The Ukraine conflict is opening up debates about the current and future nature of the international system. Led by the US, Western countries frequently claim thar Russia’s military operation threatens the global “rules based order”. Hence, they do acknowledge that a profound change is taking place.
Others meanwhile claim the rise of a new, multipolar world order. This argument finds supporters all around the world outside its Western parts.
The Initiative on a New International Order (NINTO), inaugurated last year by the International Relations Bureau of the Turkish Vatan Party, has held an international online conference on May 7, dealing with this topic. The conferences title was: “The construction of a new world in the context of the Ukrainian military operation led by Russia”.
The following questions were discussed among others:
- What is the rationale behind the expansion of NATO towards the East?
- Which countries is NATO threatening?
- Does the Ukrainian crisis reflect a conflict between Russia and Ukraine only?
- Can the Ukrainian operation led by Russia be regarded as a sign that the initiative has changed hands from the Atlantic System led by the U.S. to the Developing World struggling against unipolar hegemony?
- What kind of consequences are to be expected to result from the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the E.U. in terms of international cooperation among the developing countries in the economic, financial, and political spheres.
United World International presents today the speech of Guillermo R. Barreto from the Instituto Simón Bolívar para la Paz y la Solidaridad entre los Pueblos, Venezuela.
On February 24th, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, ordered a special military operation in neighbouring Ukraine to protect the local people of Donbass, to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine. A few days before, the Russian government had recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. At that moment, trhe Ukrainian Armed Forces, backed by nationalistic regiments, including the infamous/notorious Azov Batallion, were bombarding and attacking civilian and military targets in that territory, as they had been doing during the last 8 years, while the so called international community remained completely indiferent.
The Western news media immediately responded by condemning what they called a Russian invasion of Ukraine aiming at an occupation. Something the Russian government has denied numerous times. Since then, the narrative has been riddled with unfounded accusations about human right violations and alleged war crimes by the Russian troops. A truly hybrid war is taking place, where we have witnessed the use of the news media and social networks to manipulate the public, to disseminate fake news and to censor alternative media, in parallel with the implementation of economic and political sanctions, financial control and pressure to govenments to stick to the line imposed by the US. We have even seen how vaccines have been denied to countries that refused to join the the sanctions against Russia. The recent coup d’etat in Pakistan, a country that had declared neutrality in the conflict, but with important rapprochements to Russia and China, will be matter for investigation in the upcoming months.
It is hard, under these circumstances, to know for certain what is happening on the ground, even though there are elements that allow us to evaluate the reasons that impelled Russia to initiate the operation, elements that have been previously discussed with some level of detail.
What brings us here today is the motivation to share some points that we think may contribute to the debate on the consequences of the conflict.
As a first point, we could analise who is coming out as “the clear winner”, at least at the beginning. Everything points to the USA. In fact, if we used to say that Latin America was the back yard of the USA, today we could say, that after this conflict, the US succeeded in making Europe its back yard. This is something that had been planned for several years and it comes to no surprise. In 2019, a public report from the Rand Corporation entitled: “Overextending and unbalancing Russia” made several recommendations on actions that the US government should take to weaken Russia, break its ties with Europe and take control of the European markets. The Rand Corporation is a North American think tank whose mission is to “help improving policy and decision-making through research and analysis”. Provoking a war in Ukraine, wearing down Russia is explicitly outlined in that report. The complete lack of willingness to find political and diplomatic solutions show that for the US, the war in Ukraine was part of a larger project. The imposition of sanctions and the isolation of Russia is also part of the recommendations from the report. The paralysis of the Nord Stream 2 project, after exerting so much pressure, was finally achieved in this conflict. The US then becomes the main energy provider at prices that triple the cost of energy supplied by Russia, which generates immense profits to the US companies and corporations, and at the same time, increase European subservience to the US. Europe is already feeling the effects of the sanctions imposed to Russia as a boomerang that is affecting fuel, gas and food prices, without taking into account that Europe is providing the ground for this war and of course, the dead bodies. The conflict has already managed to rescue NATO under the absolute leadership of the US, whose policy has been and continues to be that of maintaining a state of permanent war in the world. We should keep in mind that fot USA, war became not a mean to reach a goal but a goal in itself. War is what keep alive the American industrial and miltary apparatus, the base of its economy.
In the beginning, therefore, we could say that the conflict gave USA both substantial revenues and political domain over Europe aiming at weakening Russia while pointing at the real goal: to neutralise China.
Whatever outcome USA expected, we are not talking about mathematical calculations. An important number of countries whose populations add to more than 50% of world population did not stick to the sanctions regime. Sanctions itself have not been able to produce the political instability inside Russia as it was projected by the recommendations made in the Rand Corportion Report.
In fact, among other consequences, the conflict seems to be accelerating the transition between an economy centered in dollars and a new post dollar economy.
We know that Saudi Arabia and China have been talking about future exchanges based on yuans. Russia demanded that countries that joined to the sanctions regime pay their gas in rubles and recently Inacio Lula da Silva rescued the idea proposed by President Chavez to create a South American currency he named SUR for financial transactions within the region.
The consequences of the conflict, in this regard, are still to be seen, but important changes at the global level seem to be rising. With respect to countries such as Venezuela, we can expect some initial negative effects from the blockade against Russia, given that due to the illegal sanctions our country has been subjected to, Russia has turned into an important commercial ally.
The weakening of the US, as a superpower, could signify important opportunities for our country depending on the conflict’s outcome. Politically, the outlook in South America presents interesting changes and the possibility of becoming independent, even if only partially, of the dollar system, could mean the strengthening of the Latin American system, and its relation with the rest of the world.
There is a second issue that we believe is important to highlight, which is related with the rise and reemergence of fascism at the global level, but specially in Europe, a tendency that does not appear to be taken seriously into consideration.
In fact, as part of the sanctions, the US and its subordinate governments, like the European Union, have opted to generate anti-Russian sentiments in the population. An open and unbridled Russophobia which has led to situations as absurd as closing Russian literature courses, impeding the participation of Russians athletes in international sports competitions, and generalized sense of rejection to anything related to Russian history, culture, language, and origin.
Racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, are expressions of discrimination that have been present in Europe for centuries. Discrimination exists, but it is not celebrated, it is not talked about in the media, no jokes about it are made. Russophobia is now telling the world is now normalizing hate speech, and naturalizing open discrimination based on national origin. Hate speech has become something politically accepted.
It is not a secret that the Ukrainian government is made up of neofascist elements and that Nazi ideology, supremacist views, and the justification of genocide based on ethnic origin are a reality and a daily practice in the regions with ethnic Russian population.
Western social media have even allowed hate messages within that sphere. The batallions of Ukrainian neofascists openly use Nazi symbols and Ukrainian youth is being unrestrictedly taught Nazi ideology, giving way to a porcess similar to the one imposed to German youth under the Third Reich. It is not necessary to remind everyone about the risk this implies not only for the Ukraine, but for the rest of Europe where extreme right groups feel empowered with that discourse and Russophobia has given them solid footing to operate freely.
Can Europe stop this dangerous trend for the world? Are the government’s conscious of what they could be sowing? Is the European people aware of the gates it is opening?
It seems that there is still time to stop this, but not much. European history teaches what this implies and how difficult it is to revert it, once it has consolidated.
The Ukraine conflict is not a conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, it is a construct of the United States under it’s current decadence where it seeks to maintain world domination at any cost, including reviving Nazism and placing the world on the brink of a world war of nuclear dimensions, which could mean the end of humanity.