Bryn Jones and Julie Ward on Ukraine, Jeffrey Sachs and the benign dismissal of authoritarian expansion
On 19th February the noted US development economist, Jeffrey Sachs gave a talk to a meeting of unaligned MEPs in the European Parliament in Brussels. This speech, allegedly to a “packed house”, attacked what Sachs regards as illusory fears of Russian aggression, and has been variously described as “explosive“, “jaw-dropping” and “masterful”. It has also been taken up enthusiastically by sections of the British left for its denunciation of NATO and US foreign policy. Close inspection of both Sachs and his argument shows it to be indeed passionate, but driven more by personal angst and Russian disinformation than logic or accuracy. Contrary to the impression given in several reports this meeting was not official EU business but rather a sparse collection of unaligned MEPs (whose dubious politics prevent them from doing any meaningful parliamentary work), and the odd sympathetic guest. A video of the event posted by Fidias Panayiotou, an unaligned young Cypriot MEP and former YouTube prankster endorsed by Elon Musk, went viral.
The relevant background here is that Sachs was a prominent member of a group of western economics experts parachuted into Russia in the 1990s to advise on the “shock therapy” to convert Russia’s state-controlled, command economy, overnight, into a Western-style market economy. The ultimate outcome was massive inflation, unemployment and destitution for millions of Russians. A chaos that paved the way for Putin’s authoritarian “solution” and the dominance of business oligarchs.
Sachs implicitly blames the failure of shock therapy policies on the failure of Western bodies to stump up billions of dollars to keep the Russian economy afloat during the transition to the promised land of free market prosperity. Others, such as IMF experts, disagree that such huge donations would have helped achieve these over-ambitious plans. Either Sachs was flawed in his analysis, or very naive about the realities of international political economy. Should he be trusted to pontificate on the war between Russia and Ukraine? He is right to draw attention to the NATO machine for unsettling Putin and providing excuses to invade Ukraine. However, he displays some of the same old naivety with respect to Putin’s strategy and aims.
He downplays Putin’s imperialism, claiming that the man whose politics display a ruthlessness way beyond even the dirty tricks of US presidents, only wants the “Russian” parts of Ukraine and has no wider ambitions. This ignores the pervasive Russian attempts to destabilise governments in other east European and Caucasian states and the fact that his army marched to the outskirts of Kyiv in 2022 with the stated aim of replacing the Ukraine government and a fairly representative democratic political system.
Putin’s assault was therefore justified on the grounds that Ukrainians were not really a nation. Does this sound familiar? Yes, it’s a similar trope to the Israeli claim that Palestine and its people are a bogus construct. Some of Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine resemble the devastation of Gaza. With whole cities, such as Mariupol obliterated and populations, especially children, deported to Russia. Tactical alliances prevent Russia and Israel from actual collaboration, but they are variants on the same militaristic-authoritarian political model. They employ ethnicist rhetoric and practices: dehumanising in the case of Israel and repressive in Ukraine. More importantly, this model, of which Putin and now Trump have become twin driving forces, seeks to subjugate and destroy inconvenient exceptions like Ukraine and Palestine. Unlike crude anti-NATO claims, it is no contradiction to defend the right of both these countries to self-determination. Contra Sachs and others, it is essential to support both their struggles against aggression. If you believe in basic democracy, which thanks to the Trump-Putin axis is threatened even in western Europe, this is imperative.
Useful information re Sachs etc. I can’t understand people who persist in treating Russia as benign. Quite a few seem to think it represents their youthful dreams of the Soviet Union. But at least the scales fell from the eyes of some old CP hacks when the tanks rolled into neighbouring countries. It seems invading Ukraine is OK because it’s “not a real country”. What load of crap!
Julie Ward and Bryn Jones display the same blinkered and misleading attitude regarding Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as most of the mainstream media. What they lack in first hand authoritative on the ground experience as an insider like Professor Sachs, they more than make up for in their condescending attempt to undermine his narrative on Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. They are forced into the cul de sac of hair splitting as to the status of the meeting Sachs addressed as a means of trying to diminish the authority of his position.
The Israeli assault on Gaza provides a convenient but inappropriate moral hook for Ward and Jones to hang the Russian intervention on. Comparing Mariupol with Gaza fails to recognise that most of the population of Mariopul had been evacuated and did not come to any harm. Presenting the appearance of a bombed out city like Mariopul as if its population suffered the same deathly fate of thousands of Gazans who had and have nowhere to go, is simply manipulating reality.
Putin did not justify his intervention in Ukraine on the grounds that Ukrainians were not really a nation. This just another convenient concatenation of unrelated events and utterances to fit a narrative. And there is absolutely no evidence that Russia wanted to dismember Ukraine as a sovereign nation, let alone annex the territories it now has, before the war. This is all the result of Western imperialism and the irresponsible promotion of this war by Western establishments and certain parts of the left in the name of a non existent Ukrainian democracy where all opposition to the current regime is banned, and dissidents imprisoned or disappeared.
Ward and Jones are all in favour of self determination and democracy so long as it fits their narrative. What about the democratic right to self determination of the people of the Donbas and other Ukrainian minorities who have faced the daily aggression of the Western backed Ukrainian military since the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukrainian democracy?
If you believe in basic democracy stop treating Ukrainians as canon fodder on the flimsy pretext that they are defending their right to self determination.
Civilian deaths in Mariupol are estimated at over 10, 000. Children were targeted https://www.hrw.org/feature/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol/counting-the-dead
But if that were not true and they were ‘evacuated’ and the city occupied. You are then making a case to support ethnic cleansing.
Also it is not a coup no matter how many times you repeat that lie. Poroshenko was elected after Yanukovych fled and in another set of elections Zelensky was elected. Meanwhile Putin sits in Russia pretending he has been elected for all these years and people like you are stupid enough to believe that people in the Donbas want to be part of a scam election like what happened in Crimea.