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Editor’s Note: This first-person account was originally published on Fergie’s Lighter, the author’s Substack blog, and has been lightly edited for Toward Freedom.

JUNE 28, 2022 (NEW YORK)—Last week, two U.S. citizens who had traveled to Ukraine to fight for the Ukrainian International Legion were widely reported as having been captured by military forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine that is allied with Russia in the ongoing conflict in the region.

Alexander John-Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, both Alabama residents, were apparently captured amid fighting in the outskirts of the Ukrainian oblast (province) of Kharkov. To this point, they had not had any contact with the U.S. press. That is, until this reporter received a phone call.

This afternoon, my phone rang as I was driving home out in eastern Long Island. A Russian number appeared on my caller ID. It was a number British prisoner of war (POW) Aiden Aslin had previously used to contact me, as the DPR administration had my information from my time reporting in Donbass in April and May. Aslin, a British national who had been living with a family in Ukraine and was a regular in the Ukrainian marines, was sentenced to death for the crimes of being a mercenary and killing civilians. He is currently waiting to see if a prisoner exchange can be facilitated for his release, though current reports do not look good for him. The DPR, unlike the Russian Federation, has not banned capital punishment. Per my discussions with Aslin, Ukrainian and U.K. authorities’ lack of footwork on his behalf is why his exchange has not been prioritized.

This time, however, when I answered, the caller identified himself as Alexander John-Robert Drueke. His DPR state-provided lawyer accompanied the call from the captivity site in Donetsk. Drueke is from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and served 12 years in the U.S. Army Reserve. That includes two deployments to Iraq, though neither resulted in active combat. Above all, he is similarly seeking a prisoner exchange, but he described to me in relative detail how he ended up in his predicament, and some of his perspective on the situation.

From U.S. Retired Veteran to Prisoner of War

He said that earlier this year, he had extensively watched U.S. and other Western news reports on the developing conflict in Ukraine, and was particularly affected by images of Ukrainians fleeing their homes. Drueke had been retired and living on veteran benefits. “[I] had to do something to help, not necessarily fighting, but whatever I could do.” He had no prior arrangements with the Ukrainian Armed Forces or the regime in Kiev before flying on April 12 from Atlanta, Georgia, to Warsaw, Poland, hoping to find his way to Ukraine.

On April 15, Drueke rode by bus over the border into Lvov, a western Ukrainian city, without incident. There, he was quickly interviewed by the Ukrainian International Legion, which signed a contract with him to work in a training role with a unit in Lvov, an arrangement that lasted eight days. Drueke said he was “dissatisfied” with this unit, for reasons he’s not at liberty to share, due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement he signed in his contract. By early June, he had signed paperwork to transfer to a reconnaissance unit on the other side of the country, in Kharkov. Drueke presumed the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the primary Ukrainian intelligence agency, oversaw this unit. He and his friend, Huynh, arrived in Kharkov on June 7. On June 9, they were sent into a combat mission—something Drueke said he didn’t expect—and they separated from the rest of their unit. That day, DPR patrol apprehended both men and brought them to Donetsk for detainment. They have not been officially charged as of yet. But Drueke understands they are to be charged with being mercenaries, and may face the death penalty, though their charges are likely to be less severe than their British counterparts’.

Drueke’s captivity, as he described it, has been calm, and he has been well-treated, given the obviously uncomfortable broader context. He says he has been provided with food and water regularly, is in a cell by himself, and has not had any contact with his fellow U.S. POW or any other prisoners. Though, for over a week now, he has had access to phone calls, including to his mother, Lois Drueke, and has been contact with his lawyer every other day. He maintains a very close relationship with his mother, and she appears to be working tirelessly on his case. I reached out to her for her comment and have yet to hear back.

The DPR authorities, per Drueke, are willing to negotiate for his release in a prisoner exchange, and are generally motivated to secure safe return for their own people. While he has been in contact with the U.S. State Department (he named one Michael Abbott as his contact; I was not able to track down this person), and while the U.S. government has told Drueke and his mother that they are “doing what they can,” he told me that “the U.S. is not technically a combatant in this fight, and they have no one to exchange with the DPR, so what they can do is limited to pressuring Kiev.” Whether the Ukrainian authorities were working on his case was not clear to him, and he has had no contact since his capture with anyone in the Kiev government.

‘Extremely Uninformed’ By Western Media

When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donestk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”

Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donestk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.

“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.”

‘Do Your Research… Be Better Informed’

My inquiries to the U.S. State Department and Ukrainian military press contacts have yet to yield any responses. Drueke remains adamant that the DPR is eager to arrange his release, and hopeful that the U.S. government is trying to facilitate that. But he says, “Time is starting to run out.” Portuguese journalist Bruno Carvalho, with whom I worked in Donetsk, and who remains there on assignment, suggested that one of the hold-ups in these prisoner exchanges with the DPR may be that a foreign government, such as the United Kingdom or the United States, agreeing to negotiate such an exchange might be tantamount to a recognition of the republic. On a diplomatic level, that could have major ripple effects. After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic proved to be the great harbinger of the recent escalation in what many see as a Western proxy war against Russia.

Before we hung up, I assured Drueke that I would at the very least write about our conversation, and I asked him what he might say to others who were caught in the fever of U.S. propaganda, and might have the same instincts to fly across the ocean and sign up to fight for Ukraine.

“As I said, I did not have a full understanding of what was going on, and if I had, I wouldn’t have made the decision that I did. What would I say to someone else? Do your research, look at sources outside of the West—be better informed.”

A Serbian colleague and friend of mine, Miodrag Zarkovic, is also in Donestk, and was given access to do a full interview with Drueke and fellow U.S. POW Andy Huynh. It can be found in English on his Serbian YouTube channel, HelmCast.

With the United States imposing technology sanctions on China, the world’s electronics industry is facing turbulent times. After the sanctions, Huawei has slipped from its number one slot as a mobile phone supplier—which the company held during the second quarter of 2020—to number seven currently. Commenting on this slide, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping has said that the company’s battle is for survival right now. According to Reuters, Guo in a note circulated internally maintained that Huawei “will not give up and plans to eventually return to the industry’s ‘throne.’” On that count, Huawei is not only surviving but doing quite well. It is still the world leader in the telecom equipment market with a hefty 31 percent revenue share, which is twice that of its nearest competitors Nokia and Ericsson, and profits of nearly $50 billion in the first six months of 2021. But will Huawei be able to retain its market position without China catching up with the latest developments in chip manufacturing and design technologies?

It is not just the Chinese companies alone that are facing tough times. With growing chip wars between the United States and China, the global supply chain for electronic chips has been affected, leading to chip shortages across several sectors. Semiconductor chips are used in almost every product, from household equipment—microwave ovens and toasters—to the automotive and defense industries. The auto industry’s biggest bottleneck today is the chip shortage, which has badly hit their production. If the chip wars continue, the crisis of the chip shortage may affect other industries as well.

This crisis, meanwhile, has raised several questions: Is the crisis of the semiconductor industry the precursor to the fragmentation of the global supply chains? Will it lead to warring blocks, with the United States at one pole and China at the other? With this fragility of the supply chain, are we seeing the end of globalization as a paradigm?

The electronics industry is one of the most capital-intensive and research-and-development-intensive industries. No other industry has this characteristic. Power or steel plants are capital-intensive; pharmaceuticals are R&D-intensive. But no other industry is both. ASML, a little-known Dutch company that produces the lithographic machines for chip manufacturing, is worth more than Volkswagen, the world’s largest car manufacturer. This is due to the high R&D costs of ASML’s lithographic machines: it is the only company that can deliver the machines that the most advanced chips require. In order for a new fabrication facility to make the new generation of chips today, it will cost $20 billion, which is more than the cost of an aircraft carrier or a nuclear plant. Only two fabricators, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung, have the capability to produce the most advanced chips that the industry uses.

The United States and China compete in areas such as artificial intelligence, computers, mobile networks and phones. The basic building block for all these technologies is semiconductor chips. The more circuity we can pack into a chip, the more computing power it has. The bulk of the market consists of older fabricators using 180 nm to 28 nm level technologies, with only 2 percent of the chips below the 10 nm level. The only fabricators that can make such chips are TSMC and Samsung, the world’s largest chip fabricators. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) of China, the third-largest chip fabricator globally, has only recently moved from the 28 nm level to the 14 nm level. With Chinese government support, SMIC is investing in production lines that can go below 14 nm. Intel, once the world leader in chip manufacturing, is still stuck at the 14 nm level. However, it also has plans for developing the next generation of chips.

The United States has chosen the electronics/semiconductor industry as a battleground for its geostrategic competition with China. It believes that it has a significant technology lead and commands a major market share in this industry. China is a late entrant here. Though it has a comparable market share to that of the United States, it still depends on certain core technologies. The United States and its allies—the European Union, Japan and South Korea—control these core technologies. That is why the United States has chosen Huawei and SMIC, two major Chinese players in the technology and the semiconductor industry respectively, as its target for sanctions. The United States has put more than 250 Chinese companies on the entities list, which require a special license to import equipment or components. However, it is not a blanket ban.

The United States is following up on its sanctions against Huawei and SMIC with a plan to bar China from what it calls “foundational technologies” under its 2018 Export Control Reform Act. The argument that the United States is building is a simple one: they are ahead of China in certain critical technologies required for advanced chip manufacturing; all they have to do to maintain this lead is to deny China access to these technologies; this will ensure the United States lead for the future and its dominance over the electronics industry.

John Verwey, an investment analyst who writes about semiconductor technology on his website Semi-Literate, discusses what can be considered a foundational technology in the electronics industry. At first sight, chip-making could appear as a foundational technology and the target of U.S. sanctions. This is what the United States did when it barred Huawei from buying the latest 7 nm scale chips from TSMC.

SMIC then tried to set up its fabrication line for 7 nm chips and needed to import extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines from ASML, each costing around $120 million to $150 million. These lithographic machines are the critical part of the production lines of chip fabrication. Though the EUV machines are from the Netherlands, they use software developed in ASML’s U.S. subsidiary and therefore they fall under the U.S. sanctions regime.

The U.S. sanctions mean that ASML cannot sell the EUV lithography machines to China, though it can sell other lithographic machines for lower-end chip production, keeping China out of the high-end under-10-nm technology, and, therefore, a generation or two behind the market leaders.

This brings us to the question of how to define foundational technology. Though chips are the key driver of electronics, they are not as foundational as the machines that produce them. A country at the cutting edge of technology needs to master the technology of chip production and the machines that run such production lines. That is why ASML’s lithography machines are the bottleneck for China.

What then drives the advances in key technologies of the machines and chip production? As Marxists know, knowledge drives the productive forces—in this case, the advances in chip design. This knowledge is captured in the software design tools and the lithography machines. They are both highly knowledge-intensive and require people with very specialized skills.

The United States and its universities are still the major source of knowledge development, the key to the advances in this sector. But here is the long-term problem facing the nation: The research programs of the U.S. universities are mostly staffed by international students, with the bulk of them from China, India and other developing countries. Many of them stay back in the United States and provide the human power required for the advances in knowledge that the United States has today.

If Chinese students and researchers are not welcome in the United States, this source of knowledge development will weaken. Unfortunately, countries like India do not have high-quality education institutions and research laboratories to be a substitute for the stream of Chinese students who enter U.S. universities. China has invested heavily in its universities and research institutions and produces more Ph.D.s in science and technology today than the United States. It is also building a pipeline of innovations from the universities/research institutions to the technology industry.

China is the biggest market for the U.S. semiconductor industry’s chip designs and design software. The U.S. companies also design high-end chips, which are then manufactured in Taiwan and China. In the short run, the U.S. sanctions will damage China’s advanced chip production and the production of electronic devices based on such chips. But it will also mean that the U.S. companies will lose a significant part of the revenues that they now receive from the Chinese market from the sale of their design tools. It will also lead to a loss of revenue for advanced chips that the U.S. companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia design and then manufacture in Taiwan’s TSMC.

For the high-tech U.S. companies, the loss of this income means less money for their R&D and the slow erosion of the country’s position as the global knowledge hub. Suppose the U.S. companies lose the Chinese market and, therefore, a significant part of their revenues. In that case, it will seriously affect their ability to compete in the future. In the short run, they may gain, as they are doing with Huawei losing its number one spot in smartphones. But still, the loss of revenues will mean less ability to produce the knowledge that gives the United States its edge in technology. Less money in research means an eventual loss of leadership because, unlike other countries, the United States increasingly does not produce the chips or the machines, but the knowledge that goes into both of them.

This is what the U.S. semiconductor industry has argued in its submission to the U.S. Department of Commerce. If the U.S. companies delink from the Chinese market, it will mean a significant loss of revenue for them. In the long run, it will lead to a loss of U.S. leadership in electronics. Already, the U.S. sanctions have led the Chinese companies to remove the U.S.-designed components from their product lines. Sanctions are double-edged: they hit Huawei and other Chinese companies and their U.S. suppliers.

How long will China take to erase the lead in semiconductor technologies that the United States and its allies have? Analysys Mason, a leading consulting company, says in its May 2021 report that China will be able to attain self-sufficiency in semiconductors in three to four years. The Boston Consulting Group and Semiconductor Industry Association have modeled the impact of breaking up the global supply chain of China and the United States delinking their supply chain and markets. The model predicts that with such a policy, the United States would still lose its leadership to China. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the only way that the United States can preserve its lead is to export to China, except in the strategic military sector. The United States can then use its profits from these exports for developing a new generation of technologies. Of course, the loss for not exporting in the strategic sector must be compensated with hefty subsidies from the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, India missed the semiconductor manufacturing bus when it decided not to rebuild Semiconductor Complex Limited its premiere chip-making facility in the city of Mohali, after it was destroyed in a mysterious fire in 1989. Its policymakers decided that India should leverage its strength in software and systems and not worry about manufacturing chips. Vinnie Mehta, formerly the executive director of the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), had said to Mint, “A nation without silicon (technology) is like a person without [a] heart.” That heart is still missing in India’s technology ecosystem.

If the United States wants to retain its position of being a world leader in the electronics industry, it has to match China by investing in the generation of knowledge for future technologies. Why, then, is the United States taking the sanctions route? Sanctions are simpler to implement; building a society that values knowledge is more difficult. This is the pathology of late capitalism.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published by MintPress News.

The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved, and even allegedly rescued their own children first.

The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun-control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.

Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.

 

Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American.

An activist for over 50 years, Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that for any progress to be made, Americans must stop worshiping a 234-year-old document written by slaveholders. Today with Lowkey, she also discussed how it was that the National Rifle Association was taken over by reactionary political actors and how it came to be that the United States is a country with 4% of the world’s population but half of the world’s guns.

“The Constitution is so embedded in white supremacy that there is no way to amend it to change that. It is everywhere…This is so obvious if you just face what U.S. history is and not leave so much out,” she told Lowkey.

A revolutionary and a feminist, Dunbar-Ortiz’s life’s work has taken her across the world, including to Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua, where she documented the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against indigenous groups. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Among her other notable books include, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”; “The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America”; and “Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.”

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.