After ten years of war, and two years of all-out invasion
Russia is turning the parts of Ukraine it has occupied into a giant military buffer zone, from which further assaults may be launched, the Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG) has warned.
The expansion of military combat, training and transport infrastructure, and the forced mobilisation of local men, was documented in a recent report by the group, which champions labour and civil rights in the occupied areas.
While military institutions multiply, industry across the occupied territories stagnates. Russian passports are forced on young and old, imperial dogma on school pupils. A reign of terror continues against all forms of protest.
Here I try to outline the situation in the occupied areas, as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine goes into its third year, with links to more sources. (See Note at the end for a reminder of the territories occupied.)
Militarisation
□ The establishment of four new military units in occupied parts of Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya regions.
□ The expansion of paramilitary higher education institutions, including the setting-up last year of a branch of the Nakhimov Naval School in Mariupol, the southern Ukrainian city where thousands of civilians were killed by Russian military action in 2022.
We have discussed this proposal in the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition, and now invite organisations, groups and individuals to join us in this initiative. We hope to have a get-together on this early in 2024. To indicate interest, please write to stopsilvertowntn[at]gmail.com.
Aim
Free public transport can help tackle climate change globally, and air pollution locally, while supporting households struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. Transport should be provided as a service, just as health, education and public parks are.
The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition on a trade union march to keep rail ticket offices open, in September
On climate, London is falling behind its own weak targets, and even further behind targets worked out by climate scientists. The transport sector is the city’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the built environment, and the sector that has made the least progress in cutting fossil fuel use over the last twenty years.
Drastic, demonstrative action is needed. Free public transport, implemented together with improvements to services, investment in active travel and ending subsidies to car drivers and the haulage industry, can help rapidly to cut the number of vehicles on the road. We need to make public transport Londoners’ first choice for getting around: make it enjoyable. This is the best way to reduce emissions.
Cutting down road traffic is also the best way to tackle air pollution that kills thousands of Londoners each year.
Two trade union leaders from the giant Naftan oil refinery in Belarus were arrested on Friday, human rights organisations said.
Olga Britikova addressing a mass meeting at the Naftan refinery in 2020
Olga Britikova, former head of the independent trade union organisation at the factory, and Aleksandr Kukharenok, a member of the strike committee formed in 2020, were detained by the OMON security police.
Legal cases have been opened against both activists for political offences under the Criminal Code (Article 2.361, making calls for sanctions and other actions that threaten national security).
Initial reports said that Kukharenok’s wife has also been arrested. The pair have young children.
Olga Britikova was “one of the leaders of the protest movement at Naftan after the 2020 elections”, the Zerkalo web site reported. “It was Olga who conveyed the workers’ demands to the authorities and factory management.”
In August 2020, a letter signed by more than 3000 Naftan workers called on Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka to resign and for new elections.
Community mobilisation in Whitby, Merseyside, has forced the UK government to drop plans to test hydrogen heating in 2000 homes there.
Lord Martin Callanan, energy security minister, announced in a tweet on Monday that the trial had “no strong local support” and would be scrapped.
Campaigners against the hydrogen-for-homes scheme in Whitby, Merseyside. Photo from HyNot facebook feed
The decision follows months of campaigning by Whitby residents, who feared that the HyNet scheme to convert the gas grid to hydrogen would bring a greater risk of explosions, nitrous oxide emissions and uncertainty.
They were strongly supported by the HyNot campaign group – and by energy systems researchers who oppose hydrogen for home heating. They point out that a combination of insulation and electric heat pumps is four or five times more energy-efficient than hydrogen, and effectively reduces fossil fuel use.
Jan Rosenow of the Regulatory Assistance Project and Tom Baxter of Strathclyde University, who are among the many specialists who have lambasted the government’s approach, spoke at a virtual public meeting in Whitby called by residents in November last year.
The government’s plan has obstructed the use of tried, tested and truly carbon-free technologies, such as heat pumps, for the sake of a survival strategy for oil and gas companies.
Russia’s monthly revenues from oil exports rose by $1.7 billion to $15 billion in April, the International Energy Agency reported this week.
The combination of shipments to China and India, which are taking about 80% of Russian oil, and of sanctions-avoiding tricks by European and other shipping companies, means that the western powers’ price cap on Russian oil is causing few problems.
The IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report showed that in March, Russian oil exports were at 8.1 million barrels per day (bpd), their highest level since April 2020. In April they went up even further, to 8.3 million bpd.
School students march with Fridays for Future Germany, in a joint action with public transport workers demanding action on climate change, and collective bargaining rights and investment in public transport, on 3 March 2023. Photo from FFF Germany twitter feed
What is going on, 15 months after Russia’s murderous full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
In this article – based on a talk I gave at the Berlin School of Economics and Law last week – I look at (i) the background, (ii) oil and sanctions, (iii) gas and the Kremlin’s self-sanctioning, and (iv) what this all means in terms of cutting fossil fuel use and climate policy.
–
1. Background
The character of the war
To understand the economic aspects of this biggest military conflict in Europe since the second world war, we need to understand its political character.
The primary target of the Russian military operation is Ukraine’s civilian population – and, to underline this, it’s worth summarising the main points from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights interim report (December 2022).
The actions by the Russian Federation that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity” included:
□ “Repeated and apparently indiscriminate strikes in densely populated areas using explosive weapons with wide area effects, resulting in widespread civilian death and injury”;
□ “Devastating and intensified attacks reportedly carried out against civilian infrastructure, […] resulting in high numbers of civilian casualties and loss of access to critical infrastructure for millions”.
Lützerath will remain.[1] Even if the coal is eventually extracted, the name of the place will continue to be a powerful symbol of the courage and ingenuity of people who resist both a powerful corporation and the power of the state.
Demonstrators versus mining machinery, Lutzerath, 2022
Lützerath is also a symbol of a policy that fails to recognise the signs of the times: the phasing-out of coal and the transition to a mode of production in which the good life for all, rather than the defence of powerful particular interests, is the central point of reference.
Responsible for the failed policy is the so-called “traffic light” coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD, red), the Liberals (FDP, yellow), and the Greens, which has been governing Germany since the end of 2021. Together with the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, formed by the Christian Democrats and the Greens, they made a deal with the German energy company RWE.
The latter would be allowed to destroy Lützerath, situated in the Rhenish brown coalfield, in order to extract the lignite stored underneath the village. In exchange, the company would abandon its plan to destroy five further villages in the region and commit to phasing out coal by 2030, i.e., eight years earlier than envisioned in the so-called “coal compromise” concluded between the German state, the federal states, and the energy companies in 2020.
Until the very last moment, a broad coalition of movements – ranging from Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, the Last Generation, and “Ende Gelände” to a local protest alliance, church groups, the Left party, and the Greens’ youth organisation – tried to prevent the destruction of Lützerath. Climate activists squatted in the houses left behind after the original owners were dispossessed and relocated. With enormous creative energy, they constructed a protest infrastructure and trained people in civil disobedience.
“Profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society” are needed to limit the increase in global temperature, climate scientist Kevin Anderson argued in Responsible Science journal last month.
Scientists and academics joined other demonstrators on 25 March at Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands, demanding a ban on private jets, a frequent flyer tax and an end to short-distance flights. Photo from the Scientist Rebellion NL web site
I hope that everyone who cares about climate change and social justice will read Anderson’s short, clear article, available on the Scientists for Global Responsibility site. It’s a great starting point for discussion.
Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester university, briefly summarises the “carbon budgets” that need to be stuck to, if society is to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
He thinks it is “still do-able – just”, despite thirty years of “failures, tweaks to business-as-usual, carbon markets” and talk of the “dodgy prospect” of carbon removal technologies.
What would count as “serious climate action”, in Anderson’s view? A “roll-out of low and zero-carbon technologies”, in the style of the Marshall Plan – an international, state-directed reconstruction programme for Europe after world war two.
These technologies cover retrofitting our houses, public transport and massive electrification. It’s much more this “far from sexy” end of technology that’s important: the everyday technologies that allow us to live sustainable and fulfilling lives, rather than dreams of big and powerful electric vehicles (EVs), electric planes and lots of future carbon dioxide removal.
But, Anderson continues, rapid deployment of these technologies will no longer be enough. “We also need profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society. That is to say, a rapid shift in the labour and resources that disproportionately furnish the luxuries of the relative few – not just the billionaires, but also people like me.”
Society’s productive capacity, its labour and resources, need to be mobilised to “deliver a public good for all – a stable climate with minimal detrimental impacts”.
“Clean energy transitions” by rich countries of the global north are producing “a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South”, states a manifesto published last week by an alliance of social and environmental organisations.
“This decarbonisation of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South, which affects the lives of millions of women, men and children, not to mention non-human life”, the Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition says.
Women, especially from agrarian societies, are among the most impacted. In this way, “the Global South has once again become a zone of sacrifice, a basket of purportedly inexhaustible resources for the countries of the North.”
As the rich countries secure supply chains for these “clean” transitions, the web of debt and trade agreements in which countries outside the rich world are caught is tightened.
I hope that social movements and the labour movement in the rich countries will not only sign the manifesto (which you can do here), but also – probably more to the point – think about and discuss what it means for us.
The South African government of the African National Congress (ANC) has decided to join military exercises with Russia and China. They were announced during a visit to South Africa this week by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov – who was given a warm welcome by Nalendi Pandor, the South African foreign minister.
Striking miners at Marikana, 2012
Lavrov denounced “colonialism” – and no doubt various “left” groups around the world will trumpet this accord as evidence that Russia, China and South Africa are “fighting imperialism”.
Last year, South Africa called on Russia to withdraw troops from Ukraine. But this week Pandor said it would be “simplistic and infantile” to ask for that now.
The ANC government uses its stance to bolster its own “anti-imperialist” credentials among its own people and among neighbouring African governments.
But this alliance is not “anti-imperialist” at all. It is an anti-working class alliance that actually has a long history.
The ANC emerged as a political movement in the early 20th century. It was the party of the small black business and professional class. With the rise of apartheid it fought for the rights of black business. It tried to appear as a spokesperson for all the oppressed black population, but there was always a problem with this as it had no interest in the real emancipation of black workers.
Two good examples of this tension can be seen in the period after world war two.
First, at the end of the war there was an upsurge of black working class militancy leading to a general strike of black miners. Nelson Mandela, at that time leader of the ANC youth wing, refused to support the strike, fearing it would undermine the ANC’s efforts to win concessions for black business.
For many years the Russian opposition propagandised a particular manner of protest: clean, peaceful protest of the urban class, not dirtied with violence or even any pretension to violence. I was politicised at that time. I am 25, and I first went to a street demonstration when I was 17, in the second year of study at university. And I learned the lessons conscientiously: when somebody urges people to free a demonstrator who is being detained – that’s a provocation. If someone proposes to stay put on a square and not leave, or to occupy a government building – that’s a provocateur, and that person should be paid no heed.
We are better than them, because we do not use violence, and they do. Let everyone see us and our principles as unarmed, peaceful protesters, who are beaten by cosmonauts in full combat gear. Then they will understand what is going on. Why go on a demonstration? To express our opinion, to show that we are here. And if there are enough of us, that will produce a split in the elite.
A fire at a military recruitment centre in Nizhnevartovsk in May last year. Photo from Libcom
Evidently, this strategy didn’t work. Whether it worked at one time is probably not so important now. I am convinced, by my own life experience, that it has failed. A year and a half ago, I recorded an inoffensive video to support student protests – and for that got a year’s house arrest. [Reported here, SP.] And in that year, the Russian authorities succeeded in destroying the remains of the electoral system, and invading Ukraine. No peaceful protest could stop them.
During that time, as the anti-Putin opposition de-escalated protests and adapted to new prohibitions – you need to give advance notice about a demo? OK. You need to set up metal detectors on site? Very good – the authorities, by contrast, escalated the conflict with society. They pursued ever-more-contrived legal cases – for actions ranging from throwing a plastic cup at a cop, to liking stuff or joking on twitter.
We have been retreating tactically for a long time, and finally wound up on the edge of a precipice – in a situation where not to protest would be immoral, but where, at the same time, the most inoffensive action could result in the most serious sanctions. The neurosis in which a large part of Russian society now finds itself – all those arguments about who is more ethically immaculate: those who have left, those who have stayed, those who have half-left or one-quarter-stayed; who has the moral right to speak about something and who doesn’t – all this is a result of living in a paradox.
For the first few weeks after the invasion, this logic of conflict – that the opposition de-escalates and the state escalates – reached its limits. Peaceful protests came to an end. Resistance didn’t stop: several hundred people, at a minimum, set fire to military recruitment offices or dismantled railways on which the Russian army was sending arms, and soldiers, to the front.
Posted by peoplenature123 
People and Nature 