A third report encompassing their suggestions and new initiatives is underway, but in this brief to our membership I point out the main themes.
Ukrainian diplomats are conferring with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) with the terminology shifting to the Decolonization of the Russian Federation. In pushing the regions across Russia to supply soldiers, Putin has violated his social compact of two decades with his subjects “We let you steal from us and we don’t interfere in politics, but you leave us alone”. Furthermore, the theft by the oligarchs is so severe that the 100 or so billionaires of Russia own half of everything. It takes six years of an average salary of 53,000 Rubles to buy a new Zhiguli (Lada). A doctor earns the average salary only by working two or even three jobs and a nurse is too tired to work more than one job, thus settling for about 28,000 rubles. Security officers and loans officers at banks earn more than doctors. The bottom line is that the regions of Russia from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok are fed up with being exploited by Moscow, hence protests and failure to send in taxes are already occurring, meaning disintegration of Russia is already underway.
First recommendation will be to work with local leaders to achieve the decolonization. The work currently being done is documenting the needs and aspirations of 37 ethnic groups across the five language families of Russia and then linking this with the various separation movements, already presented in the first two reports. This is in line with OSCE thinking. A hands off approach could lead to chaos and to safeguard custody of the nuclear stockpile; therefore, reaching out to progressive leaders is necessary.
The second issue is not so obvious. That Russia’s landscape, rivers and lakes are polluted is well known, but what is underappreciated is the effect on the tundra, taiga and Arctic. Practically all of Russia’s rivers run south to north, into the Arctic. The polar icepack is melting far faster on the Russian side than anywhere else, because Russia’s time honored environmental policy remains “let’s get rich first, we can clean up the mess later.” The permafrost of the tundra-taiga is melting and it extends farther south than people think, right to the Mongolian border. Softening of the permafrost has led to collapsing bridges, cracking and leakage of fuel storage tanks and cracking of building foundations (everything is on piles driven into the permafrost) across Siberia from the Urals to Kamchatka (Siberia is 13 million square kilometres, the Urals to St. Petersburg is only 4.3 m sq km; Canada is 9.9 m sq km).
It gets worse, melting permafrost releases methane gas which has been feeding wildfires across vast expanses of Siberia. Also released will be various as yet unknown viral and bacterial agents. Finally, Russian policy intends to let the Arctic icepack continue melting in order develop a Northern Sea Route across the north, to expand shipping routes from Norilsk to the Bering Sea. This will come at the expense of the planet. Russia does not have the resources, or the intent, to address the methane fed wildfires, fix their collapsing communities, or combat the new viral agents.
The second recommendation has to be to secure the Arctic creating a conservation zone. This is not the only existential threat exposed by the war between democracy and autocracy.
We get a nightly refrain of too many people at the Mexican border. At this writing there are 101 million people in displaced persons camps, the largest in the huge swaths of Central Africa, the second in Syria, the third in Poland, the fourth in Venezuela.
Recommendation three is dealing with the refugee crises. What is under-appreciated is that the flows of desperate people, coming up Central America to Mexico, Africans crossing the Mediterranean, the persecuted from the Middle East coming through Turkey or Greece will only increase if we don’t devote resources to alleviating the persecution and poverty in their homelands.
It gets worse, inequality of wealth has reached the point where 1/3 of the world’s population is hungry and 828 million are on the edge of starvation according to the UN World Food Programme.
Recommendation four will be dealing with economic inequalities. Hungry children don’t learn at school and hungry adults are prone to becoming ill and carrying bugs worse than Covid. We got off lucky with Covid because agents such as Ebola are more lethal. The best way to preventing future pandemics is dealing with economic inequalities through fairer taxation policies and closing tax havens.
The third area is securing a lasting peace once hostilities end and this means getting Ukraine rebuilt and setting up a Special Tribunal to deal with Putin and his cabal of about 20 decision-makers in Russia, which is in line with OSCE thinking but not everyone agrees. There are three camps.
1) The Macron camp supported by Kissinger is to appease Putin and get back to business as usual. Some will argue the Scholz also belongs to this camp, but German voters forced him to adopt a middle position, camp 3.
2) The Ukrainian camp, supported by the US, Britain, Poland, and all three Baltic Countries, insists on holding Russia responsible and degrading Russian military capabilities.
3) The middle camp led by Germany supports a get what we can out of Russia and set up some form of NATO guarantee for Ukraine.
Recommendation five will reject the appeasement camp and produce alternatives for the German approach and the Ukrainian approach. Under no circumstances will the report suggest an imposed solution on Ukraine.
Whatever is arrived at cannot leave a dictatorship in place in Russia because among the world’s superpowers, dictatorships would outnumber the sole democracy two to one and this means we would have to maintain high levels of military expenditures. Europe would become an armed camp to hold off Russia and the Pacific would have to be beefed up to protect all those democracies. If we had to spend so much on defense, we could not solve global warming (Recommendation two) we could not deal with the migrant crisis (Recommendation three) and we could not address world hunger (Recommendation four). According to Freedom House, democracies have been in decline every year since 2005.
We can no longer make historical mistakes. The One China policy of Nixon was a mistake, eventually China would have come into the WTO and accepted the presence of Taiwan. We must learn when to stand firm. This report does conclude on a positive note. The EU is beginning to increase their contributions to Ukraine.
Slava Ukraini!
