate situation. They are escaping violence and the threat of death, their lives are being demolished around them, they are cold, they are frightened, and — worst of all — they have no idea what the future holds for them or for their loved ones. … More Europe’s Acceptable Refugees

Western Hypocrisy over Ukraine

Saturday 5 March 2022

So completely convinced are we that ‘the Russian’ is a monster that all we are capable of seeing in Russia is monsters, and this has not been at all difficult for western governments to tap into and exploit for their own ends. Ireland is by far not the worst example, and so here we are looking at Ireland so as to give some kind of idea of how bad things are in more Russophobic societies — places like Britain, Germany, Poland, and Estonia. While, for example, Poland and Estonia have recent histories of Russian Soviet domination and so have legitimate fears of a return to that awful reality, we can also see in this a racial element. Russia, we have decided, is the evil other. Whatever it does is wicked. … More Western Hypocrisy over Ukraine

Why Russia had to invade Ukraine

Friday 4 March 2022

The purpose of this brief article is to explain — not justify — why events in Ukraine posed such a threat to the security of Russia that the Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, felt he had no alternative but to launch a military invasion. We must recognise that, as the leader of the Russian Federation, as is the case with every other head of state, Mr Putin’s priority is the security of his country. His actions, certainly given the western media’s hysteria, may cause us some considerable discomfort, but, when it comes to defending the international red lines laid down by Russia for its own security, Mr Putin — like every world leader — will put his country’s interests first. … More Why Russia had to invade Ukraine

The Rules We Cannot Break

Thursday 3 March 2022

Ukrainian civilians — qua persons who are not members of the armed forces — who have taken up arms before the occupation of Ukraine have in effect become a levée en masse. They are considered under international humanitarian law and by the rules of military engagement in international treaty law as combatants. They are no longer safeguarded by the laws and conventions of warfare that exist to protect civilians and civilian populations. Such persons may be targeted and killed by invading forces as enemy combatants, and where such persons (combatant civilians) take shelter among non-combatant civilians they pose a serious danger to unarmed civilians who may be killed as collateral damage in any fighting between the invaders and the combatants. … More The Rules We Cannot Break

Understanding the Ukrainian Conflict

Thursday 3 March 2022

NATO expansion to the east violated the Russian-US understanding of 1990, and the continued existence of NATO posed its own set of problems. NATO was an anti-Soviet alliance, but the Soviet Union no longer existed. The only way Moscow could interpret this post-Cold War NATO was an anti-Russia alliance, which it was. Which it still is. And it is through this expansion — 1999 with the inclusion of Poland, Czechia, and Hungary, 2004 with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, and to the present with US efforts to include Georgia and Ukraine — that Putin’s mood towards the West changed. These were not the actions of a friend nor even those of an international partner. … More Understanding the Ukrainian Conflict