Review of Flight MH17 and the New Cold War, by Kees Van der Pijl - not ready for prime time draft

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Living in Kyiv since 2007, I have witnessed the events that Kees van der Pijl analyzes. This is the most thoroughly researched, comprehensive book I have seen on the conflict with Russia.  Having been impressed by the author's most recent book, States of Emergency, about the Covid crisis, I was delighted to find that he had written one about my adoptive country.

I write this review in four parts:
o  The objectives of the book, and its slant
o  My own perspective, and how it meshes with the author's
o  A brief summary of the book itself
o  How these themes are reflected in the "Russian invasion" of February 2022

The objectives of the book, and its slant

Van der Pijl is a Dutchman writing for a Western audience. The story that we in the West have been told about the Maidan revolution of 2014, the downing of MH17, and the continued tensions between Russia and Ukraine has been provided by the Western media.

The degree to which the media is in lockstep with the intelligence agencies and the Internet oligarchs has become impossible to ignore in the last two years of the Covid crisis. More and more of us find it impossible to believe what the government says about the dangers of Covid, its transmissibility, the effectiveness of lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and sanitizing and especially the newfangled mRNA jabs.

Only the unimaginable level of today's deception surprises a guy like me who played an unwitting part in the deceptions of the Vietnam War and has since observed the falsehoods associated with weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons in Syria, supposed poisonings in England, the Benghazi fiasco and so on. It was time to rethink what I thought I knew about 2014.

The author gives himself away by calling the Ukrainian ultranationalists "Fascists." In my mind the last of that breed died in 1945. Probably because progressives in the United States apply that label to me, along with racist, sexist and the other predictable slurs, I tend to discount people who use it.

Many of my Ukrainian neighbors have the view that had it not been for the strong patriotism of the Western Ukrainians in the Right Sector and other militias, much of Ukraine would have been lost to Russia. The Ukrainian Army had been hollowed out, underfunded and populated with pro-Russian sleepers under Yanukovych and his predecessors. It was in no shape to resist the annexation of Crimea and the spontaneous uprisings that resulted in the People's Republics.

There are some questions that can never be answered. I know several people who were in Crimea at the time of the referendum on annexation to Russia. It was hastily conducted, ambiguously worded, and the polls were watched in such a way that the integrity of the process is in doubt. Nonetheless, in my several visits to Crimea I had noticed that they did only speak Russian and appreciated Ukrainians mainly for the money they dropped during vacations.

It was called the Autonomous Republic of Crimea at the time, in deference to its long-standing separate status. Although the refugees from Crimea no doubt suffered discrimination and considerable financial losses when the Russians took over, I think it is equally true that most of the population was comfortable with them. After all, the Russians had been a major presence all along on account of their long-term lease on the port of Sevastopol. The Russian takeover was stealthily and smoothly executed. So far as I know only one Ukrainian died.

Van der Pijl's account of the uprisings that led to the People's Republics seems incomplete. I met the mayor of Slavyansk, a very Russian-speaking city in the Donetsk oblast, who regaled me with stories about how they had resisted the insurgents. Uprisings in Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odessa and many other Russian speaking cities appear to me to have been put down by the local citizenry.  It had to be – the central government was too weak and ineffective. Also, the playbook seemed to hew very closely to the techniques I had read about for Soviet-guided "people's uprisings" to install communism in what became the Eastern European satellites. The process was repeated in the Transnistria region of Moldova.

My conclusion is that today's People's Republics represent the two portions of southeastern Ukraine with the greatest affinity for Russian history and culture. Given that the rest of Ukraine five years ago absorbed the people who did not want to live under the Russians, the best bet at this point would be to implement the Minsk Accords and let everybody live in peace. I suspect that van der Pijl is right to observe that the Ukrainians seem to be the obstacle. No Ukrainian politician can afford to be tagged as the one who "gave away the Donbas." 

My own perspective, and how it meshes with the author's

Van der Pijl calls Ukraine a "failed state." One of the better parts of the book is his analysis of who the players are – the oligarchs who own 90% of the economy. They fight interminably over the spoils. This constant infighting and name-calling are certainly an impediment to presenting a united face to Russia and seeking a settlement.

While I'm on the topic, let me remark on the benefits of a "failed state." They have not come together to enforce Covid vaccinations, masks, or even childhood vaccinations. They do not push politically correct agendas with regard to sex, gender, race or whatever. We in Ukraine enjoy the same accidental but nonetheless refreshing freedom as citizens of Argentina, Nicaragua and wartime Vietnam. The government has better things to do than pester the citizenry.

Ukraine does not have the sense of despondency and purposelessness that one thinks of in connection with a failed state. The sense of personal pride shows itself in the way people dress, take care of their cars and possessions, and treat each other with respect. It is a more pleasant place to live than Washington DC. Children are happier and more normal. Among other things, they haven't been wearing masks. They are learning arithmetic rather than rainforest math. This may represent the paradox of a healthy society within a failed state.

A person's sense of well-being is a relative thing. The economy has been growing comfortably over the past few years. Agricultural exports to Europe and China are booming. Outsourcing of services delivered by the Internet, chief among which is computer programming, have been growing by leaps and bounds. The sense of optimism in Kyiv is palpable. My understanding is that this is true as well in regional cities. There are IT technology hubs all over the country.

Van der Pijl has a negative take on the big agricultural firms. Mostly publicly traded, these large companies consolidate thousands of square kilometers on which they can conduct large-scale farming operations using Dutch and American farm equipment, seed, fertilizer, irrigation systems and the like. It makes them vastly more efficient.

So far, these big combines are not allowed to own land outright. They lease family-owned smallholds, for which they pay fairly modest leases.  Van der Pijl contends that the leaseholders overuse the land, destroying its fertility. I had heard that before. He contends that they use GMO crops. This I had not heard. GMOs are generally against the law here, although glyphosate – Roundup, used with GMO corn among other things – is still tolerated as a farm chemical.  While I share his concern for the future the land, I cannot envision a scenario in which smallholdings will be profitable for owners to farm any time in the future. Not here, or any place in the developed world, unfortunately. I am glad that Ukrainians at least retain ownership.  There are a number of techniques for restoring degraded farmland, depending on what's wrong with it, though they take both time and money. It will not be lost forever.

Van der Pijl observes, as do many others, that Yanukovych was a lawfully elected President.  This is true. He was elected by a narrow plurality, significantly less than a majority. There are many historical precedents: Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Salvador Allende, and in our day Justin Trudeau. And all four men, once elected, far exceeded their mandates in an attempt to perpetuate their power.

Yanukovych's predecessor, Western Ukrainian Victor Yushenko, had appeal to his base by sticking it to the Russian speakers. He renamed streets after detested anti-Soviet resistance leaders such as Simon Petrulya and Stepan Bandura.  Van der Pijl calls them fascists.  He also curbed the language rights of the Russian speaking minority by limiting broadcasts, movies and the like in the Russian language.

Yanukovych's pushback was predictable. He more than restored language rights. His minister of education Tabachnik eviscerated Ukrainian language institutions such as the oldest university in the country, Kyiv Mogilia Academy, and the Ukrainian Catholic University. He made significant changes to public school education, reducing the national pride factor significantly. This did not make him popular.

Yanukovych was also a world-class thief. At the time I said of him that he "broke more than he stole, and stole all he could." All of the merchants I dealt with in Kyiv lived in terror of his tax police, who unfairly shook down small businesses such as my barber. On a larger scale, he prevented the export of Ukraine's 2013 bumper crop of grain in on the spurious ground that it was somehow contaminated and required meticulous inspection. One could only export through companies Yanukovych controlled. This was a vast hit to Western grain dealers such as Cargill.  They ran up huge charges for demurrage of railcars and ships as their cargoes could not move. Quite a bit spoiled.

When Maidan came around, the people of Kyiv rallied enthusiastically against this much hated president. Though I have no use for the CIA – see my reviews of Legacy of Ashes and Deadly Deceits – my impression, and my Russian and Ukrainian language searches on the Internet convince me that the CIA was not heavily involved in Maidan. I credit it to ineptitude rather than a lack of malicious intent.

Whereas Van der Pijl would put most of the blame on the United States and Western machinations, my view is that the blame can be rather equally shared. This was a historical confrontation with deep historical roots, in which there are no white hats.

As mentioned above, I have seen what the CIA and American diplomacy did in many other countries. It is disreputable, reprehensible. My observation is that in this case events got ahead of them. The American Embassy, whatever their intentions, did not initially stage manage the Maidan uprising. They were playing catch-up.   I was there a few times; some acquaintances quite often. Their protest was sincere. These friends did not belong to right wing groups, or any groups at all for that matter.

A brief summary of the book itself

This is a good time to repeat that although I do not totally agree with Van der Pijl's take on the situation, it is the best, most thoroughly documented one I have seen. The chapter outline is a good introduction.

1 The global gamble of a new Cold War

2. Divided Ukraine

3. From the Maidan revolts to regime change

4. The Civil War and the MA17 disaster

5. Aftermath: the failed state on NATO's front line

1. The global gamble of a new Cold War

The US sees itself as the leading world power. As such it habitually meddles in other countries business for a number of reasons. It promotes its own commercial interests. It works to suppress potential rivals to its global hegemony.

It does this by soft means – supposedly "promoting democracy," teaching English, student exchange, and exporting American culture and values. In the last decades this has included rampant secularism, feminism, gay and transsexual rights, notions of racial equality in countries that historically had insignificant problems with minorities, and so on.

The United States has extended its hegemony commercially through banks, pharmaceuticals, the Internet, entertainment and other domains, and in vigorous enforcement of intellectual property law.

The United States has used covert operations to support governments amenable to American hegemony and to upset those that might oppose it. Van der Pijl points to the color revolutions that have taken place throughout the world. The now defunct U.S. Army run School of the Americas educated a generation of Latin American caudillos.

Van der Pijl provides as good an overview as one can find of how this operated in Ukraine. This alone is worth the price of the book.

2. Divided Ukraine

Van der Pijl provides a pretty good history of Ukraine. It has not been a strong and united country since its glory days of the 11th century. Its fate is governed as much as anything by geography, which Van der Pijl could afford to describe at greater length. The Black Sea and the Carpathian Mountains to the west, peaking at 6000 feet, are the only natural barriers the country enjoys – but they aren't much. From the northwest wrapping clear around to the Black Sea there is nothing but flat land. Ukraine has been controlled by invaders from every quadrant.

The two dominant languages, Ukrainian and Russian, are distributed along three clines: west to east, rural to urban, and poor to rich. Though a majority may have spoken Ukrainian, Russian has simply been a superior language for science, commerce, and even literature. This has resulted in constant tension.

Ukrainian speakers in the West bridle at the memory of centuries of domination by Lithuania, Poland and Hungary, followed by a brutal Russian communist regime.  There is a lingering resentment of all things Russian, including today's political class which mostly grew up speaking the language. While people in the West have always been polite to me, they make it clear that they would prefer to speak Ukrainian. People in the East never attempted to address this foreigner in Ukrainian and were pleased by my less-than-perfect Russian.

Though he may overdramatize the tensions between East and West, Van der Pijl is certainly describing a real phenomenon. Ukraine has not been a united polity in anybody's memory. It was not prepared to immediately become one upon achieving its independence in 1991. The United States' delusion that a full-blown democracy might spring up automatically was as unrealistic in Ukraine as in sub-Saharan Africa. These things take time. It is clear in any case that, rhetoric aside, the United States wanted a catspaw to irritate Russia more than a functioning democracy.

The United States supported ardent Ukrainian nationalists, the so-called fascists, because it was in the US national interest to pry Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and to keep it divided.

3. From the Maidan revolts to regime change

Van der Pijl's account of the events of Maidan are very much worth reading because they go against the mainstream narrative.  There is undoubtedly truth on both sides.

The most significant claim he makes is that the "heavenly hundred" of martyred on European Square, to spark the ultimate removal of Yanukovych, were shot by Western Ukrainian forces to engender outrage against Yanukovych. This claim has been made many times before and the forensic evidence he presents in support it is quite compelling. Whatever the case, it was certainly effective in getting rid of Yanukovych.

4. The Civil War and the MA17 disaster

Van der Pijl characterizes the Donbas uprisings as a civil war. I am less charitable. I believe that these "popular uprisings" were sparked and supported by Russia. The modus operandi is familiar – enlist local thugs, of whom the local people are appropriately in fear, to take over and rush to recognize and support them once they get a foothold.

As noted above, the uprisings took place simultaneously in a great many cities in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. It's quite obvious they were coordinated. Putin did, however, ensure deniability. He kept an arm's-length relation with the insurrectionists and did not support them when they failed in all but Donetsk and Lugansk. These uprisings galvanized the Western Ukrainian patriots who rushed in to fight their long-time enemy, Russia, and what they took to be Russian proxies. The American Embassy and CIA were no doubt overjoyed at this development.

Van der Pijl's treatment of the MA17 catastrophe is extremely detailed and compelling. Although he stops short of claiming that the Kyiv government did it as a false flag, one can read his opinion between the lines. It is worth reading all of the contradictory accounts of the affair, which he chronicles in detail, providing a wealth of footnotes for his sources.

He observes that the affair played into the hands of the United States. It killed the North Stream and the South Stream gas pipeline projects which would have strengthened the economic ties between Russia and Europe, weakening American interests. It allowed NATO to push closer to Russia, being even more threatening.

Whatever one chooses to believe about the MH17 affair, one should not ignore such a thoroughly researched position as is presented here.

5. Aftermath: the failed state on NATO's front line

Ukraine remains governed by a motley collection of oligarchs. Van der Pijl finds this to be a lamentable situation. In my opinion it is not too different from the present situations in the United States and Western Europe. We need only look at the past couple of years under Covid. The tyranny has been worse almost everywhere in the world outside Ukraine.

The failed state is serving the residents fairly well in not attracting immigrants. My bet is that the meager quota – about 7000 this year – will not be exceeded simply because immigrants don't find it attractive. That is wonderful – we are not importing the headaches of multiculturalism and diversity. Wages and salaries are artificially depressed, which means that talented young people are able to find jobs in high tech at home and working in Western Europe, where their work ethic is appreciated.

How these themes are reflected in the "Russian invasion" of February 2022

As I write, the United States appears to be stubbornly persisting in efforts to spark a war with Russia. Just this morning there is an unexplained explosion on a pipeline in the People's Republics. I have dark suspicions that it was not Russia who lit the match.

A person seeking to tie the threads together, to look for historical antecedents to present day events, must approach this book as required reading.

As a bottom line, though I do not agree with all of Van der Pijl's points, I have not seen a better presentation of the facts and theories about Ukraine for this period of history. It is a five-star effort.