UAE drone conference warns of rising threat

Debris of Iranian-made Ababil drones displayed in 2018 in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi -- the Emirati armed forces said the devices were used by Huthi rebels in Yemen against Saudi-led coalition forces -

by Mohamad Ali Harissi
February 20, 2022 — Abu Dhabi (AFP)

The UAE and its allies warned Sunday of the rising threat of drone attacks, as Middle East militants rapidly acquire a taste for the cheap and easily accessible unmanned systems.

But while the countries called for a collective effort to protect airspaces against the small and often hard to detect targets, one question remained: how to easily stop a drone attack?

"We have to unite to prevent the use of drones from threatening civilian safety and destroying economic institutions," Mohammed bin Ahmed al-Bowardi, United Arab Emirates' Minister of State for Defence Affairs, said at a defence conference in Abu Dhabi.

The Unmanned Systems Exhibition (UMEX), running until Wednesday, began in the UAE capital with regional and Western military and industry representatives, including from the United States, Britain and France.

Speakers addressed the importance of developing such systems for civil and military uses but also acknowledged their dangers when used by groups deemed a threat to the region.

While the event will showcase the latest in high-tech drone technology, the host country warned that such weapons are becoming cheaper and more widespread.

They are now part of the arsenals of "terrorist groups that use the systems to terrorise civilians or to impact the global system in a negative way," said the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar bin Sultan al-Olama.

"That is a challenge that requires us to... work together to ensure that we can create a shield against the use of these systems."

The UAE is part of a Saudi-led military coalition that has been fighting in Yemen since 2015 to support the government against Iran-backed Huthi rebels.

While the Emirates announced it withdrew its troops from the country in 2019, it remains an influential player, backing fighters there.

The UAE has been on heightened alert since a Huthi drone and missile attack killed three oil workers in Abu Dhabi on January 17. Authorities have since thwarted three similar attacks, including one claimed by a little-known militant group believed to have ties with pro-Iran armed factions in Iraq.

The UAE's staunch ally the United States has deployed a warship and fighter planes to help protect the Middle East financial and leisure hub, usually a safe haven in the volatile region.

France also said it would bolster its defence cooperation with the UAE, mostly in securing its air space.

In December, the Saudi-led coalition said the Huthis had fired more than 850 attack drones and 400 ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia in the past seven years, killing a total of 59 civilians.

That figure compares with the 401 coalition air raids carried out in January alone over Yemen, according to the Yemen Data Project, an independent tracker which reported around 9,000 civilian fatalities from the strikes in that country since 2015.

Last year the United States and Israel said an Iranian drone attacked a ship managed by an Israeli billionaire as it sailed off Oman. Two crew members were killed.

More recently, Israel's military said its air defences fired at a drone that had crossed into its airspace from Lebanon on Friday, the second such intrusion in as many days.

- Integrating AI -

Such incidents have again raised concerns about the dangers of bomb-laden drones. Some are difficult for radars to detect and require a complex process to shoot down without causing casualties from falling shrapnel.

These are concerns and challenges that "our adversaries" do not have, said Major General Sean A. Gainey, US Army director of the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office.

"They're rapidly purchasing this stuff off the shelf, redesign it, taking the great technology that's being developed for good, and then employing it" for other purposes, he said.

One way of countering a drone attack is to integrate artificial intelligence in air defense systems.

"They can detect a target through some form of AI, track that target and ultimately defeat that target," Gainey said, adding: "AI is going to be a key component to the counter-UAS fight."

SEMIOTICS OF WAR
Something to believe in: signifiers, symbols and Russia’s national ideology


Terms like ‘Great Patriotic War’ and ‘Russian world’ carry a heavy symbolic load and are imbued with meanings that adapt to serve political goals


Natalia Savelyeva
15 February 2022

A monument to Georgy Zhukov, a Second World War Soviet

 military commander, in Moscow |
(c) ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

In December 2021 the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a list of demands to NATO and the US. It proposed pulling back NATO troops from eastern Europe and urged that there should be no further membership additions from within Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’, referring to Ukraine and Georgia.

Since then, the whole world has become preoccupied with the possibility of a new Russian invasion in Ukraine. Although nobody knows what the Russian president is thinking, some of the arguments for or against the likelihood of military action reflect how Russians themselves view the possibility of war, and how an invasion could affect their political attitudes and support for Vladimir Putin.

Yet there is a remarkable ambiguity in the emotions and opinions expressed in the Russian media regarding a possible conflict with Ukraine.

In late December, Dmitry Kiselev, a provocative TV host and head of the government-owned international news agency Russia Today, promised that if Ukraine ever joined NATO or if NATO developed military infrastructure in the country, “We will hold a gun to America’s head.” The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, officially declared on 27 January: “We have repeatedly stated that our country is not going to attack anyone. We consider unacceptable even the idea of a war between our peoples.” The next day Margorita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, opened a press conference with an alarming question to the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, which she claimed came from her social media subscribers: “When are we going to bomb Washington?” To which Lavrov replied: “If it depends on the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We don’t want wars. But we will not let them ignore our interests.”

Finally, according to recent polls, 53% of respondents in Russia in December 2021 believed there would be no war between Russia and Ukraine, while 39% claimed the opposite. Despite this spread of opinion, respondents displayed solidarity over one point: that it is the US and NATO that are responsible for dragging Russia into war – a war which Russians are afraid of, but prepared for.

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Source: Kremlin.ru

The Great Patriotic War and the Russian psyche

Since the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, two logically contradictory ideas have coexisted peacefully in the minds of Russian citizens: ‘If only there were no war,’ and ‘We can repeat it!’ Both refer to the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Second World War, and the second slogan refers to the Soviet military campaign against Nazi Germany.

How does this strange double mindset work and why does it exist at all? Is it part of some strange Russian ideology, and if so, can it mobilise people in the case of real conflict? Right now we can only guess about the potential impact of this twisted worldview. But back in 2014, Russians mobilised in order to defend the ‘Russian world’, travelling to southeastern Ukraine to build a ‘New Russia’ (Novorossiya) and fight ‘the West’, in an effort to repeat the heroism of their grandparents and parents during the Second World War.

Drawing on data from interviews with Donbas combatants, collected in 2016-2017 in Donbas, Moscow and St Petersburg by me and my colleagues from the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent sociological initiative, I explored how these contradictory ideas can coexist. Is there any ideology that defines Russian discourse about the war in Donbas? And how does this ideology operate at the grassroots level? In other words, how does ideology impact the decisions of ordinary people directly involved in the conflict?
Ideology as myth, and myth as ideology

Sometimes ideology is a story. Communist ideology in the Soviet Union was one. It gave an exhaustive explanation for human history from the beginning of time until the 20th century, explaining the reasons and the forces behind political events and human behaviour. It had its heroes, the proletariat, and villains, the capitalists. And it had its own sense of time – from oppression to communism, from a dark past to a bright future through struggle.

Nationalist ideologies are usually stories as well. They often tell us how the ‘golden age’ of a glorious nation came to an end at the hand of invaders who contaminated the pure blood and high moral standards of its people, and how it is necessary to fight an enemy to restore that lost greatness.

Sometimes an ideology is what theorist Roland Barthes called a myth: a sort of parasite that takes already existing semiotic systems – whether images, stories or performances – and drains them, investing already-existing signifiers with new meanings. One famous example he citeds was a cover of Paris Match magazine, featuring a photograph of a young Black soldier saluting the French flag. Barthes reported how he saw beyond the image itself to what he believed it was intended to signify: the greatness of a French imperialism that united people irrespective of race.

Sometimes ideology includes both narratives and general, vague concepts, combining them in different ways.

In Russia, the combination of narrative and ambiguous concepts seems unique: the meaning of common words and phrases like ‘the West’, the ‘Russian World’ (the concept of a broader community of Russian language, culture and spirituality outside of the country), ‘fascists’, and even the ‘Great Patriotic War’ have eroded. The words themselves can thus be filled with different meanings depending on the political circumstances and the people who use them. Intrinsically vague, these phrases are able to conjure up a cause, a devotion and a sense of unity across society. We saw this with Donbas in 2014, we observe it now and we will probably see it many times in the future.

To explain how these common words and phrases work and what Russian ideology in action looks like, I want to look at three big ‘empty signifiers’ – the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the ‘Russian World’, and ‘Novorossiya’ – used to make sense of Donbas conflict by its immediate participants, local and Russian combatants.

A militant of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" |

 (с) REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

Novorossiya, the Russian world and the Great Patriotic War

There are several groups of fighters who had more or less consistent narratives about their involvement in the war and the war itself: Donbas citizens who had some measure of financial stability; fighters from both Russia and Ukraine who had already fought in other post-Soviet conflicts; and activists (or ex-activists) from Russia with nationalist-leftist views.

For many Donbas residents, the idea, promoted in part by the Russian media, that the Donbas conflict is a repetition of the Great Patriotic War, became the main source for making sense of events of 2013-2014. Detailed stories about relatives who fought or wound up in captivity during the 1940s framed stories of their own mobilisation. “My father was a defender of Leningrad. My wife’s relatives also took part in the Great Patriotic War. A week after the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine was occupied [in our town], I was here, on the barricades,” a 63-year-old Donbas resident told me.

Being the successors of Soviet heroes, combatants believed they fought against the successors of the ‘Banderites’, Ukrainian nationalist guerillas from the 1940s, only now backed by US and the West, who did not understand what kind of evil they were feeding. This narrative mixing of present and past negated the need to articulate any other reasons to join the conflict: “I am a Soviet person/My father was a defender of Leningrad/My mother was in captivity – of course I joined the fight.” During the chaos of 2014, to fight with the same enemy in the same place for the same reason as one’s parents or grandparents became a sort of a moral obligation. The real fear, the feeling of alienation from a new Ukrainian state which was emerging after the Euromaidan revolution, and the resulting resentment many experienced was masked by two other popular concepts – the ‘Russian World’ and ‘Novorossiya’.

Combatants who had fought in other conflicts prior to 2014 simply loved war, I found. For them, although they used the same words to talk about war as local Donbas citizens without any previous military experience, the whole conflict looked different. In their world view, the Second World War and events in Donbas – along with the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conflicts that emerged in its aftermath – were simply episodes in the long-running antagonism between Russia and the West.

April 2014. Barricades in front of the Donetsk regional administration building 

| (c) Mark Pourel / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

“The Western world... will never wish us well, they always had the task to destroy us, for thousands of years, damn, starting with Alexander the Great and the ancient Romans,” one 33-year-old fighter told me. In this historical chain of events spanning more than a thousand years, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was considered another link. The current conflict in Ukraine, and the necessity to join it, were justified by the idea that if “Ukraine [is] torn apart, it would be Russia’s turn next”.

If Donbas locals referred to the ‘Russian World” in an attempt to articulate their vision of a ‘normal life’ without the Ukrainian nationalist threat, for the experienced fighters, the ‘Russian World’ referred to people, spirit and culture. This world could be found everywhere and include anybody regardless of his or her ethnicity, nationality or personal preferences – very much in line with Putin’s joke that “Russia’s borders end nowhere”.

For this second group of combatants, Novorossiya was, ultimately, just one territory – their ambitions extended well beyond it. They dreamed of recreating Russia in its imperial borders as they existed before 1917, as one combatant told me. This vision was very different from that of the local fighters, for whom Novorossiya (a term most of them never heard before 2014) remained a possible future for Ukraine, and one in which Donbas could find its place.

But there was a third group of combatants, mostly Russian nationalists of different sorts, for whom Novorossiya constituted the main goal of the war and the main reason they joined it. For them, the ‘Russian World’ was an ideational entity, everything they wanted to believe in, but were not able to make a reality in Putin’s Russia. The idea of Novorossiya became a container for this unsatisfied desire, a real chance to build the society they were not able to create in Russia.

As one 36-year-old Russian man explained: “Why did many people go to the Donbas? It was the idea of Novorossiya itself. It’s clear that it was utopian, that... there was still some little hope that it’s possible to create some kind of island, an island of true freedom, free from… this system, to create something new. Here. I would move there, with my family. There should be social justice, no oligarchs and bribed cops… Free bread, free air and the blossoming of culture like a wild tree. Liberty, equality, fraternity, in the best sense.”

For representatives of this last group, the Great Patriotic War was an event of the past – a lost opportunity to be a hero, while the Donbas conflict gave them a real chance to act as heroes in the here and now.

Ambiguous terms, multiple meanings

How did these terms become so ambiguous, carrying so many different layers of meaning? Here, it’s important to note that different parties did not fight to promote their vision via discussion. What we see here is not different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Novorossiya, the Russian World and the Great Patriotic War appear in both public and private narratives as floating signifiers. They are not completely empty, but they are empty enough to serve political goals, to be filled and refilled depending on the need of the day.

In the Soviet period, Novorossiya referred to a particular territory, which was synonymous with the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and now constitutes Ukrainian territory in the south-east of the country. In 1994 it reemerged among Transnistrian separatists, and then finally appeared in Russian public discourse in 2014, already carrying multiple ideological meanings to justify Russian involvement in the conflict. The concept of the ‘Russian World’ never had any concrete referent – no particular territory, social group, or historical event. Its meaning has been defined entirely by its political usage. Finally, the Great Patriotic War has proven to be the most ‘politically usable’ element of Russia’s past in recent decades, due to its versatility and capacity to fit various cultural frames, ranging from ‘heroic sacrifice’, ‘national glory’, ‘defence of freedom’, and ‘salvation of civilisation’ to ‘mass suffering’, ‘unrecoverable losses’ and ‘national victimhood’. Being loaded with meanings and intentionally expanded, these concepts became perfectly suitable for any new political adventure.

Radical ambiguity is not only the fate of these three concepts, which were so useful at the beginning of the Donbas conflict. Some of them, like Novorossiya, have practically exited the political scene, at least for now; others, like the Great Patriotic War, continue to carry a heavy symbolic load and political importance – they have too much meaning to simply disappear. ‘Fascists’ and ‘the West’ are still with us and not going to leave Russian public discourse and people’s imagination any time soon. Explaining the role of propaganda in 2014, Peter Pomerantsev wrote that propaganda reinvented reality, producing mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. However, it is not only that new political entities appear and disappear whenever the Russian political establishment needs it.

The increased use of political language due to the vagueness and emptiness of commonly used political concepts has become even more visible in Russia in recent years. Now almost any activity can be qualified as ‘political’ (and thus any organisation or person be declared a ‘foreign agent’ or ‘extremist’). This extremely ambiguous language hides genuine worries and produces fake solidarities. In 2014, feelings of fear and insecurity disappeared behind the slogans ‘We can repeat’ and ‘We fight for Novorossiya’. The unity of popular support for Putin and regular people arose when ‘the Russian people’ (including those who did not want to be Russian at all) opposed themselves to the mysterious ‘West’.

Eight years on, what kind of story can we tell with words whose very meanings mutate and escape? With concepts which, like Putin’s imagined Russia, have no borders? If it is true that the future of Russia is history, then it is also true that this history is just a fantasy. A fantasy we can easily fill with any meaning we choose. This is a story of ‘forever’ and ‘always’, where nothing ever changes – Russia, the West, war. Nothing new happens in this story and everything remains; of a country stuck in nowhere, lost in a time-loop, where the imagined and reimagined past constantly repeats itself. This language – ambiguous, vague and boundaryless – is perfect for creating an impression of stability that lasts forever. Paradoxically, this is similar to the feeling that many regular Soviet citizens had in the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some things can last forever, it seems, until they are no more.

PPE from VIP companies three times more likely to be unfit for purpose

Nearly 60% of the PPE procured from firms linked to the UK government was unusable – sparking fresh questions about controversial ‘VIP’ lane

Adam Bychawski
17 February 2022

£3.3bn of PPE was unsuitable for use in the NHS or defective. |
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

PPE supplied through the government’s controversial ‘VIP’ lane was three times more likely to be useless to the NHS than normally procured PPE, analysis by openDemocracy has revealed.

The government spent £1.7bn on masks, gowns and other items of PPE from 50 companies referred through its ‘VIP’ lane, meaning they were awarded contracts after being recommended by MPs, ministers, peers or health officials. More than half of this (59%) – supplied by 25 of the firms – was never used, equivalent to £1bn wasted.

In comparison, the proportion of unfit PPE supplied by non-VIP companies was significantly lower. Of the £10.4bn spent on PPE from suppliers that did not come through the VIP channel, £1.8bn (17%) has been unused.

In total, £2.8bn was spent on 1.9 billion items of unused PPE, according to figures from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that were obtained by Spotlight on Corruption through a Freedom of Information request. The department did not explain why the PPE was unused by the NHS, but said not all of it was defective.

Among the 127 companies on the department’s overall list of PPE suppliers is Meller Designs, which the DHSC revealed in November was processed through the VIP lane after being referred as a potential PPE supplier by Michael Gove’s office.

The company was at the time co-owned by David Meller, who has donated more than £63,000 to the Conservative Party since 2009 – including £3,250 to support Gove’s party leadership bid in 2016, a campaign on which Meller worked as chair of finance. Some 552,100 items, costing £8.5m, supplied by the firm were unused.

Also on the list is PPE MedPro, which supplied more than 25.5 million items, worth £124.6m, that were not used. The company was referred to the VIP lane by Baroness Mone, a Conservative peer, just weeks after it was set up. Last month, The Guardian reported that leaked documents appear to suggest that Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were secretly involved in the business.

Lawyers for Mone said she had no “association” with the company or the process by which it was awarded its PPE contract, while Barrowman’s lawyers said he “never had any role or function in PPE Medpro”

George Havenhand, a senior legal researcher at Spotlight on Corruption, said that the millions wasted on unused PPE from VIP lane companies was “an extraordinary indictment of government decision-making and due diligence”.

“It is essential that the government is fully transparent about what went wrong and what steps it has taken to recoup its losses, and that lessons are learned for the government’s new procurement framework,” he added.

The government broke the law with its VIP procurement process, the high court ruled last month, following a challenge by the Good Law Project and Every Doctor.

Justice O’Farrell found that two companies – PestFix and Ayanda – were unlawfully awarded PPE contracts through the VIP process. Together they supplied £225m worth of PPE that was unused, according to figures from DHSC. It is not known how much PPE they supplied that was used, if any.

In a written judgement, O’Farrell said: “There is evidence that opportunities were treated as high priority even where there were no objectively justifiable grounds for expediting the offer.”

Today’s figures on wasted PPE pale in comparison to the losses the DHSC revealed in its 2020-21 annual report earlier this month.

The report showed that the department squandered almost £10bn of the £12.1bn it spent on PPE. This was due to purchasing defective, unsuitable or overpriced equipment as it scrambled to meet unprecedented demand at the start of the pandemic.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “At the height of the pandemic, there was a desperate need for PPE to protect health and social care staff and the government rightly took swift and decisive action to secure it.

“The purpose of the high-priority lane was to efficiently prioritise credible offers of PPE, and our efforts helped secure vital equipment to protect healthcare workers during the pandemic, with 97% of PPE we ordered being suitable for use.”

It is unclear how the department calculated this figure. According to the DHSC’s own annual report, of the £12.1bn the government spent on PPE, £3.3bn worth was unsuitable for use in the NHS or defective. A further £750m was surplus to requirements and £5.9bn was written off because the department overpaid or could not cancel unsuitable orders.

The truth about modern slavery offenders

Most people convicted of a trafficking or modern slavery offence are a long way from having Crime Boss on their CV

David Gadd & Rose Broad
17 February 2022

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel |
Barbara Cook/Alamy Stock Photo. 

As the 2021 Borders and Nationality Bill is debated within the UK’s House of Lords, NGOs representing victims of modern slavery are campaigning to have part five of the legislation removed. In a brutal extension of the hostile environment policy, this section: introduces the premise of ‘trauma deadlines’ which deny victims of trafficking access to support if they do not share details of their abuse quickly enough; raises the thresholds against which the veracity of the claims of potential victims of trafficking will be tested while reducing the circumstances in which leave to remain will be granted; and seeks to disqualify those victims who have committed crimes or who represent a “threat to public order” from protection.

The position of the British Home Office is that such harsh remedies are required to "break the business model" of organised criminal networks of people smugglers and traffickers, whose profiteering has driven an “alarming rise” in “child rapists, people who pose a threat to national security, serious criminals and failed asylum seekers … abusing our modern slavery system”. How exactly making life harder for people who have been exploited will break the business model of organised crime is difficult to fathom. Global inequality and immigration policy ‘organise’ the illicit markets for irregular migration and labour exploitation far more than criminals ever could, and the “business model” of those who facilitate illegal entry into the UK – if there is one – is simply to turn the government’s distaste for migrants into an opportunity for profit. Continuing to fortify the walls only supports this model. It doesn’t dismantle it.

Further questions must be asked about who the people convicted of trafficking and modern slavery offenses actually are, and whether it is accurate to characterise them as ‘gang members’ or ‘organised criminals’ at all. For if that characterisation doesn’t hold, it’s difficult to understand what the Borders and Nationality Bill could effectively “break”, no matter how draconian it is. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that most of those being depicted as posing an imminent threat to the UK’s security are not what popular culture would have us believe.

Mr Bigs, profiting substantially from organised crime, are only a tiny minority of those convicted.

Between 2018 and 2021 we interviewed 21 men and nine women convicted of smuggling and modern slavery offences in the UK. They were implicated in: trafficking for sexual exploitation; arranging or entering into sham or forced marriages; keeping people in domestic servitude; facilitating illegal entry into the UK; labour exploitation; exploiting vulnerable people to supply illicit drugs; and supplying food, drugs or alcohol in exchange for labour or sex to vulnerable and/or young people. From a criminal justice perspective they were serious offenders, and all but one were serving prison sentences from six months to 12 years.

Yet our research shows that their motives did not fit neatly with the narrative being used by the Home Office to justify the provisions of the Borders and Nationality Bill. Mr Bigs, profiting substantially from organised crime, are only a tiny minority of those convicted of people smuggling, people trafficking, and modern slavery offences in the UK. Many are substitutable actors within chains of migration. Quite a few are destitute people who are also victims of exploitation, while others are actually British business people failing to ensure compliance with immigration regulations.

Serious and organised criminals?

A small subsample of the men we interviewed did fit the stereotypes of organised criminals to some degree. Idris, for example, was a former Nigerian police chief who had hired destitute people to smuggle drugs across international borders, all while being protected by serving officers back home. Darius was a former Romanian police officer who laundered money, including some that derived from the international proceeds of sex work. And John had been the muscle for protection rackets in metropolitan nightclubs before he took a job smuggling people from Paris into the UK.

But these three men were not necessarily typical of those convicted of modern slavery offences – around a quarter of whom are women. Nor were they those serving the longest sentences. More common were individuals simply caught on the wrong side of 21st century globalisation, and many had had their lives destroyed by the legacies of colonialism before the UK added destitution and the threat of deportation to their lists of injury.

Rasheed, for example, was serving 12 years for purchasing a sham marriage. He had grown up in indentured labour on the Pakistan/Afghan border and first came to the UK on a tourist visa. Once here he became a victim of acute exploitation in a British off-licence, where he both worked and lived to send money home. He told us that he was tricked into paying for a marriage to avoid being deported. Similarly, Estelle, a woman from Cape Verde, was pushed to arrange sham marriages between Nigerian men and Portuguese women in order to pay off her significant gambling debts. She received four years in prison.

Vicki was a UK national in her 20s serving seven years in prison for exploiting others via county lines drug dealing. After losing her mother to cancer as a young teenager and being expelled from school, Vicki left her hometown at 14 to live in the care of her brother. The two of them were persuaded by an uncle to become involved in distributing drugs as a way to avoid becoming homeless.

While we could go on, there isn't space to relate the life stories of all 30 individuals here. Instead, we will focus on three groups often singled out in the justifications for new the Borders and Nationality Bill: sex traffickers, people smugglers, and labour exploiters.
Sex traffickers

Among those who were found guilty of trafficking adults for the purpose of sexual exploitation, all claimed to be working with sex workers who understood the nature of the work they had committed to. They also claimed that, where foreign nationals were involved, they had come to the UK in search of better pay after first undertaking sex work in their countries of origin. Only one interviewee appeared to be physically forcing women to sell themselves.

That was Adam, a Hungarian national, who had taken his sexual partner’s passport after he “rescued” her from another family in the UK who were sexually exploiting her and selling her into a “sham marriage”. Adam subsequently physically assaulted this woman after she did “bad things” like “smoking drugs” and as a reminder that she needed to pay her way in the house where he and his family lived, either by undertaking sex work or completing domestic chores. The exploited woman eventually “grassed” on Adam and his family, providing the evidence that led to their conviction.

The stories told by convicted people smugglers, though also troubling reflections of a globally unequal world, were morally comprehensible.

Conversely, Faziel considered himself to be running an elite “escort service”. Some of the Thai women involved were able business women, though others, it materialised, were less successful and vulnerable to exploitation. Andrei, a Romanian heroin user, who came to the UK partly in search of drug treatment, designed websites for the women who lived with their male partners in a house he shared. And Anton, another Romanian who had worked in low paid agricultural and construction work in Western Europe, was little more than a low paid taxi driver for women travelling between sex work jobs and/or the airport. This included driving his partner, who described herself as a “masseur” and who was working in the sex industry to finance her cancer treatment.

Two of the three women interviewed in this category were former sex workers. Grace and Sandra had become brothel keepers partly to establish better working environments for themselves and other women, and in Grace’s case also to escape domestic servitude. Nina, who also ran a brothel, did so in collaboration with a male partner who had subjected her to near lethal domestic abuse.
People smugglers

The stories told by convicted people smugglers, though troubling reflections of a globally unequal world, were, to varying degrees, morally comprehensible. Bob and John, both men with long histories of criminal involvement and prison records, were two smugglers who drove foreign nationals across borders. They were aware that travel debts would have to be repaid on arrival, but saw little wrong in helping people who were coming to work. Neither was involved in exploiting those people who entered the UK and both were appalled to learn others did so. They were simply “drivers”.

Others thought it was right to help fellow refugees like themselves. Alesandro, for example, was a long-term unemployed Albanian refugee with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder from his time as a teenage combatant in the Balkans. He went to collect clothing from a lorry as a favour to a man who had lent him money to pay for his brother’s medical care. How genuine his “surprise” was when he discovered the lorry contained not clothes but other Eastern European migrants was hard to gauge in the interview. Regardless, he saw them as refugees with similar backgrounds of trauma and destitution to his own and thought it right to give them a hand.

Others charged with smuggling offences claimed to have been duped into transporting undocumented migrants, either because they did not know their passengers were hiding in their vehicles, or because the passengers convinced them they had a right to enter the UK until this was challenged by border enforcement officers.
Labour exploiters

Among those involved in hiring workers who became exploited, one shopkeeper and landlord, Sammy, saw himself as doing a favour to his British and Eastern European tenants, offering them small amounts of work and “leftover food” from his takeaway shop. A married couple, both of whom worked very long hours as public sector professionals, thought they had done a “good” thing by bringing two destitute Nigerian teenagers to work for them as domestic helpers to care for their children. The young women were provided with the prospect of an education and money to send back home. The tide turned when the young women presented themselves as ‘victims of modern slavery’, which they possibly did because they had been denied a right to remain in the UK and because some of their earnings were paid directly to their fathers. And Charles, the staffing lead of an international logistics company and the only participant who had not served a prison sentence, had failed to explore the terms under which Romanian migrant labour was supplied to a meat processing factory where profit margins were tight.

So what is the truth about modern slavery offenders?

In The Truth About Modern Slavery, Emily Kenway, the former policy adviser to the UK's first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, explains how:

Modern slavery as a metaphor for severe exploitation and as a political frame constructs a way of seeing that makes us blind to things we need to know. By characterising severe exploitation as exceptional … it also produces ... moral legitimacy for the very policies that enable severe exploitation in the first place. (p.9)

We concur with Kenway’s analysis, but think there are further considerations to add with regard to the very small number of offenders convicted of such offences. Contrary to what the architects of modern slavery policy have asserted, modern slavery offenders are not a coherent group with common motives reducible to “evil” or “organised crime gangs”. Their offending cannot be reduced to a singular cause or deterred by tough talk and hostile immigration policies, however much politicians might wish it to be.

One reason why some modern slavery offenders fail to recognise the stark choices victims face is that they have quite serious histories of social disadvantage of their own, including childhood abuse, drug use, post-traumatic stress disorder, unmanageable debts, substance dependencies, and experiences of also being exploited. This subgroup of offenders are victims too, illustrating that unless we support victims adequately we risk increasing the number of people desperate enough to consider exploiting others.

Other perpetrators of modern slavery include business people working at the margins of legality, or within firms that lack the capacity to compete in certain industries when immigration rules change. Some of the individuals we talked to had attempted to reach out to regulators or law enforcement before they were arrested. The responses they received, however, merely confirmed a need to cover up what was happening to protect co-workers, including migrant workers at risk of deportation. This suggests that there is much to be gained from trying to support and regulate legitimate businesses that are hiring migrant workers and/or working in industries where margins have become tight, particularly when regulatory or employment frameworks change.

Modern slavery discourse has so thoroughly blinded us that we now need to speak to those cast as ‘evil perpetrators’ to appreciate how UK policies enable severe exploitation.

A truth about the sex trafficking of adults, as Kenway also argues, is that sex work is primarily undertaken by women who see few other means of meeting their financial needs. In order to do this in countries where sex workers have no rights, they have to rely on others to provide transport, accommodation, IT support and physical security: people who inevitably do so on their own terms in an industry that is unregulated because it is illicit.

A truth about labour exploitation is that it typically involves the underpayment of people who, like sex workers, lack employment rights and/or owe money to the people who facilitated their journeys. It is this lack of protection that blurs the line between smuggling and the exploitation that is definitive of ‘trafficking’. The reasons why those who are exploited become so indebted is not reducible to the greed or callousness of organised crime groups. Rather, the smuggled pay substantially more than Western tourists to cross international borders because governments have made them hazardous to cross. Many can only afford the trip by taking on debt, which then pushes them to accept work from whomever is willing to give it to them. In this way, border control policies and employment laws compound the problem of modern slavery more often than they redress it.

The unpalatable truth is that modern slavery discourse has so thoroughly blinded us that we now need to speak to those cast as ‘evil perpetrators’ to appreciate how UK policies enable severe exploitation by pushing vulnerable people to become dependent on people who are thoroughly unsuited to caring for them. As it stands, the Borders and Nationality Bill will do little to rectify this major oversight. It will compound the plights of vulnerable people, some whom will feel they have little choice but to exploit others in order to survive their extremely precarious predicaments.

This article draws on research laid out in greater detail in our forthcoming book, Demystifying Modern Slavery, which is due out with Routledge later this year. All names used in this piece are pseudonyms.

Violence against women garment workers increased during pandemic


Women workers experienced more verbal, physical and sexual violence under COVID-19, reveals report into garment factories in six Asian countries


Tansy Hoskins
18 February 2022

Illustration: Inge Snip. All rights reserved

“Any mother who sends their daughter to a factory will be scared for her safety. I have worked in this industry for more than 20 years and I have seen terrible things happen: rapes, suicides and even murders,” said Chellamma*, a 46-year-old garment worker in the city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu.

Tiruppur, which is known as the knitwear capital of India, bustles with garment factories, but when her two daughters started looking for work, Chellamma insisted it was in the same factory as her, so that she could at least try to keep them safe.

“Women workers have no power to oppose the men in power – be it supervisors or managers. They can do anything to any woman, we are all at their mercy and we have no one to support or stand for us,” she said.

Women at the factory where Chellamma and her daughters work were interviewed as part of a new in-depth survey that documents an alarming rise in Gender Based Violence and Harassment (GBVH) against garment workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examined six countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

‘A Stitch in Time Saves None’, by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), says that while the global garment industry has promised to reduce poverty and uplift the status of women, in reality it has delivered rock-bottom wages, extreme hours and unsafe, often violent conditions. As a result, the AFWA now terms the harm inflicted on garment workers as the “Garment Industrial Trauma Complex”.

The report, which makes for extremely disturbing reading, directly links the rise in GVBH during the pandemic to the purchasing practices of international fashion brands including American Eagle, Bestseller, C&A, Inditex, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Marks & Spencer, Next, Nike, Target, Vans/VF Corporation and Walmart.

“GBVH, in the form of economic harm, has become an essential condition in supply chains through which lead firms transfer the costs of market crises to women workers in order to accumulate vast profits or control losses,” according to the report. Workers are paid poverty-level wages, which means they can’t survive even a few days without work and quickly fall into hunger, debt and intergenerational poverty.

"We have documented violence from men including supervisors, landlords, dormitory owners, shop keepers etc – men in positions of power who used the pandemic to further exploit and abuse women,” explained Ashley Saxby, South-East Asia coordinator at AFWA.

“This is linked to a range of gendered power dynamics, but it can’t be separated from the purchasing practices of brands and their actions during the pandemic that reinforced women’s vulnerability."
Verbal, physical and sexual violence

When the owners of Chellamma’s factory resumed production after the first lockdown in 2020, workers experienced extra overtime (unpaid), high targets and an increase in GBVH.

Another worker at the factory, Soumya, described verbal harassment as part of the job. “As production targets increase, harassment also increases. Every day is stressful,” she said. “Some supervisors call you ‘bitch’, ‘moron’, ‘idiot’ and so on, when a worker does not finish targets. Complaints against all this won’t take you anywhere. No one cares about our complaints. Only finishing production targets matter.”

AFWA's report into garment factories in Asia | AFWA

At a factory in Gurgaon in northern India, workers reported being pushed, touched inappropriately, having items of clothing thrown at them, and supervisors repeatedly raising their hands as if to slap them. An elderly woman from the factory said: “What respect will you have for men who abuse women of their mother’s age?”

As well as verbal and physical abuse, workers reported sexual violence. “The supervisor harassed me in various ways, even trying to touch my body, slapping me on my backside,” said Sakhina, a worker in the busy garment city of Gazipur in Bangladesh. “One day he hugged me when he found me alone in front of the toilet. After that, I was afraid to go to the toilet.”

I kept silent for fear of losing my job

Increased job insecurity during the pandemic led to an increased fear of retaliation if violence was reported. This created an even greater culture of impunity among male supervisors. “Despite these problems,” Sakhina said, “I kept silent for fear of losing my job.”

At other factories there were reports of women workers being coerced into sex by factory mechanics who otherwise refused to fix broken sewing machine, which meant that workers lost vital wages.
Impact on home life

The impact of brands’ purchasing practises did not remain within factory walls, but ricocheted out into workers’ homes and communities. The report outlines how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, workers faced “not only the retreat of the state but also the disengagement of global apparel brands and the absence of employer-based social protection”.

According to the report, factory life is inseparable from home life, where women garment workers do the majority of the housework and care provision: “The fashion industry, despite being a modern capitalist industry, relies on and strengthens pre-capitalist patriarchal relations in supplier countries as a central means to amass wealth.”

For many people around the world, the pandemic deepened the significance of the home, but for many garment workers, ‘home’ was reinforced as a site of violence.

Sonali is a 40-year-old garment worker from Bengaluru (Bangalore) in India. Her lockdown experience was one of closed factories, nothing to eat except rice and water, and not enough money to buy medicine for her daughter. But there is another part of her story.

“Although I am separated from my husband, I had to live with him during the lockdown period because I did not have any savings,” she said. “My husband tried to sexually abuse me many times. He would not take a ‘no’ as an answer. It was torture. I have never felt so helpless in my life. Many women had to endure this [marital rape] silently during the lockdown.”

Sonali’s experience is inseparable from her treatment as a worker for global fashion brands. Her pay is so low that she is unable to amass any savings for periods of crisis, such as the pandemic.

“The shame associated with speaking about her experience, and living in a highly patriarchal society, prevented Sonali from speaking out,” said Nandita Shivakumar, AFWA’s campaigns and communications coordinator.

“When we do these interviews, we also offer GBVH training and a safe space where many women speak about their personal lives – that is why women like Sonali open up about these issues. Many feel that if they had higher wages, they could leave abusive marriages,” Shivakumar explained.

Anju is another worker in Gazipur, Bangladesh. Her story represents the widespread increase in gender-based violence by landlords and dormitory owners within the fashion industry. “When the pandemic came, my work became irregular and I couldn’t pay my rent on time,” she said.

“After two months, my landlord approached me and said, spend two nights with me and I will not charge you for the rent. Make me happy and I will help you. With that, I thought my only [way] out was suicide.” When she refused him, the landlord stole her jewellery and kicked Anju out of her home. Other garment workers report similar stories of harassment and violence from shopkeepers, to whom they have fallen into debt.
Pay a living wage

“The lack of living wages escalated the massive humanitarian crisis brought about by the pandemic,” according to ‘A Stitch in Time’, so it is not surprising that a living wage is the first thing AFWA is calling for.

“Preventing and remediating gender-based violence in homes and factories requires brands to provide living wages for workers and ending all barriers to freedom of association and collective bargaining – especially in women-dominated sectors from the garment industry,” said Saxby.

AFWA also wants to see its ‘Safe Circle Approach’ established across factories. This includes pouring time and resources into building women workers’ leadership on production lines; ending misogynistic power relations between owners and workers; and long-term monitoring and oversight. AFWA says that brands must stop exploiting governance weaknesses and patriarchal social norms in production countries in their quest for profit.

“Vague, superficial and noncommittal promises of brands to eradicate gender-based violence need to be replaced with enforceable, binding commitments to work with women-led trade unions, to develop agreements and programmes to monitor, remediate and prevent GBVH,” Saxby concludes.

* The names of all garment workers have been changed.

UK

How Priti Patel is using gay rights to push through ‘draconian’ Police Bill

The Tories are offering crumbs to some groups in order to ‘divide and conquer’, say campaigners

Nandini Archer
14 January 2022

Priti Patel has been accused of using ‘divide and conquer tactics’ to pass her policing bill |
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

“I find it very offensive. It’s window dressing. It's purely symbolic.”

Tyler Hatwell, the founder of LGBT Travellers Pride, is describing Priti Patel’s plans to wipe historic convictions for homosexual activity from people’s criminal records.

“I’m not saying that wrongs shouldn’t be righted,” Hatwell adds, “but it feels like an absurd thing to be focusing on that rather than some of the more existential issues facing LGBTQ people today.”

As it happens, several of those existential issues stem from the same law that seeks to overturn historic convictions: Priti Patel’s fiercely opposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, set to go through the final day of its so-called “report stage” in the House of Lords on Monday.

Hatwell calls this a deliberate “divide and conquer” tactic. “The government wants to split off LGBTQ people from any movement against the draconian police bill,” he says.

The bill has been met with fierce backlash since its inception in March 2020, which sparked #KilltheBill protests, riots, petitions and letters across the UK. It is a 300-page plan to increase surveillance and stop-and-search powers, put strict conditions on protests, and threaten Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) rights to roam. For people like Hatwell at the intersection of GRT and LGBTQ communities, as well as queer people of colour, the plans to erase historic convictions for homosexuality (which was legalised for some people in 1967) are worth little.

“The government is trying desperately to hide and rush through its many draconian proposals through the sheer size and breadth of the legislation,” Emmanuelle Andrews, policy and campaigns manager at the human rights organisation Liberty, tells openDemocracy.

Andrews believes the government has had countless opportunities to introduce historic pardons for homosexuality. “Throwing them in now alongside dangerous and oppressive new powers is a cynical ploy to confuse debate around the bill and to make it harder politically for MPs and peers to reject it wholesale,” they say.

“What good does wiping records of homosexual activity do?” Lady Phyll, executive director of UK Black Pride, asks. “These records should not exist in the first place, and homophobia and homophobic violence are on the rise in the UK.”

Lady Phyll has long been outspoken on the government’s failure to truly support the rights of queer people. She turned down an MBE in 2016, pointing out that LGBTQ people continue to be persecuted and killed because of laws put in place by British colonists.

She says LGBTQ rights cannot be talked about without talking about the impact of racism in the UK and says the country has a “piecemeal understanding” about what LGBTQ rights are.

“LGBT Black people and people of colour continue to be excluded from data gathering about what life is like in the UK for LGBT people,” she says. “The government’s Sewell Report discarded evidence put forward by UK Black Pride and other organisations which offered data about the impact of racism on LGBT people.”

The “window dressing” of the police bill is a long-standing government tactic, Lady Phyll explains, citing marriage equality as an example.

“Marriage equality is great,” she says – yet more fundamental issues get sidelined, such as the vulnerability of LGBTQ people in particular to homelessness, racism, food poverty, violence, incarceration and unequal access to healthcare.

“We deserve a government that looks at and treats its LGBTQ citizens as the diverse and deserving citizens it’s elected to serve,” she says.

The government is ‘window dressing’ its ‘draconian’ policing bill, said Lady Phyll | Courtesy of Kaleidoscope Trust

Gypsy, Roma and Traveller rights

Critics say part four of the policing bill effectively criminalises the way of life of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. The bill means that if neighbours of camps complain about any disturbances at all, police will be able to seize vehicles.

“It’s a curtain twitcher’s charter,” says Hatwell, “an extreme sledgehammer to crack a walnut.”

Hatwell says lawmakers are cynically using “antisocial behaviour” at a handful of camps as an excuse to push through this section of the bill. “But the trouble is, those things are already crimes,” he points out. “So all you're really doing is criminalising people who aren’t causing any difficulty.”

Hatwell describes himself as a showman. He puts on funfairs and tells openDemocracy he’s part of the Showman’s Guild – which was launched to combat a Victorian bill that tried to criminalise “movable gladdings”. He describes today’s police bill as similar but worse.

“The bill is basically one big land grab, where there’s no common space any more, and it’s all accounted for and everyone has to be in their place,” he explains.

Gypsy rights activist and journalist Jake Bowers calls the homosexuality pardons in the police bill a “fig leaf”, adding, “Patel herself is a fig leaf of diversity being used to drive through a deeply racist law.

“No one who believes in equality should fall for this. The Tories are deeply playing off different struggles in the hierarchy of inequalities against each other.”

LGBTQ rights and women’s rights have been secured by long and often bitterly contested campaigns of protest and non-violent direct action, he says, highlighting that part three of the bill will criminalise the modern equivalent of the suffragettes, such as the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter movements.

He says parts three and four of the bill must be thrown out: “These are linked struggles and no one is free until all are free.”

From domestic abuse to football

The government is also looking to buy support from other groups. One amendment to the police bill will treat domestic abuse and sexual offences “as seriously as knife crime” and extend the time limit for reporting domestic violence from six months to two years. Taking pictures of breastfeeding mothers in public will also be illegal.

Patel’s department also wants to impose a ban on online racist abusers from attending football matches for up to ten years.

The government announced last week that the bill would even crack down on ‘hare coursing’ – the niche practice of chasing hares with dogs.

But Lady Phyll tells me these are just examples of the government using progressive values to obscure the bill.

“What good does it do to ban a racist from a football match, if the police are empowered to beat, detain and harm Black people and people of colour without impunity? What good does [it] do when services that would uplift Black people and people of colour in this country, like mental health services, continue to be under- or defunded?”

On the issue of breastfeeding, she asks: “What of the Black women who die during childbirth in the UK at rates of four to one [compared] to white women? What of the physical violence women across the UK experience at the hands of the police?”

When the police cracked down violently on women gathering peacefully at a candlelit vigil for Sarah Everard, who was murdered by a police officer, activists started connecting police violence against women to the bill. This was the beginning of the #KilltheBill protests led by the feminist direct action group Sisters Uncut.

“Our feminism cannot be at the expense of other communities. They are chucking all this legislation into one bill precisely to make the oppressive, racist, unpopular parts palatable,” Sisters Uncut tweeted in response to the government’s plan to extend the time limit on domestic violence cases. “It's divide & rule, we can do better!”

And it’s this issue of unity that has run through the protests and movement. At one of the protests last year, a Sisters Uncut spokesperson said Patel was making the same mistake that Margaret Thatcher did with the poll tax, which was ultimately her downfall: “Don’t come for us all at once, you idiot.”

For Lady Phyll too, Patel’s attempt to appease footballers, breastfeeders, domestic violence survivors and some members of the LGBTQ community is simply not enough.

“None of these changes address the structures that allow and empower such disparities,” she said. “These changes do not address the structural racism, misogyny, sexism or homophobia that makes such racism, discrimination and violence the absolute norm in this country.”

Putin may go to war to capture Ukraine. With Belarus, he did it without firing a shot.

Putin once rescued Belarus’s Lukashenko from street protests. Now he could use Belarus to stage an invasion of Ukraine.



Tanks move during the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military drills at the Obuz-Lesnovsky training ground in Belarus on Feb. 19. 

(Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr/AP)


By Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina

MOSCOW — Belarus announced Sunday that Russian forces would remain in the country after massive military drills ended, in a move that opposition figures said surrendered the country’s independence to Moscow without a shot being fired.

Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said it undermined the country’s security and sovereignty, dragging it into a foreign war as an aggressor.

Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin announced that joint drills would continue after the end of massive joint military exercises with Russia on Sunday, citing “the aggravation of the situation” in eastern Ukraine.

The announcement runs contrary to earlier pledges from Minsk officials that Russian troops would go home when the drills ended.

Khrenin said the two countries would “fight back” if necessary, in a move analysts said showed that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s foreign and military policies had been effectively captured by Russia.

“It is just a sign that the current government of Belarus, Lukashenko’s government, is increasingly dependent in its foreign and security policy on Russia and it cannot actually pursue its own autonomous decisions,” said Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

As Western leaders warn that Russia could mount an attack on Ukraine in coming days, Tikhanovskaya, who is recognized by Western leaders as the rightful winner of the flawed 2020 presidential election, said Belarus was “losing its sovereignty” and called for Russian troops to leave immediately.

“The presence of Russian troops on our territory violates our constitution, international law, and endangers the security of every Belarusian and the whole region. Belarus is dragged into someone else’s war and turned into an aggressor country,” she said in a statement Sunday.

Wielding the threat of war, a new, more aggressive Putin steps forward

Lukashenko has been beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin since Belarus’s disputed 2020 election, when street protests nearly toppled him from power before Putin promised to send in Russian forces to quell unrest if required. Lukashenko launched a massive crackdown, beating and jailing hundreds of opposition figures and activists, and clung on without Putin’s help.

Putin and Lukashenko met Friday to discuss the crisis between Russia and NATO, after Western countries rejected Moscow’s demands for sweeping security guarantees including barring Ukraine and other countries from joining NATO and rolling back alliance forces and materiel from Eastern Europe.

Lukashenko said after Friday’s meeting that he and Putin worked out a joint plan to deter “Western aggression.” The next day, Putin rewarded him with an invitation to attend drills of Russia’s nuclear forces as the Russian leader oversaw multiple launches of hypersonic and cruise missiles.

A Kremlin photo showed the two sitting at a circular white table in the situation center of Russia’s Defense Ministry as Putin launched the drills, co-opting the Belarusian leader as he sent a powerful message to Washington and NATO about his determination to reshape Europe’s security architecture, and his willingness to use military force if necessary.

Putin sees Belarus and Ukraine as Russia’s junior Slavic brothers, part of what he calls the “Russian world.” He is convinced that Ukraine can only succeed if, like Belarus, it joins Russia’s sphere of influence.

As Western officials warn Putin against an invasion to force Ukraine’s capitulation, Putin has dominated Belarus without the need for military force, by leveraging Lukashenko’s political debt. It is not yet clear whether Putin will demand that Belarusian forces participate directly, should he invade Ukraine, but Russia would use Belarusian airfields, transportation and logistics.

“When it comes to war, Putin will simply take it for granted that he has Belarus as an extension of his territory, militarily speaking, so it might be like Belarus is an accomplice, a supporting force, but not participating and attacking Kyiv together with Russian soldiers,” said Shraibman, the analyst.

Even people in separatist Ukraine question ‘evacuation’ crisis brewed by Russian-backed leaders

Even before the exercises began 10 days ago, Western military analysts warned that it could be cover for an attack force to invade Ukraine from the north and potentially encircle the capital Kyiv, part of a large-scale, multi-pronged invasion from the south, east and north.

According to NATO, there are some 30,000 Russian forces in Belarus, as well as substantial military hardware including S-400 missile systems, positioned in the south of the country.

Shraibman said that if Lukashenko ordered his forces to participate in an invasion of Ukraine, Belarusian military officials would obey their orders, but probably reluctantly.

“From my analysis of the public opinion in Belarus, including in law enforcement and the military, there is simply zero appetite for Belarus being dragged into any kind of conflict and let alone the conflict of another country.”

Lukashenko has floated the idea of hosting Russian nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil several times, including this past week — an example of him offering the Kremlin even more than Putin expected, Shraibman said.

On Saturday, at Putin’s side during the nuclear forces exercises, Lukashenko was showing his loyalty at a critical time for Putin, hoping to win economic support and favors, he added.

Putin claims Ukraine crisis is over Russia’s future, but that rings with Cold War brinkmanship

“Lukashenko does even more than what is demanded from him, for example his initiative about the nukes being stationed in Belarus. He sometimes wants to overperform to show that he is even more of an ally than everybody could expect.

“Until we are in a war situation, while it is still mainly lip service, he can afford to do this. He’s happy to do it.”

Khrenin said the focus of the continued military drills would be the same as the recently completed exercises: “to ensure an adequate response and de-escalation of military preparations of ill-wishers near our common borders.”

Just four days ago, Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei said: “Not a single [Russian] serviceman, not a single piece of military equipment will remain in Belarus after these exercises.”

The first hint that Russian forces might not leave after the exercises came Saturday, when Belarusian general Alexander Volfovich told journalists that all the tasks of the exercises had been achieved but that “the exercise may continue. When and for how long will be decided by the head of the inspection.”

Russia-Ukraine tensions: What you need to know

The latest

What’s happening in the Ukraine-Russia crisis | Putin has decided to invade Ukraine, Biden says | Ukraine’s Lviv becomes ‘western capital’ as some diplomats leave Kyiv | In Ukraine’s Donbas region, war is an ever-present reality

The geography

Four maps that explain the Russia-Ukraine conflict | Wetlands and radioactive soil: How Ukraine’s geography could influence a Russian invasion

The backstory

Why might Russia want to invade Ukraine? | Six reasons Russia is at odds with Ukraine’s Zelensky | What is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and why is Biden vowing to stop it if Russia invades Ukraine? | Here’s where countries stand on the Russia-Ukraine crisis

Analysis

When it comes to Ukraine, what do Russian citizens actually want? | Why it’s not so easy to slap sanctions on Vladimir Putin | An invasion of Ukraine could drive up global food prices and spark unrest far from the front lines | How joining NATO and the E.U. became Ukraine’s unattainable dream



By Robyn DixonRobyn Dixon is a foreign correspondent on her third stint in Russia, after almost a decade reporting there beginning in the early 1990s. In November 2019 she joined The Washington Post as Moscow bureau chief. Twitter

 

Putin’s influence means Lukashenko has “lost his independence in decision making,” says Belarus opposition leader

Matt FreiEurope Editor and Presenter

20 Feb 2022

I spoke to the exiled leader of Belarus’s democratic opposition Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and I asked her if she was worried the extension of planned military drills in Belarus suggested that Russia might use her country as a staging post for an incursion into Ukraine

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M PROPERTY IS THEFT

Rents reach ‘insane’ levels across U.S. with no end in sight


Krystal Guerra, 32, poses Feb. 12 outside her apartment, which she has to leave after her new landlord gave her less than a month’s notice that her rent would go up by 26%, in Miami. Guerra had already been spending nearly 50% of her monthly income on rent before the increase.
(Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press)

BY R.J. RICO
ASSOCIATED PRESS

FEB. 20, 2022 

Krystal Guerra’s Miami apartment has a tiny kitchen, cracked tiles, warped cabinets, no dishwasher and hardly any storage space.

But Guerra was fine with the apartment’s shortcomings. It was all part of being a 32-year-old graduate student in South Florida, she reasoned, and she was happy to live there for a few more years as she finished her marketing degree.

That was until a new owner bought the property and told her he was raising the rent from $1,550 to $1,950, a 26% increase that Guerra said meant her rent would account for the majority of her take-home pay from the University of Miami.

“I thought that was insane,” said Guerra, who decided to move out. “Am I supposed to stop paying for everything else I have going on in my life just so I can pay rent? That’s unsustainable.”

Guerra is hardly alone. Rents have exploded across the country, causing many to dig deep into their savings, downsize to subpar units or fall behind on payments and risk eviction now that a federal moratorium has ended.

In the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, median rent rose an astounding 19.3% from December 2020 to December 2021, according to a Realtor.com analysis of properties with two or fewer bedrooms. And nowhere was the jump bigger than in the Miami metro area, where the median rent exploded to $2,850, 49.8% higher than the previous year.

Other cities across Florida — Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville — and the Sun Belt destinations of San Diego, Las Vegas, Austin, Texas, and Memphis, Tenn., all saw spikes of more than 25% during that time period.

Rising rents are an increasing driver of high inflation that has become one of the nation’s top economic problems. Labor Department data, which cover existing rents as well as new listings, shows much smaller increases, but these are also picking up. Rental costs rose 0.5% in January from December, the Labor Department said last week. That may seem small, but it was the biggest increase in 20 years, and will likely accelerate.

Economists worry about the effect of rent increases on inflation because the big jumps in new leases feed into the U.S. consumer price index, which is used to measure inflation.

Inflation jumped 7.5% in January from a year earlier, the biggest increase in four decades. While many economists expect that to decrease, rising rents could keep inflation high through the end of the year since housing costs make up one-third of the consumer price index.

Things have gotten so bad in Boston, which has nearly overtaken San Francisco as the nation’s second-most expensive rental market, that one resident went viral for jokingly putting an igloo on the market for $2,700 a month. “Heat/ hot water not included,” Jonathan Berk tweeted.

Experts say many factors are responsible for astronomical rents, including a nationwide housing shortage, extremely low rental vacancies and unrelenting demand as young adults continue to enter the crowded market.

Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, lead author of a recent report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said there was a lot of “pent-up demand” after the initial months of the pandemic, when many young people moved back home with their parents. Starting last year, as the economy opened up and young people moved out, “rents really took off,” she said.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, rental vacancy rates during the fourth quarter of 2021 fell to 5.6%, the lowest since 1984.

“Without a lot of rental vacancy that landlords are accustomed to having, that gives them some pricing power because they’re not sitting on empty units that they need to fill,” said Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist.

Meanwhile, the number of homes for sale have been at a record low, contributing to ballooning home prices that have caused many higher-income households to remain renters, further upping demand.

Construction crews are also trying to bounce back from material and labor shortages that at the start of the pandemic made a preexisting shortage of new homes even worse, leaving an estimated shortfall of 5.8 million single-family homes, a 51% leap from the end of 2019, Realtor.com said.

And potentially compounding all of this is the increasing presence of investors.

A record 18.2% of U.S home purchases in the third quarter of 2021 were made by businesses or institutions, according to Redfin, as investors targeted Atlanta; Phoenix; Miami; Charlotte, N.C.; and Jacksonville, Fla. — popular destinations for people relocating from pricier cities.

Hale said the increasing presence of investors is a factor in rent hikes, but only because they have pricing power due to low vacancies. “I don’t think that’s the only driver,” she said.

Most investors aren’t tied down by rent control. Only two states, California and Oregon, have statewide rent control laws, while three others — New York, New Jersey and Maryland — have laws allowing local governments to pass rent control ordinances, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council.

And laws in some states like Arizona actually restrict local jurisdictions from limiting what landlords can charge tenants.

In Tucson, the mayor’s office said it has been deluged with calls from residents worried about rent hikes after a California developer recently bought an apartment complex that catered to older people and raised rents by more than 50%, forcing out many on fixed incomes.

The rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the complex went from $579 to $880 a month, an increase legal under Arizona state law.

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema decried the increases during a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, saying Arizona’s rapidly growing housing costs have been a “major concern” of hers for years.

Nationally, Hale, the Realtor.com economist, expects rents to continue to rise this year, but at a slower pace, thanks to increased construction.

“Improving supply growth should help create more balance in the market,” said Hale, who forecasts rents to rise 7.1% in 2022.

In Miami, Guerra has started packing her belongings ahead of her March move-out date. She spent weeks frantically looking for places within her budget but said she couldn’t find anything that wasn’t “either incredibly small, incredibly broken down or an hour away from work and everyone I know.”

Her plan now is to put her things in storage and move in with her boyfriend, even though the timing isn’t ideal.

“We didn’t want to have the decision of moving in together forced upon us,” Guerra said. “We wanted it to be something we agreed to, but it’s happening before we wanted it to happen.”