Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine is a Dangerous Gamble

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

I will admit to being surprised by the invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, though I am not entirely unsympathetic to some of the claims, geopolitical, historical, and ideological, that he makes.

He appears to see himself standing alone against the United States and what he portrays, hyperbolically, as the “far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis” that “the leading NATO countries are supporting” in Ukraine.

Behind all this is Putin’s anger over the perceived Western humiliation of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union three decades ago, followed by NATO’s subsequent expansion eastward, to now encompass former satellite states such as Hungary and Poland, and even the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic.

The seeds of the current crisis were planted in 2014, when the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was deposed in an uprising and replaced by pro-Western politicians.

Putin’s response was decisive. Russia annexed the Crimea and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in the eastern Ukrainian region of the Donbas, with its heavily ethnic Russian population.

Putin backed the rebels and distributed more than 700,000 Russian passports. This conflict with the Kyiv government has already claimed an estimated 14,000 lives.

He has now gone further, recognizing the independence of the two People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, the breakaway separatist regions, so that they could ask Russia for “help.” Russia says it was within its rights, under the United Nations Charter, in responding to this request for assistance.

But the incursion into the Ukrainian heartland is a far greater gamble, and the Russian president has put forward his narrative to justify it. Putin believes that Russians and Ukrainians constitute a single nation -- in other words, that Ukraine is a component of Russia.

Last July, Putin wrote a long essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he defended this thesis. “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole, occupying the same historical and spiritual space,” he asserted.

In this he is correct: Both Ukrainians and Russians trace themselves to Kievan Rus, a trading center set up by Vikings along the Dnieper River more than 1,000 years ago.

To Putin, modern Ukraine is “entirely the product of the Soviet era,” having been incorporated into the Bolshevik state after the Russian Revolution. Putin takes note of the fact that Ukraine was part and parcel of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires prior to 1917.

He is dismissive of the modern-day Ukraine, arguing that its creation as a sovereign state was a tragedy and an accident, the handiwork of Communist leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the 20th century, to Russia’s detriment.

He was particularly scornful of the decision of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove Crimea, with its Russian majority, from the Russian Soviet republic in 1954 and award it to Ukraine, with no justification.

With the passing of the Soviet Union, Putin asserted, many Russians and Ukrainians sincerely believed that “our close cultural, spiritual and economic ties would certainly last.” But since 2014, the state has fallen into the hands of what he refers to as “neo-Nazis.”

His supposed evidence? The existence of far-right ultranationalist and extremist groups, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.

He paints today’s Ukraine as a corrupt puppet of the United States that, with its desire to join NATO, threatens Russia’s security. In his view, the NATO alliance, now at Russia’s border, should go no further.

Putin’s aim will be to oust President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. “We will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” was the way he phrased it. However, it’s unlikely he will permanently occupy Ukraine, with its 44 million people, the largest country in Europe in size after Russia itself.

Behind all this lies the way in which two multi-national Communist states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, suddenly dissolved. Relatively unimportant internal boundaries, often containing rival ethnicities, suddenly became international borders, and this has since then caused no end of trouble.

A case could have been made that strange creations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and even Ukraine, should have been partitioned, with sections carved off and attached to adjoining ethnic kin-countries.  

 

Can Bulgaria’s Government Stamp Out Corruption?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Following eight months of political standoff, including three general elections, Bulgaria’s parliament finally chose Kiril Petkov as the country’s next prime minister in December, following the country’s November 14 balloting.

MPs selected the 41-year-old graduate of the University of British Columbia and Harvard by 134 votes to 104. In a separate vote, lawmakers also approved his new centrist-led government -- a coalition led by Petkov’s anti-corruption We Continue to Change party (PP) and three other political groups.

Together they control 134 seats in Bulgaria’s 240-seat parliament and are close to President Rumen Radev, who also won re-election last year.

The country’s ruling party between 2009 and 2021, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), led by Boyko Borisov, went down to defeat. He was accused of having links with the country’s oligarchs and criminals.

Founded just last September, the PP quickly won support due to their resolute anti-graft pledges to bring transparency, zero tolerance for corruption, and reforms to key sectors, in what remains the European Union’s poorest member.

The country has the highest income inequality and the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate in the 27-nation EU. Anti-vaccine protesters tried to storm the Bulgarian parliament Jan. 12, led by Revival (Vazrazhdane), a nationalist, COVID-skeptic party.

“You and the coalition partners have a responsibility to reform the vicious power model inherited from 12 years of authoritarian rule, to tackle corruption and lawlessness, the inequalities and poverty they create,” President Radev told Petkov, in reference to Borisov.

This has come none too soon. Bulgarians have been leaving their home in droves, contributing to the world’s fastest population decline. Bulgaria’s population was around nine million at the end of the 1980s, but has dropped to fewer than seven million today.

Low birth rates are the biggest factor for such a steep decline. But what sets Bulgaria apart from other declining European countries is its massive outbound migration. The majority of Bulgarians, from doctors to construction workers, believe that better opportunities await abroad. 

At least 60,000 Bulgarians leave each year. About 1.1 million live in other European countries, particularly Germany and Spain.

“It is time, after 32 years, that Bulgarians saw power-holders who care for them; it is time young Bulgarians abroad saw Bulgaria as a promising place to return to, and our parents saw Bulgaria as a place where they can have a worthy pension and live their old age with dignity,” Petkov declared.

Andrey Gyurov, chair of the parliamentary group of the PP, explained that graft has long been the biggest problem in the country. “We need justice. That’s why our top priority is zero corruption.” Bulgaria remains the EU’s most graft-prone member, according to Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perception Index.

Its recent Global Corruption Barometer, published last summer prior to Borisov’s defeat, showed that 48 per cent of Bulgarians thought that corruption had increased in the previous 12 months. As well, 56 per cent believed that Borisov was involved in corruption, 67 per cent thought the same for MPs, and 40 per cent felt that most or all magistrates and judges were corrupt.

Corruption in Bulgaria had reached a boiling point that the electorate felt could no longer be tolerated. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated across Bulgaria against the right-wing government in 2020.

Among the priorities of the new government are the fight against corruption, plus tackling rising electricity prices and the coronavirus crisis. Plans to overhaul the Anti-Corruption Commission led to the resignation of its chair, Sotir Tsatsarov, in January.

Bulgaria is also in urgent need of judicial reform. A 2020 European Parliament resolution noted a “significant deterioration when it comes to respecting the principles of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights.”

On top of the scandals within the country, the U.S. Treasury Department last summer blacklisted several prominent Bulgarians, including lawmaker Delyan Peevski. He was one of six individuals who were added to a sanctions list due to “their extensive roles in corruption.”

The move was described as the single largest action targeting corruption to date under the Magnitsky Act, a law under which Washington punishes foreign government officials implicated in corruption or human rights abuses. Petkov’s government can only improve matters.

 

A Remarkable Shift

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Since the signing of the Abraham Accords, there has been a remarkable shift in Israel’s relations with the Muslim world. New reports have emerged of the possibility of further breakthroughs in diplomatic ties with former foes like Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country.

Another large Muslim nation that observers see the possibility of normalization is Bangladesh. There have been reports of unofficial economic and military cooperation, and Dhaka also dropped a key travel restriction to Israel last year.

Older Bangladeshi passports used to bear the sentence “This passport is valid for all the countries of the world except Israel.” But when the South Asian country rolled out its new e-passport, the “except Israel” phrase was removed without any public announcement. Bangladeshi nationals can now travel to Israel from a third country if they can obtain a visa.

Bangladesh has purchased Israeli military-grade technology, and the World Bank’s World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) database showed that between 2010 and 2018, Israel imported products worth around $333.74 million that originated from Bangladesh.

Israel was an early supporter of Bangladesh during its war of independence from West Pakistan in the early 1970s and was one of the first nations to recognize independent Bangladesh. Nevertheless, the country’s original leaders shunned Israel in favor of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who had sided with Pakistan.

“In ’71, in the most difficult time of our lives, we received an offer from Israel for recognition. We appreciated the offer, we kindly told you, ‘Thank you so much, it is OK, our patron India is with us, the Soviet Union is with us.’ Our people don’t forget, though,” former Bangladesh foreign affairs minister and long-time diplomat Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, has stated.

Choudhury faced charges of sedition, treason, blasphemy and espionage in part for attempting to attend a conference of the Hebrew Writers’ Association in Tel Aviv in 2004. He was beaten, jailed in solitary confinement for 17 months and denied medical treatment, before being released on bail with the help of an American congressman, though the charges against him are still pending.

Choudhury noted that Bangladesh’s first foreign minister, Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad, was responsible for turning Israel away. Ahmad later took part in a conspiracy leading to the assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in 1975 with Ahmad immediately taking control of the government and declaring himself president.

“The man responsible for our country’s original anti-Israel standing was himself an enemy of the state. We have had relations with Pakistan for nearly a half-century -- a country responsible for the killing of three million of our people. But no official relations with Israel. It makes no sense,” said Choudhury.

However, one of Bangladesh’s most revered war heroes was Jewish. Lt. Gen. Jack Farj Rafael Jacob, an officer in the Indian army, played a crucial role in negotiating the surrender of Pakistan in Dhaka during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.

His death was publicly mourned by high-level officials, and he was previously bestowed with the “Friend of Liberation War Honour” award. Louis Isadore Kahn, a Jewish Estonian-born American architect, designed Bangladesh’s National Assembly parliament building, an extraordinary example of modern architecture.

Bangladesh’s rapid development has not gone unnoticed by Israeli officials, who publicly welcomed the removal of Israel’s printed exclusion on Bangladesh passports and have openly called for warmer ties over the years. Bangladesh is experiencing a GDP growth of 7.9 per cent, with a $409 billion economy, and its government structure is quite inclusive. Women have led the country for nearly all of the last 20 years, and the current prime minister, parliament speaker, and opposition leader are women.

Ilan Sztulman Starosta, head of Mission of the Israeli Consulate in Dubai, recently became the highest-ranking Israeli official to give an interview to a Bangladesh media outlet, telling the Weekly Blitz that “Bangladesh could be a very important partner for us. Bangladesh has centers of innovation, a big population, resources.”

Israel is waiting for partnerships with Bangladeshi researchers, universities, and “everybody in the region would benefit from this relationship,” intimating that mutual ally India could play a critical role in bringing Israel and Bangladesh together.