It's been a real week...
Discover more from Conflicts of Interest
It's been a real week...
And one of those "days into which 20 years are compressed."
I planned to open with that old saw from Vladimir Lenin about “days where decades happen,” but turns out, it’s probably not real. So I stuck with the bit from ol’ Karl Marx which we know is legit.
Howdy, you hanging in there?
A lot has happened this week in the ongoing war in Ukraine, and a good amount of it in the last 48 hours.
I thought it’d be good to lay out a few quick timelines, drawing for context on events from earlier this year.
Going back to relatively recent news is important to understanding what the US gets up to abroad, because it helps us view this stuff more as a chain of historical events, ones which are related to each other, which were caused by previous events, and which cause new ones in turn.
It’s especially useful to grow beyond how most of us were taught history, treating individual events as single moments, to be explained definitively by individual people, whether that’s the personality of a single politician, or the analysis of any one expert, or even just a lone writer (myself included).
All my timelines below are Eastern Standard, GMT-5:
Someone bombed Russia’s gas pipeline
On Monday at 8:03 (EST) an unknown party bombed the majority Russian-owned Nord Stream 1 and 2 liquefied natural gas pipelines, causing extreme damage to an economic and political link between Russia and its European neighbors. Danish and Swedish intelligence reported it was an act of sabotage, but not war (an interesting distinction to make based on physical evidence, but whatever). Germany, Denmark, and NATO were consulted soon afterward.
Back in February, US President Joe Biden had threatened to end the Nord Stream pipelines, even as they were politically controlled by Germany, saying, “I promise you we will be able to do it.”
In June, the US Navy partnered with NATO off the Danish island of Bornholm, training with unmanned minesweeping drones directly next to the site of the explosion.
The investigation to determine who conducted this attack will be carried out by recent NATO-applicant Sweden. The Pentagon has denied any involvement, even saying “the jury is still out” on the sabotage confirmed by Denmark and Sweden.
Big thanks to Twitter user @bidetmarxman for pulling together a useful thread which helped me discover and organize some of the above sources. Go check their stuff out!
Russia absorbs part of Ukraine after controversial local vote
This morning at 9:00 AM (EST), following a controversial vote on Wednesday in Ukraine’s Russian-friendly east, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced several of Ukraine’s eastern regions will now be annexed (incorporated) into the Russian Federation.
The US has been working overtime at the UN Security Council, through Albania, to get a full condemnation of these elections as illegal and illegitimate. The UN Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, seems to agree. India, the United Arab Emirates and China may not.
I’m not qualified to pass judgements on the competing international legal arguments for and against this referendum’s legality. My sense is, these elections were illegal, but the results seem possible given the intense level of geographic polarization in the country’s east and west, but I’m not a lawyer, an election monitor, or that guy from CNN with the khakis and the touchscreen TV.
It’s frustrating that most allegations of illegality begin and end with press releases by US and Ukrainian government officials, and independent election monitoring seems to be a contradiction in terms these days, but “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” so that’s all I’ll say on it till (if) we get better sources.
What’s in it for Russia?
Al Jazeera’s released a useful writeup on this, but if you don’t have time, here’s some rough details.
The four regions Russia plans to absorb have been leaning toward it since a US-backed coup in 2014, which deposed Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. These regions include:
The Donetsk People’s Republic: A region Russia recognized as its own country just before the war, whose call for Russian military gave cover for Russia to move into Ukraine under what it calls its Special Military Operation.
The Luhansk People’s Republic: Simultaneously recognized exclusively by Russia, North Korea and Syria as an independent nation under similar circumstances, and for similar reasons.
The region of Kherson: This is a port city, critically important for its access to the Black Sea. It’s also a choke point for sea traffic up the Dnipro River to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
The region known as Zaporzhizhia: Where a nuclear reactor occupied and defended by Russian troops has been the subject of international investigations by nuclear watchdogs. Lebanese and Russian media claim a recently-foiled terror attack was conducted by Ukrainian special operations, trained by the United Kingdom, timed to coincide with nuclear watchdog visits. I think those claims are possible, and worth investigating, because I see them in line with Kyiv’s strategy of ratcheting up nuke-related fears to drive action from the west, but I don’t think there’s enough independent sourcing to confirm it.
For even more context, here’s a picture of a current (approximate, and always-changing) battle lines:
Ukraine Applied for NATO Membership
Later this morning, an hour after Mr. Putin’s speech, the president of Ukraine, Voldymyr Zelenskyy, applied for membership in NATO, the US-led military agreement designed to contain Russia. This is one in a series of reversals by Mr. Zelenskyy’s government, whose initial position was to ask to join, which the country later reversed, likely during the round of negotiations in April, which either fell through or were sabotaged by former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.
While unlikely right now, If NATO accepted Ukraine’s application, it could be pressured to employ the mutual-defense clauses in its charter (called Article 5 for short) which could draw the US and Western Europe officially into war.
Likely because of that sobering fact, at around noon today, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said both that “NATO is not a party to the conflict” at all, and that they’re instead focused on arming and guiding Ukraine. These two statements are contradictory, because NATO’s position is intrinsically disingenuous here too. Washington, London and Brussels need to be able to send money, guns, and experts to Ukraine with a wink and a nod, with the goal of weakening Russia, without guaranteeing their official involvement, which could be criticized diplomatically.
I know that’s a ton of information, articles, and events to process, all back-to-back. What do you make of all of it?
If you want to send me your thoughts or ask questions down in the comments, about what’s going on with the referendum, the detonations around the oil pipeline, or anything else, I’d be happy to read them, and to help sort some of this out, together with you.
Till next time,
-Will
It's been a real week...
" My sense is, these elections were illegal, but the results seem possible given the intense level of geographic polarization in the country’s east and west" Sure, if you ignore the soldiers going around to pretty much "collect vote", or the forced population displacement done by Russia...
Any vote under guns is never legitimate. Even UN GenSec says the same. When countries like Iran and Serbia rejects the result...you know you screwed up.