Vigilante punishment spreads in Ukraine

Jason Melanovski

Images of people being tied to poles and subsequently beaten and humiliated have spread on social media in recent weeks as far-right vigilante forces run amok throughout the country now entering its fourth week of a disastrous NATO-provoked war with Russia.

In several videos the tying up and beating of Ukrainian citizens is performed by regular Ukrainian Armed Forces members, suggesting that legal and civil rights have been effectively abandoned in a country that is supposedly a pinnacle of European “democracy” compared to the “totalitarian” Putin regime.

Ostensibly, the victims of such vigilante justice are looters or Russian agents and saboteurs. However, no evidence is presented of their guilt, and the allegations against an individual often change in disparate postings of the same video.

Shocking videos of this “flogging” have been shared widely by far-right social media accounts in Ukraine. Victims include children, as well as members of the Sinti and Roma minorities.

In addition to being wrapped in plastic wrap and tied to a pole, the victims of such dehumanizing abuse regularly have their pants pulled down and are subsequently beaten by passersby or members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Some also have their faces painted in green or blue.

The same Western media, which is engaged in a frenzied propaganda campaign against the Putin regime and its war crimes, has largely maintained silence on these horrific acts of violence by Ukraine’s far right. One of the exceptions—an article in the UK’s Daily Mirror —even excused them as justified and even as a humorous response to Russia’s invasion, writing of “proud Ukrainian civilians” fighting back with a “unique punishment.”

This kind of vigilantism in Ukraine predates the beginning of the war on February 24 and was previously used by Ukraine’s various far-right and neo-Nazi groups following the US-backed coup that overthrew the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

In 2018 in the city of Chernihiv, members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion tied a man to a pole for supposedly damaging a memorial dedicated to those killed during the Maidan protests of 2013-14.

The video of the man’s illegal detainment was uploaded by Azov Battalion member Oleksandr Tarnavskyi and showed police arriving but leaving the man tied up for another 20 minutes.

As an Azov member, Tarnavskyi was known for posting racist content against Roma people, as well as a photo of himself raising his arm in a Nazi salute.

Such vigilante movements were officially supported by the Ukrainian government and integrated into the state. In 2018, the Poroshenko government formed a National Militia in 2018 and tasked them with patrolling the streets and rooting out “criminal” behavior.

In reality, such groups acted as political gangs persecuting and attacking anyone perceived to be opposed to Kiev’s militaristic anti-Russian and pro-NATO orientation.

In addition to Azov and the officially created National Militia, the neo-Nazi C14 movement was known for carrying out acts of vigilantism following 2014, particularly against Ukraine’s ethnic minorities.

In 2018 C14 carried out several raids of Roma encampments throughout the country killing at least one young Roma male. In an attack in Kiev, C14 members burned the homes of Roma families after driving them out.

In early February the leader of the neo-Nazi group C14 Yevhen Karas told his audience at a political seminar named after the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera that killing Russians was “fun” and “cool.” Karas also bluntly stated that it is precisely because neo-Nazis like him loved killing Russians that the West had supplied them with weapons.

The racist attacks on Roma previously led by C14 are now being carried out under the auspices of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Recent photos from L’viv show Roma women taped to a pole with their faces painted green. The photos clearly show Ukrainian Armed Forces members in the background, proving such attacks are being carried out either directly by Ukrainian soldiers or under their supervision.

Image of Roma tied to a pole in Lviv that was shared on social media.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces are also explicitly encouraging war crimes, such as the murder of captured Russian soldiers.

While the “flogging” appears to inflict relatively few physical injuries, the recent kidnapping and torture of a Jewish anti-war MMA athlete make clear that such attacks by the far right can easily end in serious injury and killings. The reactionary vigilante campaign against supposed looters, suspected Russian agents and ethnic minorities is a direct consequence of the right-wing militaristic policies of the Ukrainian government.

Following the 2014 US-backed coup, both governments of former President Petro Poroshenko and current President Volodymyr Zelensky steadily moved to curb civil and democratic rights while building up fascist forces.

This campaign is now being escalated under wartime conditions. On Sunday, Zelensky outlawed the activity of 11 political parties for supposed Russian collaboration.

The pro-Russian Opposition Platform—For Life party was Ukraine’s second largest political party and held 45 seats in the country’s 450-seat parliament.

None of the parties banned have called for a Russian victory or supported the disastrous invasion, and no evidence of collaboration or sabotage has been presented by the Ukrainian government.

Their main crime, rather, was supporting a negotiated peace with Russia, something which is opposed by Ukraine’s right wing and which Zelensky and his representatives are actively attempting to prevent.

The official banning of oppositional political activity is the culmination of an orchestrated political campaign of terror being carried by Ukraine’s security service (SBU). On March 6 the SBU arrested Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich of the Ukrainian Communist Youth on charges of “pro-Russian views and pro-Belarusian views.”

The vigilante campaign currently being carried out throughout Ukraine is a crude expression of the political environment fostered by the imperialist war drive against Russia and its proxy, the Zelensky government, as it has dispensed with free speech, the right to a free trial and other democratic rights.

Sudan erupts as millions in Africa go hungry due to Ukraine war and sanctions on Russia

Jean Shaoul

Thousands of workers and students took to the streets in cities across Sudan in protest at rocketing food and fuel prices. Food prices are 100 to 200 percent higher than they were a year ago and inflation stands at 250 percent.

In the capital Khartoum on Monday, the protesters were met with tear gas and stun grenades as they came within 200 metres of the presidential palace.

Sudanese anti-coup protesters take part in ongoing demonstrations against the military rule in Khartoum, Sudan, Monday, March.14, 2022. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali)

The mass protests follow the sharp dive in the value of the Sudanese pound in the last month, as the military junta ended its fixed currency policy, and take place alongside ongoing strikes by teachers and railway workers in Atbara over their abysmally low salaries and

According to the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP), nearly half of Sudan’s 44 million people will face hunger this year as a result of the military’s ouster of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdouk last October (prompting international financial institutions to suspend billions of dollars in crucial budget aid), the war in Ukraine and sanctions imposed on Russia.

The WFP says that about 20 million people are likely to be at “emergency” or “crisis” levels of “acute food insecurity,” double 2021’s figure. The situation has worsened dramatically due to soaring global grain prices, the shortage of foreign currency and drought in some parts of the country, fueling the escalating protest movement demanding an end to military rule.

Like many countries in Africa, Sudan sourced about 35 percent of its wheat imports in 2021 from Russia and Ukraine and now must find an alternative supplier demanding far higher prices. Russia and Ukraine accounted for nearly one third of the world’s grain exports, one fifth of its corn trade and almost 80 percent of sunflower oil production. According to the US Department of Agriculture, world wheat supplies will tighten, with exports from Russia and Ukraine likely to be 7 million tonnes smaller than expected before the war.

Following the US/NATO-provoked war, exports from Russia and Ukraine have virtually ground to a halt because of sanctions imposed by Washington and the European powers on Russia’s banks, shipping and airlines and Ukraine’s ban on the exports of grain and other food products to prevent a domestic humanitarian crisis. The northern Black Sea ports, where some of the most destructive fighting is taking place and through which most of Russia and Ukraine’s grain exports are shipped, have closed, while flight bans are causing cargo planes to divert around Russian airspace. This has exacerbated already-rising food prices due to pandemic-related supply chain problems and deepening poverty.

The northern Black Sea area exports at least 12 percent of the world’s traded food calories, while 45 percent of Ukraine’s exports—Ukraine has one-third of the world’s most fertile soil—are agricultural-related. As some of Ukraine’s exports are used for animal feed, the export ban and disruptions are likely to impact livestock. Farmers fleeing the fighting and the war’s destroying infrastructure and equipment threatens April’s planting season.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the price of wheat increased 80 percent between April 2020 and December 2021 as the pandemic took hold, sending food prices to their highest levels since the 1970s. Wheat prices have jumped 37 percent and corn 21 percent so far in 2022. Wheat futures are 80 percent higher than six months ago, and corn is up 58 percent.

Twenty-three of Africa’s 54 countries depend on Russia and Ukraine for more than half the imports of one of their staple goods. Some countries are even more reliant: Sudan, Egypt, Tanzania, Eritrea and Benin import 80 percent of their wheat and Algeria, Sudan and Tunisia more than 95 percent of sunflower oil from Russia and Ukraine. They too are seeing higher prices across the board, exacerbating hunger under conditions where most African elites provide no social safety net.

African dependence on wheat from Russia and Ukraine. 25 African countries import more than 1/3 of their wheat from Russia & Ukraine. 15 countries import more than half their supplies. (Source: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development-@UNCTAD/Twitter)

The cost of living will soar, particularly in countries that import most of their food and where the economic effects of COVID-19 hit hardest: Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Egypt. This is likely to double the number of people facing hunger in Africa, expected to reach more than 500 million of Africa’s 1.2 billion people.

The dangers are particularly acute in Egypt, the world’s largest buyer of wheat and the largest importer of wheat from Russia and Ukraine accounting for 80 percent of total imports. Around 30 million of Egypt’s 104 million people live on less than $1.50 a day and more than 70 million depend on government-subsidized imports for their bread and vegetable oil.

The government has banned the export of wheat, flour, and other staples, which will precipitate a sharp increase in prices and impact countries such as Yemen, already facing the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. Last year, President Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi announced he would raise subsidised bread prices. But with Egypt’s bread subsidies already costing $3.2 billion a year, the Finance Ministry estimates it will have to budget an additional $763 million in 2021-22.

Last July, the government reduced subsidies for sunflower and soybean oil by 20 percent, and unblended vegetable oil by 23.5 percent. This week, Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly set the price of unsubsidized bread at 11.5 Egyptian pounds, up 25 percent, as the currency fell by 14 percent against the dollar following the war in Ukraine.

Libya, reliant on Ukraine for over 40 percent of its wheat imports, saw the price of wheat and flour rise by up to 30 percent. According to the WFP, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 12 percent of Libyans, 511,000 people, would need food assistance in 2022. There are also 635,051 migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in Libya, one quarter of whom are considered moderately or severely food insecure. These terrible figures testify to the devastation caused by the 2011 NATO war against what was a middle-income country.

South Sudan, torn apart by civil war and conflicts between rival cliques over control of the country’s oil resources since independence in 2011, faces starvation with 8.9 million of the country’s 12 million people—including 680,000 people affected by floods since May 2021—expected to face hunger in the coming dry season.

In Ethiopia, fighting in and around Tigray province in the north has displaced more than 2 million people. Most of the remaining four million Tigrayans do not have enough food and are surviving by reducing meals, selling crops to pay debts or begging. There are 454,000 malnourished children, more than a quarter severely, and 120,000 malnourished pregnant or lactating women. The situation has been made worse by the UN’s inability to get emergency food supplies into Tigray since mid-December.

According to the WFP, 44 million people worldwide are on the brink of famine and another 232 million are only one step behind. The WFP has been badly hit as it gets half of the wheat it distributes in humanitarian crises from Ukraine. It must turn to other suppliers at a higher cost amid massively increased demand from countries torn apart by US-led or provoked wars and conflicts such as Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan, even as its funds from the advanced countries collapse as resources are diverted to Ukraine.

The world’s leaders and analysts know that the expanding hunger will stoke social instability, migration and political unrest, just as the rising cost of living precipitated the Arab Spring in 2011. Last year, there were five coups in West Africa. Only 22 percent of the continent’s 1.2 billion people have been vaccinated against COVID-19, while $100 billion in aid to deal with the pandemic promised by the advanced countries has yet to be delivered. Around 20 countries are massively in debt and close to defaulting on international loans.

Health care struggles grow in the US as Omicron BA.2 surge spreads

Alfred Kurosawa & Norisa Diaz

As the mainstream news centers continue to push ever more for war with Russia there has been a near media blackout concerning the coverage of COVID-19 in the US. A new mutation of the virus, the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, is ripping through populations in Asia and Europe and has already migrated to North America, accounting for nearly 25 percent of new cases in the US as of this writing.

The danger posed by the BA.2 subvariant was shown by the massive spread of infection that crushed hospital systems in Hong Kong. An even worse situation threatens US health systems, with a dwindling and increasingly overtaxed workforce, facing staff shortages and deteriorating living standards due to the surge of inflation. These conditions have sparked an uptick in strikes by health care workers in the US as well as among health care workers globally, who face similar conditions.

Armstrong County Memorial Hospital nurses on strike, March 13, 2022, in Kittaning, Pennsylvania (Photo by Twitter user @wpxigigi)

In just the past week there have been strikes and protests in the US states of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Nevada and California as well as in Haiti, South Africa and Turkey.

On March 13, 220 nurses went on strike at Armstrong County Memorial Hospital (ACMH) in Kittanning, Pennsylvania in response to understaffing and lack of pay. Nurses have criminally been kept on the job working for eight months by the ACMH Nurses United under the umbrella of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) since their contract expired in July 2021. The union ended the strike on Friday March 18 despite providing no acknowledgment that any of the demands of nurses had been met. One emergency room nurse, Athena Scanlon, noted in a statement put out by the union itself that she has at times had to care for 18 patients when their labor agreement called for only three or four patients.

PASNAP bargains on behalf of more than 9,000 health care workers in the state. The trade unions, who are tied by a thousand threads to the Democratic Party, are complicit in the horrendous working conditions for health care workers. ACMH for instance, has overseen deteriorating conditions and has not called a strike for improved conditions in more than 20 years. Instead, it has peddled false hopes in legislative actions such as the current state House Bill 106 and Senate Bill 240, or Patient Safety Act.

The rural hospital is the only one in the county with a population of some 65,000. Rural areas have been even harder hit throughout the pandemic than urban ones, often with poorer and sicker populations who face long travel distances. Rural hospitals themselves have fewer funds and are overall less attractive to the shrinking pool of travel nurses. Rural Americans have died from COVID at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s analysis of data from the Rural Policy Research Institute.

The ACMH hospital’s Community Health Needs Assessment published last June notes that the hospital is the largest employer in Armstrong County and serves a rural working poor population where the annual per-capita income for Armstrong County residents is at $27,715 and 12 percent are experiencing food insecurity. The report also notes that “22.6% of the Armstrong County Population is 65 or older.”

One nurse had this to say to the Courier Express about unsafe staffing, “I love my job, but in the ER, we go into the med room and cry; we go home and cry.” She went on to say, “It’s unsafe for the patients; it’s unsafe for us.”

Jerry Dunn spoke to KDKA saying, “We’re having nurses leave this hospital in droves to other facilities. We’re asking for competitive wages, we’re asking for them not to pull our call-off language from our contract that’s been in it for the last 20 years, and we’re asking not to be pulled into departments that we’re not comfortable working in. It’s just not safe for our patients.”

Across the Great Lakes, in Minnesota, about 100 workers employed at the Minnesota Epilepsy Group (MEG) conducted a five-day unfair labor practice (ULP) strike that lasted from Monday March 14-18. The MEG tried to impose a new contract that will no longer give a pay raise to new employees, effectively creating a two-tier wage system. MEG is a service provider to Allina Health, and picketing extended to three locations: Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, United Hospital in St. Paul and in front of the MEG office in Roseville.

Significantly, their union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, only authorized an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike, which restricts workers from raising any demands over economic issues or workplace conditions, but only those related to employer violations of labor law. Despite the demands of the rank and file, SEIU will push workers back onto the job as soon as the MEG supposedly begins “bargaining in good faith.” At the service of the Democratic Party, this is a tactic used by all the trade unions to have the workforce let off steam in order to ram through a contract beneficial for the employer and the state.

Renee David, one of 60 Electroencephalogram (EEG) Technologists at MEG told FightBack! News, “We are not out here asking for a lot. We are just another group of healthcare workers who are standing up to a system that has burnt us out. We’re not only standing up for our department, we are standing up for EEG technologists all around the nation and for anyone who works in healthcare.”

At University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada (UMC), where 1,400 nurses and Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are employed, nurses under the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Nevada Local 1107 held a protest on March 10 in opposition to mandatory overtime shifts that were set to begin March 16 for at least 60 days in order to deal with the influx of patients coming in.

These mandatory shifts play a large role in faster burnout among health care workers and cause the level of patient care to deteriorate. Despite this, union representative Elizabeth Bolhouse, SEIU local 1107, praised UMC: “I truly felt like UMC appreciated us,” and reiterated to local media that their contract allows the hospital to mandate overtime, saying, “Our contract does allow in case of emergency staffing need to institute mandatory overtime. Generally, two-week notice is required when you’re going to change our schedule,” but stressed that the only real issue was the overall tone in the memo announcing these mandatory shifts.

The unions, which have agreed to placement of such measures in the contract, are working to rubber stamp the maintenance of abusive conditions for health care workers, who are already stretched thin. They “argue” instead that there be a two week notice rather than one week, and that a volunteer list be posted first, and lastly that there be “reasonable accommodations for those that can’t fulfill the four-day requirement from mandatory overtime.” In response, the hospital pushed the start date of mandatory overtime to begin one week later. Their Facebook page features endless praise for President Biden, who has been at the forefront of relaxing all mitigation measures, including the dropping of mask mandates.

In California, Sutter Health unionized nurses have been working without a contract since June 2021 and are still tied up in negotiations. Sutter nurses picketed this past Tuesday at 15 different Sutter Health hospitals in the state in the cities of Antioch, Auburn, Burlingame, Castro Valley, Crescent City, Lakeport, Novato, Roseville, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Tracy and Vallejo. They are demanding an end to unsafe staffing ratios and improved measures for pandemic readiness concerning PPE (personal protective equipment) and workplace violence protections.

Critical care nurse Amy Erb spoke to the Record-Bee of Lake County saying, “We have been on the front lines before and during this pandemic.” She then continued, “Throughout this time, we have witnessed Sutter Health become profitable while they refuse to invest in the resources we need in order for us to provide safe and effective care to our patients and community.”

Renee Waters, who is a registered nurse at the trauma neuro intensive care unit at Sutter Roseville also spoke to the Record-Bee and had this to say: “Sutter failed us during the pandemic.” She went on to say, “Our proposals are intended to correct Sutter’s gaps in pandemic readiness and workplace violence prevention. We want to have a proactive approach to the protections that we deserve.”

Global job actions by health care workers

The working class is not only on the move within the US, but also internationally. Haitian health careworkers have gone on strike to ask for security in response to the increased reports of gangs kidnapping health care workers. South African health care workers did a work stoppage protest to voice their opposition to the closure of hospitals in the Eastern Cape province, and in the Gauteng Province of South Africa another group of health care workers picketed to protest the dismissal of over 800 pandemic hired employees.

In Turkey tens of thousands of health care workers took part in a two-day national strike that began on Monday, March 14.

Instead of waging the war on COVID throughout the world, the ruling class, led by the Biden administration, provoked a NATO-led war with Russia to create an external enemy as it contends with unprecedented crises at home, with an uncontained pandemic that has already claimed close to 1 million lives, and rising inflation. No preparations are being made to combat the oncoming new surges of the pandemic. In fact, all of the still insufficient mitigation measures are being taken away, such as the dropping of mask mandates. Health care workers will continue to bear the burden created by these criminal policies of “herd immunity.”

There is no shortage of militancy and a desire to fight by workers, but this must be done not just against this or that employer, but against the Democratic Party, the unions and the entire ruling class that is responsible for the current conditions facing nurses and health care workers. At every stage of the pandemic the corporate-political establishments and their trade union stooges have prioritized the defense of profits over the safeguarding of human life.

Impoverishing Ukraine: What the US and the EU have been doing to the country for the past 30 years (Part 1)

Andrea Peters

At last Wednesday’s gathering of US congressmen to hear the words of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the event by crying out, “Slava Ukraini”—“Glory to Ukraine”—no less than five times. This expression has become popular in Washington, London, and elsewhere as of late, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also bellowing out the cry in a session of the House of Commons and on Twitter.

American President Joseph Biden, while not yet tackling the two Ukrainian words, claims at every moment that the more than one billion dollars’ worth of armaments he has poured into Ukraine—enough for every citizen to kill every other multiple times over—is to defend the “freedom” and “dignity” of that nation.

The origins of the term “Slava Ukraini” reveal something about the real relationship of the US and NATO to Ukraine’s working masses of all ethnicities and linguistic groups—Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, etc. As biographer Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe explains in his book about Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, “Slava Ukraini” was part of the salute delivered by members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which were collectively responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Soviets, Jews and Poles during World War II.

Neither the United States nor the EU nor any of their related institutions care now or have ever cared about the people of Ukraine, much less their liberty. Even as they have been using the country as a cat’s paw in their battle with Russia—as a result of which massive amounts of firepower are making their way into the hands of today’s Ukrainian fascists, and parts of the country are being blown to bits—the US and the EU have been economically strangling the Ukrainian people for decades.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (R) greets Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich (L) at the IMF Headquarters April 12, 2010 in Washington, DC. (International Monetary Fund Photograph/Stephen Jaffe)

As measured by GDP per capita, Ukraine, with its 44.13 million inhabitants, is the poorest or second poorest country in Europe. It competes with Moldova, with about 2.6 million people, for these inauspicious titles.

The bottom 50 percent of Ukraine’s population gets just 22.6 percent of all the country’s income and 5.7 percent of its wealth. The top 10 percent own nearly 60 percent of Ukraine’s net personal assets, according to the World Inequality Database, a publication put out under the directorship of three of the globe’s leading specialists in inequality—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. In 2018, Ukrainian households’ average net savings stood at minus $245.

The median household income in Ukraine is around $4400 a year, about on par with that of Iran, whose economy has been operating under crushing sanctions for years. The average wage in Ukraine is estimated to be just 330 euros a month, and the state-mandated minimum a worker can be paid is 144 euros. According to the Ukrainian government, an individual ought to be able to survive on less than half that amount, as the subsistence minimum is 64 euros. Retirees who are at the bottom rung of the pension scale take home 50 euros a month.

The country’s Institute of Sociology reports that the typical Ukrainian family spends 47 percent of its total income on food and another 32 percent on utility bills. In 2016, nearly 60 percent of people were poor according to government standards, including 60 percent of kids. That poverty rate dropped to “only” 37.8 percent in 2019. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization found that in 2020 15.9 percent of Ukrainian children under 5 were malnourished, and in 2019 17.7 percent of women of reproductive age were anemic, a condition caused by lack of iron in the diet. That number has been steadily rising since 2004. Twenty-four percent of the population is obese.

Ukraine population

Between 2014 and 2019, the birthrate fell by 19.4 percent. Ukraine’s mortality rate is extremely high—14.7 per 1,000 people. It is well above that of many countries in Africa, the poorest continent on the globe. Its suicide rate, according to the World Bank, ranks 11th in the world. With deaths outstripping births by more than two to one and hundreds of thousands emigrating annually in search of anything better, the country’s population has shrunk every year since 1993. There are 8 million fewer Ukrainian citizens today than there were 30 years ago.

One could go on. Apart from the super-rich and a narrow layer of middle and upper-middle class people concentrated in the major cities, Ukraine is a sea of deprivation.

This is a direct outcome of economic policies imposed on the country by the very states that today parade around declaring their love for Ukraine. In an immediate sense, the current situation has its roots in the 2014 US-backed coup that brought to power a government in Kiev that immediately signed an association agreement with the EU requiring it to implement severe austerity measures. But it has even deeper roots.

The social and economic disaster in that country can be traced back to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and the restoration of capitalism in all of the newly independent nation states, which saw their full integration into global financial and trade networks. Through a series of policies collectively known as “shock therapy” — worked out in close collaboration with Western advisors —nationalized property was transferred to private hands. Former Communist Party officials and their children, economic managers and directors of major Soviet factories and sections of industry, as well as criminal elements active in the shadow economy, won out at the expense of the working masses, through a combination of outright theft and bargain basement fire sales of Soviet resources.

Europe Net Average Monthly Salary Adjusted for Living Costs

Out of this wrecking operation, competing factions of big business emerged in Ukraine that were centered in Donetsk in the east and Dnipropetrovsk to its west, with coal mining and processing, energy production and transit, and metallurgy being their main sources of wealth. Banking and media empires emerged, and new sources of profits were soon realized in consumer products and agriculture.

The names of Ukraine’s billionaires began to grow from this period forward—Victor Pinchuk ($1.9 billion), Renat Akhmetov ($7.6 billion), Igor Kolomoyskyy ($1.8 billion) and Henadiy Boholyubov ($1.1 billion), Petro Poroshenko ($1.6 billion), Vadim Novinsky ($1.4 billion), and on. For decades, Ukrainian politics has been consumed by conflicts, alliances, splits in alliances, and warring among them, which have intersected with the question as to whether the country would be pulled into closer economic relations with Europe, maintain its strong ties with Russia, or somehow manage the two simultaneously. The warfare has unfolded as geopolitical tensions between Washington and Moscow have grown, with Ukraine understood as a key zone of competition.

During the 1990s, even as great sums were being accumulated at one end of the spectrum, Ukraine’s economy was in free-fall. With per capita growth declining by 8.4 percent between 1993 and 1999, its economy was among the worst of any European country. Inflation was at times completely out of control, reaching an annual high of around 376 percent in 1995, thereby wiping out the savings and spending power of Ukrainian workers early in the process of market restoration.

“Many young people, who lacked alternatives in the early 1990s, joined gangs and were used as pawns in the process of accumulation by criminals,” observes political economist Yuliya Yurchenko in her 2018 book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, with warfare between competing business clans producing at times bodies in the streets. A two-and-a-half fold increase in crime between 1988 and 1997 was largely driven by various forms of “theft, robbery, swindling, and extortion” and “bribe taking, counterfeiting, and trading in narcotics,” she notes.

Top 10 percent wealth share Ukraine

During this time, Ukraine received ten loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in the start of what would be a near-constant process of borrowing from international financial institutions over the course of the 2000s and 2010s. The terms of the loans have centered around a 1994 “Memorandum on Questions of Economic Policy and Strategy” signed by Ukraine and the IMF that, in the words of Yurchenko, “effectively limited Ukraine’s government decision-making power.”

Agreements with other international financial institutions, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, drafted on the principle of cross-conditionality—i.e. creditors set terms that coincide and reinforce one another—established similar limits. The noose around the loan recipients’ neck tightens in multiple directions.

Lenders demanded that the government in Kiev end policies that created obstacles for foreign trade, eliminate price regulations, reduce the state budget deficit, cut subsidies to “unproductive” industries, make manufacturing outlets more competitive by modernizing their plants and laying off workers, privatize more state-owned property, cut budgetary expenditures by targeting social programs and pensions, and impose value-added taxes such that the collection of money from sales would fall more heavily on consumers as opposed to business.

While these processes have accelerated and/or slowed down at times depending on whether the administration in Kiev has been more US- or more Russian-allied, every Ukrainian government has been a partner in implementing the demands of global capital. Having emerged out of the ashes of the great barbeque that was the breakup of the Soviet Union, the ruling class of Ukraine is a comprador class in the most complete sense of the term.

In 1998, for instance, Ukraine’s parliament granted President Leonid Kuchma the authority to impose a 30 percent reduction in government expenditures. This was done because the IMF told the country to do so. “In addition to meeting fiscal and monetary targets, the government must pass legislation on privatisation, tax reform, energy and agricultural sector restructuring, and flushing out its massive ‘shadow economy,’” observed an August 1998 article in the Financial Times.

“The reforms,” writes Yurchenko, “created mutually reinforcing negative effect on the economy by opening up outdated industry for competition with foreign transnational corporations and by reducing financial state support for enterprises and citizenry thus making the latter poorer and the former even less competitive with expected negative aggregate consumption and potential revenue drop.”

Ukraine’s debt continued to balloon over the course of the coming years, increasing from $10 billion in the period from 1997-2002 to $100 billion in 2008-2009, the equivalent of more than 56 percent of the country’s GDP and more than double the total value of all its exports at that time. While it has fluctuated in recent years, it is basically at the same level today as it was in a decade ago. As a result, Ukraine has ended up in a constant cycle of indebtedness, careening at times towards default due to broader crises in the world economy, such as the 2008-2009 crash.

US COVID-19 death toll reaches 1 million

Evan Blake

By this evening, the official COVID-19 death toll in the United States will surpass 1 million, according to the Worldometers tracker. Due to the absence of uniform data, the exact death toll from COVID-19 and the moment it will pass 1 million on other data trackers is unknown, but by the end of April every tracker will likely surpass this horrific milestone. Estimates of excess deaths caused directly or indirectly by the pandemic place the true US death toll at over 1.2 million.

The catastrophic loss of life and broader societal impacts of the pandemic are unprecedented in American history. Entire families have been wiped out. One out of every 100 people above 65 years old has been killed by COVID-19. Over 200,000 children have lost a parent or primary caregiver to the disease.

In the span of two years, more Americans have died from COVID-19 than the cumulative death toll of every war fought by the United States in the 20th century. On average, 2,735 Americans have died from this preventable disease every two days over the past two years, close to the total of 2,977 people killed in the September 11 terror attacks.

In the first year of the pandemic alone, life expectancy in the US dropped by an astounding 1.8 years, the largest decrease since World War II. At this point, the cumulative total decline in life expectancy is likely approaching five years.

Ventilator tubes attached to a COVID-19 patient at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles, Nov. 19, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

Lost among the statistics of mass deaths are countless individual tragedies. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, the elderly, people in the prime of their lives, youth who had hardly even begun to live, have all been struck down by COVID-19.

In response to this monumental social catastrophe and the approaching milestone of 1 million deaths, everywhere there is a massive official indifference.

One would imagine that a series of solemn memorials, tributes, and serious discussions on the pandemic would be held in the days and weeks leading up to this milestone. Nothing of the sort. The pandemic is now all but ignored by the entire political establishment and the corporate media, as a potential new surge of the more infectious, vaccine-resistant and virulent Omicron BA.2 subvariant looms in the background.

While the 1 million needless deaths are the most tragic element of the pandemic, millions and possibly tens of millions more Americans now suffer from Long COVID as a result of their illness. These include a myriad of symptoms that can affect nearly every organ in the body, including the lungs, brain, heart, kidneys and immune system.

Seroprevalence studies indicate that likely upwards of 200 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19. Studies on Long COVID estimate that at least 10 percent of infections lead to long-term symptoms, with comparable rates among breakthrough infections in vaccinated people, meaning that upwards of 20 million Americans are likely experiencing some form of long-term ramifications.

Further, there is a growing body of evidence proving that those infected with COVID-19 face increased risk of brain damage, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and more. The overall long-term societal impact is incalculable.

The overwhelming majority of COVID-19 infections and deaths have befallen the working class and lower middle class. Comprising the bottom 90 percent of income earners, they have been compelled to return to unsafe workplaces and send their children into unsafe schools, which have been the primary centers of viral transmission.

By September 2021, the CDC estimates that roughly 25.8 million children had already been infected with COVID-19 in the US. The full reopening of schools since that time likely pushed the figure above 40 million, with millions infected or re-infected with Omicron.

For the capitalist ruling class, the pandemic has been an unprecedented bonanza. This Sunday will mark two years since the CARES Act was signed into law by Donald Trump after passing with near-unanimous bipartisan support. This initiated the greatest transfer of wealth in US history, with US billionaires amassing a staggering $2.1 trillion through October 2021.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who violated California state law and forced his employees back to work in May 2020, went unpunished by state Democrats and has amassed over $200 billion in the past two years. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has overseen mass COVID-19 infections and numerous deaths at his workplaces, has garnered $75 billion since March 2020.

Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, as well as Republican and Democratic state and local governments, public health has been continuously subordinated to the economic, social and political interests of the corporations and financial oligarchy. The pretense of Biden and the Democrats that they would “follow the science” and maintain efforts to stop the pandemic was exploded during the surge of the Omicron variant.

On December 15, 2021, as Omicron infections started to skyrocket, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients (net worth over $90 million) stated, “We know how to keep our kids in school and our businesses open, and we’re not going to shut down our economy in any way.” This set the tone for the subsequent three months, which became the second worst wave of the pandemic as over 170,000 Americans died from COVID-19.

During the Omicron surge, the Democrats embraced the “herd immunity” strategy pioneered by Trump, based on the lie that COVID-19 is now “endemic” and a “new normal” has been reached. The same process unfolded in Canada, across Europe and internationally, with almost every world government outside of China abandoning all public health measures to slow the spread of the virus.

Worldwide, the official death toll now stands at over 6.1 million, while excess deaths are estimated to be roughly 20.2 million. This will only intensify in the coming weeks and months as the Omicron BA.2 subvariant continues to spread uncontrolled throughout the world and as new variants evolve.

More so than any other event, the pandemic has made clear that the capitalist ruling elites are willing to accept any level of death in the population. The Biden administration is not concerned with how lives can be saved from COVID-19. Quite the opposite. He has flown off to Europe to partake in war councils with the other NATO powers and stoke up the conflict with Russia over Ukraine. Rather than call on the world to unify in the fight against COVID-19, Biden aims to unify NATO to oppose Russia.

Were the US-NATO imperialist powers to engage in a direct confrontation with Russia, this could quickly spiral out of control and unleash a nuclear war that could permanently destroy human civilization.

Every belligerent in the war, including Russia, Ukraine, the United States and all the NATO powers, have in common that their countries have all experienced a massive loss of life from the pandemic. But if one contrasts the resources which exist to what has been done to stop the spread of COVID-19, America leads the way for sheer indifference to its population.

The acceptance and even promotion of mass sickness and death from COVID-19 indicate that a certain psychological barrier has been crossed in ruling circles in relationship to the use of nuclear war. If they are willing to sacrifice the lives of 1 million Americans, what qualms do they have about the deaths of millions abroad?

Biden arrives in Europe to press for military escalation against Russia

Alex Lantier

US President Joe Biden arrives today in Brussels for two days of meetings with the European Council of European heads of state and then the NATO military alliance. His visit aims to ensure that NATO recklessly escalates military operations against Russia, despite the rising danger of nuclear war.

Asked yesterday on Biden’s trip, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that war would continue indefinitely, dismissing reports of successes in Russian-Ukrainian talks on ending the war begun by Russia’s February 23 invasion of Ukraine.

“This war will not end easily or rapidly,” Sullivan said. “For the past few months, the West has been united. The president is traveling to Europe to ensure we stay united, to cement our collective resolve, to send a powerful message that we are prepared and committed to this for as long as it takes.”

Biden is to discuss plans for a ground invasion of Ukraine by NATO member states during his subsequent March 25 visit to Poland, which has championed plans for NATO troops to deploy to Ukraine as “peacekeepers.”

President Joe Biden on March 18, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield denied that US troops are now in Ukraine but gave a green light to other NATO states to invade. “I can’t preview what decisions will be made at this NATO conference and how NATO will respond to the Polish proposal [to deploy peacekeepers in Ukraine]. What I can say is American troops will not be on the ground in Ukraine at this moment,” she said, adding that “other NATO countries may decide that they want to put troops inside of Ukraine.”

Thomas-Greenfield’s denial of US military involvement on the ground in Ukraine is misleading and false. US private military contractors like Academi (formerly Blackwater) and CIA paramilitaries are aiding Ukrainian nationalist militias and army units against Russia. However, a major escalation is being prepared: retired US military officers have said the Pentagon may double its current force of 100,000 troops in Europe.

Conditions are emerging for NATO to launch a land war against Russia that could escalate to global nuclear war. The Russian army has an estimated 1 million regular troops; of those, around 150,000, largely drawn from elite armored units, are bogged down in bloody fighting in Ukraine. NATO armed forces, at about 3.3 million, enjoy overwhelming numerical superiority on a world scale and are publicly preparing to launch military operations in Ukraine.

Yesterday, CNN interviewed Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and provocatively asked him about Russian willingness to use nuclear weapons.

Peskov emphasized that Russia may use nuclear weapons if the Kremlin believes it faces a threat to Russia’s national survival. “We have a concept of domestic security and it's public, you can read all the reasons for nuclear arms to be used. So, if it is an existential threat for our country, then it [the nuclear arsenal] can be used in accordance with our concept,” he said.

Peskov also gave CNN an account of the bankrupt calculations that led the Kremlin to invade Ukraine. He said it was concerned about an invasion of separatist Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine such as the Donbass by the current far-right Ukrainian regime in Kiev. Moreover, he added, the Kremlin was increasingly frustrated with NATO’s treatment of Russia in the decades since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991.

“President [Vladimir] Putin’s intents are to make the world listen to and understand our concerns,” Peskov said. “We've been trying to convey our concerns to the world, first to Europe, to the United States for a couple of decades, but no one would listen to us.”

Russian desperation mounted as US and NATO weaponry and support poured into Ukraine, which became a heavily armed NATO base directly on Russia’s borders. Moscow was “hoping that Ukraine will never get prepared for a strike against Donbass,” Peskov said, and counting on “Normandy Format” talks between Berlin, Paris, Kiev and Moscow. However, Peskov added, “No one would warn Ukrainians not to do that [attack the Donbass]. No one would push Ukrainians towards the solution within a framework of Normandy process. No one did.”

Peskov indicated that the Kremlin concluded that to reach a deal with the NATO imperialist powers, it had to intimidate them militarily. After Ukraine amassed about 120,000 troops on the front lines in the Donbass, Peskov said, it become “perfectly clear for us … for our military specialists, that Ukraine was going to launch an offensive against Donbass.” Moscow decided, he stated, that “no one would listen to our concerns” until Russian military operations began.

The extreme danger of a global military conflagration is rooted in the disastrous consequences of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. Over 30 years, NATO absorbed countries across Eastern Europe, moving ever closer to Russia’s borders, while rampaging across the Middle East and Central Asia, attacking countries including Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Now, it is now deploying troops directly on Russia’s borders in Poland, the Baltic republics, and potentially now in Ukraine.

Peskov’s comments lay bare the reactionary conceptions of the leaders of Russia’s post-Soviet capitalist regime, trained on false Stalinist theories of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Constantly disappointed in their attempts to negotiate a settlement with NATO powers they call their “Western partners,” they gambled, according to Peskov, that a credible military threat would force NATO to negotiate. This gamble is visibly failing.

While the Kremlin fired the first shot, it is the NATO imperialist powers that have goaded Russia into the conflict. Now, they are reacting to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and to Moscow’s nuclear threats, simply by escalating their operations. Even as Peskov stresses that the Kremlin is looking for a negotiated settlement, the NATO powers are recklessly pressing ahead, risking nuclear war.

While American and European media demonize Russia for its military operations in Ukraine, NATO military and intelligence officials appear to be drawing the unsubstantiated and extremely dangerous conclusion that Moscow will be reluctant to use heavy weaponry in a war.

Yesterday, military correspondent William Arkin wrote in Newsweek an account of Russian tactics in Ukraine, based on US intelligence sources. They emphasized Moscow’s relatively limited use of air power and artillery causing large-scale damage to Ukrainian cities. After nearly a month of war, Arkin wrote, Russian aircraft flew “some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles.” By contrast, he noted, “the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war.”

“The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets,” a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency official told Arkin. “I know it's hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is. But that's what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.”

In Europe, official circles are clearly calculating on the increased likelihood of nuclear conflict, which could rapidly destroy any or all European countries. Yesterday, Professor Benoît Pelopidas, a nuclear weapons expert at the Political Science University in Paris, spoke to France Info to stress France’s vulnerability to nuclear attack.

“France’s military and political elites bet on nuclear deterrence,” Pelopidas said. However, under extreme political conditions, France’s possession of nuclear weapons may no longer be sufficient to deter Russia or other powers from using nuclear weapons, leaving France open to annihilation if Russia and NATO fire ever-larger salvoes of nuclear bombs.

Pelopidas explained, “Already in the 1950s, a National Civil Protection Service report indicated that 15 thermonuclear bombs would be enough to destroy France.” France is the largest Western European country by surface area, meaning that it would take less to annihilate other countries. While building masses of underground shelters might protect the population, Pelopidas added, “Faced with anything more than a very small number of [nuclear] explosions, it has been shown that these shelters offer only illusory protection.”

Workers across Europe and around the world must be warned: as the NATO powers press ahead with military escalation in Europe, nuclear war is now a clear and present danger.