New Book
By Prof. Kees van der PijlGlobal Research, April 30, 2018
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/
On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down over eastern Ukraine, a few minutes before it would have crossed into Russian airspace on its journey from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The incident, killing all on board, occurred six months after Ukrainian ultra-nationalists had seized power in Kiev with Western support, triggering the secession of Crimea and a Russian-Ukrainian insurgency in the Donbass (Donetsk and Lugansk provinces).
In my forthcoming book Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War. Prism of Disaster (Manchester
University Press, June), which will also come out in a German
translation with PapyRossa in Cologne and a Portuguese one with Fino
Traço publishers in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, I challenge the Western
narrative on what happened that day.
Recent
events, such as the alleged gas incident in Douma (Syria), the assault
of father and daughter Skripal in Salisbury, as well as the accusations
of systematic doping of Russian athletes, confirm one of the book’s
basic conclusions: Moscow is being accused of misdeeds of all kinds and
subjected to sanctions before any serious investigation has occurred to
establish its culpability.
In
the book I analyse the MH17 catastrophe as a prism that refracts the
broader historical context in which it occurred. Its different strands
include the capsizing of the European and world balance of power after
the collapse of the USSR; the resurrection by the Putin leadership in
Moscow of a Russian state and economy strong enough to resist Western
direction; the Gazprom-EU energy connection; the civil war in Ukraine
that followed the seizure of power of February 2014, and the attempt to
turn Russia into an enemy again, legitimising NATO and EU forward
pressure and the new Cold War.
Source: VICE News
There
is no way that the disaster can be understood as an isolated incident, a
matter of identifying the immediate causes of the crash, or who gave
the order to shoot it down if it was not an accident. The analysis must
cast its net much wider, if only because many conclusive details are
either missing or shrouded by the fog of the propaganda war that broke
out immediately afterwards. Certainly an investigation of the
catastrophe cannot remain confined to the forensics or rely on phone
taps provided by the intelligence service of a regime in Kiev which, by
any standard, should be considered a potential perpetrator.
The
first, most comprehensive frame in which to understand the downing of
MH17 is the challenge posed to Western global governance by a tentative
bloc of large contender states led by China and Russia. Russia is at
the heart of a Eurasian alternative to the neoliberal EU, whilst China
is the obvious centre of the BRICS countries (the others being Brazil,
Russia, India and South Africa). The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation,
established in 2001, is another of the bloc’s supporting structures. In
the days immediately preceding the downing, the BRICS heads of state,
hosted by the Brazilian president,Dilma Rousseff (since
removed by a soft coup staged in May 2016), signed the statute
establishing a New Development Bank as a direct challenge to the US and
Western-dominated World Bank and IMF. Still in Brazil before flying back
to Moscow on the 17th, Russian president Vladimir Putin on the fringes of the football world cup finals also agreed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to
pursue a comprehensive Land for Gas deal. Its tentative provisions
included normalising the status of Crimea in exchange for a massive
economic rehabilitation plan and a gas price rebate for Ukraine.
Russia’s
energy resources were key to this deal and, more broadly, to forging a
symbiosis with the EU, in particular with Germany and Italy. After the
Nordstream pipeline across the Baltic, agreed in 2005 and linking Russia
and Germany directly, a South Stream counterpart across the Black Sea
was contracted with ENI of Italy in 2007, to be extended through a grid
into southern Europe as far as Austria, with German companies involved
too. This sort of German-Russian rapprochement goes back to the days of
Bismarck and around the turn of the 20th century gave rise to the notion
that Anglo-America, the heartland of liberal capitalism and the
potentially excluded party from such a rapprochement, should consider
its prevention the priority of its European diplomacy. For, by the sheer
size of the Eurasian land mass (for which the term ‘heartland’ was
coined originally), not to mention the formidable combination that
European industry and Russian resources could constitute, unity among
the Eurasian states had long appeared threatening to the supremacy of
the Anglophone West.
Energy
diplomacy likely explains the sanctions the US imposed on Russia
following the coup in Kiev, and it may explain why Washington stepped up
the level of punitive measures so drastically on 16 July, one day
before MH17 was brought down, while the BRICS leaders were still in
Brazil and Putin and Merkel agreed to work on a solution to the crisis.
However, these sanctions were still to be underwritten by an EU summit
and expectations were that this was not going to be smooth sailing,
because several EU states balked at the prospect of a further disruption
of their gas supply, agricultural exports and other economic links with
Russia. These hesitations were only overcome after the catastrophe
occurred the next day. The Land for Gas negotiations, too, were
immediately terminated. South Stream, already being opposed for
violations of EU competition rules, was finally abandoned on 1 December
2014. It was replaced by a tentative agreement with Turkey on an
alternative route, but this too was disrupted by the shooting down of a
Russian jet over Syria by an F-16 from the NATO air base at Inçirlik in
southern Turkey in November 2015. It was only revived after the failed
coup against the Erdoğan government in July 2016. Today a Nord Stream 2
pipeline is in the works, again fiercely contested by Washington.
The
book situates these events in the context of a struggle of
world-historical proportions between two conflicting social orders: the
neoliberal capitalism of the West, locked in a crisis caused by
speculative finance, yet still hostage to it; versus a state-directed,
oligarchic capitalism, and with Europe in between. This struggle is
being fought out in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’, in the Middle East, in the
South China Sea, and elsewhere. The downing of one Malaysian Airlines
Boeing and the disappearance of another a few months before, both
occurred on these front lines.
The MH17 crash over eastern Ukraine, then, is a focal point in how this struggle unfolded and continues to do so.
So what was ‘new’ about the New Cold War in which it occurred?
Here
I argue that in the current stand-off with Putin’s Russia, the West
operates from a perspective inspired by the mentality of extreme
risk-taking that stems from the dominant role of speculative finance in
contemporary capitalism. In fact, the post-Soviet space became a testing
ground for predatory finance and for the uncompromising
authoritarianism that we also see emerging in the West. The financial
crisis of 2008 coincided with the first actual test of strength with
Russia, when the Bush Jr. administration encouraged Georgia to try and
recapture its breakaway province of South Ossetia by force. The European
Union was simultaneously trying to commit former Soviet republics to an
Eastern Partnership and EU Association, a barely disguised extension of
the Euro-Atlantic bloc into the former Soviet space. More specifically
it was directed against Moscow’s Eurasian Union project, in which
Ukraine, one of the key heavy-industry nodes of the former Soviet Union,
figured as well.
In
fact Ukraine upon the 1991 break-up of the USSR found itself struggling
with the legacy of the enlargement of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in
1922 and the addition of Crimea to it in 1954, that left the country
divided in two different ethno-cultural halves. The Russian-Ukrainian
population in the south and east favoured close ties with Russia; the
Ukrainian population in the westernmost parts on the other hand had a
history of resistance to it. This fault-line was reinforced by the
formation of a rapacious, criminal oligarchy, of which the strongest
fraction emerged in the south-east and favoured federalism, the
constitutional arrangement best suited to accommodate the country’s
fragile unity. By 2004, however, society grew restive over the endless
plunder amid mass poverty and destitution. In the ‘Orange Revolution’ of
that year, protest over election fraud was exploited by lesser
oligarchs to try and wrest back control over gas and other economic
assets from the billionaires associated with federalism.
The
decision of federalist President Yanukovych not to sign the EU
Association Agreement in November 2013 sparked another round of
demonstrations. For Ukraine, the agreement would have had grave economic
consequences, but in the eyes of many, especially the urban middle
classes, Yanukovich’s readiness to accept a Russian counteroffer was a
missed chance to stop the plunder by the oligarchy, by then including
the president’s family.
Viktor Yanukovych (right)
From
mid-February 2014, the demonstrations descended into deadly violence,
which was later found to have been the work of provocateurs associated
with the ultra-nationalist and actual Ukrainian fascists serving as
‘self-defence’ units. When EU foreign ministers rushed to Kiev to
mediate and avoid further bloodshed, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt instead negotiated with the co-founder of the fascist party of independent Ukraine and commander of its militia, Andriy Parubiy,
on the modalities of removing Yanukovych by force. After the coup
provoked the secession of Crimea and the uprising in the Donbass,
Parubiy, put in command of all military and intelligence operations as
Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC), played a
crucial role in the ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ to bring the rebellious
provinces to heel and prevent key cities such as Odessa from joining the
uprising.
The
West committed itself to the coup regime in Kiev right away and
actually identified who should lead the new government (as revealed in
the notorious, leaked phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt).
The hacked e-mails of NATO commander General Breedlove furthermore
reveal that US advisers were directly involved in getting the coup
government to respond with maximum force to the uprising in the eastern
provinces, on the express supposition that this was the time and place
to confront Russia and China. Indeed here we find the documentary
evidence of how the larger, geo-economic struggle between the West and
the BRICS played out in Ukraine.
The
civil war in the east was slow to erupt, but time and again, the forces
of compromise, nationally and internationally, were cut off by a
distinct war party made up of NATO hard-liners and Ukrainian ultras.
Whether the downing of MH17 was a conscious move in this context cannot
be established, but there is no doubt that the disaster swept aside all
remaining hesitations in Europe to go along with the new round of
sanctions on Russia imposed by the US the day before.
From
the start, the civil war was portrayed in the West against the
background of an alleged Russian intervention in Ukraine and the MH17
catastrophe was seamlessly woven into this narrative. However, the
official investigations into the MH17 disaster, formally delegated to
the Netherlands, were profoundly compromised by granting the coup
government in Kiev a veto over any outcomes, a novelty in history of
aviation disaster investigation that was considered shameful even in
Ukraine.
Petro Poroshenko and Barack Obama (left)
The
immunity from criminal prosecution was granted on 7 August, the day
Andriy Parubiy stepped down as NSDC Secretary. Since NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen paid
a lightning visit to Kiev that very day, with tanks patrolling the
streets, in the book I ask the question whether Rasmussen had come to
express support for President Petro Poroshenko and the immunity was the price to ward off another coup.
The
narrative of Russian responsibility had meanwhile been floated by the
minister of the interior of the coup government in Kiev, Arsen Avakov, and his spokesman, Anton Gerashchenko,
right after the downing and it has been confirmed in both the
conclusions of the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the criminal
investigation by a Joint Investigation Team (JIT). According to the DSB
the plane had been downed by a Buk (SA-11) surface-to-air missile hit
coming from rebel-held territory; the JIT progress report in September
2016 added that a Buk unit had in fact been transported from Russia,
fired a missile and then was transported back.
In
the book I contest these findings by pointing to obvious
inconsistencies in both the official Buk, and the alternative fighter
plane scenarios that have been put forward. Among others, the DSB
conclusion that MH17 was brought down by a Russian missile, was based
on two tell-tale, bowtie-shaped shrapnel particles found in the
plane wreckage, out of the potential 2,500 contained by a missile
warhead, of which in tests some 1,500 smash into the plane’s body.
Without
claiming to know who, intentionally or by accident, finally pulled the
trigger, I see the drama of MH17 as the outcome of Western, mostly US
and NATO forward pressure into the former Soviet bloc and the actual
USSR. From the Russian angle, the disaster is only one element in a much
broader picture covering the coup and the civil war, its more than ten
thousand dead and more than a million refugees. Nevertheless, throughout
the entire process Moscow, too, has adopted a strange posture that does
not inspire confidence. Excluded from both investigations, it has not
come up with compelling evidence exculpating itself and/or the
insurgents, either. Besides reticence about exposing the true reach and
capacity of its satellite and radar intelligence, the explanation for
these oblique hints and last-minute revelations can only be that for
Moscow there are other priorities in Ukraine and even in its relations
with the West than revealing the truth about MH17—just as for the United
States and NATO, which have consistently failed to back up any of their
claims concerning Russian or insurgent responsibility, geopolitical
considerations come first.
Since
finishing the book, the aforementioned instances in which Moscow was
declared guilty before the facts are in, have further exacerbated an
international situation already fraught with grave dangers.
Investigating what we do know about these events, in this case the
downing of Flight MH17, therefore constitutes a necessary step in trying
to defuse what may explode into a far larger conflict.
*
Prof. Kees van der Pijl is
fellow of the Centre for Global Political Economy and Emeritus
Professor in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.