It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, March 03, 2022
Who is Viktor Yushchenko? What you need to know about the former Ukrainian president
In 1919, the country became the independent state of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, but it wasn't long before it was under the rule of the Soviet Union in 1922. It would remain part of the country until it achieved independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Since then, Ukraine has had seven presidents, but as Zelenskyy faces threats from Russia, one former president, Viktor Yushchenko, has resurfaced because of former threats against him and an assassination attempt during his presidency.
Here is what to know about the third president of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko speaks to journalists after a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008.
Yushchenko was elected president of Ukraine in 2004, took office in 2005 and remained there until 2010. However, Ukraine's 2004 presidential election was anything but ordinary.
What was the Orange Revolution?
Ukraine has a two-part election system, in which if no presidential candidate gains at least 50% of votes, a runoff election will take place between the top two vote-getters.
After no one gained 50% of votes, a runoff took place between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych went on to win the runoff and the election, but the Yushchenko campaign claimed the election was rigged in favor of Yanukovych, claiming he was strongly supported by Russia and that officials there had interfered.
The claims of a rigged election by Russian interference gained traction in the country, resulting in mass protesting taking place across Ukraine. The civil protests became known as the "Orange Revolution" and gained global attention over Russia's influence in Ukraine.
The protests were successful in having a another election between the two candidates, in which Yushchenko won with 52% of votes.
Was Viktor Yushchenko poisoned?
Another factor that contributed to the "Orange Revolution" was what happened to Yushchenko during his presidential campaign.
In September 2004, Yushchenko became seriously ill, so much so that he was transported to a hospital in Vienna, Austria, suffering from intestinal issues as well as face disfigurement with jaundice and pockmarks.
Tests confirmed Yushchenko had been poisoned with dioxin, a chemical found in agent orange, according to The New York Times. Doctors said his blood dioxin level was "more than 1,000 times" normal and suggested he had eaten the poison.
"It is my growing conviction that what happened to me was an act of political reprisal against a politician in opposition. The aim, naturally, was to kill me," Yushchenko said at the time.
To this day, there is no definitive answer as to how and who poisoned Yushchenko, but many pointed to a dinner he had with Ukrainian officials who had ties with Russian officials after which he fell ill.
Contributing: Karina Zaiets and Janet Loehrke, USA TODAY
Russian sanctions risk ‘developing world debt crisis’ — not a Lehman moment
Talk of risk of another ‘Lehman moment’ from Russian sanctions is overdone, says Adam Posen, president of Peterson Institute The risks from the profound economic and financial sanctions that the West has put on Russia as a result of its invasion of Ukraine are not tantamount to another 2008 “Lehman” meltdown in financial markets, said Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on Tuesday.
The risks are akin instead to the developing nation debt crises that roiled the banking sector in the early 1980s, Posen said, in an interview with MarketWatch.
Russia is not systemically connected enough and not large enough to cause that sort of shock, according to Posen. The bankruptcy of Lehman was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and caused the Great Recession.
Russian assets are not as widely held, Posen said.
“There just aren’t that many people exposed to Russians,” Posen said. Instead, it’s worth a comparison to another country facing a financial crisis.
“I think its analogous to distress when Argentina was defaulting on the International Monetary Fund,” Posen said. Someday, the debts will be paid off in some measure but there may be a legal fight to get paid off at face value, he said.
“We all remember 2008. In this case, I don’t think it’s there. I hope I’m right,” he added.
Experts say that more than $500 billion of Russian securities have been effectively frozen due to the moves to the moves to isolate Russia.
Read: Experts see risk of a massive liquidity shock from sanctions of Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort over the past eight years to make his country’s economy sanction-proof has backfired, Posen said.
Putin’s moves to building a fortress of foreign-exchange reserves and reducing exposure to U.S. and European creditors also “cuts the other way.”
“If you make yourself too disentangled from the world economy, than the world’s governments don’t have to care that much about you. They can afford to play hardball,” he said.
Posen, a leading academic on monetary policy, was a voting external member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee from 2009 until 2012.
He said the U.S. Treasury’s decision to freeze assets of Russia’s central bank “is an extremely big step.”
The collapse of the value of the Russian ruble RUBUSD, -3.82%, the decline in Russian stocks, the rise in the cost of living will hit Russia hard.
In response, the Russian central bank is forcing people to turn over foreign exchange and not letting foreign owners get their money out.
“These are familiar from financial crisis textbooks from Latin America or Southeast Asia,” he said.
The sanctions are analogous in some ways to strategic bombing campaigns, he said, with a goal of breaking support for the Russian government.
“Ethically, it is not quite the same as bombing, but it is not that different. You’re saying women and children, you’re going to be deprived of medicines and technology and quality of life and opportunities to make a living indefinitely until your government changes,” he said.
“It is not costless,” he added.
Depending on how long the sanctions last, Russians will experience a significant rise of inflation with shortages of goods. Rents will be higher and purchasing power will fall due to the weaker currency, he said.
The Russian economy is also likely to experience a contraction in GDP growth.
Dow skids about 750 points, U.S. stocks drop sharply as Russia says it will begin attacks on Kyiv Salesforce stock options priced for much bigger than usual move reaction earnings Ukrainian activist tells Boris Johnson World War III has already started and ‘Ukrainian children [are] taking the hit’ These companies are positioned to create the first U.S. super app ‘They all promise to help’ but no financial adviser seems to offer what I need. I have two 401ks, Roth accounts and real estate, and want a one-time plan for managing my money myself. Can you help? Click Here To Get Funded!
Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.
One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)
Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.
Americans making money abroad. What’s the problem?
Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.
In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”
Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”
Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”
Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.
“We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process”
In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.
With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.
“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.
According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)
A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.
One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”
According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.
Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.
The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”
Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.
After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.
Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.
“Do us a favor”
With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.
By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.
Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.
Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.
Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:
These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.
In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.
Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”
In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Where they are now…
Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:
Paul Manafort:convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump
Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI
Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch
Rudy Giuliani:reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman:convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal
White supremacy is at the heart of U.S. war propaganda. The exhortation to ‘stand with Ukraine’ is no exception to this rule.
(Margaret Kimberley is executive editor and senior columnist of Black Agenda Report. Her commentary is part of a special edition on Ukraine by the online journal. Part of the special edition is a statement by the Black Alliance for Peace. That statement was re-published on A Socialist In Canada on March 1, here.)
Empire State bldg in New York lit in the colours of the flag of Ukraine
By now everyone knows that Ukraine’s flag is blue and yellow. It is impossible to miss as the Empire State Building in New York, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris have all been bathed in those colors. Nearly every city and town across the United States has followed suit and politicians ranging from local legislators to members of congress shout ‘Stand with Ukraine!’ at every opportunity.
Yet it must be pointed out that those blue and yellow motifs and pleas for solidarity are all about white supremacy. Ukraine is upheld as a bastion of ‘civilization’ which is supposed to put it off limits for war and suffering. The quiet part is now being spoken out loud. We are told that Ukrainians are more deserving of concern because they are Europeans.
Ukraine’s deputy chief prosecutor said as much in a BBC interview. “It is very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed…” He wasn’t alone in his assessment. An reporter at NBC was asked why Poland was willing to admit Ukrainians even as it turned away other refugees. “Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from neighboring Ukraine. That, quite frankly, is part of it. These are Christians, they are white, they’re … um… very similar to the people that live in Poland.”
CBS followed suit, “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan who has seen conflict rage for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully – city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it was going to happen.”
The narrative that only white people deserve peace and security is all the more shameful because the global south suffers from war and privation as a direct result of U.S./NATO actions. It is NATO that destroyed the nation of Libya, NATO which attempted to do the same in Syria, NATO that occupied Afghanistan, NATO which wages war across African countries with U.S., French and British troops deployed across the continent. The white world causes suffering and then says that the people of the global south are “uncivilized” with no rights that need to be respected.
A Watson Institute of Brown University study showed that more than 37 million people in North Africa, Western and Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa have been displaced by the U.S. and its allies since 2001. The humanitarian disasters begun years ago are ongoing, as refugees use the Mediterranean and even the U.S. border with Mexico as points of escape. After experiencing wars of aggression, these nations are then subjected to punishment as the United States steals Afghanistan’s assets and keeps Syria under the thumb of Caesar Sanctions. These thefts cause more suffering and even death as nations are robbed of the ability to care for their people. Who is civilized and who is not?
Ukraine has been pushed to the forefront of American thought in order to defend the imperialist foreign policy which led to the current conflict with Russia. If the blue eyed nation is suffering, it is because of U.S. and NATO arrogance and aggression. Ukraine’s current situation is a direct result of the 2014 coup engineered by the U.S. and its EU partners. An elected president was dispatched and a civil war began that has killed some 14,000 people. Ukraine is a U.S. colony with a puppet government now under military attack. Ukrainians are themselves refugees as they flee to neighboring Poland, Romania, Slovakia and other countries. It is the supposedly advanced, democratic and supposedly civilized who have created their problems.
Yet once again, bare faced racism is evident. African migrants and students in Ukraine were prohibited from boarding trains and buses that could take them to safety. A group of Jamaican students was forced to walk 20 kilometers when they were forced off of a bus en route to Poland. Africans and Jamaicans live and study all over the world because the U.S. and Europe underdevelop their nations through a variety of means. Yet Ukrainians and Poles didn’t see people in need of help. They determined that the non-blondes were not deserving of assistance.
Ironically, it is the white supremacist underpinnings of U.S./NATO foreign policy which has created all of Ukraine’s suffering. The need to dominate, to “contain” Russia and its ally China is not playing out the way they had hoped, but the Ukrainians be damned. The Minsk II agreement of 2015 which was unanimously approved in the United Nations Security Council was a roadmap to peace. Ukraine should be a neutral nation but that is the exact opposite of what its lords and masters in Washington want. The good faith negotiations that could resolve the crisis are a non-starter because NATO is a very dishonest broker.
The corporate media have joined the state in an extraordinary effort to create war propaganda. They deliberately tug at heartstrings and demand solidarity with Ukraine because the truth is very unpalatable. Instead of standing with Ukraine, Americans should stand with humanity across the world. If they did, they would be better able to understand why there are wars in Europe and elsewhere.
THIS IS THE SAME POSITION OF THE CPUSA, CPGB, CP CANADA
FOR MORE STALINIST APOLOGETICS SEE
'Manifest Violation' of UN Charter: Amnesty Decries Russia Invasion
The head of the advocacy group said that the invasion sparked "a massive human rights, humanitarian, and displacement crisis that has the makings of the worst such catastrophe in recent European history."
Secretary General of Amnesty International Agnes Callamard holds a press conference in East Jerusalem on February 1, 2022.
(Photo: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Amnesty International said Tuesday that Russia's invasion of Ukraine amounted to "a manifest violation of the United Nations Charter" and urged U.N. member states against letting Moscow "push the world closer toward an abyss of violence."
"There are long-lasting consequences from this for us all."
The statement from the human rights organization came as Russian forces continued to pummel large Ukrainian cities in a weeklong invasion that the U.N. says has already forced over 874,000 people to flee to neighboring countries.
The invasion, said Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, is singularly defined by "aggression" and "cannot remotely be justified on any of the grounds that Russia has offered."
"Yet," she continued, "all of this is being committed by a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council."
Callamard added that the invasion unleashed "a massive human rights, humanitarian, and displacement crisis that has the makings of the worst such catastrophe in recent European history," and accused Russia of "not only breaching the sovereignty of a neighbor and its people" but "also challenging the global security architecture and exploiting its frailty, including a dysfunctional U.N. Security Council."
"There are long-lasting consequences from this for us all," she said.
Amnesty further welcomed the announcement on Monday from the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecutor that his office intends to open an investigation into the situation in Ukraine given his satisfaction that "there is a reasonable basis to believe that both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed."
Neither Ukraine nor Russia is state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC. In 2015, however, Ukraine accepted the court's jurisdiction over crimes committed since 2014.
Callamard said that further steps toward "comprehensive accountability" were necessary including "concerted and innovative efforts of the U.N. and its organs, as well as initiatives at the national level pursuant to the principle of universal jurisdiction."
"Above all," she said, "we must ensure that the tragically increasing number of victims of war crimes in Ukraine hear a message that the international community is already determined to secure redress for their suffering."
Amnesty International and other humanitarian groups have already expressed grave concern about indiscriminate harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure and potential war crimes since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on February 24.
Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have documented use of cluster munitions in eastern cities of Ukraine, including in strikes that damaged a hospital and preschool.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday the U.N. General Assembly, during an emergency meeting, voted overwhelmingly in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces from within Ukraine's "internationally recognized borders" and expressing "grave concern at reports of attacks on civilian facilities such as residences, schools, and hospitals, and of civilian casualties, including women, older persons, persons with disabilities, and children."
Also on Wednesday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government called for a "thorough and unbiased" review of Russia's permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.
This article was updated to reflect the voting result of General Assembly resolution.
Analysis: Nuclear Disaster in Ukraine Could Make Swaths of Europe 'Uninhabitable for Decades'
Russia's assault on Ukraine risks nuclear devastation "far worse even than the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe of 2011," Greenpeace warns.
Pictured in this video screengrab is the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on February 26, 2022 in Pripyat, Ukraine (Photo: Russian Defence Ministry/TASS via Getty Images)
The international environmental group Greenpeace warned Wednesday that Russia's intensifying assault is placing Ukraine's nuclear power facilities under serious threat, risking devastation "far worse even than the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe of 2011."
"For the first time in history, a major war is being waged in a country with multiple nuclear reactors and thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel."
In a 12-page analysis, Greenpeace details the unique hazards posed by Russia's war on Ukraine, which maintains 15 nuclear power reactors and is home to the largest nuclear energy complex in Europe. That facility, known as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, is currently surrounded by Russian troops looking to force their way through a makeshift blockade erected Wednesday by ordinary Ukrainians.
Greenpeace's new brief argues that the Zaporizhzhia plant is especially vulnerable to an accident or attack stemming from Russia's invasion, which entered its seventh day on Wednesday with no end in sight.
Authored by a pair of Greenpeace nuclear specialists, the risk analysis notes that "there have been multiple safety issues with the Zaporizhzhia reactors over the decades, not least that these reactors are aging having been designed and built in the 1970s to the 1990s."
Greenpeace raises particular concern over the complex's susceptibility to electrical power outages, its storage of spent nuclear fuel, and risks posed by flooding given the facility's close proximity to the massive Dnipro river system. Severe damage to the plant, the group warns, could "render vast areas of the European continent, including Russia, uninhabitable for decades."
In the case of the 2011 Fukushima disaster—during which three nuclear reactors melted down and released radioactive plumes following an earthquake-induced tsunami—the Japanese facility's spent nuclear fuel did not catch fire, a near miss that scientists have said should serve as a "wake-up call" for other countries.
Greenpeace's report raises the ominous possibility that catastrophe may not be averted if the Zaporizhzhia facility is damaged in the course of Russia's assault on Ukraine, either from an accident or an intentional bombing:
The amount of spent fuel in each of the pools at the six Zaporizhzhia reactors ranges from 132 to 157 tons as of 2017, and in total 855 tons of spent fuel are in the six pools. This is the latest publicly available data we have access to. It is not possible without precise data to say what the radiological inventory is of this spent fuel, however, in our review of the scientific and technical literature of the past two decades it appears that the average fuel burn-up of the nuclear fuel used over the last 20 years at Zaporizhzhia is 44-49GWd/tHM. This is comparable, and perhaps higher, than the nuclear fuel in the pools at Fukushima Daiichi.
In the event of a loss of cooling and resultant fire in any of the spent fuel pools at Zaporizhzhia, the potential for a very large release of radioactivity would have a devastating effect not only on Ukraine but also its neighboring countries, including Russia, and potentially, depending on the weather conditions and wind directions, on a large part of Europe. Again, it should be stressed that in the event of such a catastrophic incident, the entire power plant might have to be evacuated and a cascade of similar accidents at the other five pools as well as the six reactors might take place.
To prevent such a nightmare scenario from becoming reality, Greenpeace said Russia must end its war on Ukraine.
"So long as this war continues, the military threat to Ukraine's nuclear plants will remain. This is one further reason, amongst so many, why Putin needs to immediately cease his war on Ukraine," Jan Vande Putte, a radiation protection adviser and nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia and Greenpeace Belgium, said in a statement Wednesday.
"For the first time in history, a major war is being waged in a country with multiple nuclear reactors and thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel," he continued. "The war in southern Ukraine around Zaporizhzhia puts them all at heightened risk of a severe accident."
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Russians Fire on Ukraine Civilians Blocking Road to Nuclear Plant
"More unbelievable bravery from everyday Ukrainian citizens," responded one journalist.
Video footage shows Ukrainian residents gathered in a street near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on March 2, 2022.
Video footage from the ground Wednesday showed Russian forces firing on ordinary Ukrainians who were blocking a road with their bodies and makeshift barricades in the town of Enerhodar in an effort to prevent Russian troops from advancing on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power facility in all of Europe.
Earlier footage posted on social media and circulated by news outlets showed hundreds of residents and plant employees rallying in the street in the eastern Ukraine town in a show of defiance as Russian troops reportedly seized control of the territory surrounding the Zaporizhzhia complex, which contains six of Ukraine's 15 nuclear energy reactors.
"More unbelievable bravery from everyday Ukrainian citizens," journalist Kyle Glen wrote on Twitter. "The road into the town of Energodar, which contains Europe's largest nuclear power plant, is blocked by vehicles and people."
The attempt to prevent Russian troops from overtaking the Zaporizhzhia plant was just one of many acts of resistance carried out by ordinary Ukrainians across the country in recent days as Russia's military intensified its ground and air assault, bombarding densely populated cities and moving on the nation's capital Kyiv.
As The Daily Beast reported Tuesday, "A video posted to TikTok shows a crowd of civilians armed only with a few Ukrainian flags go after a Russian vehicle invading their town."
"A caption on the video claims it was recorded in Kupyansk, in Kharkiv oblast in the northeast of the country, although the location could not be verified," the outlet noted. "What is clear from the extraordinary footage is that a group of five Ukrainians spot a Russian SUV attempting to drive down their street and they race to block it off. The vehicle is forced to slow down and around 20 men and women, some carrying Ukrainian flags, risk their lives by swarming around the vehicle. One man climbs onto the hood and attempts to kick out the windshield before the Russians make a hasty exit."
Other video clips posted to social media show Ukrainian residents trying to slow the advance of Russian tanks:
The Ukrainian effort to blockade Zaporizhzhia came amid growing concerns of nuclear disaster as Russia continues to ramp up its deadly bombing campaign, potentially putting Ukraine's nuclear reactors in the line of fire.
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the Ukrainian government warned that radiation near the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant "exceeded" control levels.
In a statement Wednesday, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that "any military or other action that could threaten the safety or security of Ukraine's nuclear power plants must be avoided."
"Operating staff must be able to fulfill their safety and security duties and have the capacity to make decisions free of undue pressure," said IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi. "The IAEA continues to closely monitor developments in Ukraine, with a special focus on the safety and security of its nuclear power reactors."
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Atomic vs. Nuclear Bombs: Which Are More Dangerous?
Jay Bennett
POP MECH Wed, March 2, 2022, Photo credit: FPG - Getty Images
The “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II are the only nuclear weapons used in warfare ... so far.
But that could soon change—in a February address to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin provided a thinly veiled threat of nuclear warfare against the West.
The atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II—codenamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively—caused widespread destruction, leveled cities, and killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people in Hiroshima (about 20,000 of which were soldiers), and between 39,000 and 80,000 in Nagasaki.
These are the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, to date, and let’s hope it stays that way—because some of the nuclear weapons today are over 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And there are new fears, stoked by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could deploy nuclear weapons against the West. During a February 24 address to Moscow, Putin warned other countries that any attempt to intervene would lead to “consequences you have never seen,” which has been interpreted as a veiled threat of nuclear warfare.
Let's return to the history of atomic weapons. The Little Boy and the Fat Man were atomic bombs, or fission bombs, which set off a chain reaction of nuclear fission. The atomic nuclei of radioactive materials were split to create different elements, which releases a large amount of energy, splitting more atoms as a result and producing a destructive explosion.
In the Little Boy, a bullet-like projectile made of uranium-235 was fired at a core of the same substance to set off the chain reaction. The Fat Man, on the other hand, used a core of plutonium-239 that was ignited with thousands of pounds of conventional explosives, again setting off a chain reaction of nuclear fission.
In a thermonuclear weapon, often called a hydrogen bomb, the fission process is only the beginning. Modern nuclear weapons, such as the United States’ B83 bombs, use a similar fission process to what is used in atomic bombs. But that initial energy then ignites a fusion reaction in a secondary core of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The nuclei of the hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and again a chain reaction results in an explosion—this time a much more powerful one.
As the above video from YouTube channel RealLifeLore illustrates, the blast from the Little Boy released about 15 kilotons of energy, equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, and sent a mushroom cloud up to about 25,000 feet. The Fat Man produced an explosion of about 21 kilotons. The B83? 1.2 megatons, equaling 1,200,000 tons of TNT, making it 80 times more powerful than the Little Boy.
It gets even more terrifying than that. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, set off by the Soviet Union in 1961, produced an insane 50-megaton blast—about 3,333 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb that leveled an entire city. The Tsar Bomba is the largest manmade explosion to date, sending a mushroom cloud up to more than 130,000 feet in altitude—about 4.5 times the height of Mount Everest—as it sent shockwaves around the globe three times over.
Curious to see how you’d fare in the event that a nuclear bomb were dropped on a big city near you? NUKEMAP, created by Alex Wellerstein, charts out the impacts of a nuclear blast on cities around the world. (It also maps out the waste laid by historic nuclear blasts such as the Trinity blast in New Mexico in 1945, and that 1961 Tsar Bomba blast in Novaya Zemlya, Russia.)
If we wanted to, we could build a bomb even more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. But maybe it’s time we start looking to use nuclear fusion for something else. How about a six-month round-trip to Mars instead?
Climate Movement Announces Global Rallies to Demand End of War in Ukraine
One climate activist in Ukraine called for people to take part in demonstrations "in support of peace everywhere without fossil fuels." Climate activist Luisa Neubauer turns around after her speech at a demonstration under the slogan "Stop the war! Peace for Ukraine and all of Europe" against the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 27, 2022, in Berlin.
(Photo: Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Youth climate movement Fridays for Future announced Wednesday a series of global solidarity strikes to demand an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and denounce fossil fuel-based economic systems they say lead to such wars.
The first such strikes are slated to take place Thursday, March 3, and have already been scheduled in over 50 cities from Warsaw, Poland to Abuja, Nigeria to Washington, D.C.
The announcement follows a plea on Tuesday from the Ukraine arm of Fridays for Future urging fellow climate activists and others opposed to the war to hit the streets Thursday to "fight for peace in our name."
In their Wednesday statement, the global group linked Russian President Vladimir Putin's current attack with the planetary crisis.
"Fossil fuel capitalism is one of the roots of this war, financing Putin's invasion, and many other conflicts and crises around the world," the group said. "That is why, during the next few weeks, we also want to call out the era of fossil fuel, capitalism, and imperialism that allows these systemic oppressions."
"We are at a critical moment," the group said, when "political leaders can take the side of people or of money, greed, and the fossil fuel industry."
Global leaders, they added, must "stop financing Putin's whims, and end the import of oil, coal, and gas from Russia" including by fully pulling the plug on the Nord Stream 2, which is set to transport Russian gas to Europe through a Baltic Sea pipeline.
In a video shared on Twitter Wednesday, Ilyess El Kortbi of Fridays for Future Ukraine echoed the group's earlier statement, saying that "we the activists are usually fighting against a climate crisis we didn't create" but "now we are in a war fueled by fossil fuels. These wars are wars for resources we no longer need."
El Kortbi called upon global activists to take part in actions Thursday "in support of peace everywhere without fossil fuels."
The planned demonstrations drew strong support from Fridays for Future Russia.
"All wars are battles for resources, including this one in Ukraine," the Russian group said. "Putin is trying to keep the status quo in which petroleum rules, but the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end."
"Societies that depend on fossil fuels provided by autocrats cannot be safe," they said, and called for "international political mobilization. Everyone worldwide should take a stand against war. There's no such thing as neutrality in war."
Antiwar activists have taken part in demonstrations in cities across the globe, including within Russia, to denounce the invasion since it began February 24.
