Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.

Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.

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By Howard Jacobson

“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….

So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.

I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.

So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?

You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.

Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.

There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?

Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel is Howl (Jonathan Cape)

On paper, this is presented as a decisive step to “cut Russia’s war revenues” and to force Moscow to the negotiating table. In practice, it is little more than the continuation of a policy that has failed time and time again. Russia has not been brought to its knees and has redirected energy flows elsewhere, while Europe has been crippled by higher prices and locked itself into a position of permanent dependence on the United States.

Before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia was the EU’s largest supplier of oil and natural gas. Since then, Russia’s share of EU oil imports has dropped from 29% to 2%, and that of gas from 48% to 12%. Yet imports have not ceased entirely. Two pipelines remain operational: the Druzhba pipeline, which still delivers oil to Hungary and Slovakia, and the TurkStream pipeline, which supplies gas to Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Romania. Meanwhile, the EU has rushed to replace Russian pipeline gas with much more expensive and volatile LNG, whose share of total EU gas imports has more than doubled from 20% to 50%. Nearly half of this LNG now comes from the United States, making Europe the most important market for US LNG exports.

The irony is that while the EU boasted of cutting pipeline imports from Russia, it has quietly increased its purchases of Russian LNG, most of which goes to France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. This is simply a matter of economic reality: not only is Russian LNG “significantly cheaper” than American liquefied gas, but existing agreements bind European buyers to Russian supplies.

Nothing, however, illustrates the absurdity of the EU’s sanctions regime more than the fact that Europe continues to indirectly import large quantities of Russian oil. Instead of buying cheap crude directly from Russia, as it used to, it now purchases refined products from countries like India and Turkey, which import Russian crude, refine it and sell it back to Europe at a significant markup. In the first six months of 2025 alone, the EU and Turkey imported 2.4 million tonnes of petroleum products from India. Estimates suggest that two thirds of this originated from Russian crude. In effect, the EU and Turkey paid India around €1.5 billion for oil that was Russian in all but name.

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This means that Europe is now paying more for the same Russian oil than it did before, while also paying more for LNG to replace Russian pipeline gas. The bloc has thus shot itself in the foot twice: once by substituting cheap Russian pipeline gas with more expensive American (and Russian) LNG, and again by substituting direct Russian oil imports with indirect and more costly purchases from India and Turkey.

The consequences have been brutal. Europe has endured three consecutive years of industrial stagnation. Germany — once the engine of the continent — is now experiencing outright deindustrialization, with 125,000 industrial jobs lost in just the past few weeks.

Russia, meanwhile, has emerged relatively unscathed, redirecting its exports to Asia and consolidating its partnership with China. From the standpoint of Europe’s long-term interests, the obvious path would be to re-normalize economic relations with Moscow, resume cheap energy imports and work towards a negotiated end to the war. But rationality has long since disappeared from European policy. Indeed, Brussels has doubled down, announcing not only the LNG ban but also a de facto prohibition on any future use of the Nord Stream pipelines, while at the same time sabotaging any peace effort.

The justification, once again, is that sanctions will force Russia to end the war on the West’s terms. The reality is that 18 packages of sanctions have failed to achieve this goal, and the 19th will fare no better. What it will do, however, is deepen Europe’s dependence on the United States.

Indeed, the timing of the new sanctions package was not coincidental. Just days earlier, Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Nato allies. The US, he declared, would only impose “major” new sanctions on Russia once Europeans had agreed to stop buying Russian oil. He went further, suggesting Nato impose 50-100% tariffs on China and India, both of which he accused of circumventing sanctions. He insisted such measures would weaken Russia’s “strong control” over its partners. Trump even claimed that halting Russian energy imports, combined with heavy tariffs on China, would be “of great help” in ending the conflict.

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The logic is baffling. Europe has no power to force China or India to stop buying Russian oil. Tariffs on those countries would fuel sky-high inflation and trigger counter-tariffs that would devastate European exporters, while doing little to change their purchasing behavior. Even EU diplomats privately acknowledge that Trump’s conditions are unrealistic — as Trump himself likely understands all too well. Yet his demands reveal the transactional essence of transatlantic politics today.

Trump’s ultimatum dovetails with a broader US strategy: to dominate Europe’s energy market. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright made this explicit: “You want to have secure energy suppliers that are your allies, not your foes.” Under Washington’s plan, the US could account for nearly three-quarters of Europe’s LNG imports within a few years. Indeed, ExxonMobil now expects Europe to sign multi-decade contracts of US gas as part of its pledge to buy $750 billion American energy.

Until recently, EU countries resisted such deals, fearing fossil fuel dependence and the undermining of climate goals. But the tide has shifted. Italy’s Eni recently signed a 20-year deal with Venture Global, its first long-term agreement with a US LNG producer. Edison and Germany’s Sefe have signed similar agreements. The result is structural dependence on US gas — which is not only more expensive but also has a far higher carbon footprint than Russian pipeline gas — for decades to come. This is a textbook example of geopolitical vassalage.

But it gets worse. Even as Europe is told to cut all ties with Russian energy, reports have emerged of secret talks between ExxonMobil and the Russian oil company Rosneft about resuming cooperation on the massive Sakhalin project in Russia’s Far East. If confirmed, it would mean that while Europeans are forbidden to buy cheap Russian gas and oil, American companies are quietly preparing to return. The aim, it would seem, is to buy Russian energy cheaply, resell it at a premium and push competitors like Turkey and India out of the game.

But there’s a clear flaw in this strategy. It is hard to imagine US companies actually resuming business with Russia while the war continues — especially as Washington threatens ever-tighter sanctions on Russia and its key partners, such as China and India. Indeed, Exxon’s CEO has denied the rumors. This contradiction highlights the limits of Trump’s transactional approach: the belief that he can neatly separate economics from politics, striking commercial deals with Moscow while challenging Russia’s broader security and geopolitical aims.

All the while, the push to decouple Europe from Russian energy has only strengthened the strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing. Earlier this month, they signed a memorandum to build the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, a $13.6-billion project stretching 2,600 kilometers through Mongolia. If confirmed, it would deliver 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually to China, providing Beijing with a reliable source of cheap energy.

For Europe, this is a disaster. Having voluntarily cut itself off from Russian energy, the continent is now committed to a future of high prices and low competitiveness. Russia, by contrast, is securing long-term markets in Asia. The new pipeline would also have implications for the US as well. Analysts predict the pipeline will cause a “structural shock” to global LNG trade, reducing China’s reliance on seaborne cargoes and undermining US ambitions for long-term contracts.

But this simply highlights why it is imperative for the US to keep its client states as reliant as possible on American fossil fuels. Seen in this light, the war has been nothing short of a triumph for the United States: guaranteeing windfall profits for its energy companies and binding Europe ever more tightly to its geopolitical priorities. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this outcome was part of the rationale all along. After all, driving a permanent wedge between Europe and Russia while securing Europe as a captive market for US energy has arguably been a consistent objective of American strategy for decades.

By adopting sanctions that align with Trump’s demands, Brussels is sacrificing what remains of its autonomy. The result is a geopolitical paradox so twisted that it almost defies comprehension. European governments, trapped by their own rhetoric and by a dogmatic commitment to permanent confrontation with Moscow, have maneuvered themselves into a laughable position. They have allowed Trump to frame his demands as a perverse quid pro quo: he can present Europe’s economic self-harm and growing dependence on US energy as the price they must pay in order to accelerate their own strategic decline.

Overall, the EU’s energy policy since 2022 has been a textbook case of self-inflicted harm. By cutting itself off from cheap Russian supplies, it has handed the United States a once-in-a-generation opportunity to dominate Europe’s energy market. By embracing sanctions, which have failed to weaken Russia but have devastated European industry, Brussels has turned the continent into a geopolitical pawn. Europe’s leaders claim to be defending values and solidarity; in reality, they are presiding over a process of deindustrialization and decline, while continuing to dangerously escalate tensions with Russia. Unless there is a dramatic shift, the continent’s future will be one of stagnation and irrelevance — and, at worst, all-out war.

But if renewed US action could hamstring the ayatollahs’ economy, sanctions are already being undermined: and not just by the Islamic Republic. I’ve obtained documents from confidential sources showing the illicit export of Iranian oil, a scheme involving foreign banks and shipping firms. And if these activities are sure to bolster a brutal regime in need of hard cash, they’re also funding chaos right across the region, even as shutting off the tap could yet spark a geopolitical revolution.

Iranian oil is big business. In 2023, total sales of its petrochemical products were worth some $70 billion. Listen to the regime, and it heralds this activity as a source of civilian prosperity. But dig a little deeper and things soon get murky. One of the major companies behind the Iranian oil sector is the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). According to the US government, this state-owned firm is an “agent or affiliate” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the organisation that funds and controls Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Nefarious activities like these doubtless explain why the Islamic Republic is so worried about Trump’s second presidency. “I think they’re scared,” says Behnam Ben Taleblu, director of the Iran programme at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “Iran tried to kill Trump and failed,” he continues, referring to an alleged plot on US soil. “And it knows that after the inauguration, it can expect a return to the policy of “maximum pressure” Trump applied in his first term — with potentially devastating political and economic consequences.”

Certainly, the numbers show the relatively easy ride Iran has enjoyed under President Biden. Four years of Democratic rule has seen Iranian oil exports more than treble, from 400,000 barrels a day in 2020 to an average of over 1.5 million barrels a day this year.

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Yet as my documents show, sanctions-busting was happening even while Trump first occupied the White House.

The first batch relates to five vessels used to carry Iranian oil, and owned by the Greek shipping magnate George Gialozoglou and firms controlled by his family. In August 2020, the US authorities intercepted four of Gialozoglou’s ships, operated by his International Marine Services firm, as they sailed to Venezuela. The Department of Justice said they were carrying almost 1.2 million barrels, then worth some $50 million, and described the operation as “the successful disruption of a multimillion dollar fuel shipment by the IRGC, a designated foreign terrorist organization”.

After the cargoes were impounded, Gialozoglou said he had believed they were “legitimate” — and that being caught in breach of US sanctions was a “nightmare”. He added that he had no intention of flouting the rules, and had allowed the US to seize the oil because he did not wish to break the law.

Earlier this year, meanwhile, I revealed a further, earlier oil shipment, this time from 2019. Made by the Victor 1, which had been leased from another Gialazoglou company, its organisers produced a fake manifest suggesting it had been loaded in Iraq. Genuine documents instead prove it came from Bandar Abbas in Iran, even as crew members disabled the ship’s transponder to stop it being tracked.

When I approached Gialozoglou about this shipment, his lawyer said he couldn’t comment. Yet he later became embroiled in a legal dispute with Ceto, the Gulf-based firm that had leased the ship. Documents filed by Ceto, in the High Court in London, claim Gialazoglou had been aware his vessel was handling Iranian oil, and had asked for a $1 million bonus for doing so. He and his lawyers deny this, and the case has not yet been tried.

However that story ends, a new batch of documents also sheds light on how bankers may facilitate the global trade in Iranian oil too.

They suggest that payments totalling millions of dollars, relating both to the Victor 1 and the four vessels whose cargoes were seized, were handled by Eurobank Ergasias. Headquartered in Athens, this is one Greece’s biggest banks, with assets worth $100 billion.

I asked the bank whether it had been aware that the payments it handled related to Iranian oil, what due diligence checks it had carried out, and whether it had continued to do business with Gialozoglou after his ships were seized. Its spokesman declined to answer, saying “it is our policy” not to comment on specific customer relationships. The bank, he went on, was committed to upholding “all applicable legal and regulatory standards” and had “rigorous compliance frameworks” to ensure all transactions were “monitored”.

Nor is Eurobank Ergasias the only bank involved here. The documents cover several other transactions over the period 2019-23, each worth millions of dollars and involving everything from the lease of a drilling rig to shipments of Iranian oil products from Bandar Abbas. The specifics encompass a complex mix of energy firms and financial institutions: but many are ultimately linked to Kuwait Finance House (KFH), part-owned by the Kuwaiti government and one of the world’s leading Islamic banks. I approached Kuwait Finance House, as well as the other institutions and banks named in the documents, attaching the relevant papers in my emails. None of them replied.

In theory, of course, the Americans have various ways to tackle sanction busters. Beyond seizing the relevant vessels or their cargoes — as they did to those Venezuela-bound ships in 2020 — they can also impose what’s known as “secondary sanctions”. This means slapping sanctions on any firm or individual trading oil with Iran, freezing their assets in the US and fining or charging any American citizen doing business with them.

In theory, again, the rules here are strict: a sanctions expert tells me that merely pricing deals involving Iranian oil in US dollars could make an overseas company or bank “easy prey” if Trump chose to reinstate his “maximum pressure” campaign.

Yet as the documents vividly show, the gap between theory and practice is vast. Quite aside from industry ruses — fake manifests and muddled webs of ownership — International Marine Services has never been subject to US sanctions. Neither has Eurobank Ergasias, something also true of the other entities mentioned in the documents.

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Not that the situation is hopeless. In recent months, the Biden administration has tried to prevent Iran from selling black gold. In October, for instance, it sanctioned 10 overseas transport and energy firms, based in countries including the UAE and Liberia. Earlier this month, it placed a further 35 “entities and vessels” on its sanctions list.

Trump, for his part, is again promising to get tough. Sources close to him reportedly say that this time, he plans to “bankrupt Iran as soon as possible”.

Success here could have broad repercussions. The elimination of Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon, and the degradation of its military assets by Israeli airstrikes, has already precipitated the fall of Assad in Syria. Without a crucial ally in the region, that leaves the Iranian regime weaker and more vulnerable than it’s been for decades — and this, say British Foreign Office sources, at a time when its internal popularity is at an all-time low. With stakes like these, no wonder Ben Taleblu argues that, had Trump’s maximum pressure strategy been rigorously enforced during the Biden era, the Middle East would not now be embroiled in the wars that started on October 7 last year.

Yet while Republicans are sure to take the Iranian threat more seriously than their Democratic forebears, actually stopping the flow of illicit oil won’t be easy. “This involves more than just consumers,” says Norman Roule, a 35-year CIA veteran and now senior adviser to the campaigning think tank United Against a Nuclear Iran. “It requires clear and stringent standards to ensure international banks aren’t facilitating financial transfers associated with illegal oil sales.”

For that to happen, Roule adds, the US should immediately judge any transaction with Iran as dubious — even as Washington must also push other governments to take their responsibilities seriously. Maximum pressure, it seems, will involve a joint effort.

And if the ultimate value of this support remains dubious — what North Korea is providing Russia pales in comparison to the over $175 billion worth of supplies Ukraine has received from Washington — it nonetheless speaks to the fact that the DPRK is one of the most militarised societies on earth. From an immense army, to an intensive if rickety arms industry, this is a country that can make its presence felt thousands of miles from its borders, especially once you factor in Kim Jong Un’s remarkable ability to circumvent sanctions and supply weapons to terrorists. Dovetail too the country’s long-running nuclear programme, and Trump must clearly take North Korea seriously, especially compared to the laxness of his predecessor.

In North Korean studies, one often hears of the country’s “military-first” policy or songun. This is the country’s stated policy of allocating as many state resources as possible to military development. In the event, songun is somewhat controversial, not actually appearing in writing until after nation-founder Kim Il Sung died in 1994. Yet it’s clear that the younger Kim believes his country needs to keep expanding its arsenal, both of conventional weapons and nuclear bombs. And if that explains why multiple rounds of diplomacy with the US and South Korea have failed — Kim never had any intention to denuclearise — the songun philosophy also speaks to recent domestic developments.

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Right through Covid, for instance, Kim Jong Un only continued to double down on military development. Despite the rest of the world masking up and staying indoors, the country still held a lavish military parade in 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of its Workers’ Party. The Korean People’s Army (KPA) is estimated to have over 1.3 million active personnel. Like its southern neighbour, military service is mandatory for all men, but women are also included via selective service. In theory, men must serve up to 10 years, and women eight, though the country’s richest elites are always finding ways to reduce their time through loopholes and bribes. This still makes North Korea one of the most militarised countries on earth and its people are instilled in warmaking from a very young age.

Channelling his father and grandfather, meanwhile, Kim has mobilised millions of young people to join the country’s army, even as North Korean children have “volunteered” to work in coal mines, farms, and factories. According to one defector, factory workers enjoy just one day off a week. Agricultural labourers have it even worse, getting only one day off in 10. Like most socialist countries, meanwhile, one’s own labour is framed by government propaganda as essential in furthering revolutionary state goals. While North Koreans are typically required to work eight hours a day at minimum, this can be stretched much further if issued quotas are not met. Children are also mobilised to participate in the workforce so they are instilled with a sense of loyalty toward the regime as early as possible.

Certainly, this mass conscription helps explain why the DPRK has managed to send Russia so much military equipment, even as far richer nations are struggling to meet the demand. Not that the West should look to North Korea for inspiration anytime soon. That’s clear enough ethically: UN reports have consistently shown that forced labour and abysmal working conditions are rampant across the DPRK. More than that, though, the products of these sweatshops aren’t proving very useful. Experts assert that the DPRK’s munitions being found on the battlefields of Russia are highly unreliable, unsurprising given they come from old stocks.

That’s equally true when you look at specific weapons. Debris recently recovered from a crashed projectile appears to show that Russia is employing KN-23 or KN-24 missiles sent from North Korea. The KN-23 and KN-24 share similar hardware, which can make it difficult to distinguish which is which from wreckage. But, in theory, they can strike targets from 400 to 690 kilometres away and are particularly challenging to intercept. In practice, however, Ukraine’s forces were able to shoot one of these missiles down, while experts from NAKO, a Kyiv non-governmental organisation, believe it may have been faulty to begin with.

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Not that the role of the DPRK’s military equipment should necessarily be underestimated. After all, a war of attrition like the one in Eastern Europe can be prolonged indefinitely as long as both sides have enough ammunition and weapons to keep it going. North Korea is also not alone in exporting weapons to Russia: Iran and Chinese firms are providing Putin with everything from missiles to components. As any kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine looks extremely unlikely for the foreseeable future, these shipments will undoubtedly continue as the war enters its third year in February.

And while North Korea’s aid may not be cutting-edge, the bigger question here is how it actually gets to Eastern Europe — especially given the mountain of foreign sanctions theoretically there to cripple the Kim regime. Things are especially given NAKO found that electronic components from the felled missile included parts from at least nine Western manufacturers, including ones based in the US and Britain. The chances of the West intentionally helping Pyongyang build weapons are obviously slim. Rather, it speaks to how deftly Kim has been able to sidestep outside sanctions.

The sanctions regime enacted by the United States and its allies has thus far been one of the most important tools for stopping North Korea’s illegal activities. But that hardly means it’s foolproof. As Mads Brügger has shown, officials in countries like Uganda are willing to look the other way if North Korean investment projects can benefit them. That’s even as shell companies can be used as fronts. Certainly, Kim Jong Un’s growing collection of luxury goods has still continued despite the pandemic. North Korea is also infamous for ship-to-ship transfers, which allow it to acquire sanctioned goods by using decommissioned and rebranded vessels flying under different flags.

No less important, North Korea is now fashioning itself as an arms exporter far beyond Russia. Sanctions monitoring organisations have long known that Pyongyang regularly deals with the likes of Syria and Iran in selling them old weapons stock, while also exchanging technical information on how to develop new missiles. Long before the war in Ukraine, North Korea has been a longtime supporter of terrorist groups like Hezbollah. While it’s unclear whether Kim Jong Un himself truly cares either way about the territorial disputes between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Moscow and Kyiv, North Korean support for the West’s enemies clearly makes sense. Having suffered terribly due to its self-imposed isolation during the pandemic, Pyongyang needs all help it can get. If this means aiding international terrorism, then so be it.

At the same time, this feeds into the future of North Korea-Russia relations. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Moscow can continue vetoing all new sanctions proposed against Pyongyang, even as the North Koreans themselves keep developing new weapons — and deliver them to the West’s ideological rivals. The DPRK is continuing to test and improve its ICBM technology, which is technically capable of reaching American shores. Then there’s the nuclear elephant in the room. With the West’s hopes of denuclearisation little more than a pipe dream, Kim Jong Un’s biggest priority is being recognised as a legitimate nuclear power. No wonder the country has conducted six nuclear weapons tests since 2006. South Korea’s military intelligence has long warned that Pyongyang is poised to conduct a seventh at any time, but when this will happen remains to be seen.

All this might matter less if the US were taking this threat seriously. As it is, and notwithstanding some new sanctions, the Biden administration largely treated North Korea as a side issue compared with China or the Middle East. But given Trump was the first sitting president to hold a summit with a North Korean leader, could he coax Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table? The chances are slim, unless both leaders know that they can come away with something substantial. And given Kim is now adamant that the DPRK will never give up its nuclear weapons, it seems that future talks will only be around arms control, if they even happen at all. Though given how much of a threat North Korea poses from Lebanon to Ukraine, that’d surely be a start.

The dirty secret is that we were only able to sanction so much wealth because British governments have for decades welcomed Russian oligarchs, encouraged them to spend money here, and pointedly failed to question the origins of that wealth. By providing them with a safe haven for their money, and a playground in which to spend it, we have — in the manner of a particularly-obliging fence for stolen goods — encouraged them to steal evermore egregiously.

And if we were providing a safe haven for Russian oligarchs, we had no need to employ any investigators, which means — now we’ve suddenly changed our minds about the desirability of welcoming dirty money — we have no one sufficiently skilled or experienced to bring cases against them. So, all of this frozen money is in limbo, and its owners aren’t happy about it. The problems will start with legal challenges, the first of which is imminent. Eugene Shvidler is a Russian born UK-US citizen and, according to Forbes, is worth $1.7 billion. The British government sanctioned him last March because of his business ties with Roman Abramovich, saying that he was “involved in obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”, which his lawyers say is plainly unfair.

The case is due to be heard next month, and lawyers certainly sound like they’ve gearing up to bring more cases against the UK’s sanctions. “They are an act of war and a gross departure from the rule of law,” Robert Amsterdam, a partner at Amsterdam & Partners in London who has been working on high-profile oligarch-related cases for decades, told The Times. “Western governments have sanctioned Russians who have nothing to do with Putin and fail to understand that not all rich Russian businessmen are oligarchs and Putin cronies.”

Among the wealthy Russians with substantial amounts of wealth frozen in London are Andrei Guryev, fertiliser tycoon and owner of Witanhurst, the second-biggest house in the capital; Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium baron whose property on Belgrave Square was invaded by anarchists a year ago; Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, bankers who’ve tried using British lawyers to clear their names before; and, of course, Abramovich himself.

It’s easy to see why they might choose to employ their right to challenge the Government’s decision to freeze their assets. Sanctioned oligarchs have a “general licence” to use otherwise-blocked money to pay legal fees, which makes a court challenge a free hit: if you’re going to lose your wealth anyway, you may as well spend it on lawyers. Having imposed limits on dozens of oligarchs, as well as multiple banks, the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation will be tied up in these cases for years, and ministers don’t know what to do about it. It’s politically impossible for ministers to cancel the sanctions, so the frozen property will become a legal piñata, showering fees down onto any lawyers prepared to give it a whack, and using up ever more of civil servants’ time.

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By Oliver Bullough

And that risks distracting us from the most important question we need to ask, which is: why was £18 billion worth of suspicious Kremlin-linked property in Britain in the first place? The UK’s unique combination of a friendly tax regime, biddable politicians, luxury housing and under-resourced law enforcement agencies have made it a home from home for kleptocrats the world over. Unlike in the United States, where federal agencies prosecute financial criminals no matter how deep their pockets, cash-stripped British investigators are vanishingly unlikely to probe the wealth of anyone able to afford a good legal team.

The Government has brought in new legislation over the past year to close some of the worst loopholes in our financial system. It is no longer possible for the ownership of UK properties to be hidden behind offshore shell companies; or for anonymous UK companies to be used to launder money through foreign bank accounts. And that is welcome. However, despite ministers’ claims, they have done nothing to change the core problem, which is that they don’t have enough officers to enforce the laws that politicians pass. Officers at the National Crime Agency are funded at a third of the level of their counterparts at the FBI, and the same is true at lower levels of policing. Financial crime is 41% of all crime committed in the UK, yet receives less than 1% of police resourcing.

Sanctions are law enforcement on the cheap. Yes, they result in assets being frozen, but only because politicians say so, not as part of a legal investigation, which means they don’t result in prosecution, conviction and confiscation. Sanctions don’t lead anywhere: they’re like an aircraft carrier with no planes; or a government construction programme, which never builds any actual hospitals. Yes, they have a propaganda value, but if we wish to move from freezing assets to seizing them, we come up against the consequences of our decades-long failure to invest in law enforcement.

As one official at the National Crime Agency told me laconically: “The lawyers have a look and say to the director general: ‘worst case scenario, this could cost us a billion’. If you’re the DG and your budget is £800 million, that will give you pause for thought.” Whichever agency you pick – the NCA, the Serious Fraud Office, the Metropolitan or City of London Police forces — you find the same picture: it’s under-staffed, under-resourced and under-motivated. Experienced investigators are continuously being poached by City firms keen to staff their compliance departments, which are able to offer more money and less stress. A senior detective joked to me last month that he was pitching his agency to graduates with the promise that “if you work for us, you’ll walk into a job at HSBC in three years’ time”.

In an attempt to ensure its limited resources are used effectively, six years ago the Government created the National Economic Crime Centre. But without sufficient resourcing, it has failed to deliver the “step-change” politicians promised, and instead just issues press releases announcing things that would have happened anyway. Grumpy officers now grumble that its NECC acronym really stands for “National Experts for Claiming Credit”.

Investigating kleptocratic wealth is hard at the best of times: its owners’ identities are hidden behind shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, and are protected by the world’s finest lawyers. When the NCA did bring a case against houses owned by the daughter and grandson of the former president of Kazakhstan, its lawyers were eviscerated by opponents from City gunslingers Mishcon de Reya, ably assisted by the near-bulletproof Panamanian shell structures through which the property was owned. Meanwhile, prosecutors seeking evidence of how wealth has been stolen have to rely on counterparts in the kleptocrats’ home countries, where crooked police officers will not give evidence against their own bosses.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Britain’s already-stretched officers have two competing demands: first, they have to investigate the wealth brought into our country during the decades-long “no questions asked” period; and secondly, they have to prevent more wealth joining it from other countries plagued by kleptocratic elites, whether they’re elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, in the Far East, South Asia, Africa or elsewhere. London’s new Nine Elms district is just the most visible example of developments built to attract hot money from Far Eastern investors, much of which will be as questionable as the Russian money we welcomed in the past.

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Russia has no more oligarchs

By Jade McGlynn

And so the sanctioned Russian wealth is stuck. It cannot be confiscated, because the UK lacks the investigative firepower to bring solid cases to court; but it cannot be released, because to do so would strengthen Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal. This stalemate benefits no one, except the lawyers who are paid to maintain it.

Is there a way through? Possibly. But to find it we first need to ask what problem the sanctions were designed to solve. Before February 2022, the threat of them was intended to dissuade Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine at all, a task at which they self-evidently failed. When war began, sanctions were employed to deny the Kremlin access to money it could use to fight its war by freezing it in place. That aim has been achieved, but risks being undone if successful legal challenges reduce the amount of wealth that is frozen. Officials now talk about a new aim, which is to confiscate the frozen wealth, and to use it to help Ukraine rebuild its bridges, roads, houses, schools, hospitals, power stations and factories.

Last July, Canada passed a law allowing its government to seize sanctioned assets, in order to help Ukraine and compensate Putin’s victims. In December, it began a confiscation process against wealth owned by one of Abramovich’s companies under this new simplified procedure. Here the Canadians have offered a path for us to follow. It feels wrong to take property away without a court proceedings, but leaving the money in limbo risks it being dissipated in legal fees like a super-charged 21st-century Jarndyce v Jarndyce. And perhaps, if we can confiscate some of this property, we’ll help ourselves too: we’ll cool our super-heated housing market; we’ll drive dirty money out of politics; and we’ll prevent new Putins from building new kleptocracies.

The term “oligarchy” perfectly characterises Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the Nineties, during which a small number of extremely wealthy men yielded massive influence. These men acquired key state assets, including major parts of the energy, telecommunications, and precious metal sectors, at a fraction of their real value after the Soviet Union fell. In return, these “businessmen” backed the ailing president and helped to ensure his re-election in 1996.

When Putin came to power, he set about dismantling this oligarchy and removing any threat business elites posed to his own political leadership. The deal was that oligarchs could keep their money if they stayed out of politics. Those that didn’t, risked everything — their wealth, their freedom, and their lives. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, spent 10 years in prison on tax charges after setting up a political organisation — Open Russia — to “build and strengthen civil society”. Rather than risk a similar fate, most of the other oligarchs stayed away from politics.

Of course, Putin reduced the Russian people’s political power as well as that of the oligarchs. But people were willing to accept a social contract of economic stability and growth in return for staying out of politics because they were so traumatised by the economic conditions and exploitations to which the oligarchs (and Western advisors and businessmen) contributed so substantially during the transition to capitalism and depredations of the wild Nineties.

In an oligarchy, great wealth guarantees political influence, but in Putin’s Russia, the opposite is true: business elites must suffer the tyranny of officials. State corruption winds its way through all Russian businesses, which require krysha — or protection — from powerful bureaucrats to ensure their company is not expropriated, subject to a hostile takeover, or slandered around the world via “black PR”. The bureaucrats can then exploit their powers of patronage to arrange business opportunities for their friends or family. No wonder so many young Russian professionals want to become bureaucrats, not businessmen.

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Do ordinary Russians support Putin's war?

By Jade McGlynn

In this system, wealthy Russians depend on political approval, not vice versa, which is where the UK’s misunderstanding lies. The business elites have close to zero political influence.

There are two types of super-rich Russians: both powerless to change the course of the war. The first are Putin’s men, for example, Igor Sechin, who derive their wealth exclusively from their proximity to Putin. If they were to abandon or criticise Putin, they would lose everything. The second group is made up of tamed erstwhile oligarchs, many of whom emit coded signals that they do not agree with the war. The sanctioned businessman Mikhail Fridman — who lives in London — is one such. He called the invasion of Ukraine a tragedy, but stopped short at outright condemnation of the war.

In some ways, the UK is to blame for the Russian elites’ lack of leverage. For decades, well-connected Russians kept their money and families safe in the UK, while maintaining their high positions in Russia. British accountants helped to stash their dubious incomes, lawyers settled their divorces and prosecuted libel trials, consultants lobbied politicians for their business associates’ interests, estate agents procured their mansions, private schools educated their children, and museums laundered their reputations.

Given the Russian super-rich had rights and the means to assert them in the UK, they never felt the need to promote — or defend — the rule of law at home. This double life often worked in their favour: if they wanted to bring down an enemy, they could hire a corrupt judge in Russia to ensure an unfair hearing. But when they needed real justice, they could fly to London.

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Ultra-patriots are Putin's greatest threat

By Jade McGlynn

This “Get out of Russia Free” card couldn’t last forever. In allowing Russians to live the high life away from home, the UK emboldened Putinism in its current form. With the UK offering a safe haven, rich Russians never felt the need to build or maintain strong legal institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union. As a result, there is now no realistic channel of non-centralised power, such as a strong judiciary or small and medium business constituency, that the business elites could use to influence the Kremlin — presuming they even wanted to.

Russia might have been better off following the lead of Poland or Ukraine. In Poland, which also underwent neoliberal “shock therapy” market reforms during the Nineties, measures were taken to guard against oligarchy and build up the SME sector. The Poles built millions of new businesses and gave a group of funds stakes in privatised state firms to prevent the asset-stripping characteristic of Russian oligarchs. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the rivalries between different oligarchs created obstacles for any autocrats, allowing citizens more political freedom. In many ways, Russia has the worst of both worlds: the destructive economic legacy of oligarchy without any of the elite infighting.

None of this is to say that the UK shouldn’t seize the assets of Kremlin-linked officials and businessmen. It’s just that the purpose of doing so should not be to encourage business elites to abandon or persuade or topple Putin — but to stop Russian money from corrupting our national interests and security.

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'Absolute victory over Russia isn't possible'

By Fiona Hill

Ironically, sanctions on oligarchs have given the UK some of its best PR in Russia for decades. Ordinary Russians hate the business elite and have celebrated the West’s sanctions on them. On Russian Telegram channels, announcements of new sanctions on bankers, Putin’s mistress Alina Kabaeva, and other wealthy individuals, are greeted with thousands of likes and jokey comments celebrating the UK: “Thanks London”, “More please!”, and “London is doing us a favour”. As Putin gloated during his State of the Nation speech last month: the West has seized rich Russians’ assets because it views them as “second-class strangers”, but “not a single ordinary citizen in our country feels sorry” for them.

When it comes to sanctions, the British establishment must be careful not to project its outdated historical conceptions onto Russia. The UK is no longer dealing with the influential oligarchs of the Nineties — but with powerless present-day business elites. And while the Kremlin could no doubt use Western business elites to influence our governments, the same is no longer true in reverse. The power of the Russian business elites is a phantom. The oligarchs are long dead. And we helped kill them.

The 18th-century wars, fought by rival European monarchs who could all converse in French with each other, were enviously admired in the bloody 20th century. They had allowed commerce and even tourism to persist — utterly unimaginable even in Napoleon’s day, let alone during the two world wars. These wars ended not in the utter exhaustion of collapsing empires, as in 1918, nor in infernal destruction, as in 1945, but instead with diplomatic arrangements politely negotiated in between card games and balls.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War and French America, for instance, was not drafted by the victorious British Prime Minister John Stuart, Earl of Bute. Rather, it was written by his very good friend, the French foreign minister Étienne-François de Stainville, Duc de Choiseul. It was he who solved the three-way puzzle the French defeat left, by paying off Spain with Louisiana and Britain with money-losing Canada, and regaining the profitable sugar islands for France, which still has them.

And rather than winners charging the losers with incurable bellicosity, as Versailles did with Germany, or stringing them up individually as war criminals, as in the ending of 20th-century wars, 18th-century winners were more likely to console the losers with something just short of “better-luck next time”. In a century during which there was war every single year without exception from 1700 to 1800, if one war ended, another necessarily started or at least persisted, allowing a “next time” soon enough.

By contrast, the ensuing 19th-century wars held no lessons at all for the 20th century, which was equally bereft of a Napoleonic superman at the start and ample tropical lands easily conquered later on. The Crimea expedition in the middle was mostly a counter-example of how not to wage war. The Franco-Prussian war was just as sterile. All it proved was that there really was only one Helmuth von Moltke who could win wars by parsimonious force, unlike his homonymous nephew, who lost a five-year war in its first five weeks; and that there really was only one Otto von Bismarck, who crowned his incomplete 1871 unification of German lands by refusing to unify all Germans, lest the world combine to make a bigger Germany smaller.

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How the Ukraine war must end

By Edward Luttwak

Clearly only the 18th-century precedents apply to the Ukraine War. Neither Putin nor Zelenskyy speaks French, but neither needs it to converse in their Russian mother-tongue. If they do not actually talk (Putin demurely said that he could not possibly be expected to negotiate with Kyiv’s drug addicts and Neo Nazis), their officials certainly can, and do so often.

When it comes to the persistence of commerce in war — the habit that Napoleon wanted to break with his Blocus Continental against British exports — every day, Russian gas flows to the homes and factories of Ukraine on its way into Western Europe. Ukraine transfers money to Russia every day, even as Putin attacks his faithful customer. And Ukrainian wheat is now shipped past Russian navy vessels to reach the hungry Middle East, after a negotiation unthinkable in 20th-century wars, or in Napoleon’s either.

In Russia, sanctions have certainly diminished easy access to imported luxuries in local franchised shops, but they still arrive via Turkey at a slight premium — or discount, depending how much Moscow previously marked them up. All over Russia, the sanctions have been felt in all sorts of ways because the country was actually more internationalised than anyone realised. (I arrived in Tomsk at 6am one winter morning, the temperature minus infinity, and the one place to eat was McDonald’s.)

But unlike China, which must choose between fighting and eating protein — some 90% of its chicken, pork and beef is raised on imported cereals — Russia produces all its own staple foods and can therefore fight and eat indefinitely. Neither does it import any energy, as China must.

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In other words, just as Russian propaganda has claimed from day one, the sanctions cannot stop the war materially. They have, though, played a large role in the flight of tens of thousands of elite Russians, once again diminishing the human capital of the largest European nation — as the Bolsheviks and Civil War did a century ago, and the opening of borders did again a generation ago. Still, the sanctions might yet cause trouble in the West, if the winter happens to be unusually cold. This is a subject on which Germany — which so enthusiastically applauded Angela Merkel for closing nuclear power stations and preferring Russian piped gas over American and Qatari liquified gas — has remained strangely silent.

As for tourism, after a cascade of restrictions on Russian visitors, in August, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex announced that a total of 998,085 Russian citizens had legally entered the European Union through land border crossing-points since the beginning of the war, with more arriving by air via Istanbul, Budapest, and central Asian airports. Other Russians have continued to holiday in the Maldives and Seychelles via Dubai, on the sound 18th-century principle that a war should not prevent gentlemen from taking the waters, or diving into them in this case. The confiscation of yachts from several Russians accused of proximity to Putin generated quite a bit of schadenfreude to the yacht-less everywhere in the early summer, but did not deprive a great many other Russians from the use of their bedsitters, apartments, houses, palaces and chateaux all over Europe.

This war, in short, will not end because of Russian suffering: it is not exactly the siege of Leningrad.

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Putin has made Nato stronger

By Edward Luttwak

So how can the war end? Herakleitos of Ephesus wrote that “War is the father of all things” — even of peace, since it exhausts the material resources and manpower necessary to keep fighting. It thereby induces the acceptance of lesser outcomes — even capitulation — as the costs of better outcomes keeps rising.

There is another kind of war termination — the kind that is peddled to innocent students in “conflict-resolution” classes, the kind that gains international applause and Nobel Peace prizes: war-ending not obtained by exhaustive war but by the benevolent intervention of third parties. This end can never yield peace. Its only product is frozen war, as in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the perpetual imminence of renewed war dissuades construction and the return of workers from Germany.

Peace achieved by the exhaustion of resources is the most durable form of peace because deprivation is better remembered than other people’s deaths. But of the two belligerents, only Ukraine can run out of material resources. Except now it cannot, because the United States has seemingly added Ukraine’s sustainment to its other entitlement programmes — a commitment augmented by whatever contribution the British and northern European countries care to make, and the relative pittance given by France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

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In the days of Herakleitos himself, war was the father of peace principally because it killed off young warriors, forcing a relaxation of conflict until the next generation grew to military age. It was that process that weakened Sparta’s strength. In World War Two, the Germans were clearly running out of men by the end, when 16-year-olds served on anti-aircraft gun crews, and the Volkssturm conscripted men up to age 60. Some 5.3 million died in uniform, including 900,000 men born outside Germany’s 1937 borders, both Austrians and Volksdeutsche conscripted by the SS, which never acquired the right to conscript in Germany itself. The ever-worsening manpower shortage forced the SS to betray its most basic principle by recruiting non-Aryan troops, not only Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army of 130,000 at its peak, but also SS Turkic, Indian (ex POWs), and Arab units recruited by the Palestinian Mufti Amin al-Husseini.

As for the Red Army, it lost millions in defeat and pell-mell retreat in 1941 and then again in 1942, losing still more men on the offensive at the end. But in 1943 Russian generals no longer impatiently marched men over minefields instead of clearing them, nor sent them to attack without artillery support and tanks. By 1944, it was the Russian artillery that conquered battlefields by fire, and that is how Russia did not run out of men, even if its demography remained skewed for decades.

The Allies were never in such straits because the British evacuated from Dunkirk more than two-thirds of their soldiers in 1940, then drafted many South Africans and Indians for their North African misadventures. By late 1942, at El Alamein, they had vastly superior artillery in lieu of infantry, with more of the same in Italy from 1943, when fresh Americans, the French Army’s Moroccan Tirailleurs and Goumiers, and the free Polish II Corps did most of the hard fighting.

So it was not until 1944 that the exhaustion of the British army’s appetite for fighting emerged in insistent demands for the massive aerial bombardments of any significant resistance, or at least energetic air support at every turn. Having started much later, most American servicemen were not even tired when the war ended, with total losses individually tragic but demographically unimportant. This was even more true of all later American fighting, until now.

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Putin's war is just beginning

By Harald Malmgren

In Ukraine, so far there is no question of war-ending manpower losses. In spite of a declining population, the number of male Ukrainians who annually reach military age is at least 235,000, or 20,000 per month. Ukrainian casualties, both killed or invalided out of action, have not exceeded 5,000 per month. As for Russia, colourful stories that relate the use of mercenary units and the lucrative contracts offered to combat volunteers are not true indicators of a manpower shortage: every month more than 100,000 Russian males reach military age, while the monthly average of killed and invalided wounded is under 7,000.

So the stories reveal something else: Putin’s refusal to declare war, fully mobilise the armed forces, and require conscripts to serve in combat, suggests he fears the reaction of Russian civil society. Yes of course Russian civil society had been silent on the war, or near enough. But its silence is not the silence of the grave signifying nothing. It was a very eloquent silence: fight your war but leave our sons alone.

Have you had experience of being cast as pro-Putin for expressing unease about some of the Western measures against Russia?

Immensely, and painfully. But let’s be clear, my pain is neither here nor there when you have atrocities, murders, a whole country being devastated by Putin’s armies. Who gives a damn about how I feel about my treatment by people on social media?

Back in 2001, I labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal because of the murder of 250,000 people in Grozny, Chechnya. It was in a Senate meeting of the University of Athens, which was discussing the motion for awarding an honorary doctorate to Putin, who had just become president of Russia. And I was in a minority of one opposing it. So having gone out on a limb, having condemned Putin, it was a bit surprising to be lambasted by several commentators as “Putin’s useful idiot.”

Was the charge against you based on your blaming Nato expansion for the current crisis?

The most pertinent criticism that I received was that I was “Westsplaining” — this is a version of “mansplaining” — that I was being condescending in the way that I was telling Eastern Europeans what’s in their interest. Now, that is a very serious accusation. Because we do know that mansplaining is something that we men often do.

While I’m not claiming to have the monopoly of truth, I do believe that as a European, as a citizen of the world, I have the right to, for instance, comment that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian power was built on a bedrock of animosity between the West and Russia, and that Putin exploited the humiliation of the Russians — at the hands of Nato, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund.

Don’t forget how in the Nineties, even the reformers — liberals, neoliberals in Russia — were crushed by the West, by the International Monetary Fund, forcing Russia into an awful default in 1998 that caused the life expectancy of men in Russia to drop from 75 to 58. It was a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe. And Putin, being a KGB strategist, utilised that pent-up frustration of Russians against the West in order to build up his horrid empire.

Is your argument that without Nato expansion in Eastern Europe we would not be in this position?

My point is this: there was an agreement between Gorbachev and George Bush Senior that Gorbachev would let Eastern Europe go its own way, on the condition that Nato would not expand eastward. We know that; this is well established. Given that Putin was pushing Russia back towards a re-militarised stance, and Nato and Russia were always going to develop an enmity between them, is it not a good idea to have a neutral zone between the two? Do we really want Russian nuclear weapons and Nato nuclear weapons to be side by side? For me, the neutrality of Eastern Europe is not a second best, it would be first best. It will be good for the people of Eastern Europe, it will be good for Nato, and it will be good for Russia, to minimise tensions to the extent that we can do that.

But in any case, I am perfectly willing to accept an Eastern European progressive who says to me that I’m wrong. What I find intolerable is the lack of tolerance — that I’ve been told, “butt off, you’re a Westplainer in that you even have an opinion about what should be happening in Eastern Europe”. This is not a good foundation for Europeanism.

They do say that when war begins, the truth dies very quickly. But it’s not just truth. It’s a capacity that we have in the West to have a civilised, rational debate amongst ourselves.

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Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

What about the sanctions against Russia — do you support them? 

Well, it’s always the case that when sanctions are slapped on a dictatorial regime they hurt the people, not the dictators. Especially in the case of Putin. Putin has a war chest, which is quite large. And he doesn’t care about the plight of Russian people. But let me be clear on this. I’m not against the sanctions. Watching the atrocities coming out now — the towns, the villages that the Russian army has vacated — watching the devastation on the coastal areas of eastern Ukraine, I can understand why people say, “look, we simply do not want to trade with these people — we’re not going to let them have access to their yachts, and to their money, and all that,” that’s fine by me.

I think that, in the end, we are going to have a lot more suffering — as a result of price increases, especially electricity prices — among the poor in Western Europe. I believe the dollar as the reserve currency is being placed under immense pressure. So I think that the American administration is going to live to regret the cutting off of the Central Bank of Russia from the dollar payment system.

But none of that matters really at this very moment. Because what matters is the war. Freddie, what keeps me up at night is that people are being killed. And what I want us to work for, all of us — and let’s iron out our differences: how can we have an immediate cessation of fire and a withdrawal of Russian troops?

What appalls me about those who purport to support Ukraine and who are attacking my position, is that they seem to be seriously considering the possibility that Ukraine is going to win the war and overthrow Putin. Now that’s completely pie in the sky. Anybody who believes that is jeopardising the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as we speak.

At best, you’re going to have a stalemate. Now a stalemate is terrible for the people of Ukraine. Because we know what Putin is going to do. He’s going to do what he did in Grozny. He’s going to raze to the ground areas that he needs to abandon. The Ukrainian army has been very heroic, and I applaud them for having resisted. But they cannot win the war. Do we really want this painful, murderous stalemate go on and on and on? Do we really want to invest in regime change in Russia that is instigated by the United States? Whenever the United States has tried to regime change we’ve had complete catastrophe. Look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq, look at Libya. And this is a nuclear power. Do we want to play with this fire, with this nuclear fire?

We should have an immediate ceasefire. President Zelenskyy, to his credit, has now adopted the proposal that I’ve been making from day one: that we should have an agreement between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin — of course, with Zelenskyy, and the European Union participating — that makes a very simple trade, a deal. Russia withdraws from Ukraine, in exchange for an end to the sanctions and a commitment, by the West, that Ukraine is going to be part of the West but not part of Nato.

Does that include being part of the EU?

Putin wants a way out. I think that the United States and Zelenskyy, together, and the EU, must give him a way out. If he can be seen to have won a victory — something that he can present to his own people as a victory (“I have ended Nato’s eastward expansion. I went to war to stop Nato expanding and I succeeded”), I think that we have a moral duty to give him this way out. Now, I can’t guarantee that he will take it. But the West can offer him this way out, to stop the killings.

A few weeks ago, giving an off-ramp to Putin might have proven popular. But it feels like the situation is different now. We’ve had a full-scale withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kyiv, and there seems to be increased confidence that something like a full-scale defeat might actually be in sight. What’s your reaction to that?

That’s madness. There is no way that the Ukrainian army is going to defeat the panoply of the Russian army in Mariupol, in the areas between Crimea, and Donbas. All power to them if they can do it. I don’t believe that Zelenskyy believes it. I don’t believe that anybody actually believes it. Yes, it is wonderful that Putin did not walk into Kyiv unopposed. It’s wonderful that he’s been given a bloody nose. This is the time to sue for peace.

Look, the West did that after the awful civil war in Yugoslavia. You’ll recall Srebrenica. We had atrocities galore across Bosnia. And not just in Bosnia — in Croatia, in Ukraine, in various areas that were devastated by the original civil war within Yugoslavia. And yet, under the auspices of the American President, the West sat down with Milosevic and they created an imperfect peace for Bosnia, which has been holding since then. Was that a mistake? Should we have continued the bloodletting, hoping that one side would completely annihilate the other side? I don’t believe so.

There’s talk of really escalating the amount of military hardware being sent to support the Ukraine war effort. I’m presuming from what you’re saying that you’d be against that?

While the Ukrainian army is resisting, I think we have a moral duty to support them militarily. Not me and you personally, but I’m not going to criticise the West for sending weapons to the Ukrainian resistors. But the whole point of resisting is to come to the point where we sue for peace. We can come to an agreement that leaves everybody slightly dissatisfied, which is the optimal agreement. Where, for instance, Ukraine stays out of Nato, it stops arming itself. Maybe there can be a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Crimea can be discussed in the next 10 years or so.

Such an agreement could also be augmented with an understanding that Ukraine would not be prevented from entering the EU. Well, that agreement goes hand-in-hand with ending the arms race on both sides. Because who knows, maybe Putin tomorrow is going to be supported by the Chinese military? Do we really want that kind of escalation?

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By Edward Luttwak

Something’s happened quite suddenly where to speak like that is now seen as a betrayal.

It’s what happens when war begins: we lose our head. Warmongering becomes cool and mainstream. Now, I have no doubt that there are cooler heads around Europe who are despairing. But they can’t speak out. I can see it in Germany, I can see it within the government of the Federal Republic: there are people who are besides themselves. They are pulling their hair out. Because if they speak out they will be immediately taken to task by the warmongers who are having a field day.

This is why it’s important that we band together to bring a modicum of rationality back to the debate and to focus on the only thing that matters at the moment. It’s not money. It’s not trade. It’s not natural gas. It is human lives in Ukraine. How can we stop people from dying? Because if they continue — the ones who put the theoretical right of Ukrainians to be members of Nato above the life of people in Ukraine, and above the opportunity of Ukraine to prosper as a Western democracy, which is inside the EU and outside of Nato — we’re going to be creating a quagmire that will ensure two things. Firstly, that thousands of people will die who could be saved, and secondly, that Ukraine is going to be a desert.

Do you observe that the people leading this warmongering, as you call it, would mainly describe themselves as liberals?

Yes. I can see that. But it’s not the first time. I remember when the United States were about to invade Iraq, even Left-wingers like Christopher Hitchens, a man that I admired all my life, became liberal imperialists. He was gung-ho about invading Iraq and spreading democracy. If you think of the early 1960s, it was JFK who initially showed a degree of enthusiasm for taking over Vietnam.

I do fear that it’s not just some liberal imperialists or liberal supporters of victory — of war until the final victory is achieved, as if it is possible to imagine invading Moscow. I feel that there’s something else there: a missing ingredient. Follow the money. The United States is a very complex economy. And it’s not homogeneous. Segments of the American economy are suffering as a result of the war, with the increasing price of oil. I believe Silicon Valley is not happy, because they’re being put in a very difficult situation. Even the banking sector, Wall Street, can’t really be enjoying what’s going on.

But if you are selling weapons, you are having a party. You have Olaf Scholtz, the German Chancellor, about to order 100 billion euros worth of American equipment, because the Germans are not making the stuff. If you are providing fracked oil and gas from New Mexico, from Minnesota, from Texas, you are looking at the new deals that are being struck between the European Union and the United States for LNG (liquefied natural gas), and you are rubbing your hands with glee. Because what was a dying industry in the United States now suddenly has been given a huge lease of life. This is not a conspiracy. If you have liberal imperialists, and you’ve got people that are going to make a lot of money out of this liberal imperialism, and you bring these together, you have a very powerful constituency in favour of maintaining the conflicts.

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A lot of people will listen to what you’ve just said and think that it is verging on conspiracy: evil Americans in suits sitting around board tables, trying to create wars in order to profit from them. 

There’s no conspiracy; nothing of what I said is conspiracy. It’s the truth that if you’re selling arms, you are making a lot of money. If you’re selling oil and gas that is fracked in the United States, you are making a lot of money. We know that.

It’s not causation though, is it? It’s one thing to observe that, but those people aren’t in charge of making the decisions.

Of course. Because why didn’t they do it ten years ago? They would have had an interest in doing this ten years ago. Nobody forced Putin to invade. It wasn’t Nato’s fault that he invaded, even if Nato created circumstances for him to be powerful, in my view. It was Putin’s criminal choice to invade Ukraine. And that gave rise to military resistance by the Ukrainians, which I applaud. And then on the coat-tails of these developments that have nothing to do with them, people come in with particular axes to grind, political ones, and financial agendas. So the whole thing acquires momentum. This is not a conspiracy theory. That is, I think, a solid rational analysis of what was going on.

How, then, should we treat the very popular and successful president of Ukraine? He has been incredibly effective at generating international attention. Should we support him? Should we be critical of him?

We should be critically supportive. Look, I followed Zelenskyy’s career. It was interesting that he was elected on a platform for making peace with Moscow, and for sidelining the oligarchic and ultra Right-wing elements within Ukraine. We have to note that. It’s also true that he failed in doing this to a very large extent: the oligarchs that he was going to wage war against effectively had him. His reign has not been easy. And the oligarchs managed to maintain their control over the country, some would say, forcing Zelenskyy to succumb.

The neo-Nazi Azov battalion in Mariupol and so on maintain their swastikas. I’m sure that Zelenskyy wanted to get rid of them, but he couldn’t. But none of this matters. Because when a country is invaded, I feel a natural duty to support the people who have been invaded and to support their leader — even if it’s somebody I would not have voted for, had I been one of them.

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But what about this overt campaign by Zelenskyy to encourage more direct Western military intervention?

He’s the leader of a country that is being invaded: it is perfectly natural for him to be calling upon the rest of the world to come to their assistance. I’m sure he would have loved it if Nato waltzed in, even though I’m sure he understands that it would bring us to the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. It is his job to ask for us to step in.

But to his credit, he’s done something else as well. He’s embraced the neutrality solution. And he is participating in discussions with Russians, and negotiations. Let’s face it, the European Union is a figment of our imagination. We’re so fragmented, we are a non-player, really. It’s only the United States that can provide Zelenskyy with the backing he needs in his negotiations with Putin.

What people object to about that is that it has the whiff of people making decisions for smaller countries over their heads. What the people of Ukraine want is neither here nor there.

My own country would not exist if we didn’t have such an arrangement back in the late 1820s. We were under the Ottomans for 400 or 500 years. We had our own revolution, our own resistance against the Ottoman armies. In the end, how did Greece come about? It came about because the great powers — the English, the French, and the Russians — sat down with the Ottomans. And they said: “Greece becomes an independent state, it’s a kind of buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the West”. And we were given a chance to exist.

What is your message, then, to people who object to the invasion of Ukraine but also feel deeply uneasy about the West’s involvement? How should they react when they are called Putin supporters?

Be kind. I don’t think you should antagonise anybody these days, because there is so much antagonism already. Maintain your cool, support the Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s armies. Do not succumb to the silence of militarism and perpetual war. And always keep your eye on the trophy, which is immediate peace, withdrawal of Russian troops — and a neutral, democratic Ukraine that we all help get back up on its feet.

But despite this bleak picture, one man has stood firm in his support for the invasion, both financially and with man-power: Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov is the governor of Chechnya, the small region in the North Caucasus that has repeatedly fought for its independence against Russian rule. Putin reintegrated the region in the early 2000s with the help of Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad. Following the assassination of Akhmad in 2004 by Chechen Islamists, Kadyrov developed a close relationship with Putin, frequently likened to that of father and son. He eventually took over as the head of Chechnya in 2007, receiving the Russian president’s full backing.

The personalist nature of this relationship is crucial: Kadyrov’s loyalty does not extend to the government or Russia, it is only to Putin himself. This has meant that Kadyrov has grown bolder throughout his rule, clashing with security services and even flouting federal policies. Suffice it to say, support for Kadyrov in the Kremlin does not reach much further than the president’s office. This history is important for evaluating the size of the gamble Kadyrov is taking in his support for the invasion, and what he has already gained.

In Chechnya itself, Kadyrov’s rule is characterised by brutal, indiscriminate violence. His campaign to purge the republic of its LGBTQ community, part of a policy of extrajudicial executions, is well-documented. At the start of this year, he embarked on his anti-dissident war with renewed vigour, conducting mass kidnappings of critics’ relatives. This included violently abducting Zarema Musaeva, the mother of a Chechen human rights lawyer, from Nizhny Novgorod in January; she is still held by police.

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This violence has been carried out by the Chechen security services, known as the kadyrovtsy, which operate as Kadyrov’s personal army. These units rarely leave Chechnya, and even then, only for training exercises. Kadyrov mobilised his top commanders and units at the beginning of February, sending them to the staging areas near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. Moving as one large group, the units known to be involved in the invasion are the “Sever” and “Yug” Battalions (“North” and “South,” respectively), the “Akhmat-Grozny” riot (OMON) police unit, and the “Akhmat” rapid-response (SOBR) police unit.

Allegedly deployed on March 22nd is the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment, the most notorious in Chechnya, and possibly in Russia. This is the unit largely responsible for the extrajudicial executions and the anti-LGBTQ purges. While Kadyrov claims they are now in Ukraine, he has faked their deployment before, and they just returned from a SWAT competition in the UAE.

The most important leader within these units is Magomed Tushaev, commander of “Sever” Battalion. While his counterpart in the “Yug” Battalion, Khusein Mezhidov, has appeared more prominently in propaganda clips, Tushaev played a more significant role in the psychological warfare during the military buildup and the initial days of the invasion, stemming from the brutal reputation developed by Tushaev’s unit during counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.

Tushaev was rumoured to have been killed on February 26th, the kadyrovtsy’s worst day of casualties. It soon transpired that he was, in fact, alive, yet many of Kadyrov’s opponents abroad keep repeating it, allowing Tushaev’s presence to continuously make them look foolish.

In addition to these units’ leaders, Kadyrov sent in his cousins: brothers Sharip Delimkhanov, commander of Rosgvardia in Chechnya, and Alibek Delimkhanov, deputy commander of Rosgvardia’s North Caucasus forces. Their final brother, Adam, is a Duma parliamentarian from Chechnya who is now overseeing the kadyrovtsy’s operations in Mariupol. These units were engaged near Kyiv but could not take sufficient ground to carry out their objective: assassinating President Zelenskyy. Accordingly, Kadyrov pulled them back to Chechnya, deploying new, unidentified units near Mariupol under the leadership of Adam Delimkhanov. These reinforcements also failed the crucial task of taking the Azovstal metallurgy plant, which instead had to be bombed.

Kadyrov’s financial backing for the invasion has come from the Akhmat Kadyrov Fund (AKF), his family’s private slush fund. It was primarily created by embezzling federal subsidies to the republic and racketeering businesses and state employees. As part of the war effort, the AKF has supplied food and equipment to his troops on the frontlines, as well as military vehicles to the authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He has also used his corrupt slush-fund to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Melitopol, which is under Russian occupation.

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The invasion may still be in its infancy, but a number of consequences of Kadyrov’s gamble are already visible. Most obviously, his information war has proved a success. He continuously makes his critics look foolish about the fact that Tushaev is alive, and he has been able to stage rallies in support of the invasion far beyond Chechnya. Kadyrov’s simultaneous campaign to court the Arabic-speaking world has also helped keep Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from siding against Russia in the pitched economic battle. For Putin, at least, this is enough to justify his decision to make Kadyrov Russia’s chief diplomatic emissary to the Muslim world — even if it does backfire when he prioritises Muslim issues over Kremlin policy, such as with his support for the Ronhingya.

In elite politics, Kadyrov is also coming out ahead. His strong support for Putin, when others were more hesitant, is a clear win. The domestic turmoil in both the FSB and Rosgvardia — exacerbated by American and Ukrainian intelligence disclosures pointing to leaks from the security services — plays to his advantage. Kadyrov’s long-running feud with federal security service leadership means that, the more endangered their futures become, the more secured his is.

Yet not everything is going to plan. For all his propaganda victories, Kadyrov’s biggest loss is that the kadyrovtsy’s reputational bubble has burst. Almost everyone, except the Chechen propaganda circus, has noted that his army has not engaged in fighting, but has still sustained significant casualties. This is likely to embolden his opponents among the Russian political elite, who may fear him a little less, making increased confrontation possible.

In Chechnya, too, his position will be weakened. There currently are and will be fewer kadyrovtsy, as many are engaged, while others have been killed, in Ukraine. It is also important to remember that not all of the kadyrovtsy are devout members of the Kadyrov cult of personality. Forced recruitment into their ranks has long been used as a tactic for containing societal discontent, but failure will only exacerbate it.

For the time being, however, Kadyrov is performing adequately. He is not doing as well as he would hope, but he is certainly not faring poorly, and is generally proving his value to Putin. The elite conflict among security elites could flip on him, but his propaganda victories should keep that at bay.

None of this is to say his safety is guaranteed. In the coming weeks, several trends should be closely watched to see how Kadyrov’s luck holds — the clearest of which is the continued invasion. For now, continued war means continued opportunities for propaganda, one of his favorite activities. This is representative of his regime, prioritising flash over substance. But while Tushaev may not have been killed, the abundance of Kadyrov’s trusted advisors in the field increases the odds of this happening to his allies. Were a number of them to perish, he could quickly find himself isolated.

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Then there are the worsening socioeconomic conditions in Chechnya. According to the region’s authorities, there is “no deficit of sugar”, one of the key economic benchmarks; according to reports, the AKF is now handing out sugar to some families. No doubt Kadyrov will keeping a close eye on this: socioeconomic concerns have proved to be the only mobilising grievance for the Chechen public in the current repressive atmosphere. This previous expression of dissent was led by women, who may also now have sons fighting and dying in Ukraine. Women have already led protests elsewhere in the North Caucasus, making this a distinct possibility in Chechnya.

Added to this is the fact that the entire North Caucasus region now faces mass economic disruptions from the new sanctions regime. While experts have noted the region’s potential resilience to the sanctions’ effects, their repercussions on the federal budget are not yet clear. The fate of the federal subsidies, upon which the North Caucasus relies, is still undecided.

The final threat to Kadyrov is the reshuffling of the elite hierarchy. While Kadyrov is currently edging out federal security officials, his advantage may not hold in the long run. Anticipating this, he is trying to earn federal recognition as the North Caucasus’s most important leader. Yet the Kremlin has worked to establish Sergei Melikov, head of neighbouring Dagestan, as a regional counterweight to Kadyrov — as most non-Putin officials in the Kremlin are wary of his influence in this corner of Russia. Whether he poses a significant threat to Kadyrov is still unclear: at a recent national security meeting, Kadyrov took the opportunity to, quite literally, shunt Melikov to the side. Elite jockeying is, after all, an art of longevity.

It was proof that, for now at least, Kadyrov remains in a strong position. But the consequences of Russia’s latest incursion into Ukraine are still coming into focus. The fate of the war has yet to be decided and the full effects of sanctions have not been felt. When the dust finally settles, Kadyrov may not be standing where he thought he was.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

One by one all the vast palaces of the aristocracy were “expropriated” — a favourite word of the revolution — and systematically vandalised and looted. Their lavish interiors were trashed, paintings slashed, priceless Aubusson carpets ruined, antique furniture broken up for firewood and famous wine cellars pillaged in an orgy of drinking and violence. Even Lenin was seen driving around the city in one of Nicholas II’s prized Delaunay-Belleville limousines.

What a contrast this was to the last gilded, heady days of the Belle Epoque, when the old tsarist oligarchs had indulged themselves in the food, fine wines, casinos and high-class courtesans of Paris. Before the war, couples such as the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and his wife Olga had a swanky home in the Bois de Boulogne, where they entertained the glitterati of Marcel Proust’s Paris. At Madame Yturbe’s Hungarian costume ball in 1912, Olga arrived dripping in luxury — in a dress by Worth encrusted with rows of pearls and a Cartier tiara of pear-shaped diamonds.

The legendary wealth of the Russian elite was perhaps epitomised by the fabulous jewellery they purchased in St Petersburg from the leading imperial jeweller and master goldsmith, Carl Fabergé. The high point of Romanov extravagance was manifested in the fabulous, ornately jewelled Easter eggs that Fabergé produced for the Imperial Family between 1886 and 1916 — some 54 eggs in all, of which 44 survive today.

Fifteen of those eggs form the centrepiece of the current exhibition “Fabergé: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Of the 233 charming works of art in the show, 13 are on loan from Russian institutions, causing some to question whether they will now be caught up in the new “cultural Cold War”. Will they be returned to Russia while hostilities continue? Already, the UK government has sanctioned the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, whose foundation loaned the golden “Hen egg” for the exhibition.

Coming as it does during this dramatic conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and an accompanying outburst of virulent Russophobia in the West, the Fabergé exhibition cannot help but provide a mournful and telling parallel of what happens to wealth and privilege when they are dispossessed and routed.

In 1917, along with many other private businesses, Carl Fabergé’s was seized and taken over by a workers’ collective. He found it hard to adjust and a year later fled Russia when the Bolsheviks nationalised his company. With German assistance he got out of Petrograd under diplomatic protection and made his way to Lausanne in Switzerland where he died in 1920, heartbroken that the glittering life he had once known “is no more”.

Meanwhile many of his patrons left during the 1919–20 mass exodus south out of Russia — through today’s war-torn Ukraine — to Odessa and Novorossisk when General Wrangel’s White Army took its last stand against the Red Army. At that time, a million Russians fled into Europe — but that figure is today dwarfed by the number of refugees escaping Ukraine.

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Today’s Russian oligarchs — the new post-Soviet aristocracy — now find the screws being tightened on them, just as they were on the Romanovs. More and more demands are being made for their property to be sanctioned as punishment for Putin’s war against Ukraine. For after many years of rumbling criticism, the war has finally drawn the world’s attention to the obscene wealth that this elite group of expatriates have enjoyed for far too long. Given their links to Putin, the seizure of their property, in the eyes of many, is a necessary — if not righteous — penalty for their leader’s sins.

Recently, Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove suggested that perhaps the mansions of today’s Russian oligarchs should be seized and filled with Ukrainian refugees — as “the ultimate payback for Putin’s cronies”. No sooner said than billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska’s lavish mansion in Belgravia was occupied, albeit briefly, by anarchist protesters.

One cannot help but be reminded of a moving scene in David Lean’s film Dr Zhivago, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, where revolutionaries turn up at the large apartment of the comfortably off Gromyko family of Zhivago’s wife Tonya and announce that their home is forfeit. It is now to become a communal dwelling that the Gromykos will have to share with several workers’ families.

While today’s Russian oligarchs are long practised in every possible tax scam and evasion to hide their wealth from possible confiscation, back in 1917, there was no way that the old aristocracy could evade the cudgel of revolutionary retribution. All they could do was grab a few of their most precious and easily portable possessions, travelling into exile with little more than the clothes they stood in, with their few remaining jewels sewn into their garments.

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For Russian refugees, these family heirlooms would be the currency of exile, the only tradable possessions they had left with which to sustain themselves in their future severely reduced lives. Or so they thought. The trouble was that their jewellery had greatly depreciated in value. This was due to a flood of such goods on the European market at the end of the war. For the Russians were not the only aristocracy to have seen their monarchy crash and be forced into selling off their jewels — the German and Austro-Hungarian thrones had gone the same way too.

Only one aristocrat of note, Grand Duchess Vladimir, saw her jewels safely smuggled out of her grand palace in St Petersburg – to London, by a British art dealer and unofficial spy named Bertie Stopford. But her fabulous collection, that had once been the envy of all Paris, was sold off after her death in 1920 to sustain her children in exile. Her magnificent diamond and emerald tiara by court jeweller Carl Edvard Bolin was bought by Queen Mary in 1922 and is a favourite piece worn by our own Queen Elizabeth.

As the Russian old guard fled their homeland they settled into communities of exiles in Berlin, Paris, London and elsewhere. Reduced to poverty, made worse by a lack of skills or any kind of training that would find them jobs, they discovered that the jewels they thought would last them for many years soon ran out. One émigré, Grand Duke Alexander, noted with despair how the proceeds from the sale of his wife Xenia’s great strings of Romanov pearls had lasted just three years. In London, Russian exiles sold their Fabergé treasures for a song at antiques dealers such as Wartski’s in Old Bond Street.

But at least these communities of exiles had each other and could share in the experience of dispossession and poverty. Where will today’s despised Russian oligarchs end up if they continue to support Putin’s pariah regime? Already, many have fled to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a financial haven where their wealth can ensure some kind of dismal but comfortable purdah. Their other option, of course, is to leave all their foreign assets behind, and return to Russia — retreating behind the new ‘iron curtain’ that is rapidly descending on their homeland.

Over the past few weeks, the US, EU, UK, Japan, and other allies have hit Russia with a package of restrictions targeting its access to foreign financing and technology. Russia’s currency has plummeted, inflation is rising, living standards are slumping, and many factories across the country have stopped work due to shortages in components. Russia now faces the deepest economic crisis since post-Soviet collapse in the Nineties — a downturn so severe that it may eventually threaten Vladimir Putin’s hold on power.

Only one month ago, analysts were focused not on Russia’s vulnerability to sanctions but its supposed “sanctions-proofing” strength. The Russian government has dealt with Western sanctions for decades, from the technological restrictions the West imposed on the USSR to the most recent restrictions on oil drilling technology and access to capital markets imposed after Russia’s first attack on Ukraine in 2014. However, the strength of the latest came as a surprise to Russia’s leaders. They thought they had taken adequate steps to defend their economy and that Western leaders would be too worried about domestic prosperity to risk tough measures. Neither assumption proved correct — and now Russia is paying the price.

Like many adversaries of the United States, from North Korea to Iran to Venezuela, Russia sees American sanctions as a fact of life. Almost every year over the past decade, the US has slapped on a new set of sanctions, sometimes unilaterally, sometimes in conjunction with allies in Europe. Some have been linked to domestic human rights violations, such as those implemented under the Magnitsky Act, named after a Russian lawyer who died under suspicious conditions in jail after uncovering a government-linked fraud. Some have been sparked by Russian meddling in American elections. Others were motivated by Russia’s use of a nerve agent in an attempted assassination in the UK. As Putin said just before announcing his decision to attack Ukraine: “They will never think twice before coming up with or just fabricating a pretext for yet another sanction attack … their one and only goal is to hold back the development of Russia.”

From the moment Putin announced that Russia was beginning a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine, more sanctions were inevitable. The Biden administration had threatened “devastating” sanctions, though after endured many rounds of not-very-tough Western sanctions, most Russian leaders thought America was bluffing. The fact that European leaders were divided about sanctions — and that Germany, Europe’s most important player, was putting the finishing touches on a new Russian gas pipeline — led the Russians to believe that the West wasn’t ready for full-scale economic warfare. The Kremlin, therefore, began the war expecting measures that were costly but survivable. In a public meeting right before the invasion, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin briefed Putin that “we have thoroughly reviewed these risks” and that “we have been preparing for months”.

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In fact, Russia had been preparing for years, knowing that sanctions were always a risk. America’s sanctions campaign against Iran, which cut off its ability to export oil, was a worrisome precedent — though Russia was a far more important oil producer than the Islamic Republic. The 2014 sanctions against Russia, meanwhile, showed that when the US, UK, and EU joined forces, they could sever Russian firms from financial markets in ways that no other country — not even China — could equal.

In response, Russia developed a five-pronged strategy to steel its economy. The first step was to build up a substantial war chest of foreign exchange reserves, including major currencies (Euro, sterling, dollar, yen, and renminbi) and over $100 billion worth of gold. These reserves, equivalent to over twice the value of goods Russia imports in a typical year, were supposed to give Russia financial flexibility in case the West tried imposing restrictions on its ability to export goods and earn foreign currency abroad.

The second prong in Russia’s “sanctions-proofing” strategy was to reduce its use of the US dollar, the currency in which most commodities — and thus most of Russia’s exports — are priced. Russia managed to substantially reduce the scope of dollars in its foreign trade, largely by shifting its trade with China to Euros. The Kremlin also cut dollar holdings in its foreign currency reserves, choosing to hold more of other currencies, including renminbi, instead.

Third, Russia tried developing internal payments systems in case it was severed from Western-dominated platforms. Many purchases in Russia are made using Visa or Mastercard, which are subject to US sanctions legislation. Most international banking transactions are mediated by SWIFT, a Belgium-based organisation subject to EU sanctions. Russia has rolled out a domestic card payment system, called Mir, and an interbank payment system modeled on SWIFT, trying to prepare itself for a potential future without access to these Western platforms.

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The fourth strategy was to intensify economic cooperation with China. The more China’s economy grew, and the more ties that Russia had with it, the more Russian leaders felt secure. The Kremlin knew it could rely on China to vociferously object to any Western sanctions that were applied extraterritorially to Chinese firms.

Finally, Russia counted on the West’s energy dependence to limit any willingness to apply economic pressure. The fact that the Germans were afraid of even mentioning the Nord Stream II pipeline demonstrated timidity that emboldened the Kremlin. However, though Germans were uniquely supine in their energy relations with Russia, they weren’t alone in their dependence. America liked to condemn Germany over Nord Stream II, but American politicians were and are highly sensitive to gasoline prices. Restrictions on Russian oil exports were, therefore, guaranteed to be a matter of acute domestic political concern, because such a move would drive up gasoline prices worldwide. The Kremlin assumed this was a price Western leaders would be unwilling to pay.

When Russian forces rolled into Ukraine, however, the West was jolted out of complacency. Though US and UK intelligence had been warning for several months that Russia was ready to invade, most people — and most Western European leaders — simply didn’t believe it. Images of Ukrainian cities aflame left them shocked. So it was Europe that led the drive during the first week of war for tougher economic sanctions, culminating in an almost unprecedented freeze on Russia’s central bank reserves.

This was a level of sanctions escalation that Russian policymakers had never seriously contemplated. On its own, the move — grabbing control of around $300 billion worth of Russian foreign exchange reserves stashed in Western financial institutions — constituted the biggest bank heist in world history. The fact that these moves were multilateral meant that “de-dollarising” didn’t matter. The Euro, pound, and yen were no more accessible to the Kremlin. And it didn’t matter what payments system was used, Russian or otherwise, if a substantial chunk of the world economy simply refused to transact with you.

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The Chinese — supposed allies in “sanctions-proofing” — were no less shocked than the Russians by this display of financial firepower. China has already announced that it is cutting off certain Russian industries under special sanctions, such as aviation. China’s banks, meanwhile, continue to undertake some non-sanctioned transactions with Russia, but according to reports they are broadly following the West’s lead. The Moscow–Beijing entente is more a marriage of convenience than a sanctions-busting partnership.

The only part of Russia’s sanctions-proofing plan that is proving somewhat effective is the bet that Western leaders can’t stomach a full energy cut off. The US and UK have announced bans on importing Russian energy, but this only has a minor impact. The EU has announced plans to cut Russian energy imports to zero — but only after several years. The move that would really hit Russia would be to block all its energy exports, via an Iran-style regime that severed its ability to sell to third parties such as India and China. This would dramatically escalate pressure on Russia. It would also push oil prices far higher.

For now, therefore, energy remains the one major loophole in the sanctions regime. Nevertheless, the Russian state faces a deep economic crisis. The ruble has slumped and prices are rising. Unemployment is set to spike as factory closures cause industrial bankruptcies. Living standards will fall far behind inflation, which will accelerate over the coming months. Foreign companies of all types, from BP to McDonald’s, are fleeing.

“I understand that rising prices are seriously hitting people’s incomes,” Putin admitted in a speech on Wednesday. What he didn’t say is that he has neither a plan, nor any resources, to deal with this. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Russian forces have demonstrated incompetent organisation and a horrible command of logistics. Despite much talk of “sanctions-proofing”, the Kremlin’s efforts to protect itself from economic warfare have been just as inept — and, for Russia, disastrous.

It is thought that 600,000 people have fled Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city (population 1.4 million). Mariupol no longer has enough electricity, water, food or medicine for its population of less than half a million. Children are dying of dehydration. Russia has bombed the largest nuclear reactor in Europe and now controls a further two power plants. Two days ago, Chernobyl was shut off from the grid and, with that, the IAEA monitoring systems. The spectre of nuclear disaster hovers.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces and Civilian Territorial Defense have fought with immense courage and skill to defend their homeland. Putin thought Ukrainians would welcome his invaders with cheers. He thought he’d be sitting in Kyiv after 72 hours. He was wrong. So now comes the “scorched earth” strategy. Just as they did in Chechnya and Syria, Russian forces are destroying everything in their path, with no regard for human life. Unless something changes, Kyiv will become the next Aleppo.

Can the West save Ukraine? Make no mistake: we are helping. Putin is paying a military cost he didn’t expect largely thanks to the bravery of Ukrainians, but it’s bravery made possible by the incessant flow of military equipment and training from Europe and the US and, perhaps above all, the UK. But the Russian convoys rumble inexorably on. Ukrainians continue to die. More is needed. The question is: what?

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“I think we have been too slow and too selective,” says Natalie Jaresko, who served as Ukraine’s Minister of Finance from 2014-2016, soon after Russia first invaded, and who was responsible for renegotiating Ukraine’s debt following the Maidan Revolution. “People in Ukraine are dying… More sanctions need to be rolled out with immediate effect.” And they must be broadly applied to both state-owned entities and political leaders — in Belarus as well as Russia.

“They must also comprehensively target Russia’s economic elite and their families,” she continues. “A good place to start would be the top 100 richest Russians as ranked by Forbes. We must put as much pressure as possible on Russia’s elite to force Putin to end this unprovoked slaughter of Ukrainians.”

The West’s financial sanctions are biting. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has already lost access to around two thirds of its reserves, so it’s having a hard time defending the rapidly devaluing ruble. Russians can no longer access hard currency as a result. The removal of certain Russian institutions from the SWIFT payments systems, and the exit of American Express, Mastercard and Visa from the country, are also pummelling the Russian banking system. But Putin continues, nonetheless.

More needs to be done, says Jaresko. We could delist all Russian public entities from our stock markets,  We could divest public pension funds from Russia. We could require all publicly-listed companies to report on any Russia-related activity. “We need to sanction all state-owned banks, not select banks, immediately; and we need to exclude all Russian banks from the SWIFT system”, she tells me.

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Jaresko speaks of hammering Putin financially, but there’s more than one way to pile on the pressure. Yuriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s former Minister of Energy and the CEO of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state gas supplier, sees energy as the way to squeeze Russia. When I call him, I’m told he’s in “a bunker somewhere in Kyiv with a Kalashnikov nearby”. Perhaps not meant to be taken absolutely literally, the comment points to a wider truth: Ukraine’s entire governing infrastructure is now more or less underground.

“We are in charge on securing the supply of gas to Ukraine,” he tells me. “Probably 90% of Ukraine households use it for heating, and we still have minus temperatures at night. If there’s no gas, then it’s a national tragedy. The Russians are deliberately targeting coal supplies and of course they are attacking nuclear power plants — there’s lot of pressure on the energy system.”

But Vitrenko understands that Putin, too, is vulnerable when it comes to energy. Russia is a malignant petrostate that doles out gas to a gasping Europe. This is both its major strength, and a weakness. If you can hit Russia here, you hit it hard.

Vitrenko wants concrete steps to be taken. The first is to set up a mechanism by which money from the sale of oil and gas is put into a dedicated escrow account accessible to the Kremlin only when it withdraws from Ukraine. It’s a system used in dealings with Iran, and Vitrenko believes that Moscow is now more of a rogue state than Tehran.

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But this is not enough. In the medium term, he says, the West needs to do everything it can to halt its reliance on Russian gas and oil. “The US will have to up its output as well as Norway, while Europe needs to start switching to biogas,” he says. Critically, he also wants to see a temporary switch to coal until “we get rid of our dependency or get additional volumes of gas that are not from countries invading other countries”.

I point out that there might be criticism of the environmental impact of reverting to coal. “Trust me, the environmental damage of war is far greater than that of coal,” he says. “But we need to understand that the dependence problem we have is not just about being dependent on fossils fuels but also on Rogue regimes.”

Vitrenko recognises that the initial reaction from the West has been strong, and that it surprised the Kremlin, but he also emphasises that it must last. “It is important that western leaders show that they will not backtrack”, he tells me. “We need to change the calculus of Putin and those around him. It’s clear that they expected a softer reaction from the West, but unless it’s maintained they will be able to find ways around it.”

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Svitlana Zalishchuk, a former MP who now works with Vitrenko, is equally blunt. “Putin is not going to stop,” she says. “He is trapped by his own bad decision-making, if he loses the war in Ukraine, he’s dead politically — he won’t be the president of Russia anymore. He’ll continue so we must, too.

“It’s true people are always afraid of escalation, about starting World War III, but it has already started… We allowed his disinformation, his election interference, his killing of own opposition, the imprisonment of Navalny. We didn’t respond to any of that that which is why invasion came. But now we’re still afraid of escalation.”

Her words shame the West. In 2001 and 2003, we promised to liberate Iraqis and Afghans from tyranny and instead eventually abandoned them to it. In 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, we promised Ukraine that if it gave up the nuclear weapons on its territory after the fall of the USSR, we would guarantee that it didn’t face aggression from the UK, the US or, critically, Russia. But when Russian troops marched into Crimea and then eastern Ukraine, we looked away. We did nothing.

Betrayal, in the movies, is crystal clear. But in reality, few of us are Benedict Arnold or Kim Philby or Ephialtes. We tend to betray not in black and white but in a thousand shades of grey. The averted gaze, the shuffle across the street, the decision to ignore what is plain to all.

This is what we have done to Ukraine and to so many allies over the last 20 years. Right now, the Kremlin is suffering, but it will calculate that in a month or two — when the news cycle has moved on — things may be different. Will bank accounts quietly reopen, along with the Moscow branches of Zara and McDonald’s? We need people to buy our overpriced houses, and pay our libel lawyers and fork out for our school fees.

But we cannot allow it to happen again. If not for Ukraine’s sake, then for ours. As Jaresko concludes, “Ukraine’s survival is the world’s only guarantee that this conflict does not expand into Europe and the wider world. The actions we take now will be worth any short-term cost. Global peace and freedom are at stake.”

After all, what else were they going to do?

The conflict in Eastern Europe has thrown the inherent tensions of digital culture into sharp relief. If the war itself is unfolding too slowly, a public hungry for content will get their fix in other ways, filling the void with viral videos and Ukrainian flag emojis, finger-wagging everyone else for being insufficiently engaged, or sombre, or whatever. We may not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we’re on the front lines of the accessory culture war, fighting our common enemy with the only weapon we’ve got: cancellation.

Russian films have been barred from festivals in Glasgow and Toronto, while Hollywood films from Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros are skipping their Russian release. London’s Royal Opera House has cancelled the Bolshoi Ballet. Russian athletes (and in some cases, those from neighbouring country and ally Belarus) have been suspended from competition by FIFA, the International Skating Union, and the Paralympics. In Milan, a course on Dostoevsky — which perhaps didn’t mention the fact that he spent multiple years in exile for defying the Russian state — was cancelled (albeit reinstated after backlash).

And then there’s the vodka, that famous export now the subject of performative destruction. In American liquor stores and supermarkets, Russian vodka has been removed from displays; in a viral Twitter post, a bartender at a ski resort in Vermont poured a bottle of Stoli down the drain.

Even as reasonable voices beg the general public to maintain a sense of perspective — and as countless articles seek to remind us, “the war is not about you” — the impulse is nevertheless easy to understand. No longer is politics a topic thought to be best avoided in public; these days, your good standing in polite society (not to mention the continued operation of your business) requires your vocal participation in the cause du jour. One is reminded of that moment in mid-2020 when every corporation suddenly felt compelled to announce its support of Black Lives Matter in the most strident possible terms. Neutrality was complicity; silence was violence. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we need to know who our neighbours vote for. We need to know if the local hardware store supports the LGBT community. We need to know Doritos’ deep thoughts about racism and police brutality. We need, we insist, to know how the International Cat Federation feels about Vladimir Putin.

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Because in spite of everything, we remain convinced that this is, somehow, all about us: our sense that we are owed complete political solidarity by the brands we consume, our histrionic sense of betrayal when we don’t get it. The ski resort bartender pouring his Stoli down the drain would probably like to think of himself as a resistance hero; really, he’s more akin to the angry Republicans who set their Nikes on fire when the company hired Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman.

Now, as in 2020, people generally mean well — even if what they’re doing ranges from empty gestures to gross absurdities. As those in charge strategise support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia in the hopes of achieving submission through economic starvation, culture warriors hope that barring Russian athletes and artists from the global stage is an effective secondary strategy. One such argument in The Atlantic suggested that depriving ordinary Russian citizens of the pleasures of seeing their country compete in the Olympics or enjoying the latest MCU blockbuster might provoke them to turn on their leaders — not to mention how much it’ll piss Putin off. (“The decisions to strip him both of his titles as honorary president and ambassador of the International Judo Federation and of his honorary black belt in tae kwon do are particularly personal blows”.)

That’s the optimistic take, of course; the cynical one is to note how very, very reminiscent this argument is of that moment when Left-wing commentators thought they were really sticking it to Donald Trump by making fun of the size of his hands and referring to him as “Drumpf”. You know, right before he was elected the President of the United States.

And even if the symbolic resistance of cultural boycotts is an important piece of the puzzle, then those measures still need to make sense — and here one must note, setting aside the questionable impact of one man in Vermont trashing one bottle of spirits that was already bought and paid for, that Stoli vodka is not actually produced in Russia. The Stoli company is Latvian and owned by the Luxembourg-based SPI beverage group.

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This absurdity reveals the dark side of the current fever: adopting a hostile stance toward anything that sounds Russian is undergirded by a potent mix of ignorance and misdirected aggression that ought not to be indulged. It’s the sort of blunt impulse that led to the harassment of blameless, turban-wearing American Sikhs in the wake of 9/11, a spasm of bigotry against anything that seemed Muslim which we now look back at with shame and chagrin. Even as much remains uncertain, we know that this with-us-or-against-us line of thinking rarely leads anywhere good.

Well-intended or not, imposing guilt by association on ordinary Russians — the classical musicians, the cat owners, the athletes — in the hopes of inspiring mass resistance against Putin is absurd. Demanding that Russian expats denounce their homeland contains ugly shades of McCarthyism (not to mention that speaking out may put their families at risk). And in the case of Russians now trapped in their country, it’s not just morally questionable but unlikely to be effective, given the country’s merciless crackdown on dissenters against the war. It’s easy for westerners to forget that our willingness to protest our government goes hand in hand with the guaranteed freedom to do so; if speaking up came at serious personal risk, many of us would choose to keep quiet (and keep our skulls intact).

It’s also a betrayal of an important tradition, one in which art, sport, and culture are supposed to sustain our sense of shared humanity in times of tragedy, including war. There’s a reason why the famous Christmas ceasefire during World War I was marked by football matches and music — or why, when the Cold War between the then-USSR and the US finally ended, it was thanks in part to the effects of cultural exchange and engagement between the two nations. Of the many videos to emerge from Ukraine in the past week, some of the more hopeful ones show Russian prisoners being offered bread, tea, and a chance to call their parents.

Yes, these isolated feel-good stories pale in comparison to the wide-ranging and countless horrors of war, but the sentiment they contain is anything but cheap: embedded in each of these moments is a broader perspective, the understanding that we all still have to share a planet when the fighting is done. To isolate, alienate, and demonise those on the other side may satisfy one’s sense of purpose in the moment, but it also creates rifts with our neighbours that are not easily fixed.

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Meanwhile, Americans of all people should understand that the citizens of a country cannot be expected to shoulder the guilt of their president’s misdeeds. The character of an entire people is not defined by the worst whims of its most authoritarian lunatic. But here, too, our perspective is skewed: we are too used to being able to criticise, insult and openly rail against our political leaders. We are too used to the meaningless performative bluster of American politics. We are, in short, so used to culture wars that we’ve forgotten that real wars have different stakes and are not won by rhetoric — and that if the US decided to truly involve itself in this conflict, a victory would not be measured by how much we managed to hurt Putin’s feelings.

In the meantime, punishing a bunch of figure skaters, cats, filmmakers, and the corpse of Fyodor Dostoevsky for Vladimir Putin’s warmongering is the emptiest of endeavours, like painting half your face blue and booing your favourite football team’s rivals from the safety of your living room. But nobody will emerge at the end of this conflict to hand out awards for team spirit; nobody will congratulate you for all the vodka you didn’t drink. Nobody will ask you, “What did you do during the war?”, when the war had nothing to do with you. And when someone says, “We cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing”, the truth is: yes, you can. Better a witness than a self-involved keyboard warrior. Better to watch than turn away.

To succeed, sanctions must not only impose economic costs — they must also change the political behaviour of target governments. Neither is at all straightforward.

As the past week has shown, designing sanctions that will harm Russia but not other European economies is fiendishly difficult. So far, only modest measures have been imposed: primarily asset freezes and exclusion from the Swift payments system for some banks; asset seizures and travel bans for some elites and oligarchs; and limits on Aeroflot flights. None of these will cripple Russia’s economy, despite fanciful claims by Western leaders.

The proposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank may cut much deeper. Exactly how far these will go is not yet clear. But freezing Russia’s overseas currency reserves will make it harder for the central bank to defend the value of the rouble, and to supply foreign exchange for commercial banks. This is unlikely to collapse the economy, as some advocates suggest, but it could have significant and far-reaching consequences, including runs on Russian banks and impediments to foreign trade.

However, it’s precisely the threat to trade that will probably lead Western governments to avoid a total freeze — limiting Russia’s access to foreign exchange, but not severing it entirely. The reason is simple: Russia is not a minor economy. Western countries, firms and banks do a lot of business with Russia. Wide-ranging sanctions will naturally have blowback. This is why tougher measures will be difficult, if not impossible, to impose.

The real “nuclear” option would be to embargo Russia’s energy exports, which comprise over half of Russia’s total exports. This would inflict serious damage. But, given that Europe relies on Russia for about a quarter of its oil and over a third of its gas, it would also spur massive inflation and induce economic recession in the West. Prices have already spiked due to the conflict, which will further harm households reeling from record-high energy prices. It’s telling, for example, that Germany has “de-certified” the Nordstream-2 pipeline, but not the pipelines through which it receives existing supplies.

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Likewise, Western governments appear unable to agree on completely blocking Russia from Swift, because this would create difficulties for Russian and Western banks alike. Without Swift, how would Germany pay for Russian gas? And, if it cannot pay, would the gas keep flowing? How would the many other Western businesses working in or dealing with Russia make payments? For the same reason, although some sectors of the Russian economy, such as chemicals and automobiles, rely on imported hi-tech Western components, so far, export restrictions remain limited, for fear of damaging Western firms.

Despite their belligerent rhetoric, Western leaders are wary of creating more problems for economies already struggling to recover from the deep recessions caused by their Covid-19 lockdowns. They are quietly carving out even non-critical economic sectors, such as luxury goods and diamond exports, from the sanction regime. It is hard to avoid the impression that, having blundered into confrontation with Russia, Western governments are now realising they have very limited options, and remain reluctant to put their money where their mouths are.

However, even if the West can find ways to inflict serious economic damage on Russia, that still does not mean sanctions will “work”. To be truly effective, they must also change the Russian government’s behaviour. And this is where the logic of sanctions often breaks down. It is remarkably rare for Western policymakers to explain — or even consider — exactly how “economic pain” is supposed to translate into “political gain”. And the prospects in this particular case do not look promising.

The fundamental problem is that sanctions are based on a dubious understanding of human behaviour. They are a quintessentially liberal instrument, resting on the assumption that every man has his price: if I impose economic costs on you, you will revise the cost-benefit analysis of your course of action, and change your behaviour accordingly.

In the real world, however, many regimes and their supporters are willing to endure colossal economic costs to pursue their political and security goals. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party regime preferred to see Iraq’s economy and society destroyed rather than relinquish power. Fidel Castro’s regime withstood a punishing US embargo for decades. Iran has suffered serious economic harm under Western sanctions without relinquishing its nuclear programme.

What are Putin’s goals in Ukraine? The Russian government has made it clear since the early Noughties that it cannot tolerate the eastward expansion of Nato, considering it a serious threat to Russian security. Its invasion of Georgia in 2008, and its attacks on Ukraine in 2014, long ago demonstrated the Kremlin’s determination to prevent neighbouring countries falling into the Western orbit, even at the cost of international isolation and punitive sanctions. One does not need to sympathise with Putin at all to recognise that Russia’s bank balance is not his primary consideration.

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If Putin will not put economic costs ahead of his security goals, how else might sanctions work? Classically, comprehensive embargoes seemed to be guided by a “naïve theory” of sanctions, whereby economic suffering is expected to compel the population to rise up against their wicked leaders. But this rarely, if ever, happens. If anything, economic immiseration tends to fragment and weaken the population, who become absorbed by the struggle to subsist and more reliant on government help — as seen in Iraq.

Targeted sanctions work on an equally naïve basis, assuming that political leaders and their business cronies are completely autonomous from the people, such that manipulating their personal wealth will convince them to change course. In truth, political leaders always represent some broader set of forces in their regime and wider society. Their policies reflect that underlying coalition. If they change course, they will have to answer to their supporters.

Vladimir Putin is a powerful and quasi-authoritarian leader, but he is not autonomous from Russian society. His rise reflects a broadly-based nationalist backlash against the consequences of neoliberal “shock therapy” practised on Russia by the International Monetary Fund after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under the pro-Western President Yeltsin, the public wealth built up under communism was pillaged by oligarchs, while the Russian people suffered astonishing levels of deprivation. In the decade to 1998, GDP fell by 45%, mortality increased by 50%, government revenues had nearly halved, and crime had doubled.

Putin rose to power by promising to halt and reverse Russia’s national decline. In his first seven years in office, real wages doubled (albeit from a low base). Using soaring oil revenues, Putin stabilised the economy and paid off foreign debt, reasserting Russia’s sovereignty. He brought the oligarchs to heel, jailing or exiling anyone who would not recognise the state’s supremacy. And he restored stability and a measure of national pride to an exhausted and demoralised people. His regime, centred on a network of siloviki (security and military officials) and managers of state-owned enterprises, has proven politically robust and durable — a state within the state.

This is important not to praise or exonerate Putin, but to understand why his popularity has remained high, even under sanctions. Experimental research suggests that Russia’s economic decline since 2014 — mostly caused by declining oil prices, though compounded by sanctions — has cost Putin some support. But it has been more than compensated for by an upsurge in nationalist backing. Putin’s approval rating increased from 65% in January 2014 to 86% in April 2014, following the annexation of Crimea. It remained above 80% for the next two years before returning to the high 60s.

Today, a large majority of Russians blame the West for the crisis in Ukraine, while two-thirds have little or no concern about sanctions. Putin’s regime may have persecuted opposition figures, curbed dissent, and restricted electoral competition — but, despite such authoritarian measures, he retains widespread support. Western leaders could only dream of his approval ratings: support for Biden stands at 42%, for Macron, 40%, and, for Boris Johnson, just 25%.

Nor is there much sign of political fracture within the regime that sanctions could exploit. Putin’s ability to publicly humiliate his spy chief, who bodged his lines at the televised, stage-managed security council meeting prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggests he feels secure and confident. The overwhelming vote in the Duma of 400 to zero in favour of recognising the breakaway “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk suggests either broad elite consensus or an unwillingness to openly defy the Kremlin. Exactly how the (modest) economic pain caused by sanctions is meant to generate political gain is therefore hard to discern.

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All too often, sanctions are a comforting but dangerous illusion: they are alluring because they seem to provide an effective option between war and words. When diplomacy seems to fail, and states are unwilling to risk war, something else is needed — and that something is sanctions. But just because something must be done does not mean that this “something” is going to work. Moreover, it is all too easy to forget that embargoes are a weapon of war, often devastating target populations and escalating conflicts, rather than peacefully resolving them. In response to the latest sanctions, Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. It seems unlikely that he would deploy them in response to banking sanctions. But this is a reminder of that the stakes are incredibly high.

Ultimately, even if sanctions do bite, we need to ask: what is the endgame? Sanctions are at best a means to an end, and surely the desired end is lasting peace in Eastern Europe. And one does not need to have any sympathy whatsoever with the Putin regime to believe that this can only be achieved by reckoning with core Russian interests.

Like it or not, powerful states have the capacity to inflict serious harm on weaker ones — just ask the Serbs, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians on the receiving end of the Nato powers’ tender mercies. If Russia is dissatisfied, it clearly has the power to upset the existing order by force. The only way to prevent this is to compromise with Russia’s concerns, or deploy overwhelming force to deter it from using its military power. The West has done neither, dismissing Putin’s demands to establish a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Nato, while failing to deter him from using force to achieve his objectives.

The only way out of this disaster is a negotiated settlement, which will require Nato to reckon with Russian interests, and preserve Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty within a framework of international neutrality. For the brutal reality is this: sanctions are unlikely to force Russia out of Ukraine, and the West is unwilling to be drawn directly into battle with a nuclear-armed state. Unless a diplomatic solution can be found, sanctions are likely to be merely part of a grinding proxy war along the lines of the brutal and horrific conflict in Syria.

The people of Ukraine have already suffered too much. Sanctions won’t save them — they may only make their misery worse.

The former event brought the country’s warring white tribes together in a wary equilibrium of mutual benefit which lasted through more than seven decades of economic growth and modernisation. The latter cobbled together all the nation’s tribes — black, white, Asian and mixed-race — into a fragile comity that, despite a weakening State, has yet somehow survived its first quarter century; frayed, hissy and bowed, to be sure, but somehow miraculously still alive.

The Act of Union was forged less than a decade after a bitter war, described either as a noble, imperial mission, or one of Africa’s great freedom struggles, depending on which side of the kopje one sat. The critical fault-lines at the National Convention called to give form to a united South Africa were between a Cape liberal vision of South Africanism, which included a very limited form of “Native” representation in Parliament, and a bleaker, exclusionary view by the Boer Transvaal and Orange Free State delegates. English-speaking Natal, from which many of the imperial combatants had come, was also exclusionary: it wanted to exclude itself from Union altogether.

The Boer approach won and thus was early laid the contours of the apartheid state which, in various guises, survived two World Wars, The Great Depression, two fringe Afrikaner rebellions and a bruising white national strike in 1922 which was eventually suppressed, literally, by artillery fire. It also survived decolonisation, international sanctions, two decades of simmering internal rebellions, two States of Emergency and a 15-year-long defensive wars along the borders of Angola and Mozambique which consumed huge amounts of national resource and the time, although not many of the lives, of my generation of young white males.

How on earth did it hold together?

A healthy devolution of power to provincial level helped mollify Cape Liberals and “Natal Stand” reactionaries, as did a mutual respect for language, culture and religion. International sanctions also solidified a sense of unity: it is amazing what indiscriminate vilification can do to engender a sense of common purpose amongst otherwise diverse people.

But the real glue, despite all challenges, was the trajectory of the country towards modernisation, economic growth, rising employment in all sectors, burgeoning physical infrastructure and growing national prosperity, although grievously unequally distributed. Money, the balm to nearly all wounds, softened the edge of communal antagonism between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites; there was a quantum improvement in living standards across the board, initially for whites and then increasingly for other marginalised groups.

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South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

International sanctions in the Eighties spurred a surge in internal industrial manufacturing and high tech development from which Afrikaners were disproportionately the winners. Sanctions thus won not by making white South Africans poorer, as liberals predicted, but by making Afrikaners richer and more amenable to the tides of history.  This was not the generation of 1948 that brought the Afrikaner’s National Party and Grand Apartheid to power. This was an educated, richer, more cosmopolitan generation which accepted the absurdity of a small racial minority trying to dominate a much larger, restless and offended majority. The Afrikaners started dealing for an inclusive future South Africanism, a broadened and modernised Cape vision if you will, that would bring stability and profit.

In the early Nineties arose the perfect confluence of event, circumstance and personality.  The border wars ended with the advent of Glastnost and the end of superpower meddling in the region: everybody went home. The internal rebellions were snuffed out by two brutal States of Emergency during which the State had assumed virtually limitless powers of arrest, detention and censorship. Stellar political leadership arose in the opposing camps. The two most important western leaders, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, threw their weight behind the project.

It succeeded in a way it could never have done now. Catapult this moment forward to today and the African National Congress would be incited to up the ante by Western governments and a feral social media: armed resistance groups would be equipped and trained to “equalise” forces, human rights groups would have piled into the fray, white politicians would have been threatened with the Court of International Justice and progressives would have sought to virtue-signal the people of southern Africa into oblivion. Whites, like the Israelis, would have gone back to the trenches.

It never happened. Three years of intense negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa brought a genuinely and proudly homegrown solution: no local leaders being forced with gritted teeth to shake hands before some benign United States President here.

But this new Constitution, celebrating its 25th anniversary last Friday, differed from its original version in significant ways. And therein lay its strengths and its weaknesses. Its legacy, a sorely tried one, now lies intimately connected to the central question of whether South Africa will reemerge as a modern state.

The first change was a major concentration of power at the central level: the powers of the nine newly created provincial units — ironically created more on a geo-tribal basis than the old four provinces had ever been — are vestigial. When centralised systems do not work, through State weakness or lack of central political coherence and mission, as in contemporary South Africa, it creates damaging centrifugal forces throughout the polity.

A recent survey of Western Cape residents showed half wished to cede from South Africa. In the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu Natal, a low-level insurgency has been underway for two years, culminating in the bloody July Troubles for which the instigators have not yet been caught. The only thing stopping a renewed 1910-type Natal Stand is the fact that the rebels are a discredited faction of the ruling party with whom nobody wants to associate.

So bad is the collapse of the centre, that more than 60% of South African voters in a recent poll said they want a committee to run the country, if only they would deliver jobs, security and services.

The new constitution also eschewed the attempts by the then ruling whites-only National Party to entrench “group rights”, by which they meant race vetoes. Faith was instead placed in a durable constitution embedding individual rights and an impeccable Constitutional Court to defend those rights.

The Constitution and the Court has worked just fine for 25 years: the ruling party, on the other hand, has not. Massive public sector incompetence and corruption has crippled state and para-state entities; eroded confidence across the board in institutions (particularly criminal justice ones); forced a skills exodus and a foreign capital investment hiatus and driven unemployment: another benchmark in joblessness was reached last week when it officially topped 34.4 % and a heart-stopping 66.5% for those between 15 and 24 years old.

The minorities, meanwhile, are being systematically discriminated against by statute in terms of job opportunities, study grants, internships and other opportunities, a process in which craven corporates seek to outbid each other. Many of the victims were born long after apartheid. Many of the beneficiaries, meanwhile, are children of wealthy black parents; they also never knew apartheid nor indeed poverty.

Under those circumstances, it is not surprising that individuals are falling back on the oldest safe zone redoubts: family, community, tribe. Last month’s local government elections saw a significant drop in the support of the ruling ANC and surges of support for the extremist black socialist and conservative Afrikaans-speaking white and coloured parties. Independent candidates representing ethnic neighbourhoods did well.

So where should hope be sought, on this 25th anniversary of the new democracy’s founding document?

Two anecdotes and a comment.

One: in the run-up to the first democratic election, the African National Congress and members of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party engaged in a midday shoot-out in the centre of Johannesburg.

I found shelter behind an armoured personnel carrier with a young rifleman from a Cape regiment.

“So what do you think?,” I asked the soldier.

“Sucks”, he said, “and I haven‘t even had my fucking breakfast.”

So, it is a tough and resilient nation, bomb-proof, that has survived a thousand predictions of Armageddon.

Two: a few months ago I was invited to a Founder’s Day celebration at my once all-white, all-boy state school. The Head Prefect was white, her deputy Indian and the rugby captain black. And we won the memorial match. If it took 80 years for the white tribes to come up with the current constitution, perhaps we need to be patient a bit longer for the younger generations to have a shot.

And lastly. The toxic ruling party that has done such damage for so long is in free fall, its internal organisation is in a shambles; so toxic is it that not one of the major parties would enter coalitions to save its control of the country’s major metro’s.

Only in Ethekwini, largest metro in KwaZulu Natal, with its former Mayor and 16 councillors on bail for alleged fraud, did the ruling party hold on by its fingertips by allying with a tiny party sympathetic to the faction in the ANC’s own ranks that instigated the July Troubles. But that is the Natal Stand.

Last week, 26 ANC Parliamentarians broke ranks and voted against a constitutional amendment that would have allowed seizure of land without compensation. Small green shoots, perhaps, but potentially heralding the beginning of a seismic re-alignment in South African politics that could see a split in the ruling party and the emergence of a coalition of modernist parties committed to turning back, after so many wasted years, the country’s race to irrelevance.

Whether we like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Taliban now preside over a country devastated by decades of conflict: its new government cannot rely on the structures in place, which have been crippled by the abrupt departure of so many educated and trained managers and professionals.

Public safety, always hazardous in the tumultuous days after a major transition, needs intense policing and patrolling. Isis remains a huge threat, while the new regime’s young Taliban foot soldiers — born in remote villages, raised on nothing but combat and now amazed to find themselves in the shining metropolis of Kabul — have to be closely monitored.

Meanwhile, the disruption to trade is causing massive inflation and price increases for basic goods. A long drought has led to a poor harvest. Covid is still rampant. Winter is coming and the poor — 72% of the population, according to the UN — will look to the Government to provide them with firewood and food.

But good news: Afghanistan has money! The country has $9 billion in financial assets, of which $7 billion are in US banks and $2 billion are deposited in Europe. This is because Afghan banks traditionally keep the bulk of their funds in foreign financial institutions, drawing on them monthly for ongoing liquidity. Then there is the aid money already set aside for Afghanistan. The World Bank administers a Trust Fund for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was supposed to pay $800 million this year, while the IMF has around $400 million designated for Afghanistan.

There’s just one problem: on the orders of the US government, all this cash has been frozen.

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The truth about Afghan women

By Cheryl Benard

And that’s not all. So much money has been ferried out of the country in recent years by corrupt officials that there is now a cash shortage. People can only withdraw a small portion of their savings. The country can’t print new bills to replace what was stolen, because the country’s currency is printed by a European company that also falls under US sanctions. It’s economic strangulation.

America likes to give names to its overseas efforts. The Afghan venture was called Operation Enduring Freedom until 2015, and Freedom’s Sentinel thereafter. What shall we call this new phase? Operation Enduring Anger, perhaps. That, after all, is what US military officers, and many in the policy community, are: very angry. It’s a blow for a superpower to have to acknowledge that it could not gain mastery over 90,000 unshaved, minimally equipped fighters, and wasted $2 trillion dollars in the process. It’s embarrassing.

But we should save our empathy for the Afghan people. Their country has been in unrelenting continuous war for more than 40 years. With 70% of its population under the age of 25, most people alive in Afghanistan have never experienced peace. We may not like their new government. But their last leaders were awful in a different way: more educated, yes, and savvier — but they used those attributes to pad their bank accounts in the UAE.

The Taliban government prior to that made women wear burqas and beat men if their beard was too short and executed adulterers in the sports stadium. Before that was a civil war and before that a proxy superpower conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. If the Taliban refrain from their previous behaviour – which so far they have largely been careful to do – and if they honour their promises to reopen girls schools, clamp down on terrorism and not persecute their former enemies, they could turn out to be Best in Show.

Granted, the return of the Taliban is not the solution the US had hoped for: to create a beautiful, free and democratic Afghanistan that would be rich on the basis of its mineral wealth. Yet that project stalled. The Taliban reappeared, won recruits, took territory, inch by inch, year by year. Until 2021, when, at long last, the US faced the facts. They pulled out their military and their diplomats and their contractors, closed the embassy and departed, taking with them nearly 200,000 local staff and supporters and accidental stowaways in a sloppy and casualty-riddled evacuation.

For punctuation, they launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The US Inspector General investigated the “incident” and described it as an “honest mistake”. The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. That’s a lot of mistakes.

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Where are the good war reporters?

By Justin Webb

But now that we’re out, and winter has arrived, Afghanistan is braced for things to get worse. Last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told the BBC’s John Simpson that the situation “is as bad as you possibly can imagine: 95% of the people don’t have enough food, and now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.”

For his part, Simpson, a veteran reporter who has reported from 120 countries and 30 war zones, broke down on BBC Radio 4’s Today program as he described the plight of an Afghan mother-of-seven facing famine. “I came across a woman whose name is Fatima and she’s a widow. She’s got seven kids – five girls and two boys – and they’re grindingly poor already,” he said. “She used to make money by weeding the area for a local farmer. He can’t pay her now because he’s not able to grow the crop that he was growing. She’s got no money – she’s having to beg for fuel to make a fire and beg for flour which used to be delivered under the old government before the Taliban came in.”

Widows. Little girls. Hell on earth. Afghanistan is clearly in trouble. But let’s step back for just one moment. This woman used to work for a farmer, who used to farm, but now she doesn’t because he can’t — and it’s not because the Taliban “ascended” to power. It’s because we are sitting on their country’s money and won’t let go. It’s because we, in our determination to starve the Taliban, are starving this widow and her seven children. And 40 million others like them. Operation Mind-blowing Hypocrisy.

Now we think we have the solution: sure, we just left, but now we’re going right back in. To prevent the looming humanitarian crisis. That we made.

So money can now go into Afghanistan — as long as it is administered and dispensed by international organisations, companies and agencies. That means international staff with their Western salaries and entourage of drivers and guards and fixers and translators. That means rented houses and offices surrounded by hired security, and fleets of armoured cars and international conferences that add up to an overhead that consumes 60% or more of the total funds.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And this will never end, because humanitarian aid does not relate to economic development. Afghanistan, in effect, is being positioned as a permanent welfare state. Perhaps, then, this is not about hungry Afghan children after all. Perhaps this about us — our contractors and the huge aid and development machinery that thrived in the country and now sees a way back in.

But we have to let go. We left. That was our decision. Now let’s leave them in peace. Give them their money. It’s all very well to tell them we won’t trade with them, and their government won’t be recognised, if they violate international law and prevailing international standards of human and women’s rights. And yes, it is regrettable that there are no women in their cabinet. But the same is true in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. No one is freezing their assets, and they are all comfortably seated in the UN.

For Afghanistan to prosper, we need to stop telling them what to do and how to do it. They are not on our continent or in our cultural sphere. They have not gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolutions, or any of the other transformative steps that made the modern West. But they shouldn’t be punished for that. As we did, they too must find their path. And, in the meantime, we shouldn’t put boulders in their way.

The US Congress passed an Act in 2012 that legislated for asset freezes and travel bans abroad but at the time our government was having none of it and blocked the idea: we cared only about raking in cash, morals be damned. Now that MP, Dominic Raab, is Foreign Secretary and his old initiative is being implemented: sanctions have been imposed against individuals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and North Korea. As the Government scrambles around to define ‘Global Britain’, could “defender of human rights” be part of the narrative?

In a sense this is a return to an older British image. During the Cold War the UK combined economic, cultural and political achievements to forge a greater narrative about our superior rights and freedoms: Parliamentary debates, Amnesty International, the BBC, the Beatles and the City of London were all part of one great story of ‘freedom’, in contrast to the dour state-officiated five-year plans, politburo diktat, censorship and food shortages of the USSR. In the following decades the talk of political freedoms were gradually relegated to the little leagues of foreign policy, and economic links became pre-eminent as the UK, or a few postcodes in London at least, became the capital of globalisation. Officials would sometimes mumble something about how economic integration would lead to authoritarian regimes becoming ‘more like us’ and adopting political freedoms, but if anyone ever really thought that true it now seems laughable.

Quite the opposite. When London gleefully took the money of kleptocrats and human rights abusers the cynical spin masters of the Kremlin and beyond could chortle and point. Instead of becoming ‘like us’ it showed that all that time we were just the same as them.

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What Donald Trump shares with Don Giovanni

By Peter Pomerantsev

If, and it’s a big if, the Magnitsky Act is implemented effectively it could signal a revival of standing up for political freedoms (or at least a little more than Brussels, which could be a motivation in and of itself). But what does it mean to speak up for human rights today? We live in a world where much of the Cold War language of ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ has been hacked, twisted and corrupted. Far-right extremists in Europe, for example, now argue they want to get rid of all Muslims from the continent to defend our ‘liberal’ traditions and women’s rights.

Or take my specialist subject: media and propaganda. It used to be easy to define a democratic information environment as opposed to a dictatorship’s: we had freedom of speech as opposed to censorship; pluralism as opposed the state’s single voice. These days it’s much harder to tell the difference. From Mexico to Manila, Moscow to DC politicians have learnt to flood the zone with so much information and disinformation people become confused, despair of telling fact from fiction.

In very different political systems cyber militias and troll farms are used to drown out dissenting voices, accusing them of being ‘fake news’ or ‘enemies of the people’, a sort of censorship through noise. And when critical journalists or opposition politicians complain of coming under attack from these online mobs, the reply from the government is cynical but crafty: ‘These online accounts are just exercising their freedom of speech! Isn’t that what democracy is all about? It’s now you, the so-called democrats, who want censorship!” And in a sense they’re right. There’s nothing in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about ‘disinformation’ being illegal; it states only that people should have the right to give and receive information.

The first regulatory proposals that democracies have come up with to deal with the deluge of disinformation is to try to pass laws to suppress what the UK Online Harms White Paper calls ‘legal but harmful speech’, a new category that includes ‘disinformation’. These proposals have appalled human rights groups: creating new, vague, and often subjective types of speech to control is exactly the sort of thing authoritarian regimes do. This is a solution that delights the Putins and Xis of this world, who are already conjuring up ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ laws that allow them to arrest anyone they care to. In trying to save democracy from disinformation, we risk boosting authoritarians.

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Let's scrap the Human Rights Act

By John Gray

For the past two years I’ve been part of a transatlantic group of policymakers, academics and tech types that’s been trying to find a way of imagining what an internet in line with human rights could look like — and which different democracies could agree on. Do you really have to sacrifice freedoms to save democracy? What does freedom of speech mean in an age of bots, trolls and cyborgs?

At the start it looked like we could never find common ground: American free speech fundamentalists argued that any control on content was authoritarian; people who’ve experienced how actual authoritarians twist freedom of speech to crush any critical voices despaired. But after much debate a consensus began to emerge. We began to think about ‘disinformation’ not just as a type of content, but as a type of deceptive behaviour.

The problem with the cyber militias and troll farms is not so much individual pieces of content they post, but the way they distribute them en masse in a way that looks organic, as if it’s real citizens exercising their freedom of speech, when in reality these are hidden, coordinated campaigns from a single source.

This sort of mass, inauthentic campaign actually takes away people’s right to receive information about its origins, to understand how the information environment around them is shaped. I’m not talking about individual anonymity — that’s an important right — but the warping of reality where what seems to be one person saying something online is actually part of a network of accounts all saying the same thing, at the same time, according to lines passed down from a hidden manipulator.

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America is losing the information war

By Nina jankowicz

This sort of ‘viral deception’, as we began to call it, is the sort of behaviour that can be regulated against. And most importantly this is in the spirit of Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights: it’s a demand for more information, not less. As David Kaye, the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and one of the members of our group said:

“Another way to conceptualise the impact and purpose of viral deception is as a tool to interfere with the individual’s right to information. Coordinated amplification…interferes with the individual’s right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Conceived this way, it seems to me that solutions could be aimed at enhancing individual access to information rather than merely protecting against public harm.”

Ultimately, what does it mean to be a democratic citizen online? It should mean understanding who is targeting content at you and how. Which of your own data is being used to target you and why. Whether the content you see from, shall we say, a political campaign is the same content your neighbour sees. It should mean public oversight of algorithms so we understand why we see one thing online and not another.

We live in a strange paradox: on the one hand there’s more content than ever before and less censorship, even in authoritarian countries. But there is a new form of censorship: we have no idea how the information environment around us is shaped. We are like Caliban on Prospero’s island, surrounded by digital weather and weird sounds that drive us into social media swells of panics and hysterias, but which we cannot make sense of because it is all dictated from behind a cloak. This cloak needs to be ripped away. And this, of course, is the sort of transparency dictatorships don’t want: the rulers of Beijing and Moscow don’t want their citizens to know how they monitor and manipulate their data; how they rig algorithms so people see what they want them to see.

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The war against objectivity

By James Bloodworth

The UK could take the lead in formulating what a democratic information environment is in the 21st century. We have already committed to making media freedom one of the aims of our foreign policy (with Amal Clooney fronting our campaign no less), but to be relevant in the media debate now you need to coordinate democracies on how to define freedom in the new digital space too.

There’s a security aspect to this also. Until we define the democratic standards of online behaviour, we can’t nail what’s so wrong with hostile states, such as Russia but also increasingly China and Iran, using covert, digital campaigns to influence our politics and interests — whether that’s to attack the Magnitsky Act, subvert the credibility of our elections or destabilise our friends in Ukraine. If we had even the simplest rules around transparency of coordinated campaigns, we would have a legal and philosophical platform to argue that Russia’s use of non-transparent bots and trolls and Facebook groups in the UK is an offence. At the moment there’s little difference in how domestic disinformation works and how foreign adversaries wage it.

But that’s always been the twist in promoting your ‘global’ image: it reverberates back home. In the Cold War the US was partly spurred on to pass civil rights legislation because its racist laws were being hammered by Soviet propaganda, undermining the US foreign policy narrative as the world’s defender of universal freedoms.

In today’s weirdly interconnected world the outer and the inner are more intertwined than ever. Dominic Raab may sit in the Foreign Office, but he’s defining the most domestic and internal of agendas.