Alexander John-Robert Drueke (left), 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, residents of Alabama, may face the death sentence in the Donetsk People’s Republic on the charges of being mercenaries and killing civilians / credit: Families of the prisoners of war / Tuscaloosa Thread
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.
Drueke with his mother, Lois (left), and Drueke’s photo from his time in the U.S. Army Reserve, which included two tours in Iraq / credit: New York Post
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.
Map highlighting the Ukrainian oblast of Kharkiv in orange. The breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugantsk are in gray / credit: Carnegie Europe
‘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.
Fergie Chambers is a freelance writer and socialist organizer from New York, reporting from eastern Europe for Toward Freedom. He can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.
On left, speakers at the Ukraine Recovery Conference held July 4-5 in Lugano, Switzerland. On right, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky / credit: Multipolarista
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.
While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russian proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also making plans to essentially plunder its post-war economy.
Representatives of Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland this July to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”
Ukraine has been destabilized by violence since 2014, when a U.S.-sponsored coup d’etat overthrew its democratically elected government, setting off a civil war. That conflict dragged on until February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded the country, escalating into a new, even deadlier phase of the war.
The United States and European Union have sought to erase the history of foreign-sponsored civil war in Ukraine from 2014 to early 2022, acting as though the conflict began on February 24. But Washington had sent large sums of weapons to Ukraine and provided extensive military training and support over several years before Russia invaded.
Meanwhile, starting in 2017, representatives of Western governments and corporations quietly held annual conferences in which they discussed ways to profit from the civil war they were fueling in Ukraine.
In these meetings, Western political and business leaders outlined a series of aggressive right-wing reforms they hoped to impose on Ukraine, including widespread privatization of state-owned industries and deregulation of the economy.
On July 4 and July 5, top officials from the United States, European Union, Britain, Japan, and South Korea met in Switzerland for a so-called “Ukraine Recovery Conference.” There, they planned Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and performatively announced aid commitments—while salivating over a bonanza of potential contracts.
New NATO candidates Finland and Sweden committed to assure reconstruction in Lugansk, roughly 48 hours after Russia and separatist forces announced the region had fallen fully under their control.
But the Ukraine Recovery Conference was not new. It had been renamed to save the expense of a new acronym. In the previous five years, the group and its annual meetings were instead referred to as the “Ukraine Reform Conference” (URC).
The URC’s agenda was explicitly focused on imposing political changes on the country—namely, “strengthening the market economy“, “decentralization, privatization, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform,” and “Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Before 2022, this gathering had nothing to do with aid – and a lot to do with economics.
Documents from the 2018 Ukraine Reform Conference emphasized the importance of privatizing most of Ukraine’s remaining public sector, stating that the “ultimate goal of the reform is to sell state-owned enterprises to private investors”, along with calls for more “privatization, deregulation, energy reform, tax and customs reform.”
Lamenting that the “government is Ukraine’s largest asset holder,” the report stated, “Reform in privatization and SOEs has been long awaited, as this sector of the Ukrainian economy has remained largely unchanged since 1991.”
The Ukraine Reform Conference listed as one of its “achievements” the adoption of a law in January 2018 titled “On Privatization of State and Municipal Property,” which it noted “simplifies the procedure of privatization.”
While the URC enthusiastically pushed for these neoliberal reforms, it acknowledged that they were very unpopular among actual Ukrainians. A poll found that just 12.4 percent supported privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOE), whereas 49.9 percent opposed it. (An additional 12 percent were indifferent, whereas 25.7 percent had no answer.)
Economic liberalization in Ukraine since Russia’s February invasion has been even more grim.
In March 2022, the Ukrainian parliament adopted emergency legislation allowing employers to suspend collective agreements. Then in May, it passed a permanent reform package effectively exempting the vast majority of Ukrainian workers (those at businesses with fewer than 200 employees) from Ukrainian labor law.
While the most immediate beneficiaries of these changes will be Ukrainian employers, Western governments have been lobbying to liberalize Ukraine’s labor laws for years.
Documents leaked in 2021 showed that the British government coached Ukrainian officials on how to convince a recalcitrant public to give up workers’ rights and implement anti-union policies. Training materials lamented that popular opinion towards the proposed reforms was overwhelmingly negative, but provided messaging strategies to mislead Ukrainians into supporting them.
West Calls for Aggressive Neoliberal Reforms at ‘Ukraine Recovery Conference’
The July 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference, which was held by Lugano, Switzerland and jointly hosted by the Swiss and Ukrainian governments, featured representatives from the following states and institutions:
Albania
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Iceland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Latvia
Lithuania
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
North Macedonia
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Republic of Korea (popularly known as South Korea)
Romania
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey)
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States of America
Council of Europe
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
European Commission
European Investment Bank
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Among the prominent officials who attended were European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, and UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss.
Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky also addressed the conference via video.
Physically present at the Switzerland meeting were Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and Zelensky’s top political ally Ruslan Stefanchuk, the chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Stefanchuk is the second-in-line for the presidency after Zelensky. He is also a member of Ukraine’s all-powerful National Security and Defense Council, which truly governs the country.
From left to right: Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, and Verkhovna Rada chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2022
Even the United Nations gave its imprimatur to the conference: UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a video statement as well.
At the two-day meeting, the attendees agreed that Ukraine should eventually be given membership in the European Union. The country had already been granted EU candidate status just two weeks before, at a June summit in Brussels.
At the conclusion of the meeting, all governments and institutions present endorsed a joint statement called the Lugano Declaration. This declaration was supplemented by a “National Recovery Plan,” which was in turn prepared by a “National Recovery Council” established by the Ukrainian government.
This plan advocated for an array of neoliberal reforms, including “privatization of non critical enterprises” and “finalization of corporatization of SOEs” (state-owned enterprises) – identifying as an example the selling off of Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear energy company EnergoAtom.
In order to “attract private capital into banking system,” the proposal likewise called for the “privatization of SOBs” (state-owned banks).
Seeking to increase “private investment and boost nationwide entrepreneurship,” the National Recovery Plan urged significant “deregulation” and proposed the creation of “‘catalyst projects’ to unlock private investment into priority sectors.”
In an explicit call for slashing labor protections, the document attacked the remaining pro-worker laws in Ukraine, some of which are a holdover of the Soviet era.
The National Recovery Plan complained of “outdated labor legislation leading to complicated hiring and firing process, regulation of overtime, etc.” As an example of this supposed “outdated labor legislation,” the Western-backed plan lamented that workers in Ukraine with one year of experience are granted a nine-week “notice period for redundancy dismissal,” compared to just four weeks in Poland and South Korea.
Neoliberal economic reforms proposed in Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan
In the same vein, the National Recovery Plan urged Ukraine to cut taxes on corporations and wealthy capitalists.
The blueprint complained that 40 percent of Ukraine’s GDP comes from tax revenue, calling this a “rather high tax burden” compared to its model example of South Korea. It thus called to “transform tax service,” and “review potential for decreasing the share of tax revenue in GDP.”
In short, the Ukraine Recovery Conference’s economic proposal was little more than a repackaged Washington Consensus: a typical right-wing program that involves implementing mass privatizations, deregulating industries, gutting labor protections, cutting taxes on the rich, and putting the burden on Ukrainian workers.
In the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States imposed what it called capitalist “shock therapy” on Russia and other former constituent republics.
A 2001 UNICEF study found that these harsh neoliberal reforms in Russia caused 3.2 million excess deaths, and pushed 18 million children into poverty, bringing about rampant malnutrition and public health crises.
Washington and Brussels appear committed to return to this very same neoliberal shock therapy in their plans for post-war Ukraine.
More Calls for Neoliberal Shock Therapy in Post-war Ukraine
To accompany its July 2022 meeting in Switzerland, the Ukraine Recovery Conference published a “strategic briefing” compiled by a right-wing Ukrainian organization called the Center of Economic Recovery.
The Center of Economic Recovery describes itself as a “platform that unites experts, think tanks, business, the public and government officials for the development of the country’s economy.” On its website, it lists many Ukrainian corporations as its partners and funders, making it clear that it acts as lobby on their behalf, like a chamber of commerce.
The report that this corporate lobby wrote for the Ukraine Recovery Conference was even more explicit than the National Recovery Plan in its advocacy of aggressive neoliberal economic reforms.
Using right-wing libertarian language of “economic freedom,” the document urged to “reduce government size” and “open markets.”
Its proposal read as neoliberal boilerplate: “decrease the regulatory burden on businesses” by “reducing the size of the government (tax administration, privatization; digitalization of public services), improving regulatory efficiency (deregulation), and opening markets (liberalization of capital markets; investment freedom).”
In the name of “EU integration and access to markets,” it likewise proposed “removal of tariffs and non-tariff non-technical barriers for all Ukrainian goods,” while simultaneously calling to “facilitate FDI [foreign direct investment] attraction to bring the largest international companies to Ukraine,” with “special investment incentives” for foreign corporations.
It was essentially a call for Ukraine to surrender its economic sovereignty to Western capital.
Both the National Recovery Plan and the strategic briefing also heavily emphasized the need for robust anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
Neither document acknowledged that fact that Kiev’s Western-backed leader Volodmyr Zelensky, who spoke at the Ukraine Recovery Conference, is known to have large amounts of wealth hidden in a network of offshare accounts.
Even More Calls for Liberalization, Privatizations, Deregulation, Tax Cuts
In addition to the National Recovery Plan and the strategic briefing, the July 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference presented a report prepared by the company Economist Impact, a corporate consulting firm that is part of The Economist Group.
This third document, titled “Ukraine Reform Tracker,” was funded by the Swiss government with the stated “aim of stimulating and supporting discussion on this matter at the 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference.”
The Ukraine Reform Tracker analyzed the neoliberal policies already imposed in Ukraine since the U.S.-backed 2014 coup, and urged for even more aggressive neoliberal reforms to be implemented when the war ends.
Of the three reports presented at the conference, this was perhaps the most full-throated call for Ukraine to adopt neoliberal shock therapy after the war – a tactic often referred to as disaster capitalism.
Quoting the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the document insisted that Ukraine has “issues in deregulation and competition that still need to be addressed, such as ongoing state intervention” – depicting state intervention in the economy as something inherently bad.
In this vein, the Ukraine Reform Tracker pushed to “increase foreign direct investments” by international corporations, not invest resources in social programs for the Ukrainian people.
The report emphasized the importance of developing the financial sector and called for “removing excessive regulations” and tariffs.
“Deregulation and tax simplification has been further deepened,” it wrote approvingly, adding, “Steps towards deregulation and the simplification of the tax system are examples of measures which not only withstood the blow of the war but have been accelerated by it.”
The Ukraine Reform Tracker praised the central bank for “successfully liberalising the currency, floating the exchange rate.” While it noted some of these policies were reversed due to the Russian invasion, the report urged “the swiftest possible elimination of currency controls,” in order to “reinstate competitiveness within the financial sector.”
The report however complained that these neoliberal reforms are not being implemented quickly enough, writing, “Privatisation— which already progressed slowly before the war—stalled, with a draft law aiming to simplify the process rejected” by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
It called for further “liberalising agriculture” to “attract foreign investment and encourage domestic entrepreneurship,” as well as “procedural simplifications,” to “make it easier for small and medium enterprises” to “expand by purchasing and investing in state-owned assets,” thereby “making it easier for foreign investors to enter the market post-conflict.”
“Further pursuing the privatisation of large and loss-making state-owned enterprises” will “allow more Ukrainian entrepreneurs to enter the market and thrive there in the post-war context,” the report urged.
The Economist Impact study stressed the importance of Ukraine cutting its trade with Russia and instead integrating its economy with Europe.
“Ukraine’s trade reforms centre on efforts to diversify its trade operations and enhance its integration into the EU market,” it wrote.
The Western government-sponsored report boasted of significantly reducing Kiev’s economic ties to its eastern neighbor, noting: “Russia was Ukraine’s main trading partner in 2014, capturing 18.2 percent of its exports and providing 22 percent of its imports. Since then, however, Russia’s share of Ukraine’s exports and imports has decreased consistently, reaching 4.9 percent and 8.4 percent in 2021, respectively.”
“Ukraine made particular progress in diversifying its trade portfolio within the EU, raising its trade volumes with member states by 46.2 percent from 2015 to 2019,” it added.
The report added that it is “essential” that Ukraine carry out other reforms, such as modifying its railways by “aligning the rail gauges with EU standards.”
The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland on July 5, 2022
The Ukraine Reform Tracker presented the war as an opportunity to impose even more disaster capitalist policies.
“The post-war moment may present an opportunity to complete the difficult land reform by extending the right to purchase agricultural land to legal entities, including foreign ones,” the report stated.
“Opening the path for international capital to flow into Ukrainian agriculture will likely boost productivity across the sector, increasing its competitiveness in the EU market,” it added.
The document proposed new ways for exploiting Ukrainian labor in specific industries, “especially pharmaceutical and electrical production, plastic and rubber manufacturing, furniture, textiles, and food and agricultural products.”
“Once the war is over, the government will also need to consider substantially lowering the share of stateowned banks, with the privatisation of Privatbank, the country’s largest lender, and Oshchadbank, a large processor of pensions and social payments,” it insisted.
The Ukraine Reform Tracker concluded optimistically, stating that that “post-war moment will be an opportunity for Ukraine,” and “there is likely to be significant pressure to continue and speed up the implementation of the reform agenda. Continued business reforms could allow Ukraine to further deregulate [and] privatise lossmaking SOEs.”
While Pushing Disaster Capitalism, the Ukraine Recovery Conference Exploits ‘Social Justice’ Rhetoric
While these three documents published by the 2022 Ukraine Reform Conference (URC) were vociferous calls for the imposition of right-wing economic policies, they were accompanied by superficial appeals to social justice rhetoric.
The URC released a set of seven “Lugano Principles” that it identified as the keys to a just, equitable post-war reconstruction:
partnership
reform focus
transparency, accountability, and rule of law
democratic participation
multi-stakeholder engagement
gender equality and inclusion
(environmental) sustainability
These principles demonstrate the ways that hawks in Washington and Brussels have increasingly weaponized ideas about “intersectionality” to advance their belligerent foreign policy.
In his report “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism,” former U.S. State Department officer Christopher Mott discussed the growing use of left-liberal social-justice talking points to legitimize and enforce Western imperialism.
Mott observed that the “liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash.”
Western-backed liberals in post-socialist Europe have spent three decades creating a false dichotomy between either a liberalizing cultural project that can only be realized under U.S.-led trans-Atlantic hegemony and neoliberal economic reforms, or a purely fictional socialist past whose political legacy is somehow reflected in right-wing anti-communist nationalist parties attempting to roll back advances that women had achieved under socialism.
Despite its patent absurdity, this narrative has won adherents among younger liberal intellectuals, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, who have little or no memory of the socialist period, and who face increasingly desperate career prospects outside of the Western-backed ideological apparatus.
On the other hand, right-wing nationalists like Hungary’s Viktor Orban posture as the only defenders of their countries’ cultural sovereignty against hostile outsiders, while also refusing to break from neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
In turn, organic local activists struggling for legitimate social justice causes find themselves portrayed as agents furthering the agendas of foreign powers.
At best, during peacetime, this undermines their work and hinders progress for their causes. In a country like Ukraine, where Western governments have supportedfar-right, neo-fascist groups and eight years dragging out a civil war, this is life-threatening.
In Ukraine, What’s Even Left to Loot?
On May 9, 2022, the U.S. Congress passed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, greatly expanding Washington’s authority to provide military aid to Ukraine.
Lend-lease provisions originated during World War II and were used by the U.S. government to provide military aid to countries fighting Nazi Germany, including Britain and the Soviet Union, without formally entering the war.
Under this framework, the United States provides military equipment as a loan; if the equipment is not or cannot be returned, recipient governments are on the hook to pay back the full cost.
The Joe Biden administration explained its use of lend-lease by the need to quickly move the bill through Congress before other funding ran out.
While many North Americans protested what they saw as a pointless giveaway of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign country, lend-lease provisions are loans, not grants.
Britain, one of the United States’ closest allies, only finished paying back its 60-year-old lend-lease debt in 2006. Russia settled its former Soviet obligations the same year.
Given this historical precedent, Ukraine will likely be saddled with debts it can’t readily pay back—debts extended to corrupt Western-backed elites under wartime duress. This means U.S. financial institutions will have further collateral to impose neoliberal structural adjustment policies on Ukraine, subordinating its economy for years to come.
Washington and its allies have a long history of instrumentalizing debt to force countries to accept unpopular pro-Western policy changes, and difficulties of repayment often compel countries to accept even more debt, leading to debt trap cycles that are extremely difficult to escape.
It was in fact the International Monetary Fund, and specifically the refusal of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending, and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU, which led him to turn instead to Russia for an alternative economic agreement, thus setting the stage for the Western-backed “Euromaidan protests” and eventually the 2014 coup.
Meanwhile, in the current war, Moscow and Russian-backed separatist fighters are occupying and may annex what were historically the most industrialized regions of Ukraine, located in the east.
At the same time, much of what remained of the country’s pre-war industrial base has been physically destroyed by the war. And these same regions hold much of Ukraine’s energy resources, notably coal.
Millions of Ukrainians have already emigrated and are unlikely to return, especially if they are able to access work visas in the EU. Young and educated people with technical skills are the least likely to stay.
The situation is even bleaker when one considers that, well before Russia’s February invasion, Ukraine was already the poorest country in Europe.
While Soviet Ukraine had thrived as a center of the USSR’s heavy industry, and a source for much of Soviet political leadership, post-Soviet Ukraine has been a playground for rival elites supported by the West or by Russia.
Post-Soviet Ukraine has been devastated by persistent economic crises and rampant and systematic corruption. It has consistently had smaller incomes and a lower standard of living even compared to neighboring post-socialist countries, including Russia.
Ukraine has not been able to restore the size of the economy it had in 1990, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. And looking beyond raw GDP data, the quality of life for many Ukrainian workers and their access to social services has significantly declined.
With limited financial means to provide for basic state functions, much less to repay foreign debts, a post-war Ukraine could be forced to accept humiliating and dangerous concessions in other spheres—serving, say, as an Israel-style trying ground for weapons testing, or hosting Kosovo-style black sites for U.S. covert operations, or providing Western businesses a Chile-style no-regulation environment for tax evasion and criminal activities—all while gutting what little remains of its domestic welfare state and labor protections.
Yet instead of advocating for a diplomatic solution to the war, which could help the Ukrainian government and people concentrate their resources on economic recovery, Western governments have adamantly opposed proposed peace talks, insisting, in the words of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, “This war will be won on the battlefield.”
Washington and Brussels are sacrificing Ukraine for their geopolitical interests. And their Ukraine Recovery Conference shows they expect to keep benefiting economically even after the war ends.
1. This war will be won on the battlefield. Additional €500 million from the #EPF are underway. Weapon deliveries will be tailored to Ukrainian needs. pic.twitter.com/Jgr61t9FfW
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) April 9, 2022
An array of people TF contributor Fergie Chambers interviewed in Moldova / credit: Fergie Chambers
CHISINAU, Moldova—Nestled above the Black Sea, between the war zone in Ukraine and the eastern limits of NATO territory in Romania, sits the tiny, oft-forgotten landlocked nation of Moldova. Among the poorest countries in Europe by just about any relevant metric, it has been overwhelmed by Ukrainian refugees in the three weeks since the outset of what Russia calls its “special military operation” (спецоперация) in Ukraine.
More than 359,000 people of the 3.38 million who have fled Ukraine since February 24 have passed in and out of the country, according to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees. Roman Macovenco of the Moldovan Consular Directorate confirmed at least 300,000 Ukrainians had crossed through Moldova. The vast majority came through the border town of Palanca, just 57 kilometers (or 35 miles) from Ukraine’s Odessa. Many wound up in Chisinau, the tiny country’s capital. As of March 14, roughly 100,000 remained in Moldova.
Map showing migration trend out of Ukraine. Striped countries are part of the EU’s passport-free Schengen Area / credit: United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees’ Operational Data Portal
Primarily due to its limited capacity and even more limited financial resources, Moldova is a transitional zone for refugees. Though, the length of their stay depends on their economic status. Moldovan Ministry of Interior Principal Specialist Olesea Sirghi and Macovenco said the refugees who remain for more than two days cannot afford passage to EU countries.
‘Oligarchs Who Drink, Complain and Chase Women’
This reporter learned from local people that the first wave of refugees was made up of almost exclusively wealthy elites.
Misha Tsarkisan, a Georgian who had migrated to Moldova years ago, complained the first wave of Ukrainian refugees were “oligarchs” / credit: Fergie Chambers
Misha Tsarkisan is a Georgian migrant who has lived for years in Moldova and does maintenance work near one of Chisinau’s primary refugee centers. He described the initial wave as “oligarchs, who came to drink, complain and chase women.”
Similar sentiments can be heard everywhere in the capital, though they are often expressed with more nuance. Ion Popov, 25, moved his coffee truck near a bus depot that dealt with the influx of refugees. He told Toward Freedom the arrivals were as mixed in their attitudes and temperament as any group might be.
“The rich loaded their things up in their cars with as much money as they could gather, and have generally behaved rudely,” Popov said. “I don’t know how you can be in such a situation and expect to make demands. But you know, many of these people are just caught in a bad situation, and many of them are perfectly decent.”
Moldova’s split identity, vacillating between former Soviet, Russian, Romanian and independently Moldovan, lends to these simmering tensions.
For less affluent refugees, the primary destination is the International Exhibition Center MoldExpo, the largest complex of any sort in the country. The scene on March 14 featured police checkpoints, buses coming and going, and makeshift kiosks-turned-sleeping-quarters. Visitors ranged from young volunteers to European reporters, as well as a troop of “Dream Doctors.” These entertainers were dressed as clowns to provide limited medical care. An Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) had flown them in from Tel-Aviv (Occupied Jaffa).
A view inside the MoldExpo, where about 200 Ukrainian refugees live permanently because they cannot afford passage to other countries / credit: Fergie Chambers
The center itself is a collection of concrete buildings, offset from a wooded park that boasts a Soviet-era “Hall of Fame” featuring a collection of statues: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the towering centerpiece, Vladimir Lenin.
Inside the center, refugees are served food and drink, and can access donated items, such as clothing, diapers and medical equipment. About 200 people appeared to be in that case, sleeping on cots. The majority came from the southwestern Ukrainian cities of Odessa and Mykolayiv, but also from the capital, Kyiv.
From Chisinau, NGO-sponsored buses take off to EU countries, but most especially to Germany and Poland. In some cases, the embassies of EU countries are paying for the buses. According to the aforementioned Moldovan officials as well as an NGO representative, the EU has pledged about $20 million in support funds to Moldova. Far more buses await at the Romanian border, as Romania simply has more infrastructure as well as the presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations. People with even modest means appeared able to find a way to arrange passage to Romania. But those Ukrainians who are completely destitute often remain in the shelter.
Ukrainian children play in the MoldExpo, a complex that has been transformed into a refugee hub, as they await passage out of Moldova / credit: Loris Capogrossi
Refugees Speak Out
Contrary to the narratives with which the Western public has been inundated, Ukrainian refugees expressed largely divergent positions on the causes and potential outcomes of the conflict. This reporter witnessed EU-zone reporters gravitating toward the far fewer refugees who held pro-Kyiv positions. Not a single foreign press crew had a Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking member in tow, making it less likely they would hear from working-class Ukrainians, who mainly spoke Ukrainian or Russian.
Toward Freedom spoke at length in Russian with several refugees. What stood out was how few of them lent unequivocal support to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Alex Kirillov, 40, originally of Donetsk, said Ukraine has a “real problem with nationalist aggression” / credit: Fergie Chambers
Alex Kirillov, a 40-year-old restaurateur originally from Donetsk, had left Kyiv four days earlier with his wife and three children. His main focus on the situation back in Ukraine was what he called a “real problem with nationalist aggression.” He saw no way out of the war without compromise and neutrality. Kirillov said the war had begun eight years ago. “Zelensky’s breaking of the Minsk agreements [ceasefires in Donbass brokered between Moscow and Kyiv] was the only reason this new stage of the war began.” He described pre-2014 Ukraine as “very calm, not as stable as the USSR, but much better than after Maidan, when things became economically unstable and full of war.” Maidan was the series of 2013-14 protests that led to the coup that ousted democratically elected President Victor Yanukovych. Kirillov said the U.S. and NATO supply of weapons to Ukraine worsened the situation. “But, then of course, allies must do this.” He was adamant that Putin, whom he disliked, had zero intention of going past Ukraine, or of even annexing Ukraine itself, and that it was naive to believe otherwise.
Oksana Novidskaya, from the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv, arrived in the MoldExpo center with her two teenage children / credit: Fergie Chambers
Claims have emerged that Russian and Ukrainian troops are being violent toward civilians and journalists. “We have no idea about any of this, as there is so much propaganda,” Kirillov said. “My house is safe, but we did hear bombs, and wanted to leave with the children.” Zelensky, in his eyes, had unwittingly allowed the United States to “poke the Russian bear.” He reiterated Ukrainians and Russians had always seen one another as brothers, a refrain this reporter repeatedly heard from refugees living at the MoldExpo. Then a large white charter bus appeared, he and his family said their goodbyes, and they were off to Belgium.
Oksana Novidskaya, from the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv, found herself in the center with her two teenage children. Her 19-year-old daughter, Sofia, carried a 2-year-old. Novidskaya said a bomb went off near her former classmate’s house. That’s when she decided to leave with her children. “I am not interested in politics, nor do I understand them,” she said. “But I want Russia to stop attacking. All I know is that Russians and Ukrainians should help each other.” Her brother stayed back to fight with the Ukrainian army. As of March 11, he was still okay. When this reporter inquired about her thoughts on the Donbass, Novidskaya did not wish to discuss. Later, she secured a ride to Romania, so she could get to where her mother lives in Italy.
‘The West Was Silent’
Meanwhile, emphatic in opposition to the Ukrainian government was Alec Shevchenko, a 70-year-old former prosecutor from Kharkiv. He approached this reporter, eager to share his perspective, speaking with such vigor that a few dozen other refugees gathered around to witness the conversation.
Alec Shevchenko, a 70-year-old Ukrainian refugee and former prosecutor from Kharkiv, kept on his surgical mask for the photo, out of fear of repercussions for expressing his views / credit: Fergie Chambers
“This war started when the Ukrainian government began bombing homes in Donbass! The West was silent then. Millions of people live there, you know?”
A civil war began in Ukraine in 2014 after the majority Russian-speaking Donbass region containing two provinces, Donetsk and Lugansk, began breaking away from Ukraine after witnessing the neo-Nazi and nationalist-infused Maidan protests. The provinces announced their secession as independent republics after holding successful referenda. The 2015 Minsk agreements were intended to end the fighting. However, the Ukrainian government has violated the agreements to appease nationalists and neo-Nazis. Since then, more than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukrainian region and 1.5 million have been displaced.
Shevchenko, who had lived in Ukraine his entire life, then lit a cigarette and demanded this reporter take one as well. “After the Nuremberg Trials, there were no more fascists in the USSR. People from all the Soviet republics—Tajiks, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians—all lived together happily. But after 1991, suddenly there were some Nazis again. And after 2014, they began to dominate things in Ukraine.”
Alec Shevchenko, a 70-year-old Ukrainian refugee, grabbed this reporter’s notebook, and wrote down in Roman letters: “AYDAR, AZOV, DNEPRI, TORNADO,” the names of Ukrainian military batallions / credit: Fergie Chambers
He grabbed this reporter’s notebook, and wrote down in Roman letters: “AYDAR, AZOV, DNEPRI, TORNADO”
Those are the names of Ukrainian military battalions. Then Shevchenko drew a swastika, and said in English, “These guys!” In his view, explicit Nazis were a minority in the government itself, which he described as full of “actors, athletes, ballerinas and clowns.”
The former prosecutor went on to say the United States and Kyiv had protected and encouraged the military battalions. Putin, in his eyes, was someone who moved deliberately. “He protects his people and his borders. If he was aggressive, like Hitler—as they are saying in Europe—he would have invaded Ukraine 8 years ago.” He gave a strong stare, and said, “Write this down: 80 percent of the Ukrainian people are glad that the Russian army has come. But they are terrified to say so publicly, especially now, because these Nazis will kill them.” The surrounding crowd appeared unfazed at his commentary.
Recent polls on the war have relayed Russian and U.S. public opinions. However, one poll conservative British billionaire Michael Ashcroft conducted March 1 to 3 claims most Ukrainians disfavor Russia, see Russians as kin, favor Europe, approve of NATO expansion, prefer not to leave Ukraine and wish to pick up arms to defend Ukraine.
What was clear in these and other exchanges is the reality of the East-West split in Ukraine, with anti-Russian sentiment the strongest in the west. “[Russians] would never want to kill Ukrainians for no reason,” one refugee, Dima Chumak, 48, of Mykolayev, told Toward Freedom during the conversation with Shevchenko. “But the nationalists want to kill Russians in the east for fun.” What is certain is, like in Syria, Iraq and other U.S.-inspired conflicts, public opinion on the ground is not as uniform as the Western press makes it seem.
Fergie Chambers is a freelance writer and socialist organizer from New York, reporting from eastern Europe for Toward Freedom. He can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attended in July 2019 the presentation of an investment project already implemented—an automobile plant built in Russia’s Tula Region / credit: Kremlin.ru
Editor’s Note: This analysis was produced by Globetrotter.
On January 21, 2022, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach attended a talk in New Delhi, India, organized by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. Schönbach was speaking as the chief of Germany’s navy during his visit to the institute. “What he really wants is respect,” Schönbach said, referring to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “And my god, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost.” Furthermore, Schönbach said that in his opinion, “It is easy to even give him the respect he really demands and probably also deserves.”
The next day, on January 22, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba summoned Germany’s ambassador to Ukraine, Anka Feldhusen, to Kyiv and “expressed deep disappointment” regarding the lack of German weapons provided to Ukraine and also about Schönbach’s comments in New Delhi. Vice Admiral Schönbach released a statement soon after, saying, “I have just asked the Federal Minister of Defense [Christine Lambrecht] to release me from my duties and responsibilities as inspector of the navy with immediate effect.” Lambrecht did not wait long to accept the resignation.
Why was Vice Admiral Schönbach sacked? Because he said two things that are unacceptable in the West: First, that “the Crimean Peninsula is gone and never [coming] back” to Ukraine and, second, that Putin should be treated with respect. The Schönbach affair is a vivid illustration of the problem that confronts the West currently, where Russian behavior is routinely described as “aggression” and where the idea of giving “respect” to Russia is disparaged.
Aggression
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration began to use the word “imminent” to describe a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine toward the end of January. On January 18, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki did not use the word “imminent,” but implied it with her comment: “Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine.” On January 25, Psaki, while referring to the possible timeline for a Russian invasion, said, “I think when we said it was imminent, it remains imminent.” Two days later, on January 27, when she was asked about her use of the word “imminent” with regard to the invasion, Psaki said, “Our assessment has not changed since that point.”
On January 17, as the idea of an “imminent” Russian “invasion” escalated in Washington, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rebuked the suggestion of “the so-called Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Three days later, on January 20, spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova denied that Russia would invade Ukraine, but said that the talk of such an invasion allowed the West to intervene militarily in Ukraine and threaten Russia.
Even a modicum of historical memory could have improved the debate about Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the Georgian-Russian conflict in 2008, the European Union’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, found that the information war in the lead-up to the conflict was inaccurate and inflammatory. Contrary to Georgian-Western statements, Tagliavini said, “[T]here was no massive Russian military invasion underway, which had to be stopped by Georgian military forces shelling Tskhinvali.” The idea of Russian “aggression” that has been mentioned in recent months, while referring to the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine, replicates the tone that preceded the conflict between Georgia and Russia, which was another dispute about old Soviet borders that should have been handled diplomatically.
Western politicians and media outlets have used the fact that 100,000 Russian troops have been stationed on Ukraine’s border as a sign of “aggression.” The number—100,000—sounds threatening, but it has been taken out of context. To invade Iraq in 1991, the United States and its allies amassed more than 700,000 troops as well as the entire ensemble of U.S. war technology located in its nearby bases and on its ships. Iraq had no allies and a military force depleted by the decade-long war of attrition against Iran. Ukraine’s army—regular and reserve—number about 500,000 troops (backed by the 1.5 million troops in NATO countries). With more than a million soldiers in uniform, Russia could have deployed many more troops at the Ukrainian border and would need to have done so for a full-scale invasion of a NATO partner country.
Respect
The word “respect” used by Vice Admiral Schönbach is key to the discussion regarding the emergence of both Russia and China as world powers. The conflict is not merely about Ukraine, just as the conflict in the South China Sea is not merely about Taiwan. The real conflict is about whether the West will allow both Russia and China to define policies that extend beyond their borders.
Russia, for instance, was not seen as a threat or as aggressive when it was in a less powerful position in comparison to the West after the collapse of the USSR. During the tenure of Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), the Russian government encouraged the looting of the country by oligarchs—many of whom now reside in the West—and defined its own foreign policy based on the objectives of the United States. In 1994, “Russia became the first country to join NATO’s Partnership for Peace,” and that same year, Russia began a three-year process of joining the Group of Seven, which in 1997 expanded into the Group of Eight. Putin became president of Russia in 2000, inheriting a vastly depleted country, and promised to build it up so that Russia could realize its full potential.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the Western credit markets in 2007-2008, Putin began to speak about the new buoyancy in Russia. In 2015, I met a Russian diplomat in Beirut, who explained to me that Russia worried that various Western-backed maneuvers threatened Russia’s access to its two warm-water ports—in Sevastopol, Crimea, and in Tartus, Syria; it was in reaction to these provocations, he said, that Russia acted in both Crimea (2014) and Syria (2015).
The United States made it clear during the administration of President Barack Obama that both Russia and China must stay within their borders and know their place in the world order. An aggressive policy of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and of the creation of the Quad (Australia, India, Japan and the United States) drew Russia and China into a security alliance that has only strengthened over time. Both Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping recently agreed that NATO’s expansion eastward and Taiwan’s independence were not acceptable to them. China and Russia see the West’s actions in both Eastern Europe and Taiwan as provocations by the West against the ambitions of these Eurasian powers.
That same Russian diplomat to whom I spoke in Beirut in 2015 said something to me that remains pertinent: “When the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq, none of the Western press called it ‘aggression.’”
