By continuing to collude with Russia in Vienna, the West’s claims that the sanctions the US and its allies are imposing on Russia are morality-based fall apart.
By Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM
A protestor calls for on NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine during a demonstration in Paris on Feb. 26, 2022 | File photo: AP/Peter Dejong
On Wednesday evening, Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai reported from Kyiv that the memorial site at Babi Yar is unharmed. For a full news cycle Tuesday, Ukraine’s leadership from President Volodymyr Zelensky down a report of an alleged Russian bombing of the site where Ukrainian and Nazi forces massacred 33,000 Jews in two days in September 1941 as a means to demonize Russia. They also used the alleged Russian bombing to whitewash Ukraine’s record of massive collaboration with the Nazis in the genocide of Ukrainian Jewry during the Holocaust.
Ukraine’s obscene and cynical exploitation of Babi Yar and the Russian bombing that didn’t happen, must serve as a lesson to Israel that there’s much more gray than black or white in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Since the Western and Israeli media have given saturation coverage the blackness of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it makes sense to consider the dubiousness of Ukraine’s claim to the mantel of liberal democracy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides have made over the top statements accusing Ukraine of being a Nazi state. But just because the accusations are wild exaggerations doesn’t mean they are unfounded. There are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine.
To be sure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. But as Germany’s Die Welt reported in 2020, Zelenskyy owes his election to the support he received from Ukraine’s then-Minister of the Interior Arsten Avakov. Avakov, who served under Zelenskyy until last July, has been the most powerful patron of Ukrainian Nazis since the Maidan Revolution in 2014.
The Maidan Revolution, which brought down Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, is widely viewed as having been a liberal revolution. But the truth is more complicated. The Maidan Revolution would not have succeeded without the support of the Azov Battalion neo-Nazi militia.
Avakov, who began his seven-and-a-half-year tenure as Interior Minister in 2014, integrated the Azov Battalion into the Ukrainian National Guard. Avakov made Vadym Troyan, one of the heads of the Azov Battalion, his deputy.
Although Avakov’s successor Denys Monastryrsky is a member of Zelenskyy’s party, he is widely considered to be Avakov’s man. At a minimum, Monastryrsky has made no move to purge Azov Nazis from Ukraine’s National Guard. Media reports over the past week have shown them taking significant roles in the fighting in Mariupol and Kharkiv.
Ukraine isn’t the only supposed good guy suffering from moral impairment. There are also its Western supporters. And the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should worry Israel specifically far more than either the Ukrainian Nazis or Russian invasion forces.
The first aspect of the West’s behavior that deserves scrutiny is its role in fomenting the Russian invasion. While Putin is obviously the person most responsible for Russia’s invasion, US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Sholz, and Sholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel are also culpable for Putin’s decision to pull the trigger and invade.
A month and a half ago, Biden effectively gave Putin a green light to invade Ukraine when at a press conference he said NATO wouldn’t know how to respond if Russia carried out a “minor incursion” in Ukraine.
As for Germany, under both Scholz and Merkel, Germany has been Russia’s most steadfast apologist. Germany adopted a hypocritical, ecologically insane energy policy that made Germany and much of Europe dependent on Russia for their gas and oil, and all but ended domestic German production of clean nuclear energy.
To be sure, in the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, Biden and his advisors ratcheted up their rhetoric against Russia. But their statements were so hysterical it was hard to take them seriously. The shrillness of their warnings that a Russian invasion was imminent compelled Zelenskyy to tell them to calm down repeatedly. Their threats of sanctions were vague and seemed barely vetted. And indeed, the initial sanctions Biden announced after Russia invaded were fundamentally unserious.
But suddenly, over the last week, the situation was utterly transformed.
In the annals of modern warfare, there is no precedent to the financial campaign Western nations have initiated against Russia. The sanctions that the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and the states of Europe are instituting are so harsh that despite the fact that Russia has developed a largely self-sustaining, highly diverse economy and has built up a massive reserve of foreign currency, all Russians are feeling their bite. The ruble lost 30% of its value in days. The decision of technology giants Google and Apple to block use of their payment systems in Russia, the expulsion of Russia’s largest banks from the SWIFT system, and other moves have plunged all Russian citizens into significant financial distress.
What accounts for the whiplash-inducing shift in the West’s position? How did it come to pass that one day the Germans and Americans were giving at best a yellow light to a Russian invasion, and the next day they adopted financial measures aimed at bringing the Russian people to their knees and forcing Putin from power?
It isn’t morality that is pushing their buttons. If Biden and his partners were most concerned about morality they wouldn’t be keeping the gas lines and oil shipments coming from Russia, and so financing Putin’s war. So too, they wouldn’t be impoverishing the Russian people to bring down Putin in the service of morally compromised Ukraine while letting Russia dictate the terms of the nuclear negotiations with Iran in Vienna.
And indeed, it is in the West’s continued collusion with Russia in Vienna, that the claim the sanctions the US and its allies are imposing on Russia are morality-based fall apart.
Wednesday, former State Department official and Iran sanctions expert Gabriel Noronha published a long post on Twitter where he reported the details of the nuclear deal that the US is poised to conclude next week in Vienna with Iran. Noronha sourced his report to career officials at the National Security Council, the State Department and the European Union who divulged the contents of the all-but-completed agreement to him in the hopes of getting Congress to block Biden from moving forward before it is too late.
Noronha’s sources described a total collapse of all the U. positions, replete with a willingness to abrogate all sanctions against Iranian terror masters. Biden’s envoy Robert Malley reportedly has agreed to remove Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department’s list of foreign terror groups. He has also agreed to remove weapons of mass destruction proliferators, and the Iranian institutions that fund and conduct terror, WMD proliferation, repression, mass murder, torture and other crimes.
The sanctions relief that Biden is conceding will provide Iran with a cash injection of more than $90 billion immediately after the deal is concluded and an additional $50 billion annually through oil and gas revenues. The deal of course will also provide the Iranians with US and UN legitimacy as they cross the nuclear finish line and begin producing nuclear warheads within two and a half years.
A sanctions regime against Iran that induced but a fraction of the pain the West’s financial war against Russia is unleashing would bring down the regime and free the long-suffering Iranian people in short order. It would remove the greatest and most dangerous force of instability, terror, war and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Instead of doing so, Biden has been obsessed with reaching a nuclear deal with the mullahs, regardless of its provisions since the moment he was sworn in. The Europeans, for their part, have waged a 20-year campaign to protect Iran and its nuclear program from Israel and the US.
Morality is not the only thing lacking from the West’s unprecedented efforts to break the Russian economy. Strategic rationale is also hard to discern.
Strategy begins with geography. Ukraine is located between Russia and the EU/NATO. From a strategic perspective, there are only two possible fates for a nation located smack in the middle of two competing powers. It can either be neutral in the contest between them or it can become a satellite state of one camp. Neutrality will induce stability. Unless both powers agree that the border state can join one of the camps, attaching a border state to one of the competing powers will generate instability and increase the probability of war.
Russia was willing to accept the possibility of Ukraine as a neutral state, but over the past 15 years, Putin has said repeatedly that he viewed the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU as a casus belli. The Minsk Protocol from 2014, which Ukraine accepted and the West sponsored, paved the way for Ukraine to become a neutral state. If the US and its allies were acting strategically, they would have urged Zelenskyy to implement the Minsk Protocol, which provided autonomy for the pro-Russian provinces in eastern Ukraine. Instead, as Putin deployed tens of thousands of Russian forces to the Ukrainian border, Biden reportedly gave Zelenskyy the impression that Ukrainian membership in NATO would happen at any time. And now the EU is applauding Zelenskyy’s request for EU membership, thus reducing to near zero the prospect that the conflict will be peacefully resolved.
Watching the virtue signaling statements by Western leaders since Russia invaded Ukraine, the unmistakable impression is that what we are seeing is not morality-based or strategic policymaking. We are witnessing how a herd makes policy. Herd policymaking involves all parties embracing the same policy because everyone is embracing the same policy. In the current context, everyone agrees Ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy because everyone agrees that Ukraine is a paragon of liberal democracy. Everyone agrees that Putin is evil and crazy and must be ousted from power because everyone agrees that Putin is evil, crazy and must be ousted from power.
The West’s embrace of herd policymaking against Russia is a strategic menace to Israel.
To be sure, Israel is not Russia. And the Palestinians and Iran are not Ukraine. Whereas there is a strong case to be made against Russia and for Ukraine, there is no strategic rationale nor moral justification for the hostility that the EU and the progressive left in the US demonstrate towards Israel. There is no strategic rationale nor moral justification for their support for the Palestinians or for the Iranian regime, who both pledge Israel’s destruction.
There is an antisemitic explanation for the West’s positions. And there is a policy-by-herd explanation for their positions.
If the West’s financial total war against Russia is successful, it is a foregone conclusion that it will rapidly be adopted as a standard operating procedure. There are many leaders in the Western herd who love to try it out on Israel. As a consequence, Israel must be concerned that the next time its enemies start a war against it, those voices in the herd will raise to call to turn their new weapon against the Jewish state.
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In many ways Caroline backs up the method of Mearsheimer. She has followed his videos. It would have served better to say that. Israpundit has not hidden his name.
Caroline introduces the concept of herd thinking and even herd rule.
For a time Trump in those television debates preelection of 2016 was challenging the herd. But he became in time not really different and even vulgarly attacked Bibi. He did not have to do that. For that alone I would never forgive.
Caroline is right in the fundamentals. The herd is making for hell on earth in the Nuclear Bomb Iran Destroying Israel. I could shorten to (NBIDI).
Weird how the Capo Jew Wellensky facilitated NBIDI as he and his Nazi chums in Ukraine are laughing at the Holocaust.
There is another monster charging at us and that is Global Heating of this our wonderful (once) Earth.
But here’s the big catch. Those in the middle class types of climate movers like that little opiniated child of the spoiled variety Greta Thunberg are politically bankrupt. She is young and I say so what because a stupid young one is same as a stupid old one.
The state our world is in on Russia is the state we are in on Fossil Fuels.
Caroline does a good job in explaining how they, like a herd let loose from a mental asylum, sanction Russia. But they charge into the abyss all over. Climate worries me far worse than anything and that is saying something because I fear for Israel re NBIDI. And the way these Ukrainians and Lithuanians mock the Holocaust is an alarm bell.
The clarity of John Mearsheimer is a joy to behold. And Caroline the same. They both spend time taking facts that we tend to rush over. Then the conclusions are very valuable.
And my conclusion. The Empire is falling apart but we too must be steadfast. We are in massive danger.
I’ve seen Russian neo-nazis on far -right forums, years ago. There was a famous incident in Israel, when some Russian immigrants to Israel were deported for attacking Jews. More recently, I’ve seen many vile anti-semitic comments at RT, which itself has an anti-semitic flavor. I thought everyone knew this about Russia, they don’t hide it.
@efirub
The Nazi history of Ukraine is much more substantive and broadly based than to suggest it was simply due to a fight against Russia. My childhood neighbor was a survivor of the Ukrainian nightmare against the Jews and the terrors that she and her family faced there had nothing to do with Russia. Furthermore, the villainy of the Ukrainians against the Jews is well documented both before Hitler’s occupation of Ukraine and afterwards. Your suggestion that the current Nazi’s present in Ukraine are “atavistic memory”, recalls to mind references by the Washington Post in which they described the presence of Nazi memorabilia by members of Azov and Svoboda as being simply due to “romantic” recollections of their heritage. Please read the article by Larry Johnson, not exactly a Putin apologist -“Yes, The AZOV Battalion is a Nazi Sympathizer”:
https://turcopolier.com/yes-the-azov-battalion-is-a-nazi-sympathizer/
The BBC has several videos describing the views of these groups including their hatred of the mongrel races and the role of “semetic races” leading their world view opposition. If you have trouble finding some, let me know.
In any event, I am curious of your assertions regarding there being more Nazis in Russia than Ukraine. Likely, there are more of everything in Russia than Ukraine, but Nazis? I am curious what you base this claim upon as it seems highly dubious. Serious question if you would indulge my curiosity.
Caroline Glick is only partially right. She does not know the situation from inside. Russia is an evil empire with seriously brain washed population and with KGB guy as a leader. Russia is a danger for Israel, not Ukraine. Russia has much more neo-nazi, than Ukraine is. In Ukrain these so called nazi are atavistic memory about
their fight for independence from Russia. They cannot drop and fogot their heros, as Stepan Bandera. OfCourse this is stupid and gives to the Russians the ground for propaganda, grabbing land and war.
And in Biden’s cabinet, which reads like a Who’s Who of BDS supporters, which, in turn, makes me wonder how coincidental Biden’s weak and inept but provocative response to Putin has been.