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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. 

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      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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      COVID Failure: A Matter of Principle

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      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: True Toll

      In this month of March, the world is understandably somewhat reluctant to commemorate the second anniversary of the moment when the nations of the world unanimously declared COVID-19 a pandemic and began their largely concerted actions of lockdown. The story that unfolded afterward included a variety of traumatic episodes, including speculation about a diversity of possible preventive and curative treatments, sporadic outbreaks of revolt against enforced public policies and a scientifically successful campaign to produce effective vaccines. Despite their promise, the effectiveness of those vaccines nevertheless proved to be far from absolute.

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      A group of over 100 public health, medical and epidemiology experts, after assessing the global results, has chosen this second anniversary to react and call into question the decisions taken by governments presumably capable of doing more. From the very early days, the scientific experts knew that, given the capacity of the coronavirus to mutate over time, any complication or holdup related to manufacturing and global distribution could undermine the entire logic of vaccines. They should have known that the biggest complication would come from a political and economic system that works according to principles that make it impervious to understanding the logic of a virus.

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      On March 9, the group of experts addressed a letter to the Biden administration to express their frustration with a situation that has evolved very slowly and largely inadequately outside the wealthy nations. This is not the first time concerned experts have urged “the administration to share Covid-19 vaccine technology and increase manufacturing around the world,” Politico reports. For the past two years, they have regularly been rebuffed, as governments preferred to pat themselves on the back for the short-term efforts they were making to protect their own populations, while creating the conditions that would allow the virus to mutate and gain strength elsewhere before returning to provoke new research and the promise of further commercial exploitation with boosters and new treatments.

      Principles vs. Ideals

      The experts should have realized by now that there is a principle at work that overrides every other scientific or medical consideration. It was established early on by the coterie established around Bill Gates, big pharma executives and other important influencers sharing their industrial mindset. It can all be traced back to the wisdom of Milton Friedman, who loved to repeat the slogan, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The principle is self-explanatory: In a competitive world, the idea of sharing simply cannot compete with the idea of competing. If you can’t afford lunch, you’ll just have to go without eating. That works when the only outcome is seeing people starve. It doesn’t work when the effects of their starvation are somehow transmitted back to those who have a permanent place at the banquet.

      US culture has cultivated the idea that life itself is a competitive race for advantage and the promotion of self-interest stands as the highest of virtues. Health like wealth must play by the rules of the competitive game. That same culture insists heavily on a form of discipline based on the idea of respecting “principles,” which it sometimes perversely confounds with “laws of nature.” The divinely ordained requirement to solve all problems through competition is a prominent one, but not the only one. 

      The problem with such principles that are taken to be universal laws is that once you believe it is a law, you no longer need to reflect on its appropriateness or assess its very real effects. We are witnessing an example of it today in the Ukraine conflict. The United States has invoked the defense of the sacred principle of “sovereignty,” reformulated as the right of a nation to determine its own foreign policy, including the choice to join a distant empire. That may be a principle, but is it a law? Insisting on it instead of reflecting and debating the question has provoked a disastrous and increasingly out of control war that, like the COVID-19 pandemic, has already had severe unintended knock-on effects, wreaking havoc on the global economy as well as destruction in Ukraine itself. 

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      Every culture must realize that its own principles may not be universally applicable, that they may not be perceived as others to have the status of laws. Any attempt to apply them as universal truths may cause immense human suffering. And that reveals the very dimension of the problem the health experts are pointing to. A potentially criminal complacency exists when the suffering caused by the inflexible application of the principle is directed toward others, at the same time when the purveyors of the principle take measures to protect their society and their environment. The principle of Ukraine’s sovereignty is already damaging not just Ukraine itself and now Russia, thanks to the application of the principle, but also Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which will be cut off from vital supplies of energy, food and fertilizer.

      For the past two years, the concerted defense of the ideal of competition by the pharmaceutical companies in their supposed combat to defeat COVID-19 has clearly aggravated the effects of a pandemic that might have been contained if the idea of sharing had been elevated to the status of principle. But sharing doesn’t deserve to be regarded as a principle. For Americans, it is based on soft ideas like empathy and compassion rather than hard reasoning about what might be financially profitable.

      Reflecting on two years of struggle, the group of experts noted “that the development of U.S. vaccines was largely successful, bringing protection to the public in record time,” Politico reports. That’s the good news. And now for the bad news: “But getting shots in arms in low- and middle-income countries has been a ‘failure.’”

      Out for the Count

      No precise statistics can account for the difference between the damage actually done by COVID-19 and what might have happened had governments effectively managed the global response in the earlier phases of the pandemic. “The true toll of this failure will never be known,” the experts explain, “but at this point almost surely includes tens of millions of avoidable cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid.”

      The “true toll” they cite reminds us of John Donne’s meditation on the bells rung for the dying in a time of plague. The poet and dean of St Paul’s affirmed that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Might we hope that 400 years after Donne wrote these words, pharmaceutical companies and politicians could, for once, take them to heart?

      But there is yet another much more concrete  meaning of “toll,” as in “toll road.” It is the price humanity is expected to pay, in dollars and cents, to the pharmaceutical companies that have so diligently used their patents to protect their exclusive rights to exploit and enrich themselves thanks to the global potential for suffering of others.

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      The final and fundamentally political irony of this sad tale relates to the fact that to do what the experts insist needs doing requires “more funding from Congress.” At a time when prominent members of Congress have become obsessed by the threat of inflation, while at the same time unabashedly inflating military budgets and responding urgently to the “sacred” needs of NATO in times of peril, the likelihood that Congress might suddenly address a global problem it has avoided addressing for two years seems remote.

      One of the experts, Gavin Yamey, suggests that COVID-19 “could follow the path of diseases like HIV or tuberculosis: become well controlled in wealthier countries but continue to wreak havoc in poorer nations.” Geopolitics in this increasingly inegalitarian world appears to be following a trend of domestic demographics in the US, marked by the separating of society itself into two groups: the denizens of gated communities and the rabble, everyone else out there.

      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

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      South Africa’s Enforced Race Classification Mirrors Apartheid

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      The inability of the African National Congress (ANC) to provide a clean, effective government for South Africans comes as little surprise to anyone who has followed the story. Yet two figures are so astonishing that they really stand out.

      The first is 1.2 trillion rand ($85 billion). It is the estimate of how much money has been lost to corruption. The government’s commission, chaired by Justice Ray Zondo, has been unearthing corruption on an industrial scale.

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      Nelson Mandela himself pointed to this scourge back in 2001, when he remarked: “Little did we suspect that our own people, when they got a chance, would be as corrupt as the apartheid regime. That is one of the things that has really hurt us.”

      Yet the graft revealed by Zondo has been eyewatering. This is how The Washington Post reported the key finding: “[G]raft and mismanagement reached new heights during the 2009-2018 presidency of Jacob Zuma. While details remain murky, observers estimate that some 1.2 trillion rand ($85 billion) was plundered from government coffers during Zuma’s tenure.”

      This is a sum that no middle-income country can afford to squander. Many hoped that President Cyril Ramaphosa could rectify the situation, but the glacial pace of his reforms has disappointed many who believed in him.

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      The other figure is 75%. It is the percentage of youths who are unemployed. While the ANC, and the well-connected elite that run the government, help themselves to taxpayers’ cash at will, the young languish without jobs.

      Little surprise that the ANC’s appeal is fading. The party won fewer than half all votes for the first time when the municipal elections were held in November last year.

      Racial Classification in South Africa

      Bad as this tale is, at least one could assure friends that state-enforced racial classification is a thing of the past. Gone is the notorious apartheid system that divided every man, woman and child into four racial subdivisions: “African,” “Indian,” “colored,” “white.” One might have assumed that this madness was scrapped when white rule was eliminated in 1994 — or so one might have thought. Yet every South African is still racially classified by law.

      Take one case. Anyone wanting to lease a state farm in August 2021 would be warned that: “Applicants must be Africans, Indians or Coloureds who are South African citizens. ‘Africans’ in this context includes persons from the first nations of South Africa.” No “white” South African — no matter how impoverished — would have the right to apply. Poverty is not a criterion; only race is considered. Even young men and women born years after the end of apartheid are excluded.

      A complex system known as “broad-based black economic empowerment” (BBBEE) was introduced. Every South African is racially categorized and a system of incentives is applied across government and the private sector. White men face the greatest discrimination, African women the least.

      Here is an example of how it applies in one sector. The Amended Marketing, Advertising and Communications Sector Code of 1 April 2016 specifies a black ownership “target of 45% (30% is reserved for black women ownership) which should be achieved as of 31 March 2018. The 45% black ownership target is higher than the 25% target of the Generic Code.” To win tenders or contracts, all enterprises must comply with the regulations.

      Race Hate

      At the same time, South Africa’s ethnic minorities face racial abuse and racial threats unchecked by the state. The radical populist Julius Malema made singing “Kill the Boers” a trademark of his rallies. In this context, the term “Boer,” or farmer, is about as toxic as the n-word is in the American South.

      Malema is now on trial. Yet far from the state prosecuting him for stirring up race hate (a crime in South Africa), it was left to an Afrikaans trade union to take him to court. Asked whether he would call for whites to be killed, all Malema would say was that, “we are not calling for the slaughtering of white people … at least for now.”

      The trial has had to be postponed because the prosecutor was so fearful of being ladled a “racist” for bringing the case that she resigned.

      Nor are whites Malema’s only target. Malema has attacked South African “Indians” as an ethnic group, accusing them of failing to treat their African employees fairly. “Indians are worse than Afrikaners,” he declared in 2017. In another context, he referred to Indians as “coolies” — possibly the most derogatory term he might have used.  Yet the state fails to prosecute him.

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      One final example. When President Ramaphosa was asked to pick the country’s next chief justice, the public submitted some 500 names. The final four were Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga, President of the Supreme Court of Appeal Mandisa Maya, Gauteng Judge President Dunstan Mlambo, and Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. All are fine legal minds. Not one of them is from among the country’s ethnic minorities.

      This, despite the fact that some of the most eminent lawyers South Africa ever produced, who fought racial discrimination for years were not African. Men like George Bizos, Joel Joffe, Sydney Kentridge, Ismail Ayob, Edwin Cameron and Bram Fischer would probably not be selected today. Even Arthur Chaskalson, who defended the ANC at the Rivonia trial of 1963 and was chief justice of South Africa from 2001 to 2005, would probably be excluded.

      Fighting Back

      Glen Snyman — himself a “colored” or a mixed-race South African — has founded People Against Racial Classification to campaign against discrimination. “The government and private sector should deliver to all South Africans equally and not discriminate on identity,” he argues.

      But racial classification has its supporters. Kganki Matabane, who heads the Black Business Council, says that even though “democratic rule is nearly 27 years old, it is still too soon to ditch the old categories,” the BBC reports. “We need to ask: Have we managed to correct those imbalances? If we have not, which is the case — if you look at the top 100 Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies, 75% or more of the CEOs are white males — then we have to continue with them.”

      The ANC’s most celebrated document was the Freedom Charter of 1955. It was the statement of core principles of the ANC and its allies and memorably promised that: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” With South Africa’s ethnic minorities continuing to face racial discrimination and exclusion from top jobs in government and even in the private sector, it is a promise more honored in the breach than the observance.

      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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      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in book

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      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in bookMarie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”Likelihood of criminal charges against Trump rising, experts sayRead moreYovanovitch adds: “I pondered whether it was better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine.“Either way, it was disconcerting that he did not seem to know where we had our troops – his troops – deployed. I could only imagine what the Ukrainians were thinking.”Trump fired Yovanovitch in 2019, amid attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and other rivals, an affair which fueled Trump’s first impeachment.Yovanovitch describes the Trump-Poroshenko meeting in Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book comes three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which followed years of proxy warfare in the east of the country.Yovanovitch also writes that Trump told Poroshenko Ukraine “was a corrupt country, which he knew because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him”.Trump, she says, also said: “Crimea was Russian, as the locals spoke Russian”.Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move never recognized by the international community. Yovanovitch writes that Trump’s words were “surprising enough to hear from one head of state to another” but Trump topped them by asking his national security adviser, HR McMaster, whether US troops were in Donbas.“Everyone kept a poker face on,” she writes.Echoing descriptions of Trump’s favored working techniques by multiple close aides, Yovanovitch says Poroshenko deployed “visual aids, which Trump really liked” as he “ably pushed back” and made his case for support.Poroshenko requested the inclusion of Javelin anti-tank missiles in a package of security aid. Trump seemed open to the idea, Yovanovitch writes. In 2019, however, news broke of his attempt to withhold military aid and secure dirt on Biden.Yovanovitch’s book comes as Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, leads his country’s fight against Russian invaders, his forces using US-supplied Javelins and other weapons sent by allies.The Poroshenko meeting was brief and forms a small part of a book which tells Yovanovitch’s story of machinations involving Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, which led to her firing and Trump’s impeachment.But her description of the meeting echoes others by sources including John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, which have shown Trump risking embarrassment and mishap when one-on-one with world leaders.Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, recently revealed that Trump risked disaster in an early meeting with his counterpart Reuven Rivlin, when he praised the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, for being unwilling to seek peace.Trump’s comments “knocked everyone off their chairs”, Friedman wrote.Participants in the meeting with Poroshenko appear to have stayed seated.Yovanovitch writes that she sensed “Trump had come into the meeting viewing Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”, only to be “a little surprised by Poroshenko”, who was “as physically imposing as Trump” and who was also “a billionaire businessman”.After the meeting, Trump said Ukraine was “a place that everybody’s been reading about”. Poroshenko told reporters he was “satisfied with the results of the negotiations”, and said the two leaders discussed military and technical cooperation.Yovanovitch “hoped that Poroshenko had created the kind of favorable impression that would make Trump rethink his views of Ukraine and its importance to our strategic interests”.However, she adds, “Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin was a frequent and continuing cause for concern”.In 2018, Trump staged an infamous summit with Putin in Helsinki at which the two men spoke in private for close to two hours. Trump’s “toadying up” to Putin at the press conference which followed, Yovanovitch writes, made her lose her appetite.“When the Ukrainian media called,” she writes, “… we took the opportunity to reinforce the point that US policy was to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression”.Five years on from Trump’s meeting with Poroshenko, with Ukraine in a fight for its existence, Trump seems not entirely to have shed his suspicion that US troops could be in the country – a step the Biden administration has made clear will not be taken, given the potentially huge cost of confrontation with Russia.Last month, Trump appeared to misunderstand a Fox News host, to the extent of believing Americans troops had landed in Ukraine.“You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about it,” the former president said, seemingly mistaking reports of Russian troop movements for US ones. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”“No, those are the Russians,” Ingraham corrected him.“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” Trump said. “That’ll be next.”TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpUkraineCrimeaRussianewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Is Putin proving the need for Western power? Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Dr Shadi Hamid about why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could spark thought for anti-imperialists who question American power.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Listen to Shadi Hamid’s podcast, Wisdom of Crowds Read David Smith’s feature on Biden’s Russia dilemma Listen to Politics Weekly UK with John Harris Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com. Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts. More

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      in US Politics

      Why dissent by conservative justices in voting rights cases is alarming

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      Why dissent by conservative justices in voting rights cases is alarmingDemocrats won two major victories, but a dissenting opinion from three of the supreme court’s justices set off alarms bells Hello, and Happy Thursday,It’s no secret that the US supreme court has been hostile to voting rights recently. But two recent decisions, I think, highlight why what the court is doing is both alarming and inconsistent.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterOn Monday evening, the court gave Democrats two major victories, blocking Republican attempts to impose unfair congressional maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In both states the respective state supreme courts had redrawn them to be fairer – decisions which the US supreme court upheld. Yet even though legal experts expected this outcome, a dissenting opinion from three of the court’s conservative justices set off loud alarm bells for me.The dissent was authored by Justice Samuel Alito (and joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in the North Carolina case). The three justices wrote that they would have blocked the state supreme court maps from going into effect. They pointed to a provision in the US constitution, the elections clause, that explicitly gives state legislatures the authority to set the “time, manner, and place” of federal elections. That provision, they said, likely means that state supreme courts can’t impose a new map, even if the one the legislature adopts violates a state’s constitution.“If the language of the Elections Clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” Alito wrote.Alito’s dissent embraces an idea called the “independent state legislature doctrine”. Increasingly popular among conservative litigants, it argues that state courts cannot second-guess election rules – whether it be a gerrymandered map or a new voter ID law – passed by a legislature. It would give state legislatures enormous power over elections.The theory largely fell into disuse in the early 20th century, according to a paper by Michael Morley, a law professor at Florida State University. The supreme court has also repeatedly rejected the idea over the last century. But in a handful of cases during the 2020 election, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas all expressed interest in the idea.The focus on this idea is also notable because it is directly at odds with what Alito and other conservative justices have said recently.Reading Alito’s dissent, I couldn’t help but think of a majority opinion that he, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh signed onto in 2019. In that case, called Rucho v Common Cause, they were part of a majority that said federal courts could not do anything to stop partisan gerrymandering. But, Roberts wrote, state laws and state courts could continue to police it. It was a clear instruction to litigants that they should take their cases about partisan gerrymandering to state courts, which is exactly what they did in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.Now, Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch – and maybe Kavanaugh – seem to be backing away from that position.It’s not the only area of voting rights law where the supreme court has pulled a kind of bait-and-switch recently. In 2013, when a majority of the court, including Roberts, Alito and Thomas, gutted the the heart of the Voting Rights Act, designed to prevent voting discrimination, it pointed to another provision of the law, section 2, as a tool litigants could continue to use. But recently, the court has been slowly chipping away at section 2, too, making it harder to challenge laws under it and stepping in to overrule lower courts that have relied on it to block discriminatory maps. Taken together, the cases show how the supreme court is slowly attacking laws that are supposed to prevent Americans against voting discrimination.One other piece of Alito’s dissent deserves attention because it is, I would argue, hypocritical. In two short paragraphs, Alito explained why he didn’t think it would be a big deal for a court to step in and order North Carolina to adopt new congressional districts after candidates had begun filing for office ahead of the state’s 17 May primary. The public interest favored such a reset, he said, to ensure that districts were constitutional. All candidates would have to do, he said, was file a new form indicating they were running in the districts the legislature, not the state supreme court, had adopted. “That would not have been greatly disruptive,” he wrote.But last month, Alito took the opposite approach when he agreed with an opinion by Kavanaugh saying it would be too disruptive to impose new, non-discriminatory maps for Alabama’s 24 May primary – a week later than the one in North Carolina. Kavanaugh wrote: “Running elections statewide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. Those elections require enormous advance preparations by state and local officials, and pose significant logistical challenges.”That argument prompted a furious response from Justice Elena Kagan, who said discrimination in Alabama should not get a free pass merely because elections were on the horizon. “Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year,” she said.The opposing conclusions Alito reached in both cases underscores the immense discretion he is wielding on the bench to evaluate these claims. In North Carolina, when the legislature’s constitutional rights were at issue, it warranted the supreme court’s intervention. In Alabama, when Black Americans’ voting rights were at issue, he believed the court’s intervention was not needed.Also worth watching…
      A Colorado election clerk was indicted on charges she helped allow unaurthorized access to voting equipment.
      Florida Republicans are on the verge of creating a new office to investigate election crimes.
      The top election official in Texas’s largest county announced she would resign after the county experienced significant voting problems in the state’s primary.
      Newly released records in Wisconsin provide insight into a widely criticized review of the 2020 election.
      TopicsUS supreme courtThe fight to voteLaw (US)US politicsUS voting rightsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      A Fictional Debate Between a Biden Administration Spokesman and a Journalist

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      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