Der Haushaltskompromiss 2025 zeigt den Fokus der Ampel auf Machterhalt statt auf notwendige Reformen. Verteidigung, Wirtschaft und Sozialstaat bleiben auf der Strecke, während die Regierung unrealistische Wachstumsziele verfolgt.
Alle Medien haben den Koalitionskompromiss zur Haushaltsplanung 2025 mittlerweile kommentiert – meistens aus Sicht der Beteiligten. Der Hauptstadt-Journalismus legt nun mal keinen eigenen, sondern in der Regel den gelben, grünen oder roten Maßstab an.
Aus Sicht der drei beteiligten Parteipolitiker – Olaf Scholz spricht vom Gesamtkunstwerk – kann man das Ganze durchaus smart und clever finden: Kein Koalitionsbruch. Keine Verfassungskrise. Kein Job muss neu ausgeschrieben werden. Scholz darf Kanzler und Habeck sein Vize bleiben. Immerhin.
Three of the most important American political declarations are the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, and Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. The first was a declaration of secession from the British empire. The second was a declaration of secession from the Washington, D.C empire. The third was a declaration of non-independence, ever, under any circumstances, from the D.C. empire – or else.
The legitimate purpose of government, Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration, was to secure God-given unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whenever government becomes “destructive of these ends,” then “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government . . .” It is “the Right of the People” to secede.The Real Lincoln: A Ne…Dilorenzo, Thomas J.Best Price: $4.25Buy New $7.48(as of 07:05 UTC — Details)
After the long listing of the “train of abuses” by the government of King George III, Jefferson reminded the world that it was each individual colony or state, joining in a confederacy of united states, that was seceding from the British empire. The representatives of the individual states, he wrote, assembled to “publish and declare” that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown . . . and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which independent States may of right do.” The individual, free and independent “States,” in the plural, had rights to do all of these things, said Jefferson. The individual American states were thought to be free and independent in the same sense that France and England were free and independent states.
Twenty-seven years later, in response to a query by John Breckinridge, who had served as Jefferson’s attorney general, about the burgeoning New England Federalist secession movement Jefferson wrote that if there was to be a “separation” into two confederacies, “God bless them both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.” To Thomas Jefferson secession was an absolute right in the voluntary union of the united states of America.
Jefferson Davis’s first inaugural address was delivered in Montgomery, Alabama on February 18, 1861. He started out by quoting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and its admonition that government’s just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, and that when the governed decide that their government has failed to protect their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then it is their duty to abolish that government and replace it with a new one. In his words:
“[W]hen, in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this Confederacy, [government] had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and had ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared that so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they [the sovereign states] merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable . . . they, as sovereigns, were the final judges . . .”
The Confederate constitution outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether (allowing for a modest “revenue tariff” of 10% or so on average) while the Northern states wanted a heavily protectionist tariff averaging 50-60 percent. Northern newspapers associated with the Republican party had been calling for the bombardment of Southern ports long before the war with the understanding that free trade in the South and hyper protectionism in the North would cause all the trade of the world to leave the Northern ports for the Southern ones. Jefferson Davis then addressed this issue: “An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit.”
However, “If . . . passion or the lust of dominion should cloud the judgment or inflame the ambition of those [Northern] States, we must prepare to meet the emergency and to maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth. We have entered upon the career of independence . . .” Recognizing that the Republican party was hell bent on using miliary force to enforce its agenda of protectionism, Jefferson Davis here declared that the South would defend itself against such plunder and the North’s “lust” for political domination. Davis did not say a single word about slavery in his inaugural address.
Lincoln also addressed the all-important tariff issue in his first inaugural address two weeks later on March 4, 1861 in a most dramatic way. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” he warned, “and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority” (emphasis added). And what would force the “national authority” to resort to “bloodshed” and “violence”? Failure to collect the new tariff tax that had just been more than doubled two days earlier, from an average of 15% to 32%. “The power confided in me,” Lincoln said, included the power “to collect the duties and imposts” (i.e. tariffs), “but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” This was a clear declaration that there would be bloodshed, violence, invasion, and force of any state that refused to send tariff revenue to Washington, D.C. And of course the Confederate states, which had just seceded, had no intention of continuing to send tariff revenue to Washington, D.C. any more than they would send tariff revenue to London or any other country’s capital.
Flatly repudiating the Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian principle of government’s just powers being derived from the consent of the governed, Lincoln invented on the spot a new theory of the American founding by saying that “[N]o State . . . can lawfully get out of the Union.” The union, Lincoln said, was what Murray Rothbard called a “Venus flytrap” from which there could never be any escape, ever, for any reason. This sounds more like the compulsory Soviet Union held together by violence than the voluntary American union of the founding fathers.
Lincoln’s first inaugural address was the most powerful defense of slavery ever made by an American president. After three short introductory paragraphs he announced: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He then quotes the Republican party platform of 1860 as saying: “Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions [that is, slavery] . . . is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend . . .” “I now reiterate these sentiments,” Lincoln said. (The U.S. Congress’s 1861 War Aims Resolution, known as the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, said the same thing – that the war itself had nothing to do with slavery but was being waged to “save the union.”).
In the next paragraph Lincoln pledged his everlasting support for the Fugitive Slave Act which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves and return them to their owners. As a lawyer Lincoln represented slave owners in court seeking to round up their runaway slaves but never a runaway slave. He famously appeared in court with shackles, implying that he would make sure that the slave was returned to his owner. (He also sold the slaves that his wife inherited rather than freeing them – unlike Robert E. Lee who in 1862 freed the slaves his wife inherited in accordance with his father-in-law’s will). The Fugitive Slave Act was in fact enforced in Washington, D.C. during the Lincoln administration.
Near the end of his first inaugural address Lincoln told what is probably his biggest political lie. “I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution – which amendment, however, I have not seen – has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, [slavery] including that of persons held to service . . . holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable” (emphasis added).Team of Rivals: The Po…Goodwin, Doris KearnsBest Price: $7.00Buy New $17.92(as of 06:06 UTC — Details)
The lie was Lincoln’s claim that he had not seen the amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, named after Ohio Congressman Thomas Corwin. In her book Team of Rivals Doris Kearns-Goodwin documented with primary sources that it was Lincoln himself who instructed William Seward to get the amendment through the U.S. Senate prior to the inauguration, which he did. Besides, who could believe that in 1861 an amendment had passed the House and Senate to cement slavery in place constitutionally forever, and the president had never seen it or asked to see it?! Moreover, Illinois was one of the states that ratified the Corwin Amendment. On March 3, 1861 Lincoln was still the leader of the Illinois Republican party, the party that mustered the votes to get the amendment ratified. The notion that Lincoln did not see the Corwin Amendment, which was modeled virtually verbatim after the Republican party platform of 1860, is not believable.
The Corwin Amendment said that “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” It was a clone of the Republican party platform of 1860, in other words, which Lincoln certainly supported. The amendment had passed the House and Senate and was ratified by Illinois (“Land of Lincoln”), Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Kentucky before the war commenced.
In summary, the first two declarations mentioned here were Jeffersonian declarations based on the notion that governments’ just powers are derived from the consent of the governed and that citizens are and should be the masters rather than the servants of their own governments. That is the American way. Lincoln’s first inaugural address, on the other hand, sounds more like the French or Russian revolutions declaring an all-powerful central government from which there could never be any opposition or escape, complete with very credible threats of violence, bloodshed, invasion, and force (Lincoln’s own words). Hence was the imperialistic American warfare state born, spending the next twenty-five years waging a war of genocide against the Plains Indians “to make way for the railroads,” in the words of General William Tecumseh Sherman.
The key takeaway here is: don’t count on a simplistic ideology or reform or a “supreme leader” to save the status quo from internal failure.
Humans prefer simplicity to complexity. This is why mythologies still resonate with us, despite our hubristic claims to rationality and “following the science.” What we actually crave isn’t the challenge of teasing apart highly complex systems of interconnected dynamics in which each subsystem influences every other subsystem.Planned ChaosLudwig von MisesBest Price: $1.99Buy New $9.95(as of 07:55 UTC — Details)
What we crave is a simplistic explanation / answer and a leader who we can follow because they keep repeating the simplistic answer. So we boil complicated systems such as societies and economies down to “capitalism” or ‘socialism,” and cling to simplistic versions of these ideas as the explanation of human nature and the answer to all our problems.
When these simple ideas fail to map reality, we’re forced to say things such as “ah, capitalism / socialism works wonderfully and perfectly, but we don’t have true capitalism / socialism,” with the unstated cause of this troublesome imperfection being, well, the pesky humans in the otherwise perfect system.
Which leads us to the present. A great many people cling to a simple reform which they believe will either solve all our problems at the root, or at least go a long way to setting the course that will solve all our problems. These reforms include: hard money / return to the gold standard; adopting bitcoin as the universal currency; seeking “market-driven solutions” to every problem, more regulatory oversight to make sure bad things stop happening, and so on.
If simple reforms / “getting back to basics” actually worked, history would be composed of well-run, boring utopias interrupted every so often by spots of bother that were quickly vanquished by one of the tried-and-true simple reforms. But this doesn’t map the historical record, which tends to exhibit long periods of stability characterized by complex city-states / empires establishing a system of governance and economic organization that is productive and adaptive to the predominate conditions of the era.
These stable system are eventually fatally disrupted by one or both of these forces:
1. The predominate conditions change dramatically, demanding adaptations that are beyond the capacity of the system that had worked so well for hundreds of years. These externalities include epidemics, long-term droughts, depletion of vital resources and invasion.
In some cases, these external forces overlap, generating a Polycrisis in whih each external challenge reinforces the others or depletes the system’s reserves to the point there is nothing left to deal with the last set of crises.The Road to Ruin: The …James RickardsBest Price: $2.58Buy New $7.99(as of 10:20 UTC — Details)
(To borrow a phrase from correspondent T.D., we can say that these crises got inside their OODA Loop–observe, orient, decide, act–leading to a fatal inability to react fast enough and decisively enough to meet the challenges successfully.)
2. The system’s internal limitations–invisible to the participants–fatally restrict the flexibility and adaptability needed to recognize and respond to gradually-developing weaknesses generated by the internal limitations. The weaknesses are papered over by underlings fearful of reporting the troubling truth–“everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you”–or narrative control–the empire is forever, no worries–or the system responds by doing more of what’s failed spectacularly: the gods are angrier than we thought, sacrifice ten times more captives next time, that should do the trick.
“The year 1587 may seem to be insignificant; nevertheless, it is evident by that time the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached. It no longer mattered whether the ruler was conscientious or irresponsible, whether his chief counselor was enterprising or conformist, whether the generals were resourceful or incompetent, whether the civil officials were honest or corrupt, or whether the leading thinkers were radicals or conservatives–in the end they all failed to reach fulfillment.”
Many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on significant portions of a population. In Christian theology, the Biblical “four horses of the apocalypse,” believed by many in early modern Europe to presage the end of the world, symbolized invasion, armed conflict, and famine followed by death. They suggest the degree to which people have long recognized how violence causes starvation. Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war. (Sound familiar? I’m not going to point fingers here because most of us can undoubtedly recall recent examples.)
As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.Prophets of War: Lockh…Hartung, WilliamBest Price: $10.13Buy New $14.99(as of 02:45 UTC — Details)
We’ve been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).
Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.
America’s Post-9/11 Forever Wars
As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America’s post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.
Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel’s seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven’t been fettered by the U.S. military’s embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).
And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what’s now playing out before our eyes. We just didn’t see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks — to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren’t problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.
America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.
In the U.S., we haven’t seen antiwar protests on anywhere near the scale of the recent Gaza campus ones since the enormous 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which those hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators thinned to a mere trickle in the years to follow. Sadly, Americans have proven selective indeed when it comes to reckoning with conflict, whether because of short attention spans, laziness, or an inability to imagine the blood on our own hands.
Denials of Humanitarian Aid
So, too, the U.S. has been complicit in denying aid shipments to people in the greatest need — and not just today in Gaza. Yes, Congress and the Biden administration decided to cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of the alleged participation of some of its Gaza staff members in Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. But don’t think that was unique. For example, in 2009, our government prevented more than $50 million in aid from entering Somalia, including aid from the World Food Program, even though aid groups were warning that the country stood on the precipice of mass starvation. In 2011, the U.N. officially declared a famine there and, to this day, Somalia’s hunger crisis continues, exacerbated by climate change and wider regional conflicts.
And that’s hardly the only way this country has been involved in such crises. After all, thanks to America’s forever wars, some 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died not from bullets or bombs but, during those wars and in their aftermath, from malnutrition, disease, suicide, and other indirect (but no less real) causes. In such situations, hunger factors in as a multiplier of other causes of death because of how it weakens bodies.
Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.
This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.
A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.
Hunger as a Cause of War
Famine is the nightmarish version of the gift that just keeps giving. Hungry people are more likely to resort to violence to solve their problems. War-afflicted Yemen is a case in point. In that country, the U.S. funded and armed the Saudi military in its air strikes against the Houthi-led rebels that began in 2015 and went on for years (a role now taken over by my country). One child under five is still estimated to die every 10 minutes from malnutrition and related causes there, in large part because war has so decimated the country’s food production and distribution infrastructure. Since war first struck Yemen, the country’s economy has halved, and nearly 80% of the population is now dependent on humanitarian aid. A direct consequence of the unrest has been the flourishing of Islamic extremist groups like the Houthis. Countries facing hunger and food instability are, in fact, more likely to be politically unstable and experience more numerous protests, some of them violent.
Nowadays, I find that I can’t help imagining worst-case scenarios like the risk of nuclear war, a subject that has come up in a threatening manner recently in relation to Ukraine. The scale of hunger that the smallest nuclear conflagrations would create is hard to imagine even by today’s grim standards. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, would distribute soot into the atmosphere and disrupt the climate globally, affecting food and livestock production and probably causing death by starvation in a “nuclear winter” of three billion people. Were there to be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, an estimated five billion people might die from hunger alone in the famine that would ensue. It’s not an outcome I even care to imagine (though we all should probably be thinking about it more than we do).
Hunger at the Heart of Empire
Though this country is not (yet) a war zone, it’s not an accident that Americans are facing high food prices and record levels of hunger. The more than $8 trillion our government has spent over the past two decades on our distant wars alone has sapped resources for investment in things like transportation and better water systems here, while ensuring that there are more than 1.4 million fewer jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, military families struggle with far higher rates of food insecurity than those among the general population. Progressives and anyone interested in the preservation of this country’s now fragile democracy shouldn’t ignore the wasting of the lives of those of us who are hungrier, have a harder time affording daily prices, and have more in common with civilians in war zones than we normally imagine.
Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing. President (and candidate) Biden needs to articulate a more robust vision for preserving democracy in America, which would include ways to solve the problems of daily life like how to afford groceries.
Still, while I’ll give our youngest generation of antiwar progressives kudos for holding elected officials to task for their myopic priorities, especially on Gaza, let’s also get real and look at the alternative rapidly barreling toward us: another Trump presidency. Does anyone really think that Gaza would be better off then?
What would happen to anyone protesting wars in Gaza or elsewhere? How would we pressure a president who has advocated violence to overthrow the results of a peaceful election?
Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.
Think of Donald Trump, in fact, as the potential fifth horseman of the apocalypse, now riding toward us at full speed.Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.
Protesters outside the Donetsk Oblast regional administration building, April 2014
July 1st marked the 10th anniversary of a brutal resumption of hostilities in the Donbass civil war. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it passed without comment in the Western media. On June 20th 2014, far-right Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called a ceasefire in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation”. Launched two months prior following vast protests, and violent clashes between Russian-speaking pro-federal activists and authorities throughout eastern Ukraine, the intended lightning strike routing of internal opposition to the Maidan government quickly became an unwinnable quagmire.
Ukrainian forces were consistently beaten back by well-organised and determined rebel forces, hailing from the breakaway “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Lugansk. Resultantly, Poroshenko outlined a peace plan intended to compel the separatists to put down their arms, during the ceasefire. They refused to do so, prompting the President to order an even more savage crackdown. This too was a counterproductive failure, with the rebels inflicting a series of embarrassing defeats on Western-sponsored government forces. Kiev was ultimately forced to accept the terms of the first Minsk Accords.
Russia positioned itself as a mediator of the conflict, not as a party. However, the UK and US forced Russia into the role of a participant, to frame Russia as an aggressor and call Russian aid “a Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
This agreement, like its successor, did not provide for secession or independence for the breakaway republics, but their full autonomy within Ukraine. Russia was named as a mediator, not party, in the conflict. Kiev was to resolve its dispute with rebel leaders directly. Successive Ukrainian governments consistently refused to do so, however. Instead, officials endlessly stonewalled, while pressuring Moscow to formally designate itself a party to the civil war.
No wonder — had Russia accepted, Kiev’s claims that its savage assault on the civilian population of Donbass was in fact a response to invasion by its giant neighbour would’ve been legitimised. In turn, all-out Western proxy war in eastern Ukraine, of the kind that erupted in February 2022, could have been precipitated. Which, it is increasingly clear, was the plan all along.
‘Grassroots Movement’
In the days prior to the April 2014 launch of Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbass, notorious war hawk Samantha Power, now USAID chief, openly spoke on ABC of “tell-tale signs of Moscow’s involvement” in the unrest. “It’s professional, coordinated. Nothing grassroots about it,” she alleged. Such framing gave Ukrainian officials, their foreign backers, and the mainstream media licence to brand the brutal operation a legitimate response to a fully-fledged, if unacknowledged, “invasion” by Russia. It is referred to as such in many quarters today.
Yet, at every stage of the Donbass conflict, there were unambiguous indications that the Ukrainian government’s claims of widespread Russian involvement — endorsed by Western governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, pundits and journalists — were fraudulent. One need look no further than the findings of a 2019 report published by the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group (ICG), Rebels Without A Cause. Completely unremarked upon in the mainstream, its headline conclusions are stark:
“The conflict in eastern Ukraine started as a grassroots movement… Demonstrations were led by local citizens claiming to represent the region’s Russian-speaking majority.”
“This agreement, like its successor, did not provide for secession or independence for the breakaway republics, but their full autonomy within Ukraine. Russia was named as a mediator, not party, in the conflict. Kiev was to resolve its dispute with rebel leaders directly. Successive Ukrainian governments consistently refused to do so, however. Instead, officials endlessly stonewalled, while pressuring Moscow to formally designate itself a party to the civil war.
No wonder — had Russia accepted, Kiev’s claims that its savage assault on the civilian population of Donbass was in fact a response to invasion by its giant neighbour would’ve been legitimised. In turn, all-out Western proxy war in eastern Ukraine, of the kind that erupted in February 2022, could’ve been precipitated. Which, it is increasingly clear, was the plan all along.
3. Donbass’ resistance to the Ukrainian regime’ aggression was grass roots and Russia was not involved, contrary to the media and propaganda coming from the US and UK states and NGO’s
ICG noted that Russian leaders were from the start publicly and privately sympathetic to Russian-speakers in Donbass. Nonetheless, they issued no “clear guidance” to businessmen, government advisers or the domestic population on whether – and how – they would be officially supported by Moscow in their dispute with the Maidan government. Hence, many Russian irregulars, encouraged by “what they regarded as the government’s tacit approval, made their way to Ukraine.”
Per ICG, it was only after the conflict started that the Russian government formalised a relationship with the Donbass rebels, although the Kremlin quickly changed tack on what they should do. A Ukrainian fighter told the organisation that he “began hearing calls for restraint in rebel efforts to take control of eastern Ukrainian towns and cities” in late April 2014. However, “the separatist movement in Donbass was determined to move ahead.”
Due to this lack of control, and repeated calls for direct intervention in the conflict from the rebels, Russia replaced the Donetsk and Lugansk rebel leadership with hand-picked figures, who took an explicitly defensive posture. But the Kremlin was ultimately “beholden” to the breakaway republics, not vice versa. It could not even reliably order the rebels to stop fighting. A Lugansk paramilitary told ICG:
“What do you do with 40,000 people who believe that, once they put down their arms, they will all be shot or arrested? Of course, they are going to fight to the death.”
Elsewhere, the report cited data provided by “Ukrainian nationalist fighters”, which showed rebel casualties to date were “overwhelmingly” Ukrainian citizens. This was at odds with the pronouncements of government officials, who invariably referred to them as “Russian mercenaries” or “occupiers”. More widely, figures within Poroshenko’s administration had routinely claimed Donbass was wholly populated by Russians and Russia-sympathisers.
One Ukrainian minister was quoted in the report as saying he felt “absolutely no pity” about the extremely harsh conditions suffered by Donbass civilians, due to the “legal, political, economic and ideological barriers isolating Ukrainian citizens in rebel-held territories” constructed by Kiev. This included enforcing a crippling blockade on the region in 2017, which created a “humanitarian crisis”, and left the population unable to claim pensions and welfare payments, among other gruelling hardships.
Several Donbass inhabitants interviewed by ICG expressed nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Most felt “under attack” by Kiev. A pensioner in Lugansk, whose “non-combatant son” was killed by a Ukrainian sniper, asked how Poroshenko could claim the territory was “a crucial part” of Ukraine: “then why did they kill so many of us?”
‘Worst Option’
In conclusion, ICG declared the situation in Donbass “ought not to be narrowly defined as a matter of Russian occupation,” while criticising Kiev’s “tendency to conflate” the Kremlin with the rebels. The organisation expressed optimism newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky could “peacefully reunify with the rebel-held territories,” and “[engage] the alienated east.” Given present day events, its report’s conclusions were eerily prescient:
“For Zelensky, the worst option…would be to try to forcibly retake the territories, as an all-out offensive would likely provoke a military response from Moscow and a bloodbath in Donbass. It could even lead Moscow…to recognise the statelets’ independence. The large-scale military option is mainly advocated by nationalists, not members of Ukraine’s political establishment. But some prominent mainstream politicians refuse to rule it out.”
Zelensky did initially try to resolve the Donbass conflict through diplomatic means. In October 2019, he moved to hold a referendum on “special status” for the breakaway republics in a federalized Ukraine, while personally meeting with representatives of Azov Battalion, begging them to lay down their arms and accept the compromise. Mockingly rebuffed and threatened by the Neo-Nazi group’s leaders, while rocked by nationalist protests against the proposed plebiscite in Kiev, the plans were dropped. So then the President picked the “worst option”.
In March 2021, Zelensky issued a decree, outlining a “strategy for the de-occupation and reintegration” of “temporarily occupied territory.” Falsely characterising Crimea and the Donbass as “occupied by the armed forces of the aggressor state,” it sketched a clear blueprint for a hot war to recapture both territories. Immediately, Ukrainian forces began to mass in the south and east of the country in preparation.
This activity inevitably spooked the Kremlin, leading to a huge military buildup on its border with Ukraine, and extensive wargame exercises, plotting scenarios including encirclement of Ukrainian forces in Donbass, and blocking Kiev’s Black Sea access. Suddenly, the Western mainstream became awash with warnings of imminent Russian invasion, and British and US surveillance flights in the region surged. Media reporting either neglected to mention or outright denied this was explicitly triggered by Kiev’s escalation.
Things quietened down thereafter, although the situation on-the-ground remained tense. In October that year, a Ukrainian drone struck rebel positions in Donbass. Moscow, and German officials, charged that the attack violated Minsk, while Zelensky’s then-right hand man Oleksiy Arestovych denied this was the case. He had by this time openly stated on many occasions war with Russia was Kiev’s price for joining the EU and NATO.
Fast forward four months, and at the start of February 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed his commitment to Minsk. He claimed Zelensky provided personal assurances its terms would be fulfilled. Yet, on February 11, talks between representatives of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine collapsed without tangible results, after nine hours. Kiev rejected demands for “direct dialogue” with the rebels, insisting — yet again — Moscow formally designate itself a party to the conflict.
Then, as documented in multiple contemporary eyewitness reports from OSCE observers, mass Ukrainian artillery shelling of Donbass erupted. On February 15th, unnerved representatives of the Duma, led by the influential Communist Party, formally requested the Kremlin to recognise the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Vladimir Putin initially refused, reiterating his commitment to Minsk. The shelling intensified. A February 19th OSCE report recorded 591 ceasefire violations over the past 24 hours, including 553 explosions in rebel-held areas.
Civilians were harmed in these attacks, and civilian structures, including schools, targeted deliberately. Meanwhile, that same day, Donetsk rebels claimed to have thwarted two planned sabotage attacks by Polish-speaking operatives on ammonia and oil reservoirs on their territory. Perhaps not coincidentally, in January 2022 it was revealed the CIA had since 2015 been training a secret paramilitary army in Ukraine to carry out precisely such strikes, in the event of Russian invasion.
So it was on February 21, the Kremlin formally accepted the Duma’s request from a week earlier, recognising Donetsk and Lugansk as independent republics. And now here we are.
According to German media, Ukraine is close to receiving German “Frankenstein tanks.” The weapons are said to be hybrid arms, featuring elements from different operational systems. On the one hand, the move shows how Berlin remains committed to supporting the Kiev regime despite all the losses; on the other, it shows how the German defense industry is unable to meet Ukrainian military demands.
German military company Rheinmetall is expected to soon supply Kiev with air defense systems capable of shooting down Russian drones and missiles. These systems, however, are not being manufactured in a conventional way, following existing models of military equipment. Instead, parts from different weapons are being used to form a kind of “hybrid system” – nicknamed as a “Frankenstein tank.”
According to preliminary information, the “new” weapon is being developed with elements of the Skyranger anti-aircraft system, adding hulls from the Cold War-era Leopard 1 tanks. Furthermore, it is believed that the “Frankenstein tank” will be capable of hitting short-range targets, with the main focus being to shoot down enemy drones and missiles.
“There are still a lot of Leopard 1 battle tanks on whose chassis we could put the Skyranger turret with the 35 mm machine gun (…) Highly mobile, modular and scalable ground-based air defense systems are becoming increasingly important as NATO forces refocus on national and alliance defense,” Rheinmetall said in a press release.
A precise date has not yet been given for Kiev to receive the equipment, but operations to develop the weapons are believed to be taking place at Rheinmetall’s recently announced secret facility in western Ukraine. Given the logistical difficulties of sending weapons to Ukraine and the high amount of equipment damaged on the battlefield, the German company has decided to start operating inside Ukraine itself, focusing primarily on repairing weapons hit by Russian forces.
To date, at least 100 German Leopard 1 tanks have been delivered to Ukraine. Many, if not most, of them were quickly destroyed by Russian forces, which maintain control of airspace over most of the battlefield. Using low-cost drones, Moscow has been able to inflict irreversible damage on key Western weapons in Ukraine. With high manufacturing and maintenance costs, equipment such as Leopard and other NATO tanks have proven useless in the high-intensity conflict zone.
Of course, Western propaganda will try to report the “Frankenstein tank” news as something positive for Ukraine. According to Western newspapers, Kiev is receiving advanced and modern equipment capable of damaging Russian forces and promoting Ukrainian advances on the battlefield. But this is a baseless lie. In practice, the German measure is due to two specific factors: Germany’s inability to continue producing new equipment and the country’s distrust in supplying the Kiev regime with recent and technologically advanced weapons.
In a serious process of deindustrialization due to the energy crisis, Germany is having difficulties to maintain its military production at normal levels. The current conflict demands a constant high military production, since Ukraine loses hundreds of pieces of equipment every day. Therefore, instead of manufacturing new weapons, Germany is focusing on alternative strategies, such as repairing damaged arms and producing hybrid equipment from the parts of old weapons.
In the same vein, Kiev has been putting strong pressure on Germany and other NATO countries to provide more modern weapons with high destructive capacity and advanced technology. Berlin, however, does not seem to trust the Nazi regime, and has several objections to sending technologically advanced equipment. In addition to sending older weapons, mainly from the Cold War era, Berlin frequently sabotages military equipment sent to “help” Ukraine, reducing its technological capacity to prevent Ukrainian forces from stealing software. Since Kiev continues to insist on sending new materials, creating hybrid weapons, mixing old and new equipment, seems like an alternative for Germany to “please” Ukraine without giving it relevant military technology.
In the end, what Germany wants with these “Frankenstein tanks” is to find a cheap and safe way to continue helping Ukraine, even in the face of the severe losses it has recently suffered on the battlefield. Rather than a good gesture of support for Kiev, the move looks like an act of desperation – which will become increasingly frequent, given that the Ukrainian army is on the verge of collapse and European countries keep committed to systematically sending arms, regardless of the actual situation on the battlefield.
Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.
Das Klimaministerium hat eine Kommission eingesetzt, die den Gasliefervertrag zwischen der russischen Gazprom und dem heimischen Energiekonzern OMV prüfen soll. Dazu sollen einzelne Mitglieder auch Einblick in den Vertrag bekommen, dessen Inhalt bisher nur die OMV selbst kannte. Kritik gibt es vom Regierungspartner.
Redaktion9. Juli 2024
APA/HELMUT FOHRINGER
“Die Vertragsverlängerung 2018 war ein Fehler”, sagte Klima- und Energieministerin Leonore Gewessler (Grüne) auf einer Pressekonferenz am Dienstag. Der Vertrag von OMV und Gazprom war 2018 im Beisein des damaligen Kanzlers Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) und des russischen Präsidenten Wladimir Putin um zwölf Jahre von 2028 bis 2040 verlängert worden. Den genauen Vertragsinhalt kannte bisher nur die teilstaatliche OMV, nicht aber die Regierung oder die Regulierungsbehörde E-Control.
Bekannt ist neben der Laufzeit des Vertrages bis 2040, dass eine “Take-or-Pay”-Klausel vereinbart wurde: Gazprom liefert und die OMV muss zahlen, auch wenn sie das Gas nicht benötigt.
Einsicht unter strengen Vorkehrungen
Einsicht bekommt die Kommission auch jetzt nur unter strengen Sicherheitsvorkehrungen und im Einklang mit den rechtlichen Vorgaben der “Gas-SOS-Verordnung” der EU. Die Kommission werde dabei die Geschäftsgeheimnisse der OMV wahren, sie sei “nicht dafür zuständig, die unternehmerischen Entscheidungen der OMV zu untersuchen”, betonte Gewessler. Sie soll untersuchen, ob es einen Weg gibt, aus dem Vertrag mit der Gazprom herauszukommen. Außerdem sollen die politischen Begleitumstände der Vertragsverlängerung im Jahr 2018 analysiert werden.
“Die Kommission wird sich den Vertrag anschauen, und überlegen, wie ist es möglich, aus diesen Verpflichtungen herauszukommen”, sagte Irmgard Griss auf der Pressekonferenz. Gemeinsam mit Universitätsprofessor Andreas Kletečka wird die ehemalige OGH-Präsidentin den Vorsitz der Kommission übernehmen.
Eine zweite Frage, der sich die Kommission widmen will, laute “wie gehen wir in Zukunft bei Verträgen vor, die zwar ein privates Unternehmen schließt, die aber immense Auswirkungen auf die wirtschaftliche Lage, auf die sicherheitspolitische Lage und überhaupt auf die Lebensbedingungen in Österreich haben”, so Griss.
«Wahlkampf-Aktion der Grünen Ministerin in eigener Sache»
Die Energiesprecherin des Regierungspartners ÖVP, Tanja Graf, sah in der Präsentation der Kommission heute eine “Wahlkampf-Aktion der Grünen Ministerin in eigener Sache”. Sie warf Gewessler vor, die damals “in bester vorausschauender Absicht geschlossene Verträge für politische Effekthascherei” zu instrumentalisieren. Das stehe einer “konstruktiven Zusammenarbeit in der Regierungskoalition diametral entgegen”.
Der Friedensstifter 
