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      On Ukraine, Turkey Is Moving Cautiously Toward the West

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      Just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the chief commentator of the Turkish daily Sabah, Mehmet Barlas, summed up his assessment of the situation with the sentence, “If we had to reckon with a war, President Erdogan would not have left today for a four-day trip to Africa.” He added that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, is in constant contact with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

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      “All experts,” the avowed Erdogan supporter continued, agreed that Washington was escalating the crisis to solidify its dominance in Western Europe. With that, Barlas also echoed the general mood in Turkey. It is fortunate, he said, that Russia’s president is much more reasonable and wiser than his American counterpart, Joe Biden.

      The Bond Between Erdogan and Putin

      This positive image of Putin and Erdogan’s familiarity with the Kremlin leader is no accident. Particularly since the failed coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, Erdogan has, with Putin’s help, been able to position himself independently of — and sometimes even against — the United States and Europe on key foreign policy issues.

      In Syria and Azerbaijan, Ankara and Moscow succeeded in marginalizing Western actors. In Libya and the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey acts as a competitor or even adversary to member states of the European Union.

      Turkey’s flirtation with Moscow led to concerns that Ankara might turn away from Europe altogether. That contributed to the EU’s kid-glove approach to Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus. It also resulted in Washington’s belated reaction to Turkey’s acquisition of Russia’s S-400 missile defense system with sanctions. It is true that Turkey has experience with Putin as a cool strategist and ruthless power politician in conflicts such as the one in Syria. But Erdogan has always seemed to succeed in avoiding escalation.

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      Despite all of Ankara’s tension with Moscow, Erdogan’s rapprochement with Russia has brought him much closer to his goal of strategic autonomy for his country from the West. Turkey skillfully maneuvered between the fronts of global rivalry and was able to considerably expand its scope and influence in just a few years.

      In this seesaw policy, however, Turkey is behaving much more confrontationally toward Western states than toward Russia. For years, the government press has painted a positive picture of Russia and a negative one of the United States and Europe. This is not without effect on Turkish public opinion. Around a month before Russia attacked Ukraine, in a poll carried out by a renowned opinion research institute, a narrow relative majority of 39% of respondents favored foreign policy cooperation with Russia and China instead of Europe and the United States.

      In the first days after Russia’s invasion, Ankara’s policy followed exactly the aforementioned pattern. Turkey condemned the attack, but it is not participating in sanctions against Russia. In the vote on suspending Russia’s representation rights in the Council of Europe, Turkey was the only NATO state to abstain and, as such, is keeping its airspace open to Russian aircraft.

      The West is paying particular attention to whether and how Turkey implements the Treaty of Montreux. The 1936 treaty regulates the passage of warships through Turkey’s Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits into the Black Sea. It limits the number, tonnage and duration of stay of ships from non-littoral states in the Black Sea. In the event of war, the convention stipulates that the waterways must be closed to ships of the parties to the conflict, and it entrusts Ankara with the application of the treaty’s regulations

      Ankara Swings Around

      It took Turkey four days to classify the Russian invasion as “war.” However, Ankara is still reluctant to officially close the waterways — as the treaty stipulates — to ships of parties to the conflict, Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Ankara is warning “all countries, Black Sea riparian or not,” against sending warships through the straits.

      In the literal sense, this step is not directed unilaterally against Moscow, but it also makes it more difficult for NATO ships to sail into the Black Sea. According to the treaty, however, the waterways may only be closed to warships of all countries if Ankara considers itself directly threatened by war. Consciously creating ambiguity, Turkey has triangulated between the West and Russia.

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      Almost imperceptibly at first, however, a reversal has now set in. There are four reasons for this. First, the West is showing unity and resolve unseen since the Cold War, and its sanctions are undermining Russia’s standing in the world. Second, Putin is losing his charisma as a successful statesman and reliable partner. Third, Ankara realizes that Putin’s vision of a great Russian empire could provoke more wars. Fourth, the ranks of the adversaries are closing and it is becoming more difficult for Turkey to continue its seesaw policy.

      Thus, strongly pro-Western tones have emerged from Ankara in recent weeks. Turkey will continue to support Ukraine in consultation with the West, according to the president’s spokesman. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu now claims to have contradicted Russia’s wishes for the passage of warships through the Bosporus “in all friendship.” President Erdogan is also in favor of admitting Ukraine to the European Union and Kosovo to NATO.

      Moreover, Ankara is not contradicting reports by Ukrainian diplomats that Turkey is supplying more armed drones and training pilots to fly drones. On March 2, Turkey joined the vast majority of states in the UN General Assembly’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that asked Russia to “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces.” Two days later, during the extraordinary meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers, Turkey supported the deployment of NATO’s Response Force to NATO countries neighboring Ukraine.

      It looks like Putin is not only bringing long-lost unity to the EU, but he is also reminding Turkey of the benefits of its Western ties. Western states should realize that only more unity among themselves and more determination will make Turkey reengage with the West.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      How to Write New York Times Propaganda

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      The Russian invasion of Ukraine has ushered the Western world into an innovative moment of history managed by the media, who aim at nothing less than erasing the public’s perception of history and historical processes. Welcome to the age of nonstop propaganda. Any curious person seeking news about the war in Ukraine, let alone its background and causes, faces the permanent challenge of determining whether whatever story they happen to be reading is news or propaganda, or more likely some kind of witch’s brew containing some of the former and a preponderance of the latter.

      For the past month, the most respectable news outlets in the West have channeled their energy into perfecting a novel journalistic phenomenon that goes well beyond traditional propaganda. It has become so concentrated it now deserves an official name. I propose calling it “Obsessive Accusatory Reporting” (OAR). The message of any item in the news meriting the OAR label is to magnify an already present feeling of confirmed hatred in the reader. In principle, it can target nations, peoples, ideas or religions. But it works best when it focuses on a single personality.

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      The current version of OAR began with an idea already built into the cultural woodwork of American media: the perception that Russia — whether in its historical Soviet version or in its modern post-tsarist form — is the natural and eternal enemy of the United States and, by extension, to Western civilization as a whole. Inherited from the Cold War as a set of feelings that Americans find natural, establishment Democrats in the US gave it new impetus thanks to the artificial association they managed to establish with the man they believed could play the role of a true American evildoer: Donald Trump. Now, thanks to a specific event, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the practice of OAR can focus on a universal target by whom, unlike Trump, no American should be allowed to be seduced. It’s the new Hitler, Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

      Anyone who has ever witnessed a rowing event knows that to gain speed and ensure hydrodynamic efficiency, all rowers must have their oars strike the water at the same precise moment and achieve an equivalent depth below the surface of the water as their collective effort pushes the boat and all it contains forward. This repeated, disciplined, rhythmically coordinated energy creates the inertia strokes that produce increased momentum. 

      The media’s propaganda campaigns appear to work in much the same way thanks to the equally disciplined and repeated OAR phenomenon. Obsessive repetition, the alignment of an infinite series of examples of despicable behavior and the journalistic talent for turning each example into an emotion-stirring story are the three elements that sum up the art of OAR. The momentum the media has created around hatred for the person of Vladimir Putin has become a spectacle in itself. The danger the media has no time to worry about as its effort continues developing potentially uncontrollable speed is that it may reach the point where it triggers actions leading to a potentially thermonuclear conflagration. Call it the media’s brinkmanship that multiplies the effects of politicians who themselves, persuaded it is now the key to successful electoral marketing, have turned it into an art form. Voters want their leaders to be aggressive decision-makers.

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      There are undoubtedly plenty of reasons to distrust, despise and morally condemn Vladimir Putin that existed well before he decided to invade Ukraine on February 24. Putin has, as befits a country ruled for a century by autocratic tsars, developed a particularly thuggish form of governing his nation. Russians at least are used to it and fatalistically accept it, with no illusion about its pretention to any form of virtue other than the ability to keep things under control. 

      Putin is clearly guilty of every sin — from brutal repression to aggravated narcissism — that accrues to anyone who achieves his level of control that embraces military power, finance and technology. His ability to repress any serious opposition and manipulate electoral processes, his commitment to cronyism and self-enrichment, and his immunity from a basic moral sense concerning the value of human life and the dignity of the average citizen constitute attributes of his office. Unlike some autocratic leaders, he also has a high level of strategic intelligence. 

      Westerners have become habituated to leaders who seek to seduce broad segments of the population thanks to slogans rather than the demonstration of their clout or the display of their intelligence, which in fact is never required and, when it exists, may get in the way of their ambition. Western political leaders focus on developing the essential skill of deploying charm to win elections. To Westerners, Putin’s style of governing marked by the arrogance of power is worse than distasteful. It challenges their own belief in the illusion they need to feel of possessing political power in a democracy thanks to their ability to vote at regular intervals. They need to imagine their vote has an impact on policy, an illusion the media encourages them to believe in. All it really does is limit the degree of repression a democratic government may get away with. Putin has no qualms or regrets about manifestly unjust actions carried out against his own people. Western democratic leaders actually worry.

      Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was unambiguously illegal, morally shocking, paradoxical to the extent that he is attacking the population he claims to wish to protect and downright brutal. It may even be self-defeating, potentially tarnishing his image as a strong leader. It would, however, be premature to draw conclusions on that last point, as many in the Western media have already started doing. But for anyone susceptible to being seduced by today’s OAR culture, the temptation to believe in the inevitable failure of Putin’s enterprise is overwhelming. For the past two weeks, Western media have been joyously proclaiming that Putin’s armed assault is on the verge of defeat. 

      Journalism and Democracy

      The traditional belief about journalism in a democracy included the idea that the press plays a role closely attuned to the interest and the voice of the people. Ideally, the media exists to provide essential information about the real world and a modicum of independent insight about the topics treated. By showing restraint and focusing on discernible facts, media in a democracy could be trusted to help citizens understand complex events and make informed decisions after drawing their own conclusions about the possible relationship between causes and effects.

      That has long been the theory concerning the role of what people still call the fourth estate, a linguistic hand-me-down from 18th century European history that designates the free press. The fourth estate was deemed to be closest to the third estate (the people, or the commoners) and furthest from the first two estates (the clergy and the nobility). The advent of democracy made the theory of the estates obsolete, to the extent that the clergy lost its status of “estate.” In reality, the totalitarian drift of the 20th century revealed that the first and second estates merged as democratic governments assumed they could project the moral authority the clergy traditionally exercised.

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      The idea of a free and independent press embodied in the fourth estate continued to persist as a necessary but increasingly intangible ideal. Alas, history tells us that whenever an ideal makes contact with reality, it is likely to become distorted. With the rise of democracy in the West in the 19th century, the press permitted the expression of variable points of view. But over time, no ethical system could prevent those voices from being influenced by political parties, commercial interests, pressure groups and the government itself. The key to honoring the ideal was variety, not just tolerance but also the encouragement of a range of views. Financial concentration eventually limited and finally captured and confined that variety.

      The media has been trapped by forces it no longer tries to control or resist. It is virtually impossible even to imagine, let alone create anything resembling the ideal news outlet for which objective presentation of the news would be the inviolable norm. Perhaps the proponents of government by artificial intelligence believe they can one day put that in place by eliminating human agency. They too are victims of an illusion because manipulative human agency can work — and in fact works best — through artificial systems that include and mechanically promote the interests that created them. This is as true of political systems as it is of computer programs. The failure of humanity to even begin addressing the impending catastrophe of global warming can simply be attributed to systemic inertia, not to the idea that no leader is willing to make an appropriate decision.

      So long as diversity in the media was still possible, truth for the public at large could emerge not from a spontaneous or enforced consensus, but through the highly interactive process of recognizing and eliminating the distortions of the reality that became visible after comparing the various representations of it. By definition, the truth about human institutions and historical facts is dynamic, organic and interactive. It is not a statement and cannot be contained in statements. It exists as a perception. Perceptions can be shared, compared or contradicted. No single perception sums up the truth.

      In the traditional democratic idea of journalism, a good article avoided explicit judgment. In many instances, the standard practice became to avoid even mentioning specific interpretations or judgments. Good reporting limited itself to acknowledging dominant perspectives on a topic without choosing to endorse one or another. In stories about crime, for example, it has become a general rule — before a verdict rendered by a court of justice — to use the epithet “alleged.” This rule holds even when there is no doubt about the existence of the crime and the identity of the author of the crime (though the real reason for this precaution may be the media’s fear of being accused of libel). In contrast, when it comes to political issues, the opposite trend dominates. Journalists or their editors now routinely jump on the occasion to name the culprit and inculcate the belief of guilt in their audience. Knowing their niche audience, it enables them to offer their public what they want to hear or understand.

      Russian Agency and the Havana Syndrome

      One prominent case in recent years illustrates how easy it is for journalists to play fast and loose concerning real or imaginary political crimes. Over a period of five years dedicated to reporting on the “Havana syndrome,” The New York Times, The Washington Post and other respectable media consistently described reported health incidents as “attacks.” That word alone presumed criminal agency, even though the reality of cause and effect was closer to a “heart attack” or “panic attack” than to an assault.

      Articles on the syndrome typically insisted that, even when no evidence could be cited of any human agency, Russia was the prime suspect. Sentences such as this one from The Washington Post were clearly intended to distort the reader’s perception: “Current and former intelligence officials have increasingly pointed a finger at Russia, which has staged multiple brazen attacks on adversaries and diplomats overseas.” It is worth noting that the only act in this sentence that should qualify as news is what the intelligence officials have done: “pointed a finger.” All the rest, the “brazen attacks,” are either imprecisely anecdotal from a random past or simply imaginary.

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      Five years after initially pointing fingers, those same officials finally admitted officially that there was nothing to point their finger at. When the ultimate negative assessment by the CIA itself of Russian attacks was published in January of this year, did The Post or The Times (or any other media) apologize to their readers for their erroneous reporting over the years? Obviously, not. Perhaps they felt that might oblige them to do the unthinkable: apologize to the Russians.

      When there was finally no choice left but to reveal the CIA’s negative assessment, The New York Times tried to save face by insisting that everything it had pinned its hopes on might still have an element of truth in it. “A directed energy weapon,” Julian E. Barnes wrote on January 20, “remains the hypothesis that a number of victims who have studied the incidents believe is most likely.” If that fact is true, a serious reporter would have delved into the interesting question of why the victims continue to believe something that their superiors have determined to be untrue. Does this reveal that CIA operatives and their families have lost their trust in the truthfulness of the agency? The rest of us are left wondering why journalists like Barnes himself think it necessary to print such meaningless observations as significant facts.

      Now that the entire thesis of Russian-directed energy attacks has been discredited, a new article delving into the motivation of intelligence officials who made repeated unfounded claims might prove informative. But, miraculously, there are no new articles on the Havana syndrome, except maybe the article you are now reading. But none in The Times or The Post. With hindsight — something the legacy press studiously avoids — the articles of these papers appear to reveal the equivalent of “brazen attacks,” not by Russians but by US intelligence services. They were attacks on the public’s access to the truth. The journalists were simply willing conscious or unconscious accomplices in these brazen attacks. What this entire episode truly reveals is a lesson in how our culture of hyperreality works. It depends entirely on the media.

      Finally, a Serious Case of a Brazen Attack: Ukraine

      This inevitably brings us back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This time, Russia is indeed guilty of a brazen attack that isn’t an imaginary hypothesis dreamed up by intelligence operatives. Nevertheless, the media have turned it into something far more brazen by systematically excluding or ignoring other less brazen but equally troubling attacks that have been going on for years. They include a decidedly brazen coup d’état in Ukraine supported, if not engineered, by the United States in 2014.

      The carefully managed act of regime change in which the US gratefully accepted the assistance of neo-Nazi extremists to produce the commensurate level of violence used the deposition of one democratically elected leader to enable the comforting fiction that the two Ukrainian presidents elected since those events — Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky — are somehow more legitimate than the president overthrown in the Maidan Revolution. That fiction depends on discarding the fact that Ukraine is not just another “sovereign nation” of Europe, but a historically, culturally and linguistically divided country that also has a conflicting but highly charged symbolic meaning for both Russia, its next-door neighbor, and the United States, a distant hegemon that has used NATO to spread its military dominance across Europe.

      Most reasonable and reasoning people admit the principle that complex political entities such as Ukraine require delicate diplomatic treatment. But, as the Bush wars revealed, US foreign policy rarely acknowledges the need for rationality. Even basic diplomacy appears to be inconsistent with the culture of enforced hegemony. At best, it might serve the purpose of catastrophe avoidance. But catastrophes are increasingly welcomed rather than avoided. Instead, we can observe a growing trend of catastrophe provocation that is difficult to explain, since the cost is heavy even for the perpetrators. For the US, it appears to have something to do with the idea that world hegemony is the only possible source of global stability and that catastrophes such as war are somehow good for business (which of course they are, but not for everyone’s or even most people’s business).

      In such a geopolitical environment, propaganda becomes a way of life and serves as the core activity in the construction of public culture. Selecting the facts the public will react to in a predictable way according to the interest of those who understand the secrets of geopolitical stability has become the basis of legacy journalism in the US. The ultimately comic example of the Havana syndrome perhaps served as a kind of temporary placeholder in times of relative peace. It upheld the mythological construct of a permanent Cold War, which seems to be essential in the definition of US foreign policy. Now that things have become seriously degraded in a nation that journalists have begun calling the “civilized” part of the world — meaning that it is worth being concerned about, in contrast with the Middle East, Asia and Africa — propaganda has to focus not on pure hallucinatory hyperreality but events that are taking place in the real world.

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      We are only beginning to see the dominant strategies involved. It is too early to assess them with any historical distance. What we are witnessing is the need to whip up the blind hatred that leads to the OAR phenomenon described earlier. But there is also a more basic approach that applies especially to situations that are historically and culturally complex. It includes the decision to forget to mention or even categorically deny the obvious for as long as possible. When the obvious does become visible, thanks to the indiscipline of some rare investigators interested in the truth, the strategy consists of devising ways of downplaying it and treating it as marginal.

      The Neo-Nazi Syndrome

      When Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, he defined a mission of denazification of Ukraine. He may have presumed that all Westerners can relate to that theme. Nazis are, after all, the personification of historical evil. So, if we can agree on a common enemy, we should at the very least offer one another friendly support. Putin apparently underestimated the Westerners’ ability to remain ignorant of very real and already documented facts, thanks to the deliberate forgetfulness of their media. Not only did commentators laugh at the notion that a neo-Nazi threat existed in Ukraine, they mocked the idea that it could exist in a nation whose president is Jewish.

      Four weeks into the war, The New York Times has published an article acknowledging that the neo-Nazi question is worth mentioning. The article bears the title, “Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine.” The title alone is extremely clever. It focuses attention not on the Nazis, who are never seriously identified, but on Vladimir Putin, whom Times readers understand as being evil incarnate. The first sentence reads as pure mockery of phrases Putin has used. “Ukraine’s government,” Anton Troianovski writes, ”is ‘openly neo-Nazi’ and ‘pro-Nazi,’ controlled by ‘little Nazis,’ President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says.”

      The implication is that if Putin said it, it must be a lie. It is only in the 12th paragraph of the article that the question of the actual presence and actions of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is even grudgingly entertained. “Like many lies,” the paragraph begins, “Mr. Putin’s claim about a Nazi-controlled Ukraine has a hall-of-mirrors connection to reality.” Ah, Troianovski appears to admit, there is a connection to reality, but of course it is hopelessly distorted, like a fun park’s hall of mirrors.

      The following paragraph attempts to convince the reader that the phenomenon is so marginal there is definitely nothing to worry about. “Some fringe nationalist groups, who have no representation in Parliament, use racist rhetoric and symbolism associated with Nazi Germany.” In other words, talk of neo-Nazis is all fiction.

      Many paragraphs later, Troianovski reveals the real reason why this article of clarification became necessary for The Times rather than simply neglecting to mention neo-Nazis. It’s the fault of Facebook, which created something of a scandal when it “said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion military unit, ‘strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.’” The Russians seized on this as proof of complicity between the Ukrainian resistance and the neo-Nazis. To counter dangerous Russian propaganda, The Times is stepping up to clarify the issue, even though it would have preferred not having to mention it.

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      Unfortunately, the article spends paragraph after paragraph clarifying nothing. It somewhat precipitously ends with a quote about how Jews are now among those fleeing the war. Some of them may never return, implying that Putin’s intent of denazifying Ukraine is in itself a deviously anti-Semitic act. This reversal of perception of blame illustrates one of the key techniques of New York Times-style propaganda. The journalist finds a devious way of turning the supposedly moral motivation of the enemy into its opposite.

      Troianovski briefly hints at the uncomfortable paradox that Israel has refused to condemn Russia, a fact that might comfort the idea of Putin’s concern with neo-Nazis. But the journalist leaves that question aside, apparently convinced that the subtlety of that debate unnecessarily complicates his mission as an OAR specialist focused only on highlighting Putin’s evil nature. Surprisingly for those familiar with modern Ukrainian history, Troianovski has the honesty to mention the historical Nazi sympathizer and Ukrainian nationalist, Stepan Bandera, still celebrated by many Ukrainians.

      Troianovski even has the merit of providing a link to a fascinatingly instructive 2010 Times article, written at a time when the paper had no particular commitment to churning out propaganda in the interests of celebrating Ukraine’s democratic purity and constitutional integrity. The author of that article, Clifford J. Levy, highlights the problem that Viktor Yanukovych was facing as he bravely attempted “to address the ethnic, regional and historical passions that divide the country.” Yanukovych was, of course, the Ukrainian president that Victoria Nuland helped to depose in 2014.

      Understanding the Culture of Propaganda by Comparing The Times in 2010 and 2022

      All New York Times readers and indeed all American journalists owe it to themselves and the sanity of the world we live in to read Levy’s article from 2010, if only to compare it to the image of Ukraine that American media are putting forward today of a unified people, imbued with liberal European values and united in their hatred of tyranny in all its forms. Levy’s article that applies the now-forgotten practices of straightforward journalism presents facts, cites contrasting points of view — including admirers of Bandera — and takes no sides. In so doing, it gives a clear picture of a terrifyingly complex social and historical situation that Western media have decided to simplify to the extreme in their wish to follow the dictates of US President Joe Biden’s State Department.  

      Any objective observer today, however rare their voices are in the media, must realize, as Barack Obama did in 2016, according to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one.” Obama’s State Department that sent Nuland to Ukraine to manage the Maidan Revolution appeared at the time unaware of what Goldberg called the “Obama Doctrine.” That same objective observer should also be aware of the fact that the Ukraine described by Levy in his 2010 article still exists, despite the State Department’s 2014 coup d’état. There is much more about the history of the last eight years and beyond that, despite the terrifying consequences playing out day after day, US and Western media have now chosen to studiously ignore, if not suppress.

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      One salient point that readers of Levy’s article will relate to today, however, is the remark of the director of the Stepan Bandera museum in Lviv: “For Ukrainian nationalists, there is no such word as capitulation.” That is even truer when those same nationalists dispose of a billion dollars worth of American weaponry to keep the war of resistance going as long as possible. The citizenry of Western Ukraine will follow the lead of the nationalists — not all of whom are neo-Nazis — and refuse to capitulate, while suffering what deserves to be called severe if not sadistic cultural, political and military abuse from two enemies fighting a proxy war on their land: Russia and the United States.

      But if the continuing destruction of Ukrainian cities and loss of thousands of lives is the price to pay for the pleasure of reading reams of Obsessive Accusatory Reporting, then, as Madeleine Albright might say, “the price is worth it.”

      ​​The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      American Hypocrisy and Half-Measures Damn Ukraine and Help Russia

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      Shortly after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the government in Kyiv floated the idea of a no-fly zone to help protect civilians and soldiers. The West gave a swift and decisive refusal: threatening to shoot down Russian planes could set off World War III.

      And yet, three weeks into the war, the no-fly zone proposal just won’t die. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky begs for air support almost daily. In protests and social media posts, millions of ordinary people around the world ask NATO to #closethesky. 

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      Here in America, a nationwide poll showed that 74% of Americans support a no-fly zone. And earlier this month, 27 foreign policy experts published an open letter requesting a limited no-fly zone over humanitarian corridors. 

      If a no-fly zone is so obviously impractical, why are we still talking about it? The answer — which is conspicuously missing from mainstream Western discourse — lays bare the fundamental problem in the US response to the war. 

      A False Dichotomy

      Politicians and the media offer a single simplistic argument against protecting Ukraine’s airspace: Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Almost every official statement, article and op-ed can be summarized in one sentence: A no-fly zone would start World War III.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But here’s the part no one says out loud: What happens if the West doesn’t institute a no-fly zone? Will such a move keep us safe from nuclear Armageddon? Can the US manage to stay out of this war and out of Russia’s crosshairs? 

      Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric — and his actions — offer a clear answer. The US can avoid direct confrontation but at a price: handing the Russian leader an absolute, total victory. In Ukraine, of course, but also in Moldova and Georgia and perhaps the Baltics, and who knows where else? And, of course, carte blanche to commit whatever atrocities he’d like worldwide (à la Syria). 

      If Putin cannot win, he will lash out against enemies real and imagined. At that point, it won’t matter whether those enemies have instituted a no-fly zone. Putin has already likened sanctions and weapons deliveries to declarations of war on Russia, creating a ready excuse for retaliation. He’s set up a false narrative about Ukraine building a nuclear bomb, building a rationale to use his own nuclear weapons. 

      America’s Choice 

      The real question before the US government isn’t whether to institute a no-fly zone. It’s whether America is ready to help Ukraine win or prefers to stand by and watch the rise of a new Russian empire. 

      If not, we must stand up to Putin now. There are multiple viable policy options for doing so. One is arranging a no-fly zone administered by the United Nations rather than NATO. Another is sending Ukraine decommissioned Western fighter jets and several dozen volunteer air force vets who would be granted Ukrainian citizenship. Yet another would be to send only jets — Ukrainian fighter pilots have confirmed that they can, in fact, learn to fly Western jets in just a few days. 

      The specific mechanism matters less than the political will — the decision to send Putin a clear message that the US will not let him take Ukraine, backed up by sufficient military support. This option is not risk-free. But it’s impossible for Ukraine to prevail without angering Putin. 

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      Is the risk worth it? Ukrainians believe so because they see something most Americans haven’t yet figured out: World War III has already started. Putin’s grand ambitions are reminiscent of a certain German dictator 80 years before him, as is the US strategy of appeasement. In the end, US involvement is inevitable, so why not be strategic and proactive rather than reacting years later when the human and economic costs of Putin’s empire-building are too high to be ignored? 

      Of course, the US government may disagree with this perspective and opt for appeasement 2.0. Maybe this time around, the unstable dictator will be more reasonable?

      If this is the case, and the US government is not ready to stand up to Putin, it’s essential to make it clear that Zelensky is on his own. If we cannot make a commitment to let Ukrainians win, we should let them lose. Ukraine’s government deserves an honest understanding of what it can and can’t expect from the US so it can make decisions accordingly.  

      The Worst of Both Worlds

      So far, American politicians have spurned both of these options. Instead, they’re pursuing an immoral, dangerous fantasy, waiting for someone to stop Putin without America getting its hands dirty. To this end, they offer half-measures that drag out the conflict and cost thousands of lives. They wear blue and yellow, they send aid and enact sanctions, but they consciously steer clear of any support that could lead to a Ukrainian victory. 

      This brings us back to the absurd situation we started with: ongoing calls for an impossible no-fly zone, which we can now see are absolutely logical. Let’s review.

      America: Ukraine, we support you in your brave fight for freedom!

      Ukrainians and their friends abroad: Great! So, the one thing we need is support with our airspace.

      America: No can do. But believe us — we’re on your side here and we’re ready to help! 

      Ukrainians: Thank you. We’re dying here and we can’t win without air support. 

      America: Once again, no. But we stand with you.

      This hypocrisy goes well beyond the debate over the no-fly zone. For instance, on March 6, Secretary Blinken gave the green light for Poland to donate its fighter jets to Ukraine. When Poland agreed to cede the jets to the US for immediate transfer to the Ukrainian army, American officials backpedaled in a truly impressive display of doublespeak. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Ukraine cannot win this war without the US taking tangible steps to protect Ukrainian airspace. Pretending otherwise and willfully extending the bloodshed with partial measures is the worst possible option for the United States. 

      The US government doesn’t owe Ukraine support. But it does owe Ukraine an immediate end to the falsehoods and the empty words — a bullshit ceasefire, if you will. An admission that, no matter how many civilian deaths, no matter what kind of banned weapons Russia uses or how many war crimes it commits, no matter if Russia drops a nuclear bomb on Kyiv, the US will not step in. 

      Until then, Russia pushes new boundaries every day with impunity, Ukraine holds out hope for help that will never come and Joe Biden wavers while children die. 

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The War in Ukraine Threatens Global Food Security

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      Russia’s war against Ukraine directly impacts agricultural markets. First of all, the conflict impedes the delivery of existing stocks and the upcoming sowing of many types of grains. Due to the occupation and destruction of major ports, exports will continue to collapse. Agricultural exports from Russia are currently still possible on the main transport route via ports on the Black Sea. 

      However, shipping companies report limiting their transport due to the perceived danger and concerns about loss of business. Recently, Ukraine announced that it would restrict its own exports to secure domestic supply.

      Russian Ballet’s Soft Power: Will Dance Outlast Autocracy?

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      Ukraine and Russia have become key players for the export of both grain and sunflower (oil) in the post-Soviet era. For quite some time, their crop yields have influenced international volumes and prices, with Ukraine providing on average 10% of the world’s wheat export supply, and Russia as much as 24%; for maize, Ukraine supplied 15% of the staple feed and fodder. 

      The international market for fertilizer is even more concentrated. With trade shares of individual fertilizer components reaching up to 50%, Russia dominates the market for ammonium nitrate and Belarus, at 16%, for potash fertilizer.

      Wartime Uncertainty

      Due to general business uncertainty, the financial sanctions of numerous states and the EU against Russia currently affect agricultural exports indirectly while specific sanctions directly target respective exports. For example, last year, in response to the crackdown on the opposition in Belarus, the EU imposed sanctions on the market-dominating Belarusian potash producer Belaruskali, extending them last week.

      Prices for many agricultural products determined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations currently already exceed the historic highs during the food price crises of 2007 and 2011. Fertilizer prices have also been rising to record levels for months. In addition, shortages due to reduced or canceled supplies of grain and fertilizer from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are driving up prices. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia, like many countries, has been using export restrictions on agricultural products to secure its own supplies despite international warnings against these price-increasing measures. Just last week, the government recommended that Russian companies also limit fertilizer exports.

      Besides Ukraine, crop and supply shortfalls initially affect countries that import agricultural products from the war-affected region and are currently looking for readily available alternative sources. This drives up prices on global markets, thereby burdening all importers worldwide but hitting low-income countries and people the hardest. Egypt has an import share of 60% of Russian grain and 20% of Ukrainian grain. 

      To date, other countries that are already vulnerable to supply insecurity, such as Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Bangladesh and Turkey, also purchase the majority of their grain from the region. Chad and Niger imported up to 80% of their fertilizer and raw materials from Russia and Belarus; Europe, as well as many countries in Latin America, also purchased large shares.

      Options for Adjustment 

      Affected countries have different options for adjustment. Egypt still has limited but probably sufficient grain stocks of its own for the time being, despite strong supply dependence vis-à-vis the region. In Lebanon, on the other hand, the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut destroyed wheat warehouses, reducing storage capacity from six months to one month, necessitating a continuous flow of supplies.

      The remaining supply gaps that cannot be solved in importing countries by means of shifts in consumption toward more food rather than energy use require both food and fertilizer support. However, these are becoming more expensive as a result of rising prices for procurement and delivery. Transport and delivery must be additionally protected when sourcing from the region along vulnerable routes.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Trade must remain open and possibly protected on routes perceived as dangerous by shipping lines. Typical crisis-induced but price-pushing export restrictions must be avoided, both within the EU and internationally. Failing supplies from the major agricultural region will show their full effects in the coming autumn crop season, which may only be offset to a certain extent by crops from other major producers such as Australia, the US and the EU.

      Large agricultural countries could pursue forward-looking, coordinated market relaxation in order to quickly identify food supply potentials. However, in order to avoid symbolic politics or protectionist reflexes to support domestic production, the volume and price effects of possible approaches — suspension of set-aside programs, reduced use of agro-fuels or land rededication from fodder to food production — need to be assessed accurately. If a contribution to market relaxation is to be expected, corresponding measures should be quickly initiated for the upcoming crop year as a temporary crisis measure. 

      Similarly, the US is discussing the suspension of the conservation reserve program to allow farmers to bring set-aside areas into production. Price-driving sanctions with regard to fertilizers and agricultural goods should be avoided — or at least be accompanied by aid concepts to absorb linked supply risks.

      As during the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) — a monitoring mechanism developed by the G20 in response to past food price crises — should be used for an international information campaign to prevent price-pushing export restrictions by means of appeals. However, more important than appeals would be the adoption of strict criteria and deadlines for these measures that are enforceable at the World Trade Organization level.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      In the future, AMIS should cover not only agricultural products, fertilizers and energy sources but also the conditions of and access to trade infrastructure. Here, restrictions heavily influence supply and price and should be included in a comprehensive warning system for international supply potential.

      Furthermore, a future international political offensive for fertilizers and their raw materials is needed. Not only must the market situation be monitored and, in the event of shortages, be accompanied by aid early on. Technologies to make their use more efficient and to increase fertilizer production capacities as well as approaches to their substitution, whether technologically or by cultivation, are also needed.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Try This Game to Evaluate Levels of Disinformation in Times of War

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      Although during her three-decade-long career as a US Foreign Service officer Victoria Nuland has done many things, mostly in the shadows, she has had two moments that projected her into the headlines, both related to crucial events in Ukraine. It is worth noting that on both of those occasions, her superiors expected her to remain in the shadows. In other words, it is merely by chance that she has now become a household name in US foreign policy.

      Nuland has loyally served every administration, Democrat and Republican, since Bill Clinton, with a single exception. Donald Trump most likely refused to exploit her acquired competence on the grounds that she had been tainted by working for Barack Obama’s State Department under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Or perhaps Trump felt she had become too embedded in the culture of the deep state he claimed to abhor.

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      Nuland’s closest direct collaboration with a luminary of American politics occurred between 2003 and 2005 when she held the position of principal deputy foreign policy advisor to Vice-President Dick Cheney. That enabled her to hone her skills as an aggressive agent of US power while playing an influential role in promoting the Iraq War. After that stint, she became George W. Bush’s ambassador to NATO. In January 2021, President-elect Joe Biden named her under secretary of state for political affairs, the fourth-ranking position in the State Department.

      According to Foreign Policy, who quotes Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Nuland “has a high degree of self confidence and an absolute dedication to working for the administration she is working for, whatever administration that is.” In other words, she is a reliable tool of anyone’s policy decisions, however generous, cynical or perverse they may be. That is what she proved when sent to Kyiv in February 2014 to pilot the operations around the peaceful protests that were then taking place that the State Department judged could then, with the appropriate level of management, be turned into a revolution.

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      The hacked recording of a phone call between the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Nuland sealed the otherwise discreet diplomat’s place in history. In the recording, Nuland’s voice can be heard giving Pyatt orders about who the United States had selected to be Ukraine’s new prime minister. Countering Pyatt’s suggestion of the popular former boxer, Vitali Klitschko, Nuland selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk. After the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country and Yatsenyuk struggled to lead a new government, an anti-Russian billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, won the presidency in September 2014. He immediately appealed to the Obama administration for military assistance to counter Russia, but President Obama kept him at bay, reasoning that “Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow, in a way that it is not for the United States.”

      In other words, not only did the CIA work to overthrow the elected president, Yanukovych, but Nuland managed to manipulate Ukrainian politics from within and thus contribute to what was to evolve into a notoriously corrupt regime under Poroshenko. At the same time, her commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, chose to limit the US involvement in Ukraine by defining a prudent arm’s length relationship with the fiasco that was unfolding, even after Russia seized Crimea from the Ukrainians.

      Back in the News in 2022

      The events around the 2014 Maidan revolution provided the only occasion for the general public to become aware of Nuland’s name until last week when she appeared before the Senate where Florida Senator Marco Rubio questioned her about the current situation in Ukraine. That exchange should have been routine, but Rubio felt it was important to use Nuland’s testimony to refute accusations by Russia and China that the US was funding the development of chemical weapons in laboratories in Ukraine. 

      Nuland could have simply denied that any such laboratories existed and Rubio would have been satisfied. Instead, she uncomfortably explained not only that “biological research facilities” exist, but that the State Department is worried the Russians might effectively gain control of the labs, creating the risk of “research materials … falling into the hands of the Russian forces.” Some attentive observers deduced that the worry Nuland expressed concerned the possible revelation of illicit research funded and encouraged by the United States.

      The scandal that exploded after this exchange provoked two reactions. The first was a firm and over-the-top denial by the Biden administration. It was accompanied by a defensive counter-accusation claiming somewhat absurdly that the Russians were only making the accusation to cover up their own intention to use chemical weapons against Ukraine. The second more serious reaction was Rubio’s attempt to clarify the ambiguity of Nuland’s revelation by interrogating Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns.

      Rubio counted on Haines not to make the same mistake as Nuland. Clearly, he expected her to give just enough perspective to dismiss any suspicions that the US may be involved in illegal military research. Claiming that “the best way to combat disinformation is transparency,” to make sure Haines would understand the type of response he hoped to hear to dispel the negative effect of Nuland’s testimony, Rubio spent three full paragraphs framing his question and insisting “it’s really important … to understand what exactly is in these labs.” Haines offered this astonishing response: “I think medical facilities — that I’ve been in as a child, done research in high school and college — all have equipment or pathogens or other things that you have to have restrictions around because you want to make sure that they’re being treated and handled appropriately. And I think that’s the kind of thing that Victoria Nuland was describing and thinking about in the context of that.”

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      Haines tells Rubio not what she knows but what she “thinks,” a verb she uses three times in two sentences. What she describes is nothing more than a subjective memory from her personal past and a vague generalization about medical security. It contains zero information of any kind. The next part of her answer, concerning nuclear power plants, is not only irrelevant but also a vague generalization about the possibility of “damage … or theft.” Her answer clarifies nothing. But Rubio is satisfied and concludes with three words: “All right, thanks.”  

      In his subsequent questioning of CIA Director Burns, Rubio takes four paragraphs to frame his question, again intended to clarify Nuland’s testimony. In the last two paragraphs, however, he veers away from the question of Nuland’s revelation and instead asks Burns about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy concerning negotiations. Burns jumps on the opportunity to avoid answering the initial question about the Ukrainian biolabs. From Rubio’s point of view, the case is closed.

      Growing Curiosity Outside the Circles of Power

      Whereas most news outlets were happy to repeat the Biden administration’s adamant denials that any kind of biochemical research was taking place in Ukraine, various commentators, including Glenn Greenwald, picked up the issue and raised further questions. Greenwald took the time to remind his public of the troubling precedent of the anthrax attacks following 9/11 in 2001. Only months after killing five people did Americans learn that the anthrax originated in the Fort Detrick military lab in Maryland and not in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (I have written elsewhere on Fair Observer about my own interrogations and investigation of that affair.)

      Nuland’s testimony was seriously embarrassing. Rubio’s follow-up failed to put the scandal to bed. It was time for the White House to go into full denial mode. Predictably, presidential Press Secretary Jan Psaki stepped up with the intent to kill all debate by peremptorily tweeting: “This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.”

      We may be justified in asking whether, in times of armed conflict, anything is more preposterous — and indeed more dangerous — than seeking to kill debate on a serious topic that might permit a better understanding of the context of the war. The refusal of debate would be especially preposterous concerning a war in which one’s own nation is theoretically not involved. (In reality, the Ukraine War is a showdown between the United States and Russia.) But now that fighting on the ground is real, preposterous discourse of any kind from either side becomes dangerous as the perspective of using weapons of mass destruction, either chemical or nuclear, has clearly become part of the equation. Since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the prospect of nuclear war has never been so evident.

      In this case, unfounded speculation about evil intentions cannot be considered an appropriate response. After all, the Russian contention expressed at the United Nations that the Ukrainian “regime is urgently concealing traces of a military biological program that Kiev implemented with support of the US Department of Defense” was at least partially confirmed by Nuland in her response to Rubio. It was met at the UN by a simple denial: “Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories supported by the United States — not near Russia’s border or anywhere.”

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      The Russian accusation, citing purported facts, should require at least a consideration of those facts rather than a blanket denial or a counter-accusation. Nuland never walked back her statement. Haines mentioned only what she “thinks” and Burns was spared even answering the question.

      Psaki is nevertheless right to bring to the public’s attention the criterion of preposterousness. That is something worth focusing on in times of massive propaganda. Reading the news in all the legitimate press today, it should be clear that, as always, preposterousness becomes the dominant feature of public discourse in times of conflict. Psaki’s tweets themselves are wonderful examples of preposterous blathering.

      A Game for Spectators in Times of War

      It may be time to propose an instructive game for anyone interested in paring down the level of preposterousness in public discourse and even news reporting. Anyone can play the game, but it requires forgetting about the beliefs and reflexes our various authorities expect us to acquire.

      The game simply consists of ranking, on a scale of one to 10 in terms of the degree of apparent preposterousness, any official statement or authoritative-sounding opinion made about the conflict, whether pronounced by political authorities or the news media. In other words, it requires accepting as a default position that every simple assertion one sees or hears is as likely as not to be preposterous. 

      The first criterion is to weigh the amount of emotional force in the assertion in relation to informational content. If emotion is clearly present and dominant, three or more points should be added to the potential preposterousness score.

      The inclusion of some authentic context, real information, can, on the other hand, make the proposition potentially less preposterous, bringing the score proportionately back down. The score can be improved by the inclusion of serious context, including facts drawn from historical background, reducing the level of preposterousness. On the other hand, citing purported trends from the past, what are presented as reflexive patterns of behavior or supposed “playbooks” will add points, pushing the preposterousness level further upward. A simple denial or the categorizing an opposing comment as “disinformation” will add two or more points to the preposterousness.

      An important consideration is the identity of the source of the statement. If the author of the proposition is clearly associated with one or the other of the two opposing sides, five points will be added to the level of perceived preposterousness. Those points can only be reduced by the citation of facts. Neutral sources, unaffiliated with one side or the other, receive no preposterousness points but they may still say preposterous things. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      This neutral or non-neutral identity of the source can become complicated by other considerations, some of which may themselves prove preposterous. For example, anyone aware of the track record on controversial events of Glenn Greenwald, cited above, knows that he has no loyalty to either Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden. That fact can be easily proved. But because he is American and criticizes American leaders and pundits who demonize Russia, some preposterously believe he is favorable to Putin. This phenomenon of seeing nuance as opposition is a direct consequence of a longstanding trend in US culture that consists of believing that those who are not for us (i.e., those who do not automatically endorse all our actions) are against us.

      Another important rule of the game is that an identical counter-accusation, of the kind Psaki has made, should automatically add six points to the preposterousness index. In some cases, the counter-accusation may be true, so it cannot be assumed to be totally preposterous. If that can be established, some of the points can be canceled. The reason for adding so many points for an identical counter-accusation is simple. It is almost always an attempt not to clarify but to avoid addressing the evidence that exists. It goes beyond simple denial, which is worth only two or three points at best. A truthful counter-accusation should be accompanied by some form of concrete evidence other than vaguely reputational. If not, the six points should stand.

      Another rule is that citing sources for whom the suspicion of preposterously lying has become part of a standard mindset merits two supplementary points of preposterousness. This is a standard trick of lawyers in criminal cases who conduct research to impugn a witness who may have lied on another occasion. They want the jury to believe that lying on one occasion means lying on all occasions. Case dismissed.

      Two other significant factors of preposterousness that often go together are, first, the attempt to account for the psychology of the adversary by reducing to a particular (and generally ignoble) cause, and, secondly, predicting bad behavior to come. This last is often a clever gamble to the extent that the predictor may have some ability to provoke the predicted bad behavior. Depending on the odds, such predictions are worth two to four points. 

      Finally, repetition of stereotypes — often cited accusations or memes built up by past propaganda to provoke a predictable reflex in the public — may be worth from three to five points, depending on the status of the stereotype in the ambient culture.

      Those are the basic rules. Now, let’s look at a practical example to see how the game can be played. Jan Psaki provided another tweet that can serve that purpose: “Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.”

      Psaki has accomplished a lot in this tweet to achieve a high score in preposterousness. “False claims” and “propaganda” are gratuitous assertions that need to be supported by evidence, which she has no intention of providing. This indicates the presence of a strong emotion of indignation. Citing China is an example of discrediting anything a witness has to say as being unreliable. The suggestion of being “on the lookout” appeals to the reflex of fear. The “false flag” accusation repeats a meme that has occurred so often in recent weeks that it deserves being compared to the boy crying wolf.

      And finally, Psaki uses the idea of a “pattern,” with the intention of making the public believe there is no reason to explore the facts, since the discourse is a simple repetition of predictable behavior. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Psaki has a reputation for making preposterous statements sound reasonable, unlike, for example, Donald Trump’s former spokesperson, Kelly-Anne Conway, who excelled in sounding preposterous. In all fairness to Psaki, the state of war she is commenting on admits of so much ambiguity and uncertainty, even concerning basic facts, that the preposterousness level of her tweet should not be considered to have attained the maximum of 10;  seven or eight may be a more fitting appraisal.

      Other Applications of the Game

      Those interested in this game might try applying it to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s latest stab at being preposterous on the same issue in this clip from Sky News. In videos like this, body language and speech cadences can add a significant element to the score, two factors that became evident to observers in the Nuland hearing. 

      Of course, the same game can be played with Russia’s or any other country’s official discourse. War is not only an assault on people, infrastructure and property. It is always an assault on dialogue, curiosity and truth itself. Commenting on the “1984” communication atmosphere that we are now subjected to, Matt Taibbi notes that a “healthy person should be able to be horrified by what’s happening in Russia and also see a warning about the degradation that ensues from using “pre-emptive” force, or from trying to control discontent by erasing expressions of it.” Preposterous statements are just one way of disqualifying and erasing discontent. They may also seek to stir up the kinds of emotions that could trigger a nuclear war.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Russian Ballet’s Soft Power: Will Dance Outlast Autocracy?

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      The soft power of Russian ballet survived the two world wars, Joseph Stalin’s terror and Holodomor, the Cold War boycotts, the fall of the Soviet Union and the difficult transition to 21st-century capitalism. Ballet has served as a visiting card for Russia for centuries and even helped to soften the hearts of political adversaries like the United States. It is, arguably, one of Russia’s most sophisticated cultural soft-power tools. 

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      Now, with the war in Ukraine, that soft power is facing a major crisis. Since Russia launched its invasion at the end of February, many ballet performances are being canceled around the world: The Bolshoi Ballet’s summer season at London’s Royal Opera House, “Swan Lake” by the Royal Moscow Ballet at the Helix Theatre in Dublin and concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic — led by the Russian conductor and Vladimir Putin’s supporter, Valery Gergiev — at the Carnegie Hall in New York have all been called off. 

      The Danish minister of culture, Ane Halsboe-Jorgensen, suggested the Musikhuset Aarhus, Scandinavia’s largest concert hall, should cancel Russian National Ballet’s performance. The UK tour by the Russian State Ballet of Siberia has been interrupted as a stand against the war. 

      Because of the conflict, former dancers and Ukraine natives Darya Fedotova and Sergiy Mykhaylov changed the name of their school from the School of Russian Ballet to the International Ballet of Florida. Tyneside Cinema, in Newcastle, canceled the screenings of Bolshoi Ballet’s “Swan Lake” and “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” A Japanese ballerina with the Russian Ballet Theater in Moscow, Masayo Kondo, is dancing for peace during a tour in the US, but a restaurant refused to serve lunch to the cast when they learned they were from Russia. 

      Business Card

      The boycotts may just be starting, bringing financial loss to Russia’s cultural establishment amid already crippling economic sanctions. But the damage to Russian ballet’s soft power can be even more everlasting, taking years to recover. After all, soft power is the ability to seduce rather than coerce, strengthen a nation’s image abroad and thus enhance cultural and diplomatic relations as well as tourism. It takes years, even decades, to cultivate the tradition, like Hollywood in the US, the carnival in Brazil and MAG (manga, anime, games) culture in Japan.

      Both the USSR and Russia could never compete with truly global pop-culture exports emanating from America. There were no music icons to rival Michael Jackson, blockbusters like “Star Wars” or TV stars like Oprah. The country produced incredible cultural products, especially when it came to film. Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi “Solaris” (1972) and Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Arc” (2002) are masterpieces that earned Russian cinema a place in every art book and class around the world, but they were far from being international hits. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Russian composers like Igor Stravinski and Alexander Scriabin, and writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy, similarly occupy high positions in the world’s literary and music canons but can hardly be described as widely popular, especially in the Anglophone cultural sphere. 

      Ballet, on the other hand, has always been a lucrative export for Russia. In her book “Swans of the Kremlin,” Christina Ezrahi looks at how Russian ballet, whose tradition stretches back to the imperial court as a celebration of the Romanov dynasty, with ballet schools established during the rule of Empress Anna Ioannovna in the 18th century, has grabbed the world’s attention. Following the 1917 revolution, Anatoly Lunacharsky luckily convinced Vladimir Lenin not to destroy the Bolshoi because peasants and workers flocked to the theater despite the chaos of the civil war years. 

      Art and Politics

      Although theaters like the Bolshoi may appear as a microcosmos of liberal art, in Russia’s history, ballet has always had close ties with political power. Stalin was an opera aficionado and used to arrive at the Bolshoi by a secret entrance and watch alone. After the signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, he took Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to see Galina Ulanova dance at the Bolshoi. 

      During the Soviet era, ballet served as a visiting card for Russian diplomats. In “American-Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Cadra Peterson McDaniel demonstrates how the Kremlin used the Bolshoi ballets as a means of cultural exchange, weaving communist ideas such as collective ownership of the means of production and the elimination of income inequality discretely into the storylines along with pre-revolutionary dance aesthetics during 1959 US tour.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Other artists were also crucial for projecting Soviet cultural soft power at the time, like the world-famous cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. But they faced tough competition from Tchaikovsky’s ballet hits like “The Nutcracker.” 

      Ballet served a purpose during the putsch of 1991, which signaled the beginning of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when instead of announcing the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, “Swan Lake” was broadcast on national television on a loop. The export of Russian ballet increased during the Yeltsin years as the Bolshoi had to tour to compensate for an unstable economy while enjoying the opening up of the country after decades behind the Iron Curtain. 

      President Putin’s two decades in power may have allowed for economic recovery, but Russian ballet suffered from scandals like the acid attack on Bolshoi’s artistic director Sergei Filin in 2013. The scandal garnered the attention of the international media following stories about the toxic culture at the Bolshoi and its close affiliation with the Kremlin, tarnishing Russian ballet’s appeal.

      The connection between Bolshoi and the power structure in Russia is so vivid that artists were directly affected as the result of the invasion of Ukraine. Tugan Sokhiev, the chief conductor at the Bolshoi, resigned after coming under pressure to condemn Russian actions. Fearing that musicians are becoming “victims of so-called ‘cancel culture,’” he worried he “will be soon asked to choose between Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy.” Two Bolshoi dancers, Brazilian David Motta Soares and Italian Jacopo Tissi, also resigned, citing solidarity with Ukraine. 

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      As someone who appears to favor the outdoors, sports and guns, it’s unlikely that President Putin will see ballet as a priority to be shielded from Western sanctions and boycotts. There is, in fact, little he could do, especially given the current restrictions on travel in and out of the country. There is, of course, the question of whether boycotts of the arts are justified, considering that other countries have a history of political intervention, like China in Hong Kong or the US in Iraq, but their cultural products were not banned from movie theaters and art exhibitions. 

      It may find itself caught in another historic moment, but Russian ballet’s cultural soft power survived the tsars, revolutions, famine, dictatorship and the fall of empires. In the end, dance will likely outlast autocracy.  

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Presence of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

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      President Vladimir Putin has claimed that he ordered the Russian invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government. Western officials, such as former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”

      In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relationship with extreme right-wing parties and neo-Nazi groups has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the rug. 

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      The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off a coup amidst anti-government protests in 2014 and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as the conflict attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for.

      The Extreme Right in Ukraine

      Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the US-backed coup in February 2014. During an infamously leaked phone conversation before the Ukrainian government’s ouster, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the new government. 

      At that time, previously peaceful protests in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, gave way to pitched battles with police and armed marches to try to break through barricades and reach parliament. Members of Svoboda and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled officers, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan protests.

      We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone would have led to in Ukraine or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful process had been allowed to take its course, without interference by the US or violent right-wing extremists. But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the February 21 agreement negotiated by European foreign ministers, under which then-President Viktor Yanukovich and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and the Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on parliament that overthrew the government.

      Ukrainian Leaders

      Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like Yanukovych, who is from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like Viktor Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the Orange Revolution that followed a disputed election. Ukraine’s endemic corruption tainted every government, and public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a see-saw between Western and Russian-aligned factions.

      In 2014, Nuland and the US State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as prime minister of the new government. He lasted two years, until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the new president, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.

      When Yatsenyuk became prime minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as deputy prime minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Andriy Parubiy — who founded the fascist Social National Party that went on to become Svoboda — was appointed chairman of parliament, a post he held for the next five years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but he only got 1.2% of the votes and was not reelected to parliament.

      Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.

      Azov Battalion

      After Yanukovich was toppled, the Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what Yarosh described to Newsweek as a war to “cleanse the country” of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2, 2014, with the massacre of 42 protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.

      After protests evolved into declarations of independence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas in the east, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so. The Right Sector formed a unit, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov Battalion, which was incorporated into the National Guard in 2014, that led the new government’s assault on the self-declared republics in eastern Ukraine and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces. 

      The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics of Donbas, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014.

      US Representative Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end military aid to the Azov Battalion. In September 2017, the House amended the Defense Appropriations Act to ban military aid to the militia, but it is not clear how effective it ban has been. Since the Azov Battalion is fully integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces, it would take targeted efforts by US forces in Ukraine to ensure it does not receive the same weapons and support as other units. Today, in the midst of a war and a huge influx of US military aid, that would seem to be almost impossible.

      In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned, “The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.” The center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others. 

      Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov include Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the US Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the UK and other countries, according to the Soufan Center.   

      Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups linked to the Azov Battalion have maintained power on the street in Ukraine and in local politics in the nationalist heartland around Lviv, a city in the west of the country. After President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right allegedly threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky ran for election as a peace candidate, but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas representatives, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

      During Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Barack Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine. Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk from separatists.  

      Neoliberalism in Ukraine

      The civil war in eastern Ukraine, combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies, created fertile ground for the extreme right. The new government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In 2015, Ukraine received a $40-billion IMF bailout. Part of the deal, Tony Wood explains in an article for the N+1 website, would include privatizing state-owned enterprises, reducing public sector employment by 20%, cutting health-care benefits and cutting investment in public education.

      Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-2014 government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. Ukraine’s GDP plummeted between 2012 and 2016, making it the poorest country in Europe.

      As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism. Now, the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

      The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. US and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria 10 years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost, of course.

      Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion. But we should not be surprised when the Western alliance with extreme right-wing proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      A Fictional Debate Between a Biden Administration Spokesman and a Journalist

      by

      This is Fair Observer’s new feature offering a review of the way language is used, sometimes for devious purposes, in the news. Click here to read the previous edition.

      We invite readers to join us by submitting their suggestions of words and expressions that deserve exploring, with or without original commentary. To submit a citation from the news and/or provide your own short commentary, send us an email.

      March 10: Sacred Obligation

      Sometimes official language and even reporting in the media hides more of the truth than it reveals. This is especially true in times of armed conflict. To highlight the gap between the official narrative and other possible interpretations of events, we have crafted an imaginary scene between two entirely fictional characters. 

      One of the characters is obviously familiar with a statement by US President Joe Biden made in 2021: “NATO is Article Five, and you take it as a sacred obligation.” 

      FADE IN:

      INT/EXT. Washington Bar — NIGHT

      Two men standing at a bar. One is the journalist, Lee Matthews. The other is the State Department spokesman, Ed Costa.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Thank you for agreeing to a private conversation outside of any official context.

      ED COSTA: Yeah, it’ll do both of us good to have a frank conversation, for once. You know, it’s all about respecting the truth, not always an easy thing to do in our jobs. But just to be clear, none of this is on the record.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Trust me. I’m just trying to get a handle on a rather complex situation. After all, I can’t always be sure that what you say officially is always the unvarnished truth.

      ED COSTA: Well, we told you Putin would invade Ukraine and even announced the approximate date. We may have been off by a week or so, but it happened exactly as we predicted. This isn’t another case of Saddam’s WMD.

      LEE MATTHEWS: I grant you that. And I admit it sounded incredible when you guys started insisting that you knew for sure the Russians would invade. Some of us thought it was just Putin bluffing.

      ED COSTA: Come on, you didn’t trust us. Now you know we would never lie to you. And, hey, you have to hand it to our intelligence services. Now that I think of it, you owe me and the intelligence community an apology for doubting our word.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Actually, if you remember correctly, what I openly doubted was when you said there would be a false flag operation to justify the invasion. That never happened.

      ED COSTA: Well, it could have happened, but the result is the same. We got the invasion right.

      LEE MATTHEWS: But you promised us a false flag. Instead of that, we watched Putin sitting in front of a TV camera and rattling off a litany of historical reasons explaining why he felt compelled to mount an operation of denazification.

      ED COSTA: Well, all that history was fake news, wasn’t it? Fake news, false flag, what’s the difference?

      LEE MATTHEWS: Well, some of the history he cited made sense, at least to the Russian people, and nobody in DC wants to acknowledge it. We in the media couldn’t follow all the details, but shouldn’t you guys have been aware of both the reasoning and the motivation it represented?

      ED COSTA: We were aware. As you saw, we predicted the invasion.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Actually, you guys told us that by predicting the invasion and announcing it publicly beforehand, that would prevent Putin from invading. So, you were wrong about that.

      ED COSTA: Who can predict what Putin would do?

      LEE MATTHEWS: I thought that’s part of the intelligence community’s job, anticipating the enemy’s reaction.

      ED COSTA: Well, yeah, we thought that might happen.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Given the catastrophe that is now taking place for the Ukrainian people, whose suffering is likely to continue and most likely get worse, don’t you think that strategy of trying to prevent an invasion and failing to do so was a costly mistake?

      ED COSTA: It will be costly for the Russians, thanks to the measures we’re taking in the form of sanctions.

      LEE MATTHEWS: But it has been very costly for the Ukrainians, on whose behalf you guys are doing all this. And it is beginning to have tragic consequences everywhere, even in the US and obviously in Europe, which is to say, the populations covered by NATO. Couldn’t you have prevented the war by taking seriously Putin’s complaints about NATO and working something out? I mean, like anything? War is a pretty serious business.

      ED COSTA: NATO is sacred, as is Ukraine’s sovereignty. So, there’s some suffering. There’s a principle to defend. And how can you negotiate with a madman?

      LEE MATTHEWS: If I take you literally when you say NATO is sacred, this sounds like a holy war. A lot of American experts, from the late George Kennan to John Mearsheimer today — guys you’ve read and studied — they took Putin’s reasoning about national security seriously. And they certainly didn’t view NATO as sacred.

      ED COSTA: Sorry, when I said NATO was sacred, I meant it is necessary because, thanks to it, things have been pretty peaceful in Europe until Putin made his move. All its members are happy with NATO. So, we see no reason why that happiness shouldn’t be shared. Spread it as far as possible. And, as you know, Ukraine asked to share that happiness.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Well, didn’t Bush push that idea before anyone in Ukraine thought of it? In any case, isn’t the whole NATO question the factor that provoked the invasion and started a war that NATO seems helpless to address?

      ED COSTA: As all your colleagues in the media have been repeating — and I’ll ask you to do the same — this is an unprovoked war. Repeat after me. This is an unprovoked war.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Are you saying the Russians are wrong to see the expansion of NATO and the US supplying weapons to nations that border Russia as a provocation?

      ED COSTA: Of course, they’re wrong. How could a country that once allowed itself to be dominated by communists be right? NATO exists only for peace. That’s what aircraft, tanks, missiles and nuclear bombs are all about. They’re so frightening, no one would ever dare use them. Everybody knows that. What we’ve been expanding is peace, not war.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Are you saying that the war currently raging in Ukraine should be seen as an example of peace?

      ED COSTA: Hey, the US isn’t at war with Russia. NATO isn’t at war with Russia. We’re just helping things along, to protect the innocent. When this blows over and Russia sees how we have been able to cripple their economy, we will all be at peace again.

      LEE MATTHEWS: Why then is Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy begging the US to join the war?

      ED COSTA: You know these Slavic politicians. (LAUGHS) It’s probably a cultural thing. They get overexcited about nothing and hallucinate that we’re up to some devious games. They begin to imagine that we aren’t there for one simple reason: to ensure their safety and future prosperity. That’s the permanent mission of NATO and, of course, the eternal mission of our exceptional nation, the United States.

      LEE MATTHEWS: So, tell me, what is the exact date the intelligence community has predicted for Biden’s victory speech on a Black Sea aircraft carrier in full military garb?

      ED COSTA: Hey, we can’t predict everything.

      LEE MATTHEWS: I’ll say. And I expect there are a few Ukrainians who now agree. 

      DISCLAIMER: This dialogue is entirely fictional. Despite some superficial similarity, the names Ed Costa and Lee Matthews are not meant to refer to real people such as Ned Price and Matt Lee.

      Why Monitoring Language Is Important

      Language allows people to express thoughts, theories, ideas, experiences and opinions. But even while doing so, it also serves to obscure what is essential for understanding the complex nature of reality. When people use language to hide essential meaning, it is not only because they cynically seek to prevaricate or spread misinformation. It is because they strive to tell the part or the angle of the story that correlates with their needs and interests.

      In the age of social media, many of our institutions and pundits proclaim their intent to root out “misinformation.” But often, in so doing, they are literally seeking to miss information.

      Is there a solution? It will never be perfect, but critical thinking begins by being attentive to two things: the full context of any issue we are trying to understand and the operation of language itself. In our schools, we are taught to read and write, but, unless we bring rhetoric back into the standard curriculum, we are never taught how the power of language to both convey and distort the truth functions. There is a largely unconscious but observable historical reason for that negligence. Teaching establishments and cultural authorities fear the power of linguistic critique may be used against their authority.

      Remember, Fair Observer’s Language and the News seeks to sensitize our readers to the importance of digging deeper when assimilating the wisdom of our authorities, pundits and the media that transmit their knowledge and wisdom.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More