The problem with the Global South

 A title from the Times of India:

Russia fends off Ukrainian aggression, retaliates by destroying village; Civilians film the interception

This title, appearing not in the blog of some unhinged individual but in a major media outlet, perfectly illustrates the foggy ethics characteristic for the Global South (formerly the Third World). The lack of clear understanding of good and evil, and of the need for the good to prevail over evil, is the root cause of the incurable poverty and other societal ills of the Global South countries.

Ukrainians pay with their lives for Biden's pathological fear of their victory

 Laura Kelly, the Hill / Yahoo!News:

"US commitment to Ukraine grows murkier

President Biden’s supporters and former U.S. officials are expressing frustration and confusion over the White House’s Ukraine strategies...

The White House recently pushed back against proposals that would give NATO and Western allies a greater leadership role moving forward, even as U.S. aid to fight against Russian troops has been stalled for months in Congress.

“There is a disagreement in the U.S. government about this, and I won’t predict how it comes out,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The coming weeks could be decisive, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promising to bring a new Ukraine aid package to the floor. But it’s unclear how robust the package will be, or whether Johnson can navigate opposition from many within his own party.

If it fails or comes up short of Democratic demands, Biden could face growing pressure to embrace a less U.S.-centric coalition backing Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

Daalder, along with former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried, pitched in an article in Foreign Affairs a proposal that NATO take over the U.S.-led Ramstein group to coordinate weapons deliveries for Kyiv, among other ideas that NATO is now discussing ahead of the alliance’s July summit.

“The United States needs to get off the high horse that we know everything,” Daalder said, answering a question from The Hill at a summit hosted by Georgetown’s Center for Security Studies...

The situation is desperate for Ukraine. U.S. military officials have told Congress that Ukrainians are rationing artillery in the absence of more American support, putting them even more at a deficit against Russia’s war machine.

The Institute for the Study of War said Friday that Russian forces have “inflicted increasing and long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure this spring,” and that the Russians have been so successful, in part, because Ukraine is running out of U.S.-supplied air defenses.

“This is alarming because it suggests that absent a rapid resumption of U.S. military aid, Russian forces can continue to deal severe damage to Ukrainian forces and infrastructure even with the limited number of missiles Russia is likely to have available in the coming months,” the group wrote in its assessment.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pleading with supporters to follow through on commitments.

“It is critically important that each partner deliver on its promises regarding the supply of weapons and ammunition, as well as our agreements on co-production,” he said Thursday.

“Every day Russian missiles strike, and every day the number of promises increases. Every day, Ukrainian soldiers on the front line endure the brutal pressure of Russian artillery and guided bombs. The reality must finally start to match the words.”

While Donfried and Daalder call for Congress to follow through on delivering Biden’s request for aid to Ukraine immediately, they are also putting pressure on the administration to “secure Ukraine’s future.”

Part of this includes getting the U.S. to clarify and make concrete language surrounding Ukraine joining NATO. They are critical of ambiguous promises made at NATO’s 2023 summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where NATO leaders agreed Kyiv can join the alliance “when conditions are met.”

“I thought that was confusing, and so I just think we owe it to the Ukrainians to be clear about what those conditions are,” Donfried said.

They also call for the U.S. and NATO allies to “consider supplying Kyiv with weapons that are currently off the table, such as U.S. ATACMS and German Taurus long-range missiles.”

While the United Kingdom and France have sent Ukraine long-range missiles, the Biden administration has maintained its opposition to sending ATACMS, or Army Tactical Missile Systems, over what it says is concern of triggering an escalation from Moscow.

The administration’s guidance for Ukraine is to not use American-made weapons to hit inside Russia — with the understanding that Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory can be carried out with other weapons.

But Donfried said that over two and a half years of war, the time is right for the administration to lean further forward.

“That fear of escalation often needs to be tempered by faith and deterrence,” she said.

“We feel that we’ve learned some lessons over the past two and a half years. We were hesitant on sending other weapons systems. We have done so and we have not seen an escalation … now it is the moment for the U.S. and the Germans to join the British and the French in sending those long-range missiles to Ukraine.”

But, Donfried cautioned, “is that where the White House is gonna land? I don’t know.”

Confusion about the White House’s path forward on Ukraine is raising anxiety among Kyiv and its supporters, who are newly frustrated by the administration’s position criticizing Ukraine for hitting Russian oil refineries.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly told Kyiv last month to stop hitting Russian oil refineries over fears of driving up oil prices, an argument raised by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin earlier this week in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

And comments earlier this week from Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs, saying the Kremlin-connected refineries are not legitimate military targets has further sowed confusion.

“We have concerns about striking at civilian targets,” Wallander said about the Russian oil refineries. But, she added, “they are owned by private Russian citizens who are part of the Putin regime. That is correct.”

One person who lobbies the administration for more support for Ukraine said some U.S. officials have been “clearly embarrassed” over questions about the pushback on hitting Russia’s oil infrastructure — one of its main funding streams for its war.

“That speaks to differences within the administration, but it has not affected policy,” the person said.

Ukraine’s supporters say comments like these are pulling the U.S. further away from positions of other allies... One European official, requesting anonymity to speak candidly, called the Biden administration’s comments about the oil refineries “perverse.”

“It is perverse to tell a party at war not to attack the war machine of the aggressor party while also not delivering military aid to help the victim protect its own infrastructure, residential buildings, maternity wards, and kindergartens,” the official said.

“The administration’s pathological fear of escalation and of Ukrainian success is one major reason for the death of so many Ukrainians.”"

Biden can help Ukraine but prefers not to

 Since the USA stopped giving aid to Ukraine nearly 6 months ago, Russia has been slowly advancing and Ukraine is being slowly but surely destroyed under the stunned eyes of all good people in the world. Biden's excuse is that at his rival Trump's bidding, the Republican Congress chairman Mike Johnson refuses to put a $60 billion aid package to vote, single-handedly blocking the aid to Ukraine. However, there is more to the story, as David Axe wrote in the Forbes two months ago:

"Joe Biden Could Send Millions Of Artillery Shells To Ukraine, For Free, Tomorrow. And It’s Perfectly Legal

There’s a bureaucratically complex but perfectly legal way for the administration of U.S. president Joe Biden to send to Ukraine the thing Ukrainian brigades need the most: artillery shells. Millions of them.

As Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its third year and Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress continue to withhold U.S. funding for Ukraine, Ukrainian artillery batteries are desperately low on ammunition.

Six months ago, Ukrainian batteries were firing as many as 6,000 shells a day and, in some sectors of the 600-mile front line, even matching Russians batteries’ own shellfire.

Today, four months after Republicans began blocking aid, the Ukrainians are firing just 2,000 shells a day. At the same time, the Russians—flush with shells from North Korea and Iran—are firing up as many as 10,000 shells a day.

That firepower disparity is the main reason why Russian forces are—admittedly at great cost—slowly advancing in and around the eastern city of Avdiivka, currently the locus of Russia’s winter offensive.

Given indicted ex-president Donald Trump’s cultish hold over the Republican Party and Trump’s longstanding affinity for authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin, there’s seems to be little prospect of Biden getting much, or any, fresh funding for Ukraine now that Republicans hold a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But that doesn’t mean Biden is powerless to help Ukraine. An under-appreciated U.S. law gives the president authority to sell at a discount, or even give away, any existing weapons the U.S. military declares excess to its needs.

The law caps annual transfers of so-called “excess defense articles” at a total value of $500 million a year. But the same law doesn’t dictate how much value the president assigns to a particular weapon. He in theory could price an item at zero dollars.

Biden only rarely has used his EDA authority for Ukraine. And where he has used it, lately it’s been a part of complex “ring-trades” where the U.S. government gives excess weapons to third countries—Ecuador and Greece, to name two—then encourages those same countries directly or indirectly to give to Ukraine some of their own surplus weapons.

The United States for instance offered Ecuador ex-U.S. Army UH-60 transport helicopters, freeing up Ecuador to donate to Ukraine its surplus Mi-17 helicopters as well as rocket-launchers and air-defense systems. Greece is getting ex-U.S. Air Force C-130 airlifters and ex-U.S. Army ground vehicles on the understanding the Greeks will try to find surplus weapons to pass onward to the Ukrainians.

There’s no legal reason Biden couldn’t cut out the middleman and use his EDA authority directly to support Ukraine. And there’s no practical reason this aid couldn’t include artillery ammunition.

Generally speaking, most artillery ammunition in U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps stockpiles clearly isn’t excess. Indeed, the Army and Marines need all the modern shells they can get as they prepare for Ukraine-style wars.

But there’s an important exception. There are potentially four million 155-millimeter dual-purpose improved cluster munitions in storage in the United States. M483A1 and M864 DPICM rounds respectively scatter 88 or 72 grenade-size submunitions, each of which can kill or maim a soldier.

All of these shells are obvious candidates for the “excess” label. The U.S. Army years ago determined that these DPICMs—produced in large quantities between the 1970s and 1990s—are unreliable and unsafe, as any particular submunition has up to a 14-percent chance of being a dud.

The Army around 2017 declared a requirement for a new cluster shell with a one-percent dud rate. “Rounds now in the U.S. stockpile do not meet the Office of the Secretary of Defense's goal,” wrote Peter Burke, then the service’s top ammunition manager.

That orphaned, according to a 2004 report, 402 million DPICM submunitions. Do the math. That’s as many as 4.6 million 155-millimeter shells.

The Biden administration managed to ship to Ukraine, under authorities that don’t fall under the EDA law, an undisclosed number of DPICMs—tens of thousands, perhaps—before aid ran out and Republicans blocked additional money.

The White House’s main practice, for the first two years of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, has been to give to Ukraine weapons from U.S. stockpiles—and then immediately to replace the donated materiel with newly-produced weapons.

In that sense, almost nothing Biden has given to Ukraine actually has been free. It has cost the Ukrainians a portion of the $75 billion in financial aid the U.S. Congress approved for Ukraine before Republicans gained their majority.

If Biden abandoned this practice, he could designate all the DPICM shells remaining in U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps warehouses as excess—and donate them to Ukraine without needing a single dollar to replace them.

All four million or so remaining rounds should be available. Enough for years of intensive combat.

Now, there is a caveat in the EDA law. All weapons must be given away “as is, where is.” In other words, the U.S. government legally can’t pay for shipping.

But another caveat is that any weapons in Germany are excluded from this rule. Biden could ship those DPICMs to Germany aboard a few sealift ships and then declare them as excess to need before having the U.S. Army drop them off somewhere the Ukrainian armed forces would have no trouble retrieving them.

Why Biden hasn’t already put in motion this plan is unclear. It’s possible—likely, even—he prefers to hold out for $60 billion in fresh funding, which gives him more options for buying, or even developing from scratch, a wide array of weapons for Ukraine.

But once Biden decides, as many other observers already have decided, that Russia-aligned Republicans never will approve more money for Ukraine, he could lean on his EDA authority—and speed millions of shells to Ukraine’s starving batteries."

 

After stopping all aid to Ukraine, the USA tells it not to harm the aggressor Russia

 From the Washington Post

By David Ignatius, March 29, 2024

 

"Zelensky: ‘We are trying to find some way not to retreat’

 

President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a stark message to Congress in an interview on Thursday as Russian missiles were pounding southern Ukraine: Give us the weapons to stop the Russian attacks, or Ukraine will escalate its counterattacks on Russia’s airfields, energy facilities and other strategic targets.

 

Zelensky spoke in a sandbagged, heavily guarded presidential compound that seemed nearly empty of its old civilian workforce after more than two years of war...

 

The congressional delay in approving a $60 billion military aid package has been costly for Ukraine, Zelensky said...

“If there is no U.S. support, it means that we have no air defense, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-milimeter artillery rounds,” he said. “It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.”

To describe the military situation, Zelensky took a sheet of paper and drew a simple diagram of the combat zone. “If you need 8,000 rounds a day to defend the front line, but you only have, for example, 2,000 rounds, you have to do less,” he explained. “How? Of course, to go back. Make the front line shorter. If it breaks, the Russians could go to the big cities.”...

Zelensky summed up the zero-sum reality of this conflict: “If you are not taking steps forward to prepare another counteroffensive, Russia will take them. That’s what we learned in this war: If you don’t do it, Russia will do it.”

When I asked whether Ukraine was running short of interceptors and other air-defense weapons to protect its cities and infrastructure, he responded: “That’s true. I don’t want Russia to know what number of air-defense missiles we have, but basically, you’re right. Without the support of Congress, we will have a big deficit of missiles. This is the problem. We are increasing our own air-defense systems, but it is not enough.”

As Russian drones, missiles and precision bombs break through Ukrainian defenses to attack energy facilities and other essential infrastructure, Zelensky feels he has no choice but to punch back across the border — in the hope of establishing deterrence. An example is Ukraine’s drone strikes against Russian refineries over the past month. I asked Zelensky if U.S. officials had warned against such attacks on energy facilities inside Russia, as has been rumored in Washington.

“The reaction of the U.S. was not positive on this,” he confirmed, but Washington couldn’t limit Ukraine’s deployment of its own home-built weapons. “We used our drones. Nobody can say to us you can’t.”

Zelensky argued that he could check Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid only by making Russia pay a similar price. “If there is no air defense to protect our energy system, and Russians attack it, my question is: Why can’t we answer them? Their society has to learn to live without petrol, without diesel, without electricity. … It’s fair.”...

“When Russia has missiles and we don’t, they attack by missiles: Everything — gas, energy, schools, factories, civilian buildings,” Zelensky said...

The lesson of war for Zelensky, after two years of brutal fighting that has killed many of the best officers and soldiers in the Ukrainian army, is that Putin should have been stopped sooner.

President Barack Obama “was not strong against him” when Putin seized Crimea in 2014, Zelensky said. “Europe wanted to have security on the border and big trade with Russia. That opened the way to war with Ukraine.”

“He captured Crimea, and there was no reaction at all. Nobody pushed him back. Nobody stopped him.” When I asked whether he would have allowed Biden to send U.S. troops into Ukraine to deter the February 2022 invasion, he said simply: “Yes.” In hindsight, that show of force might have been the only way this terrible conflict could have been averted...

“We lost half a year” while Congress bickered, he said. “We can’t waste time anymore. Ukraine can’t be a political issue between the parties.” He said critics of aid for Ukraine didn’t understand the stakes in the war. “If Ukraine falls, Putin will divide the world” into Russia’s friends and enemies, he said.

Zelensky has been the X-factor in this war, mobilizing his country and much of the world to resist Russian aggression. I wish members of Congress who balk at aiding Ukraine could have listened to the Ukrainian leader talk about the price that Ukraine has paid for its defiance — and the risks ahead for the United States if it doesn’t stand with its friends."

***

I wish just to remind anyone who reads this that the only reason Ukraine is now being destroyed is that the USA disarmed it, giving a solemn promise to defend it that turned out to be pure lie. I don't know why Americans dislike Ukrainians so much to want them slaughtered.

 

 

 

 

The Budapest Memorandum, and the American betrayal of Ukraine

In 1994, when Russia grabbed Crimea and started its war in Donbas, the USA under Obama did practically nothing. It gave Ukraine some aid that didn't include weapons, implemented some toothless sanctions, and that was it.

In 2022, when Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the USA under Biden did something. It helped with money and weapons. But the help was always too little and too late to ensure a victory over Russia, and came with a string attached: not to be used for attacks on Russian soil. It was later revealed, in William Arkin's 2023 Newsweek article Exclusive: The CIA's Blind Spot about the Ukraine War, that Biden's officials secretly made a deal with Putin to prevent Ukraine from "any actions that might threaten Russia itself", and in exchange, Putin wouldn't "escalate the war beyond Ukraine". In other words, the USA, while doing lip service to the heroic struggle of the Ukrainians, in fact bound their hands and offered them to Putin for extermination. 

Moreover, as the German newspapre Bild reported, the Biden administration, by not delivering enough aid, sought to force Ukrainian leadership to negotiate with Russia and surrender some territories, rewarding Putin's aggression and land grab: "The U.S. and Germany allegedly hope to nudge Ukraine to negotiate with Russia through a carefully targeted scope of arms deliveries... Kyiv's two leading military donors... plan to provide the exact quantity and quality of arms to ensure that Ukraine can hold the front and have a strong negotiating position, but not enough to fully liberate its territory."

In fact, things have become worse. As a result of the policy of the Republican Party, which has by now become strongly pro-Russian, US aid to Ukraine stopped altogether about half a year ago.

Ordinary Americans, as far as I can see, sympathize with Ukraine but not enough to want their tax money used to rescue it. They think that it is too bad that Russia has attacked Ukraine but the USA should not send more aid because it hasn't enough money for its own citizens. In addition, they don't want "escalation", i.e. nuclear war. In their minds, angering Putin is "escalation" while the full destruction of Ukraine isn't.

What they don't know, or rather don't want to know, is that the USA has an obligation to defend Ukraine. It is called the Budapest Memorandum and it was signed thirty years ago, in 1994. According to it, Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal (third largest in the world) to Russia. In return, Russia, the USA (under Clinton) and the UK would "respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders". Ukraine, which was a newly independent country by this time, perceived the promise of the three superpowers as a guarantee, while they perceived it as empty words.

Recently, Clinton expressed regrets about persuading Ukraine to denuclearize: “I feel a personal stake because I got them (Ukraine) to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons.” He is right. Ukraine is being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of valiant Ukrainians have already been murdered because the USA tricked and betrayed it with a false promise.

The Budapest Memorandum is little known among Americans. They don't know about it because they don't want to. When I write about it in comments to Yahoo!News articles, I get multiple downvotes. The great American nation which I admired is no more. Today's America is full of people who lack the compassion to sympathize with an innocent nation subjected to a genocide, lack the sense to realize that Putin will wage World War III unless stopped in Ukraine, lack the honor to keep their country's pledge, and lack the courage to stand up to a rogue nuclear power. In addition, despite living in the strongest economy in the world, they somehow cannot make a decent earning, and are sure that this is because the USA gives too much aid to Ukraine.

I don't say that such heartless, mindless, greedy, whiny, pathetic losers are all present-day Americans, or even the majority of them. But it is an undeniable fact is that their proportion is large enough to shape the present American policy.

America is done for. It has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. But we mustn't allow its victim, Ukraine, to be dragged down and perish.

Russia openly proclaims its goal to destroy Ukraine

 From the Institute for the Study of War:

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

March 14, 2024, 8:15pm ET

"Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev posted a detailed call for the total elimination of the Ukrainian state and its absorption into the Russian Federation under what he euphemistically called a “peace formula.”[1] Medvedev’s demands are not novel but rather represent the Kremlin’s actual intentions for Ukraine — intentions that leave no room for negotiations for purposes other than setting the precise terms of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Medvedev begins the “peace plan” by rhetorically stripping Ukraine of its sovereignty, referring to it as a “former” country and placing the name Ukraine in quotation marks. Medvedev laid out the seven points of his “peace formula,” which he sardonically described as “calm,” “realistic,” “humane,” and “soft.”[2] The seven points include: Ukraine’s recognition of its military defeat, complete and unconditional Ukrainian surrender, and full “demilitarization”; recognition by the entire international community of Ukraine’s “Nazi character” and the “denazification” of Ukraine’s government; a United Nations (UN) statement stripping Ukraine of its status as a sovereign state under international law, and a declaration that any successor states to Ukraine will be forbidden to join any military alliances without Russian consent; the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and immediate provisional parliamentary elections; Ukrainian reparations to be paid to Russia; official recognition by the interim parliament to be elected following the resignation of Ukraine’s current government that all Ukrainian territory is part of Russia and the adoption of a “reunification” act bringing Ukrainian territory into the Russian Federation; and finally the dissolution of this provisional parliament and UN acceptance of Ukraine’s “reunification” with Russia.[3]

The tone of Medvedev’s post is deliberately sardonic, and the calls he is making appear extreme, but every one of the seven points in Medvedev’s “peace formula” are real and central pieces of the Kremlin’s ideology and stated war aims and justifications — Medvedev just simplified and synthesized them into a single brutal Telegram post. The first two of the seven points call for the complete military defeat, disarmament, “demilitarization,” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin identified the full “demilitarization” (stripping Ukraine of all its military and self-defense capabilities) and “denazification” (complete regime change) as Russia’s main goals in Ukraine when initially announcing the invasion on February 24, 2022. Putin and other Kremlin officials have frequently re-emphasized these goals in the subsequent two years of the war.[4] Medvedev’s calls for the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and the creation of a new provisional government are calls for regime change simply made with more specificity about the methods. The demand that any successor state to Ukraine be forbidden to join military alliances without Russian permission is a call for Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, a demand that Putin and other Kremlin officials reiterate regularly.[5]

Putin established the principles that align the Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine with Medvedev’s seven points in Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin claimed in that article that Ukrainians and Russians are historically one united people who were violently and unjustly separated by external nefarious forces.[6] Putin used this essay to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and claims over its own political, social, historical, linguistic, and cultural development — all suggestions that underpin Medvedev’s calls to dissolve Ukraine as a legal entity and fully absorb it into the Russian Federation. Putin and other Russian officials have long set informational conditions to define Ukraine as an integral and inseparable part of Russian territory and set Russia’s goal in Ukraine as “reuniting” Ukrainian territories with their supposed historic motherland.[7] Medvedev’s “peace formula” makes explicit and brutal what Putin and the Kremlin have long demanded in somewhat more euphemistic phrases: that peace for Russia means the end of Ukraine as a sovereign and independent state of any sort with any borders. Those advocating for pressing Ukraine to enter negotiations with Russia would do well to reckon with this constantly reiterated Russian position."

[1] https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/464

[2] https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/464

[3] https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/464

[4] https://isw.pub/UkrWar121423; https://isw.pub/UkrWar040723; https://isw.pub/UkrWar022823

[5] https://isw.pub/UkrWar122823; https://isw.pub/UkrWar121423

[6] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/66181

[7] https://isw.pub/UkrWar121923

 

 

The Modest Request of Valiant Ukrainians

 The photo below is from the Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar which is at risk now that the Russian invaders have taken Avdiivka.

“We are not asking too much,” reads the graffiti in Chasiv Yar, which two years of intense fighting has slowly razed to the ground. “We just need artillery shells and aviation. Rest we do ourselves. Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

(Source: NBC)