The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.
A New York Times report (March 20, 2022) on global food crisis due to the Ukraine war said:
‘A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent and some fertilizers by 40 percent.
On the evening of 18 March, President Xi Jinping (R) had a video call with US President Joe Biden at the request of the latter.
The Chinese stance on developments around Ukraine was initially one-dimensional, namely, there is no conceivable comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan issues, as they are fundamentally different, because Taiwan is a part of China, whereas Ukraine is an independent country. Factually, that was a correct stance.
However, there has been a shift lately toward acknowledging that the Eurasian tensions hold an analogy for Indo-Pacific region. The Chinese commentaries underline that the relentless expansion of the NATO in the post-Cold War era is the root cause of events unfolding over Ukraine. In the video call with President Biden in the weekend, President Xi Jinping implicitly touched on this aspect:
The process of the so-called “decommunization” in Ukraine was introduced during the first years of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and included the slandering and erasing of anything related to the Soviet period and the construction of socialism.
This term was also used by the President of today’s capitalist Russia, Vladimir Putin, in his anti-communist statement prior to the invasion, saying characteristically that “we are ready to show you what genuine decommunization means for Ukraine”. It is not a coincidence that anti-communism is a common feature of both the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev as well as the leadership of capitalist Russia, at a time when the two sides are waging a bloody war against the people on behalf of their bourgeois classes.
“The war in Ukraine is like a powerful earthquake that will have ripple effects throughout the global economy, especially in poor countries”. That’s how IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva described the impact of the war on the world economy. Nobody can be sure of the magnitude of this quake but even on the most optimistic view, it is going to damage significantly the economies and livelihoods of not just the people of Ukraine and Russia, but also the rest of the 7bn people globally. And it is happening just as the world economy was supposedly recovering from the plunge in output, incomes and living standards suffered from the COVID pandemic slump in 2020 – which was the widest and deepest global contraction (if relatively short) in over 100 years.
This week Lowkey is joined by Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist living in London, who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He hails from the south of Wales and has been visiting Palestine since 2004. He writes for the groundbreaking Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada, where he is an associate editor, and also writes a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor.
Following the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008, several conclusions were reached and published in a joint statement of those attending. One read: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22): “Unfortunately, there was virtually no focus on civilian death and agony when it was the US military launching the invasions.”
As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians.
To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.
Ukrainian sources—no experts
One of the most striking things about early coverage has been the sheer number of Ukrainian sources. FAIR always challenges news media to seek out the perspective of those most impacted by events, and US outlets are doing so to a much greater extent in this war than in any war in recent history. Of 234 total sources—230 of whom had identifiable nationalities—119 were Ukrainian (including five living in the United States.)
The past week has seen a flurry of public figures drawing direct parallels between the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the former dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. In some cases, Hitler has even been compared favourably to Putin – said to be less corrupt and less brutal as he had never killed ‘his own people’ and ‘did not use Chemical weapons’. As offensive and ahistorical as these comparisons are, to be fully understood they must be placed within the broader historical pattern of the US and its allies time and again cynically portraying leaders of their officially designated enemy states as some form of re-incarnation of Hitler in order to generate the emotional public reaction needed to justify their belligerent policies and add a superficial moral veneer to them.
An interview with Russ Bellant, author of Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party.
by Paul H. Rosenberg and Foreign Policy In Focus
This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus | March 28, 2014
As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the United States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South End Press, 1991). Bellant’s exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany’s World War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements among the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukrainians aren’t Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.
Journal of People 