Delhi’s air most polluted of any capital city for fourth year in a row

Mary Martina

Air pollution in Delhi, India’s capital and with upwards of 30 million people its largest urban agglomeration, continues to worsen. Each year it causes and aggravates debilitating, often fatal, conditions and illnesses among tens of thousands of people.

Despite a brief respite from last July to September, Delhi’s air was found to be the foulest and most toxin-laced of any national capital in 2022 for the fourth year running.

A measuring of Delhi’s air quality around 11 AM on February 7 of this year showed that Delhi’s Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 concentration was 171 micro grams per cubic meter, and the air quality index (AQI) was 223. Both figures are over five times above World Health Organization (WHO) recommended safe levels.

PM 2.5 is used by scientists as the primary indicator of air pollution. It is a measure of the atmospheric concentration of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns or micrometres. AQI is composed of the particulate levels of eight pollutants of up to 10 microns, including sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and lead.

An Indian para-military force soldier stands guard amidst morning smog at the Raisina hills, the government seat of power, in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, January 31, 2023. [AP Photo/Manish Swarup]

Small solid airborne particles of less than 2.5 microns can travel deep into the respiratory system, causing severe respiratory and cardio-vascular problems. Exposure to Delhi’s poor quality air for even a short period of time can trigger heart attacks in people with cardiac problems, and wheezing, fatigue and other complications even among healthy people.

PM 2.5 air pollution has caused an estimated 25,000 deaths in Delhi since the beginning of 2021.

Poor air quality reportedly killed 6.67 million people around the world in 2019. 1.67 million people were killed in India alone, a grim figure surpassed only by China where 1.85 million people died due to air pollution, according to the “State of Global Air 2020” report released in October 2020.

Despite the fact that on November 7, 2022, nearly all of Delhi's monitoring stations recorded air quality indexes of between 300 and 400, falling into the 'very poor' category at which “prolonged exposure” “may cause respiratory illnesses,” the authorities lifted all pollution controls. According to a recent report released by the University of Chicago in June 2022, individuals residing in Delhi could lose up to 10 years of life expectancy due to foul air.

The World Air Quality Report released by Swiss organization IQAir in March 2022 found that 35 of the 50 cities in the world with the worst air quality are in India. No Indian city met the WHO’s safety air quality standards. Coal-fired power plants, factories and vehicles are among the major sources of India’s air pollution.

The problem worsens during winter, when northern cities, including the capital Delhi, are typically blanketed in choking smog. Indian authorities largely blame this health menace on the burning of crop stubble by poor farmers. This is a gross and willful exaggeration. According to a study from March 2016 by Urban Emissions Info, all bio-mass combustion, including farmers’ activities, accounted for 20-35 percent of PM 2.5, while vehicular exhaust fumes, industrial emissions and construction activities accounted for 65 percent.

There are methods to decompose paddy stubble without burning it, such as bio-decomposers or converting paddy stubble into fertilizers. Alternatively, it could be used for bio-mass energy generation and sustainable building construction. Rather than providing the necessary financing to implement such initiatives, the central and state governments spend their time blaming each other for the problem.

Industrial and thermal power plants are a major contributor to air pollution in Delhi. Though coal usage in Delhi has been banned, only the large, regulated industries have shifted to natural gas. A recent study by the Delhi-based environmental research and advocacy think tank Centre for Science and Environment, entitled “Assessment of Industrial Air Pollution in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR),” showed that coal is still the most widely used fuel in the NCR. Around 1.4 million tons of coal are used by industry in the NCR annually.

Faridabad, an industrial suburb of Delhi and part of the NCR, and neighbouring Ballabgarh reportedly house a total of 950 air polluting industrial units. If these industries were to develop or be provided with natural gas infrastructure, the use of coal could be stopped completely and air pollution, including green-house gas carbon emissions, significantly reduced. The same would be true if diesel generators, which are also a significant contributor to air pollution, were replaced by natural gas generators. However, since the provision of natural gas would require large-scale infrastructure investments, profit-oriented industries are resisting the conversion.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” and Production Linked Incentive schemes are expected to catalyse a manufacturing boom across sectors from auto to consumer appliances. In the rush to attract investment, Indian authorities totally neglect the potential damage to the environment and human lives from profit-driven, unplanned and almost entirely unregulated industrialization. 

India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party government, like its Congress Party-led predecessor, pays lip service to the need to combat climate change and has even set aside funds to develop “green industries.” But the BJP and Indian ruling class are determined for both economic and geostrategic reasons to reduce India’s dependence on imported oil and natural gas, through a massive push to develop its abundant coal reserves—said to be the fourth largest in the world.  

The profit-oriented acceleration of coal mining and other polluting activities have been taking place with the blessing of the government, enabling billionaire tycoons such as Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani to profit handsomely.

South Asia is home to the most polluted countries in the world. In addition to India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan consistently rank among the five or ten countries with the foulest air, water and land worldwide.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia found air pollution to be the second most important risk factor for disease in India after malnutrition. More than 116,000 infants in India died within a month of birth in 2019 due to air pollution–outdoor and indoor–according to the “State of Global Air 2020” report.

The report found that India had the highest burden of infant deaths due to air pollution, followed by Nigeria (67,900), Pakistan (56,500), Ethiopia (22,900), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (1,200).

According to a WHO assessment from 2018, 1.8 billion children worldwide–93 percent of all children under the age of 15–breathe air that is so filthy that it poses a major risk to their health and development every day. Air pollution-related acute lower respiratory infections claimed the lives of 600,000 children globally in 2016.

In 2019, Bangladesh recorded the second-highest average PM 2.5 concentration in the world. A more recent study carried out between January and July 2021 found the average PM 2.5 was nearly 17 times the WHO limit and over four times Bangladesh’s permissible PM 2.5 benchmark of 65 micrograms per cubic metres of air. 

The air pollution generated by South Asia’s industries and cities spreads across the entire subcontinent, with blankets of smog simultaneously impacting Delhi, the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, and Pakistan’s Punjab province. Similarly, toxin-laden air hovers between Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal and Jharkhand. Air pollution can therefore only be dealt with on an international basis, but the rivalries between South Asia’s capitalist states makes any effective cooperation impossible.

Rather than allocating much-needed resources to implement air pollution abatement measures to save millions of lives, the ruling elites in India and the other South Asian states have dismantled even the most minimal environmental safeguards in order to compete as the cheapest location for industrial investment.

In India and South Asia as a whole, air pollution takes a much more severe toll on the health of the poorest and most vulnerable layers of the population. Wealthier people can more easily access technologies like air purifiers and can remain indoors on days with poor air quality. The impact of air pollution is therefore exacerbated by glaring levels of social inequality.

Ford slashes another 3,800 jobs across Europe, including 2,300 in Germany

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Works council head Benjamin Gruschka (left) and Ford Germany boss Martin Sander after a factory meeting in Cologne [Photo: Ford]

Behind the backs of the workforce, the general works council and management at Ford have agreed to cut 3,800 jobs across Europe over the next three years. This affects about 11 percent of the current workforce of 34,000 in Europe. In Germany, 2,300 jobs are to be cut, 1,300 in Great Britain and another 200 in other, unspecified countries.

The agreement came as a surprise to the workforce in Cologne, when the chairman of the general works council for Ford in Germany, Benjamin Gruschka, informed them of the cuts at three factory meetings on Tuesday. Just three weeks ago, Gruschka had talked about taking action against job cuts with an “escalation plan at four different locations.”

Now Gruschka describes the wiping out of 2,300 jobs a “success” because in January there was talk about 3,200 jobs being lost.

When the Cologne works council, which Gruschka also chairs, gave the go-ahead for about 500 Ford shop stewards to protest loudly at the end of January, the WSWS wrote at the time that such theatrics had only one aim: “It is to prepare the talks between the Cologne works council led by Benjamin Gruschka and Ford management at which the job cuts will be settled.”

In response to the statement by Katharina von Hebel, chairperson of the European Ford works council, that the management at Ford was seeking to “take a constructive path” in talks with the works council, the WSWS wrote: “The Cologne workforce should be warned. The ‘constructive path’ of the works council and IG Metall was to silently cut jobs.”

This has now been confirmed. The procedure is familiar, and not only at Ford. First, the company announces massive job cuts, then IG Metall and its works councils rant about an impending “struggle” and have a few shop stewards march out blowing whistles, followed finally by a somewhat smaller job cut touted as a “success” a little later. The renunciation of compulsory redundancies by the company is praised by the union as a “negotiation success” and, in the end, the company cuts exactly as many jobs as it had planned from the beginning.

Gruschka claimed last month that at least 2,500 jobs would be cut in product development at the Cologne-Merkenich and Aachen sites and another 700 in administration. Only Gruschka himself and his closest confidants know how real these figures were. Ford did not comment on these figures.

Now Gruschka is interpreting the 1,700 jobs in development and the 600 in administration lost as a “negotiating success.” “After all, we have now been able to secure 900 good, qualified jobs and important skills for the future of our product development, jobs which would have been eliminated in the company's original plans,” Gruschka claims.

Together with the cutbacks in Great Britain, where 1,300 of the total 6,500 workforce will lose their jobs, 1,000 of them in product development, means Ford will shed about 40 percent of its previous capacity in Europe. This is “roughly in line with chief executive Jim Farley’s predictions,” wrote the Financial Times, “that the group will need 40 percent fewer staff to develop battery models.” Ford plans to phase out production of internal combustion vehicles and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2030 onwards.

This conspiratorial game between the company, IG Metall and the works council has been played for many years in order to push through mass redundancies. The works council ensures this takes place without compulsory redundancies, i.e., via “voluntary” severance programmes and part-time work for older workers.

This is the type of “social partnership” that the union favours. It wants to be involved in designing the job cuts in such a way as to avoid a revolt by the workforce. When Gruschka now declares: “The workforce knows that fewer workers are needed with the new electric models,” he is in fact talking only about himself and his IGM and works council colleagues.

The Ford plant in Saarlouis with 4,600 workers is currently being wound up in a similar manner. The IG Metall works council there, led by Markus Thal, claims that the decision on the plant closure was made by Ford. The union’s “struggle” boils down to accompanying the Saarland state government in the search for an investor who will take over the entire plant.

However, it does not seem possible to find such a partner. Recently, negotiations with the Chinese company BYD (Build Your Dreams) failed. One can be sure that the head of the works council, Thal, will do everything he can to close the plant “without compulsory redundancies”—as regulated by “social partnership”—by 2025.

In 2019, 25,000 jobs were destroyed in this way in Ford’s international workforce, including 12,000 in Europe and almost half of those in Germany. At that time, plants in Russia, France, Wales and Brazil were also closed down. In the meantime, further plants in Brazil (2021) and India (2022) have been closed. Last summer, Ford also cut around 3,000 jobs in vehicle development in the US, Canada and India.

The company, trade unions and works councils constantly claim that the never-ending cuts will increase competitiveness and that the remaining jobs will be safe. Once again, Ford Germany boss Martin Sander has justified the job cuts with this argument. If Ford in Germany is positioned to be competitive in future, this will also help to secure jobs, he claimed.

Since all auto companies and the IG Metall have this attitude, the next round of cutbacks is only a matter of time. The remaining Ford sites and plants are therefore far from secure. The site in Dunton, UK, where most of the cuts in the UK will be made, is responsible for the development of Transit vans, which will be available with hybrid drive by the middle of the next decade and are to be built in Romania and Turkey.

Even the European plants where Ford wants to produce electric vehicles are not safe from constant downsizing. Gruschka had already announced last month that pressure was also high to cut costs in production. Production jobs are also being cut in Cologne, where Ford is building the Fiesta model until June and then wants to produce two electric vehicles with new investment of €2 billion.

The same applies to the plant in Halewood (Liverpool), in which the group is investing £380 million (around €430 million) to produce electric components for battery vehicles, as well as the Spanish plant in Almussafes (Valencia), which won a bidding competition against the plant in Saarlouis and is expected to produce e-models from 2024.

This brief inventory alone shows that defending jobs cannot be done in one country or even in one plant. The corporation operates internationally, and so must the workforce. The main obstacles to a European-wide and international defence of jobs are the trade unions and their works councils, who are responsible for putting all of management’s plans for cuts into practice.

Who is responsible for earthquake deaths in Turkey?

Ozan Özgür

Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s well-known novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, tells the story of a murder that many people knew was going to happen that they did not act to prevent.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on September. 6, 2022. [AP Photo/Armin Durgut]

The February 6, 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake, which destroyed tens of thousands of buildings in both countries and killed over 42,000 people, presents a different version of this story. Many reports by experts, and even by state officials, have predicted earthquakes along Turkey’s fault lines on a scientific and historical basis for years. Yet, Turkish state officials and businesses took no action to prevent tens of thousands of entirely predictable deaths.

The government, which is responsible for earthquake safety, as well as the entire political establishment, municipalities and official institutions ignored these scientific findings. They willfully turned a blind eye to the murder that would be committed. Millions of people lived in buildings that it was known would collapse or be heavily damaged in a major earthquake. In this real-life version of García Márquez’s novel, “social murder” was committed as tens of thousands of people died preventable deaths, trapped under the rubble.

In contrast, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since 2002, is trying to cover up its undeniable crime in failing to prepare for and take precautions against earthquakes in a quake-prone country. On the one hand, it uses pro-government media to claim that “earthquakes were too big” and that “one cannot be prepared for such earthquake.” On the other, it tries to pin responsibility for the disaster solely on the contractors and other low-level criminals who built them.

Undoubtedly, major perpetrators implicated in this social murder include contractors who build buildings that violate existing safety regulations, and refuse to pay for the necessary materials, labor and engineering services in order to make extra profit. However, it is the capitalist political establishment as a whole that has built the system that allows contractors to skirt essential safety regulations.

The vast profits in construction, which has dominated Turkey’s economy and politics in recent decades, have attracted enormous interest and investment. As of 2017, there were around 330,000 registered contractors in Turkey, a country of 85 million people, with 60,000 contractors registered in the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce alone. However, it is estimated that there are only 3,800 contractors in Germany, with a population of 83 million, and 20,000 or 30,000 contractors in the whole of Europe.

Construction has come to the forefront in Turkey as an industry backed and developed by the state, creating wealth and, of course, financing bourgeois politics. Regulations on construction have repeatedly been rewritten, while authority to inspect and approve projects has been taken from professional organizations like the Union of Chambers of Turkish Architects and Engineers (TMMOB).

The government has amended the State Procurement Law 192 times since its enactment in 2003, clearing all obstacles to the AKP’s favoritism of party contractors. The Hatay Airport, which was badly damaged by the earthquake, several highways that were destroyed, and the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) office building that collapsed in Hatay were all built by AKP contractors. These demolitions also played an important role in delaying official search-and-rescue and relief efforts.

“Construction amnesties” played a decisive role in preventable destruction. Eight “amnesties” were issued during the AKP era, making it legally impossible to inspect many buildings.

Despite the crocodile tears shed by ruling circles after the earthquake, the entire political establishment—both allies of the AKP and “opposition” parties—are implicated in this. In line with laws enacted by all parties in parliament, the Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Ministry opened areas that scientifically should not be opened to settlement.

Municipalities have issued building permits without inspecting projects built in earthquake-prone areas, the Building Inspection Institutions have not properly inspected these buildings, and engineers have provided their services to these structures. From top to bottom they are all implicated in social murder in the affected areas.

Most recently, in 2018, a so-called “construction amnesty” was implemented “to solve the zoning problem of unlicensed buildings built before December 31, 2017.” Approximately 10 million people benefited from this law, which “legalized” unsafe illegal structures, most of which were built without supervision and without any engineering services. As a result, 16 billion Turkish liras was collected from building owners as “building registration certificate fees” and transferred to the state treasury.

A total of 294,000 owners of illegal buildings in the 10 provinces devastated by the earthquake benefited from this amnesty. Had it not been for last week’s earthquakes, another zoning amnesty would likely have been issued, in line with a legislative proposal submitted by the fascistic Grand Unity Party (BBP), an ally of Erdoğan’s AKP, and with the support or connivance of so-called “opposition” parties, as in the past.

It should be noted that the TMMOB administration has not yet announced any disciplinary proceedings for engineers who drew the projects of the collapsed buildings after the earthquakes or carried out inspections in municipalities or private companies. However, it is well known that certain engineers rent their diplomas to contractors and inspection companies just to sign projects and documents and get paid for it, and who do not even know where the construction sites are.

In the aftermath of the 1999 Marmara Earthquake, which officially killed over 17,000, prosecutors did not open a large-scale investigation and did not bring those responsible for the collapsed buildings and mass death to justice. However, Veli Göçer, a contractor who was building in Yalova at the time and whose entire housing estate collapsed, was arrested and tried for the deaths of 198 people. Although Göçer was sentenced to 18 years and 9 months in prison, he was released after serving 7.5 years.

Today, the Erdoğan government is following the same script, trying to exonerate itself and the capitalist system by targeting a contractor of a collapsed building complex. In an event where over 36,000 people died according to official figures, the government takes no responsibility. Not a single official has resigned.

Despite the massive destruction and loss of life in the earthquake area, no high-level officials have been arrested, except for a few contractors and a few people who signed building permits at a lower level. A few token arrests cannot remove the responsibility of those who did not take safety precautions against earthquakes, those who prepared construction amnesties, those who approved them in parliament or did not oppose them, those who drew, licensed and inspected these projects.

72 mass shootings in 46 days in the United States: What are the social and political causes?

David Walsh

This week has seen another string of mass shootings in the United States. On Wednesday evening, one person was killed and three were wounded at the Cielo Vista Mall. This follows the fatal shootings at Michigan State University (MSU) Monday night, when a lone gunman killed three students and critically wounded five others before killing himself.

Mourners attend a candlelight vigil for Alexandria Verner at the Clawson High School football field in Clawson, Mich., Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023. Verner was among the students killed after a gunman opened fire on the campus of Michigan State University Monday night. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

“No more danger to the public,” declared the El Paso (Texas) Police Department following the shooting on Wednesday. If that were only the case! Mass shootings are now more than a daily American occurrence. The Gun Violence Archive has registered 72 mass shooting in the US so far in 2023—in 46 days. Those tragic incidents have taken place this year in some two dozen states and the District of Columbia. They occurred in 37 states in 2022.

The pace is accelerating. The sum of 52 such incidents in January was by far the highest number for that month since records on such things began to be kept. The previous high in January was 34, only last year.

Meanwhile, the most the public now receives from government officials and the news media are tributes to how quickly, after the deadly fact, police, FBI and other law enforcement agents descended on a given bloody scene.

For example, the El Paso District Attorney celebrated the “fantastic coordination from all” the policing organizations. The MSU deputy police chief boasted about the “absolutely overwhelming police response to that initial call. … We had officers in that building within minutes.”

The self-congratulation of politicians, policemen and news outlets, who can neither explain what is going on or even remotely assure the safety of the public, is obscene.

Violence on this scale has to be treated as a social and not an individual phenomenon. The society has itself become toxic and hazardous.

No doubt large numbers of people in the US suffer from mental illness. However, this is not primarily a biological but rather a social issue. Violence pervades the society. Not infrequently, an individual fearing his or her own instability contacts the police—and is himself or herself gunned down.

The general framework for the growth of social and individual mental distress is clear: The murderous COVID-19 pandemic, to which the authorities have responded with criminal indifference and neglect; vast, persistent and malignant social inequality; decades of war and violence perpetrated against peoples all over the world by the US government and military; declining living standards for tens of millions, including the loss of decent jobs and job security; intense political instability and turbulence; and the emergence of an extreme right wing determined to establish authoritarian rule.

Life in the US has not known this level of social and political tension, uncertainty and menace since the period prior to the Civil War.

Official sources have begun to concede that there might be broader causes for the homicidal explosion. A recent study by the US Secret Service of 173 attacks that occurred in public or semi-public places between 2016 and 2020 found that nearly every attacker (93 percent) had experienced “at least one significant stressor in their lives within five years of the attack,” and for 77 percent, “the stressor(s) occurred within one year.” Those “stressors” include concerns over health, divorce, evictions, employment issues, bullying at school or work, “contact with law enforcement,” “contact with civil courts,” etc.

Seventy-two mass shootings in the US so far this year is a horrific figure, but it is a fact that the death toll from the deliberate policy of the ruling class is far higher. Grotesquely, the media and the government pretend that the death of one million people in a preventable pandemic, with its repercussions for tens of millions or more, has had no impact on the fabric of American society.

A connection has already been drawn between the mass death and the recent surge in suicide rates. The latter are rising in communities especially affected by the pandemic. Attempting to explain the numbers of people taking their own lives, Dr. Sean Joe, professor at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, pointed to the “cumulative stress.”

The generalized social hardships, the “cumulative stress” and their particular expression in individual “stressors” exert themselves on massive numbers of people, but only an infinitesimal (although a relatively significant and growing) percentage collapse dramatically in the face of them.

In considering the mass shootings, the specific political, social and cultural conditions in the US have to be taken into account. The spree of killings is a symptom, as Frederick Engels once said, of Russia, of a society “in full decomposition economically, morally and intellectually.”

Endless war has deeply, irredeemably brutalized American society. Now, after decades of devastating societies in the Middle East and Central Asia, resulting in millions of dead and mutilated, the American ruling elite is lurching toward war with a nuclear power, Russia, with potentially incalculable consequences. Hundreds of millions might perish, and US official shrug their shoulders and repeat their determination not to be “deterred” by this possibility. What are the most vulnerable personalities likely to conclude from this criminal light-mindedness and recklessness? Life is incredibly cheap.

The US political system operates entirely at the service of the wealthy. Everything for Wall Street, the corporate oligarchs and the affluent upper middle classes, nothing for the rest of the population. Vast layers feel they don’t count, their misery means nothing to those in power. The two parties of big business and their representatives in Washington are deservedly held in contempt. No one expects anything but blows and abuse from the society’s leading institutions.

The suppression of the class struggle over the course of decades, thanks above all to the trade unions, which strain to smother every challenge to the employers and the government, has been a disastrous and destructive factor in American life. The thwarting of workers’ combativity, which would bring out the actual physiognomy of modern society and, most importantly, point a way out of the present economic and political blind alley, damages and warps popular consciousness.

The debased cultural situation also plays a significant role. Instead of holding a mirror up to the actual state of things, the popular culture largely celebrates money, celebrity, backwardness, social indifference. The lumpen quasi-pornography that dominates so much of the music and entertainment world functions to pollute the atmosphere, drowning or blotting out social criticism and encouraging the worst, basest instincts.

Russian offensive underway in Ukraine as war destabilizes the entire region

Clara Weiss

A week short of the one-year anniversary of the NATO-US war against Russia in Ukraine, there are growing indications that a Russian offensive is already underway as the war increasingly destabilizes the entire region. 

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “Russian attacks are already happening from several directions.” Zelensky again rejected out of hand any territorial concessions to Moscow, including the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, which has been claimed by Russia since 2014, and other territories in East Ukraine now occupied by Russian forces. 

On Wednesday, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC, “We now estimate 97% of the whole Russian army is in Ukraine.” Since an order for a partial mobilization in early September, the response by the Kremlin to a series of catastrophic set-backs in the war, 300,000 Russian men were drafted into the army. After several months in which most of them were kept in the rear and underwent basic training, it now seems that a large portion of them have been sent to the front, with media discussions in Russia suggesting that a renewed mobilization drive may be coming soon. 

According to the British Telegraph, heavy fighting has been reported from almost the entire front line on the border of the Russian-held territories in East Ukraine over the past 48 hours. Following months of intense fighting, Russian forces, including the paramilitary Wagner group, which is composed of mercenaries, appear to be on the verge of taking Bakhmut, and have also launched repeated assaults on Vuhledar. Both are relatively small towns, located in the Donetsk region. Al Jazeera described this week as “the toughest yet” for the Ukrainian army on the front in East Ukraine.

The fighting, which has so far resulted in little substantial movement of the front lines, is coming at a horrifying cost for both sides. Ukrainian and NATO officials have claimed, with some glee, that Russia is losing hundreds of men every day with some units having been entirely destroyed.

Destroyed Russian tanks stand across the road from a church in the town of Sviatohirsk, Ukraine, Sunday, February 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka]

Losses on the Ukrainian side, however, are also estimated to be extremely high, with hundreds believed to be dying every day, out of a much smaller population. At least 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country since the beginning of the war, out of a pre-war population of just under 40 million (as opposed to Russia’s 140 million). Several millions of those who remain are now living in Russian-controlled territories.

In November, 9 months into the war, US Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley estimated that both sides had suffered 100,000 casualties each since the beginning of the war. Now, over three months later, this already horrific figure must have risen further very substantially.

Amid these catastrophic losses and the collapse of the economy—about a third of the working age population in Ukraine is now unemployed—the state of the Ukrainian military is highly precarious and the government has been plagued by intense crisis.

The Washington Post reported this week that US officials objected to Zelensky’s prioritization of the defense of Bakhmut, writing, “American military analysts and planners have argued that it is unrealistic to simultaneously defend Bakhmut and launch a spring counteroffensive to retake what the United States views as more critical territory.”

The principal response by NATO to the crisis of its proxy military forces in Ukraine has been to further escalate its involvement and arms deliveries.

Over the past six weeks, NATO has moved with lightening speed to send hundreds of battle tanks to Ukraine and is now openly discussing sending F-16 fighter jets as well. 

Earlier this week, NATO officials pledged to “ramp up” arms production for what they called a “grinding war of attrition.” A US official told the Financial Times this past week, “The Russian land forces are pretty depleted so it’s the best indication that they will turn this into an air fight. If the Ukrainians are going to survive … they need to have as many air defence capabilities and as much ammunition … as possible.” According to the newspaper, Russia has been amassing aircraft along the border with Ukraine with over 80 percent of its air force still intact.

As the working class in the imperialist countries have been subjected to further assaults on its living standards, the 30 NATO members have pledged at least $80.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine over the past year, according to the latest figures of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.  

With a further escalation underway, the war is already destabilizing the entire region, threatening to ever more directly draw in neighboring countries. Belarus, which borders Ukraine to the north and Russia to the west, completed major joint military exercises with Russia involving all Belarusian military airfields on February 1. Belarus also continues to host Russian troops on its territory. 

So far, the government of Alexander Lukashenko, the last remaining ally of the Putin regime in Eastern Europe, has refrained from openly joining the war. Before leaving for a meeting with Putin in Moscow on Friday, Lukashenko stated that there was “no way” he would send troops to Ukraine unless Belarus was attacked. In that case, he said, he was “ready to wage war, alongside the Russians, from the territory of Belarus. ... don’t forget Russia is our ally, legally, morally and politically.”

In Moldova, a country of 2.6 million, which is sandwiched between Ukraine and NATO-member Romania, a major political and social crisis has erupted in the shadow of the war.

From the very beginning, Moldova has been heavily affected by the war. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled to Moldova and missile debris from the war regularly lands on Moldovan territory. Since the fall, Moldova has also been suffering significant energy outages as the country is closely tied to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is regularly knocked out by Russian missile strikes. In the fall, large-scale protests over soaring costs of living shook the government.

The small country has long been one of the main geopolitical flashpoints in the conflict between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe. Like Ukraine, Moldova was part of the Soviet Union until its destruction in 1991 by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Amidst the break-up of the Soviet Union, a war between Russian-backed separatist forces in the Transnistria region, bordering Ukraine, and the Moldovan central authorities erupted in November 1990. The war ended in 1992 in a ceasefire, but the status of Transnistria was never resolved. While Transnistria claims independence and is backed by Russia, it is still internationally recognized as part of Moldova. Russia has 1,500 troops stationed in Transnistria.

A central component of the temporary settlement of the conflict was that Moldova’s military neutrality was enshrined in the country’s 1994 constitution.

This map shows the location of Transnistria in Europe. [Photo by TUBS / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0]

However, since the beginning of the war, the government under the pro-EU President Maia Sandu, a former World Bank official, has moved to abandon this official position of neutrality, and has openly taken the side of NATO and Ukraine in the war. In June, Moldova was granted EU candidate status alongside Ukraine. In January, Sandu told POLITICO that her government was having “serious discussion on our capacity to defend ourselves, whether we can do it ourselves, or whether we should be part of a larger alliance”—a clear hint at NATO, even though she avoided mentioning the name. The Kremlin has repeatedly warned Moldova of aligning openly with NATO.

Moldovan troops already regularly exercise side by side with NATO forces and take part in the NATO mission in Kosovo. For 2023, the Sandu government ramped up military spending by 50 percent, while aggressively clamping down on democratic rights, including by shutting down oppositional news outlets and TV channels.

On Monday, Sandu declared that Moldovan intelligence agencies had uncovered a “plot by Moscow” to “topple” her government, with the involvement of pro-Russian Moldovan oligarchs and opposition figures. Without providing any evidence, Sandu claimed that the aim of the “plot” was to install a government “which would put our country at the disposal of Russia, in order to stop the European integration process.” She further alleged that Russia sought to use Moldova in the war in Ukraine and said, “The Kremlin’s attempts to bring violence to our country will not succeed.” A day later, on Tuesday, the Moldovan authorities temporarily closed the country’s airspace, claiming that a balloon-like object had crossed the border. 

Sandu’s allegations of a “Russian plot” came just four days after President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that his intelligence services had “intercepted the plan of the destruction of Moldova by the Russian intelligence.” 

Sandu’s former security advisor, Dorin Recean, who has spearheaded the turn toward an alignment with NATO, was sworn in as the new prime minister on Thursday, following the sudden resignation of his predecessor the week prior.

Youth of Excellence Scheme of China (Yes China) Masters Scholarship for Developing Countries 2023/2024

Application Deadline: April 2023.

Please contact the Embassies or universities for the specific deadlines for 2023 applications.

Eligible Countries: Developing countries

To be taken at (Universities/Country): China

About the Award: To promote the mutual understanding and friendship between China and other countries, and to provide education opportunities to the youths worldwide who enjoy good potentials in their career development, the Chinese Government established the “Scholarship for Youth of Excellence Scheme of China——Master Program （YES CHINA）” with the aim of providing financial support to the outstanding youth coming to China to pursue a Master’s degree.

The programs duration will be open to applicants from 56 developing countries.

Field of Study: The Master of Laws (LL.M.）Program in Chinese Law, International Program on Master of Public Health （IMPH）, Master of International Economic Cooperation, Master of China Studies, The LL.M Program in International Economic Law, MBA Program, AIIB Master of International Finance, Master of One-Belt-Road Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: 

• Healthy both physically and mentally; not over 45 years old （born after September 1, 1977）.
• A bachelor or higher degree, at least 3 years’ work experience, some educational or professional experience in a field relative to that of the program applied.
• Working in a government agency, company or research institute, and being a Section Director or Chief of Office, a senior manager, or excellent in scientific researches.
• Good English language proficiency, able to follow English-taught courses well. Minimum requirements for reference: IELTS （Academic） total score 6.0, or TOEFL Internet score 80.
• Having a strong development potential in his/her career, and willing to promote the mutual cooperation and exchanges between China and his/her home country.
• Students who are now studying in China or already winners of Chinese Government Scholarship are not allowed to apply. Note: More details about each program can be found in the corresponding university’s recruitment prospectus.

Number of Awardees: 200

Value of Scholarship: 

1. One-year Program: Total Amount: 200,800 RMB per year for each student, covering:

•  Exempted fees: registration fees, tuition fees, laboratory experiment fees, internship fees, and fees for basic learning materials.
•  On-campus accommodation.
•  Living Allowance （96,000 RMB per year for each student）.
•  One-off settlement subsidy after registration （3,000 RMB for each student）.
•  Comprehensive medical insurance.
•  A one-way air ticket to China upon registration and a one-way air ticket back from China to the student’s home country after completion of the study.

2. Two-year Program （1+1 studies）

Scholarship for the first academic year is the same as One-year Program. In the second academic year, students will do their thesis back in their home countries and the dissertation defense in China, while the scholarship will only cover one round-trip ticket for dissertation defense.

Duration of Scholarship: The programs duration will be one year or two years.  Academic year from September, 2023

How to Apply: The applicants should submit their applications during the application period to the Chinese Embassy in their countries of nationality, or to the 7 program universities.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace demands up to £11 billion extra for military budget

Robert Stevens

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has denied speculation that he will resign if Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government does not scale up military spending within weeks to levels not seen since World War II.

The budget to be presented next month is being cast as putting the nation on a “war footing”, with leading military figures and hawks within the political elite demanding billions of pounds are immediately handed over to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence, left, arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, January 31, 2023. [AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth]

The ground is being prepared to divert vast sums from health care, education, welfare benefits and housing to the war machine, at devastating cost to millions of workers already crushed by 15 years of unrelenting austerity and a surge in the cost of living.

On Tuesday, the Times reported that Wallace “is pressing [Chancellor] Jeremy Hunt to increase the defence budget by between £8 billion and £11 billion over the next two years to avoid deep cuts to the armed forces.”

It noted, “The Ministry of Defence wants its budget to rise by as much as a fifth to cover the costs of inflation, foreign exchange fluctuations and the higher cost of funding Nato and Ukraine.”

Under current plans the “defence budget is set to rise by just £700 million over the next two years.”

In December Wallace and the head of the armed forces, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, visited Downing Street to lay out the case for the “UK military’s need for money.” According to reports, Wallace threatened to resign last November as part of his campaign to ensure the military is handed billions. He has spent months enlisting the support of senior Conservative MPs, to demand the military budget is boosted and Sunak reverses planned armed forces cuts, including a decision to reduce the number of the Army’s regular troops from 76,000 to 73,000 by 2025. Other demands include a “review” of plans to slash the number of tanks. The Times reported that under “existing plans, just 148 out of a fleet of 227 Challenger 2 tanks will be upgraded to Challenger 3 tanks, at a cost of about £1.3 billion.”

On taking office, Sunak refused to commit to his predecessor Liz Truss’s pledge to increase military spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030—a staggering uplift in money terms of £158 billion. He said he would not back “arbitrary” defence spending targets and any increase in funding would have to follow a new Defence Review.

The Defence Review will be published on March 7, one week before Hunt’s next major budget. Hunt previously declared his support for defence spending to increase to 4 percent of GDP, surpassing Truss’s pledge.

Speaking to Sky News Wednesday, Wallace piled further pressure on Sunak and Hunt, declaring he was in “uphill battle” with the Treasury over increasing military spending. “It’s the right thing that the secretary of state will argue for an increase to meet their priorities. And of course, between now and the Budget, I’ve got lots of time and lots of meetings with the chancellor to make sure that we try and come to a deal on it,” he said.

Wallace was clearer in spelling out what this means for the working class. For decades, “since 1991, since the end of the Cold War,” there had been “a consistent, effectively raiding of the defence budget over time.” With the war against Russia, the military has to be prioritised to confront “growing” threats.

“Maybe a peace dividend was appropriate straight after the Cold War. We had huge armies in Europe. The Cold War finished and it was right that the taxpayer who'd invested in defence got a return on that.

“The problem is that continued and has continued for many decades as the threat has increased. And I've been very open here that the threat has increased.”

Wallace was echoing Britain’s main defence and security think-tank, Royal United Services Institute which, hailing Truss’s pledge, declared that the post-war “peace dividend” was over.

A graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and a former Captain in the Scots Guards, Wallace became defence Secretary in 2019 under Boris Johnson and has retained the position despite the extraordinary political turmoil which saw last July’s resignation of Johnson; the six-week term in office of Truss and her replacement Sunak.

Wallace was kept in place due to his intimate involvement with provocations against Russia, leading to NATO’s de facto war in Ukraine. He is trusted by Washington to maintain Britain as a partner in provocations against Moscow and the second largest provider—after Washington—of weapons of war to Ukraine.

The Times, owned by billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch, has led an incessant campaign for more military spending, foregrounding Wallace’s demands of the Treasury. On Monday, an MoD source told the newspaper “the request was not a ‘shopping list’ of new equipment. ‘It’s the cost of standing still,’ they said…. ‘The Ministry of Defence is particularly exposed to inflation because of the amount it spends on military kit. The world has become significantly more dangerous, not less. It’s time to invest.’”

Top military figures have outlined doomsday scenarios for the armed forces if the Treasury’s coffers are not opened up. Retired General Sir Richard Shirreff, formerly Nato’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, stated this month, “Our Army has been hollowed out.”

“Britain is more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the 1930s,” he added. “As it stands we no longer have the troops, the kit or the ammunition to defend ourselves. It is a truly perilous and unforgivable situation.”

Leading Tory MPs backing Wallace include Tobias Ellwood, another former army veteran and chairman of Parliament’s Defence Select Committee. He told Sky News earlier this month, “The army is in a dire state…. It is up to the Treasury and Number 10 to recognise the world is changing. We are now at war in Europe. We need to move to a war footing.”

Figures in the US military have also intervened on behalf of Wallace. Deborah Haynes, a Sky News journalist with close connections to the MoD and intelligence agencies, reported on January 30 the comments of an anonymous “senior US general” who told Wallace the British Army was no longer regarded as a “tier one force”, saying “It's barely tier two.”

Her article cited an MoD source who said, “We have a wartime prime minister and a wartime chancellor.

“History will look back at the choices they make in the coming weeks as fundamental to whether this government genuinely believes that its primary duty is the defence of the realm or whether that is just a slogan to be given lip service.”

Sky News produced a film urging more arms spending, “Is The Army Fighting Fit?”, backed by several Haynes articles including, “Why spectre of British military becoming a ‘hollow force’ is now a reality”.

Other pieces took up the complaint that defence cuts were preventing British imperialism from intervening effectively in the war against Russia and threatening its commitment to exceed the £2.3 billion in military hardware already handed over to Kiev. Each concluded that the era in which welfare state spending was allowed to rise while the defence budget fell, was over.

“What is the current state of the British armed forces?” by Sky News data journalist Saywah Mahmood, stated, “In 2021, the UK spent 2.2% of its Gross Domestic Product on defence, amounting to about £45.9bn.

“However, this number has fallen since the mid-1950s. In the financial year ending in 1956, the UK spent just under 8% of its GDP on defence and in 1980 it was 4.1%. Since 2000, the proportion has remained around the 2% mark.

“In comparison, health spending as a proportion of GDP in 1956 was just under 3% and in 2020 this figure jumped to over 7%.”

In its report on Wallace demanding extra spending, the Times included a graph showing public expenditure for the top six departmental groups in 2021-22. Health and Social Care was in first place at £274.7 billion, with Work and Pensions in second place at £225.7 billion. Education spending, even with a cut of over 5 percent from the previous year, accounted for £120.2 billion in spending. Below all these was defence spending, accounting for £71.4 billion (which included an 18 percent increase put in place by the Johnson government).

Institute for Fiscal Studies Senior Research Economist Ben Zaranko wrote in The Conversation last March, “Defence cuts effectively paid for UK welfare state for 60 years—but that looks impossible after Ukraine”.

The main parties of the political elite, Tory and Labour, are seeking to outdo each other as to who can be entrusted carry out the attacks on the working class required to slash social spending to fund a surge in militarism and war against Russia.

Speaking at RUSI this month Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey praised Truss for pledging to increase spending to 3 percent, castigating Sunak because, “Since the invasion, there has been no new money allocated to the defence budget. None.”

The main problem arising because the government “crashed the economy” was that it “sent inflation soaring” so that “defence budgets are being squeezed even further, just as threats against the UK are increasing.”