Majorityrights News > Category: Geopolitics

... be cautious about who seeks to inflect you!

As the Trump administration struggles to impose a ceasefire on the Russian aggressor, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine warns of an intensification in the Kremlin’s propaganda programme:

The Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine records the transition to an acute phase of the hostile information operation conducted by the Russian federation against Ukraine. Its aim is to eliminate Ukrainian statehood not on the battlefield, but in people’s heads: by delegitimizing the Ukrainian Government, devaluing democratic institutions and imposing an external political scenario with signs of controlled capitulation. The operation is conducted with the use of the capabilities of the Russian federation’s special services – the FSB, SVR, and GRU – under the overall coordination of the presidential administration of the rf.

The Essence of the enemy’s Operation

Under the guise of “peacekeeping initiatives” and “analytical discourse”, on the Ukrainian and international societies is being imposed the idea of:

the Ukrainian government’s alleged loss of legitimacy due to the failure to hold elections during martial law;

the need for a “temporary administration” under the auspices of the UN, the USA, the EU, or even the “quartet format” with the rf;

the impossibility of russia’s concluding a peace agreement with the Ukrainian government, which, according to the enemy, should become a casus belli for changing the political course.

Such narratives are not just disinformation, but an element of a special operation to force Ukraine to political capitulation under the guise of a “peaceful settlement”.

Methods of Implementation

The operation is carried out through:

⁕ formally Western or “neutral” media, which act as a proxy for Russian theses. Among them:

Magyar Nemzet, Magyar Hirlap, Pesti Srácok (Hungary): promote the idea of “Ukraine’s being incapable of self-governing”;

Salon24.pl (Poland): published a fake blog by an anonymous author “MarcinWi”, which, under the guise of “expert analysis”, supported the narrative of a “split” between the military and political leadership of Ukraine;

Réseau International (France): promotes theories about Ukraine’s alleged being incapable of conducting combat operations on its own and the “deep strategic gap between the Ukrainian political leadership and the General Staff”.

⁕ anonymous telegram channels posing as “insiders” in the Armed Forces of Ukraine or political leadership;

⁕ a coordinated wave of emotional videos on TikTok and YouTube with the narratives such as “the West no longer supports Ukraine,” “we have been deceived,” “we need a change in government,” as well as “it’s time for a change,” and “we need another government for peace.”

⁕ massive dissemination of destructive materials with the same theses on (Telegram /Strana.ua, Scott Ritter/, X /RothLindberg, DougAMacgregor/, Facebook /Florian Filippo, Fernand Kartheiser/) with the involvement of botnets and accounts associated with pro-Russian structures in Europe and Latin America. They publish pseudo-documents, statements and “analytical notes” that question the authority of the Ukrainian government;

⁕ quoting pro-Russian “experts” with the titles of “former diplomats”, “independent political scientists”, “UN veterans” who promote the thesis that “even the West needs a different Ukraine”;

⁕ the use of Ukrainian defendants in treason cases to legitimize narratives (including publications and comments by representatives of former pro-Russian political structures).

These actions are accompanied by the infiltration of the Kremlin’s narratives into the structures of influence of Ukraine’s partner countries, in particular through the organization of public “discussions” on the legitimacy of the government, the prospects for negotiations without Ukraine’s participation, and the alleged “loss of trust” in Kyiv.

Radosław Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, powerfully rebutting the accusations of the Russian representative to the UN Security Council, Vasily Nebenzya:

Madame President,

I associate myself with the words of minister Kuleba and my colleagues from the European Union.

I’m amazed at the tone and the content of the presentation by the Russian ambassador.

And I thought I could be useful by correcting the record. Ambassador Nebenzya has called Kyiv a client of the West. Actually, Kyiv is fighting to be independent of anybody.

He calls them a criminal Kyiv regime. In fact, Ukraine has a democratically elected government.

He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish, the defence minister is Muslim, and they have no political prisoners.

He said that Ukraine was wallowing in corruption. Well, Alexei Navalny documented how honest and full of probity his own country is.

He blamed the war on US neo-colonialism. In fact, Russia was trying to exterminate Ukraine in the 19th century, again under Bolsheviks, and now it is the third attempt.

He said we are prisoners of Russophobia. “Phobia” means irrational fear. Yet, we are being threatened almost every day by the former president of Russia and Putin’s propagandists with nuclear annihilation. I put it to you that it is not irrational – when Russia threatens us, we trust them.

He said that we are denying Russia’s security interests. Not true. We only started rearming ourselves when Russia started invading her neighbours.

He even said that Poland attacked Russia during World War II. What is he talking about? It was the Soviet Union that attacked Poland together with Nazi Germany on the 17th of September 1939. They even held a joint victory parade on the 22th of September.

He says that Russia has always only beaten back aggression. Well, what were then Russian troops doing at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? They were on a topographic excursion? The truth is that for every time Russia was invaded, she has invaded ten times.

He says that it is a perfidious proxy war by the West. My advice is – don’t fall into the Western trap. Withdraw your troops to international borders and avoid this Western plot.

He also says that there was an illegal coup in Kyiv in 2014. I was there. There was no coup. President Yanukovych murdered a hundred of his compatriots and was removed from office by a democratically elected Ukrainian parliament, including by his own party, the Party of Regions.

And finally he is saying that we the West are somehow trying to persuade that Russia can never be beaten. Well, Russia did not win the Crimean War, it didn’t win the Russo-Japanese war, it didn’t win the World War I, it didn’t win the battle of Warsaw, it didn’t win in Afghanistan and it didn’t win the Cold War.

But there’s good news. After each failure there were reforms.

Such demagoguery is unworthy of a member on a permanent basis of the Security Council. But what the ambassador has achieved is to remind us why we resisted Soviet domination and what Ukraine is resisting now.

They failed to subjugate us then. They’ll fail to subjugate Ukraine and us now.

Thank you very much.

Another old and wise hand who understands the global contest in which the war in Ukraine is a key element.  As he says, “The question is: will the world in the 21st century be based upon force and tyranny, or not?

The American diplomat and academic Mitchell Reiss airs his views of Donald Trump’s forthcoming conversational intervention in Ukraine, indicating that Trump has a degree of realism that will disappoint the bravado-filled pro-Putin right.  Interview by Times Radio.

Alexey, a 47-year-old Russian and a teacher by profession, shares his perspective on Putin’s war in Ukraine.  Among other things, he explains why he believes Ukraine should not cede territory, and questions whether the West is really the great enemy to Russia:

“We have China right next door and it’s many times scarier.

... China’s policy is that the whole world, that is, the globe, is China.  And all those who think otherwise simply do not understand the magnitude of the imperial scheme of the Chinese and their emperor”

Video from HEADSHOT, who specialise in bringing the vox populi of that vast country to the internet.

This video explains the short- to medium-term geopolitical objectives of Moscow and Beijing in their struggle against American global hegemony and the western international order.  It is produced by the Warsaw-based institute, the Centre for Eastern Studies.  Its website explains:

The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) was established in 1990 in Warsaw as a public institution. It was created to meet democratic Poland’s demand for analytical research on the processes that had occurred in the Soviet Union, and later in the states that emerged following its collapse. At present, the OSW’s portfolio includes Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Balkans, Germany, the Baltic and Nordic states, China, Turkey and Israel. In addition, we carry out research focused on specific sectors, for example the EU’s energy policy, transport, trade and digital connectivity in Central Europe, as well as on European security.

A residential apartment block in Dnipro hit by a Russian missile on 14th January 2023

This morning the DT’s live Ukraine feed carried a brief report of comments by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s, revealing the Kremlin’s real interest in peace talks with Ukraine, ie, it doesn’t have any.  The war is for empire and geopolitics, not for ethnic Russians in Ukraine (or in Russia).  The Kremlin’s interest is that the United States “negotiates” giving up of its status as global hegemon in exchange for Putin making nice with Zelensky for five minutes.  Lavrov actually means that American maintenance of the rules-based international order has to be ended so Russia can upgrade its non-rules-based, eurasionist model of imperial power to a global level.

I would remind readers that the Kremlin power elites define multipolarity as a collection of economic blocs, each led by a dominant power.  The model allows the Kremlin to piggy-back (with “no limits”) off the China’s inevitably global hegemony - as close as it can get to hegemon itself.

Here is the report:

Any Ukraine peace talks should be about ‘new world order’

Moscow wants any Ukraine peace talks to focus on creating a “new world order”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on a visit to Turkey on Friday.

He also threatened to abandon a landmark grain deal, which Turkey helped broker, if obstacles to Russian exports remain.

“Any negotiation needs to be based on taking into account Russian interests, Russian concerns,” Lavrov said.

“It should be about the principles on which the new world order will be based.”

He added that Russia rejects a “unipolar world order led by ‘one hegemon’”.

The following quotes are from an interesting (paywalled) article at the Telegraph, and speak to the impact of Putin’s failure in Ukraine and the resurgence of Western confidence.

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.

Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years. 

“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.

“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum ...

It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.

China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes ...

Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.

“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years ...

It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.

In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.

Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.

Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.

Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs ...

Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.

This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.

As to the Western feeling about Xi’s “impatience”, compare the above with the following boilerplate from the Daily Mail, published on 19th October last year:

Get ready for China ‘on steroids’: Xi Jinping will complete his totalitarian spy-state, take on the US and aim to break Western world order if he is given historic third term as leader, experts predict
● Xi Jinping set to become Chinese leader for third term this week, the first since Mao to rule for so long.
● Experts predict he will use term to complete ‘totalitarian’ spy-state using technology to repress all opposition.
● Xi will also take aggressive stance with the West and try to put China on equal footing with the US, they added.
● Ultimate aim is to break Western world order and establish another system with China at the centre, they said.

My immediate take on the change of strategy?  This pivot is almost certainly the result of Putin’s big gambit in Ukraine and the surprise of the West’s unified response to it, allied to the (for Beijing) straitening success of the Western economies in surviving Putin’s energy war.  Since the party’s 20th conference last October, when the threat to Taiwan was at its height, there appears to have been a decision that Putin has failed and there are costs to forging ahead with that “unlimited friendship” which a pragmatic Chinese leadership is unwilling to pay.  Probably at this time.  Probably because formal international support elsewhere for Putin is limited to Iran, North Korea and some fly-blown African place.  Support for Glazyev’s dollar reserve replacement is strong across the southern hemisphere, and probably now includes Lula’s Brazil in addition to Saudi.  But then the Western elites are not at all hostile to it, either.  Quite the contrary.  So Beijing is returning to geo-economics, because it is a stronger suite to play.  I don’t think that the Middle Kingdom goal has or will be dropped.  But the Chinese are good at patience.