This Mess Goes Back

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I’m a citizen of three NATO countries; one of them, Poland, borders Russia at Kaliningrad. All of them blame Vladimir Putin, exclusively, for starting the war with Ukraine.

In the immediate sense, they are of course correct. But this mess goes back much further – in fact, about a century ago. And those most responsible for creating it involve a Polish leader, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, and three Soviet Communist autocrats -- Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1914, at the start of World War I, Ukrainians were a nation, in fact perhaps two, but they had no state. In the west, they were ruled by the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, in the east by the tsarist Russian Romanovs.

The western Ukrainians looked westward and were religiously in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Eastern Ukrainians were part of the Orthodox Christian World.

Both the Austrian and Russian empires collapsed in 1918. But, despite some attempts, no Ukrainian entity emerged.

In the aftermath of the 1919 peace treaties, Communists gained power in Russia. At the same time, a reborn Polish polity was created, with boundaries not yet fully determined.

The so-called Curzon Line, named for the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, was proposed as the eastern Polish border, separating Poland from Russian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.

But a war with the new Soviet republic established Poland’s eastern border about 200 kilometres east of the line. The 1921 Treaty of Riga divided Ukraine and Belarus between Poland and Soviet Russia. Moscow established internal Soviet entities in its territory; the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) was one.

Lenin also gave the new republic areas in the Donbas region in its east which were mainly ethnically Russian. Since the Soviet Union was really a Communist entity run from Moscow, this didn’t much matter to most.

Meanwhile Poland governed the ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian regions it had conquered (as well as ethnically Lithuanian territories around Vilnius). In 1939 the population in the territories of interwar Poland east of the Curzon Line totalled 12 million, consisting of over five million Ukrainians, between 3.5 and four million Poles, 1.5 million Belarusians, and 1.3 million Jews.

In 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded and partitioned Poland, with the Soviets occupying the ethnically Belarusian and Ukrainian territories beyond the Curzon Line. They were annexed to the respective Soviet republics that were already within the USSR.

However, most of the western Ukrainians who now found themselves newly ruled from Moscow, for the very first time, were less than pleased with this arrangement and many fought against Soviet forces during World War II. But Stalin’s victorious Soviet Union regained them after 1945 and they remained part of the Ukrainian SSR.

The Crimean Peninsula had been conquered and settled by Russians in the 18^th century. It was incorporated by Catherine the Great in 1783 into the Russian Empire from the defeated Ottoman Empire.  

Though attached to the Ukrainian mainland, in 1921 the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created by Lenin. After 1945 Stalin made it a fully incorporated part of the large Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (today’s Russian Federation).

However, in 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, unilaterally handed it over to the Ukrainian SSR. Again, this didn’t matter to the mainly Russian population there because the totalitarian Soviet state was, after all, centrally ruled from Moscow.

But all this came to and end in 1991. Suddenly, almost without warning, the component union republics of the USSR, in their then current frontiers, became sovereign nations. The new Ukrainian nation now included Russian areas like Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

The 2014 Maidan uprising led to the formation of a more nationalistic political culture in Ukraine; Russians and Russified Ukrainians in these eastern regions were not comfortable with this new attitude. Putin then unilaterally annexed Crimea and has now recognized the other two entities as independent states.

The last step was his invasion of Ukraine, in order to force Kyiv to accept these moves, and also to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Will he succeed? Though not a NATO member, Ukraine has the full backing of the alliance. It is itself a large state, so the outcome remains in doubt.

 

China’s Market is More Complex than it First Seems

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

There is no doubt that President Xi Jinping is changing China in significant ways, with a view to make its political system more robust, effective and powerful. He is also increasingly projecting China as a leading player on the world stage. But has he made the Chinese political system more resilient and thus more enduring? Some don’t think so.

Desmond Shum, who knows the ways of China’s rulers, has now written a story of “wealth, power, corruption and vengeance in today’s China.” His new book, Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China, doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Shum was born in Shanghai, spent his boyhood in Hong Kong and studied in the United States. He describes his personal experience working in senior roles in Chinese companies and the guanxi (influence and connections) such people need with the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party to ensure business dealings succeed.

 

The book relates the widespread and systemic corruption, through personalized social networks of power, that permeates the party’s relationship with private business and the resulting high level of influence it exercises. It’s a political system that mouths Communist slogans while the families of senior officials gorge themselves at the economic trough.

 

“Much of what I put in the book is baked into the system,” Shum told Charlie Campbell, the East Asia correspondent for Time magazine in an interview last October.  “It’s in the DNA of the party-state; it won’t change, it cannot change.”

 

He pointed to the Communist Party’s celebrations on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party last July 1. There were seven busloads of “red aristocracy” watching the parade. These people are general citizens, without specific titles, who make no particular contribution to society. “The only reason they got invited and sit next to the President is bloodline.”

 

In 2002, when Shum met Whitney Duan Weihong, his ambitious future wife, he was impressed by her mastery of guanxi. Her most important connection was to Zhang Beili, the wife of the soon-to-be premier Wen Jiabao. Duan’s goal was to amass a fortune by becoming Zhang’s intimate and business fixer. With Duan, and under the umbrella of her holding company Great Ocean, Shum “joined the system and thrived inside it.”

The premier’s wife got 30 per cent of profits from her and Duan’s “joint” ventures, but seldom put up 30 per cent of the capital. Shum and Duan ran the ventures and worked to obtain the voluminous permits required. Zhang’s interest was the lubricating oil with party officials. It was for this that she got her cut.

As manager of the National Gemstone Testing Center in Beijing and the China Mineral and Gem Corporation, Zhang was in a pivotal position to facilitate or deny entry by global diamond firms such as Cartier or De Beers into the regulated Chinese market.

Zhang was not alone in amassing wealth. When he was the head of the government between 2003 and 2013, Wen Jiabao was considered to be one of the most powerful men in the world. His relatives accumulated shares in banks, jewelers, tourist resorts, telecommunications companies and infrastructure projects, sometimes using offshore entities.

The holdings included a villa development in Beijing; a tire factory in northern China; a company that helped build some of Beijing’s Olympic stadiums; and Ping An Insurance, one of the world’s biggest financial services companies. An October 2012 New York Times article which reviewed corporate and regulatory records indicated that the prime minister’s relatives controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.

As for Duan, she became one of the wealthiest women in China. She and Shum rationalized their good fortune. “We thought our wealth could foster social change. We were wrong,” Shum laments. Then the wheel of fortune turned. With the coming to power of President Xi in 2012, the “connections” dried up.

Shum and his wife divorced in 2015 and Shum left for England with their son. Two years later, the authorities came for Duan. She was “disappeared” from her grandiose Beijing office in 2017 and sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption. She has since contacted her ex-husband from her hidden jail, via telephone, just once.

 

Much of the World is Shrugging off War in Ukraine

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

In Canada, reaction to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reached a fever pitch. It almost feels as if we ourselves are at war with Russia.

The non-NATO countries of the world, outside Europe and North America, have a less emotional point of view and this has elicited not a fraction of the rage directed by the western countries against Moscow.

In Asia, for example, the reaction has been far more mixed. China has refused to call the Russian assault an invasion, and in Vietnam, the Russian president is being affectionately referred to as “Uncle Putin.” Vietnam refrained from singling Russia out as an aggressor, and instead called on “all relevant parties to exercise restraint.”

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has called Putin his “favorite hero.” Meanwhile, Myanmar’s ruling generals have supported Russia’s actions as “the right thing to do.”

India abstained from a UN Security Council resolution Feb. 25 to condemn the attack. New Delhi is the world’s second-largest importer of Russian arms.

Russia has often voted to support India in international forums, including refraining from criticism of its nuclear weapons tests in the 1990s. Moscow has also repeatedly used its veto power at the Security Council to block resolutions critical of India over Kashmir. Indian officials may even help Russia find workarounds for the new sanctions by setting up rupee accounts to continue trade with Moscow.

“This particular decision is a product of the geopolitical circumstances that India is looking at this point in time,” remarked Happymon Jacob, who teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

He described India’s situation in its immediate region as a “claustrophobia” that would get worse if India angered Russia. Chinese troops have been building up on the Indian border in the Himalayas.

“Whose side is India on?” asked Pankaj Saran, India’s former ambassador to Russia. “We are on our side.”

“Indonesia does not see Russia as a threat to global politics or as a foe,” said Dinna Prapto Raharja, an associate professor in international relations at Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta. “Unilateral sanctions limit the chance for negotiation and heightens the sense of insecurity to the affected countries,” she added.

Om Feb. 24 Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry, maintained that the country had no intention of imposing sanctions against Moscow, arguing it would “not blindly follow the steps taken by another country.”

Singapore has strongly opposed the Ukrainian invasion. Even so, “I don’t think we will shun Russia,” indicated Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore’s former ambassador to Russia. “It is still a big country and is a nuclear weapons state.” It is also a permanent member of the Security Council, a status that is unlikely to change, he added.

As the crisis with Ukraine intensified, Putin also began courting Latin American leaders. The effects of the sanctions on Russia’s banking system will likely affect Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Energy, military and agricultural sectors could suffer the most.

Putin recently spoke to Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega, for the first time since 2014. He also called the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba.

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela met with Yuri Borisov, the deputy prime minister of Russia, in Caracas in mid-February. Russian energy companies and banks have been instrumental in allowing Venezuela to continue exporting oil.

Putin hosted the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, who vowed to reduce his country’s reliance on the United States, and he met with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who expressed “solidarity” for Russia while on a visit to Moscow.

At the United Nations General Assembly on March 2, Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua abstained on the vote denouncing Russian aggression

“Vladimir Putin views Latin America as still an important area for the United States,” said Vladimir Rouvinski, a professor at Icesi University in Cali, Colombia. “So this is reciprocity for what is happening in Ukraine.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry contends that Latin America “was and remains for us a region of political goodwill, economic opportunity, cultural closeness and a similar mentality.” Russia never participated in colonizing the region, in exploiting the peoples that populate it, or in any conflicts, wars or other uses of force, it said.