Looking At Russia-Ukraine Is Like Thinking About The Still-Missing Malaysian MH370 Airplane: Who Has The Truth? – Essay

 March 7, 2022 

By Dr. Azly Rahma

Last week I wrote these notes as I was thinking of the world, in preparation for a lecture on Sustainability, Human Rights, and Peace and Justice.  I wanted to also read the mind of political journalists as they take sides reporting, as they interrogate their subjectivities, question their biases, and acknowledge their human-ness and their idea of “what-am-I-objective-against?”, and as their stories paid by the pied piper residing in corporations or the State. Unless they have their own forum independent of these controls, and they answer only to their souls.

So, my notes are essentially philosophical and in the next section, I present the Marxist dimension of writing, the “cui-bono” (who-benefits?) notion, and how as a case study can be applied to the still-missing Malaysian airline MH370.

Random Notes on Ukraine

WE CAN NEVER KNOW the truth about Russia-Ukraine. Who is right? Or wrong. Truth: We can only take sides based on what is told.

IF EUROPE SENDS PEOPLE to fight in Ukraine, it will be a bloody mess. Prelude to World War III. Putin knows Machiavelli well.

LEARN TO ANALYZE ISSUES like blind men and an elephant. Only this time the eyes of the blind are now wide open. Kaleidoscopic.

“TRUTH” How we construct this depends on the method we use. Truth and Method. How we see things depends on how we view ourselves.

TRUTH. One cannot see God, therefore use metaphors, personification, semiotics of representation. Creations abound, hence.

TRUTH. Sociological paradigms – Structural Functionalism, Critical Theory, Symbolic Interactionism. Now limiting. Need new way.

TRUTH. All the more subjective now. Post-truth. Pseudo-truth. New versions emerge. TRUTH is personal, elusive.

TRUTH. We live by metaphors. Organizations by those too. Cultural perspectives matter in seeing through “truth”.

TRUTH. Invasion of Ukraine might not be an invasion after all. From multivariate-alternate perspective.

TRUTH. In an age of everchanging complexity of media and production of its artifacts of perception-crafting, truth disappears.

TRUTH. What matters existentially, is the truth of one’s existence & how psycho-socio-neurology within functions in crafting truth.

TRUTH. In the life of our mind, why must we consume other people’s truth — about religion, God, politics, fate and free will?

TRUTH? Not just a concept ideologized, but production of consciousness-manipulating neurons that become us.

TRUTH? We are truth within ourselves. Unto us. But necessary to step outside of this realm to see the truth from a vantage point.

TRUTH. Not a question of “what is REALITY”. Rather, how real is real? A philosophical theme of inquiry.

TRUTH. Platonic Theory of Forms attempts to illuminate the truth and perception and reality problematique.

TRUTH. Of the religious scriptures. Are they alive? Or words read to be made alive? Hence, “living words”? Complex notion.

TRUTH. Do we read the world? Or let the world read and write us, inscribing our consciousness with externalities of “truth”?

TRUTH. Is reality. Is language. Is consciousness. These are complex concepts in themselves. Hence the existential issue of language.

Still, where is MH370 – the Malaysian airplane?

Towards looking at Ukraine I remember what I wrote on Malaysia’s missing airplane.

The following is based on a minor-edited version of my analysis:

Thinking of the still-missing Malaysian airplane, contemplating on a Marxist theory of informational diffusion, I came up with these random notes on media oligopoly I am sharing in this week’s column:

Information wants to be free and wishes to leave the shackle of control and the kingdom of officialdom.

Marx once said that whoever owns the means of production owns/controls (re: Vladimir Lenin’s classic essay on ‘commanding heights’,) and control the production of consciousness, and further controls the evolution of the act of knowing and the contents of what is to be known because what is known is produced as artifacts with politics of control structuring them.

CNN, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Time-Warner AOL, and media corporations controls the production of what is to be known, albeit appearing to be producing “objectivity” hidden under the shibboleth of “liberal-democracy” whilst in essence governed by the hegemony of the tightly-controlled news and informational oligarchic empire of consciousness-production.

This might sound like a (Noam) Chomskyian analysis of the post-modern, post-information age paradigm of media production re: the reporting of the missing MH370. It could as well be a Chomskyian view in need of a further work of deconstructionism.

There are classes of control of knowledge-production and those producing information in the ongoing reporting of MH370.

Level 1:

Those who know the whereabouts of the aircraft, such as leaders of the game, such as presidents and prime ministers playing the role of ‘chief-of-staff of armed forces’, etc. in collaboration with the warrior-commander-Kshatriya class and the most elite of the intelligence unit and working in tandem and alliance with military and supra-intelligence allies, the secret must be kept (from Edward Snowden or Julian Assange) as long as the national and international security is safeguarded – the plot must be kept intact and the show must go on…

Level 2:

Those who know the “unsealed part of the story” will be playing the role of making sure the world and the public know what’s happening, in the name of freedom to know and freedom to profit from conflict or even the manufacture of conflict. The philosophy of news reporting is simple: live and breathe the paradigm of liberal-capitalist informational democracy through sound-bite and blitzkrieg- technologies of cognitive dissonance and funnel in as much as possible issues versus non-issues and speculations and half-truths to feed the four-eyed viewers who are starved for information and drowned in speculations.

That’s the role of the media, whether in America or in Malaysia. The longer one gets glued to the TV, the higher the ratings, the more big advertisers will pour in money.

But the media will only be allowed to view a certain amount of secrecy.

CNN will not talk about speculations that the US government and its media and military ideological apparatuses know what is happening and perhaps instead the focus will be on the incompetency (rightly so…) of the Malaysian government in handling this with her bumbling and fumbling technology and techniques of handling security (again, rightly so… with all these flip-flops, contradictory statements, and true-false vacillation of official reporting, and those elusive and informational-hide-and-seek-and-peekaboo type of reporting we hear since day one of the mystery unfolding.

That’s what the media is good at and will profit from. To report on speculations that the army or the government is perhaps involved in a huge cover-up will not be good – it will mean a media kamikaze of epic instant death proportions.

CNN will report on the human side of the story, bringing in expert after expert, lullabying viewers with a thesis-antithesis-synthesis fiesta of media party and focus on by the minute day-to-day coverage of the search for an object in many vast oceanic haystacks… the rescuers and commanders of the search and rescue and recovery team do not have access to the “sealed information” on what actually happened and what is still happening

The sealed information lies with those in Level 1 above. Those searching are committed to their search and doing their job for the country and for the family and in the name of solving a most mind-boggling mystery (although Google Earth can photograph your car’s plate number from outer space).

From the point of view of revenue generation, the longer the search, the more each team can charge the Malaysian government. As of today (when this article was written) the United States has spent an equivalent of perhaps US$5 million to be billed to the Malaysian government sooner or later.

Level 3:

Of the owners of knowledge of what happened to MH370 are the classes of people who had consumed the information produced by those in Level 2.

In essence, there is both chaos and structure, and complexity and simplicity in the way we understand the kaleidoscopic and fractal nature of informational flow.

And who would Marx pronounce as the winner in this informational war, a Mahabharata of media mayhem of the construction of reality?

Not human beings. But technology. Media technology. Manipulated by the Military-Industrial Complex. The Frankenstein of our Orwellian World of 1984 inhabited by members of the Animal Farm.

Welcome to our global village.

***

That was my Chaos Theory-inspired analysis of the missing airplane.

How do we look at the Russian-Ukraine issue then?  

In other words, as an educator teaching about global issues, do I take sides when the information will never be enough for me to have an informed opinion, and that my job is to make my students think and teach them how to think and not what to think, as the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey would suggest – how do I do this while still remain a human being with philosophical sensibilities as exemplified by the questions I had at the beginning of this writing?

Herein lie the idea of teaching students how to “look at a butterfly” flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle some 100 years ago, and using scientific thinking discern the nature of global issues and world politics, taking into consideration the kaleidoscopic, multidimensional, fractal-geometric nature of events unfolding and how these have their origins which have origins and origins ad nauseum!

I suppose that is how we ought to look at the Russian-Ukraine issue and explore alternate and multivariate perspectives. From the philosophical, ideological, political-economic, strategic, leader-ego-centric, and of course geopolitical-strategic issues. Complex interlocking-directorateship of ideas we need to untangle and yet we will never find the right answer. We can only accept ones that will be comforting to us.

Could this be the reason why the United States primarily have not decided to declare war on Russia and instead, in the meantime plan to beef up NATO with arms (as a lucrative business of the US military-industrial-complex) and to be fair, to avoid a situation as such as Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis?

I don’t know. As Socrates would say.

Because Vladimir Putin is a realist.

As real as the literary approaches of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn.

As real as Lenin.

And Stalin.

Dr. Azly Rahman is an academician, educator, international columnist, and author of nine books He holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in international education development and Master's degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies, communication, fiction, and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Columbia University chapter of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. More writings here. His latest book, a memoir, is published by Penguin Books is available here.

THUMBNAIL Malaysia's MH370 in 2011 photo by Laurent ERRERA, Wikipedia Commons.

In Odesa, opera singers and perfumers seek to defend city from Russian destruction

MARCH 7, 2022

Volunteers in the city of Odessa, on March 6.

IGOR TKACHENKO/

The opera singers are filling sandbags from Odesa’s famed beaches, the local yacht club director is organizing deliveries of barbed wire and a perfumer is cleaning out shops of leftover Soviet fabric to use for bulletproof vests.
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Odesa, the city whose grand edifices on the Black Sea stand as a cosmopolitan testament to Viennese, Italian and Russian architects, has been largely spared from the aerial bombardments and artillery attacks that have turned streets in other Ukrainian cities to rubble.

But on Sunday, the lengthy wail of air raid sirens was followed by an announcement from the military that it had shot down a Russian aircraft near the city – and, then, a grim warning from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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“They are preparing to bombard Odesa,” Mr. Zelensky said. Such an act, he warned, would constitute not just a war crime, but a crime against history. Odesa has long been revered by Russians, built on land seized from the Turks by Catherine the Great, with cobblestone streets once frequented by Alexander Pushkin and sweeping beaches that have long drawn legions of Russian tourists.

Before troops under Russian President Vladimir Putin began a campaign that has destroyed Ukrainian cities, few believed it was possible for invading forces to desecrate Odesa. Mr. Putin, they believed, would not dare sully what was once a jewel of the Russian empire.

Now, such an outcome is taken as a given.

Russian troops have already ruined much of Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine.

“It’s also a Russian-speaking city and beloved by Russians – and we see that it has just been wiped from the Earth,” said Albert Kabakov, director of the Black Sea Yacht Club. “I’m sure,” he said, that Mr. Putin is prepared to do the same to Odesa.

Russian warships and landing craft already came so close to the city last Thursday that they were visible to anyone with a view of the sea, a tangible portent of doom.

And so Odesans have spent days in feverish preparation, an effort that has swept together people from all walks of life.

Shortly after the Feb. 24 missile strikes that marked the beginning of war, Mr. Kabakov started co-ordinating an effort to stuff the city’s sandy beaches into bags. For more than a week, volunteers have descended on the shoreline, some bringing supplies, others offering hot meals – and many more lending their backs to the manufacture of 300,000 sandbags.

Still others brought their own vehicles – BMW X5s, semi-trucks and many others – to ferry the sandbags to some of the city’s most treasured places. Mr. Kabakov has also organized deliveries of barbed wire and concrete blocks to places that need fortifications. Beaches that could prove attractive landing sites have been mined.

And large protective embankments of sandbags and anti-tank “hedgehog” defenses have now been installed at the Odesa National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, on Derybasivska Street – the pedestrian walkway that forms the heart of the city – and around monuments to Catherine the Great and the Duke of Richelieu.

“I would be ready to work for even 100 days to protect our city,” said Andrey Harlamov, a bass soloist at the opera house. For more than a week, he has worked at the beach from early morning until sunset, alongside other of the city’s cultural elite: four opera soloists, two ballet dancers, two philharmonic musicians and four conservatory professors.

As they worked, they sang, pausing several times a day to sing the triumphal verses of the national anthem – “Ukraine is not yet dead, nor its glory and freedom” – in the direction of others filling sandbags to defend the city.

“When our hands got sore, we tried to work a little more,” Mr. Harlamov said. He had a particularly personal reason to contribute.

In a city whose performers bring to the stage works by Gogol, Chekhov and Rossini, the opera house is a rococo masterpiece. It is a place so cherished that, shortly after Soviet troops drove the Nazis from Odesa, Nikita Khrushchev, then a political commissar responsible for Ukraine, flew to the city to inspect the damage. His immediate priority was to see the local Communist Party headquarters and find out “whether the Odesa opera building was still all right,” he wrote in his memoirs. He was relieved to discover that “only one corner of the building had been damaged.”

Volunteers fill sandbags to build barricades.

IGOR TKACHENKO/Reuters

Nearly 80 years later, “it would be a great tragedy if something happened to the theater,” Mr. Harlamov said – this time at the hand of Russian troops. “I would be torn apart if that happened.”

As the singers have bagged sand, Dmitry Milyutin, a seller of luxury perfumes, has poured nearly $35,000 of his own funds into equipping local civilians who have joined Territorial Defense Forces. He has bought half of a store’s supplies of uniforms, 15 tonnes of scrap metal to fashion hedgehog defenses and more than a kilometer of olive-green, Soviet-made fabric to give people sewing bulletproof vests.

On Sunday, he opened his perfume store as well, taking the revenue from what few sales he could make to fund more purchases. Selling fragrances in wartime, he said, is not new. During the Second World War, people continued to buy the Soviet-made Red Moscow perfume.

And the need for more war provisions is great: Every Territorial Defense checkstop needs to be equipped much like a house – from food to plates to toilets.

“My task is to help the Territorial Defense meet the enemy on land,” he said. But, he acknowledged that, “from the skies we are not protected at all. If they use missiles and bombs, we may as well be naked.”

Yet even as Odesa contemplates a coming hail of destruction, Mr. Milyutin took comfort in the city’s “spirit of resistance. Everyone is trying to do everything they can,” he said.

“What’s important is to say that we no longer feel fear,” he added. “That means we have already won.”

Members of the Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater sing the Ukrainian national anthem while volunteers fill sandbags for use in defensive positions in the city preparing for a Russian attack. President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that Russia is preparing to bombard Odesa.

1. Search Result - pictures.reuters.com

   https://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2C0FQEY7...

   Volunteers fill sandbags to build barricades during Ukraine-Russia conflict, in the city of Odessa, Ukraine March 6, 2022. REUTERS/Igor Tkachenko REUTERS/Igor Tkachenko 

More than 4,300 detained at 

anti-war protests in Russia

Sun., March 6, 2022, 

STORY: Police detained more than 4,300 people across Russia on Sunday at protests against President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

That's according to an independent protest monitoring group, which said it had documented the detention of at least 4,366 people in 56 different cities across the country.

Video obtained by Reuters showed dozens of protesters in Yekaterinburg being detained on Sunday, and one protester there was shown being beaten with a baton and kicked on the ground by police in riot gear.

The video showed numerous protesters, some elderly, being escorted onto buses by security forces.

Russia's interior ministry said earlier that police had detained around 3,500 people, including 1,700 in Moscow, 750 in St. Petersburg and 1,061 in other cities.

The interior ministry said 5,200 people had taken part in the protests.

Some Russian state-controlled media carried short reports about Sunday's protests but they did not feature high in news bulletins.

The last Russian protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he was arrested upon returning from Germany where he had been recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent.

Navalny had called for anti-war protests on Sunday across Russia and the rest of the world.

Protesters gathered at Parliament Square in London on Sunday, and outside the White House in Washington D.C., as well as in Mexico City, New Delhi, Istanbul, Budapest, Belgrade and Brussels.

And residents of some Ukrainian towns and cities occupied by Russian forces also took to the streets in protest.

 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscores Putin’s long-held goals

\

Mar 6, 2022 
By — PBS NewsHour Weekend

President Vladimir Putin has long believed that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a mistake and that Ukraine is not a ‘legitimate country’. Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what the invasion reveals about Putin’s goals in the region, autocratic attitudes and the world order.

Read the Full Transcript


Hari Sreenivasan:

Well, there's a lot of speculation on what causes Putin to do one thing or another. What can we know about the state of the world and the balance of power from what has already happened, that's not speculative?


Anne Applebaum:

Actually, we know a lot about Putin. We know a lot about how he thinks and we know what his goals are because he's told us and he's told us over and over again over many years. He has told us that he believes the destruction of the Soviet Union was a terrible mistake and a disaster. He's told us that he thinks democracy activism and democracy movements of the kind we've seen in Russia and Ukraine and elsewhere around the world are fake. He thinks they're an element of a tool of Western foreign policy. They're not authentic. And we know that he thinks Ukraine is not a real country, that it's a fake state that needs to be dismantled and it should be part of Russia. And all of those things together should help us understand both what he's doing right now and also what his goals are. His goal is the elimination of the Ukrainian state. His goal is to push back and if he can, to dismantle democracy and democratic activism in his immediate area and then if he can, elsewhere as well. We know that he wants NATO broken up. He wants the European Union broken up. And he wants to retake the territories that Russia, as he sees it, as Russia lost in the early 1990s. So I don't think his goals are that mysterious at all.


Hari Sreenivasan:

But what do you think a level of success would be for Putin or has this already been a success?


Anne Applebaum:

Putin has already said that success for him is the occupation of Ukraine, which in fact means the death of many millions of people because the occupation of Ukraine will require the slaughter of many Ukrainians.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Does he stop at Ukraine?


Anne Applebaum:

I doubt very much that Putin will stop at Ukraine if he manages to conquer Ukraine, which is, of course, not a not a foregone conclusion. In his view, he will continue to see provocations to his occupation from the countries around Ukraine, from Poland, from Romania, from the Baltic states. And he will continue to perceive Western support for Ukraine, you know, in Germany, in France, in Britain and the United States as an ongoing threat to him personally and to his power. So no, I don't think he stops in Ukraine.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Does this empower other, well, dictators or authoritarians?


Anne Applebaum:

Other authoritarians are watching Putin very closely right now. They're watching his reaction to sanctions. They're watching his reaction to NATO, NATO assistance or NATO country rather, assistance to Ukraine. And they're going to watch very carefully how the West deals with this because they're going to take that as a as a sign for how the West would deal with similar assaults and similar attempts to change borders or to occupied territories in the future. So I do think one of the reasons why the Biden administration has been as forthright as it has been about this, about the Russian invasion is that it knows this is an example. It knows that autocracies now work together. They watch one another, they copy one another. And what happens here will will have ramifications all over the world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Do you see kind of a realignment of global power?


Anne Applebaum:

I don't think what we're seeing right now is so much a realignment of global power as rather a realization that autocracy the autocracies because they often work together are genuinely dangerous to democratic states. So it's, you know, the corruption and kleptocracy in Russia, in China are just confined to Russia and China. They can also infect our societies. They can undermine our political systems and the violence that's encouraged by by a Putin or by a XI and the violence that they use against their own people won't necessarily stay contained inside those countries that eventually it can be turned outwards towards others and maybe even eventually towards the United States or towards our other allies in the world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

The economic sanctions, the raft of different measures in so many countries have been taking and the pressure that's been applied to Russia militarily, there is the opposition inside Ukraine. But we don't have the entire world sending troops on the ground to try to battle in these cities street by street.


Anne Applebaum:

The rationale behind the economic sanctions is that they should force the Russian leadership to change course, that they will be harsh enough this time and they are very harsh this time. They will be harsh enough to make them think twice and withdraw their troops. Whether that will happen and how that will happen, nobody can really say right now. Putin continues to repeat that his goal is to conquer Ukraine. In other words, it's not just about a little bit of territory, it's about changing the regime in Kyiv. He keeps repeating that if he sticks to that as his goal, then it will be very hard for even economic sanctions to make him change. Much depends on what people around him say. Much depends on what conclusions he can draw from the events of the next days and weeks as the Russian economy begins to contract and his businesses leave the country. The hope is that this will help him change his mind. But of course, we can't guarantee that people.


Hari Sreenivasan:

People are watching this war unfold in real time on social media in a way that we haven't experienced before. And I wonder what that does to our perceptions of international institutions like NATO or like a United Nations, because most people watching this just want the killing to stop. And they wonder, Well, why aren't these international organizations able to exert some sort of power?


Anne Applebaum:

In fact, there was a kind of dress rehearsal for this war in Syria. The Syrian war was also possible to follow on social media. People were also tweeting from inside the rubble of buildings and and when they were under attack, there were enormous number of video that was sent out from Syria. Most of it had relatively little impact. It didn't cause international organizations to galvanize. It didn't create any alliances. And I think actually the Russians learned from that or thought they'd learn from it that there would be no Western response this time, either. A lot of things are different this time. The lines for many people are clearer. The story it makes more sense and the way in which the Ukrainians have learned to use social media, I think has galvanized people more than in the past. But yes, I am one of the things that I hope that the social media presence of the Ukrainians will do is remind people of the realities. You know, look, we live in a world in which brutal, vicious countries are seeking to conquer innocent neighbors. And it will make people wonder, So why can't international organizations do something? Maybe there's something wrong with them. Of course, there is something wrong with them, and it's time that we face up to that.


Hari Sreenivasan:

In a recent column, you said that our assumptions about the world were unsustainable. What did you mean by that?


Anne Applebaum:

For 70 years, more than 70 years, we have assumed that it is impossible for a European country to change its borders by force, to invade a neighbor, you know, for a large country to gobble up a small country that that just couldn't happen anymore, that we disinvested that kind of conflict. We haven't disinvented it. You know, actually, Russia has made clear for some years that it believes that kind of conflict is possible. I do hope that this moment causes us to reflect, to rethink our international institutions and to rethink our military arrangements so that we can be prepared for this new world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Anne Applebaum, thanks so much for joining us.


Anne Applebaum:

Thanks so much.

Japan Inc feels the heat over Russia ties as rivals shun Moscow

Sun, March 6, 2022
By Yuka Obayashi, Maki Shiraki and Yoshifumi Takemoto

TOKYO, March 7 (Reuters) - Japanese firms are under deepening pressure over their ties to Russia and are scrambling to assess their operations, company and government insiders say, after Western rivals halted businesses and condemned Moscow for invading Ukraine.

While environmental, social and governance (ESG) investors have previously targeted Japan Inc for use fossil fuels, scrutiny over Russia could become intense. Executives say privately they are worried about reputational damage, a sign corporate Japan is - however reluctantly - becoming more responsive to pressure on social issues.

Japan's trading houses, commodities giants long seen as quasi-governmental arms integral to Japan's energy supply, have big ties to Russia. Last year Russia was Japan's second-biggest supplier of thermal coal and its fifth-largest of both crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

"The energy issue has implications for national and public interest, so it has to be discussed properly with the government," said one trading house insider, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity.

"But we also have to think about our corporate value and about how we explain this to our shareholders. It's a difficult position."

Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi Corp have stakes in the giant Sakhalin-2 LNG project Shell is now exiting. Itochu Corp and Marubeni Corp have invested in the Sakhalin-1 oil project that Exxon Mobil is pulling out of.

Mitsui and Mitsubishi said they would consider the situation, together with the Japanese government and partners. Itochu and Marubeni declined to comment on their plans related to Sakhalin-1.

Japanese firms have largely said they are watching the situation. Those that have halted activity have tended to cite supply-chain disruption rather than human rights.

A senior executive at an automaker said management at his company was holding daily meetings to gauge the impact of financial sanctions and the implication for parts supply.

"We're also discussing reputational risk and how to deal with the news from the point of view of human rights and ESG - of course we're aware of that," said the executive.

"But we can't just immediately decide we're going to pull out because we can't tell how long the Ukraine crisis will continue."

Japanese firms typically do not face the same level of scrutiny from shareholders, customers, regulators and even their own employees that Western companies now confront, said Jana Jevcakova, the international head of ESG at shareholder services firm Morrow Sodali.

"Most Japanese companies still don't have a majority of international institutional investors. Those that do will very shortly, or already are, feel the pressure."

RELIANT ON RUSSIA

A manufacturing executive said his company felt a responsibility to local staff in Russia but was also concerned about the risk of saying nothing.

"Japanese companies have been slow to react. Too slow. And I can't agree with that," he said. "If we keep quiet and just continue manufacturing and selling, we will likely face a risk to our reputation."

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has unveiled steps to help cushion the blow from higher oil prices, but it is unclear what the government will do about broader dependence on Russia. Japan's imports from Russia totalled around $11 billion in 2020.

Government officials say privately Japan cannot just walk away from Russian energy, even as they acknowledge the peril.

"If Japan remains invested in Russia, that itself runs the risk of drawing criticism" should the conflict be prolonged, said an official close to Kishida.

In a moment of rare outspokenness for the leader of a state-owned lender, the head of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation said last week that "it would not be right" for companies to stick to business as usual in Russia. Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co have stopped exports to Russia, citing logistics issues, with Toyota halting local production.

Nissan, Mazda Motor Corp and Mitsubishi Motors Corp are all likely to stop local production when parts inventories run out, they say.

Japan's most prominent companies will likely feel more heat as Western investors themselves pare back ties to Russia.

"We believe good corporate citizenship includes support of governmental sanctions, as well as closing down activities that might fall outside the current sanctions," said Anders Schelde, chief investment officer at Danish pension fund AkademikerPension, which has $21.3 billion of assets under management and $342 million exposure to Japanese equities.

"From a financial point of view this might mean companies suffer short-term losses, but given the long-term stigmatisation of Russia that is likely, the long-term cost will not change much." (Reporting by Yoshifumi Takemoto, Yuka Obayashi and Maki Shiraki; Additional reporting by Nobuhiro Kubo and David Dolan; Editing by William Mallard)

SOUTH AFRICA

WAR IN EUROPE OP-ED
Cries of pain and anguish — why the ANC is on the wrong side of history over Ukraine
Nicholas Rutherford (23) from Johannesburg demonstrates in front of the Russian Embassy in Pretoria on 3 March 2022 with the group Picket for Peace against the war in Ukraine. The Sunflower is Ukraine's national flower.

 (Photo: Gallo Images / Beeld / Deaan Vivier)

By Ray Hartley and Greg Mills
06 Mar 2022 

The ANC, having returned to its Russian lodestar, faces a second rude awakening. This time it is not the Berlin Wall falling, so much as the free world erecting a wall of isolation around Russia — a Berlin Wall in reverse, this time insulating the West against Putin’s excesses.

Thirty-five countries voted to abstain in the recent United Nations vote condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Five predictably voted against: Russia, Syria, Eritrea, Belarus and North Korea. Of the remainder, 141 voted to adopt the resolution with the demand for the Russian Federation to cease all military activity in Ukraine and withdraw its forces.

South Africa was among a minority (17) of African countries that abstained, with 28 African countries voting in favour of the resolution. The Department of International Relations and Cooperation had issued a statement that seemed to reflect the country’s place in the democratic world when it called on Russia to withdraw. But this statement was rolled back and the decision to abstain was made. Why was this the case?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin may have thought that the invasion would go quickly, the Ukrainian leadership would immediately capitulate and flee and that he would force the Europeans to accept his will

.

People protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine at North Beach, Durban on 6 March 2022. Protests have erupted around the world, with thousands of people taking to the streets in support of Ukraine. 

(Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart)

Such a scenario would have allowed him to quickly cement the narrative he was peddling that he was embarking on a “special operation” to secure the contested regions of Donbas, and the world would probably have disapproved but moved on as it did when he annexed Crimea in 2014.


But things didn’t go his way. Meeting fierce, organised resistance he became bogged down and began resorting to the Russian tactics used in Chechnya, of bombarding civilians into submission. The images of the terror unleashed on Ukrainian cities and of the hundreds of thousands who fled to neighbouring countries quickly turned the narrative against Putin.

It became apparent that the Ukrainians were going to stay and fight it out, and that Europe — led by the countries that abut Ukraine — had found its spine. Even if there was an asymmetry of military capabilities (in favour of Russia), there was an asymmetry of will (in favour of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine). It could no longer be denied that Putin was using military force to undermine a sovereign, democratic country and the world responded with an unprecedented campaign of financial, industrial, cultural and sporting isolation.

Putin, it was clear, was on the wrong side of history.

It was clear that the free world — countries where democracy and sovereignty were cherished — stood against Putin’s aggression and the reasons for voting in favour of the UN resolution calling on him to cease prosecuting the war were many. Among them:
Putin had clearly broken international law and invaded a neighbouring state. This is a bad precedent, especially in Africa where colonialism has left a legacy of contested borders.
Unless Putin withdraws, there will be ongoing conflict in Ukraine for many years, with the potential to spill over into other parts of Europe.
Human rights have clearly been abused, with well-documented attacks on civilian homes, schools, universities and public squares using cluster munitions, missiles and artillery.
There is a need to put pressure, not reduce it, to achieve negotiations, just as was done in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ukraine is a democracy; Russia is not.

Yet, despite all of this, South Africa, a democratic country that favours peace and believes in the sovereignty of nations, chose to abstain. The answer lies in the ANC’s historical relationship with Russia.

Members of the Territorial Defence Forces stand guard at a checkpoint in the eastern frontline of the Kyiv region, Ukraine on 5 March 2022. 

(Photo: EPA-EFE / Roman Pilipey)

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union was dissolved over the next several years, the ANC and the SA Communist Party were deeply affected. For decades the Soviet Union had supported liberation movements such as the ANC with education, military training and political support.

The Soviet Union lent materiel to the liberation movement. But it did far more than that. It was a major global superpower that stood at the head of the “progressive forces” for national liberation and socialism against the “West” and capitalism, viewed as an iniquitous and exploitative system to ultimately be overthrown.

Many of the ANC’s leading exiles studied in the Soviet Union or its Eastern European satellites and believed themselves to be part of a global movement for progressive change. They no doubt saw themselves as one day presiding over a South Africa with a command economy in which a powerful state would see to it that all toed the party line or suffered the consequences. The pattern for this sort of “democratic centralism” was already in place in the exiled ANC where it was dangerous not to toe “the line”. The likes of Pallo Jordan were among those interred for failing to hold the right views.

There were, of course, many in the ANC leadership who saw through the Soviet propaganda and, having spent time living in the socialist experiments of the Eastern Bloc, realised that there was an absence of freedom in these states where re-education camps and prisons were used to deal with dissenters.

The internal supporters of the ANC — trade unionists such as Cyril Ramaphosa — had already pivoted towards democracy, insisting on transparent leadership elections and scepticism about the possible abuse of state power borne out of their experience of repression at the hands of the militarised apartheid state of PW Botha in the 1980s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, which began with an uprising of dockworkers in Gdańsk, Poland, in 1980 and ended a decade later with the people of the former Soviet republics eagerly embracing democracy with anti-authoritarian guarantees, nonetheless came as a shock to the diehards in the Struggle. They were suddenly faced with evidence that the states they identified with were despised by the people who lived there and that the democratic state — viewed as an instrument of capitalist control — was more desirable.

A woman inside an evacuation train at a railway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 5 March 2022. According to the UN, at least 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine to neighbouring countries since the beginning of the Russian invasion.

 (Photo: EPA-EFE / Sergey Dolzhenko)

This opened the way for the ANC’s pragmatists — the exiled Thabo Mbeki and Ramaphosa, for example — to shift the party on to a more liberal democratic footing.

The eventual outcome of the negotiations was a social-democratic Constitution with liberal democratic characteristics. It at once compelled the state to bring about the transformation of society while checking the state’s power to act in ways that undermined individual freedoms.

When Jacob Zuma, the head of the ANC’s notorious exiled intelligence operation, became president, the criticism of the judiciary rose to a crescendo and, in a very East German turn, efforts were made to shut down the free press in the interests of “state security” with legislation and a “media tribunal” to punish those who dared publish what the state saw as falsehoods.

This Constitution with its limits on state power was never fully embraced by Zuma and his supporters and to this day there are frequent public criticisms from others — most recently by Lindiwe Sisulu — over the independence of the judiciary.

By the time Zuma reconnected the ANC to Russia with an attempt to mortgage the state to finance a “nuclear deal”, both parties had fundamentally changed, but they saw once again that they were in alignment, this time over far less noble goals. The ANC had morphed from a liberation movement to the manager of a kleptocratic elite that was “capturing the state” and Russia had become the model of a kleptocracy ruled by oligarchs all working in the service of Vladimir Putin.

South Africans and Russians began tying up business deals and the number of meetings between Zuma and Putin soon became too many to count

There were efforts made to get gas from Gazprom and there are some who believe that Gazprom might be the intended beneficiary of the government’s new appetite to move to gas to power the electricity grid.

The State Capture project was thwarted and the Zuma faction was placed on the back foot. But they have yet to face the full might of the law as the National Prosecuting Authority dithers over prosecuting them. And the relationship between the Russians and the party elite goes deeper than we think.

Now the ANC, having returned to its Russian lodestar, faces a second rude awakening. This time it is not the Berlin Wall falling, so much as the free world erecting a wall of isolation around Russia — a Berlin Wall in reverse, this time insulating the West against Putin’s excesses.

The pivot of Ukrainians away from Putin’s Russia is a pivot towards democracy and development. As much as this must annoy Putin’s version of Cold War history, it’s there in black and white: the Warsaw Pact did not vote to stay with Russia, just as the Soviet Union broke up for good reason — it delivered much less than the Western model, no matter how imperfect the latter may be. Whatever his dreams, Putin is not going to be able to push Eastern Europe back. The expansion of Nato has effectively prevented that. Otherwise, Putin might be attacking not only Ukraine, but the Baltics, Poland, Romania and others.

Ukrainian servicemen stand next to Czech hedgehogs (static anti-tank obstacle defences) in central Kyiv, Ukraine, on 6 March 2022. Russian troops entered Ukraine on 24 February, leading to a massive exodus of Ukrainians as well as internal displacements. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Zurab Kurtsikidze)

The ANC reaction has been bizarre, a confused cry of anguish to a reminder of the repeated failures of their Cold War patrons and the mythologies attached, and the upset to their current plans. But it is notable that by far the most impassioned announcement on Ukraine made to date has been the cry of pain from the ANC’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe, over the cessation of broadcasts of Russian TV, a channel where fake news is company policy.

For the ANC this should pose a conundrum. What Putin appears to be doing with Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine is rebuilding part of the Russian empire. For a country that fought against the evils of empire, it seems strange that South Africa seems happy to endorse the remaking of an old empire. If anything, it suggests that the party is still captured.

While the consequences of this ANC line have yet to fully play out, the outside world should now be clear about what the party stands for — and the extent to which it has sold out on its core values.

The ANC, like Putin, finds itself not only on the wrong side of history, but flogging the wrong version of history too — it has decided it will stand with the opportunists and not the democracies. DM


Dr Mills and Hartley are with The Brenthurst Foundation. www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org

Russia’s War Of ‘Iron And Blood’ In Ukraine Has Changed Everything

ByWallace Gregson

Image of Javelin anti-tank missile. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Means Detterence Must Be Strengthened in Europe Now: Retired British General, and former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe Richard Shirreff, said it best in the 25 February Financial Times:

At a single stroke, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has announced a new era for Europe. Russia’s unprovoked attack on its democratic neighbor is nothing less than the return of what Otto von Bismarck called: “the politics of iron and blood” to Europe. The world that we knew before February 24, in which the rights of sovereign states to live in peace was guaranteed by a respect for international law without armed force, has gone forever

This is the return of warfare on a scale we have not seen since the second world war, a return to state-on-state warfare, a massive premeditated, merciless (sic) and cruel assault by an aging, isolated, nuclear-armed autocrat determined to re-establish Russian power in the former Soviet empire and to bend their populations to his will.

This is a new era indeed. Putin’s 2014 deployment of “little green men” – masked soldiers in unmarked uniforms – to annex Crimea and reinforce Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region elicited little effective response. Conclusions were drawn in Moscow.

Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, apparently assuming continued Ukraine weakness, a disunited West, an ineffective NATO, and a conflict-averse economy-oriented European Union has foundered. The resistance of Ukraine’s armed forces and more importantly the people of Ukraine proved much tougher than expected. Rather than a short, sharp, two-medal/one-promotion war for Russia’s armed forces, Putin revitalized the West’s liberal order.

If truth is the first casualty of war, our comfortable assumptions, implicit and explicit, must be the second.

Perhaps the most welcome assumption trashed is that war is solely the business of the armed forces. The rest of the nation could “go shopping” as we were told at the onset of the 911-era wars. Just be sure to say, “thank you for your service”. Perhaps we came to this assumption with reason. Desert Shield/Desert Storm gave us a sense of omnipotence as our second “unipolar moment” began after the fall of the USSR (This second moment was destined to be equally short-lived). Triumphalism reigned, with little public sacrifice required. Implicit or explicit, war as the exclusive province of the military, not the nation, was brought forward into the new century.

This assumption had an allied corollary: that NATO and EU nations were so enamored of trade and investment relations with Russia that any unified resistance was impossible because it was not profitable. The same was said about big business and the international corporations. That assumption was also rubbished.

The decision to avoid direct contact of US and NATO forces with Russian forces brought forth many other instruments of national, and international, power to answer Putin’s naked aggression. As a result, we’re getting close to making the old aphorism “all the instruments of national power”, so beloved in the Pentagon but few other places, a reality.

Germany defied expectations with a massive defense increase, a reversal of prohibitions on weapons intended for Ukraine transiting through Germany, and an ending of the Nord Stream 2 Russia to Germany gas pipeline.

Poland is considering transferring some of their Russian fighter aircraft to Ukraine to replace their losses, with the U.S. in turn providing U.S.-built aircraft to Poland. Great Britain, now out of the EU, is nevertheless sending anti-tank weapons and trainers to Ukraine.

Financial sanctions are being employed as a weapon and remain on an ever-tightening trajectory. Maersk, a Danish shipping company meeting the textbook definition of a multinational corporation, announced a suspension of non-essential bookings to and from Russia. Two other shipping giants, MSC of Switzerland and France’s CMA CGM also halted bookings to and from Russia. Europe and the United States, and perhaps others by the time this appears, closed their national airspace to Russian flights. Visa and MasterCard suspended their operations in Russia.

Russia’s reserves of gold and foreign currency are frozen. According to economics experts, roughly half of Russia’s reserves are paralyzed. The Ruble has fallen, and fear of collapse leads to runs on the ATMs and bank windows for withdrawals. Vladimir Putin no longer stands for economic stability.

Informal hacker organizations interrupted their usual activities seeking your money to focus on getting information to the Russian people despite official censorship. It’s logical to assume they are engaged in other cyber warfare. The United States is considering a ban on imports of Russian oil.

Make no mistake, this is a war, however novel the limitations are to date. NATO and EU support to Ukraine’s armed forces strengthens their resistance and adds to Russian casualty lists. Collective economic, financial, and regulatory actions across the globe are exerting a profound effect on Russia, its economy, and its people. Vladimir Putin charged that Western sanctions are akin to a declaration of war. He also made just enough comment about nuclear weapons, ordering nuclear deterrence forces to high alert, to indicate their relevance to this conflict. He has an abundance of tactical nuclear weapons.

There is no reason to believe Russia’s ambitions are limited to Ukraine. Putin has long sought to recreate the Soviet empire in Europe. Russia has Belarus. He covets others. Eastern Europe’s NATO nations understand this well. They well remember life before freedom.

There is no obvious way out. “Off Ramps”, so popular with diplomats and negotiators, are hardly obvious. This conflict will not be a brief episode; it will be a long haul. It is a profound threat not only to Europe but to every country. Other autocrats in other regions are watching closely.

The post-WW II global order that – thus far – prevented a third world war despite many hot campaigns beneath the nuclear threshold, is threatened. Effective nuclear and conventional deterrence, defined as an undoubted capability to prevail, must be established and strengthened. Recent reinforcements in Europe are welcome, but much more is needed. There will be a cost for this, of course. But better a cost in treasure than in the massive loss of life and the return of a dark autocratic era to the world.

If the lamps are to remain lit across Europe, action this day is needed.

Lieutenant General Wallace C. Gregson (RET), Jr. serves as Senior Director, China, and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest. He retired from the Marine Corps in 2005 with the rank of Lieutenant-General. He last served as the Commander, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific; Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific; and Commander, U.S. Marine Corps Bases, Pacific, headquartered at Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii.Gregson also served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs.

WAR CRIME TARGETING CIVILIANS

Photo and video shows Russian mortar strike that killed a Ukrainian family trying to escape the invasion

PUTIN'S ETHNIC CLEANSING

Sophia Ankel
Mon., March 7, 2022,

Screenshot of a video showing Russian shelling hitting fleeing civilians in Irpin, Ukraine, on March 6, 2022.Andriy Dubchak/Donbas Frontliner

Ukrainians who were trying to flee a town near Kyiv on Sunday were hit by a Russian mortar strike.

The shelling killed eight civilians, including a family who was found dead on the street, the NYT reported.

Journalists who were there captured the moment and its aftermath.

Photo and video show a Russian mortar strike that killed a young Ukrainian family trying to escape the violence on Sunday.

The attack took place in Irpin, a town northwest of the capital Kyiv.

The family was among a group of Ukrainians who were trying to flee Irpin after Russian forces advanced there, The New York Times reported.

The fleeing civilians, who were split up in groups, were running through the streets and attempting to cross a destroyed bridge to Kyiv when the shelling started, The Times reported.

Andriy Dubchak, a freelance journalist with the outlet Donbas Frontliner, filmed the moment the mortar struck the street that the civilians were on. (Warning: Readers may find the footage linked in this paragraph graphic.)

The video showed a man in the foreground speaking as a stream of civilians walked on a sidewalk in the background. Moments later, the mortar strikes the middle of the street, causing a fire, and the camera briefly goes dark before a cloud of dust appears.

As the dust settled, journalists can be heard reacting and Ukrainian troops can be seen hurrying to a group of people lying on the ground.

The Times later reported that they were a woman, her teenage son, her daughter, and their family friend. The report said the daughter appeared to be eight years old.

The Times also featured a photo of Ukrainian troops rushing to help the family on its Monday front page.



Lynsey Addario, a photojournalist who was on the scene working with The Times, said: "Soldiers rushed to help, but the woman and children were dead. A man traveling with them still had a pulse but was unconscious and severely wounded. He later died."

"Their luggage, a blue roller suitcase, and some backpacks was scattered about, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking," she added.

A total of eight civilians, which included the family, died in the attack, The Guardian reported.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack in a Sunday night video message, saying: "They were just trying to get out of town. To escape. The whole family. How many such families have died in Ukraine? We will not forgive. We will not forget."

"We will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war," he said.

Around 2,000 civilians evacuated from Irpin after Russian forces started pushing through the town over the weekend, police said Monday, The Guardian reported.

The towns of Irpin, Hostomel, and Bucha, which surround Kyiv, were all being targeted by Russians, The Times reported.

Monday marks the 12th day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin previously said the would not target any civilians.

However, the United Nations has recorded more than 1,000 Ukrainian civilians who have been killed between the period of 4 a.m. on February 24 to midnight on March 4, Sky News reported.

Insider's live blog of Russia's invasion is covering developments as they happen.

A photo of Ukrainian civilians killed in a Russian mortar strike highlights the toll of war


The Boston Globe
Amanda Kaufman - 
FOTO © LYNSEY ADDARIO

A photo of a fleeing young family dead on a street outside Kyiv as a result of a Russian mortar strike has become a symbol of the plight of refugees and the toll the war has wreaked on Ukrainian civilians trying to reach safety.

Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, captured the photo for The New York Times on Sunday as a mother, her two children, and a family friend tried to reach an evacuation route into Kyiv, the Times reported.

In order to get to the route, civilians huddled under a destroyed bridge over the Irpin River before small groups decided to make a run for it to get to Kyiv, crossing about 100 yards of exposed street. According to a video of the blast shared by the Times, civilians were walking along the sidewalk of the street when a shell hit the center of the road, sending a cloud of smoke into the air and killing the family that was nearby. The Times reported that the children included a teenage boy and a girl who appeared to be about 8 years old.

The man who was traveling with the young family had a pulse when soldiers ran over to check on him, the Times reported, but he later died. A green case found near the family contained a dog, the Times reported, and barking could be heard in the video. The photo shows the soldiers huddled around the man as the young family is lying on the ground in their winter coats with backpacks on their bodies. A blue suitcase leans tilted on a curb next to where the mother is laying.

Addario, who has covered multiple wars and humanitarian crises, said in an interview with Times Radio, a radio station from the UK’s The Times and The Sunday Times, that on Sunday she was heading toward an evacuation route for civilians, a site she “didn’t really believe” that Russian troops would target.

“For me, this was outrageous,” Addario said. “I literally watched them zero in on civilians, a passageway that was known to be used for civilians so I think the importance of journalists on the ground here is more pronounced than ever for me, because we have [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saying he is not targeting civilians and I was there, and I witnessed it. We need these accounts public, we need people to see what’s happening, we need to show that the propaganda he’s saying is just not true.”

Addario said after she arrived to the route, she was standing behind a cement wall for cover while assessing the situation. Mortar sounds started coming in about 200 meters away from where she was, Addario said, but she assumed Russians were targeting an area nearby where the Ukrainian military was stationed. A security advisor suggested that they leave, but their car was near where the soldiers were positioned, so Addario said she didn’t want to run toward that area. The shells began coming in closer and closer to the civilians, Addario said, and the blast shown in the video landed 20 meters from where she was.

“We were very, very lucky,” Addario said. “We were in a sort of cement box so we hit the ground immediately.”


A video of the blast was captured by a freelance videographer traveling with the Times team. Warning: The video below contains graphic images.

The graphic image illustrated the devastation the war has created, and the photo ricocheted across the Internet and in international newspapers, allowing people who are not experiencing the conflict directly to viscerally understand its toll. Addario’s photo of the family was featured on the top third of the Times’ front page on Monday.

Such photos from journalists capturing the hardship of people fleeing armed conflict or humanitarian crises have become worldwide symbols of those plights, such as the photo of the body of a Syrian boy that was washed ashore in Turkey after his family tried to flee the war in 2015 and “The Napalm Girl,” the photo that captured the horror of children fleeing from a Napalm bombing during the Vietnam War in 1972.

On Instagram, Addario said her photo of the Ukrainian family captures “the brutal toll of war.”

“I’ve witnessed many horrors in the past twenty years of covering war, but the intentional targeting of children and women is pure evil,” she wrote.

The deaths come amid talks between Ukraine and Russia about the implementation of limited ceasefires and the establishment of “humanitarian corridors” to allow civilians in Ukraine to flee. Russian President Vladimir Putin denied in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron that Russian forces are targeting civilians, according to French officials, the Times reported. The United States and Ukraine have accused Putin of deliberately targeting them.

On Monday, Russia announced a new push for safe corridors for civilians in Kyiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Sumy, but some evacuation routes led to Russia and Belarus, a Russian-allied country, drawing criticism from Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said after the talks that “there were some small positive shifts regarding logistics of humanitarian corridors.”

Material from Globe wire services was used in this report.