A UN survey entitled “Humanitarian Needs and Priorities—Food Security Crisis Sri Lanka” issued on June 9 painted a tragic picture of the social devastation being inflicted on workers and the poor by Colombo’s ruling elite and the capitalist system.
“Sri Lanka is experiencing a multidimensional crisis, compounded by food insecurity, threatened livelihoods, shortages of essential medical items and rising protection concerns,” the 39-page report stated.
Long queue for cooking gas at Mahabage, 5 May 2022 (WSWS Media)
After months of strikes and protests over shortages of essential items, escalating inflation and extended power cuts, mass demonstrations erupted in early April across the island demanding the ouster of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government. These were followed by one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6.
In her foreword to the report, UN Residential Coordinator in Sri Lanka Hanaa Singer Hamdy revealed that about 5.7 million people, or around 22 percent of the total population, needs urgent humanitarian assistance. There is an “unfolding multi-dimensional food security crisis,” she wrote, with “many families unable to afford basic food commodities,” and “up to 70 percent of households having to reduce food consumption, including by skipping meals.”
Inflation and a sharp decline in the country’s agricultural products means that “low-income families face severe threat of food security.” This has worsened over the last two years with a 73 percent increase in the cost of food items. The annualised food inflation rate climbed steeply last month to 57.4 percent, Hamdy said.
Unable to afford the rising prices, people have resorted to various “coping mechanisms,” such as borrowing money, withdrawing savings, pawning belongings and selling property to make ends meet. “The number of households that borrowed money has significantly increased, from 40 percent in August 2021 to 68 percent in April 2022,” Hamdy stated. Such mechanisms, she added, “are not sustainable over the long term and will lead to greater losses in the future.”
Citing a World Food Program assessment, the UN report said that the highest risk of food insecurity is in households relying on “unskilled casual labor, fishing, and those without home gardens and livestock. Estate and urban poor, including migrants, are considered disproportionately affected.”
The report indicated that 73 percent of households surveyed had seen a reduction in income over the past two years, including 11 percent who had received no income over that period.
The UN report stated that the health sector is among the most severely impacted. Sri Lanka imports about 80 percent of its medicines, but depleted foreign reserves have prevented many vital medicines being imported. “The shortage of medicines has paralysed about 50 percent of medical operations in the country. Only urgent surgeries are performed, as some of the medical equipment and anesthesia are quickly running out,” the report said.
According to surveys cited in the report, stocks of about 200 essential drugs, including blood-thinners for heart attacks, antibiotics, vaccines and cancer chemotherapy, will be depleted in the next three months. Over 2,720 essential surgical consumables and more than 250 regular laboratory items are already out of stock. It warned, “There is an urgent need to replenish essential medicines and medical supplies” in order to protect lives and prevent more deaths. The crisis has been exacerbated by the lack of fuel and extended power cuts.
“The shortage of essential medicines is also limiting the availability and access to life-serving sexual and reproductive health services,” the UN report stated, under conditions in which there will be an estimated 72,000 births in the next three months.
The poor nutritional situation in Sri Lanka has deteriorated as a result of high food costs, the breakdown of supply chains and consequent disruptions in government nutritional support programs. The purchase of diverse food groups, the report stated, “is becoming increasingly unaffordable and out of reach for most low-income households. Pregnant and lactating women are particularly at risk because the majority cannot purchase the required nutritious food.”
Citing other surveys, the UN report stated, “Low-nutrition diets among children under-five places Sri Lanka among the ten worst low- and middle-income countries in the world.”
Slum housing at Kajeemawatha in Colombo (Image: WSWS Media)
Prior to COVID-19, Sri Lanka recorded stunting rates of 17.3 percent, wasting of 15 percent and under-weights of 20.5 percent among children under five years of age. The UN report revealed that as of April 2022, the monthly costs of a nutritious diet per household had increased by 156 percent and that at least 56,000 children under 5 are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
The number of children going to school without breakfast has also considerably increased this year and schools, due to lack of funds, are unable to provide free, nutritious meals.
Other indices of the catastrophic situation showed that 66.3 percent of households in plantation estates do not have safe drinking water and over 48.5 percent of households in Sri Lanka do not practice any water treatment methods, such as boiling or chlorinating. Limited fuel supplies to cook food means many households have stopped treating water at their homes.
Rural areas are facing serious crop failures caused by the Rajapakse government’s bans on imported chemical fertiliser due to the lack of foreign exchange. Paddy production has fallen by about 50 percent and maize by 35 to 70 percent leading to major financial problems for the rural masses, pushing up prices and causing food shortages.
Residential Coordinator Hamdy said that while 5.7 million people need humanitarian assistance in Sri Lanka, the UN program would only target 1.7 million of the most vulnerable, and that it needed $US47.2 million. The UN Humanitarian Country Team has appealed to international organisations to donate funds.
“If we don’t act now—we will see Sri Lanka slide into a humanitarian crisis,” Hamdy added. She said the UN was responding swiftly in response to requests from Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for “multi-sectoral international assistance.”
Wickremesinghe’s appeals to the UN are a cynical attempt to politically hoodwink the population. President Rajapakse appointed Wickremesinghe as prime minister in early May in order to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures.
Last week, Wickremesinghe telephoned IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva to finalise talks for a bailout loan. The IMF has insisted that any loan program is dependent on Colombo imposing harsh austerity measures. These include increasing taxes, downsizing and privatisating the state sector, slashing social programs, cutting public education and health and other regressive policies, some of which have already been implemented.
While the masses are suffering, big business and banks are reaping profits. This includes Hatton National Bank Finance, which at the end of May recorded net profits of 515.6 million rupees from a loss last year; the blue-chip Aitken Spence conglomerate that announced a before-tax profit of 14.2 billion rupees; and Softlogic Holdings which reported a 35 percent annual revenue surge and gross profit of 39 billion rupees, a 52 percent increase.
At the same time, Wickremesinghe told parliament last week that one of his priorities is repayment of $5 billion in loans due to international finance institutions. All of Sri Lanka’s capitalist parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, as well as the trade unions endorse the IMF’s demands and defend the profit system.
Contrary to the illusions promoted by the opposition parties, the trade unions and pseudo-left formations, there is no national solution to the deepening economic collapse in Sri Lanka, which is inseparably connected to the global crisis of the capitalist profit system. Since 2020, the Sri Lankan economy has been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic and then heavily impacted by the US-led NATO war against Russia in Ukraine which began in February. This resulted in spiraling oil prices, food shortages, supply-chain disruptions and, like in every other country, skyrocketing inflation.
Contrary to the relentless propaganda from the political establishment and corporate media of nearly every country, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over and will worsen in the coming weeks and months.
The highly infectious, vaccine-resistant and pathogenic Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are quickly becoming dominant globally and threaten another surge of infections and deaths from COVID-19. This is taking place under conditions in which almost every world government outside of China has dismantled the infrastructure that had been in place to track and slow the spread of the virus.
In a process analogous to the captain of a sinking ship demanding that all life vests be thrown overboard, since the start of this year mask mandates have been lifted, testing drastically curtailed, contact tracing programs scrapped, and guidelines on isolation, quarantine and travel have been tailored to suit the needs of the major corporations. The ruling elite’s motto has become “Hear no COVID, see no COVID, and do nothing.”
There is now an incredible chasm between this fictional world of corporate myth-making, where COVID-19 is supposedly gone, and the real world, where millions of people are infected and thousands die globally each week and an untold number become debilitated by Long COVID. This conspiracy of world governments and the media has degenerated into a massive cover-up, involving systematic efforts to manipulate data and stop reporting on COVID-19. Tragically, the propaganda has misled millions of people to now walk around without masks, as if the virus can simply be wished away.
A COVID-19 patient in Paris, France, in 2021. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)
The criminal policies implemented by capitalist governments over the past seven months have set the stage for COVID-19 to become a permanent feature of global society, with recurring waves of infections, deaths and mass debilitation from Long COVID to be accepted as the “new normal.” It has become nearly impossible to prevent infection, and many of our readers likely know multiple friends, family members, coworkers or neighbors who are presently suffering or have died from COVID-19.
To put the pandemic in perspective, it is even more terrible than the school shootings that have provoked such immense outrage in the US and internationally. While this goes unreported in the media, it is a fact that far more young people are dying of COVID-19 than die from school shootings.
Outrage was felt over the horrific massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where police stood by and did nothing. But the same basic policy is being conducted on a mass scale by world governments and health officials, as they have consciously implemented school reopening policies that have infected hundreds of millions of children with COVID-19 globally, killing over 1,500 children in the US and tens of thousands internationally.
In order to stop this deepening catastrophe, the international working class must assimilate the political lessons of the pandemic and understand the ongoing dangers posed. Only through the development of a unified mass movement of workers in every industry will it be possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally, stop the pandemic and lay the foundations for a vast expansion of public health.
The dangers of the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants
There are now five Omicron subvariants which have become dominant in different countries around the world since last November. Since late December, the BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants have caused an estimated 3.6 million excess deaths worldwide, according to The Economist.
In early March, the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants quickly became dominant in South Africa, causing another wave of infections and deaths despite the fact that 98 percent of the population had antibodies from infections or vaccinations. Significantly, a higher percentage of children than elderly people were hospitalized during this surge.
The Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are either dominant or becoming dominant in nearly every country that tracks variant prevalence, including throughout Europe, North America and Australia, as well as many countries in South America, Africa and Asia. This takes place under conditions where global vaccination rates have plateaued and antibodies have waned for the majority of the world’s population.
A recent study from the Sato Lab in Japan, one of the top virology labs in the world, found that BA.4 and BA.5 are more pathogenic than BA.1 and BA.2, and that vaccinations or previous infections with BA.1 or BA.2 provide very little protection against infection from BA.4 or BA.5. The implication is that most of the billions of people who were just infected with BA.1 or BA.2 are now susceptible to reinfection with BA.4 or BA.5 and that these reinfections will likely be more severe.
Figure 1: Virological features of BA.2.12.1 and BA.4 and BA.5 in vivo. (Source: Sato Lab)
Last month, BA.5 became dominant in Portugal and has caused a large wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths nearing the level from BA.1 over the winter, despite the fact that Portugal has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Test positivity rates are now above 50 percent, indicating ongoing widespread transmission far above official figures.
One cannot predict precisely how many people will be infected or die from a given variant, but it is very likely that BA.4 and BA.5 will cause a substantial wave of infections and deaths throughout much of the world in the coming months. The general trend continues that more genetically diverse and dangerous variants are evolving, and the potential always exists that a new variant could evolve that retains the transmissibility and immune-escape capabilities of the Omicron subvariants while being far more pathogenic and lethal.
Long COVID and the pandemic as a “mass disabling event”
Beyond the horrific immediate impact of mass infections and deaths, the long-term health ramifications of the “endemic” strategy are nearly incalculable. The phenomenon of Long COVID was identified by patients over two years ago but has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media and capitalist politicians. As with the science of the pandemic more broadly, there remains very little understanding in the general population of the profound societal risks posed by Long COVID.
Since 2020, Long COVID advocates have aptly characterized the pandemic as a “mass disabling event.” In recent months, research into Long COVID has expanded, firmly linking COVID-19 infection to increased risk of damage to nearly every organ in the body, as well as to risks of developing diabetes, several types of neurological disorders, several categories of cardiovascular disease and more.
Potential pathophysiological mechanisms implicated in the manifestation of acute and ‘long-COVID’ manifestations in the central nervous system (CNS) (Credit: study authors of "Neurological manifestations of long-COVID syndrome: a narrative review")
The risks for developing Long COVID are compounded with each reinfection and only slightly reduced by vaccination. Extrapolating on this in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, scientist Arijit Chakravarty of Fractal Therapeutics noted, “If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow, and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current strategy, we could well have over a billion people living with Long COVID.”
The initial societal impacts of this “mass disabling event” can be seen in a study from the Solve Long COVID Initiative, which estimates that through January 31, 2022, roughly 43 million adult Americans, or 13.4 percent of the adult population, were likely suffering from Long COVID. Of these, roughly 14 million were estimated to have debilitating Long COVID. They estimate that the total financial burden, including lost wages, lost savings and medical expenses, was roughly $511 billion. These estimates do not include Long COVID cases that have developed during the Omicron period.
The qualitative impacts of this scenario, including patients’ ability to function at work and enjoy leisure time, are unquantifiable. For more than two years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other national health agencies have been fully aware of Long COVID and the enormous dangers it poses. Nevertheless, they have consciously chosen to pursue strategies of mass infection.
China’s Zero-COVID policy and the strategy of global elimination
The only country in the world which has maintained public health measures to prevent COVID-19 from running rampant is China, where a Zero-COVID policy has saved millions of lives since January 2020. Most recently, Chinese society defeated the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, which ripped through Shanghai and other parts of the country beginning in early March.
Graph showing the elimination of Omicron BA.2 outbreak in China (Credit: WSWS Media)
The key components of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy are the following:
Mass testing wherever outbreaks occur;
Rigorous contact tracing to identify all chains of transmission;
Safe isolation and treatment of all infected patients in medical facilities;
Quarantining of all people exposed to infected patients;
The temporary closure of all nonessential workplaces and switch to remote learning at all schools until the outbreak is contained;
The provision and mandating of masks in all public places;
Mass vaccination programs; and
Strict travel restrictions and border management to prevent the importing of new cases.
The fact that China suppressed the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 subvariant using these basic public health measures reaffirms in practice that elimination is both possible and necessary. If the above measures were implemented on a world scale, combined with the improvement of filtration and ventilation systems in all indoor spaces, SARS-CoV-2 could be eliminated globally in a matter of months.
Intranasal vaccines, which could potentially provide sterilizing immunity to fully prevent COVID-19 infection, could become another weapon in the arsenal of measures to stop the pandemic. Three of these vaccines are now in Phase 3 human trials. But if they are successful, they will be subordinated to the same profit interests that have prevented the global distribution of existing mRNA and other vaccines.
The elimination strategy must also be adopted to stamp out the unprecedented global outbreak of monkeypox, which has rapidly infected over 1,600 people in more than 40 countries throughout the world, as well as future pandemics. A major study published in April found that climate change will dramatically increase the potential for viruses that already exist among animal populations to spill over into human populations, as happened with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.
The fight to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally requires a massive social and political struggle of the international working class. Fundamentally, the fight against the pandemic and for public health is not simply a medical question but primarily a political, social and economic issue. Powerful financial interests are determined to block the implementation of paid lockdowns and all other measures necessary to stop viral transmission because this would impinge on their record profit-making.
Masses of workers throughout the world have been deeply impacted by the pandemic and a profound radicalization has taken place. In every country, workers are entering into struggle against the soaring cost of living and rising food prices, which were precipitated by the pandemic and exacerbated by the US-NATO war drive against Russia. In addition to the threat of infection, debilitation and death from COVID-19, hundreds of millions are now threatened with destitution and starvation on every continent, while the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust looms over mankind.
The imperialist proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the outcome of a decades-long drive by the imperialist powers to bring the territories of the former Soviet Union under their direct control and represents a qualitatively new stage in the emergence of a new world struggle between the imperialist powers for the re-division of the resources of the globe.
In its recent analysis of the role of critical minerals in the geostrategic and economic objectives of the imperialist drive to subjugate Russia through war, the World Socialist Web Site noted:
“The breaking apart of Russia and its domination by American capital would be a strategic stepping stone in the efforts of the American ruling class to impose a “new American century” through the subordination of China and Eurasia more broadly to its aims. Resources play a role in this. Amid the enduring need for oil and natural gas, as well as the rapidly growing need for critical minerals, Russia is seen as a vital landmass with a vast array of riches.”
If the war against Russia is a “stepping stone” to the war against China, control over the Black Sea is seen as a stepping stone for the breakup of Russia. This article will review the critical significance of the Black Sea region, where this war is taking place, from a geostrategic and economic standpoint.
The geostrategic significance of the Black Sea region
Gaining direct access to the resources of the former Soviet Union, which had been closed off to imperialism for seven decades following the 1917 October Revolution, has been a major goal of the imperialist powers for decades. Within this context, the Black Sea region, which forms a nexus between Eastern and southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and the Middle East, is of strategic significance.
The Black Sea forms a bridge between Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia [Photo by Google Maps]
For US imperialism, already in the midst of a protracted economic and political decline, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy appeared like a gift from heaven. Drunk with triumphalism, the US ruling class proclaimed 1991 the “unipolar moment.” In 1992, a strategy document of the Pentagon determined that US strategy “must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.”
In his book The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign policy advisers of Washington in the past half century, elaborated on the principal significance of what geostrategists call “Eurasia”—the landmass of Europe and Asia—for the desperate efforts by the US to preserve its global hegemony.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Within Eurasia, Brzezinski identified what he called the “Eurasian Balkans” as the region where the major conflicts over the control of all of Eurasia would take place. This region, Brzezinski wrote, stretched “from Crimea in the Black Sea directly eastward along the new southern frontiers of Russia, all the way to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, then down to the Indian Ocean and thence westward to the Red Sea, then northward to the eastern Mediterranean Sea and back to Crimea.”
Almost all of the 25 states in this region, he continued, are “ethnically as well as religiously heterogeneous and practically none of them [are] politically stable. … This huge region, torn by volatile hatreds and surrounded by competing powerful neighbors, is likely to be a major battlefield, both for wars among nation-states and, more likely, for protracted ethnic and religious violence.”
The "Eurasian Balkans", according to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Map from his book The Grand Chessboard. [Photo by Zbigniew Brzeziński ]
Brezinski’s book was not so much a “prediction” but rather an outline of the fundamental strategic objectives and considerations of US imperialism. Indeed, the region he termed the “Eurasian Balkans” has been turned upside down in the past decades through a combination of US bombing raids and invasions, and the systematic fueling of civil wars and ethnic strife.
Beginning with the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, it has also involved major interventions of imperialism through drone and other means of warfare in Pakistan and many other countries. Throughout the 1990s, the US and Germany also fueled ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, culminating in the savage NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.
More recently, the geostrategically critical Xinjiang province of China, which borders Russia and Kazakhstan, has become a linchpin of US provocations against China and attempts to destabilize and break up the country. In Russia too, the fueling of separatist tendencies and regionalist and political conflicts within the ruling oligarchy with the ultimate aim of carving up the country has been a central component of US policy.
The western end of this “Eurasian Balkans,” the Black Sea region, has been the focal point of both NATO expansion and several coup operations by Washington. Until the Stalinist bureaucracies restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989-1991, the Black Sea region was largely outside the direct control of imperialism. Only one of the states neighboring the Black Sea, Turkey, was a NATO member.
This changed completely with the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, following three decades of the eastward expansion of NATO, all states bordering the Black Sea with the exception of Russia itself are either members of NATO (Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria) or have been largely integrated into the alliance in all but name, following massive interventions of US imperialism in their politics (Ukraine, Georgia.)
In addition to NATO’s expansion to the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, these operations included the 2003 and 2004-2005 “color revolutions”—US-sponsored coups that relied on mobilizing layers of the privileged middle class and sections of the oligarchy—that took place in Georgia and Ukraine, respectively.
In 2008, Georgia, with the support of Washington, provoked a war with Russia over the two break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.
These operations culminated in the 2014 coup in Kiev, that was heavily backed by Germany and the US and was carried out by far-right militias such as the Right Sector and a section of the Ukrainian oligarchy, headed then by the “chocolate oligarch” Petro Poroshenko.
These overt moves to encircle Russia have prompted fears in the Kremlin that the Black Sea is being turned into a “NATO lake.” Indeed, this has been an objective of Washington, in particular, fully aware of the military and economic consequences that full NATO control over the Black Sea would mean for Russia.
The military significance of the Black Sea region in the conflict with Russia
Ben Hodges, a retired US Army officer and former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, recently stated bluntly that the goal of the US in this proxy war consisted in “finally breaking the back of Russia’s ability to project power outside of Russia to threaten Georgia, to threaten Moldova, to threaten our Baltic allies.”
Undermining the Kremlin’s position in the Black Sea region is critical to achieving this goal.
Alton Buland, the director for European policy at the US Department of Defense, has described the Black Sea as “Russia’s geostrategic center of gravity” and its “gateway south, the gateway to the Middle East [and]…the gateway to Asia.”
It is through the Black Sea and via the Bosphorus straits that Russia has access to the Mediterranean. However, this access is highly tentative as the Bosphorus and Dardanelles are controlled by Turkey, a NATO member, with whom Russia has a very tense relationship. (Control over the Bosphorus was a key objective of the Russian Empire vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire in World War I.)
The Bosporus straits (red) and the Dardanelles straits (yellow). [Photo by User:Ineriot / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
The proximity of the Black Sea states to Russia also means that large portions of European Russia, where the bulk of the country’s population resides, can be easily targeted by US sea- and land-based intermediate range missiles, stationed in Ukraine or any NATO member in that region such as Romania or Bulgaria.
In this context, Russia has made its position in the Black Sea a major military priority, especially over the past ten years. Of six military bases that Russia retained in the former Soviet Union after 1991, three were located in the Black Sea, including its Black Sea naval port on Crimea, the peninsula in the Black Sea that Russia annexed in 2014 following the Western-orchestrated coup in Kiev. In 2019, the US Naval War College observed that the annexation of Crimea enabled Russia to reestablish its “maritime dominance in the Black Sea.”
Russia’s military base in Crimea is critical not only in the conflict with Ukraine. It is also the point from which the Kremlin controls its military operations in Syria, where a civil war and de facto proxy war between the US and Russia, which has been backing the Assad regime against the US-backed Islamist opposition, has been raging since 2011.
Cutting Russia off the Black Sea and thereby the Mediterranean would, therefore, significantly undermine its position in the Middle East as well as in North Africa where Russia still has significant economic and military interests, most notably in Libya, which has been thrown into a civil war by the 2011 NATO attack on the country.
Well aware of the geostrategic and military significance of the Black Sea for Russia, NATO has staged multiple provocations there over the past years, including in the immediate run-up to the Russian invasion.
This included the massive Sea Breeze exercises in the Black Sea in 2021, involving a record 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, and 40 aircraft. It also entailed several provocations, including by Britain, which sent a warship into waters claimed by Russia off Crimea in June 2021, prompting the Russian army to drop a bomb in the destroyer’s path. In both spring and the fall of 2021, the US also provocatively sent multiple warships into the Black Sea, well aware that the Kremlin considered this a “red line” in terms of its national security interests. As of February 2022, NATO had 18 warships stationed in the Black Sea.
Last month, Britain called for a NATO-led naval intervention in the Black Sea against Russia to “protect freighters carrying Ukrainian grain” under the cover of a “humanitarian mission” to avert a global hunger crisis. However, Ankara has closed the Dardanelles and Istanbul straits between the Aegean and Black Seas to both Russian and NATO warships since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Although not bordering the Black Sea directly, Greece, as a NATO member, has in recent years become an increasingly central country in US-NATO plans for the Black Sea region. The Greek port city of Alexandroupoli in the northern Aegean Sea has been transformed into an important US base and staging point. Since Ankara's closure of the straits, the city has been used for military deliveries to Ukraine in the NATO war against Russia.
“Grain, oil seeds and mineral oils”: Pipelines and the economic resources of the Black Sea region
The Black Sea region has been a central theater of both world wars of the 20th century. German imperialism in particular has sought to bring the region, and most notably Ukraine, under its direct control. The German historian Christian Gerlach, noting the parallels between German war aims in both world wars, wrote that the Nazis’ occupation policies in the former Soviet Union—which resulted in at least 27 million dead—were focused on exploiting a few raw materials: “grain, oil seeds and mineral oils.” (Christian Gerlach: Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Deutsche Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Zürich 2001, p. 14)
The war policies of US and German imperialism today, which are fundamentally aimed at re-subjugating the entire region and transforming it into a colonial appendage of the imperialist powers, stand in that tradition.
Agriculture
The food crisis triggered by the war has highlighted the central significance of the Black Sea region for the global grain market. Indeed, the region, and in particular Russia and Ukraine, are considered the “breadbasket” of not only Europe but much of Africa and the Middle East.
The top exports of Ukraine are all related to its agricultural industry. As of 2020, the list is led by oil seeds (accounting for 10.1 percent of exports, worth $5.32 billion), followed by corn (9.29 percent or $4.89 billion), and wheat (8.76 percent or $4.61 billion.)
Russia was the world’s leading wheat exporter in 2021. The country also accounts for 2.3 percent of the world’s corn market. Together with Ukraine, Russia is also a leading producer and exporter of sunflower oil as well as barley. Romania too is a major agricultural producer. As of 2021, Romania was Europe’s largest corn and sunflower producers, and among the EU’s top five wheat and soybeans producers.
Control over these resources promises immense profits, especially at times of food crises when the agricultural giants can engage in massive speculation on corn prices. Already last year, the global food giant Cargill, one of the world’s largest companies and one of four companies that control over 70 percent of the global agricultural market, topped $5 billion in profits on $134 billion in revenue. The combined wealth of the Cargill family grew by an average $120 million a day during the pandemic, and it is set to grow significantly further amid record food prices.
Gas and oil
In addition to its own vast agricultural and raw material resources, the Black Sea region is critical for Russia’s oil exports, and for the transport of oil and gas reserves from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
An analysis by the Carnegie Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, observed in 2021, “The Black Sea is an important trade and transportation artery for Russia. Both Russia and Central Asian countries are highly dependent on the Russian port of Novorossiysk to export grain and oil by ship.”
Far from being an “imperialist” country, Russia, for all intents and purposes, is above all a raw material supplier of the world economy. Oil and gas, along with coal and other minerals, are the most important export commodities of Russia. Crude and refined petroleum together accounted for 37 percent (worth over $74.4 billion) of Russia’s exports, followed by petroleum gas (6 percent of exports and worth almost $20 billion), gold (5.67 percent and worth $18.7 billion), coal (4.4 percent or $14.5 billion), platinum (3.2 percent and worth $10.5 billion), and then wheat.
The Novorossiysk port on Russia’s Black Sea shore is the country’s single biggest port and its third most important hub for crude oil exports. In 2020, according to the EIA, 459,000 barrels of oil passed through the Novorossiysk port each day.
Given its extremely high reliance on oil and gas exports, cutting off Russia’s access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean would be the economic equivalent of “breaking the back” of the country.
The Black Sea is critical for access to the resources of Central Asia and the Caucasus as well.
Following the destruction of the Soviet Union, energy company executives flocked to the region to negotiate lucrative contracts with the former Stalinist bureaucrats-turned-oligarchs to obtain access to these resources. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in 1999, a central objective of the imperialist-instigated wars in the Balkans in the 1990s was access to the Caspian Sea, just east of the Black Sea, which was understood to be home to the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves, with between 17 and 33 billion barrels of oil, and 232 trillion cubic meters of gas.
Since the Caspian Sea is landlocked, the question of pipeline infrastructure became central to control over these resources. To this day, Russia’s pipelines, while no longer providing exclusive access to these resources, are central and they all run through the Black Sea. Thus, the Caspian pipeline, which is operated by a multinational consortium that includes both Russian state-owned companies and the American energy giant Chevron, transports oil from oil fields in Kazakhstan, as well as Russian fields in the Caspian region, to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk from where its oil is shipped throughout the world.
Over the past two decades, the US and the EU have pushed to put an end to various other pipeline projects that would have run through the Black Sea and bypassed Ukraine. At the same time, they have pursued rival projects, aimed at directly linking up the EU to gas and oil fields in the Caspian region and Central Asia.
Thus, with $4 billion, the US pushed the Baku -Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (also known as BTC pipeline), which delivered oil from Azerbaijan over Georgia to Turkey, bypassing Russia. The pipeline was an important consideration in US operations in Georgia, where Washington funded a coup in 2003 and encouraged a war with Russia in 2008.
These pipeline wars also entailed torpedoing rival Russian-backed projects. The biggest, apart from the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines was the $50 billion South Stream pipeline project, which would have transported Russian gas from the Black Sea coast through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary to Austria, via one route, and through Greece to Italy, via another. With an annual capacity of 63 billion cubic meters, the pipeline would have covered a tenth of Europe’s total gas demand at the time. The Kremlin was forced to call off the project in 2014, right after the coup in Ukraine.
The major Russian gas pipelines to Europe. The Kremlin could never complete the South Stream through the Black Sea because of opposition from the EU. [Photo by Samuel Bailey / CC BY 4.0]
These pipeline wars have three principal objectives:
First, the imperialist powers are trying to gain direct control over the vast resources of the former Soviet Union, preventing Russia but also China, which has substantially increased its economic involvement in the region, from controlling them.
Second, they aim at undermining the Russian economy, which is heavily reliant on such oil and gas exports, and, by extension, the Putin regime.
And third, they are aimed at providing a geostrategic advantage to the imperialist powers, most notably the US, in the competition of oil and gas companies over market shares.
Through the exploitation of shale gas, the US, once the world’s biggest net gas importer, has become a major exporter of gas, and is now directly competing with Russia for the European market. In January 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US exports of liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe for the first time exceeded Russia’s gas pipeline deliveries. In response to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Germany canceled almost immediately the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, while the White House announced an increase of its LNG shipments to Europe from 22 billion cubic meters to 37 billion cubic meters.
The world's five countries with the largest annual net imports of natural gas. Because of the "shale gas revolution", US sharply cut back on its imports starting in 2008 and has since become a major exporter of LNG. [Photo by Plazak / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
Already, US shale companies experienced a several-fold jump in their profits for the first quarter of this year: The profits of Pioneer Natural Resources increased more than fivefold, and those of Continental Resources more than tripled.
The conflict with China in the Black Sea region
While Russia has been the primary target of the imperialist intervention in the Black Sea region, over the past decades rivalry with China has also become a central consideration of both the US and the EU in the Black Sea region.
For China, the region is the easiest and quickest connection between East Asia and Europe. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initially conceived of as a $40-billion infrastructure project, is planned to run through the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, including through Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey. Over the past years, the BRI has made very slow progress. Nevertheless, China has developed significant economic ties with many countries in the region, most notably Ukraine, which joined the BRI in 2017.
In 2019, China became Ukraine’s most important trading partner, relegating Russia to No. 2. Ukraine has also become China’s second largest corn supplier and largest supplier of weapons. In early 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that he hoped his country would become “a bridge to Europe for Chinese business.”
However, the growing role of China in Ukraine has been a major thorn in the side of the US in particular, and Washington has intervened heavily to undermine the growing economic cooperation between Ukraine and China. Thus, in spring 2021, as the US backed Kiev’s provocations against Russia in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian government canceled a multibillion-dollar deal that would have allowed China to take over the Ukrainian company Motor Sich, one of the world’s largest engine manufacturers for airplanes and helicopters, at the last minute due to massive pressure from Washington and at considerable cost for the Ukrainian government.
But the EU, too, sees the growing influence of China in the region as a challenge to its economic and strategic interests, which the European imperialist powers seek to increasingly assert independently from Washington.
A recent analysis by the EU-based Global Security think tank noted:
“The US is involved in the [Black Sea] region to counter the geopolitical and energy interests of Russia as well as to limit the increasing influence of China, its BRI, and Chinese Digital Silk Road, through development aid, lethal military aid, and supporting the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) and the Clean Network. Competing with Russian energy interests (Nord Stream 2 particularly), the US is also trying to find a market for its energy export.
“The EU wants to create a third space between China and the US so that it can act independently. It has acted relatively autonomously and through multifarious policies, initiatives, and partnerships to actualize its European Strategic Autonomy.”
Conclusion
As in the past two world wars, the Black Sea region has emerged as a principal battle ground between various capitalist states, with the imperialist powers determined to undermine both Russian and Chinese influence, while competing between themselves for dominance in the region.
One expression of these rivaling efforts has been the resurrection of the so-called “Intermarium” (meaning “between the seas”), an alliance of Eastern European states stretching from the Baltic over the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea. Under Trump, Washington pivoted toward explicitly supporting this alliance which has long been spearheaded by the Polish government of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS).
Originally developed by the inter-war Polish dictator Józef Piłsudski, who built up Poland as a bulwark of imperialism in the region, the Intermarium was principally directed against the USSR and the influence of the Russian Revolution on the masses of Eastern Europe. It established alliances with right-wing anticommunist forces throughout the region and exiles from the former Soviet Union, aiming to mobilize nationalist forces within the Soviet Union to destabilize it from within and prepare the path for a restoration of capitalism.
Piłsudski's post-World War I Intermarium concept ranging from the Baltic sea in the north to the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the south. In light-green: eastern parts of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922. [Photo by GalaxMaps / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
Today, the alliance has been revived as the so-called Three Seas Initiative under the umbrella of the EU and NATO. Just as in the inter-war period, the Intermarium principally relies on support from the major imperialist powers and on far-right nationalist forces. In Eastern Europe, it is endorsed by far-right forces such as the ruling Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, and the neofascist Azov Battalion in Ukraine.
While this alliance today is primarily directed against Russian and Chinese influence, on the part of both Washington and Warsaw, it is also intended to undermine the substantial position of German imperialism in Eastern Europe. Berlin, the dominant imperialist power in the EU, is notably not a member of the alliance. Fearing to be pushed out, however, the German government has recently attempted to establish better relations with the Three Seas Initiative, despite clear resistance from Poland.
Whatever these shifting alliances, the crisis of world capitalism is driving the imperialist powers toward a new global conflagration. The imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, a de facto confrontation between the world’s biggest nuclear powers, would be just the opening chapter in such a conflict. But the international working class will have its word to say.
