Union declares victory as Kellogg's strike ends with pay raise, moratorium on plant closures

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
December 22, 2021

Kellogg's plant workers remain on strike after rejecting the company's latest contract offer (AFP)

Kellogg's workers' months-long strike officially came to an end Tuesday after union members voted to approve a new five-year collective bargaining agreement that includes an immediate wage increase of $1.10 per hour, a moratorium on plant closures, and a pension boost.

Anthony Shelton, international president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), called the new contract a "great workers' victory" and said that "solidarity was critical" to the achievement. Employees are expected to return to work on December 27.

"We're definitely stronger going back into that building than we were coming out."

"Our striking members at Kellogg's ready-to-eat cereal production facilities courageously stood their ground and sacrificed so much in order to achieve a fair contract," Shelton said in a statement Tuesday. "This agreement makes gains and does not include any concessions."

"Our entire union commends and thanks Kellogg's members," he continued. "From picket line to picket line, Kellogg's union members stood strong and undeterred in this fight, inspiring generations of workers across the globe, who were energized by their tremendous show of bravery as they stood up to fight and never once backed down."

Roughly 1,400 Kellogg's workers in four states—Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee—had been on strike since October 5, when cereal plant employees walked off the job in an effort to improve pay, benefits, and poor working conditions, a longstanding issue that deteriorated further amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Kellogg's workers have accused management of intentionally under-staffing the corporation's facilities—and forcing the remaining employees to endure brutally long shifts—to save money on pay and benefits, all while handing CEO Steve Cahillane nearly $12 million a year in compensation.

"The worst is when you work a 7-to-7 and they tell you to come back at 3 am on a short turnaround," Omaha BCTGM president Daniel Osborn, a Kellogg's mechanic, told Rolling Stone last month. "You work 20, 30 days in a row and you don't know where work and your life ends and begins."

"You sign on at a place like Kellogg’s, and you know they basically own your life," Osborn added. "You decide it is OK because you do it to support your family and give them a good life. But it has to be a relationship where you're valued, and the company doesn't look to squeeze out every last drop of profit at your expense."

Osborn told HuffPost on Tuesday that with the new collective bargaining agreement, "we were able to retain everything we had before that they were trying to take away, and we got some gains in there, too."

"We're definitely stronger going back into that building than we were coming out," he said.

A major dispute between workers and management has been the existence of a two-tiered compensation system that divides employees into "legacy" and "transitional" categories, with the latter receiving lesser pay and benefits.

Under the new contract, according to BCTGM, the two-tiered system would remain in place but it wouldn't be "permanent." The Washington Post reported that management "agreed to create an 'accelerated' path from one tier to the next," but some workers voiced concern that the new contract could further entrench the status quo.

"The agreement accomplishes something incredibly important: it breaks a cycle of concessionary bargaining."

"It's a trojan horse that's been given to us," one Kellogg's worker said at a rally in Battle Creek, Michigan last week, days before the vote on the contract was held.

C.M. Lewis, an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania, argued in a series of tweets Tuesday that—all things considered—Kellogg's workers "got a better deal than if they hadn't struck."

"The agreement accomplishes something incredibly important: it breaks a cycle of concessionary bargaining that seemed irreversible even a few years ago. That's a big deal, and shouldn't be undersold," Lewis wrote. "Strikes work, but they don't work miracles. We need to be honest."

"Two-tier is still part of the contract. The road out of it is extremely limited," he added. "This isn't a defeat. It's not a slam-dunk victory. It's a victory that makes bigger victories possible. And we need to be okay with that ambiguity."

BCTGM, which did not release the vote totals for ratification, said the new contract includes a moratorium on plant closures through October 2026, "a clear path to regular full-time employment," "a significant increase in the pension multiplier," and "maintenance of cost-of-living raises."

"The BCTGM is grateful to AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler for mobilizing the AFL-CIO and its affiliates in support of our striking Kellogg’s members. Once again, President Shuler has provided highly effective leadership in support of the BCTGM and our members," Shelton said Tuesday. "The BCTGM is grateful, as well, for the outpouring of fraternal support we received from across the labor movement for our striking members at Kellogg's."

Part of a wave of recent labor actions across the U.S., the Kellogg's strike drew national attention as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), President Joe Biden, and other prominent figures spoke out in defense of the workers.

"Last year, Kellogg's made over $1.4 billion in profits. It paid its CEO, Steven Cahillane, nearly $12 million in total compensation, a significant increase over recent years," Sanders wrote in an op-ed last week. "One of the reasons that Kellogg's had such a profitable year during this pandemic was the extraordinary sacrifices made by their employees who, in significantly understaffed factories, were asked to work an insane number of hours."

After Kellogg's announced earlier this month that it would move to permanently replace striking workers, Biden said in a statement that "such action undermines the critical role collective bargaining plays in providing workers a voice and the opportunity to improve their lives while contributing fully to their employer's success."

Trevor Bidelman, a Kellogg's worker and president of the BCTGM local in Battle Creek, told HuffPost that management's threat to permanently replace the unionized workers who walked off the job likely influenced the vote in favor of the new contract.

"The replacement threat was really the biggest piece," he said.

A Climate Change Solution Direct from the Congo

December 21, 2021
By Newsroom


A revealing account authored by former US Diplomat and World Bank Group (IFC) official Oliver Griffith provides a compelling perspective on a scalable solution for climate change. Investigating the impact of UN backed projects that work to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), Griffith makes his case for listening to the people on the front line of the climate crisis.

The account researched by Griffith saw him visit nine of the most remote villages within the Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Speaking directly with community members, community leaders, civil society, and regional and national government officials Griffith witnesses first-hand a science-based climate change solution that is working today.

Author, Oliver Griffith said “There’s little debate that tropical forests must be protected. Deforestation and forest degradation are some of the leading causes of global warming, responsible for about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. At COP 26, over 140 world leaders promised to end deforestation by 2030, pledging over $19 billion to do so. However, it is not clear how the funds will be used or how countries will achieve the goal. Fortunately, REDD+ is a proven model that can make this happen.”

The REDD+ model described in the account works as a replicable and scalable product that can raise substantial funding from corporations which buy Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) also known as carbon credits. It depends on detailed, science-based carbon accounting under the internationally recognized Verified Carbon Standard, and the buy-in via Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of local communities.

Remarking on the importance of this account was Dr. Jean-Robert Bwangoy Bankanza Bolambee, Wildlife Works DRC Country Director who said: “The DRC is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa and has exceptional natural resources. Nonetheless, it regularly finishes near the bottom in the UN’s global human development index, and two thirds of Congolese live in poverty. There is a tremendous pressure to exploit natural resources, by the poor depending on them to survive, by the government looking for tax revenues, and by international firms feeding their supply chains.”

Griffith’s thesis relies on the notion that the resources depended on by those in the Forest are found in the forests, and therefore the solutions must also be found there. They must be practical, scalable, and easy to implement, and they will only be successful if they can protect the forests while meeting the economic needs of those who might cut them down.

Mike Korchinsky, founder of the project in the Congo visited by Griffith said, “This important account highlights that it isn’t practical to wait for the world to become enlightened enough to leave the forests alone. REDD+ puts a practical value on standing forests to give communities an economic alternative to deforestation.”

USSA

Empire of Lies

Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the country's assault on truth remains all too relevant.

Soviet policemen look at the portrait of Vladimir Lenin on the facade of the KGB building in Moscow on November 7, 1990, one year before the USSR's dissolution in 1991. (Photo: Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

By Roland Merullo

The first time I headed home from working in the USSR, in early October of 1977, a colleague and I left the country on a train that traveled overnight from Leningrad to Helsinki. Just shy of the Finnish border, somewhere after midnight, the brakes squealed and the train jolted to a halt. My friend and I waited there in our two-person coupe, anxious to cross over into freedom. After half an hour or so, there was a quick knock, the coupe door was thrown open, and in strode a pair of no-nonsense Border Guard officers in their green uniforms and maroon epaulets. 

Against my skin, inside the front of my long-sleeved shirt, were hidden several pen-and-ink drawings on heavy paper. The drawings had been made by a Soviet friend, a veteran of the Gulag, a damaged man, and they depicted Vladimir Lenin in various insulting poses. The friend had begged me to carry them out of the country and, perhaps foolishly, I’d agreed, not having any idea what I’d ultimately do with them. 

I sat on the edge of the bunk while the officers ran their eyes over every corner of the coupe and fired questions at me in Russian. Where were we going? What had we been doing in the USSR? Were we carrying any contraband—icons, gold, caviar, samizdat? Throughout this unpleasant farewell, I could feel the drawings against my chest. My hands were sweating. I could hear the sounds of voices and dogs barking just outside the coupe windows, and could see flashlight beams angling there in the darkness. When they were finished, the officers grunted suspiciously and slammed the door behind them, but the activity outside went on for what seemed like another hour. Eventually, things quieted down, the train jerked into motion again, and it wasn’t long until we crossed the border into a very different land.

The border guards would no doubt have detained and questioned me if they’d discovered the drawings. The soldiers outside and their trained German Shepherds had been searching beneath the rail cars, looking for citizens so desperate to leave their troubled homeland that they’d cling there, risking arrest, injury, or death. The intensity of the indoor questioning and the care taken in the outdoor search gave the lie to what so many Soviets had told us over the months we’d worked there: that they were free to express themselves in any way that pleased them and were able to travel anywhere they wanted. Finland, France, Africa, America—it didn’t matter; they were as free as we were to wander the globe and speak our minds.

When I think of the breakup of the Soviet Union—a place where I lived and worked for 28 months between 1977 and 1990—I think of that nervous moment on the train, and I remember, all too clearly, the assault on truth we’d encountered in the country we were about to leave. 

That train trip marked the end of my first tour in the USSR, working on United States Information Agency traveling cultural-exchange exhibitions that were visited by as many as 15,000 people per day. The 28 months I’d eventually spend in the Soviet Union were broken up into three long tours: seven months in 1977 as exhibit guide; fourteen months in 1987-88 as General Services Officer; and seven months in 1989-90 as Field Director. 

Inside the United States Information Agency Exhibit, "Design USA." (Photo: ©1990 Amanda S. Merullo)

In those three very different positions, I interacted with a broad spectrum of the Soviet population: exhibit visitors young and old, ordinary laborers, police, customs officials, and high-ranking Party officials. By the end of my service there, I spoke Russian fluently and had been soaked from head to toe in the life, culture, and politics of the place. I’d also watched it evolve from the harsh days of Brezhnev-style communism to the vastly more open-minded rule of Gorbachev. Through it all, I observed and listened to the way the truth was buried, twisted, manipulated, and eventually, however briefly, allowed to see the light of day.

As they left our exhibit, Soviet visitors were given the opportunity to write in a “comment book.” In 1977, many of the comments reflected Communist Party propaganda. Here are some typical examples: Why do your guides lie about your country and ours? Isn’t it true that, if your employees live in private homes, they must be the sons and daughters of wealthy capitalists? We know that the exhibits shown here do not honestly reflect the horrible conditions under which most Americans live. During my first tour, I briefly had a Siberian girlfriend. In our last conversation, not long before I left for home, she told me, “I feel so sorry for you, having to return to America. It must be like going back to prison.”

By the late eighties, all that had changed. The truth had been let out of the tight red bag in which the apparatchiki had kept it, and, among the few remaining hardline comments in the exhibit book, we’d find many like these, that stick in my memory: You live on the moon. We live in shit. And, It will take us 500 years to catch up to life in the West. And, Why have we been lied to all this time?

Passersby walk through Moscow’s Red Square, with the Kremlin and Saint Basil's Cathedral in the background. (Photo: ©1990 Amanda S. Merullo)

What happened next reminds me of a line spoken by Mike, one of Hemingway’s characters in The Sun Also Rises. When asked how he went bankrupt, Mike replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” Well into the 1980s, though the Soviet economy was pitifully weak, not even the most prescient scholars could have predicted the abrupt unraveling of the USSR’s seven-decade system of sophisticated propaganda backed by torture, murder, and strict prohibitions against foreign travel and exposure to Western media. And yet, that sudden unraveling is exactly what occurred. 

I was working in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It seemed the perfect metaphor for the ensuing collapse of the structure of lies on which the Soviet Union had been constructed: that Party leaders were building a just society and not lining their own pockets; that life in the USSR was far better than life in the Russia that preceded it and much preferable to life in the West; that Soviet goods were a match for, or even superior to, those produced in the United States; that there was no Gulag, no censorship, no crime, no corrupt courts or police, no travel restrictions; that all the evil in the world could be traced to the capitalist impulse.

This Sunday marks thirty years since the collapse of the onion-domed palace of mendacity once called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—a collapse which filled so many of us with hope until Vladimir Putin arrived on the scene.  That nation’s relatively brief lifespan has led me to believe that the truth exerts a kind of invisible pressure on human constructs, continuously leaning against us as individuals and societies, pushing us in the direction of honesty and harmony.

Of course, those whom the popular psychiatrist M. Scott Peck labeled “people of the lie” are continuously pushing back, often employing propaganda and violence in an effort to design and maintain a false narrative, and bend others to their will. The degree to which violence is always necessary for the perpetuation of their lies makes me envision the truth as something tidal. It recedes but never disappears, and its inevitable return can be prevented only with great effort and artificial constraints.

A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Donetsk, Ukraine. At the time, Soviet Ukraine was a constituent republic of the USSR. (Photo: ©1990 Amanda S. Merullo)

Dictatorships cause an immeasurable amount of suffering on this earth, but, in many cases, they don’t last. Whether it’s the junta in Argentina or the iron fist of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda or the closed nation built by Lenin and Stalin and supported by their heirs, the tidal pressure of the truth eventually erodes the dictator’s power and breaks apart the system. Sometimes, as is the case in Iran, Burma, and Cambodia, and now in Russia, that breakage leads only to new lies, a new boss, more misery. At other times, as in Uruguay and what was once called East Germany, the collapse lets in a flood of light and the society blossoms and thrives.

It also happens—and perhaps this is happening in our country now—that a healthy society’s truthful foundation can undergo a slow erosion. In such cases, ordinary citizens begin to question even the idea of truth, whether it’s the evolving and complicated truth of science, fairly-counted votes in a national election, or the facts presented by multiple respected media outlets. 

The human experience is painfully complex and, as a result, many of us long for simple answers. Autocrats on both right and left are more than happy to provide those simple answers if it serves their own purposes. First, they muddy the waters with conspiracy theories and disinformation, and then they construct their own narrative, based on a foundation of lies but presented with great conviction, and backed up by mockery, censorship, duplicity, and violence. 

I watched as the truth, kept from the Soviet motherland for seventy years, flooded into view like a hopeful tide, and was then shoved away again, by Putin and his minions, with murder and treachery. It waits there, though, always pushing toward the light. I feel for those truth-tellers—like the heroic Alexei Navalny—who suffer terribly in the meantime, and I worry about my own country, flawed as it is but still beautifully free, as the tide of truth ebbs slowly away from our shores. Steeped as I have been in the sordid history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I sometimes lie awake at night, remembering the suffering and deprivation I witnessed there, replaying the lies, and wondering, as the truth is assaulted here in America day after day, what will become of us. 

Roland Merullo is the author of 16 novels and writes an essay series called On the Plus Side. More of his work is available at RolandMerullo.com.

USSA

The Kremlin’s Strange Victory

How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline

By Fiona Hill

November/December 2021

Benedetto Cristofani

LONG READ

Donald Trump wanted his July 2018 meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to evoke memories of the momentous encounters that took place in the 1980s between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Those arms control summits had yielded the kind of iconic imagery that Trump loved: strong, serious men meeting in distant places to hash out the great issues of the day. What better way, in Trump’s view, to showcase his prowess at the art of the deal?

That was the kind of show Trump wanted to put on in Helsinki. What emerged instead was an altogether different sort of spectacle.

By the time of the meeting, I had spent just over a year serving in the Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Like everyone else who worked in the White House, I had, by then, learned a great deal about Trump’s idiosyncrasies. We all knew, for instance, that Trump rarely read the detailed briefing materials his staff prepared for him and that in meetings or calls with other leaders, he could never stick to an agreed-on script or his cabinet members’ recommendations. This had proved to be a major liability during those conversations, since it often seemed to his foreign counterparts as though Trump was hearing about the issues on the agenda for the first time.

When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers. During a cabinet meeting with a visiting Hungarian delegation in May 2019, for example, Trump cut off acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point about a critical European security issue. In front of everyone, Trump told Shanahan that the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, had already explained it all to him when they had met in the Oval Office moments earlier—and that Orban knew the issue better than Shanahan did, anyway. In Trump’s mind, the Hungarian strongman simply had more authority than the American officials who worked for Trump himself. The other leader was his equal, and his staff members were not. For Trump, all pertinent information trickled down from him, not up to him. This tendency of Trump’s was lamentable when it played out behind closed doors, but it was inexcusable (and indeed impossible to explain or justify) when it spilled out into public view—which is precisely what happened during the now legendarily disastrous press conference after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

Before the press conference, Trump was pleased with how things had gone in his one-on-one meeting with Putin. The optics in Finland’s presidential palace were to Trump’s liking. The two men had agreed to get U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations going again and to convene meetings between their countries’ respective national security councils. Trump was keen to show that he and Putin could have a productive, normal relationship, partly to dispel the prevailing notion that there was something perverse about his ties to the Russian president. Trump was eager to brush away allegations that he had conspired with the Kremlin in its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or that the Russians had somehow compromised him—matters that at the time of the meeting, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was actively investigating.

Things went wrong as soon as the press conference began. Trump expected public praise for meeting with Putin and tackling the nuclear threat. But the U.S. journalists in attendance were not interested in arms control. They wanted to know about the one-on-one meeting and what Putin might have said or not said regarding 2016 and election interference. Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked Trump whether he believed Putin, who had repeatedly denied that his country had done anything to meddle in the election, or the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had concluded the opposite. Lemire pressed Trump: “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?”

Trump balked. He really didn’t want to answer. The only way that Trump could view Russia’s broad-based attack on the U.S. democratic system was through the lens of his own ego and image. In my interactions with Trump and his closest staff in the White House, it had become clear to me that endorsing the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence agencies would be tantamount to admitting that Trump had not won the 2016 election. The questions got right to the heart of his insecurities. If Trump said, “Yes, the Russians interfered on my behalf,” then he might as well have said outright, “I am illegitimate.”

So as he often did in such situations, Trump tried to divert attention elsewhere. He went off on a tangent about a convoluted conspiracy theory involving Ukraine and the emails of his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and then produced a muddled, rambling answer to Lemire’s question, the crux of which was this:

My people came to me. . . . They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . But I have confidence in both parties. . . . I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

The outcome of the Helsinki press conference was entirely predictable, which was why I and others had counseled against holding it at all. But it was still agonizing to watch. I was sitting in front of the podium as Trump spoke, immediately behind the U.S. national security adviser and the secretary of state. I saw them stiffen slightly, and I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me. I just wanted to end the whole thing. Perhaps contrary to the expectations of many American observers, even Putin was somewhat dismayed. He reveled in the national and personal humiliation that Trump was courting, but he also knew that Trump’s careless remarks would provoke a backlash in the United States and thus further constrain the U.S. president’s already limited room to maneuver on Russia policy. The modest agreements for further high-level meetings were already out the window. As he exited the room, Putin told his press secretary, within earshot of our interpreter, that the press conference had been “bullshit.”

Trump’s critics immediately pounced on his bizarre conduct in Helsinki. It was more evidence that Trump was in league with Putin and that the Kremlin held sway over the American president. The following year, Mueller’s final investigative report determined that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign had in fact been willing to exploit any derogatory information about Clinton that came its way from whatever source, including Russia. In seeking to thwart Clinton’s bid to become the first female American president, the Trump campaign and the Kremlin had been acting in parallel; their goals had aligned. Mueller concluded that although this did not amount to a criminal conspiracy, there was plenty of evidence of an extensive and sophisticated Russian political influence operation against the United States.

Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it.

The Mueller report also sketched the contours of a different, arguably more pernicious kind of “Russian connection.” In some crucial ways, Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it. In the very early years of the post–Cold War era, many analysts and observers had hoped that Russia would slowly but surely converge in some ways with the United States. They predicted that once the Soviet Union and communism had fallen away, Russia would move toward a form of liberal democracy. By the late 1990s, it was clear that such an outcome was not on the horizon. And in more recent years, quite the opposite has happened: the United States has begun to move closer to Russia, as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy. This is a development that few would have foreseen 20 years ago, but one that American leaders should be doing everything in their power to halt and reverse.

Indeed, over time, the United States and Russia have become subject to the same economic and social forces. Their populations have proved equally susceptible to political manipulation. Prior to the 2016 U.S. election, Putin recognized that the United States was on a path similar to the one that Russia took in the 1990s, when economic dislocation and political upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Russian state weak and insolvent. In the United States, decades of fast-paced social and demographic changes and the Great Recession of 2008–9 had weakened the country and increased its vulnerability to subversion. Putin realized that despite the lofty rhetoric that flowed from Washington about democratic values and liberal norms, beneath the surface, the United States was beginning to resemble his own country: a place where self-dealing elites had hollowed out vital institutions and where alienated, frustrated people were increasingly open to populist and authoritarian appeals. The fire was already burning; all Putin had to do was pour on some gasoline.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

When Trump was elected, Putin and the Kremlin made no attempt to conceal their glee. They had thought that Clinton would become president and that she would focus on criticizing Putin’s style of governance and constraining Russia. They had steeled themselves and prepared for the worst. Instead, they got the best possible outcome from their perspective—a populist, nativistic president with no prior experience in foreign policy and a huge, fragile ego. Putin recognized Trump as a type and grasped his political predilections immediately: Trump, after all, fit a mold that Putin himself had helped forge as the first populist leader to take power in a major country in the twenty-first century. Putin had blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.

The essence of populism is creating a direct link with “the people” or with specific groups within a population, then offering them quick fixes for complex problems and bypassing or eliminating intermediaries such as political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referendums, plebiscites, and executive orders are the preferred tools of the populist leader, and Putin has used them all over the past 20 years. When he came to power on December 31, 1999, at the end of a decade of crisis and strife in Russia, Putin promised to fix everything. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin did not belong to a formal political party. He was the champion of a looser, personalized movement. After 2000, Putin turned Russian presidential elections into national referendums on himself by making sure his rivals were obscure (or wholly manufactured) opposition candidates. And at every critical juncture during his time in power, Putin has adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin. Finally, in 2020, he formally amended the constitution so that in theory (and health permitting), he can run for reelection and stay in power until 2036.

Putin blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.

All of Putin’s machinations greatly impressed Trump. He wanted to “get along” with Russia and with Putin personally. Practically the only thing Trump ever said to me during my time in his administration was to ask, in reference to Putin, “Am I going to like him?” Before I could answer, the other officials in the room got up to leave, and the president’s attention shifted; such was life as a female adviser in the Trump White House.

Trump took at face value rumors that Putin was the richest man in the world and told close associates that he admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing. He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at its disposal. This was a troubling perspective for a U.S. president, and indeed, over the course of his time in office, Trump came to more closely resemble Putin in political practice than he resembled any of his American predecessors.

At times, the similarities between Trump and Putin were glaringly obvious: their shared manipulation and exploitation of the domestic media, their appeals to their own versions of their countries’ “golden age,” their compilation of personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia and conservatism—and their attendant compilation of personal lists of enemies to do the same for their voters’ darker sides. Putin put statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Trump tried to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate leaders and the renaming of American military bases honoring Confederate generals. The two men also shared many of the same enemies: cosmopolitan, liberal elites; the American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros; and anyone trying to expand voting rights, improve electoral systems, or cast a harsh light on corruption in their countries’ respective executive branches.

Trump also aped Putin’s willingness to abuse his executive power by going after his political adversaries; Trump’s first impeachment was provoked in part by his attempt to coerce the government of Ukraine into smearing one of his most formidable opponents, Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And Trump imported Putin’s style of personalist rule, bypassing the professional civil servants in the federal government—a nefarious “deep state,” in Trump’s eyes—to rely instead on the counsel and interventions of cronies. Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had personal connections to the president and his family, avoiding their own embassies in the process. Lobbyists complained to whomever they could reach in the West Wing or the Trump family circle. They were quick to set attack dogs on anyone perceived as an obstacle and to rile up pro-Trump trolls on the Internet, because this always seemed to work. Influence peddlers both domestic and foreign courted the president to pursue their own priorities; the policymaking process became, in essence, privatized.


Trump and Putin shake hands in Helsinki, Finland, July 2018Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The event that most clearly revealed the convergence of politics in the United States and Russia during Trump’s term was his disorganized but deadly serious attempt to stage a self-coup and halt the peaceful transfer of executive power after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Russia, after all, has a long history of coups and succession crises, dating back to the tsarist era, including three during the past 30 years. In August 1991, hard-liners opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms staged a brief putsch, declaring a state of emergency and placing Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation home. The effort fizzled, and the coup was a debacle, but it helped bring down the Soviet Union. Two years later, violence erupted from a bitter dispute between the Russian parliament and Yeltsin over the respective powers of the legislature and the president in competing drafts of a new constitution. Yeltsin moved to dissolve parliament after it refused to confirm his choice for prime minister. His vice president and the Speaker of the parliament, in response, sought to impeach him. In the end, Yeltsin invoked “extraordinary powers” and called out the Russian army to shell the parliament building, thus settling the argument with brute force.

The next coup was a legal one and came in 2020, when Putin wanted to amend Yeltsin’s version of the constitution to beef up his presidential powers—and, more important, to remove the existing term limits so that he could potentially stay on as president until 2036. As a proxy to propose the necessary constitutional amendments, Putin tapped Valentina Tereshkova, a loyal supporter in parliament and, as a cosmonaut and the first woman to travel to outer space, an iconic figure in Russian society. Putin’s means were subtler than Yeltsin’s in 1993, but his methods were no less effective.

It would have been impossible for any close observer of recent Russian history to not recall those episodes on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television. The “Big Lie” that Trump had won the election was built on the backs of the thousands of little lies that Trump uttered nearly every time he spoke and that were then nurtured within the dense ecosystem of Trumpist media outlets. This was yet one more way in which, under Trump, the United States came to resemble Russia, where Putin has long solidified his grip on power by manipulating the Russian media, fueling nationalist grievances, and peddling conspiracy theories.

I ALONE

Trump put the United States on a path to autocracy, all the while promising to “make America great again.” Likewise, Putin took Russia back toward the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union under the guise of strengthening the state and restoring the country’s global position. This striking convergence casts U.S.-Russian relations and the exigencies of Washington’s approach to Moscow in a new light.

Historically, U.S. policies toward Russia have been premised on the idea that the two countries’ paths and expectations diverged at the end of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western analysts had initially thought that Russia might embrace some of the international institutional arrangements that Washington and its allies had long championed. That, of course, did not happen. And under Putin, U.S.-Russian relations have become more frazzled and fraught than at any point in the 1990s.

There is something confounding about the ongoing confrontation between the two countries, which seems like an artifact from another era. During the Cold War, the stakes of the conflict were undeniable. The Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States and its allies, and vice versa. The two superpowers faced off in an ideological clash between capitalism and communism and a geopolitical tussle over spheres of influence in Europe. Today, Russia maintains the capacity to obliterate the United States, but the Soviet Union and the communist system are gone. And even though foreign policy circles in Washington and Moscow still view U.S.-Russian relations through the lens of great-power competition, the struggle for Europe is over. For the United States, China, not Russia, poses the greatest foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century, along with the urgent existential threats of climate change and global pandemics.

The ongoing confrontation between the two countries seems like an artifact from another era.

Yet a sense of confrontation and competition persists. Americans point to a pattern of Russian aggression and provocation: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent assaults on Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty, its intervention in Syria in 2015, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the frequent ransomware attacks and email hacks attributed to Russian actors. Russians, for their part, point to the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe and the Baltic states, the U.S. bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999, Washington’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, U.S. support for the “color revolutions” that took place in post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine in the first decade of this century, and the uprisings in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. In Moscow, all of these serve as proof that Washington is hell-bent on invasion and regime change and also has Russia and Putin in its cross hairs.

In truth, most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their attention on what really matters. For their Russian counterparts, however, the United States still represents the main opponent. That is because, as a populist leader, Putin sees the United States not just as a geopolitical threat to Russia but also as a personal threat to himself. For Putin, foreign policy and domestic policy have fused. His attempt to retain Russia’s grip on the independent countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and to reassert Moscow’s influence in other global arenas is inseparable from his effort to consolidate and expand his authority at home.

Putin sits at the apex of a personalized and semi-privatized kleptocratic system that straddles the Russian state and its institutions and population. He has embedded loyalists in every important Russian institution, enterprise, and industry. If Putin wants to retain the presidency until 2036—by which time he will be 84 years old and will have become the longest-serving modern Russian ruler—he will have to maintain this level of control or even increase it, since any slippage might be perceived as weakness. To do so, Putin has to deter or defeat any opponents, foreign or domestic, who have the capacity to undermine his regime. His hope is that leaders in the United States will get so bogged down with problems at home that they will cease criticizing his personalization of power and will eschew any efforts to transform Russia similar to those the U.S. government carried out in the 1990s.


Putin observing Russian military exercises in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia, September 2021Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters

Putin also blurs the line between domestic and foreign policy to distract the Russian population from the distortions and deficiencies of his rule. On the one hand, he stresses how decadent and dissolute the United States has become and how ill suited its leaders are to teach anyone a lesson on how to run a country. On the other hand, he stresses that the United States still poses a military threat and that it aims to bring Russia to its knees. Putin’s constant refrain is that the contest between Russia and the United States is a perpetual Darwinian struggle and that without his leadership, Russia will not survive. Without Putin, there is no Russia. He does not want things to get completely out of hand and lead to war. But he also does not want the standoff to fade away or get resolved. As the sole true champion of his country and his people, he can never be seen to stand down or compromise when it comes to the Americans.

Similarly, Putin must intimidate, marginalize, defuse, or defeat any opposition to his rule. Anyone who might stand in his way must be crushed. In this sense, the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Clinton fall into the same category. In Putin’s view, if Clinton had become U.S. president, she would have continued to hound him and hold him to task, just as she did when she served as secretary of state in the Obama administration, by promoting democracy and civil society to root out corruption in Russia.

Of course, Navalny is far more dangerous to Putin than Clinton would have been. Navalny is a Russian, not a foreigner. He is a next-generation alternative to Putin: young, handsome, charismatic, patriotic, and defiant. He poses a threat to Putin not only owing to their differences but also because of a few key similarities: like Putin, Navalny is a populist who heads a movement rather than a party, and he has not been averse to playing on nationalist sentiments to appeal to the same Russian voters who form Putin’s base. Navalny has survived an audacious assassination attempt and has humiliated Putin on numerous occasions. By skillfully using digital media and slick video skills to highlight the excesses of the Russian leader’s kleptocratic system, Navalny has gotten under Putin’s skin. He has forced the Kremlin to pay attention to him. This is why Navalny is in jail and why Putin has moved swiftly to roll up his movement, forestalling any chance that Navalny might compete for the presidency in 2024.

THE TASK AT HAND

The current U.S.-Russian relationship no longer mirrors the Cold War challenge, even if some geopolitical contours and antagonisms persist. The old U.S. foreign policy approach of balancing deterrence with limited engagement is ill suited to the present task of dealing with Putin’s insecurities. And after Trump’s disastrous performance at Helsinki, it is also clear that the arms control summitry that took the edge off the acute phase of the Cold War and nuclear confrontation can provide little guidance for how to anchor the future relationship. The primary problem for the Biden administration in dealing with Russia is rooted in the domestic politics of the United States and Russia rather than their foreign policies. The two countries have been heading in the same political direction for some of the same reasons over the last several years. They have similar political susceptibilities. The United States will never change Putin and his threat perceptions, because they are deeply personal. Americans will have to change themselves to blunt the effects of Russian political interference campaigns for the foreseeable future. Achieving that goal will require Biden and his team to integrate their approach to Russia with their efforts to shore up American democracy, tackle inequality and racism, and lead the country out of a period of intense division.

The polarization of American society has become a national security threat, acting as a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes and thwarting external dangers. Partisan spectacles during the global covid-19 pandemic have undermined the country’s international standing as a model of liberal democracy and eroded its authority on public health. The United States’ inability to get its act together has hindered the projection of American soft power, or what Biden has called “the power of our example.” During my time in the Trump administration, I watched as every peril was politicized and turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount coherent responses or defenses to security issues in the face of personalized, chaotic, and opportunistic conduct at the top.

In this regard, Putin actually offers an instructive contrast. Trump railed against a mythological American deep state, whereas Putin—who spent decades as an intelligence operative before ascending to office—is a product of Russia’s very real deep state. Unlike Trump, who saw the U.S. state apparatus as his enemy and wanted to rule the country as an outsider, Putin rules Russia as a state insider. Also unlike Trump, Putin rarely dives into Russia’s social, class, racial, or religious divisions to gain political traction. Instead, although he targets individuals and social groups that enjoy little popular support, Putin tends to promote a single, synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the domestic conflicts of the past that destabilized and helped bring down both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. That Putin seeks one Russia while Trump wanted many Americas during his time in office is more than just a difference in political styles: it is a critical data point. It highlights the fact that a successful U.S. policy approach to Russia will rest in part on denying Putin and Russian operatives the possibility to exploit divisions in American society.

The Biden administration must integrate its approach to Russia with its efforts to shore up American democracy.

The United States’ vulnerability to the Kremlin’s subversion has been amplified by social media. American-made technology has magnified the impact of once fringe ideas and subversive actors around the world and become a tool in the hands of hostile states and criminal groups. Extremists can network and reach audiences as never before on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to attract people’s attention and divide them into affinity groups. Putin has weaponized this technology against the United States, taking advantage of the ways that social media undermines social cohesion and erodes Americans’ sense of a shared purpose. Policymakers should step up their cooperation with the private sector in order to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms. They also need to figure out ways to educate the American public about the perils of posting personal and political information online.

Making the United States and its society more resilient and less vulnerable to manipulation by tackling inequality, corruption, and polarization will require innovative policies across a huge range of issues. Perhaps the highest priority should be given to investing in people where they reside, particularly through education. Education can lower the barriers to opportunity and accurate information in a way that nothing else can. It can help people recognize the difference between fact and fiction. And it offers all people the chance not only to develop knowledge and learn skills but also to continue to transform themselves and their communities.

One thing U.S. leaders should avoid in seeking to foster domestic unity is attempting to mobilize Americans around the idea of a common enemy, such as China. Doing so risks backfiring by stirring up xenophobic anger toward Americans and immigrants of Asian heritage and thus fueling more divisions at home. Instead of trying to rally Americans against China, Biden should rally them in support of the democratic U.S. allies that Trump spurned and derided. Many of those countries, especially in Europe, find themselves in the same political predicament as the United States, as authoritarian leaders and powers seek to exploit socioeconomic strife and populist proclivities among their citizens. Biden should base a new transatlantic agenda on the mutual fight against populism at home and authoritarianism abroad through economic rebuilding and democratic renewal.

Most important, Biden must do everything in his power to restore trust in government and to promote fairness, equity, and justice. As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions. Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention

FIONA HILL is Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and the author of There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century (Mariner Books, 2021), from which this essay is adapted.

War With Russia?

BY JOHN FEFFER
DECEMBER 22, 2021

Photograph Source: kreetube – CC BY 2.0

First, let’s be clear: Russia already invaded Ukraine.

At the end of February 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia seized key facilities in Crimea and then helped secessionists in eastern Ukraine some weeks later. Crimea is now under Russian control, and a civil war continues to flare up over the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.

Second, the United States has repeatedly provoked Russia by pushing the boundaries of NATO ever eastward.

Virtually all of Eastern Europe is part of the military alliance, and so are parts of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Ukraine is in a halfway house called “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners” and it has contributed to NATO-led missions. A majority of Ukrainians—those not living in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—support NATO membership according to a November 2021 poll. Such poll results are no surprise given that membership would provide Ukraine with the additional insurance of NATO’s collective defense clause. Of all the countries considering membership in NATO, Ukraine is the one that most threatens Russia’s national interests in what it calls the “near abroad.”

That’s some of the necessary context to the recent news that Russia has been massing around 100,000 soldiers along its border with Ukraine along with medium-range surface-to-air missiles. Russia argues that such maneuvers are purely precautionary. Ukraine and its supporters think otherwise.

The United States has rallied its allies to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. It has promised to levy additional economic sanctions against Moscow as well as send more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe to add to the several thousand U.S. soldiers in Poland as well as those stationed at four U.S. military bases in Bulgaria, a military facility on Romania’s Black Sea coast, and elsewhere. The Biden administration has been clear, however, that it wouldn’t send U.S. soldiers to Ukraine to confront Russian invaders.

Putin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s membership in NATO be taken off the table. He has also calledfor an immediate security dialogue with the United States and has been strategizing with China’s Xi Jinping on how to coordinate their policies.

The transfer of troops to the Ukrainian border may simply be a test of the West’s resolve, an effort to strengthen Putin’s hand in negotiations with both Kyiv and Washington, a way of rallying domestic support at a time of political and economic challenges, or all of the above. Given enormous pushback from the Ukrainian army among other negative consequences of a military intervention, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not likely in the cards. Putin prefers short wars, not potential quagmires, and working through proxies wherever possible.

A hot war with Russia is the last thing the Biden administration wants right now. Nor is an actual détente with Moscow on the horizon. But could Putin’s aggressive move raise the profile of U.S.-Russian relations in such a way as to lay the foundation for a cold peace?

Fatal Indigestion?

The civil war in Ukraine does not often make it into the headlines these days. Ceasefires have come and gone. Fighting along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian army from secessionist forces breaks out sporadically. Since the beginning of the year, 55 Ukrainian soldiers have died and, through the end of September, so have 18 civilians, including four children. Many residents of the border towns have fled the fighting, but millions who remain require humanitarian assistance.

For the Russian government, this low-level conflict serves to emphasize its main message: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country. Moscow claims that its seizure of Crimea was at the behest of citizens there who voted for annexation in a referendum. It argues that the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are simply exercising their right of self-determination in a political climate that discriminates against Russian speakers. Such fissures in the territory of Ukraine, according to this logic, suggest that the government in Kyiv doesn’t have complete control over its borders and has thus failed at one of the principal tests of a nation-state.

For Ukraine, the issue is complicated by the presence of a large number of Russian-language speakers, some of whom feel more affinity for Moscow than Kyiv. A 2019 law that established Ukrainian as the country’s primary language has not helped matters. Anyone who violates the law, for instance by engaging customers in Russian in interactions in stores, can be subjected to a fine. So far, however, the government hasn’t imposed any penalties. That’s not exactly a surprise given that the current president Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the law when he was running for office, is more comfortable speaking Russian in public.

Despite its domestic challenges and the recent history of Russian military incursions, Ukraine is very much a country. It is a member of the United Nations. Only a handful of states—Somalia, Palau—have neglected to extend it diplomatic recognition. There is no strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s place in the international order as compared to, say, Taiwan.

Not even Putin, despite his paeans to One Russia, realistically contemplates trying to absorb a largely resistant country into a larger pan-Slavic federation with Russia and Belarus. After all, Moscow has had its challenges with the much smaller task of integrating little Crimea into the Russian Federation. Upgrading the peninsula’s infrastructure and connecting it to the Russian mainland has cost tens of billions of dollars even as the sanctions imposed by the West have cost Russian corporations more than $100 billion. A water crisis in Crimea—because Ukraine blocked the flow from the Dnieper River into the North Crimean Canal—has offset the infrastructure upgrades Moscow has sponsored, leading to speculation last year that Russian would invade its neighbor simply to restart the flow of water.

Invading Ukraine to resolve problems raised by the earlier invasion of Crimea would turn Vladimir Putin into the woman who swallowed a fly (and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider, and so on). Such a strategy promises larger and more diverse meals followed by the inevitable case of fatal indigestion.

An Improbable Peace?

So far, the Biden administration has offered a mix of threats and reassurances in the face of a possible Russian invasion. New sanctions and the dispatch of additional troops to Eastern Europe have been balanced by the refusal of the administration at this point to consider any direct involvement in Ukraine to counter Russian forces. Biden communicated this strategy not only in speeches but in a two-hour telephone call with Putin last week. It was, by all accounts, a diplomatic conversation, with no bridge-burning and no Trump-like fawning.

Biden and Putin may meet in early 2022. If that sounds like deja-vu, you’re right. After Russia mobilized troops on Ukraine’s border last April, a Biden-Putin summit took place in mid-June in Geneva. Long ago North Korea discovered that missile launches were an effective way of getting Washington’s attention. Russia can no longer count on Donald Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders to secure summits, so it has now adopted the North Korean approach.

The important thing is that Putin and Biden are talking, and that the respective diplomatic establishments are engaging with one another. The problem is that both leaders face domestic pressure to take a more aggressive stance. In the United States, bipartisan efforts are afoot to send Ukraine more powerful armaments and escalate the threats against Moscow. In the Russian Duma, far-right nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and putatively left-wing leaders like Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov have at one point or another called for the outright annexation of Ukraine’s Donbass region. Also, the approval ratings of both Putin and Bidenhave been dropping over the last year, which provides them with less maneuvering room at home.

To resolve once and for all the territorial issues involving Ukraine, the latter has to be sitting at the table. The civil war, although still claiming lives, is thankfully at a low ebb. But it’s important to push through the implementation of the 2014 Minsk accords, which committed Ukraine to offering a special status to Donetsk and Luhansk that would provide them greater autonomy within Ukrainian borders. Ukraine can bring such a compromise to the table by pushing stalled constitutional amendments through the parliament.

Crimea is a different problem. Even if Ukraine has international law on its side, it cannot easily roll back Russian integration of the peninsula. As the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer points out, success might be the best form of revenge for Ukraine. If the country manages to get its economic act together—a difficult but not impossible task—it will present itself as a better option for Crimeans than being Moscow’s charity case. Queue a second referendum in which Crimea returns to Ukraine by popular demand.

The question of NATO membership should be treated with a measure of strategic ambiguity. The U.S. government won’t categorically rule out Ukrainian membership, but it also can deliberately slow down the process to a virtual standstill. Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO troops massed on its border. Putin’s demand that the alliance not engage in a military build-up in countries bordering Russia is worthwhile even outside of its value as a bargaining chip.

Another major thorn in U.S.-Russian relations is Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Obviously, it should be up to Germany where it gets its energy, and surely Russia is no worse than some of the places the United States has imported oil from in the past (like Saudi Arabia). But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is yesterday’s problem. The pipeline will soon become a huge stranded asset, a piece of infrastructure that will send unacceptable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will be made redundant by the falling price of renewable energy. The European Union, additionally, is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that will only add to the cost of imported natural gas, stranding that particular asset even earlier than expected.

Everyone talks about the United States and China working together to battle climate change. The same spirit of cooperation should animate U.S.-Russian relations. The Russian government has been a little bit more forthcoming of late on setting decarbonization goals, but it has a long way to go, according to the analysis of these three Russian environmental activists.

Imagine Washington and Moscow working together to wean themselves off of their mutual dependency on fossil fuels. Let’s call it a Green Détente that includes regular “carbon control” summits designed to reduce mutual emissions, much as arms control confabs have aimed to cut back on nuclear armaments.

Of course, there are plenty of other issues that can and will come up in talks between the two superpowers: denuclearization, cyberwarfare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the future of Afghanistan, UN reform. Sure, everyone is talking about avoiding worst-case scenarios right now. The conflict over Ukraine and the conflict inside Ukraine are reminders that the United States and Russia, despite powerful countervailing pressures, can indeed go to war to the detriment of the whole world. Perhaps Putin and Biden, despite the authoritarian tendencies of the former and the status-quo fecklessness of the latter, can act like real leaders and work together to resolve mutual problems that go well beyond the current impasse in Ukraine.


John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.

 Protecting the Nazis: The Extraordinary Vote of Ukraine and the USA 

December 21, 2021  in Uncategorized by craig

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This is verbatim from the official report of the UN General Assembly plenary of 16 December 2021:

The Assembly next took up the report on “Elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, containing two draft resolutions.

By a recorded vote of 130 in favour to 2 against (Ukraine, United States), with 49 abstentions, the Assembly then adopted draft resolution I, “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo‑Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”.

By its terms, the Assembly expressed deep concern about the glorification of the Nazi movement, neo‑Nazism and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials, holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo‑Nazism, and declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti‑Hitler coalition, collaborated with the Nazi movement and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity “participants in national liberation movements”.

Further, the Assembly urged States to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination by all appropriate means, including through legislation, urging them to address new and emerging threats posed by the rise in terrorist attacks incited by racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance, or in the name of religion or belief. It would call on States to ensure that education systems develop the necessary content to provide accurate accounts of history, as well as promote tolerance and other international human rights principles. It likewise would condemn without reservation any denial of or attempt to deny the Holocaust, as well as any manifestation of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities on the basis of ethnic origin or religious belief.

In Ukraine, support for the Ukrainian nationalist divisions who fought alongside the Nazis has become, over the last eight years, the founding ideology of the modern post 2013 Ukrainian state (which is very different from the diverse Ukrainian state which briefly existed 1991-2013). The full resolution on nazism and racism passed by the General Assembly is lengthy, unnzaires but these provisions in particular were voted against by the United States and by the Ukraine:

6. Emphasizes the recommendation of the Special Rapporteur that “any commemorative celebration of the Nazi regime, its allies and related organizations, whether official or unofficial, should be prohibited by States”, also emphasizes that such manifestations do injustice to the memory of the countless victims of the Second World War and negatively influence children and young people, and stresses in this regard that it is important that States take measures, in accordance with international human rights law, to counteract any celebration of the Nazi SS organization and all its integral parts, including the Waffen SS;

7. Expresses concern about recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons, and in this regard urges States to fully comply with their relevant obligations, inter alia, under article 34 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949;

…

10. Condemns without reservation any denial or attempt to deny the Holocaust;

11. Welcomes the call of the Special Rapporteur for the active preservation of those Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration and forced labour camps and prisons, as well as his encouragement of States to take measures, including legislative, law enforcement and educational measures, to put an end to all forms of Holocaust denial

As reported in the Times of Israel, hundreds took part in a demonstration in Kiev in May 2021, and others throughout Ukraine, in honour of a specific division of the SS. That is but one march and one division – glorification of its Nazi past is a mainstream part of Ukrainian political culture.

In 2018 a bipartisan letter by 50 US Congressmen condemned multiple events commemorating Nazi allies held in Ukraine with official Ukrainian government backing.

There are no two ways about it. The Ukrainian vote against the UN resolution against Nazism was motivated by sympathy for the ideology of historic, genocide active Nazis. It is as simple as that.

The United States claims that its vote against was motivated by concern for freedom of speech. We have the Explanation of Vote that the United States gave at the committee stage:

The United States Supreme Court has consistently affirmed the constitutional right to freedom of speech and the rights of peaceful assembly and association, including by avowed Nazis

That sounds good and noble. But consider this – why does the United States Government believe that avowed Nazis have freedom of speech, but that Julian Assange does not? You can have freedom of speech to advocate the murder of Jews and immigrants, but not to reveal US war crimes?

Why was the United States government targeting journalists in the invasion of Iraq? The United States believes in freedom of speech when it serves its imperial interests. It does not do so otherwise. This is the very worst kind of high sounding hypocrisy, in aid of defending the Nazis in Ukraine.

The second reason the United States gives is that Russia is making the whole thing up:

a document most notable for its thinly veiled attempts to legitimize Russian disinformation campaigns denigrating neighboring nations and promoting the distorted Soviet narrative of much of contemporary European history, using the cynical guise of halting Nazi glorification

The problem here is that it is very difficult to portray the Times of Israel or 50 bipartisan US congressmen as a Russian disinformation campaign. There is no historical doubt whatsoever of Ukrainian nationalist forces active support of Nazism and participation in genocide, not just of Jews and Roma but of Poles and religious minorities. There is no doubt whatsoever of the modern glorification in Ukraine of these evil people.

It is of course not just Ukraine. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the record of collaboration with Nazis, of active participation in fighting for Nazis, and in active participation in genocide is extremely shaming. Throughout Eastern Europe there is a failure in these “victim nations” to look history squarely in the eye and to admit what happened – a failure the United States in actually promoting as “a campaign against Russian disinformation”.

I recommend to you the website www.defendinghistory.com, run by the admirable David Katz, which is a large and valuable resource on this website from a Lithuanian Jewish perspective that cannot remotely be dismissed as Russian or left wing propaganda. The front page currently features the December 2021 naming of a square in the capital after Lithuanian “freedom fighter” Juokas Luksa “Daumantas”, a man who commenced the massacre of Jews in Vilnius ahead of the arrival of German forces.

These are precisely the kind of commemorations the resolution is against. There has been a rash of destruction of Soviet war memorials and even war graves, and erection of commemorations, in various form, of Nazis throughout the Baltic states. That is what paras 6 and 7 of the resolution refer to, and there is no doubt whatsoever of the truth of these events. It is not “Russian disinformation”.

However the European Union, in support of its Baltic states members and their desire to forget or deny historical truth and to build a new national myth expunging their active role in the genocide of their Jewish and Roma populations, would not support the UN Resolution on Nazism. The EU countries abstained, as did the UK. The truth of course is that NATO intends to use the descendants of Eastern European racists against Russia much as Hitler did, at least in a cold war context.

You won’t find that in the Explanation of Vote.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/